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On the president of Yale's response to recent protests there.
One morning in March 1980, a select group of readers in Boston woke to find an editorial in The Boston Globe about one of Jimmy Carter's hectoring speeches. It bore the headline "More Mush from the Wimp." That working title wasn't meant to see publication, and only 160,000 copies of the paper escaped into the wild with that comic but illuminating and accurate rubric. We thought about that delicious story when casting our eyes over the long email that Yale's president Peter Salovey broadcast in response to the protests that had gripped the campus in early November. Those protests, along with similar outbreaks at institutions from Amherst and Dartmouth to Claremont McKenna College and the University of Missouri, captured the nation's attention for their exhibition of juvenile showboating on the part of students and craven capitulation on the part of professors and administrators. As Allan Bloom put it, writing about the radical protests of the 1960s and '70s in The Closing of the American Mind, "A few students discovered that pompous teachers who catechized them about academic free speech could, with a little shove, be made into dancing bears." At Yale, the ursine circus culminated (as of this writing) in a late-night march...