That's a NYT headline, and of course, I suspect it of being intended to provoke the kind of sarcasm I put up there in the post title.
The person the students "object to" is Jonathan Haidt, who's been selected as the speaker at their graduation. As the NYT puts it: "the choice reflects a dismissal of their values at a moment they should cherish." He's getting the platform of their graduation ceremony.
In his breakout book, “The Coddling of the American Mind,” he and his co-author, Greg Lukianoff, argued that schools cultivated a mentality of fragility, making personal safety paramount, while de-emphasizing problem-solving skills. Students, they concluded, were insulated from encountering uncomfortable situations and upsetting ideas, leaving them ill-prepared to handle difficulty as adults....
“Many students have reported feelings of disappointment, disgust, unenthusiasm, defeat, and embarrassment,” the letter went on, expressing regret that their celebratory moment had instead “become another instance of being misunderstood.”
The students' letter noted that a recent NYU graduating class got Taylor Swift as their speaker. Another got Sonia Sotomayor. Haidt is a professor at N.Y.U. Maybe the students wanted more of an exciting personality, but certainly not a scold! You can understand the disappointment, disgust, unenthusiasm, defeat, and embarrassment. You're asking your family to come to this big event for you, one where students 4 years ahead of you got Taylor Swift, and you have to tell them it's a business school professor who writes about how Americans are too fragile these days. Yeah, I see how "embarrassment" got on that list of feelings.
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72 comments:
--- Yeah, I see how "embarrassment" got on that list of feelings
LOL. I guess that covers it.
*sad trombone
Just sat through a commencement speech at UW-Madison this past weekend by author James Patterson. He isnt a professor but has close UW ties. Chosen no doubt because he has interesting things to say and communicates well (and has given over $250 milllion to universities, several million of which went to UW). He was fine. No embarrassment detected. I concluded there are two kinds of people in the world. Those who love these events and those that hate them. Only the ones who love the event care who the speaker is, and the subset of the "carers" who require like kind ideology to be comfortable are the ones who most need to hear the opposite message.
I can beat their embarrassment- we had Alan Bond, an Aussie businessman later convicted and imprisoned for fraud, and Anne Hawley, the Gardner museum director in charge during the museum’s art heist.
I didn’t get a say, either…
Jonathan Haidt, Jordan Peterson, Bret Weinstein, and Steven Pinker. The four horsemen of the Woke Apocalypse, as facilitated by Joe Rogan.
These are literally the most signficant talking heads of the 21st century. The students ought to tag Haidt with: growth, challenge, accuracy, competence, and balance.
Resilience is a lesson of life. I don’t blame young people for being fragile. I know lots of senior executives that are very fragile. what I would like to see in our college students is a little more humility instead of certainty that their conclusions about the world are particularly informed or valid. There is a phrase in our culture “sophomoric zeal“ but I suspect the phrase was coined in recognition of what the phenomenon was.
Four years of college and you want to listen to Taylor Swift talk? It doesn't sound like we are producing Inquiring Minds.
I guess they want someone who will tell them that they can revolutionize the world and make hip-hop dance classes free for the masses.
How many NYU students object? All? A majority? A vocal few? Relatives of the authors? I bet >90% do not care.
My daughter graduated from NYU and we got to hear Hillary Clinton drone on and on! She was a horrible speaker.
Only good thing it was at the new Yankee Stadium.
I sat through my daughter's graduation a couple of years ago. The speaker was a recent graduate who was a VP at Tesla. She wasn't a great speaker. I don't remember a word of it. i would imagine she wouldn't be as welcome there these days. She did hand out toy cars to everyone.
I was just proud that my daughter earned her doctorate. That's the only reason to be there.
I skipped the commencement address at my graduation. Who wants to stand there and be bored by someone gassing on and on?
I can't recall who the speaker was at my graduation, nor at two of my four children's commencement. I remember one child's because it was the guy who had a movie made about the time he was hiking alone and had to amputate his own arm. He was an entertaining speaker, so it was doubly memorable. The other one was supposedly Gabby Giffords but her husband, Mark Kelly, did all the talking and it was all about him. I remember because I thought he came across as a real jerk.
