People used to think of college as a place for the vibrant exchange of ideas, but these days it’s more like the incessant elaboration of one idea. Dissenters will face unpleasant consequences.
How did things go so wrong?
In today’s Martin Center article, Samuel Negus of Hillsdale College reviews a new book that sheds a good deal of light on that question. The book is Rob Henderson’s Troubled: A Memoir of Foster Care, Family, and Social Class. Higher education figures into his memoir because he was a student at Yale during the ridiculous eruption on campus over an email regarding Halloween costumes. That really opened his eyes.
Here’s a sample:
In other students’ explanations, Henderson first encountered the language of Intersectionality and Critical Theory. Identification of “privilege” with racial characteristics, and the phrase “lived experience” in connection to supposedly subaltern races, struck him as perhaps contradictory ideas. He asked two classmates which determined victim status more, racial characteristics or personal experience? One answered with an obvious tautology: “Characteristics determine experiences. […] If you belong to a ‘privileged’ group, you must have a privileged life.” The other “replied that this question was dangerous to ask.”
Henderson subsequently dove into the history of our obsession with “diversity” and traces it back to the Bakke case, where an off-the-cuff comment by Justice Lewis Powell sent the nation off on a disastrously wrong path.
Read the whole thing.