The True Purpose of the University | City Journal:
"Yale University’s president recently provided a window into the modern university’s self-conception—an understanding embraced by both liberals and conservatives but flawed in essential ways.
A primary purpose of a Yale education, President Peter Salovey told Yale’s freshman class last year, is to
teach students to recognize “false narratives.”
Such narratives, Salovey claimed, are ubiquitous in American culture: “My sense is that we are bombarded daily by false narratives of various kinds, and that they are doing a great deal of damage.” Advocates may “exaggerate or distort or neglect crucial facts,” Salovey said, “in ways that serve primarily to fuel your anger, fear, or disgust.”
(Salovey repeated this trilogy of “anger, fear, and disgust” several times; it was impossible not to hear a reference to Donald Trump, though Salovey tried to stay nonpartisan.)
According to Salovey, the Yale faculty is a model for how to respond to false narratives: they are united by a “stubborn skepticism about narratives that oversimplify issues, inflame the emotions, or misdirect the mind,” he said.
Two things can be said about Salovey’s theme:
- first, it is hilariously wrong about the actual state of “stubborn skepticism” at Yale.
- Second, and more important, Salovey mistakes the true mission of a college education.
To assess whether Yale is, in fact, a bastion of myth-busting, it is necessary to
return to one of the darkest moments in Yale’s history: the university’s response to a shocking mass outbreak of student narcissism in October 2015.
The wife of a college master had sent an e-mail to students,
suggesting that they were capable of deciding for themselves which Halloween costume to wear and didn’t need oversight from Yale’s diversity commissars. (Halloween costumes have been the target of the PC police nationally for allegedly “appropriating” minority cultures.)
The e-mail sparked a furor among minority students across Yale and beyond, who claimed that it threatened their very being.
In one of many charged gatherings that followed, students surrounded the college master, berating him for the pain that his wife had caused them.
One female student was captured on video violently gesturing at the master and shrieking, “Be quiet!” as he gently tries to answer her tirade.
She then screams:
“Why the fuck did you accept this position [of college master]? Who the fuck hired you?”..."
Read on!!
