If you live in a country in which you can protest without fear of being arrested, can afford to go to a respectable university, and feel that you deserve to be heard, you’re pretty privileged. I’m sure there are those with more privilege, but you aren’t exactly living a rough life. You are privileged enough to have the opportunity to help change the world. Do not squander it demanding everyone who slights you is punished.

Please do not misunderstand; I know there are racial inequalities and tension, and we should do something about that. But lobbying for the resignation of everyone who makes a mistake or voices an opinion you dislike is not the solution. Engage your critics with an open dialogue, and try to understand their side while you explain yours. Once upon a time, an exchange of ideas was a big part of what universities were about.

Another reader also examines the idea of privilege:

One rarely remarked upon effect of this campus rhetoric is a general desensitization that is occurring with regards to the politics of race, gender, and sexuality. Everything is racist. Everyone is bigoted. Gay men who dress in drag are privileged compared to transexuals. Feminist film professors enable rape culture by being dismissive of its power. The Vagina Monologues isn’t feminist; it’s hurtful to women without vaginas. Hollywood actresses calling attention to the pay gap need to be educated on intersectionalism. And so on and so forth.

Once upon a time, if you were left leaning and wanted to consider yourself a good citizen, maybe you’d take inventory and consider whether your thoughts and feelings were racist or bigoted. Now, you can’t pin down what virtuous behavior is. It’s whatever an apoplectic 20 year old on campus says it is, with some critical theory thrown in.

This reader points a finger at the changing landscape of online discourse:

This is what happens when a generation who came of age on Internet bulletin boards, comment sections, and social media tries to join in the real world discourse. They seem incapable of understanding nuance and that not all issues are black and white. They have valid grievances, but they lack the experience and perspective to translate their ideas to constructive and ideologically consistent solutions.

Another reader zooms out:

The First Amendment, at its core, is a protection for unpopular ideas. The corollary to that is that one should never assume that someday your ideas won’t be the ones that are unpopular. Censorship is a dangerous game in a world where power and influence are ever-changing, and lasting change isn’t enforced—it’s persuaded, thoughtfully legislated when necessary, and a function of time.

Forcing someone to be a “better person” by any standard doesn’t make them better. It just makes you an oppressor in your own right.

This reader makes a similar point:

There’s a real risk in depending on authoritarian solutions to social issues. What happens when you grant your leaders increased power to force your enemies to capitulate, and then your enemies gain that increased power after their candidate wins the next election? It’s extremely dangerous to sacrifice civil liberties on the altar of social gains, no matter how righteous the cause.

If you strongly disagree with any of these readers and want your voice heard, please email hello@theatlantic.com. The vast majority of the emails we’ve received are critical of the campus activists to varying degrees, so the more views we get in the mix from different sides, the better. Update: Here’s that literary critique I referenced above:

Dear Note Squad,

One of things I love about ya’ll’s project is the high quality arguments you tease out from readers. This the only place I’ve seen good dissent to Between the World and Me, a book that deserves a better class of critic. The Demons = Mizzou critique really missed the mark, however,

Like many of Dostoevsky’s novels, Demons ends in murder because the radical protagonist’s ideology is permissive of, or outright demands, murder. This is why the analogy breaks down. Unlike the young radicals of the great writer’s most boring novel, many of the Mizzou protesters are from a group of people shaped by being on the business end of a violent philosophy.

Beyond the lack of murder and the inversion of the social positions, the list of dissimilarities goes on: the son Verkhovensky is the head of a cohesive group, not an amalgam of interests that outsiders are keen to judge by the most shocking parts; the “demons,” who are all from upper part of Russian society, desire to create a world in which they have even more power; the sociopathic nature of the leaders, etc.

The collegiate no-goodniks, apart from being unimpressed with their parent’s generation, bear no resemblance to the Demons in philosophy, action, or standing. But if frustration with grown-ups is sufficient to be evil, we must also admit the hellish nature of the Fresh Prince.

I know you were excited to get an email from somebody comparing Missouri to a book other than 1984, but that email was frankly not worthy of this space.

Update from a reader who pushes back more generally:

Hi! I'd like to make an argument for the legitimacy of trigger warnings. I sometimes have episodes of severe anxiety. During those times, I’m anxious nonstop for no real reason, except for when I’m asleep, and I feel generally miserable.