Coddled and lied to.
See here
Invite Pelosi to show up - she'll tell you how fascist everyone is - obey the left!
The democrap party have nothing to offer except calling everyone a FASCIST! -- all day all night.
I love this story. It's almost too perfect in it's circular nature. "Students" could easily be substituted with "Democrat politicians" in this story. The DNC buried their 2024 "autopsy" because they didn't want to face the truth of how unpopular their positions were. CA and AZ democrats are simply refusing to debate any challengers because they can't stand being on stage when people hear the truth about their failed policies.
But it's even worse. They are loathe to acknowledge any good news for Trump because it is always good news for America as well, which by definition is bad news for the DNC.
Just one tiny everlasting issue, race, reveals the scam. If we have to obey the Constitution as written and "stop discriminating on the basis of race" as recent SCOTUS rulings signal, much of the power democrats have built into their race spoils system goes away. Plenty of black republicans can win in white districts, but black democrats need specially carved out districts to prevail.
We just attended our youngest's commencement; the student address was given by a remarkable young man who's been a friend of our son since freshman year, and was probably the best thing I'd heard in any commencement ever.
This was the engineering graduation. This kid spoke about how all of them had just spent the prior years learning about the design cycle - especially its iterative nature, in which each failure provides data to be used in the next round of trials. And he encouraged all of "us" (my son pointed out later that this guy himself basically never failed at anything, but he's a sweet and generous fellow who nevertheless included himself in his admonition) to adopt the same attitude about life: don't give up, use failure to propel you toward success and learn from everything.
A depressingly high percentage of the undergrads don't have jobs yet, including our son, so this was a message that I think both they and their worried parents needed to hear. And it dovetails nicely with Haidt's themes, I think.
Maybe he should have spoken at a convocation of incoming freshmen, not this "we got your money, too late, you can't declare bankruptcy due to the machinations of George W Bush, who gave Joe Biden's son, a 26 year old coke head just out of college, a $90,000 per year gig on the board of Amtrak, in return for Joe Biden ramrodding the "Bankruptcy Reform Act" through Congress.
Young people have been anything but coddled, but they have been ill-served by institutions who were supposed to give them the intellection tools to manage the challenges of life.
Having one of your own professors as Grad Speaker is probably not what they were thinking after their $250k of tuition. Did they serve refreshments in Dixie cups too?
Joe Biden's corruption, TBH, seems almost quaint compared to the Soros infiltrated, billions skimming administration of Donald Trump's second term.
You didn't hear? Scott Bessent was the Soros lieutenant who headed the project to short the British Pound and made Georgie a billionaire, and here he is, Donald Trump's Secretary of the Treasury. And cronies of his are being created billionaires as we speak.
In the first quoted paragraph, the word 'safety' definitely needs scare quotes -- maybe multiple levels of them.
More smears from losers:
Scott Bessent was the Soros lieutenant who headed the project to short the British Pound and made Georgie a billionaire
His ability to spot trends was integral to the Black Wednesday episode. But Soros was already a billionaire from stolen Nazi treasures. Further the pejorative "lieutenant" is a snide slander meant to obscure the huge talent Scott has for leveraging financial opportunities that arise in free markets.
You should be glad we have him looking out for America's finances. The biggest beneficiary of that talent right now is the US Treasury.
The speaker at my daughter’s graduation in 2010 was Eric Holder. I guess Vlad the Impaler was otherwise engaged.
Having one of your own professors as Grad Speaker is probably not what they were thinking after their $250k of tuition. Did they serve refreshments in Dixie cups too?
I hope you're joking, Mark - otherwise this is analogous to obsessing about the wedding rather than ensuring that the marriage is the right move. (And when one of your professors is a best-selling author and world-famous researcher, it seems to me he's probably worth your fifteen minutes or whatever.)
Mark Kelly, did all the talking and it was all about him. I remember because I thought he came across as a real jerk.
So, authentically himself?
