Rod Dreher writes:
This academic is starting to consider leaving the academy entirely, rather than face an entire career in fear of saying the wrong thing. This is a serious thing. If I were a young journalist just starting out, I would be thinking the same thing.
Oh, the problems of the rich! Oh, the humanity (of the 1%)! Oh the problems of journalists and academics! Thank God poor white Americans have much better things to worry about (like drinking themselves to death) than the quibbles of the over-privileged. America is lot bigger than the confines of college campuses, but too many journalists (being human-all-too-human) continue to equate their educational experiences as a utopian universalism that bleeds over into their writing and inevitably stirs the resentment of their poorer, less-privileged readers.
Why are today’s journalists shilling the Domino Theory of yesterday’s General Westmoreland? I.e., as Yale goes, so goes the whole country….
UPDATE:
I don’t think Mr. Dreher reads this blog, but he has definitely responded to what’s going on at Yale and Missouri with a similar perspective. I particularly liked this paragraph:
The report got some notice in the media, but not a lot, certainly not commensurate to the scale of the problem. Now, it could be that major media organizations are preparing follow-up reports, which can’t be done well overnight. But I doubt it. Major-media reporters don’t know people like these. And they think of them as the Wrong Sort of Person.
And as the Divine Oscar reminds us:
Education is an admirable thing, but it is well to remember from time to time that nothing that is worth knowing can be taught. (Wilde, Oscar. “The Critic as Artist: Parts I.†Intentions. London:Osgood, McIlvaine. 1891.)