College Is As College Does

“Everyone invested in how the elites of tomorrow are being acculturated should understand, as best they can, how so many cognitively privileged, ordinarily kind, seemingly well-intentioned young people could lash out with such flagrant intolerance.” The Atlantic’s Conor Friedersdorf on how a Halloween costume controversy at Yale spun out of control and became another example of the new intolerance of student activism.

+ WaPo’s Daniel W. Drezner argues that it’s unfortunate that the clash between administrators and students went viral: “One of the purposes of college is to articulate stupid arguments in stupid ways and then learn, through interactions with fellow students and professors, exactly how stupid they are. Anyone who thinks that the current generation of college students is uniquely stupid is either an amnesiac or willfully ignorant. As a professor with 20 years of experience, I can assure you that college students have been saying stupid things since the invention of college students.” (That’s what I love about social media. It lets us adults relive our college days.)