The last one attended was at MIT a decade or so ago. New CEO of Xerox, if I remember right. A DEI choice before we were all aware of that acronym. Without a doubt, the most boring speaker I've ever heard.
In the spring of 1969 I was a junior at Wellesley and on the committee charged with selecting the Commencement speaker for the 1970 Commencement. Teddy Kennedy was selected. That summer I was traveling in Europe with another member of the selection committee. Imagine our horror when we woke up July 19, 1969 and heard about the Chappaquiddick incident.
We quickly rescinded our invitation to Senator Kennedy and scrambled to invite the runner-up.
The problem right now is massive asset inflation. The prices of houses is too high and stocks and debt are all way overpriced compared to wages.
We need a massive devaluation in assets held by old people so young people have a chance.
Income taxes need to be replaced with vat and capital taxes.
Achilles,
VAT orsome other kind of sales tax? Sure.
Capital??? You've got to be kidding, and I'm surprised at you falling into the Scrooge McDuck economics fallacy.
What is currently wrong with our schools.
It is not the students that are coddled. It is the people running the schools that are creating this environment and the students are the natural result.
Kirk Parker said...
Achilles,
VAT orsome other kind of sales tax? Sure.
Capital??? You've got to be kidding, and I'm surprised at you falling into the Scrooge McDuck economics fallacy.
If you hire an employee you pay 25-40% of the money to the state for hiring that person.
If you buy a robot you get to expense that as a tax deduction.
Software companies all maintain software but there is no taxation on anything but the employees maintaining it.
We are now heading into a time where there will be options to replace employees with automated agents and robots.
Pretty soon you will have zero tax revenue because all incentives are to have capital and eliminate labor.
Just think of the world you are creating. You are surprised because you haven't followed the current system to its inevitable conclusion.
What is your source for Soros becoming a billionaire from "stolen Nazi treasure," Mike (MJBW)?
About twenty years ago, I was tasked with developing a disaster response plan for the university library. We ended up substantially copying NYU's, with proper attribution.
Tom Wolfe gave the commencement address at Yale in 1989, back when The Bonfire of the Vanities was still a topic of conversation. Even then, there were students who stood and turned their backs to him during his speech, while others ostentatiously marched out. It would be inconceivable for someone like him to deliver a Yale commencement address today.
Out of curiosity, I looked up recent Yale commencement speakers. The only nominally conservative speakers since Wolfe were acceptable, milquetoast ones, like Christopher Buckley (2009), George Pataki (2002), and David Gergen (1999).
The rest of the speakers have all been drawn from a list of the usual suspects.
I have no idea who spoke at any of my own graduations.
Librarians were faculty at Memphis Mistake University, which meant we were on graduation duty every few semesters. Even in the early '90s the thing had become a farce--they were closer in spirit to pep-rallies than to anything having to do with educational achievement.
The funniest thing in regard to the wasted Saturday morning or afternoon was that the faculty were told not to be seen reading while the ceremony trudged on, punctuated by airhorns and confetti.
I remember nothing about my commencement speaker. It was 1968, and my draft board was about to reclassify me from 2-S to 1-A. I had enough on my mind.
Narr, it was a perhaps apocryphal story that built on young George Soros' participation in a Hungarian inventory of stolen Jewish treasures. Some reports say he was merely an observer. My source said the Hungarians helped themselves to the loot. But reliable objective reporting is rather difficult since the EU had an agreement to "cleanse" Wikipedia of derogatory data that "populists" might use for oppo research on things shadowy billionaires like Soros were doing.
To be fair, his Soros Fund Management had made him fabulously wealthy by 1973 (whatever the source of seed capital) when he changed the name to Quantum fund and it would another two decades before the "short the pound" move that Bessent proposed. My point was Bessent helped him grow but was by no means his main source of wealth.
Yes he went to lse after that and based on a misreading of poper he created his hedge fund
Bessent is john wick with a spread sheet
Ironically, speaking as someone who has tried to get top shelf speakers for events, for anyone *other* than NYU, securing Haidt as a speaker is an expensive and a significant coup. But yes I wonder how it plays to have an NYU professor speak at the NYU Commencement. That does sound a bit bush league.