Once they’re over, remembering certain things associated with what I did during an episode can send me right back into that state of mind. It’s like coming home after a vacation (except much worse); the familiar setting puts you back into the mindset of everyday life. I’ve found from experience that waiting a while to stabilize myself before I revisit unpleasant memories has been extremely helpful. The experience seems more distant and easier to think about critically—as just an event that’s passed rather than the end of the world.

I would hope that this is the intention of trigger warnings in universities: to help people who have recently experienced trauma and are especially sensitive to painful memories for a short period of time—not to permanently let people avoid thinking about topics they believe are offensive.

Amherst College activists hope to create learning spaces from such alienation. The demands of Amherst Uprising are not illiberal. They are concerned with the creation of spaces and community norms that affirm individual dignity. These Amherst College students are not in favor of perfunctorily sanctioning anyone from their community. They are simply pressing their college to create necessary structures to address instances of racial injury in a sufficient way. Debates on free speech detract from the fact such movements at Yale, Mizzou and Amherst are primarily concerned with equal justice.

Administrators are more mindful of petty drug violations than matters of racial injury. This prevents minority students from fully taking advantage of what their schools have to offer. Students merely hope to not only prevent behaviors that cause racial injury in an inclusive, restorative way for both parties, but also to create introspection within the involved parties about the factors that led to racial injury. The Amherst College administration may not be able to change an individual’s beliefs about certain issues but they can certainly create spaces for parties respectfully learn about and reflect on their behaviors.

Best,
Andrew Lindsay
Amherst College Class of 2016

I thank him for the engagement; wish him success in inculcating mutual respect and creating community norms that affirm the dignity of all students, not just members of majority groups; sympathize with students who do not feel welcome on their campus; and stand by my characterization of the original “Amherst Uprising” demands as flagrantly illiberal. Readers can see them here and judge for themselves. Amherst Uprising has subsequently engaged Amherst’s president in dialogue about alternative ways to proceed that are, in my view, less objectionable.

Outside of Europe and North America, people tend not to assume that their personal life achievements are entirely merit based. In South Asia, personal success is understood explicitly as a not only a product of individual work ethic and habits, but also other factors such as ethnicity, language, caste, gender, socio-economic class of family, family social network, geographic location etc. Working hard and being persistent only reaps rewards if you belong to the right combination of these factors (i.e. upper class, upper caste, male, fluent in English, urban). An individual who does not belonging to this right combination will almost never get the same opportunities(i.e. a slum dweller from Mumbai can work harder and more persistently than a middle class, upper-class, English speaking Mumbaite, but he/she will almost never achieve any social mobility).

The North American narrative of meritocracy is extremely problematic because it allows people in positions of power to believe that their personal and social successes are determined by a single factor, work ethics and habits, and to ignore the role that race, gender, sexual orientation, religion, socio-economic class have played in their success. This narrative also allows these individuals ignore the suffering of others by blaming any lack of success on personal moral failings, thereby removing any impetuous for social change.

Your thoughts? Drop me an email and I’ll likely post. Update from a reader:

The reader argues that “not all racialized experiences are the same” and claims that Jews and Asians “were given social privileges not provided to other groups.” The fundamental problem with this line of thinking was expressed clearly by Justice Sandra Day O’Connor in City of Richmond v. J.A. Croson:

To accept Richmond’s claim that past societal discrimination alone can serve as the basis for rigid racial preferences would be to open the door to competing claims for ‘remedial relief’ for every disadvantaged group. The dream of a Nation of equal citizens in a society where race is irrelevant to personal opportunity and achievement would be lost in a mosaic of shifting preferences based on inherently unmeasurable claims of past wrongs.

A discussion on whose ancestors were oppressed more or oppressed enough is not likely to be a productive one. Furthermore, a disproportionate amount of black students at prestigious universities that practice affirmative action are immigrants or their children. If we really want to delve into the past and measure the level of oppression our ancestors experienced in the U.S., we would have to employ the same tools that were once used to disenfranchise blacks, such as grandfather clauses. The irony is perverse.

