I haven’t got a lot of respect for Princeton President Christopher Eisengruber’s principles or integrity, but I do admire his self-restraint. I would never have been able to listen to the young lady’s diatribe in the second video without correcting her.

The finger-snapping accompanying all the insolent assertions and demands becomes downright sinister at times. It kind of reminded me of jungle drumbeats or the threatening rattling of spears as the tribe of angry natives menaces the British district officer in one of those 1930s Sanders of the River movies.

Geoffrey R. Stone wonders out loud:

[I]f Woodrow Wilson is to be obliterated from Princeton because his views about race were backward and offensive by contemporary standards, then what are we to do with George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, James Madison, James Monroe, and Andrew Jackson, all of whom actually owned slaves? What are we to do with Abraham Lincoln, who declared in 1958 that “I am not, nor ever have been, in favor of bringing about in any way the social and political equality of the white and black races,” and that “I am not, nor ever have been, in favor of making voters or jurors of negroes, nor of qualifying them to hold office, nor to intermarry with white people”?

What are we to do with Franklin Roosevelt, who ordered the internment of 120,000 persons of Japanese descent? With Dwight Eisenhower, who issued an Executive Order declaring homosexuals a serious security risk? With Bill Clinton, who signed the Defense of Marriage Act? With Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton, both of whom opposed the legalization of same-sex marriage?

And what are we to do with Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, who once opined in a case involving compulsory sterilization that “three generations of imbeciles is enough”? With Leland Stanford, after whom Stanford University is named who, as governor of California, lobbied for the restriction of Chinese immigration, explaining to the state legislature in 1862 that “the presence of numbers of that degraded and distinct people would exercise a deleterious effect upon the superior race”?

And what are we do with all of the presidents, politicians, academic leaders, industrial leaders, jurists, and social reformers who at one time or another in American history denied women’s right to equality, opposed women’s suffrage, and insisted that a woman’s proper place was “in the home”? And on and on and on.

When former head of the NKVD Nikolai Yezhov was purged and executed in 1940 by Stalin, his image, too, was purged from official photographs.

With characteristic Ivy League administrative courage, Princeton President Christopher Eisgruber surrendered to snowflakes of color demands that former Princeton (& US) President Woodrow Wilson be purged for holding racial opinions a century ago deemed politically incorrect today.

Following a 32-hour standoff with student protesters, the president of Princeton University acceded Thursday night to demands that Woodrow Wilson’s name be removed from campus.

In a statement released Thursday evening, the university announced that President Christopher Eisgruber, along with Dean Jill Dolan and Vice President for Campus Life Rochelle Calhoun, had reached an agreement with members of the Black Justice League to resolve a sit-in that had been taking place outside Eisgruber’s office since Wednesday afternoon.

Seventeen students also signed the document addressing their demands for various diversity initiatives, which was inspired by the Mizzou protests, and in the process received immunity from disciplinary consequences related to their demonstration.

In the agreement, the administrators promise to “initiate conversations” with the Board of Trustees on proposals to change the name of the Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs, as well as to remove a mural of the former U.S. president from a dining hall on campus.

Wilson served as Princeton’s president prior to his election to national office—hence the tributes to him on campus—but the student protesters believe such references to him are unbecoming, insofar as the progressive-minded President was also a virulent racist and staunch segregationist.

In addition, the Black Justice League also secured concessions on related demands for mandatory cultural competency courses for all school employees and the creation of a cultural center for black students on campus.

While the school did agree to expand the availability of cultural competency training, it stopped short of committing to make the training mandatory as the protesters had requested, instead inviting the BJL to send representatives to an upcoming meeting to discuss the possibility of implementing a cultural diversity requirement.

The administrators also pledged to immediately designate four rooms in a building on campus for use by “Cultural Affinity Groups,” promising over the longer term to pursue the creation of “Affinity Housing for those interested in black culture” with the Residential Colleges.

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Princeton’s eagerness to purge its one-time favorite son is absolutely loaded with delightful ironies, alas! lost upon the ideologically-deranged minority students as well as upon their slimy and invertebrate praecepters.

Yale renaming the residential college previously named in honor of Yale’s greatest contributor to political thought is rather tragic, but Princeton throwing Woodrow Wilson to the wolves of trendy contemporary elite opinion could scarcely be more fitting.

