16 ms·

The Problem at Yale Is Not Free Speech

332 points by jseliger 7y ago

jseliger 7y ago
This mostly makes Yale sound like an extremely unpleasant place to be.
- StudentStuff 7y ago
  Any place where people LARP and hide themselves behind masks of their own design all day can be caustic, Yale is far from being an outlier.
  - julienreszka 7y ago
    Your point being?
  - pmarreck 7y ago
    I'm fairly certain that some group of people LARP at all the Ivy Leagues. I think we all wear masks, though.
tengbretson 7y ago
Good grief, get to the point!
- sonthonax 7y ago
  When was the last time you read something longer than a tweet?
  - bena 7y ago
    It's over 60,000 characters and rambles
  - tengbretson 7y ago
    Length has literally nothing to do with it. It's a matter of give and take, and politeness. If there's thirty minutes of content I'm happy to commit my thirty minutes of reading. If you have five minutes of content in thirty minutes of text you're just being rude.
    - jvagner 7y ago
      I want to think it's about "show, don't tell" but I gave up on this article, too..
  - theobeers 7y ago
    This essay is not well written enough to justify its dilatory nature.
  - ggggtez 7y ago
    The author says "this story isn't about me" and yet spends 10 paragraphs telling a personal anecdote. Who said the problem at Yale is free speech? Is the audience supposed to know what he's talking about? I may never know because I too gave up.
    - heavenlyblue 7y ago
      Well, the author is a). she, and b). she tells a personal anecdote because she's about to write an article about her own experience at Yale. So obviously she needs to present her bio in order to express the position from which she's seeing Yale.
  - buboard 7y ago
    prose is pleasant when it's good
- DavidVoid 7y ago
  I think these paragraphs from the "Abandoning The Ship of State" section summarize it fairly well. There is a deep comedy to this sort of signaling. Only around 2% of the student body was in the bottom 20% of American society, and yet extremely wealthy Singaporean students who had spent just a few years in America marched in the street and referred to themselves as “people of color.” People’s experiences were ignored when they volunteered information that countered the main narrative, because the surface-level debate wasn’t the point. The point was to signal that you were with the program. Only a select and secret group of student “leaders”—who were already savvy enough to engage comfortably with hierarchy—were invited in to chat with administrators. Shouting from the rooftops that “They aren’t doing enough!” is much easier than following any traditional system of elite social norms and duties, let alone carefully re-engineering that system to reestablish order in a time of growing crisis. Western elites are not comfortable with their place in society and the responsibilities that come with it, and realize that there are deep structural problems with the old systems of coordination. But lacking the capacity for an orderly restructuring, or even a diagnosis of problems and needs, we dive deeper into a chaotic ideological mode of coordination that sweeps away the old structures. When you live with this mindset, what you end up with is not an establishment where a woke upper class rallies and advocates for the rights of minorities, the poor, and underprivileged groups. What you have is a blind and self-righteous upper class that becomes structurally unable to take coordinated responsibility. You get stuck in an ideological mode of coordination, where no one can speak the truth to correct collective mistakes and overreaches without losing position. This ideology is promulgated and advertised by universities, but it doesn’t start or stop at universities. All the fundraisers. All the corporate events. The Oscars. Let’s take down the Man. They say this in front of their PowerPoints. They clink champagne glasses. Let’s take down the Man! But there is no real spirit of revolution in these words. It is all in the language they understand—polite and clean, because it isn’t really real. It is a performative spectacle about their own morale and guilt. If you were the ruler while everything was burning around you, and you didn’t know what to do, what would you do? You would deny that you are in charge. And you would recuperate the growing discontented masses into your own power base, so that things stay comfortable for you.
  - jadbox 7y ago
    At a higher meta US-political level, this is probably the best criticism of the Left: "all talk without the required hard change- so that to gain power/status." ...and of the Right: "rooting into a comfortable position to deflect, avoid, blame, deny the responsibility to solve structural issues, in order to capitalize on existing power." Until we can remove the power incentives and 'take money out of politics', it'll be an extremely uphill problem to address large systematic changes on either sides. More than ever, people should stop treating people in government as celebrities, but as they are, important civil servants of the people to do the tasks that their job demands. Until then, it's a dog and pony show. Even trying to remove the corrupt to "drain the swamp" will be as futile as draining grains of sand at the beach, if you do not first address your terrain (the structure).
DenisM 7y ago
The articles contends the rich kids at Yale pretend to be poor to shirk the elite responsibilities, which then leads to deterioration of the elites. I find it doubtful that the kids have thought it through that far. A couple of more likely explanations come to mind: - Rebellious teenagers always want to establish independence from their parents. Giving up part of the money takes you part of the way there. - It's hard to be friends with people much poorer than you are - they may not accept you, and you may have hard time adjusting your spending patterns creating various embarrassments. Pretending to be poorer significantly increases the number of people you can be friends with. As to the deterioration of the elites, I believe that our country lacks raison d'etre, and absent a clear mission people to turn to scrutinizing wealth indicators, culture wars, and such to decide why they get up in the morning. The US used to defend freedom from the Soviets and that was a pretty solid mission in the mind of the missionaries, then it coasted for a while, then tried to fight the terrorism which frankly was never the proper scale of a mission, and now it's just adrift.
- nonce42 7y ago
  The author seems pretty confused about rich kids. Having rich parents doesn't necessarily mean that you have a lot of cash in college. (Sensible parents are going to give their college kids enough money to get by, not enough to go on a spending spree.) Thus, it's totally reasonable that college kids are commonly broke. It's not some role-playing to escape their responsibilities as members of the elite. In other words, there's a big difference between being broke and being poor.
  - jatmataz 7y ago
    Even if the rich parents aren't injecting a huge cash flow, that student still has the safety net to fall back on.
    - liability 7y ago
      Yes, however the thing with safety nets is people typically avoid having to fall back on them. I could go broke and fall back to living with my elderly mother, but you can bet your ass I'd rather avoid that. A rich kid might be able to ask their parents for more cash, but the embarassment and scolding that might come with that is likely enough to get a lot of rich kids to avoid the situation by choosing to live within the artificially imposed bounds of their allotted budget.
clairity 7y ago
i was rooting for some weighty insight but was disappointed by a lack of perspective and coherence. the author writes at length about what yale, and the problem, isn't and much less about about the consequences and potential avenues to shape them. she seems to lack enough life experience to put her critiques into a wider context that's relevant much beyond yale. for instance, the ivy league is viewed through the lens of 3 schools: harvard, yale and princeton, which suggests she's wholly internalized the elitist tunnel vision she decries and can't see beyond. as far as i can tell, she's saying administrators, students and faculty are at odds, particularly around what it means to have privilege and how to properly account for it (resulting in deadlock & status quo). beyond that, it's hard to tell. despite the harsh critique, i'm interested to see where this goes. more research and exploratory writing on the subject should help, as she clearly has something she wants to say.
- samdunham 7y ago
  Interestingly, I found parallels for what she was describing in much of society these days. The comics, games, movies, anime, etc... industries are all going through this same sort of thing. And if you look at the skeletal structure of what she describes going on at Yale, it's mirrored almost perfectly in those spheres.
  - DenisM 7y ago
    Can you elaborate? How do games, for example, display this?
- rossdavidh 7y ago
  I got a different take out of that. What I got was: 1) the elite know that things are messed up 2) the adult elite have no coherent answers as to how to fix it 3) their children therefore are nervous about being identified as part of that elite. Perhaps they see pitchforks coming? https://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2014/06/the-pitchforks-are-coming-for-us-plutocrats-108014 https://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2014/06/the-pitchfor...
neilv 7y ago
One thing that struck me from the piece (what I could read, before switching to skimming) was the implicit acceptance of the outsized power of Yale people. It sounded like the concern was that they acknowledge and wield this power well. I didn't see a question of whether they should have this power.