And don't rip Taylor Swift, self-made billionaire. She might know a thing or two about making it. .
Haidt is someone they could actually learn something from, not another politician with the usual bromides. Admittedly, he is no Taylor Swift.
Arguably the real event is when the musical acts come around for Spring Fling or Senior Week, and you can have four and more of those shows in your academic career.
A new blood libel: The only thing of interest about the NYT is the Nicholas Kristof piece drawing the sting from a 300-page evidentiary report documenting Hamas atrocities on Oct. 7th. Kristof’s coverup article focuses on reports, from guess who, about Israeli abuse of Hamas prisoners and, guess what, dogs trained by Israelis to “rape Arabs”. You know those dogs trained to distinguish between the orifices of Semitic Arabs and Semitic Jews./s
Haley Dunphy: "It's very simple, Alex. In order to give a good speech, all you have to do is take a song and say it. Like 'Don't Stop Believing,' or 'Get This Party Started.' ... Who cares?
Nobody wants to think; it's a graduation! A celebration of being done with thinking!"
imTay (8:57): “And cronies of his are being created billionaires as we speak.” Document please. Who and how? We’ll wait.
BTW, asGay agBay, TDSers can’t sell it here.
We were always getting Democrat politicians. The university president wanted to secure his budget with Congress and the state legislature, but much more than that, he once had political hopes and probably still had them. So, no Tay Tay Swift or whoever the equivalent back then was.
In grad school, we didn't get a speaker. That was for the undergrads on their "Class Day." We got to "march," though most of the day was just standing around in mock "gowns." Maybe somebody came along and pronounced us masters and doctors, like a religious leader conferring blessings on the assembled crowds.
The whole point to having a commencement speaker is to give the students some insights that they may not have. Granted, a lot of schools just book some famous celebrity because they think that it boosts their popularity, but I would hope for someone who has an interesting story to tell.
And there already is someone scheduled to speak who is specifically from their group. It's the Valedictorian.
If even ultra-left NYU is putting a famous critic out as the speaker, even ultra-left NYU knows there's an issue. They accept that the students need to hear what Haidt says.
Haidt is a super soft and gentle old-time leftist by temperament. He became alarmed by the downward shift in his own students close to 10 years ago.
The objectors are just proving Haidt's point.
James K,
Satyng that there are "points" you can "prove" is the absolute ultimate in white patriarchal thinking.
That is MY truth, and I am sticking with it. How dare you!
@Mike(MJBW)--
It's well known that the teenaged Soros was employed by the Nazis to help inventory looted property--until his usefulness came to an end. Other Jews saw a few more sunrises because they were useful, feeding corpses to the incinerators until it was their turn to die.
Personally, though I am no expert of George Soros, I find it hard to believe that much in the way of riches stuck to his hands. Every government in postwar Europe had people searching for their national treasures, artistic and financial, and it's just not plausible to me that a teenaged orphan (even a smart Jew) could have enriched himself with millions or billions(!) in that context.
And don't rip Taylor Swift, self-made billionaire. She might know a thing or two about making it.
….what I was thinking…
How self-made is Taylor Swift, though? No question that in recent years she has been master of her own fate, in done very well... But what about in the beginning? Could she have started from a self-produced nobody and gotten where she is today?
Haidt is one of the most famous public intellectuals in America, an old-school, open-minded liberal who defends the idea of exposing students to actually diverse speech and ideas. He is also adult, thoughtful, and decent. I can see why he holds no appeal for these shallow snowflakes. I don't agree with all of his politics, but I respect the man and what he's trying to bring back to education: educating. That sounds like a pretty expensive kindergarden.
Martha: by 1969, it should have been clear what Ted Kennedy was, no matter how much the media protected him. Didn't anyone even object in the first place?
A lot of the evil in presentist history is intentional forgetting/starf*****g. Anyone paying attention should have been able to suss some things out, if they were paying any attention. The academic rot started far earlier, of course, and you were young and elite, playing in Europe, not heading to Vietnam. As usual, Big Mike is right about everything.
"Haidt is a professor at N.Y.U."