When we are talking about state universities and community colleges, we are talking about hundreds of expandable institutions that can add on teachers and programs to accommodate your average undergrad with virtually no ill-effects. By definition, those types of universities are supposed to be inclusive. The conversation changes a lot when we start talking about elite universities, and especially so when we are talking about elite programs within them.

When we talk about admission of black students to colleges, we aren’t talking about a system that tries to keep them out anymore. On the contrary, their admission is subsidized by diversity-seeking recruiting processes and lowered standardized testing bars that encourage students of diverse backgrounds to fill as many spots as possible. And that’s a good thing, because there isn’t really an upward limit to how many students we can put into average schools. Average is easy to expand.

When we talk about elite universities, we are talking about schools that are elite primarily because they are exclusive, because their standards of admission are high. When we say proudly that someone “got into MIT” (or CalTech, Harvard, or Yale), there’s a tacit assumption that this was difficult to do. And we need that. Our top universities—especially the graduate programs at our top research universities—are the drivers of our scientific economy. This is our country’s top-end intellectual capital. It’s how we stay ahead and healthy in terms of our scientific output. There is a huge interest in keeping those programs elite and making sure that the students that are allowed in are the highest qualified and also those who, frankly, want it the most.

Is it possible that the lack of adequate diversity in these schools and programs are due to institutional bias? Sure, but the data doesn’t generally show that. The article tacitly acknowledges this by not showing us a single data point that would suggest anything otherwise. And in the absence of this data, what he’s apparently asking universities to do is to admit less qualified, un-elite students. He’s asking us to dumb down sectors of our education system that are literally defined by being the home of our very smartest students.

This reader had the most up-voted comment on the piece:

Acknowledging that by the standards every other group is judged by for admission and academic success—like standardized test scores, graduation rates, and a challenging curriculum—black students lag, the assumed solution is to change the rules of the game. This is much more comfortable that confronting the possibility that a) black students as a group do not produce as many top-shelf students no matter what resources or accommodations are made, or b) they have been failed by some combination of their parents, communities, and elementary and secondary school educators.

Instead we have the political class and media talking about discarding aptitude tests that are in practice a solid measure of intellectual firepower and softening up the curriculum so it’s easier for ill-equipped students to get to graduation at schools they have no business being at in the first place. It shows that people pushing for more inclusion really don’t think black students can navigate the same intellectual space as every other group in the country, and this condescending paternalism is a signal that all the “solutions” put forth to lift up a troubled minority group aren’t really working very well.

This commenter pushes back:

Aptitude tests are not meaningless, but they are not a complete measure. They don’t capture tenacity, long-term memory, goal setting, and persistent but efficient effort towards those goals.

I saw this during my time in the military’s language training. Generally, if you did well on the aptitude test, you had a better chance at succeeding. But it wasn’t a perfect correlation. Some people did well on the two-hour aptitude test but could not retain the cumulative information over the 15-month course. Others could not maintain the needed level of effort and focus over that length of time. Still others had trouble with the psychological factors needed in language acquisition. These students were outperformed by the persistent students with good memory and a flexible, willing mindset.

This is why I support efforts to identify those students who are punching well above their weight. That is, they are scoring higher than you’d expect based on social factors such as poverty, poor schools, family makeup, and social status. (In some places that’s race, but in Appalachia it’s not.) If these students score within striking distance of the affluent norm, then they have overcome considerable drag in the process. It is a good bet that they will continue that persistence and do well in a selective, supportive college. We’d be wasting a great deal of potential to ignore this base of human capital.

Another reader retorts:

This is an insult to poor people everywhere. All this paternalistic pandering is just liberal arrogance—“you can't do it without my help because I am superior to you.” I was raised in greater poverty than the welfare of today but that did not prevent me from staying out of trouble, being honest, and studying just as hard as the affluent. One’s attitude and behavior is quite different when you have to earn what you get instead have it given to you.

What do you think? Drop me an email and I’ll post the strongest arguments from any side. Update from a reader:

I read all the reader responses in your note. It seems that the people who argue against any extra efforts to add diversity to the campuses believe that entrance to an elite school is purely based on merit. However, that’s not true. The schools consider many elements: legacy admissions, extracurricular activities, and significant other talents (musical, athletic, etc). I am certain that I was accepted to an Ivy based on geographical diversity. (I’m from Newfoundland, Canada.) So, it is entirely reasonable within this framework for the schools to consider financial and racial diversity.

