Sit-ins, hunger strikes and angry mobs: These are all things I became accustomed to in my late teens and early 20s. No, I haven’t been living in a country experiencing severe political unrest. I am living in New Haven, Conn., and attending Yale University as an undergrad.

While this may sound bizarre to you, behavior typical of a severely oppressed society has taken hold among students who are part of the Ivory Tower. I call it Protester Derangement Syndrome, or PDS for short.

Yale students enjoy luxuries akin to European aristocracy. Students live in resort-style housing that includes lavish feasts, massage parlors and recreational spaces that boast everything from a printing press to a pottery studio. However, Yale students afflicted with PDS display derangement symptoms similar to an oppressed religious cult. They refuse to interact with the world around them. They have demanded the buildings be renamed. They support the desecration of art. They sanitize history by demanding professors exclude certain authors from syllabi.

The Yale administration believes they can treat PDS through concessions and pacification. Unfortunately, their prescription has been ineffective. The disease has even spread to graduate students, who in 2017 held a “hunger strike” as part of their attempt to unionize.

For some background, graduate students receive a full-tuition scholarship, funding for their research, full health coverage and a minimum $31,800 “stipend” that goes up by year. That still was not enough. They decided their working conditions were so unbearable and their employer so hostile their only choice was to go on hunger strike. Except they ate anyway when they were hungry.

Now, I am not from the Northeast or California and did not attend a prep school, so I will always feel a bit foreign around Yale students, but I knew there had to be others who recognized what was going on. Some PDS behavior is typical, but this was just too much. There had to be other rational individuals who would sympathize with my frustration, and there were. With the financial support of the Yale College Republicans, I hosted a barbecue next to their hunger strike. It was a huge success, with about a hundred students turning out. I took much comfort knowing there were other sane people on campus.

Honestly, I do not care one way or the other about graduate student unions. I’m not even a member of the Yale College Republicans. What I took issue with was the detached self-gratification that motivated their little stunt. Why should people like me be silent when individuals appropriate the sacrifices of true activists to push their own agendas? People have died hunger-striking in genuine campaigns against staggering oppression and persecution, and no one has the right to spit on their memory the way those students did.

‘I guess one symptom of PDS is forgetting what you are protesting’

Perhaps luckily for the non-afflicted population, PDS is similar to chicken pox: It usually lies dormant for a while. Generally, symptoms only flare up during low-intensity academic periods when students have little else to do. The hunger strike began during Dead Week (the last week of classes before reading period), and the time when dozens of Yale students mobbed and verbally assaulted a tenured professor, leading to his and his wife’s resignation in 2016, occurred during Halloween, one of the least stressful times at Yale.

Just this past Wednesday, I was at a lecture when a student stood up and loudly announced he was going on strike for the climate. He proudly walked out of the auditorium and was joined by about a quarter of the class, who proceeded to have a mini-rally on campus. Apparently, the protest included attacks on “racial capitalism,” whatever that means, and calls to free Palestine. I guess one symptom of PDS is forgetting what you are protesting. And of course this all happened right before midterm season picks up.

I can only assume that students will forget about their crippling oppression and looming environmental crisis when the first midterms hit (unless they use the upcoming election as an excuse to skip them).

The fault for this infantile behavior lies squarely with the university, led by appeaser-in-chief Peter Salovey. Students treat perpetual university concessions as vindications of their grievances, which emboldens them to ask for more. Satiating students is now a Sisyphean task. The children’s book “If You Give a Mouse a Cookie” by Laura Numeroff paints a pretty decent picture of what is going on here. Think of students as the mouse, and the Salovey as the boy. Instead of a cookie, however, protesters get tens of millions of dollars.

The behavior exhibited by my peers should concern us all. Many undergrads have convinced themselves they are experiencing Maduro-style oppression, and this mentality will follow them into adulthood. I shudder at the thought of more than 1,200 PDS carriers inoculating the rest of the country upon graduation.

Esteban Elizondo is a Yale senior and research assistant majoring in political science.