… is from page 317 of George Will’s 2021 book, American Happiness and Discontents: The Unruly Torrent, 2008-2020 – a collection of many of Will’s columns over these years; (the essay – now titled “Another Yale Burlesque, ‘Contextualized’” – from which the quotation below is drawn originally appeared in the Washington Post on August 31st, 2017):
The therapeutic university’s language – students are “vulnerable” to routine stresses and difficulties that are defined as “traumas” – also becomes self-fulfilling. As a result, students experience a diminished sense of capacity for moral agency – for self-determination. This can make them simultaneously passive, immersing themselves into groupthink, and volatile….