- walshemj 7y ago
  That is the take I got to is if the writer feels that there is some golden age in the past that the "elites" should adhere to. And academic politics (which the article mentions) have always been nasty.
- akhilcacharya 7y ago
  I agree. We should ask if they should have this power and the people should seize it back if necessary.
  - Nasrudith 7y ago
    Well that is the thing - it isn't granted by us or even talent but by the connection to the resources of others and the benefits - not all of them material. Many of them even if they suffered full fledged "flee a homicidal government and start with nothing" would have immaterial assets like education and experience running large organizations to gain wealth and rise up again.
    - akhilcacharya 7y ago
      You’re right, but all of this flows from perceived status. Status is not immutable. Stanford was not the elite institution it is today in the 1940s for instance.
- lancebeet 7y ago
  Articles questioning who ought to have power are a lot more common. I found it refreshing that the author left that out to focus on just the issue of what those in power should do. That question may be at least as important, given that those with wealth and power are unlikely to let go of said wealth and power, regardless of what the rest of society may think.
pmarreck 7y ago
The Yale campus may be pretty, but immediately outside, a far less impressive New Haven beckons...
inflatableDodo 7y ago
You should see what happens when these people leave university and continue the charade in a variety of broken down diesels. A lot of the worst behaviour I have ever seen by people in travelling communities has been from the expensively educated children of the exceedingly rich, pretending to be gypsies.
- tossAfterUsing 7y ago
  the woke-est girl i ever met was from the ivy league, the daughter of state department parents. she'd been 'traveling' for a year, and just returned to the bay area... to sleep on a filthy couch in the warehouse where i was living with a handful of other folks. except for the dreadlocks, filth, and b.o., she was as white as the driven snow. she lectured me for 40 minutes. when i told her i was raised by a single mother, went hungry sometimes as a kid, and paid my way through college she helped me understand that i needed "sit down and shut up" to hear other people's oppression at this time, i don't remember her burner-name. i do remember she was cute, and i had a bit of a crush on her until that day. the experience comes to mind every time somebody asks me "why in god's name?!" would i leave the bay area for texas
  - frankc 7y ago
    It's like the Pulp song Common People. The moral is that you will never have the same experience as common people because you dont have the same existential dread.
  - deleted 7y ago
    [deleted]
PaulHoule 7y ago
I remember teaching a physics section at Cornell that had an Indonesian prince who was always attended by somebody who I think was a bodyguard. He struck me as a pretty nice guy.
Nasrudith 7y ago
It appears that they are oblivious to just how problematic a culture of poseurdom is and that itself explains the dysfunctions of the old-guard elite of all sorts. It isn't that they are privileged but that they outright spend their time lying to put up appearances instead of actual substance. It might be reverse pathological causology admittedly - that pathological bullshitters get into power not that those positioned for power are trained to be pathological bullshitters.
WalterBright 7y ago
The article is interesting and worthwhile, but the author believes she has upper class students all figured out and is a little too condescending towards them.
Ismair 7y ago
Economic inequality is at its highest level since 1928 and is about to increase even more due to automation, this climate of victimization/identity politics is being increasingly forced at a higher level by corporations, a simple way to build goodwill in the public opinion and feel that they are in the right.
- barry-cotter 7y ago
  Indeed, and we can solve it as it was solved in 1929, through massive economic mismanagement. If the money supply is contracted by a third again we’re guaranteed a large destruction in wealth, reducing inequality. We could use one of the other ways we know work historically too, war or famine. After the Black Death killed 30-60% of the European population there was over 100 years of broad based prosperity, similarly after the Plague of Justinian, the fall of the Western Roman Empire or in Germany following the 30 Years War. Global inequality has been deceasing for decades. https://ourworldindata.org/global-economic-inequality https://ourworldindata.org/global-economic-inequality > Global inequality is driven by changes both of the inequality within countries and the inequality between countries. The below visualization shows how both of these changes determine the changing global inequality. > – Inequality within countries followed a U-shape pattern over the course of the 20th century. > – Inequality between countries increased over the course of 2 centuries and reached its peak level in the 1980s according to the data from Bourguignon and Morrison shown here. Since then, inequality between countries has declined. > As is shown in the visualization below, the inequality of incomes between different countries is much higher than the inequality within countries. The consequence of this is that the trend of global inequality is very much driven by what is happening to the inequality between countries.
  - nudpiedo 7y ago
    Those were tragic unwanted accidents. But look at the fall and collapse of Western Rome, Spanish Empire and Chinese Dynasties, a foreign power will help to break down our stability in less effective regions and forcing them fight against each others promoting perpetual inequality. Look at the Balcanes or the breakdown of any large enough empire which achieved unity for long enough.
buboard 7y ago
If yale is really being pushed around this much and apparently shows zero spine, why is it still considered the place for future leaders? It's far more likely they ll be taught leadership-like qualities in MOOCs these days.
geitir 7y ago
This is precisely why we have capitalism
povertyworld 7y ago
Couldn't read past the first section. I'm still feeling guilty for spending $15 getting food from a restaurant last night.
beeschlenker 7y ago
FREE SPEECH GET IT RIGHT HERE: Obama rapes & kills 2 boys. DeBlasio 5, Buttgieg 5, Cuomo 4, Murray 3, Dorsey 3, Thiel 3. Trump $4 billion to cover. Pelosi $3 billion, Harris $1 billion, Schumer $2 billion, to help bring the boys over the border. See pages 18-23, 8, 11, 12, 35, 45, 61, 62 Having trouble getting traction. Getting censored/banned. Billions in bribes paid to Trump, Pelosi, Schumer, Harris to enable a Soros funded child raping ring to operate in the USA. Please listen to the links below. Turn up the volume and put headphones on. You will hear these people, and many other high profile people, incriminate themselves in unbelievable fashion. Full 74 page document [update 10Aug] filled with red handed evidence like this at the bottom. Go to pages 18-23 of this document and you will hear Dorsey and Thiel raping children. You will hear their screams. They both rape and kill three. Also at the "rape party" of note: Bill DeBlasio, Andrew Cuomo, Bill Murray, Peter Buttgieg, George Soros, Barack Obama. Please copy and paste this post and repost it. I keep getting censored by these people. Peter Thiel and Jack Dorsey raping and killing three boys each. Turn the volume all the way up and put head phones on. https://s3.wasabisys.com/conv1/Overnight_14-17Jan/15JanCh3_100-200.avi https://drive.google.com/file/d/1mzZrjobxhNIEf38M3xk-IeA5SeF4aUtB/view?usp=sharing Obama admits to raping and killing boys he{re, with commentary from Peter Thiel, George Soros, Matt Porter: https://s3.wasabisys.com/out2/Out2/15JanCh3_0545.avi https://drive.google.com/file/d/1LCDoc1kT7cfSeKQ1vniP_sx32_bRsHau/view?usp=sharing Trump demands $4 billion to "take a blind eye" at 1015+ (link missing from report, unsure how). Here's pieces of dialogue: 1015 The President requests four billion and henry Porter agrees to it. Some dialogue below. 1017 Donald Trump: Why don't you think about it. 1017 Henry Porter: I don't need to think about it. I'm ready for you to find out what we're really about. 1017 Gigi Hadid: I don't think it's a good idea Henry. 1017 Henry Porter: ...no shit. Jelena just stop talking about it. 1018 Gigi Hadid: About what? 1018 Henry Porter: The child raping. 1018 Donald Trump: What the fuck are you talking about? 1018 Gigi Hadid: Mr. President we are child rapists. 1018 Donald Trump: You cannot be serious. 1018 Donald Trump: You're gonna need $4 billion for me to take a blind eye. 1019 ?: People are laughing because they think four billion is too much. I think it's not a problem when you have $35 billion. 