Jonathan Haidt is a social psychologist and author of, among other works, “The Coddling of the American Mind.” he has been vocal on criticizing attacks on campus free speech for more than a decade, warning that the American education system is handicapping generations of students by allowing them to avoid ideas, opinions, and even facts that they find unpalatable. Last week he gave the guest commencement speech at NYU, but not before students, including the Executive Committee of the NYU Student Government Assembly, angrily protested his selection…because they found his ideas and opinions opposed to their “values.”
As Mr Rogers would say, “Can you say ‘irony’? Sure you can!” Below is the hilarious letter they sent to the school’s administration. Frankly, I don’t know how any student with the sense to come in out of a lightning storm could read this and not think, “Wait a minute…doesn’t this letter prove that this Haidt guy may be on to something?”
But no. Read this thing without your head exploding or dissolving into giggles. I’ll try to keep my comments brief at the end:
Ethics Alarms 
The college at which my sister teaches had that respected scholar Hugh Jackman as a commencement speaker this year!
My lawn school commencement speaker was none other than Dan Rather. His mwssage: “you don’t need to be a lawyer to succeed. Look at me! I flunked out and got called to the Big Desk!”
jvb
erm . . . “law” school.
Whew. I was afraid you had an educated lawn….
nope. Just a yard or so.
jvb
You got me there too, JVB. I thought maybe you’d been to lawn guy school. I didn’t know there was such a thing. Hah!
Well, there is Hamburger University, so I don’t know why their can’t be lawn school.
https://www.mcdonalds.com/qa/en-qa/career_mcd/training-and-education.html
I read it as an education regarding lawns, like a PhD in gardening.
Our military build-up won’t matter. Other countries will destroy us with a better educated populace that also has a decent work ethic.
Taylor Swift and Molly Shannon? Did no one proofread this or think about how this kind of opening pretty much tanks your credibility immediately?
Isn’t that great? They might as well have written Pauly Shore and Kylie Jenner….
Jack, don’t you know that mid level comedy actors are peak graduation speakers?
I think the best line that came out of the 2024 presidential campaign was someone’s reaction to Kamala Harris securing the much sought after Taylor Swift endorsement along the lines of, “This recommendation from the woman whose entire oeuvre is exclusively about women making bad decisions?”
I would question my life if Taylor Swift endorsed me.
FERPA has really hurt education. When I was an undergrad, a student group claimed that on-campus job recruiting was racist because the members weren’t getting interviews. The student newspaper policy at the time listed the year, GPA, and major of any student quoted in the paper. The president of this ‘group’ was listed as a 5th year undecided major with a 0.7 GPA. The vice president was a 6th year general studies major with a 1.0 GPA. This let everyone with a brain know what was really going on.