Eliana Johnson of National Review Online documents the background of today’s “free-speech crisis” at prestigious Yale University.
As students become more easily outraged, they seem to live — at Yale and elsewhere — in a perpetual state of being offended. And that has become a powerful protest tool, or at least a way of shutting down open debate, whether they are aware of it or not.
“Look, if somebody says, ‘I’m in pain,’ then for all practical purposes they have a kind of privileged position with regard to their own pain and suffering,” says Shelly Kagan, a professor of philosophy at Yale. “The people who felt there was a problem here did a better job of vocalizing their pain and their suffering than they did of spelling out the precise nature of the behaviors that caused” that pain and suffering. And in spelling it out, they would have ceded the “privileged position” of simply reporting their pain.
Kabaservice offers a similar thought: “How do you argue with trauma? It’s very difficult, and administrators just don’t want to go there.” …
… Is there any way back from this state of affairs?
Donald Kagan, who left Cornell University for Yale in 1969 over the former’s fecklessness in response to student protesters, says he is pessimistic.
“It’s very hard to recover from this kind of surrender — surrender to fear, to the prospect of violence and obloquy, to people who are just afraid of not standing with the noisiest and most aggressive element,” he says. “And that’s what happens when you allow bullies to bully you.” Kagan gives a wry smile and says, with a shrug, “It’s progress.”
