America’s Elites Are Not Fit for Purpose
11th December 2023
Some years ago, I was in Boston on business, and invited a European friend to lunch. The man was finishing a year-long fellowship at Harvard University, and was about to head back to Europe. Over a spread of delicious New England raw oysters, I asked my friend what the most important lesson he learned from his year at America’s most prestigious university.
He thought for a moment, then said, “How fragile the American elites are.”
The European explained how shocked he and his fellow Europeans on the program were to see so many American students unable to confront ideas that gave them anxiety—and how eager professors were to accommodate their intellectual and emotional fragility. This expressed itself as an ideological phenomenon—the students were all on the left, and coughed up the usual woke hairballs (e.g., “Transphobia is triggering”) told me that when he read in the Harvard student newspaper that more than three-quarters of the university’s student population was taking anti-depressants, he understood that their intellectual fragility was tied to their mental fragility.