Professor Quits Because Some Students Have Bad Beliefs

Now perhaps his reasoning was something like this: I had a job in the business world that paid me very well. I took a pay cut to work at MIT, because I was excited about sharing knowledge with the younger generation. (I’m just guessing at this, but so far it’s consistent with what many people do.) But now that I see how awful some members of the younger generation are, the costs and benefits of an MIT job come out the other way. I’ll just go back into the private sector, and if some bad people profit from what I do for them, at least I’ll be making really good money doing that.

Yet even that would strike me as odd. If one finds joy in helping pass along the aggregate knowledge of mankind, does it really make sense to sour on that just because some small fraction of the students are morally benighted? Again, if that’s indeed his personal choice, I don’t begrudge him whatever reason for what is, after all, a decision about his own career. But it’s just not the sort of choice that strikes me as likely to be common, or to tell us much about how to organize a modern university.

via reason.com

Eugene Volokh.

I see Eugene’s point but I think it’s a matter of degree. I can see why a professor would grow disillusioned if the prevailing opinions of his students grew so bad that he just didn’t want to be around it anymore. This seems to be the situation at MIT, where just being a Jew, let alone an Israeli, makes one a target for hate and vitriol. It’s not a matter of the opinions of your students; it’s a matter of how they behave, and students at MIT, enough of them, behave quite badly. It only takes a minority, say 10 or 20 percent of students, behaving very badly, to spoil the whole enterprise of “passing along the aggregate knowledge of mankind.” Instead, you have to witness how that knowledge, so hard earned, is lost.