Yale plays nice, and so (occasionally) does Dara

Thursday, cigarette #3

The last sentence of Dara's YDN column ('In creating dialogue, Elis should raise the bar') is:

We shouldn’t strive for a dialogue so universal that nobody feels comfortable speaking at all.

I think she could have been snarkier (and therefore better) by saying what I thought it said when I first read it:

We shouldn't strive for a dialogue so universal that nobody feels comfortable speaking it at all.

The first evokes a picture of Yalies shrugging their shoulders and not engaging in campus dialogue; the second evokes (at least to me) a bunch of Yalies being forced to conduct campus dialogue using only their high-school French. ("Oui, mais... l'education est comme... une porte...") The second, in addition to being snarkier, is closer to what it feels like to be limited by campus conventions on what constitutes productive speech.

For more on what some of those limitations are, read the whole column:

...in non-academic settings — from common-room conversations to, yes, columns in the News — using jargon is usually an easy way to ensure one’s contribution will be dismissed or ignored. This has nothing to do with the content of these discussions. I’m not accusing Yale students of being frivolous, and I don’t want us to steer our attentions exclusively toward high-minded Major Issues. But by expressing disgust toward styles both rude and intellectual, we become relentlessly middlebrow...

The ideal of “constructive dialogue” is often invoked in the hopes of making Yale’s campus an example to the rest of the world. But a belief that we can construct exemplary dialogue designed for anyone to understand implies that the difference between Yalies and everyone else is our moral superiority...

For the record, I object to the taboo on supposedly jargon words like "liminality" and "narrative" as much as Dara does, but I object even more to the insistence that all dialogue be oriented towards consensus rather than one side's victory or defeat.