1022 Donald Trump: You better have that $4 billion or you can kiss this shit goodbye. https://s3.wasabisys.com/conv2/3Jan/3JanCh3_900-1100.avi https://drive.google.com/file/d/1Grdr8xF2psKNsuYlEnl9dIRV-77YG0Vr/view?usp=sharing Trump wants $138 million to ensure smooth outcome for false judgment for a court case: https://s3.wasabisys.com/conv1/10JanCh3/10JanCh3_951-1033.avi https://drive.google.com/file/d/1iSeGHDToFRoRdIht50Wii0i30mlw9INp/view?usp=sharing Obama explains the Illuminati with Jack Dorsey: https://s3.wasabisys.com/conv1/Overnight_14-17Jan/15JanCh3_200-347.avi https://drive.google.com/file/d/1Ok1-9IvANULzKBOwADFgaiYCFi6yszfj/view?usp=sharing At 230 a conversation is occurring on the embedded Porter camera system with Jack Dorsey, Peter Thiel, Barack Obama, Bill M^urray, and the Porter's. Jack Dorsey provides a statement defining who their group is: "The Illum%inati is an underground organization of child rapists and homosexuals." Matthew Porter: "We have to thin the herd, so Barack is going to explain a few things." At 232 Barack Obama says the following: "You people have to realize we are child rapi'sts. The Illuminati are child rapists. As soon as you figure that out, you can decide what to do. Everybody is freaking out about what just happened [child raping event still going on]. This is who ^we are." Full 74 page document [updated 10Aug]: https://s3.wasabisys.com/aviewmefirst/FBI_FinalDraft_26Jul2019_BSchlenker.pdf https://drive.google.com/file/d/1dXNjPQdQ8c-hFFLt9LT0GiSY5Vud0TzL/view?usp=sharing Please post this anywhere you can! Each google drive link is a backup to the wasabi link just in case one is "down". A word about the "f@#$ot" usage: it was a necessary tool. It showed three things: they were not in control, if they were the usage would have be stopped. Everyone out there needed to see t%his. Two, it made it unpleasant for them to be in the headspace, which has obvious advantages. Three, it pointed out impersonators of BS because they would not call each other faggot, thus helping to mitigate the spread of false information. Apologies for those unintentionally offended. Of special interest to the LGBT community, I give you Barack Obama in a foursome with Peter Thiel, Jack Dorsey, and Matthew Porter. It is on page 12 of the document where you can download the video containing audio footage of the "event". Link is just above under "Full 71 page document".
xxxpupugo 7y ago
Yeah, self victimization is trendy right now. People are desperate seeking to find micro oppression from their life experiences and wear them like accessories, while in fact they are top privileged. I would say that is just the new 'rich kids get boring' stories in our post-modern/post-truth world, and the fashion right now is to dress/act as their imagined oppressed. Cruel pleasure indeed.
mensetmanusman 7y ago
Fascinating exploration. It seems the ‘eternal adolescence’ of the modern mind is effecting class dynamics. At MIT I remember being told that we were expected to be the best in the world at a particular technical subject. I remember a mixed feeling of awe and trepidation at being told of the responsibility we held to society. I hope the elite can improve and practice sacrificial leadership for the betterment of all.
nyxxie 7y ago
I think the author is ascribing too much intent to a simple economy of shame that’s omnipresent in all classes; if people find out you have more than they do, they hate you. The author herself appears to be biased by this. She believes that the “rich elites” have a great burden of responsibility towards the world, which she justifies with shaky zero sum logic that suggests that because they have more, they necessarily took it from those who have less (her bulky villager metaphor). She might not be openly jealous, but she still seems to believe that her rich peers must somehow earn this wealth (an undefined and likely impossible undertaking), and writes about them with condescension when she sees they do not meet her burden. The kind of “rich elite” that attends Yale—that is to say a child who has access to vast sums of wealth they themselves did not amass—is an otherwise normal person who simply wants to live a happy life. Some end up president, some end up “gypsies”, but as the observes all of them have learned that in order to pursue these goals unmolested they have to put on the cloak of being less privileged than those around them. If they don’t, they’ll drown in a sea of hate from those of lesser means than them. Thats it. There’s no mystery here, just a bunch of kids trying to avoid being systematically bullied for circumstances outside of their control.
- rossdavidh 7y ago
  Well, by that logic, it should always have been this way. And yet, conspicuous consumption by the children of the ruling class, is not an historically unusual event. Pretending you're poor when you're very rich, while perhaps not unprecedented, is at least not the norm. So I think an explanation is called for, and hers is at the very least quite plausible. Whatever the reason, it would have to be something that is not common to all times and places, because the college-age children of the ruling class don't always act this way. One wonders if, for example, the equivalent demographic in China (a rising power) acts this way.
  - nyxxie 7y ago
    >Pretending you're poor when you're very rich, while perhaps not unprecedented, is at least not the norm. So I think an explanation is called for, and hers is at the very least quite plausible Here's mine: social media and culture in general seeming to centralize around the internet places rich people in the same cultural environment as their poorer counterparts at a scale that is historically unprecedented. The elite have always been inaccessible, now they are within a stone's throw of us. American pop culture is disdainful (or at worst hostile) towards outwardly rich people, and has been legitimized by the popularity of the political concept of privilege. The rich want to participate in this culture but are surrounded by messaging telling them they're somehow lesser or a bad person for being rich. Cause, meet effect.
alexandercrohde 7y ago
I find this piece fascinating. To honor it I offer a tl; dr 1. Author recounts experiences of people lying about their class/wealth at Yale, often feigning less wealth. 2. Explains behavior 1 as style, safety, loss-of-perspective, and avoiding social responsibility 3. Retells several incidents where a vocal minority of students at Yale picked and won battles over verbiage (e.g. emails, Calhoun, "Master of college"). 4. Interprets the battles in 3 as at best insignificant and at worst a distraction from real problems of class disparity in America. Contrasts these protests against Vietnam protests. 5. Proposes "American Elites" have no idea what they stand for anymore, are shirking their responsibility, and have no capability to be self-critical for fear of losing belonging in the in-group. 6. Rejects these Yale social movements: "This ideology is filled with inconsistencies and contradictions, because it is not really about ideological rigor. Among other things, it is an elaborate containment system for the theoretical and practical discontent generated by the failures of the system, an absolution from guilt, and a new form of class signaling." 7. Interprets the "inconsistent" Yale protests as an unproductive way for students to avoid guilt of their privilege and distance themselves from failing "legacy institutions." 8. Holds the Yale administration accountable for siding against a "vacuous" student cause instead of their own faculty. Demands more from "an institution older than the Republic" 9. Asks what it means if "Yale dies" and why this matters. Proposes it speaks to a more universal problem. [All that said, I recommend reading the whole thing if you can find the time. This distillation has only a fraction of the value of the whole piece. Many tangential points are very interesting.]
- bsder 7y ago
  > 4. Interprets the battles in 3 as at best insignificant and at worst a distraction from real problems of class disparity in America. Contrasts these protests against Vietnam protests. I tend to agree. I view the "tempest in a teapot" protests that go after some academic functionary in the same light as I view most of the animal rights protesters--deeply hypocritical. You don't see these college students go after someone with actual power just like you don't see the animal rights advocates throw paint on Hell's Angels for wearing leather. Protest is good--until you you might actually face consequences for your protest. Sorry, protest without consequences isn't a real protest. If the Yale students want to protest, we have an oversupply of things that need to be protested--feel free to join us. But, these might upset people with real power, they might get arrested, they might wind up with a criminal record like the plebeians and that might upset their getting that cushy Goldman-Sachs position in a couple years.
finolex1 7y ago
This article strikes me as extraploating a select few experiences to make far reaching conclusions. 99% of the people at yale are not children of billionaires or statesmen. They are children of doctors, lawyers, programmers, etc. who are wealthy but not wealthy enough to live off their inheritance indefinitely. People attend classes, do research, play sports, or put up performances - in short what's been going on for decades at virtually every college. Maybe there's a larger structural inequality problem in society, but it seems far fetched to point to her anecdotal experiences with rich kids as the cause.
- alexandercrohde 7y ago
  Do you have a source for the claim that 99% of attendees of Yale don't have enough money to live off their inheritance indefinitely?
  - shadowbanme 7y ago
    Do you have a source for the claim that more than 1% are? I’m not sure why we’re talking about inheritances anyway; most people these days don’t get significant inheritances until they’re in their fifties or sixties, when their parents die. A college student who has already been the recipient of a large inheritance is a rare bird indeed.
deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
ikeboy 7y ago
>But this low number of 2% surprised me because when I was at Yale, everybody kept talking about how broke they were. >“Want to go out for brunch?” “I can’t—I’m so broke.” This was a common line. Seems like a huge stretch to assume this is a lie. The 2% figure is for the bottom quintile. The same source says the median family income for Yale students is 192k. That's perfectly consistent with a student who's taking on a heavy debt load to not have much disposable income. The family could have several kids, perhaps be paying partial tuition for 2 kids and have basically no money to give their kid aside from the minimum for food and board.
