Campus Turmoil Starts With High School
The four years earlier may be the source to the campus meltdown.
Minding The Campus reports.
Campus Turmoil Begins in High School
A month before the Yale Halloween meltdown, I had a bizarre and illuminating experience at an elite private high school on the West Coast. I’ll call it Centerville High. I gave a version of a talk that you can see here, on Coddle U. vs. Strengthen U. (In an amazing coincidence, I first gave that talk at Yale a few weeks earlier).
The entire student body — around 450 students, from grades 9-12 — was in the auditorium. There was plenty of laughter at all the right spots, and a lot of applause at the end, so I thought the talk was well received.
But then the discussion began, and it was the most unremittingly hostile questioning I’ve ever had. I don’t mind when people ask hard or critical questions, but I was surprised that I had misread the audience so thoroughly. My talk had little to do with gender, but the second question was “So you think rape is OK?”
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Of all the reasons to be discouraged, the complete generational communication disconnect tops the list. Back in the 1970s in graduate school, I coined the phrase “Liberal Speak,” but it was really “New Speak.” As an experiment, after a 5 minute discussion with another student, I said something about “making sure we are on the same page.” It took about 30 minutes to go over each and everything I had said. I was appalled at what he thought I had meant, and amazed anyone clearly brilliant intellectually could misunderstand without doing so deliberately. Today, in my limited exposure to people in their teens, it is far worse.