'This Is Not a Debate’

[Valin]

National Review:

Eliana Johnson

July 11, 2016, Issue

 

Bill Buckley was one of the first to suggest there was trouble brewing on campus when he published God and Man at Yale in 1951. He argued that Yale University was doing more to strengthen students’ belief in godlessness and Communism than in Christianity and capitalism. It was an early warning.

 

That became clear in the 1960s and 1970s, when universities were the churning center of the anti-war movement, with students rioting against campus police and occupying administrative buildings. Those struggles, which focused in part on accusations of American oppression in the Third World, fed directly into the conflicts of the ’80s and ’90s over the proper role of the Western canon in undergraduate education. It was in 1987 that Jesse Jackson led Stanford students in a protest of a then-required course in the literature and philosophy of the West, chanting, “Hey, hey, ho, ho, Western culture’s got to go.”

 

Throughout these battles, Yale has been both the breeding ground for and the adjudicator of higher education’s challenges — from the Buckley-instigated debate over whether universities should hire Communists to Yale’s heavy-handed attempts to maintain order in the Vietnam era to the debate in the ’90s over a $20 million donation for a course in the study of Western civilization that was ultimately rejected by the university. All these episodes were subjects of national headlines — and all reflected larger national struggles.

 

(Snip)

 

The day after Nicholas Christakis was surrounded in the Silliman courtyard, Yale’s conservative student group, the William F. Buckley Jr. Program, hosted a long-planned conference on free speech.

 

One of the speakers, Greg Lukianoff, the president of the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education, told attendees that, judging from the reaction to Erika Christakis’s e-mail, “you would have thought someone wiped out an Indian village.”

 

The remark fueled protests already under way outside the event. As attendees streamed out of the building, protesters spat on at least two conference-goers, according to Zach Young and Josh Altman, two members of the Buckley group. One of the protest leaders, Mitchell Rose Bear Don’t Walk, told the Yale Daily News, “The spitting happened,” adding that she considered it “disgraceful.”

 

 

(Snip)

 

Is there any way back from this state of affairs?

 

Donald Kagan, who left Cornell University for Yale in 1969 over the former’s fecklessness in response to student protesters, says he is pessimistic.

 

“It’s very hard to recover from this kind of surrender — surrender to fear, to the prospect of violence and obloquy, to people who are just afraid of not standing with the noisiest and most aggressive element,” he says. “And that’s what happens when you allow bullies to bully you.” Kagan gives a wry smile and says, with a shrug, “It’s progress.”