- Jill_the_Pill 7y ago
  My second child is starting at Yale this fall, and yes, the tuition struggle is real (trying to do it with no debt). My son has 3 summer jobs, and my daughter is moving off campus to save money. We might make that median this year, but only because I just took on a second job. They won't be posing when they can't go out for brunch -- not when that damned meal plan already took $9 for breakfast.
viburnum 7y ago
The problem is that Yale exists at all
- gaze 7y ago
  You seem to be the one person on HN with consistently the right take.
Ericson2314 7y ago
I have many reservations about the rest, but the first point about guilty rich kids deserves to be more widely known. Forget "upper middle class", let's ban "middle class" from the discourse. It's 1/2 anachronism 1/2 compromise between guilty rich and aspirational poor.
hos234 7y ago
This reads like a prologue to the Cambridge 5 - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cambridge_Spies https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cambridge_Spies There too an empire was in decline.
tfowler 7y ago
I would have rather wasted my time reading a Skull & Bones expose.
senderista 7y ago
Yale certainly failed to teach the author how to write.
glangdale 7y ago
The Problem at Yale, based on the length of this essay, seems to be Too Much Speech. This is an extended complaint about annoying people one might have brunched with at a few elite institutions, dressed up as cultural analysis. I am minded of McAdoo on President Harding: “His speeches left the impression of an army of pompous phrases moving over the landscape in search of an idea; sometimes these meandering words would actually capture a straggling thought and bear it triumphantly as a prisoner in their midst, until it died of servitude and overwork.” In a shock development, university students dress down, pretend to be poorer than they are, and get into conflicts with administrators over things (often pointless things); clearly something that has Never Ever Happened Before. There are nuggets of good sense here, but the overall message is a scrambled mess. Apparently what's going wrong in the world can be largely attributed to liberal elites patting themselves on the back while trying to do good, or something. I'm sure this plays well in certain circles. In a world where we have gazillionaire plutocrats actively working 24/7 to fuck other people over (the Koch brothers and the Sacklers spring to mind) I'm not losing too much sleep over this micro-diagnosis about how some kinda-liberal rich people in a tiny slice of American academia pissed off the author and should be spending their lives differently.
- gaze 7y ago
  Author wrote a pro-Jordan Peterson piece for the weekly standard. We both know exactly where this plays well.
- Barrin92 7y ago
  fully agreed. the piece exists in some weird space where it suffers from the exact sort of superiority / inferiority role playing anxiety that it's supposed to be about which makes it difficult to draw anything from it.
sunstone 7y ago
Brevity is the soul of wit.
- PunchTornado 7y ago
  did anyone read the whole article? At first I was interested, read a few scrolls, but when I saw that she goes on and on I just couldn't finish it.
marcus_holmes 7y ago
I went to an English boarding school long enough ago for the intent of that system to still be to train the officer class of the British Empire. But not so long ago that it was actually practical for any of us to realistically be colonial administrators. This piece reminds me of that education. We were in the middle of the feminist and multi-cultural ideological revolutions. Being culturally aware; not insisting that British culture is superior to everyone else's, was both socially mandatory and against the dominant narrative of the school's educational message. It made for interesting confrontations between the institution and the students and staff Britain had lost its empire, and the institutions that were set up to administer that empire, and train the administrators of that empire, were failing. Are still failing; though the UK's latest PM is an archetypal product of that system, he is being parodied for it rather than respected for it. I wonder if America is going through the same thing? For decades the USA has been utterly, unshakably confident that its values, its culture, are superior to the everyone else's. Now... not so much?
- FakeComments 7y ago
  I find it interesting that movements such as feminism and multiculturalism trace their roots to countries that hated the US, UK, etc supporting radical professors with intel assets, as a means of subversion. Arguably, feminism and multiculturalism, as currently embodied, are weaponized memes meant to destroy a society. Neither is supported by factual basis, and both rely heavily on emotionally manipulative propaganda tactics. Feminism has left men happier and women less happy than the social dynamics of the 1950s, while causing generational scale institutional misandry and breakdowns in relationships.
- jgalt212 7y ago
  > unshakably confident that its values, its culture, are superior to the everyone else's. Now... not so much? I feel the same way about American values that Churchill felt about democracy.
  - marcus_holmes 7y ago
    I would agree with you. Well, except for the guns and religion bits of it.
9nGQluzmnq3M 7y ago
This struck a chord, and not as an Ivy League student, but as somebody working at a FAANG: the same continual narrowing of the space of what is permissible to say out loud and same witch-hunts for people who say Wrong things are happening here too.
- verall 7y ago
  I think in the workplace it is different though, whereas universities have been progressive environments and places for debate for many years, at companies, people just want to get work done. I don't want work somewhere where I ever have to hear off-color jokes about women or minorities. I am lucky I work somewhere I have not heard those things. People should be permitted to say those things outloud, but not okay at work. Not as a joke. Take it home or to a bar or to golf buddies or something.
profunctor 7y ago
Interesting piece although I don't think they represent the point of view of the agitators fairly, for example the author writes: " you ask supporters, they will tell you the cost does not matter so much, because this is about creating an ideal world. Of course the professor should be fired—how dare she stand against the minority student organizations? Of course it’s okay that the Yelp reviews were published—she should never have written them. Of course names should be changed if they hint at or honor the wrong ideology. What does preserving history matter if history is racist? " What does honouring someone who is extremely pro-slavery even for their time have to do with preserving history? That history still exists whether they have a building named after them or not. And I don't think you will honestly find many people who believe that the ends justify the means no matter what, although you will of course find some people who believe anything. So I think the "ideal world" bit is also somewhat a strawman and a mischaracterisation of people who are anti-racist or whatever. I do however agree that a lot of this stuff doesn't really help those who need it most. The rich kids paying a 2% wealth tax funnelled into social welfare and education for the working class would do more, as would having Yale include more working and lower-middle class student. But it's easy for me to say as a white guy that having many buildings named after pro-slavery politicians is not really doing any harm. Maybe we should ask those who would be more effected.
- aschmid 7y ago
  I thought the exact same thing, the "Calhoun incident" mentioned completely takes away from the rest of the examples showing that Yale is acquiescing to unreasonable demands. Not wanting to live in a building celebrating a violently pro-slavery historical figure is not at all unreasonable, and is not erasing history. Being anti-slavery and anti-racism isn't some "politically correct fad of the day" that nobody can keep up with.
Tycho 7y ago
In Christianity, you admit that you are flawed and wicked, but you can repent by accepting Christ as your lord and saviour, and by helping the poor and needy, and then carry on with your business, providing you publicly pour scorn on the unrepentant. In Woke Studies, you admit that you are white and privileged, but you can repent by accepting Diversity as your lord and saviour, and then carry on with your business, providing you publicly pour scorn on the poor and needy white people who don't share your wokeness.
ZeroGravitas 7y ago
I'm fascinated by this sub-genre of "political correctness has gone too far" on campus. Parts of this could have come from a script to generate these. In particular the bit about how some elderly academic was a liberal, and therefore anyone who disagreed with them must be some dangerous extremist. Always seems more likely that as a youth they would have been similarly distant from a "reasonable" moderate of a similar age. A couple of years ago the big trope was that this this was the new face of fascist authoritarianism, that republicans were reasonable moderates and people trying to push veganism, or fight climate change or whatever were crazy extremists. The rise of Trump seems to have muted that a little and rendered most of it ridiculous in hindsight. (Well, it was ridiculous at the time too, but got carried by the same media that would then support Trump).

