Lawrence Person's BattleSwarm Blog 9/22/2019
The Decline and Fall of Yale
This is long, detailed, and interesting piece on the rapid surrender of intellectual freedom at Yale to social justice warrior radicals. It’s a sad, scathing indictment not only of how elite higher education can no longer defend itself or Western civilization, but of how social justice warrior ideology makes our elites feel less responsibility for leading the nation properly than ever before.
How would a university with vision act when such cultural institutions come under attack? In Yale’s case, several students began to agitate that the term “Master†had problematic racial connotations. In other words, “Master†was also what African-American slaves called their owners. In the case of authentic individual tensions—if a student had a difficult background where they had been forced to use the term—perhaps the university would find a reasonable resolution to make the student comfortable. But in the case of broader misunderstanding, perhaps it would be better to educate the students about their academic heritage. The administration could have explained that this term has nothing to do with slavery in America and actually derives from a rich history that makes Yale unique.
What actually happened? After some debate, the title was quickly changed to “head of college.†The suspicion is that this was done to appease the student body as a compromise for not changing the name of a dormitory. In the end, the compromise was rejected, a large number of students took to the streets, and both were changed.
But the appearance of bottom-up protest politics is always a bit of a false narrative. It would be one thing if the students were polled and a majority said they wanted the name changed, or some other process was used. At least the university could say that it was making decisions based on some objective democratic process, and wasn’t just being pushed around. But this is not what happened. No polls were taken. There was no authoritative process. The school said no for a few months, then caved. If the school were actually confident in its position to resist, it could have easily pushed back on the protests. Instead, it folded on demands from a small number of students willing to make noise. Either the university administrators are spectacularly spineless, or the protests just provided a convenient impetus and excuse to do something they already wanted. We can look at several more incidents and notice a similar trend.
More:
https://www.battleswarmblog.com/?p=41937
