Poor Little Lambs Who Have Lost Their Way

Natalia Dashan (B.S. 2016) tries to put her finger on The Real Problem At Yale Is Not Free Speech. Excerpts: [bold added]

an administration and student body coordinated around an ideology that continually mutated to ensure moral entrepreneurship and a continued supply of purges, as new forms of human behavior or commonplace descriptors became off-limits. Some of this energy was genuine, some cynical...

It is not easy to stay up-to-date with the new, ever-more-complex rules about what you are allowed to say to qualify as the bare minimum of sociable and sane. It is cognitively and socially demanding. I had to not just study psychology and computer science, but I had to stay up-to-date with the latest PhD-level critical theory just to have conversations.

I had to debate with people why it is not racist that my Russian parents actually liked the word “Master.” That they liked that Yale was drawing from a rich, centuries-long tradition. “Master” connotes mastery of a subject. It connotes responsibilities and a cultural aesthetic far beyond what “head of college” connotes.

If words like “Master” are deemed offensive based on questionable linguistic or historical standards, then this means other words and phrases can become offensive at a moment’s notice. Under these rules, only people in the upper ranks who receive constant updates can learn what is acceptable. Everybody else will be left behind.

The people best positioned for this are professors at elite universities. They are ingrained in the culture that makes up these social rules. They get weekly or even daily updates, but even they cannot keep up.

Gutenberg Bible, Beinecke Library, Yale

During the early Middle Ages literacy rates were low, and educated Catholic priests often had a local monopoly on knowledge. The invention of the printing press, iconically represented by the Gutenberg Bible, kick-started literacy among non-clerics. Knowledge was no longer confined to a chosen few.

Whether the phenomenon Ms. Dashan describes is due to the decline in the church, the family, or in general the authoritativeness of the Western canon, today the ramparts of high culture and education have been co-opted by a caste whose scrolls are impenetrable to everyone but themselves.

However, your humble blogger is confident that this phenomenon, too, shall pass. The latter-day printing press, the Internet, is already beginning to expose the new clerics' ideological inconsistencies and individual moral failings.

When Yale and other colleges start to remember what made them elite in the first place, I'll start donating again.