Commentary: Will Bardenwerper: The elite students and the professor they wouldn’t eat with

Will Bardenwerper April 18, 2024 1 min read

Will Bardenwerper
Pittsburgh Post-Gazette

Excerpt: The article was so bizarre I thought it might be an April Fool’s hoax, given the April 1 byline. The author of “We must not let eating clubs be ideological safe spaces” in The Daily Princetonian had invited a prominent Princeton professor to join him as a guest for lunch at his “eating club” (essentially a private club serving as hybrid dining hall and fraternity/sorority for Princeton juniors and seniors). He later learned that a “group of membership” felt “caught off guard” when they saw the professor, and they were deeply upset by his presence.

If our future leaders are coddled to the point that they cannot share a dining room with an accomplished professor with whom they disagree, where does that leave us as a country? What good comes from four years spent reinforcing the ideas one arrived on campus with?

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