A fraternity at Yale had its new members chat “no means yes”…meaning that if a woman says no, she means yes…in pledging during the Fall of 2010. The dean of Yale College asked the college’s executive committee to look into the matter. This seems to me to evince a penchant for bureaucracy for its own sake.
In the old days, a dean would simply have called the guys into his or her office and given them a tongue lashing, followed by having them do something like pick up trash around campus. Now it is like a government investigation being referred to an executive committee. At the very least, any punishment would lag from the offense temporally and thus be less efficacious. I suspect that the dean was thinking at some level that referring the matter to her executive committee makes her more important…as akin to being a government official. It could also be that the political correctness has vaunted the incident to such an extent that the students could be expelled even though no person was physically harmed (and the chants were not done in front of a sorority).
The enforcers of political correctness act like they are government officials. To be sure, the guys acted reprehensibly, but it is also true that boys will be boys; to expect them to always be as though mature forty-year-olds is a foolhardy endeavor. The Yale College dean should have realized that she was more like a parent than a government official with respect to students.