332 points by jseliger 7y ago

jseliger 7y ago

This mostly makes Yale sound like an extremely unpleasant place to be.

StudentStuff 7y ago
Any place where people LARP and hide themselves behind masks of their own design all day can be caustic, Yale is far from being an outlier.
- julienreszka 7y ago
  Your point being?
- pmarreck 7y ago
  I'm fairly certain that some group of people LARP at all the Ivy Leagues. I think we all wear masks, though.

tengbretson 7y ago

Good grief, get to the point!

sonthonax 7y ago
When was the last time you read something longer than a tweet?
- bena 7y ago
  It's over 60,000 characters and rambles
- tengbretson 7y ago
  Length has literally nothing to do with it. It's a matter of give and take, and politeness. If there's thirty minutes of content I'm happy to commit my thirty minutes of reading. If you have five minutes of content in thirty minutes of text you're just being rude.
  - jvagner 7y ago
    I want to think it's about "show, don't tell" but I gave up on this article, too..
- theobeers 7y ago
  This essay is not well written enough to justify its dilatory nature.
- ggggtez 7y ago
  The author says "this story isn't about me" and yet spends 10 paragraphs telling a personal anecdote. Who said the problem at Yale is free speech? Is the audience supposed to know what he's talking about? I may never know because I too gave up.
  - heavenlyblue 7y ago
    Well, the author is a). she, and b). she tells a personal anecdote because she's about to write an article about her own experience at Yale. So obviously she needs to present her bio in order to express the position from which she's seeing Yale.
- buboard 7y ago
  prose is pleasant when it's good
DavidVoid 7y ago
I think these paragraphs from the "Abandoning The Ship of State" section summarize it fairly well. There is a deep comedy to this sort of signaling. Only around 2% of the student body was in the bottom 20% of American society, and yet extremely wealthy Singaporean students who had spent just a few years in America marched in the street and referred to themselves as “people of color.” People’s experiences were ignored when they volunteered information that countered the main narrative, because the surface-level debate wasn’t the point. The point was to signal that you were with the program. Only a select and secret group of student “leaders”—who were already savvy enough to engage comfortably with hierarchy—were invited in to chat with administrators. Shouting from the rooftops that “They aren’t doing enough!” is much easier than following any traditional system of elite social norms and duties, let alone carefully re-engineering that system to reestablish order in a time of growing crisis. Western elites are not comfortable with their place in society and the responsibilities that come with it, and realize that there are deep structural problems with the old systems of coordination. But lacking the capacity for an orderly restructuring, or even a diagnosis of problems and needs, we dive deeper into a chaotic ideological mode of coordination that sweeps away the old structures. When you live with this mindset, what you end up with is not an establishment where a woke upper class rallies and advocates for the rights of minorities, the poor, and underprivileged groups. What you have is a blind and self-righteous upper class that becomes structurally unable to take coordinated responsibility. You get stuck in an ideological mode of coordination, where no one can speak the truth to correct collective mistakes and overreaches without losing position. This ideology is promulgated and advertised by universities, but it doesn’t start or stop at universities. All the fundraisers. All the corporate events. The Oscars. Let’s take down the Man. They say this in front of their PowerPoints. They clink champagne glasses. Let’s take down the Man! But there is no real spirit of revolution in these words. It is all in the language they understand—polite and clean, because it isn’t really real. It is a performative spectacle about their own morale and guilt. If you were the ruler while everything was burning around you, and you didn’t know what to do, what would you do? You would deny that you are in charge. And you would recuperate the growing discontented masses into your own power base, so that things stay comfortable for you.
- jadbox 7y ago
  At a higher meta US-political level, this is probably the best criticism of the Left: "all talk without the required hard change- so that to gain power/status." ...and of the Right: "rooting into a comfortable position to deflect, avoid, blame, deny the responsibility to solve structural issues, in order to capitalize on existing power." Until we can remove the power incentives and 'take money out of politics', it'll be an extremely uphill problem to address large systematic changes on either sides. More than ever, people should stop treating people in government as celebrities, but as they are, important civil servants of the people to do the tasks that their job demands. Until then, it's a dog and pony show. Even trying to remove the corrupt to "drain the swamp" will be as futile as draining grains of sand at the beach, if you do not first address your terrain (the structure).

DenisM 7y ago

The articles contends the rich kids at Yale pretend to be poor to shirk the elite responsibilities, which then leads to deterioration of the elites. I find it doubtful that the kids have thought it through that far. A couple of more likely explanations come to mind: - Rebellious teenagers always want to establish independence from their parents. Giving up part of the money takes you part of the way there. - It's hard to be friends with people much poorer than you are - they may not accept you, and you may have hard time adjusting your spending patterns creating various embarrassments. Pretending to be poorer significantly increases the number of people you can be friends with. As to the deterioration of the elites, I believe that our country lacks raison d'etre, and absent a clear mission people to turn to scrutinizing wealth indicators, culture wars, and such to decide why they get up in the morning. The US used to defend freedom from the Soviets and that was a pretty solid mission in the mind of the missionaries, then it coasted for a while, then tried to fight the terrorism which frankly was never the proper scale of a mission, and now it's just adrift.

nonce42 7y ago
The author seems pretty confused about rich kids. Having rich parents doesn't necessarily mean that you have a lot of cash in college. (Sensible parents are going to give their college kids enough money to get by, not enough to go on a spending spree.) Thus, it's totally reasonable that college kids are commonly broke. It's not some role-playing to escape their responsibilities as members of the elite. In other words, there's a big difference between being broke and being poor.
- jatmataz 7y ago
  Even if the rich parents aren't injecting a huge cash flow, that student still has the safety net to fall back on.
  - liability 7y ago
    Yes, however the thing with safety nets is people typically avoid having to fall back on them. I could go broke and fall back to living with my elderly mother, but you can bet your ass I'd rather avoid that. A rich kid might be able to ask their parents for more cash, but the embarassment and scolding that might come with that is likely enough to get a lot of rich kids to avoid the situation by choosing to live within the artificially imposed bounds of their allotted budget.

clairity 7y ago

i was rooting for some weighty insight but was disappointed by a lack of perspective and coherence. the author writes at length about what yale, and the problem, isn't and much less about about the consequences and potential avenues to shape them. she seems to lack enough life experience to put her critiques into a wider context that's relevant much beyond yale. for instance, the ivy league is viewed through the lens of 3 schools: harvard, yale and princeton, which suggests she's wholly internalized the elitist tunnel vision she decries and can't see beyond. as far as i can tell, she's saying administrators, students and faculty are at odds, particularly around what it means to have privilege and how to properly account for it (resulting in deadlock & status quo). beyond that, it's hard to tell. despite the harsh critique, i'm interested to see where this goes. more research and exploratory writing on the subject should help, as she clearly has something she wants to say.

samdunham 7y ago
Interestingly, I found parallels for what she was describing in much of society these days. The comics, games, movies, anime, etc... industries are all going through this same sort of thing. And if you look at the skeletal structure of what she describes going on at Yale, it's mirrored almost perfectly in those spheres.
- DenisM 7y ago
  Can you elaborate? How do games, for example, display this?
rossdavidh 7y ago
I got a different take out of that. What I got was: 1) the elite know that things are messed up 2) the adult elite have no coherent answers as to how to fix it 3) their children therefore are nervous about being identified as part of that elite. Perhaps they see pitchforks coming? https://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2014/06/the-pitchforks-are-coming-for-us-plutocrats-108014 https://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2014/06/the-pitchfor...

neilv 7y ago

One thing that struck me from the piece (what I could read, before switching to skimming) was the implicit acceptance of the outsized power of Yale people. It sounded like the concern was that they acknowledge and wield this power well. I didn't see a question of whether they should have this power.

