Excerpt: When confronted with the astonishing news that, henceforth, students at Yale “may not visit New Haven businesses or eat at local restaurants (even outdoors),” one might naturally wonder what sort of person would pay $60,000 to be locked down and told what to do. But the question answers itself: Of course Yale’s students will comply. And, worse still, their doing so will not represent some egregious departure from the norm, but the latest exercise in the sort of obedient box-ticking that helped them get into Yale in the first place.
If Yale asks them to go outside and stand like flamingos in the quadrangle, they will do it. There is no incentive for Yale to be prudent here, because there is no incentive for its students to demand it be prudent. They’re not there to be respected; they’re there to get stamped. Knowing full well that Yale’s students need Yale more than Yale needs its students, Yale staffers have set the game up to benefit themselves.
National Review