Woodrow Wilson himself would have been among the first to chisel out the name of any distinguished predecessor currently in bad odor with the forces of Moral Uplift and Progressive Thought. One can almost picture Wilson arising from his tomb in order to recant all of his old-time racial and eugenicist positions, and to volunteer to take down his own portrait, while getting in a few unkind remarks along the way about George W. Bush’s invasion of Iraq.

Abraham Lincoln (the dirty racist!) will be next.

On a Ricochet podcast (requires subscription), Rob Long captures the current situation on campus in a nutshell: “It’s like the Barney the Dinosaur version of Orwell.”

Hat tip to Tim of Angle.

A crowd of student demonstrators dropped by Yale President Salovey’s house on Hillhouse Avenue late on Thursday with a few modest demands.

Yale Daily News:

At close to midnight on Thursday night, roughly 200 students marched to University President Peter Salovey’s home on Hillhouse Avenue under a new name — Next Yale — wielding a new set of demands.

The students said the new movement will hold Yale accountable to its students of color and that a diverse coalition of students crafted the new demands. …

Salovey told the News that University leaders will “seriously” review the new set of demands and reiterated that a response to them will be issued next week.

Salovey said he considers the manner by which the students delivered the demands entirely acceptable and in compliance with University policy.

“This was a peaceful group of students visiting me at my home at a somewhat late hour, completely consistent with University protest policy,” he said.

Next Yale’s six demands each involved several parts. The first, which focuses on ethnic studies, demands that all Yale undergraduates be required to fulfill an ethnic studies distributional requirement and that the Ethnicity, Race and Migration Program be given departmental status immediately.

The second demand centered on mental health services, a topic that has been prominent in campus discussions and forums over the past two weeks. Next Yale calls for the University to hire mental health professionals in each of the four cultural centers, as well as increased mental health professionals of color at Yale Mental Health and Counseling.

Another demand asked for an increase of $2 million to the current annual operating budget of each cultural center, as well as five full-time staff members for each.

The students also demanded that Calhoun College be renamed and that the two new residential colleges be named after people of color. Under this demand, they also asked for the abolishment of the title “master” and the building of a monument on Cross Campus to acknowledge that Yale was founded on stolen indigenous land.

After the gathering, Salovey told the News that decisions about renaming and naming residential colleges fall under the domain of the Yale Corporation, the governing board and policy-making body for Yale.

The fifth demand, directly addressing recent racial controversies on campus, called for the removal of Nicholas and Erika Christakis from their administrative positions. The final demand focused on allocating resources to support the physical well-being of international, first-generation, low-income and undocumented students.

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Robert Long, at Ricochet, looks on the bright side of all this.

At Yale, a group of students has exploited their overseers’ weak and pathetic need to appear “inclusive” and “nurturing” and “safe.” We’ve all seen the pictures: thoughtful and intellectually accomplished professors and administrators begging their charges for forgiveness, covering themselves in shame and remorse, confessing to all sorts of crimes and shortcomings. …

[P]retty impressive for a group of students at one of the most elite universities in the world. Think of the exams they’ve been able to get cancelled! Think of the late term papers that won’t be penalized!

Let’s total up the life skills on display here: 1. brilliant use of financial leverage; 2. exploiting an opponent’s weakness and cowardice; 3. remorselessly demanding that heads roll; 4. and here’s the best one: Doing it all on someone else’s dime!

I don’t know about you, but those seem like some pretty impressive life and business skills. I don’t know about you, but if I were a college recruiter from, say, Goldman Sachs, I’d have to say that these are exactly the skills I’m looking for.

Economics, financial statistics, that sort of thing you can learn in a webinar. But an instinct for blood and power? That’s some powerful innate stuff right there.

My advice? Hire those brats. Hire them at Goldman and JP Morgan Chase and Cravath. Pay them really well the first year in order to get them hooked on being members of the power elite — there’s nothing that shakes off progressive ideology like a fat end-of-year bonus — and watch those killer instincts go into motion.

Just make sure to stay on their good side. You wouldn’t like to see them angry.

The Guardian reports that Social Justice Warriors have blasphemed against the Ancient Ones.