walshemj 7y ago
That is the take I got to is if the writer feels that there is some golden age in the past that the "elites" should adhere to. And academic politics (which the article mentions) have always been nasty.
akhilcacharya 7y ago
I agree. We should ask if they should have this power and the people should seize it back if necessary.
- Nasrudith 7y ago
  Well that is the thing - it isn't granted by us or even talent but by the connection to the resources of others and the benefits - not all of them material. Many of them even if they suffered full fledged "flee a homicidal government and start with nothing" would have immaterial assets like education and experience running large organizations to gain wealth and rise up again.
  - akhilcacharya 7y ago
    You’re right, but all of this flows from perceived status. Status is not immutable. Stanford was not the elite institution it is today in the 1940s for instance.
lancebeet 7y ago
Articles questioning who ought to have power are a lot more common. I found it refreshing that the author left that out to focus on just the issue of what those in power should do. That question may be at least as important, given that those with wealth and power are unlikely to let go of said wealth and power, regardless of what the rest of society may think.

pmarreck 7y ago

The Yale campus may be pretty, but immediately outside, a far less impressive New Haven beckons...

inflatableDodo 7y ago

You should see what happens when these people leave university and continue the charade in a variety of broken down diesels. A lot of the worst behaviour I have ever seen by people in travelling communities has been from the expensively educated children of the exceedingly rich, pretending to be gypsies.

tossAfterUsing 7y ago
the woke-est girl i ever met was from the ivy league, the daughter of state department parents. she'd been 'traveling' for a year, and just returned to the bay area... to sleep on a filthy couch in the warehouse where i was living with a handful of other folks. except for the dreadlocks, filth, and b.o., she was as white as the driven snow. she lectured me for 40 minutes. when i told her i was raised by a single mother, went hungry sometimes as a kid, and paid my way through college she helped me understand that i needed "sit down and shut up" to hear other people's oppression at this time, i don't remember her burner-name. i do remember she was cute, and i had a bit of a crush on her until that day. the experience comes to mind every time somebody asks me "why in god's name?!" would i leave the bay area for texas
- frankc 7y ago
  It's like the Pulp song Common People. The moral is that you will never have the same experience as common people because you dont have the same existential dread.
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]

PaulHoule 7y ago

I remember teaching a physics section at Cornell that had an Indonesian prince who was always attended by somebody who I think was a bodyguard. He struck me as a pretty nice guy.

Nasrudith 7y ago

It appears that they are oblivious to just how problematic a culture of poseurdom is and that itself explains the dysfunctions of the old-guard elite of all sorts. It isn't that they are privileged but that they outright spend their time lying to put up appearances instead of actual substance. It might be reverse pathological causology admittedly - that pathological bullshitters get into power not that those positioned for power are trained to be pathological bullshitters.

WalterBright 7y ago

The article is interesting and worthwhile, but the author believes she has upper class students all figured out and is a little too condescending towards them.

Ismair 7y ago

Economic inequality is at its highest level since 1928 and is about to increase even more due to automation, this climate of victimization/identity politics is being increasingly forced at a higher level by corporations, a simple way to build goodwill in the public opinion and feel that they are in the right.

barry-cotter 7y ago
Indeed, and we can solve it as it was solved in 1929, through massive economic mismanagement. If the money supply is contracted by a third again we’re guaranteed a large destruction in wealth, reducing inequality. We could use one of the other ways we know work historically too, war or famine. After the Black Death killed 30-60% of the European population there was over 100 years of broad based prosperity, similarly after the Plague of Justinian, the fall of the Western Roman Empire or in Germany following the 30 Years War. Global inequality has been deceasing for decades. https://ourworldindata.org/global-economic-inequality https://ourworldindata.org/global-economic-inequality > Global inequality is driven by changes both of the inequality within countries and the inequality between countries. The below visualization shows how both of these changes determine the changing global inequality. > – Inequality within countries followed a U-shape pattern over the course of the 20th century. > – Inequality between countries increased over the course of 2 centuries and reached its peak level in the 1980s according to the data from Bourguignon and Morrison shown here. Since then, inequality between countries has declined. > As is shown in the visualization below, the inequality of incomes between different countries is much higher than the inequality within countries. The consequence of this is that the trend of global inequality is very much driven by what is happening to the inequality between countries.
- nudpiedo 7y ago
  Those were tragic unwanted accidents. But look at the fall and collapse of Western Rome, Spanish Empire and Chinese Dynasties, a foreign power will help to break down our stability in less effective regions and forcing them fight against each others promoting perpetual inequality. Look at the Balcanes or the breakdown of any large enough empire which achieved unity for long enough.

buboard 7y ago

If yale is really being pushed around this much and apparently shows zero spine, why is it still considered the place for future leaders? It's far more likely they ll be taught leadership-like qualities in MOOCs these days.

geitir 7y ago

This is precisely why we have capitalism

povertyworld 7y ago

Couldn't read past the first section. I'm still feeling guilty for spending $15 getting food from a restaurant last night.

beeschlenker 7y ago

FREE SPEECH GET IT RIGHT HERE: Obama rapes & kills 2 boys. DeBlasio 5, Buttgieg 5, Cuomo 4, Murray 3, Dorsey 3, Thiel 3. Trump $4 billion to cover. Pelosi $3 billion, Harris $1 billion, Schumer $2 billion, to help bring the boys over the border. See pages 18-23, 8, 11, 12, 35, 45, 61, 62 Having trouble getting traction. Getting censored/banned. Billions in bribes paid to Trump, Pelosi, Schumer, Harris to enable a Soros funded child raping ring to operate in the USA. Please listen to the links below. Turn up the volume and put headphones on. You will hear these people, and many other high profile people, incriminate themselves in unbelievable fashion. Full 74 page document [update 10Aug] filled with red handed evidence like this at the bottom. Go to pages 18-23 of this document and you will hear Dorsey and Thiel raping children. You will hear their screams. They both rape and kill three. Also at the "rape party" of note: Bill DeBlasio, Andrew Cuomo, Bill Murray, Peter Buttgieg, George Soros, Barack Obama. Please copy and paste this post and repost it. I keep getting censored by these people. Peter Thiel and Jack Dorsey raping and killing three boys each. Turn the volume all the way up and put head phones on. https://s3.wasabisys.com/conv1/Overnight_14-17Jan/15JanCh3_100-200.avi https://drive.google.com/file/d/1mzZrjobxhNIEf38M3xk-IeA5SeF4aUtB/view?usp=sharing Obama admits to raping and killing boys he{re, with commentary from Peter Thiel, George Soros, Matt Porter: https://s3.wasabisys.com/out2/Out2/15JanCh3_0545.avi https://drive.google.com/file/d/1LCDoc1kT7cfSeKQ1vniP_sx32_bRsHau/view?usp=sharing Trump demands $4 billion to "take a blind eye" at 1015+ (link missing from report, unsure how). Here's pieces of dialogue: 1015 The President requests four billion and henry Porter agrees to it. Some dialogue below. 1017 Donald Trump: Why don't you think about it. 1017 Henry Porter: I don't need to think about it. I'm ready for you to find out what we're really about. 1017 Gigi Hadid: I don't think it's a good idea Henry. 1017 Henry Porter: ...no shit. Jelena just stop talking about it. 1018 Gigi Hadid: About what? 1018 Henry Porter: The child raping. 1018 Donald Trump: What the fuck are you talking about? 1018 Gigi Hadid: Mr. President we are child rapists. 1018 Donald Trump: You cannot be serious. 1018 Donald Trump: You're gonna need $4 billion for me to take a blind eye. 1019 ?: People are laughing because they think four billion is too much. I think it's not a problem when you have $35 billion. 1022 Donald Trump: You better have that $4 billion or you can kiss this shit goodbye. https://s3.wasabisys.com/conv2/3Jan/3JanCh3_900-1100.avi https://drive.google.com/file/d/1Grdr8xF2psKNsuYlEnl9dIRV-77YG0Vr/view?usp=sharing Trump wants $138 million to ensure smooth outcome for false judgment for a court case: https://s3.wasabisys.com/conv1/10JanCh3/10JanCh3_951-1033.avi https://drive.google.com/file/d/1iSeGHDToFRoRdIht50Wii0i30mlw9INp/view?usp=sharing Obama explains the Illuminati with Jack Dorsey: https://s3.wasabisys.com/conv1/Overnight_14-17Jan/15JanCh3_200-347.avi https://drive.google.com/file/d/1Ok1-9IvANULzKBOwADFgaiYCFi6yszfj/view?usp=sharing At 230 a conversation is occurring on the embedded Porter camera system with Jack Dorsey, Peter Thiel, Barack Obama, Bill M^urray, and the Porter's. Jack Dorsey provides a statement defining who their group is: "The Illum%inati is an underground organization of child rapists and homosexuals." Matthew Porter: "We have to thin the herd, so Barack is going to explain a few things." At 232 Barack Obama says the following: "You people have to realize we are child rapi'sts. The Illuminati are child rapists. As soon as you figure that out, you can decide what to do. Everybody is freaking out about what just happened [child raping event still going on]. This is who ^we are." Full 74 page document [updated 10Aug]: https://s3.wasabisys.com/aviewmefirst/FBI_FinalDraft_26Jul2019_BSchlenker.pdf https://drive.google.com/file/d/1dXNjPQdQ8c-hFFLt9LT0GiSY5Vud0TzL/view?usp=sharing Please post this anywhere you can! Each google drive link is a backup to the wasabi link just in case one is "down". A word about the "f@#$ot" usage: it was a necessary tool. It showed three things: they were not in control, if they were the usage would have be stopped. Everyone out there needed to see t%his. Two, it made it unpleasant for them to be in the headspace, which has obvious advantages. Three, it pointed out impersonators of BS because they would not call each other faggot, thus helping to mitigate the spread of false information. Apologies for those unintentionally offended. Of special interest to the LGBT community, I give you Barack Obama in a foursome with Peter Thiel, Jack Dorsey, and Matthew Porter. It is on page 12 of the document where you can download the video containing audio footage of the "event". Link is just above under "Full 71 page document".