One more reader for now:

Given the disproportionate numbers of Jewish and Asian students in elite institutions, it is simply mathematically impossible for other ethnic groups to match their population proportions.  If the same analysis applied to blacks were to be applied to the Polish, the Italians, the Germans, Appalachian whites, etc, it would be mathematically impossible for them all to hit their population percentage.

Either quotas need to be introduced (again) to keep Jews and Asians at their “rightful” level, or the disproportions need to be accepted as a natural outcome of a meritocracy where some groups outshine others … until the laggard groups somehow change their achievement levels.

Resegregating the federal government did not merely mean white and black people not being able to hold hands, it meant civic plunder. Here is Gordon J. Davis recounting how Wilson destroyed the livelihood of his grandfather, John Davis:

Over a long career, he rose through the ranks from laborer to a position in midlevel management. He supervised an office in which many of his employees were white men. He had a farm in Virginia and a home in Washington. By 1908, he was earning the considerable salary — for an African-American — of $1,400 per year.

But only months after Woodrow Wilson was sworn in as president in 1913, my grandfather was demoted. He was shuttled from department to department in various menial jobs, and eventually became a messenger in the War Department, where he made only $720 a year.

By April 1914, the family farm was auctioned off. John Davis, a self-made black man of achievement and stature in his community at the turn of the 20th century, was, by the end of Wilson’s first term, a broken man. He died in 1928.

Davis was an upstanding, tax-paying American. But he faced a danger that most upstanding, tax-paying Americans of that day didn’t face—the destruction of wealth for the better upholding of white supremacy. And because wealth is inherited, the effects of this plunder redound through the generations.

As I said, I didn’t go to a school like Princeton. But one need not have that experience, to understand why seeing one’s University celebrate the name of someone who plundered your ancestors—in a country that has yet to acknowledge that plunder—might be slightly disturbing.

Free speech is one of the most important constitutional freedoms. The key test of any freedom is whether exercising that freedom harms any other freedom. Hate speech is generally accepted as one of the limits. [CB note: There is no “hate speech” exception to the First Amendment, but there is for “fighting words” and “true threats.”] Dressing up in a way that is hurtful for others is certainly at least bordering on hate speech.

What defines hate speech is a moving target—a group that is vulnerable or who suffers discrimination is prone to hurt more than a group that is in a position of privilege or power. Nonetheless, treating hurtful speech as a normal mode of expression is not something that should be encouraged, even in circumstances where it may be tolerable within the definition of freedom of speech.

Yale as one of the world’s top educational institutions should be a centre for thoughtful discourse. Opening the lines of debate by a mealy-mouthed, vaguely-intentioned discouragement of openly racist displays is not a good start. Attacking that statement as too strong? How is that supposed to be thoughtful or civilised? There is nothing either thoughtful or civilised about racism.

It’s worth reading the whole email from Christakis to determine for yourself whether it was thoughtful or civilized. An email from a Yale grad (‘88):

I want to echo what other readers have written to you all thanking you for Notes—indeed, as someone commented recently, it fills a hole where The Dish used to be. As an alum of Yale University, I have been distressed at the news I have read and heard over the airwaves—mostly because of how absurd the controversy is, but also because of the gross misrepresentation of the contents of Prof. Erika Christakis’ letter by those supporting the student activists, and the complete ignorance of many of those activists about the university they attend.

Friedersdorf did a great job explaining how the letter Prof. Christakis wrote was quite respectful of the fact that students will have different views on what is offensive and what is not, and that students should engage those with whom they differ in discussion of their differences. What he wrote about the letter perfectly sums up my thoughts on it from my time at Yale: “When I was in college, a position of this sort taken by a faculty member would likely have been regarded as a show of respect for all students and their ability to think for themselves.”

As a side note, I found it odd that supposedly liberal students were harassing and berating Prof. Nicholas Christakis for the actions of his wife. I thought we were well past the days when husbands were supposed to account for what their wives did.