S.T. Joshi has condemned the World Fantasy awards’ decision to stop using trophies modelled on the controversial writer as ‘the worst sort of political correctness’

HP Lovecraft’s biographer S.T. Joshi has returned his two World Fantasy awards following the organisers’ decision to stop using a bust of the author for the annual trophy – a move the Lovecraft expert called “a craven yielding to the worst sort of political correctness”.

The change was announced on Sunday. It follows a year-long campaign led by the author Daniel José Older, who launched a petition calling for the awards to end their trophy’s association with “avowed racist” Lovecraft.
World Fantasy award drops HP Lovecraft as prize image

Writing on his blog, Joshi said he had returned the awards he won in previous years to the co-chairman of the World Fantasy Convention, David Hartwell. “Evidently,” Joshi added, “this move was meant to placate the shrill whining of a handful of social justice warriors who believe that a ‘vicious racist’ like Lovecraft has no business being honoured by such an award.”

Joshi also provided the text of his letter to Hartwell, telling him that the decision “seems to me a craven yielding to the worst sort of political correctness and an explicit acceptance of the crude, ignorant and tendentious slanders against Lovecraft propagated by a small but noisy band of agitators.”

Older’s petition followed a blogpost from WFA winner Nnedi Okorafor on her “conflicted” feelings about the prize after seeing Lovecraft’s racist 1912 poem On the Creation of Niggers. (Its couplets include: “A beast they wrought, in semi-human figure,/ Filled it with vice, and called the thing a Nigger.”) …

Following Sunday’s announcement, Older told the Guardian: “Today, fantasy is a better, more inclusive, and stronger genre because of it.”

But Joshi told Hartwell that the change means the awards are now “irremediably tainted”, and requested that he no longer be nominated for any future WFA. In the past, Joshi won an award for his Unutterable Horror: A History of Supernatural Fiction, Volumes One and Two, and a special award for scholarship. His works include a biography of Lovecraft, further studies of the author, and extensive collections of the Cthulhu mythos creator’s writing and letters.

“I will never attend another World Fantasy Convention as long as I live. And I will do everything in my power to urge a boycott … among my many friends and colleagues,” wrote Joshi to Hartwell, adding on his blog that “if anyone feels that Lovecraft’s perennially ascending celebrity, reputation, and influence will suffer the slightest diminution as a result of this silly kerfuffle, they are very much mistaken”.

Fifteen minutes of fame have been awarded to Yale’s own “Shrieking Girl”, Silliman senior and Master’s aide Jerelyn Luther, who hails from nearby affluent, suburban Fairfield, Connecticut.

Daily Caller spilled the beans.

Heavy.com (somewhat repetitively) piles on.

I was amused myself at just how rapidly Yale loudest tricoteuses, editorialist Jencey Paz of the Yale Herald, “who did not want to debate, but only wanted to talk about her pain,” and Jerelyn Luther, who told Silliman Master Christakis to “shut up” and demanded that he resign, when they found that their publicly-taken positions had become widely-discussed news items, removed their presences on the web, retreated from the national stage, and went instantly into hiding. So much for the courage of their convictions.

It’s no accident that people wedded to fabulously-self-indulgent, paranoid, and hysterical posturing feel that they need “safe spaces” where no analysis of or dissent from their nonsense is permitted in order to spout off.

I had predicted to my wife that any young lady so obviously extraordinarily spoiled and self-infatuated, with no manners and no respect for her elders and university officials, would be found inevitably to have come, not The Hood, but from some especially comfortable enclave of upper middle class privilege.

Silliman College entrance, Yale University.

Things have reached a pretty pass when even ultra-liberal Atlantic columnists are shocked and appalled by the expectations and behavior of student activists.

With world-altering research to support, graduates who assume positions of extraordinary power, and a $24.9 billion endowment to marshal for better or worse, Yale administrators face huge opportunity costs as they parcel out their days. Many hours must be spent looking after undergraduates, who experience problems as serious as clinical depression, substance abuse, eating disorders, and sexual assault. Administrators also help others, who struggle with financial stress or being the first in their families to attend college.

