A reader who is a college professor (and whose name I know) writes:

I thought you’d enjoy this signs-of-the-times story. It’s good for a laugh—or perhaps a cry.

In one of my classes yesterday we were talking about current events, and a student mentioned that the soldier in the famous Times Square kissing photo had died. “Yes,” I said. “Too bad. Such a beautiful image, and such a moment of joy.” One of my least favorite students, a smug know-it-all in the back row, piped up. “You actually like that photo?” she said. “Well, yeah,” I replied, a bit taken aback. “That’s an iconic image of a moment of unbridled joy.”

“And do you think she consented to that kiss?” she said icily. “No, no she did not. That is a photo of an assault. That man should have gone to jail.”

Now, this happens with some regularity in classes these days. I don’t use Twitter, but I’m familiar with the term “wokescold,” and it’s incredibly accurate. Most of my students are just pure scolds. They’re deeply puritanical (though they have no idea who the Puritans were, given their virtually nonexistent awareness of history). So I tried to play it off a bit.

“Well, okay…” I said. “I acknowledge that it may not hold up with our contemporary standards of morality—”

“What were we even celebrating?” interjected another student, a gay man who can’t get through a sentence without mentioning that identity.

I couldn’t help it: I laughed. “Uh, winning World War II?” I said. “Pretty big deal, no?”

He scowled. “Yeah, if colonialism’s your thing.”

I admit I was dumbfounded by this, and I figured the best thing to do was escape the situation quickly. But I couldn’t help it. “What was our colonial project in that war?” I asked. “Did we go over there to occupy France? I’m pretty sure it was something more like the opposite.” This got a couple laughs, which helped defuse the tension, and even the student in question chuckled and rolled his eyes. I turned back to the girl. “So,” I said. “You don’t like this photo, I take it.”

“No,” she said. “It should not be shown to people.”

“Hang on,” I said. “Because this feels like an important point. Do you mean this photo should be banned? Kept out of public view?”

“Exactly,” she said. “Why should I be forced to see a woman’s sovereignty violated? That’s a picture of a victim, and nothing else. There’s nothing to celebrate.”

I smiled and nodded, and moved on to the next topic.

Now, I’m not entirely sure what to think of this. Sure, we could laugh it off as the crazy ravings of college freshmen. But here’s the thing: the students I teach are in the university’s elite academic program. There are roughly 800 of them in our 30,000-person student body. Many of them received offers from Ivies but came to this university instead for the full scholarship. They are not cranks—they are the leaders of tomorrow.

You might recall that William Deresiewicz wrote a book a few years ago called Excellent Sheep, about his experience at Yale. I can’t think of a better term for today’s elite students. All of my students are very smart in a technical/regurgitating knowledge kind of way. They do the assignments, they email you outside of class, etc. But they are the most boring people I have ever known. Their whole lives have been curated purely to boost credentials. They do not understand—and I mean literally do not understand, as if you were speaking Latin—the language of morality, goodness, philosophy, justice, and so on. Sometimes we’ll be talking about the news and I’ll ask one of them something like “Hey, is the death penalty wrong?”

They can never reply. They just stammer something about personal opinion and individual choice. I say “Yeah, but is it wrong? Like, on a moral level?” They don’t even understand the question. I’m being totally serious. They don’t understand what it would mean to have a code of beliefs, or to believe in something outside of the individual. They have been brought up to believe in one thing: a vague notion of “success” that mostly involves accumulating credentials, racking up meaningless accolades, and making money. That’s it. They are philistines—smiling, pleasant, well-educated, quasi-totalitarian philistines.

I know you’re working on that book about the new socialism, and I think it will be timely. It seems to me that totalitarianism is not arriving in the U.S. via the stern face of Big Brother staring down from the screen. It’s coming from the college student who says we shouldn’t view a photo of pure, untrammeled joy. And the thing is that they can’t see that joy, not just because they’re puritans, but because they have no historical consciousness. They have no sense of what so many Americans sacrificed in the years leading up to that famous kiss because they never really learned it. I’m not a gung-ho America First guy—I’d be an expat in a second if I could get my wife on board—but the K-12 textbooks have gotten insane. They really do stress the failures of the country, the bad angle of every story, the endless aggressions-in-hindsight that form the modern wokescold.

Look, I get it: this country has done terrible things. We continue to do terrible things. But there are no pure good guys and pure bad guys. We are crazy if we don’t think for one second that the things we consider good and just today will be denounced as oppressive in 30 years. To say that we shouldn’t look at an image that shows the joy of having just defeated the f’ing Nazis is just insanity.

My students are generally pleasant, but they’re never any fun. Where’s the joy in their lives? They live to denounce. It’s like having 25 Robespierres around you three times a week. They’re always on the lookout for something to be outraged about. I’m never surprised when I hear that rates of sexual activity have decreased. It’s hard to imagine them letting their guard down for one second to cherish the company of someone else. What on earth will the romantic comedy films of the future be like? Zooming in on phone screens as two people exchange sexual consent notices on an app?

In the coming weeks I have to make a decision about whether to keep teaching in this elite program, and I doubt I’ll return. The non-elite kids at least have a sense of humor, a sense of joy. I’m not sure at what point we made elite education negative and puritanical, but take it from this professor: it sure isn’t any fun.