Your contention that a student who gains admission to Yale automatically forfeits a right to claim being marginalized reveals a woeful lack of imagination. As if attacks against Barack Obama’s citizenship cannot be attributed to his marginalization as a Black (biracial) man, just because he is literally the most powerful person in the world? The fact that he is so marginalized despite the status he has attained is exactly the problem.

And your reframing the Yale students’ demands as unrelated to race but merely a form of gangster-ism simply shows that (like many White liberals in recent weeks) your traditional status of enlightened patron who can explain the world and bestow liberty is being challenged by people of color who might know more about social justice than you, and it just irks you. You find it irksome that you are being lectured. And since you’ve never felt the burden of your skin color (and your ancestors were not enslaved), this is the greatest injustice you’ve ever suffered – having the world explained to you.

“Hey, parents, Yale classes and Yale ‘credentialism’ for your kid without them ever having to attend Yale!”

While I certainly reject conservatives’ bashing of academia, the New New Left continues to hand them plenty of talking points, both students and faculty like Melissa Click. And, had she not done something idiotic, a Melissa Click would have remained quietly teaching, or “teaching” students whatever it is she teaches, or “teaches.”

http://socraticgadfly.blogspot.com/2015/11/journalism-vs-mass-communication.html

From Ken White (Popehat), this is a very good piece about distinguishing between safe places as “shield” (good) vs. safe places as “sword” (bad). https://popehat.com/2015/11/09/safe-spaces-as-shield-safe-spaces-as-sword/

As for the students? I seriously doubt any of them had “mental breakdowns.” If a flight of anger is being labeled a “mental breakdown” in seriousness, then they may be mentally at risk. If, as I suspect, the phrase and labeling, per White, is being brandished as a sword, not held up as a shield, they’re disgusting, with the disrespect for actual mental illness, the Yalies.

As for the free speech issue at Mizzou? I know of recent graduates, now journalists themselves, who seem not to find it’s that big of a deal. (Note: I am a newspaper editor, and have seen this on Twitter, and it’s not confined to newspapers in liberal enclaves.)

This assertion does not survive to the end of your essay. For all your concerns about the spate of campus protests becoming “an intramural struggle for elite power in the political economy to come” and an effort to seize custodial management of the corporatized university (as opposed to a free-speech fight) what’s the ultimate outcome? The protesters take control and… wait for it… stifle speech.

There are a lot of moving parts in these protests, and it’s worthwhile to disassemble and catalog them, as you have done here. But when the Rube Goldberg machine is assembled, what it produces are muzzles.

So sure, this isn’t a free-speech conflict per se. It’s a power struggle. But the inevitable and first thing that the victors will do is shut down dissent.

I think you misread me. I do think that the ongoing reaction at Wesleyan including the student government approach is about constricting and controlling speech with which the activists and student government leaders disagree. What I’m suggesting is that the move the student government made is even worse: it combines the worst features of neoliberal corporate policy with controls on speech. The rest of the essay from that point onward is intended to suggest that this is a dimension of this entire struggle–that at least some activists are wittingly or unwittingly moving towards a class-based infrastructure of control over the expressive lives of people below them on a class hierarchy, often through institutions or corporations.

If the email that Christakis sent genuinely caused unbearable harm to a student then that student does not belong at Yale, or any other institute of higher learning. I say this not out of malice or a desire to punish these kids- many of whom are undoubtedly well-meaning- but simply as an observation that earning a degree from a rigorous school like Yale or Swarthmore comes with the implicit requirement that the earner be willing to confront uncomfortable ideas as long as those ideas are presented in a respectful way. If they are unwilling to do that they should not get the degree. You don’t get it just for showing up (and, of course, tendering the attendent fee).

A student saying that they need to be protected from the content of Christakis’s email is saying that they are not ready for college and do not belong there.

How is it wrong to connect the protest in the video with censure or calls for firing? That is explicitly what (some of) the students called for. I don’t see how noting this sidesteps talking about the content of Christakis’s email, which is…unbelievably tepid. That anyone could read it, and react the way the students in the video did, or claim the email caused people to have mental breakdowns or be unable to sleep is almost beyond belief.

Quite apart from anything else, such controversies provide extraordinary ammunition – and will for much time to come – to right wing causes and interests. They confirm their narrative about the left generally, and the academic left in particular – that it is radically elitist, populated by”race hustlers” driving a “grievance industry,” and is radically authoritarian at its heart.