One of the latest issues to pop up in the discussion of what is transpiring at Yale, and by far the most infuriating, revolves around the term “Master.” I worked as a student aid in the office of the Master of my residential college, so I have good familiarity with the role of a Master at Yale (at least how that role was conceived 30 years ago, though I doubt it has changed). Certain activists claim that the word hearkens back to what is imagined as a slavery-sympathetic university, with the term “Master” representing a legacy of that slavery-loving past. The link, it is argued, is provided through the naming of one of Yale’s residential colleges after John C. Calhoun.

Calhoun College was founded in 1933, and at the time Calhoun, a graduate of Yale, was considered one of the nation’s greatest statesmen. I do not think the university sat back and said, “Gee, let’s pick someone who supported slavery as a name for our new college.” Yale, to its great credit, initiated a conversation in August of this year to discuss whether Calhoun College should remain named after such a vehement supporter of slavery and white rule—hardly the act of an administration that is insensitive to the perceptions and feelings of its non-white students. (I wonder, however, what liberals make of Calhoun’s opposition to the war with Mexico, as he was concerned not only with racial issues, but about abuse of executive power and feeding the public’s lust for empire.)

Brushing this tendentious argument aside, the term “Master” for the head of a residential college does not derive from or have any connection to plantation life (which would be very odd indeed, were it the case, as the residential colleges were founded in an exceedingly Yankee institution in 1933, a bit shy of seven decades after the end of the Civil War). As any semi-educated person should know, “Master” comes from the academic universe of the United Kingdom. (Here’s a simple Wikipedia article on the subject).

To object to the term “Master” because of supposed slave associations of that term is not only ahistorical, it is offensive to those who suffer real oppression and struggle daily with the legacy of racism in our nation.

Our Politics section has run two pieces on Calhoun. Lincoln Caplan drills down into the history of the college and concludes: “The Calhoun name is Yale’s Confederate flag. It’s time the flag came down.” R. Owen Williams, on the other hand, worries about the “danger of erasing Yale’s Confederate ties.” He comes up with a novel solution:

[R]ather than changing the name of Calhoun College, the university should acknowledge the good and bad of history, and amend the name to Bouchet Calhoun College. In 1876, Edward Alexander Bouchet became the first African American to receive a doctorate in any subject from an American university, at Yale. Joining these two historical figures would stimulate a more honest and comprehensive discourse about American history.

Lastly, a reality check from a local:

I work about two blocks and a world away from the Yale Quad and the very spot where Ms. Luther shouted obscenities at the Christakis. The New Haven I see everyday is a human wasteland—of homeless, of obesity, of addictions, of crime, of unemployment, of welfare dependency, of school dropouts, and, most of all, of wasted potential. [CB note: Here’s a good article with data and maps: “Poor residents in greater Hartford and greater New Haven are just as likely to live in an extremely poor, predominantly minority neighborhood as those in greater Detroit or greater Philadelphia.”]

The irony of the situation is overwhelming. A very, very privileged few students screaming to be handled more carefully. To be allowed to live in safe spaces? How in the world have these students come to believe that they should not have to see a Halloween costume that might offend them? Or hear slights? Or make their own home? Or, for that matter, express their opinions without resorting to obscenities and tears?

The world outside Academia is a far tougher place than they are ready for. I think these students have been failed, but not in the way they imagine. They have been deprived of the real-world experiences that allow children to grow up, to leave childhood behind and assume the most basic of responsibilities—the loss of narcissism.

For the record, the Yale senior at the center of the controversy is very involved off campus:

Much of Luther’s information is lost, as she’s taken down her Twitter and Facebook profiles and her Instagram page is private. However, what remains shows that she’s a coordinator for Project Homeless Connect, which offers social and health care services to the homeless. According to her bio at The Globalist, she also works with the Yale Refugee Project. Her bio on PresentTense describes her as having a passion for social justice and helping others.

In the military I firsthand witnessed occasional racism—not institutionalized nor systemic. Some men, largely those born below the Mason-Dixon line, would indeed make disparaging, aggressive, and/or malevolent comments toward my dark-green Marine brothers.  At college, I again heard of racial tensions between student groups. I wholeheartedly acknowledge and support the causes that the students at Mizzou/Yale/Ithaca/CMC/Amherst and other colleges are fighting for. Their cause is just and needed.  

