In US on campus, a freedom from speech

WASHINGTON, DC: Yale’s president, Peter Salovey, dealt with the Crisis of the Distressing Email about Hypothetical Halloween Costumes about as you would expect from someone who has risen to eminence in today’s academia. He seems to be the kind of adult who has helped produce the kind of students who are such delicate snowflakes that they melt at the mere mention of even a potential abrasion of their sensibilities.

Salovey gave indignant students a virtuoso demonstration of adult groveling. With a fusillade of academia’s cliches du jour, he said the students’ “great distress” would be ameliorated by “greater inclusion, healing, mutual respect, and understanding” in the service of -- wait for it -- “diversity.” But of course only diversity that is consistent with the students’ capacious sense of the intolerable.