Conor Friedersdorf writes in the Atlantic:

[At Yale University, one] resident declared in a campus publication, “I have had to watch my friends defend their right to this institution. This email and the subsequent reaction to it have interrupted their lives. I have friends who are not going to class, who are not doing their homework, who are losing sleep, who are skipping meals, and who are having breakdowns.” One feels for these students. But if an email about Halloween costumes has them skipping class and suffering breakdowns, either they need help from mental-health professionals or they’ve been grievously ill-served by debilitating ideological notions they’ve acquired about what ought to cause them pain.

This is the reaction of Ivy League students, the best and the brightest, the cream of the crop, the hope for the future, the movers and shakers of the next generation, the political, social, and economic leaders of tomorrow.  Their entire world collapses because someone, somewhere disagrees with them.

The depressing irony of the episode is that Erika Christakis’ noble attempt to accord students a greater measure of personal and moral responsibility resulted in the students themselves protesting for — and thereby demonstrating — their own incapacity to take responsibility for their actions on any level at all.  Without a trace of embarrassment, academe’s most elite sons and daughters dissolved into a collective hissy-fit because one of their instructors suggested they should be treated as adults.

Read the whole article here.