By Tal Fortgang ’17
Maryanne Wolf is a neuroscientist of reading. Princeton asked her to teach the Class of 2030 how to reckon with difficult language. Little could be more necessary at a moment of vanishing attention spans and visceral intolerance for language upsetting to its audience. Which makes it surprising that at Opening Exercises Wolf had a hard time finishing a sentence. She collapsed into her armchair, announced that she could not say “his name,” and spelled “T-R-U-M-P” to 1,300 first-years. Princeton President Christopher Eisgruber, sitting across from her, smiled and said nothing.
Some criticism has come for Eisgruber, but who knows what his snap reaction really means. What’s shocking is that ten years after his first election victory, the name of the sitting president of the United States is treated as some kind of hex. The university that assigned incoming freshmen Wolf’s Reader, Come Home: The Reading Brain in a Digital World — meant to foster courage in encountering challenging sentences — somehow failed once again to display a modicum of maturity when it counted. A decade on, is it possible that we’re still not ready to speak about the president without hyperventilation—or treating his name as a curse, or a trigger?
Princeton freshman Simon Riley (who, I must brag, was my student in extracurricular seminars when he was in high school) skewered the incident in a Daily Princetonian column. Orientation, he argued, presented an institutional left-leaning perspective: sustainability as intersectionality, sex education that does not mention children, two hours of diversity programming and zero hours of disagreement. That’s all true, and the fact that universities are still struggling to break out of such indoctrinating programming is baffling.
Yet an appreciation for the virtues of viewpoint diversity should lead us to level a deeper criticism. Somehow, Donald Trump’s name is still ineffable, even among people hand-selected to teach new college students the importance of encountering difficult words.
Tal Fortgang ’17 is a Legal Policy Fellow at the Manhattan Institute, a regular contributor to PFS and a contributing writer at The Dispatch.