Viewed from the outside world, both the video and the op-ed can be distilled into that last sentence. It feeds into a narrative of free speech under assault on college campuses. And to put it gently, it’s a sentiment that did not instill much sympathy among most observers...
That said, I also find the outsize reaction to this campus contretemps — including my own tweet — to be troubling as well.
The problem is local knowledge. As Friedrich von Hayek observed 70 years ago, there is an awful lot of knowledge that is local in character, that cannot be culled from abstract principles or detached observers. What looks like free speech infringement at first glance can turn out to be something different the more one drills down. For one thing, the events of late last week were part of a largerchain of events at Yale beyond the e-mails that suggest a few obvious sources of frustration for minority students there in particular.
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An additional problem that affects the current generation of college students even more is that it is so easy for these contretemps to balloon so quickly into national debates. That’s extremely unfortunate. 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.