xxxpupugo 7y ago

Yeah, self victimization is trendy right now. People are desperate seeking to find micro oppression from their life experiences and wear them like accessories, while in fact they are top privileged. I would say that is just the new 'rich kids get boring' stories in our post-modern/post-truth world, and the fashion right now is to dress/act as their imagined oppressed. Cruel pleasure indeed.

mensetmanusman 7y ago

Fascinating exploration. It seems the ‘eternal adolescence’ of the modern mind is effecting class dynamics. At MIT I remember being told that we were expected to be the best in the world at a particular technical subject. I remember a mixed feeling of awe and trepidation at being told of the responsibility we held to society. I hope the elite can improve and practice sacrificial leadership for the betterment of all.

nyxxie 7y ago

I think the author is ascribing too much intent to a simple economy of shame that’s omnipresent in all classes; if people find out you have more than they do, they hate you. The author herself appears to be biased by this. She believes that the “rich elites” have a great burden of responsibility towards the world, which she justifies with shaky zero sum logic that suggests that because they have more, they necessarily took it from those who have less (her bulky villager metaphor). She might not be openly jealous, but she still seems to believe that her rich peers must somehow earn this wealth (an undefined and likely impossible undertaking), and writes about them with condescension when she sees they do not meet her burden. The kind of “rich elite” that attends Yale—that is to say a child who has access to vast sums of wealth they themselves did not amass—is an otherwise normal person who simply wants to live a happy life. Some end up president, some end up “gypsies”, but as the observes all of them have learned that in order to pursue these goals unmolested they have to put on the cloak of being less privileged than those around them. If they don’t, they’ll drown in a sea of hate from those of lesser means than them. Thats it. There’s no mystery here, just a bunch of kids trying to avoid being systematically bullied for circumstances outside of their control.

rossdavidh 7y ago
Well, by that logic, it should always have been this way. And yet, conspicuous consumption by the children of the ruling class, is not an historically unusual event. Pretending you're poor when you're very rich, while perhaps not unprecedented, is at least not the norm. So I think an explanation is called for, and hers is at the very least quite plausible. Whatever the reason, it would have to be something that is not common to all times and places, because the college-age children of the ruling class don't always act this way. One wonders if, for example, the equivalent demographic in China (a rising power) acts this way.
- nyxxie 7y ago
  >Pretending you're poor when you're very rich, while perhaps not unprecedented, is at least not the norm. So I think an explanation is called for, and hers is at the very least quite plausible Here's mine: social media and culture in general seeming to centralize around the internet places rich people in the same cultural environment as their poorer counterparts at a scale that is historically unprecedented. The elite have always been inaccessible, now they are within a stone's throw of us. American pop culture is disdainful (or at worst hostile) towards outwardly rich people, and has been legitimized by the popularity of the political concept of privilege. The rich want to participate in this culture but are surrounded by messaging telling them they're somehow lesser or a bad person for being rich. Cause, meet effect.

alexandercrohde 7y ago

I find this piece fascinating. To honor it I offer a tl; dr 1. Author recounts experiences of people lying about their class/wealth at Yale, often feigning less wealth. 2. Explains behavior 1 as style, safety, loss-of-perspective, and avoiding social responsibility 3. Retells several incidents where a vocal minority of students at Yale picked and won battles over verbiage (e.g. emails, Calhoun, "Master of college"). 4. Interprets the battles in 3 as at best insignificant and at worst a distraction from real problems of class disparity in America. Contrasts these protests against Vietnam protests. 5. Proposes "American Elites" have no idea what they stand for anymore, are shirking their responsibility, and have no capability to be self-critical for fear of losing belonging in the in-group. 6. Rejects these Yale social movements: "This ideology is filled with inconsistencies and contradictions, because it is not really about ideological rigor. Among other things, it is an elaborate containment system for the theoretical and practical discontent generated by the failures of the system, an absolution from guilt, and a new form of class signaling." 7. Interprets the "inconsistent" Yale protests as an unproductive way for students to avoid guilt of their privilege and distance themselves from failing "legacy institutions." 8. Holds the Yale administration accountable for siding against a "vacuous" student cause instead of their own faculty. Demands more from "an institution older than the Republic" 9. Asks what it means if "Yale dies" and why this matters. Proposes it speaks to a more universal problem. [All that said, I recommend reading the whole thing if you can find the time. This distillation has only a fraction of the value of the whole piece. Many tangential points are very interesting.]

bsder 7y ago
> 4. Interprets the battles in 3 as at best insignificant and at worst a distraction from real problems of class disparity in America. Contrasts these protests against Vietnam protests. I tend to agree. I view the "tempest in a teapot" protests that go after some academic functionary in the same light as I view most of the animal rights protesters--deeply hypocritical. You don't see these college students go after someone with actual power just like you don't see the animal rights advocates throw paint on Hell's Angels for wearing leather. Protest is good--until you you might actually face consequences for your protest. Sorry, protest without consequences isn't a real protest. If the Yale students want to protest, we have an oversupply of things that need to be protested--feel free to join us. But, these might upset people with real power, they might get arrested, they might wind up with a criminal record like the plebeians and that might upset their getting that cushy Goldman-Sachs position in a couple years.

finolex1 7y ago

This article strikes me as extraploating a select few experiences to make far reaching conclusions. 99% of the people at yale are not children of billionaires or statesmen. They are children of doctors, lawyers, programmers, etc. who are wealthy but not wealthy enough to live off their inheritance indefinitely. People attend classes, do research, play sports, or put up performances - in short what's been going on for decades at virtually every college. Maybe there's a larger structural inequality problem in society, but it seems far fetched to point to her anecdotal experiences with rich kids as the cause.

alexandercrohde 7y ago
Do you have a source for the claim that 99% of attendees of Yale don't have enough money to live off their inheritance indefinitely?
- shadowbanme 7y ago
  Do you have a source for the claim that more than 1% are? I’m not sure why we’re talking about inheritances anyway; most people these days don’t get significant inheritances until they’re in their fifties or sixties, when their parents die. A college student who has already been the recipient of a large inheritance is a rare bird indeed.

deleted 7y ago

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ikeboy 7y ago

>But this low number of 2% surprised me because when I was at Yale, everybody kept talking about how broke they were. >“Want to go out for brunch?” “I can’t—I’m so broke.” This was a common line. Seems like a huge stretch to assume this is a lie. The 2% figure is for the bottom quintile. The same source says the median family income for Yale students is 192k. That's perfectly consistent with a student who's taking on a heavy debt load to not have much disposable income. The family could have several kids, perhaps be paying partial tuition for 2 kids and have basically no money to give their kid aside from the minimum for food and board.

