What a horribly constructed sentence. No wonder they would tell him (but won’t or can’t for some unexplained reason) they “feel” (but don’t think or know) there is no place for them at Yale.

The economics department at Yale might even still teach the rule that you get more of what you reward and less of what you punish. Every five year old quickly learns whether screaming “I demand ice cream” at your parents works — or not.

That which is allowed will continue.

I believe that a big part of this problem is the result of a watering down of standards. One example of this is the many “studies”programs, i.e. black studies, women’s studies, etc. I think these untraditional and unserious programs exist only to allow the colleges to enroll more “diverse” students AND to mine the huge amount of federal subsidies offerred to these marginal students. What Yale and other serious colleges need to do is return to offering traditional degree programs and leave the basketweaving and “studies” programs to community colleges and diploma mills.

I’ve been reading Nassim Taleb’s ‘Antifragile’. It occurs to me that the open discussion that used to be part of college was a very effective means to become antifragile, i.e., not robust but to grow from the stress and conflict.

So these college students are now truly becoming fragile and will be easily broken.