https://www.city-journal.org/free-speech-camille-paglia
To appreciate the significance of recent events at Philadelphia’s University of the Arts and at the University of Arizona in Tucson, it helps to recall briefly some landmark moments in the College Administrator Hall of Shame.
Claremont McKenna College, October 2015: a Hispanic student writes a lachrymose oped denouncing Claremont’s “western, white, cisheternormative upper- to upper-middle class values” that, she says, make her and other minority admits feel out of place. The dean of students thanks the student for her oped and asks if she would be willing to meet with Claremont’s administrators to help them “better serve students, especially those who don’t fit our CMC mold.” The phrase “not fitting the mold” was used by Claremont’s minority students themselves to describe their status; nevertheless, protests, hunger strikes, and marches engulf the campus, demanding the dean’s resignation for having described minority students as not fitting the school’s “mold.” The dean grovels before an angry group of students for over an hour, apologizing for her poor choice of words and promising to make amends. Claremont’s president Hiram Chodosh offers not one word of support for the dean, who soon resigns.
Yale, November 2015: a mob of minority students surrounds a respected Yale sociologist, Nicholas Christakis, and berates, screams, and curses at him for two hours. The students’ rage was triggered because Christakis’s wife, a child psychologist, had suggested in an email that Yale undergrads could choose their Halloween costumes without guidance from Yale’s diversity bureaucracy. One girl shrieks at Christakis: “Be quiet! . . . Who the fuck hired you? . . . You should not sleep at night! You are disgusting!” When Christakis meekly disagreed with another student’s claim that free speech allows “violence to happen on this campus,” the student shouts back: “It doesn’t matter whether you agree or not . . . It’s not a debate.” Four Yale diversity bureaucrats silently observed the professor’s scourging from the edges of the mob without coming to his defense.