A prophet is not without honor except in his hometown and among his own relatives and in his own household.
"And don't rip Taylor Swift..."
I saw the portmanteau there and pictured a hybrid of Rip Taylor and Taylor Swift. Yikes!
He's getting the platform of their graduation ceremony.
I must've missed all the stories about conservative students who've had to put up with loudmouth leftist speakers at their graduation ceremony.
Haidt himself is a coddled intellectual. According to his Wikipedia page he had an existential crisis the age of 17 after reading Waiting for Godot.
In 1975 We had Kingman Brewster as a speaker for W&M graduation. No one's life was ruined by it. Get over it.
Swiftly tailored, indeed. Planned, perhaps.
Yikes has anyone read the comments on this article? Summary: most are backing the snowflakes.
NYU is 60% female. The rest are gays. Taylor Swift, indeed.
According to Wikipedia (FWIW and IIRC) the young Soros was passing as a Gentile in 1944-45, and was not orphaned.
Whether it's Donald Trump seeking to imprison journalists or a couple of NYU students telling Jeremy Peters they don't like Jonathan Haidt, both sides have adopted a totalitarian attitude towards free speech.
In response to TINA TRENT 3:47pm:
the Commencement speaker in 1969 was Senator Edward Brooke, a moderate Republican from Massachusetts and the first African-American popularly elected to the U.S. Senate. 1969 was the height of the Vietnam campus protests. Both Martin Luther King Jr. and Bobby Kennedy had been assassinated.
Senator Brooke’s speech celebrated incremental progress and spent a lot of time arguing against protest. He believed "the overwhelming majority of Americans will stand firm on one principle: Coercive protest is wrong, and one reason it is wrong is because it is unnecessary."
Hillary Rodham, Wellesley student government President and the first ever student speaker at a Wellesley Commencement, famously responded extemporaneously to Senator Brooke’s remarks stating they were insufficient to the moment —shocking the assembled guests and the Wellesley administration. To chastise an invited guest was not something one did at Wellesley.
But Hillary’s rebuke of Senator Brooke catapulted her to a LIFE magazine spread complete with photo and subhead: "With eloquent defiance, top students protest right through commencement."
The selection of Senator Ted Kennedy for Commencement speaker by the Class of 1970 the following year might have been a reaction to the backlash among the students to the selection of the moderate Republican Senator Brooke the previous year.
BTW I was not playing in Europe during the summer of 1969. My Wellesley friend and I worked our way through Europe starting in England with a work permit starting as a clerk at Harrods on Regent Street. Then I spent a month researching the background for my Biochemistry senior honors thesis at Trinity College in Dublin. It was not all fun. And my parents did not foot the bill.
My college graduation featured the CEO of Eastern Airlines - just a few years before that enormous enterprise went belly up. I don't recall the lessons of life he imparted at this late date, but I still wonder if he listened to what he said.
Has there ever been a generation that wasn't coddled, according to the previous generation?
IMO, the last 100% non-coddled generation was the WW1 boys and men shipped off to face machine guns with horses and flamethrowers and chemical weapons in the trenches. Up to 22 million dead.
That was the last gasp of the English aristocracy with giant estates staffed by hundreds of peasants. The girls were more heavily coddled back then than they are today.
Martha, the Harvard-to-UVa jog in Ted Kennedy's resume was well-known. Someone expelled for cheating was considered suitable as a commencement speaker?
He was a poor choice under any circumstances other than trying to grab a famous politician. Tina Trent has it right.
Ted's jog from Harvard was to the Army. The expulsion was a well-known fact, however.
Ok, young naive Wellesley students should have disqualified Senator Kennedy as a potential Commencement speaker. Why was Senator Kennedy elected by the citizens of Massachusetts repeatedly from 1962 until his death in 2009 despite his history of cheating at Harvard and repeatedly cheating on his wife—re-elected please note even after Chappaquiddick. Teddy ran for President AFTER Chappaquiddick! Nothing disqualified Teddy Kennedy in the eyes of the Democratic Party.
Why do you hold 20 year old young women to a higher standard.
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