The Yale Problem Begins in High School

Thursday, November 26th, 2015

After giving his Coddle U. vs. Strengthen U. speech at an elite private high school on the West Coast, Jonathan Haidt realized that the Yale Problem in fact begins in high school:

The entire student body — around 450 students, from grades 9-12 — were 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?” Like most of the questions, it was backed up by a sea of finger snaps — the sort you can hear in the infamous Yale video, where a student screams at Prof. Christakis to “be quiet” and tells him that he is “disgusting.” I had never heard the snapping before. When it happens in a large auditorium it is disconcerting. It makes you feel that you are facing an angry and unified mob — a feeling I have never had in 25 years of teaching and public speaking.

After the first dozen questions I noticed that not a single questioner was male. I began to search the sea of hands asking to be called on and I did find one boy, who asked a question that indicated that he too was critical of my talk. But other than him, the 200 or so boys in the audience sat silently.

After the Q&A, I got a half-standing ovation: almost all of the boys in the room stood up to cheer. And after the crowd broke up, a line of boys came up to me to thank me and shake my hand. Not a single girl came up to me afterward.

Comments

  1. Bomag says:

    Haidt documents here the left/liberal lean of academia and calls for a diversity of viewpoints. Ha! Fat chance. This is a victory dance by the Left, and they aren’t going to let their opponents anywhere close to their turf.

    What we are getting now is a “holier than thou death spiral” of the activists maneuvering to be even more oppressed; claiming even more victim cred. Performance enhancing drugs will soon be needed to keep the process afloat.

Leave a Reply