However, I would like to make a distinction that I think is necessary in light on the events of the last two weeks. There are currently thousands of combat veterans on campuses across the United States, men and women who fought al-Qaida in Iraq and the Taliban in Afghanistan who are now reintegrating into society and taking advantage of the incredible generosity of the Post 9/11 GI Bill.  Speaking as a veteran who saw combat, and who had friends killed and wounded, it is difficult for me to reconcile the idea that campuses are not “safe spaces” for students. To me, a “safe space” is one in which no one is actively trying to kill you. Forget micro-aggressions; there is a large subset of students on American campuses who spent many of their formative years being shot at and blown up by IEDs.  

If a student’s comfort on campus is determined relatively—i.e. they do not feel “included” or “like a typical” member of campus—I would like to remind them that that relativity goes further. After my deployment to Afghanistan, a member of my unit, Kyle Carpenter, was awarded the Congressional Medal of Honor, for diving onto a hand grenade to save his friend. That kind of environment, to me, constitutes an “un-safe space.”

Again, I do agree that there is racism in academia, and I would say there are issues with racism, to a lesser degree, within the military. I only want to provide nuance to the current student activists, who seem so quick to fear for their safety. Please keep in mind that some of your fellow students went through periods of no physical safety—that they walked, day in and day out, amongst people who actively sought to kill them.  

My Millennial peers who are still on college campuses do their causes disservice by claiming conversations about inappropriate Halloween costumes cause them to fear for their safety. Talk to a student veteran about fearing for your safety, before invoking such hyperbolic terms.

Some students said they believe administrators are hoping that the protests will die down soon, especially because finals and Thanksgiving break are approaching. “This is just the beginning,” Riley said. "There will be [a demonstration] the first day after break.”

Zooming out, Mother Jones takes stock of the most notable campus protests so far and provides a map:

Hey! Some enterprising student journalist should make a canonical, updating list of protestor demands. There’s a huge need for it right now.

— Robinson Meyer (@yayitsrob) November 19, 2015

Okay but Northwestern’s not on there, nor are the black Yale alumni—I think there’s still an opening for an independent journalist here.

— Robinson Meyer (@yayitsrob) November 19, 2015

Many of the demonstrators then approached the sitting students and chanted “F**k your white privilege” and “F**k your white asses,” demonstrator Dan Korff-Korn ’19 said. “It was important to point out that the students sitting there in the library at the computers represented this greater degree of ignorance, apathy and privilege that you see at Dartmouth, but the way it was done by personally attacking people was counterproductive,” Korff-Korn said. [...] “While I don’t think the protest should happen again to the extent where people are being yelled at and making people cry, I think the invasion of space needed to be done,” [student David] Tramonte said.

The college administration has stepped in to say sorry—to the protestors:

Vice provost for student affairs Inge-Lise Ameer was in attendance at the meeting, and she apologized to students who engaged in the protest for the negative responses and media coverage that they have received. “There’s a whole conservative world out there that’s not being very nice,” Ameer said.

Veitch was extolled for his supposed accomplishments. One of which being his “tireless[ness] in hiring a diverse faculty and staff.” In 2013 the college had 7% black faculty, 10% Latinx faculty, and 12% API faculty. A school where over two thirds of tenured faculty is white can ever be commended for hiring diverse faculty and staff.

Two-thirds of Americans nationwide—64 percent—are White. “7% black faculty, 10% Latinx faculty” are indeed lower than the nationwide numbers of 12 percent Black and 16 percent Hispanic, but Occidental’s “12% API ” is far outpacing the 5 percent of Americans who are Asian or Pacific Islander (API). Should White faculty be fired to fill precise racial quotas? Should the API percentage also be lowered?

The percentage of students at Occidental this year who are African American is 4.5 percent, so “7% black faculty” is in fact overly representative. It would be wonderful if both numbers were higher, but should a president lose his job over it, a president whose institution ranks 13 among hundreds of liberal arts colleges in terms of ethnic diversity?

Occidental College is also notable for having one of its former students go on to become the first African American to be elected and reelected President of the United States. He didn’t appear to need a safe space:

“It’s a wonderful, small liberal arts college,” President Obama says of Oxy. “The professors were diverse and inspiring. I ended up making some lifelong friendships there, and those first two years really helped me grow up.” … Oxy was the place where the future president made his first political speech on Feb. 18, 1981 as part of a movement to persuade the Occidental Board of Trustees to divest the College of its investments in South Africa. “I found myself drawn into a larger role [in the divestment movement] … I noticed that people had begun to listen to my opinions,” Obama recalled.