It is therefore remarkable that no fewer than 13 administrators took scarce time to compose, circulate, and co-sign a letter advising adult students on how to dress for Halloween, a cause that misguided campus activists mistake for a social-justice priority. …

This year, we seem afraid that college students are unable to decide how to dress themselves on Halloween,” she wrote. “I don’t wish to trivialize genuine concerns about cultural and personal representation, and other challenges to our lived experience in a plural community. I know that many decent people have proposed guidelines on Halloween costumes from a spirit of avoiding hurt and offense. I laud those goals, in theory, as most of us do. But in practice, I wonder if we should reflect more transparently, as a community, on the consequences of an institutional (bureaucratic and administrative) exercise of implied control over college students.”

It’s hard to imagine a more deferential way to begin voicing her alternative view. And having shown her interlocutors that she respects them and shares their ends, she explained her misgivings about… telling college kids what to wear on Halloween. …

When I was in college, a position of this sort taken by a faculty member would likely have been regarded as a show of respect for all students and their ability to think for themselves. She added, “even if we could agree on how to avoid offense,” there may be something lost if administrators try to stamp out all offense-giving behavior. …

In her view, students would be better served if colleges showed more faith in their capacity to work things out themselves, which would help them to develop cognitive skills. “Nicholas says, if you don’t like a costume someone is wearing, look away, or tell them you are offended. Talk to each other. Free speech and the ability to tolerate offence are hallmarks of a free and open society,” she wrote. “But—again, speaking as a child development specialist—I think there might be something missing in our discourse about … free speech (including how we dress) on campus, and it is this: What does this debate about Halloween costumes say about our view of young adults, of their strength and judgment? In other words: Whose business is it to control the forms of costumes of young people? It’s not mine, I know that.”

That’s the measured, thoughtful pre-Halloween email that caused Yale students to demand that Nicholas and Erika Christakis resign their roles at Silliman college. That’s how Nicholas Christakis came to stand in an emotionally charged crowd of Silliman students, where he attempted to respond to the fallout from the email his wife sent.

Watching footage of that meeting, a fundamental disagreement is revealed between professor and undergrads. Christakis believes that he has an obligation to listen to the views of the students, to reflect upon them, and to either respond that he is persuaded or to articulate why he has a different view. Put another way, he believes that one respects students by engaging them in earnest dialogue. But many of the students believe that his responsibility is to hear their demands for an apology and to issue it. They see anything short of a confession of wrongdoing as unacceptable. In their view, one respects students by validating their subjective feelings.

Notice that the student position allows no room for civil disagreement.

Given this set of assumptions, perhaps it is no surprise that the students behave like bullies even as they see themselves as victims.

Read the whole thing.

Silliman Associate Master Nicholas Christakis told to “shut up” by screaming student.

Katy Waldman, Yale ’10, writes for Slate, is a recent graduate, and is obviously no conservative, but even she was shocked.

I was shocked to watch students treat their professors and administrators with such disrespect. But horrified emotional responses aside, it’s troubling to see the Christakises scapegoated for defending the crucial liberal tradition of free speech. That’s not to dismiss the pain of students of color; I’m sure Yale proves far less hospitable to them than to the wealthy white scions it was founded to serve. Nor should anyone mourn the days of good old college fun, when wearing a racist Halloween costume was considered a harmless bit of white wing-spreading. But in censuring the Christakises for wanting to create “an intellectual space,” students are vociferously exercising the very rights—to speak out against people and practices they find objectionable—that the Christakises seem to want to protect.

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A number of current students at Yale did not like her article one bit.

Via Navaisha Harris on Facebook:

Last night in Silliman College:

An unidentified male individual is apparently mopping away chalked slogans and inscriptions pertaining to the Great-Halloween-Costumes-Which-Could-Potentially-Threaten-Students’-Safe-Spaces controversy. A female student, presumably a “person of color”, confronts him and demands to know what he is doing.

He (inaudibly) replies that he is cleaning/removing chalk inscriptions which he considers “slanderous messages.”

(interlude involving milk and laughing)

Unidentified Male defends Associate Masters, Erika and Nicholas Christakis, and Young Female Person of Color replies: “Do you know that there are Silliman freshmen who are afraid of sleeping in their own beds?”

Unidentified Male expresses skepticism of that one, and Young Female Person of Color rejoinders:

“You have no idea how they feel because you a white male with privilege! You don’t know what it’s like to be a woman of color on this campus.”