Their young lives are tremendously impressive by any reasonable measure. They are unfortunate to live in an era in which the normal mistakes of youth are unusually visible. To keep the focus where it belongs I won’t be naming any of them here.
The focus belongs on the flawed ideas that they’ve absorbed....
It's a longish article, describing the uproar at Yale, but it does not develop the idea I am most interested in: how university faculty taught the very ideas that the students are now throwing back in their faces.
The Yale student appears to believe that creating an intellectual space and a home are at odds with one another. But the entire model of a residential college is premised on the notion that it’s worthwhile for students to reside in a campus home infused with intellectualism, even though creating it requires lavishing extraordinary resources on youngsters who are already among the world’s most advantaged....
But for many decades, in the intellectual space of the American university, it's been presented as deeply intellectual to think in the very terms that the students have processed into activism.
"This is what civic-level censorship looks like at a university with the largest and oldest public college for journalism."
ADDED: The protesting students are making many rudimentary PR mistakes here and could use some training in basic protest technique. They end up looking repressive and brutish, right in front of a camera, and they keep cranking up the intimidation. The photographer knows he's getting video that he'll be able to put up on the internet, and he's using a very effective technique of remaining calm and standing his ground in the face of what looks like scary intimidation. I have walked with a camera into big, passionate protests here in Wisconsin, and — with afewexceptions — the protesters were much better prepared to resist making the photographer seem like a sympathetic victim.
As for the First Amendment: The students and the photographers have free speech rights against the government, but not against each other. At 1:43, the photographer calmly cites the First Amendment, which, he says, gives all of them all "right to be here," in the public space, which is true. One of the black female protesters says "We do have our space as human beings," to which the photographer responds, emphasizing each word: "There's not a law about that." The woman then makes what I think is the most interesting statement in the video: "Forget a law. How about humanity? Respect?" He says, "How about documenting this for posterity?"
That's right where a good conversation could have begun. The law is not the beginning and end of how people treat each other. There is etiquette and there is respect. There is even love. As human beings, we want all of that. Please respect our space is an understandable request that a person should evaluate in ways that go beyond legal rights. The photographer did engage on that level when he offered a counter-value, documentation for posterity.
Unfortunately, that one-to-one conversation ended when another woman barged in and started yelling, precluding the development of the issues about photographing people who don't want to be photographed, and the crowd —which probably didn't notice the touching moment when Respect and Documentation stood face to face — got going with the old "Hey hey ho ho" chant format: "Hey hey ho ho/Reporters have got to go."
Justice Anthony Kennedy was taking questions from Harvard Law students last week, when one student asked a somewhat garbled question about whether government officials can act on their own understanding of the meaning of life. Scroll to 50:44 to begin at the student's question:
Kennedy says that he'll "refaze" the question "in a fair way," which seemed both disrespectful to the student and, like not bothering to enunciate all the letters in "rephrase," a bit lazy. But the crowd of students chuckled its support for the most powerful person in the room as he diminished their peer.
The "fair" rephrasing was:
Uh what what what is the duty of the public official if he or she cannot, in good conscience and consistent with her own personal and religious beliefs, enforce a law that they think is morally corrupt?
The student had talked about "rational norms" and "judgment of the truth of new insights" and the "truth" and never used any words that connoted religion, morality, or corruption.
So, basically, Kennedy plugged in a question that the student's question reminded him of and that he had a good shot at answering in a predictable, conventional way. This is a strategy that is very commonly used by law students answering exam questions, and that I always warn my students against: I'll notice and you can't get credit for that. You must face the difficulties of answering the question in the form it is asked.
But Justice Kennedy was not writing an exam; he was talking to a friendly crowd that had just warmly chuckled its approval of his rejection of the question that was asked.
Did anyone really understand the question? I've listened to it a few times, and it is pretty hard to absorb and figure out how to approach answering. Why did the student ask it that way? Was it unfair? I'd have loved to have heard a more spontaneous dialogue between Kennedy and the student that began, perhaps, with Kennedy's saying: "Here's why I think your question is unfair: You're using words like 'rational norms' as if the official is looking, scientifically, at the facts, but I think you're really talking about religious beliefs and moral compulsions imposed not by reason and facts but by God."
But Kennedy plugged in the conventional answer, phrased — fazed — in the most noncommittal way:
"Great respect, it seems to me, has to be given to people who resign rather than do something they think is morally wrong, in order to make a point. Uh, however, uh, the rule of law is that, as a public official in performing your legal duties, you are bound to to enforce enforce the law. Um and it's it's it's difficult sometimes to see whether or not what you're doing is transgressing your own personal philosophy. This requires considerable introspection. Um and it's it's it's a fair question that officials can and should should ask ask themselves. Um but um certainly, in an offhand comment, it would be difficult for me to say that people are free to ignore decisions of the Supreme Court. Lincoln went through this in the Dred Scott case. Um and uh these are difficult moral questions."
It's the theater of thoughtfulness studded with ums and repetitions and expressions like "considerable introspection" and assertions about how "difficult" it all is, until you've either forgotten the question — not just the original question but the substituted "fair" question, even as he reminds us "it's it's it's a fair question" — or you decide he's just said what you feel he must have said — what you want him to have said — and you go off and write a little article about it:
You know, if you're going to be mealy-mouthed, people can use you however they want.