Many young Millennials may not know that South Africa in 1981 was governed under something called apartheid, a brutal system of racial segregation and physical violence.

In September, Obama joined the debate over the new campus politics by saying, in part, “I don’t agree that you, when you become students at colleges, have to be coddled and protected from different points of view.” Will a reporter ask him about his old college? Update: I missed Obama’s interview with Stephanopoulos this week:

OBAMA: [...] The civil-rights movement happened because there was civil disobedience, because people were willing to get to go to jail, because there were events like Bloody Sunday. But it was also because the leadership of the movement consistently stayed open to the possibility of reconciliation and sought to understand the views, even views that were appalling to them of the other side.

STEPHANOPOULOS: Because there does seem to be a strain on some of these campuses of a kind of militant political correctness where you shut down the other side.

OBAMA: And I disagree with that. And, it's interesting. You know, I've now got, you know, daughters who — one is about to go to college — the other one's — you know, going to be on her way in a few years. And then we talk about this at the dinner table.

And I say to them, "Listen, if you hear somebody using a racial epithet, if you hear somebody who's anti-Semitic, if you see an injustice, I want you to speak out. And I want you to be firm and clear and I want you to protect people who may not have voices themselves. I want you to be somebody who's strong and sees themselves as somebody who's looking out for the vulnerable."

But I tell 'em — "I want you also to be able to listen. I don't want you to think that a display of your strength is simply shutting other people up. And that part of your ability to bring about change is going to be by engagement and understanding the viewpoints and the arguments of the other side." And so when I hear, for example, you know, folks on college campuses saying, "We're not going to allow somebody to speak on our campus because we disagree with their ideas or we feel threatened by their ideas —" you know, I think that's a recipe for dogmatism. And I think you're not going to be as effective. And so, but I want to be clear here 'cause, and it's a tough issue because, you know, there are two values that I care about.

I care about civil rights and I care about kids not being discriminated against or having swastikas painted on their doors or nooses hung — thinking it's a joke. I think it's entirely appropriate for — any institution, including universities, to say, "Don't walk around in blackface. It offends people. Don't wear a headdress and beat your chest if Native American students have said, you know, 'This hurts us. This bothers us." There's nothing wrong with that.

But we also have these values of free speech. And it's not free speech in the abstract. The purpose of that kind of free speech is to make sure that we are forced to use argument and reason and words in making our democracy work. And you know, then you don't have to be fearful of somebody spouting bad ideas. Just out-argue 'em, beat 'em.

Make the case as to why they're wrong. Win over adherents. That's how — that's how things work in — in a democracy. And I do worry if young people start getting trained to think that if somebody says something I don't like, if somebody says something that hurts my feelings that my only recourse is to shut them up, avoid them, push them away, call on a higher power to protect me from that. You know, and yes, does that put more of a burden on minority students or gay students or Jewish students or others in a majority that may be blind to history and blind to their hurt? It may put a slightly higher burden on them.

But you're not going to make the kinds of deep changes in society — that those students want, without taking it on, in a full and clear and courageous way. And you know, I tell you I trust Malia in an argument. If a knucklehead on a college campus starts talking about her, I guarantee you she will give as good as she gets.

So pitch perfect.

The newest generation of scholars (myself included) have been increasingly focused on the nuts and bolts of how institutions, movements, and networks in history functioned. While not ignoring the very real insights from our linguistically-inclined predecessors, we seem to be more interested in the tangible, material, aspect of historical problems.

It’s not that questions of identity and language don’t matter to us, but we have taken investigations to the next level. Or so it seems to me from the shore of Lake Michigan. I wanted to share that view with you in the spirit of (as historians love to do) “complicating” an already fascinating discussion.

One more reader via the hello@ address:

There are some big issues here, and strong feelings—about race, about privilege, about the First Amendment and other civil rights.  Yet what strikes me after reading a lot of news coverage is how irrelevant all this is to the world at large, or even to the academy. I am sure the students who feel aggrieved by aggressions micro- and macro-, and the administrators afraid for their jobs, think it is highly meaningful, and politicians will ride the issue of “political correctness” as far as they can.  

