‘A Really Easy Mark for Trump’: Three Columnists on the Threats to Elite Colleges
15th March 2025
The New York Times, a Voice of the Crust.
The moment I realized something had gone terribly, maybe irreversibly, wrong in higher ed came in 2015, when Nicholas Christakis, a distinguished sociobiologist at Yale, was surrounded, hounded, lectured and yelled at by students furious that his wife, Erika, had suggested in an email that perhaps students could be entrusted to make their own Halloween costume decisions. The incident seemed to encapsulate the entitlement, the arrogance and the unbearably petty grievances of a generation who seemed to find their voice and power in the taking of offense. I was left asking: Who admitted these students? Who taught them to think this way? And why weren’t they immediately suspended or expelled?
All good questions to which people like those who write for the NYT don’t want the true answers.