Jill_the_Pill 7y ago
My second child is starting at Yale this fall, and yes, the tuition struggle is real (trying to do it with no debt). My son has 3 summer jobs, and my daughter is moving off campus to save money. We might make that median this year, but only because I just took on a second job. They won't be posing when they can't go out for brunch -- not when that damned meal plan already took $9 for breakfast.

viburnum 7y ago

The problem is that Yale exists at all

gaze 7y ago
You seem to be the one person on HN with consistently the right take.

Ericson2314 7y ago

I have many reservations about the rest, but the first point about guilty rich kids deserves to be more widely known. Forget "upper middle class", let's ban "middle class" from the discourse. It's 1/2 anachronism 1/2 compromise between guilty rich and aspirational poor.

hos234 7y ago

This reads like a prologue to the Cambridge 5 - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cambridge_Spies https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cambridge_Spies There too an empire was in decline.

tfowler 7y ago

I would have rather wasted my time reading a Skull & Bones expose.

senderista 7y ago

Yale certainly failed to teach the author how to write.

glangdale 7y ago

The Problem at Yale, based on the length of this essay, seems to be Too Much Speech. This is an extended complaint about annoying people one might have brunched with at a few elite institutions, dressed up as cultural analysis. I am minded of McAdoo on President Harding: “His speeches left the impression of an army of pompous phrases moving over the landscape in search of an idea; sometimes these meandering words would actually capture a straggling thought and bear it triumphantly as a prisoner in their midst, until it died of servitude and overwork.” In a shock development, university students dress down, pretend to be poorer than they are, and get into conflicts with administrators over things (often pointless things); clearly something that has Never Ever Happened Before. There are nuggets of good sense here, but the overall message is a scrambled mess. Apparently what's going wrong in the world can be largely attributed to liberal elites patting themselves on the back while trying to do good, or something. I'm sure this plays well in certain circles. In a world where we have gazillionaire plutocrats actively working 24/7 to fuck other people over (the Koch brothers and the Sacklers spring to mind) I'm not losing too much sleep over this micro-diagnosis about how some kinda-liberal rich people in a tiny slice of American academia pissed off the author and should be spending their lives differently.

gaze 7y ago
Author wrote a pro-Jordan Peterson piece for the weekly standard. We both know exactly where this plays well.
Barrin92 7y ago
fully agreed. the piece exists in some weird space where it suffers from the exact sort of superiority / inferiority role playing anxiety that it's supposed to be about which makes it difficult to draw anything from it.

sunstone 7y ago

Brevity is the soul of wit.

PunchTornado 7y ago
did anyone read the whole article? At first I was interested, read a few scrolls, but when I saw that she goes on and on I just couldn't finish it.

marcus_holmes 7y ago

I went to an English boarding school long enough ago for the intent of that system to still be to train the officer class of the British Empire. But not so long ago that it was actually practical for any of us to realistically be colonial administrators. This piece reminds me of that education. We were in the middle of the feminist and multi-cultural ideological revolutions. Being culturally aware; not insisting that British culture is superior to everyone else's, was both socially mandatory and against the dominant narrative of the school's educational message. It made for interesting confrontations between the institution and the students and staff Britain had lost its empire, and the institutions that were set up to administer that empire, and train the administrators of that empire, were failing. Are still failing; though the UK's latest PM is an archetypal product of that system, he is being parodied for it rather than respected for it. I wonder if America is going through the same thing? For decades the USA has been utterly, unshakably confident that its values, its culture, are superior to the everyone else's. Now... not so much?

FakeComments 7y ago
I find it interesting that movements such as feminism and multiculturalism trace their roots to countries that hated the US, UK, etc supporting radical professors with intel assets, as a means of subversion. Arguably, feminism and multiculturalism, as currently embodied, are weaponized memes meant to destroy a society. Neither is supported by factual basis, and both rely heavily on emotionally manipulative propaganda tactics. Feminism has left men happier and women less happy than the social dynamics of the 1950s, while causing generational scale institutional misandry and breakdowns in relationships.
jgalt212 7y ago
> unshakably confident that its values, its culture, are superior to the everyone else's. Now... not so much? I feel the same way about American values that Churchill felt about democracy.
- marcus_holmes 7y ago
  I would agree with you. Well, except for the guns and religion bits of it.

9nGQluzmnq3M 7y ago

This struck a chord, and not as an Ivy League student, but as somebody working at a FAANG: the same continual narrowing of the space of what is permissible to say out loud and same witch-hunts for people who say Wrong things are happening here too.

verall 7y ago
I think in the workplace it is different though, whereas universities have been progressive environments and places for debate for many years, at companies, people just want to get work done. I don't want work somewhere where I ever have to hear off-color jokes about women or minorities. I am lucky I work somewhere I have not heard those things. People should be permitted to say those things outloud, but not okay at work. Not as a joke. Take it home or to a bar or to golf buddies or something.

profunctor 7y ago

Interesting piece although I don't think they represent the point of view of the agitators fairly, for example the author writes: " you ask supporters, they will tell you the cost does not matter so much, because this is about creating an ideal world. Of course the professor should be fired—how dare she stand against the minority student organizations? Of course it’s okay that the Yelp reviews were published—she should never have written them. Of course names should be changed if they hint at or honor the wrong ideology. What does preserving history matter if history is racist? " What does honouring someone who is extremely pro-slavery even for their time have to do with preserving history? That history still exists whether they have a building named after them or not. And I don't think you will honestly find many people who believe that the ends justify the means no matter what, although you will of course find some people who believe anything. So I think the "ideal world" bit is also somewhat a strawman and a mischaracterisation of people who are anti-racist or whatever. I do however agree that a lot of this stuff doesn't really help those who need it most. The rich kids paying a 2% wealth tax funnelled into social welfare and education for the working class would do more, as would having Yale include more working and lower-middle class student. But it's easy for me to say as a white guy that having many buildings named after pro-slavery politicians is not really doing any harm. Maybe we should ask those who would be more effected.

aschmid 7y ago
I thought the exact same thing, the "Calhoun incident" mentioned completely takes away from the rest of the examples showing that Yale is acquiescing to unreasonable demands. Not wanting to live in a building celebrating a violently pro-slavery historical figure is not at all unreasonable, and is not erasing history. Being anti-slavery and anti-racism isn't some "politically correct fad of the day" that nobody can keep up with.

Tycho 7y ago

In Christianity, you admit that you are flawed and wicked, but you can repent by accepting Christ as your lord and saviour, and by helping the poor and needy, and then carry on with your business, providing you publicly pour scorn on the unrepentant. In Woke Studies, you admit that you are white and privileged, but you can repent by accepting Diversity as your lord and saviour, and then carry on with your business, providing you publicly pour scorn on the poor and needy white people who don't share your wokeness.

ZeroGravitas 7y ago

I'm fascinated by this sub-genre of "political correctness has gone too far" on campus. Parts of this could have come from a script to generate these. In particular the bit about how some elderly academic was a liberal, and therefore anyone who disagreed with them must be some dangerous extremist. Always seems more likely that as a youth they would have been similarly distant from a "reasonable" moderate of a similar age. A couple of years ago the big trope was that this this was the new face of fascist authoritarianism, that republicans were reasonable moderates and people trying to push veganism, or fight climate change or whatever were crazy extremists. The rise of Trump seems to have muted that a little and rendered most of it ridiculous in hindsight. (Well, it was ridiculous at the time too, but got carried by the same media that would then support Trump).