The problem is that the ideological center of the discussion resides in, and is almost entirely limited to, the humanities. Contrary to the self-congratulatory narrative of academic humanists, poets are not the unacknowledged legislators of mankind.

Here is something you will never see in any syllabus: “Trigger warning: nature of reality. The following chapter on quantum mechanics contains a discussion of entanglement and Bell’s Theorem, and may raise fundamental questions about the nature of time and space, and therefore reality, thus causing discomfort and a feeling of being unsafe on the part of those grounded in a Newtonian world view.”

Nor this:  “The following chapter and related labs on developmental biology may cause discomfort to some religious groups who do not believe in evolution, to those who believe in inherent racial superiority, or to those who are afraid of blood.”

Cheap satire? Maybe, but that’s not my intent.  Actually, I myself am terrified by the philosophical implications of quantum mechanics and by the fact that I am dependent on so many devices and technologies the workings of which I cannot comprehend.  That’s my point: Our true rulers care very little for the arguments that mean much to those of us schooled in the humanities. There is nothing “postmodern,” there is no “cultural turn,” there are no meaningful “intersectionalities” in a university’s schools of medicine, business, engineering, or in any STEM department.  

And that is where the money is. In terms of the university budget, that is where it comes from, and that is where it goes. That translates to power and relevance.  The rest of us are just playing at being Matthew Arnold or Cornel West. The only reason the news media are paying any attention at all is that they are in the reality TV business.  With all due respect to the semioticians and SJWs, you cannot change the reality of the Higgs Boson by giving it a different name, nor can you check its privilege.

Update from a reader who quotes the previous one:

“With all due respect to the semioticians and SJWs, you cannot change the reality of the Higgs Boson by giving it a different name, nor can you check its privilege.”  I take his or her point to be that science is made up of universal, constant laws, which scientists only need to discover and acknowledge. Thus the fields of physics, mathematics, engineering, medicine, etc., are immune from any cultural or social critique of their theory or practice. 

This kind of ahistorical nonsense—like something out of a 1950s sci-fi novel—is what happens when individuals embrace some ideal notion of “science” as its own complete ethos.  The entire history of the practice of science since Copernicus has been that of a constant struggle between human scientists making empirical observations and the cultural frameworks of those same scientists.  These frameworks almost always determine how scientists interpret the meaning of the information they observe. 

From Kepler—who was convinced that the planets’ orbits had to follow patterns that matched the shapes of perfect geometric solids—to Einstein, who refused to accept the reality of quantum mechanics because “God does not play at dice,” science always has existed and will always exist in a particular cultural and social context that shapes what scientists “see.” The fact that so many are willing to put science on a pedestal as some kind of ideal activity speaks to the technocratic moment we’re living in, despite some notion that the “SJW”s are ruining everything for those who simply love facts and truth.

A retort:

You followed my note with a response from a reader who thinks my view of how science relates to its cultural context is backward. S/he wrote:

The entire history of the practice of science since Copernicus has been that of a constant struggle between human scientists making empirical observations and the cultural frameworks of those same scientists.  These frameworks almost always determine how scientists interpret the meaning of the information they observe.

Really?  Catholic doctrine and The Inquisition determined how Galileo interpreted his observed data? Galileo’s recantation paid tribute to the political correctness of his day, but he did not let it determine his theory (“Still, it moves!”). From the point of view of history, Galileo sat in judgment of the cultural framework of his day, not the other way round.

My respondent’s take sounds like the English Department’s bid for relevancy—“Let the scientists play with their models and ignore us, but we determine the culture, and the culture determines everything. They can speak only on matters of science; we can speak on everything.” Vanity. C.P. Snow’s two cultures are still very much with us on campus, and even further apart than ever.

BTW, the reader also suggested that my comment implied a belief that “the fields of physics, mathematics, engineering, medicine, etc., are immune from any cultural or social critique of their theory or practice.” I didn’t say that nor do I believe it. The theories—and most definitely the practices—of science and technology are definitely liable to criticism, though the persuasiveness of such criticism will have something to do with how well the critic understands the science s/he criticizes.