So all three speeches to introduce students and parents to the university were devoted to praising diversity, with one zeroing in on our alleged homophobia and supposed contempt for Islam. Many of us got the message right away. Yale is not as interested in intellectual matters as it is in inculcating the reigning prejudices of the academic class: the blase multiculturalism, the hair-trigger sensitivity of protected groups, and the total approval of all of the narratives and all demands of self-styled 'disempowered groups.' In short, Yale seemed less interested in actual education than in preaching its preferred attitudes. They assumed, despite all the praise packed into our acceptance letters, that, as non-academics, straight out of Ordinary America, we must necessarily be bigots in need of reform. This assumption showed tremendous arrogance and a disconcerting detachment from reality on the part of the academic community.

Condemning prejudice is great, but devoting the keynote speech of Yale orientation to a finger-wagging lecture against bigotry, as Professor Yoshino did, was like opening a conference of physicists with a warning on the dangers of astrology. In short, Despite Dean Salovey's assertion that, "We will help you learn how to think rather than tell you what to think," it looked more and more that they were going to teach us neither how to think nor what to think, but rather, what to feel.

That evening, things went from mere disappointment to sheer farce. Tedious lectures turned into indoctrination. We were required to attend 'discussions' with our freshman counselors about Professor Yoshino's speech. The freshman counselor set the tone, and then student after student performed a series of variations upon a single theme: white men are bad, Islam is fabulous and judgment is bad. We need to be eternally vigilant and morally courageous in the face of the innumerable male WASP bigots around us. (Why we are allowed to judge white people as bad and Islam as good when judgment is supposedly forbidden is beyond my ken.)

I attempted to make my own small contribution to the conversation, by pointing out that Professor Yoshino's narrative seemed a bit delusional, that I had never heard a bigoted remark about homosexuals or Muslims at Yale, and that earlier that day at the freshman activities bazaar I had heard a member of a pro-Palestinian student group shouting "we hate Christians, Jews, and all other Zionist pigs!" In fact, Yale has a reputation for being particularly popular and open to gay students, and media and academe show infinite sympathy with gay activism, but Catholic students whose convictions might put them at odds with gay activists are regularly blacklisted from Yale Political Union office. Not all judgments are bad at Yale.

It was evident that I had transgressed. I still remember the looks of shock and disgust on the faces of my classmates and my freshman counselor, as, losing caste, I found myself labeled a bigot and a political pariah. Questioning the narratives of the self-appointed leaders of 'disempowered' groups was not acceptable, and the next day I found myself on the receiving end of suspicious looks of the Dean and Master to whom my freshman counselor was expected to report.

This was merely the first in a long string of very similar incidents in my time at Yale. Worse, our first evening at Yale communicated to the class of 2010 that our university is not actually interested in free, open, and dispassionate inquiry. Questioning the narratives of disempowered groups won't merely generate intellectual disagreement; you will be labeled with the word against which there is no defense, the most stigmatizing and socially debilitating label that exists in the modern university: intolerant.

To put something beyond reproach is to forbid free and open inquiry. As such, Yale's political correctness hysteria is not merely politically imbalanced; it is absolutely contrary to the purpose of the University. This trend is reflected throughout the Yale University experience. We now have a semi-annual "Sex Week," at which porn stars are invited to address students on issues of vital academic importance, and at which stimulating events such as the "Skull and Boned" party are thrown. Surely these porn stars look at the world in a different way than I do (I wonder if this is what Provost Salovey had in mind). Many students have privately shared with me their distaste for the porn star lectures and the grotesque advertisements, but they are afraid to make this distaste public, not wanting to be labeled 'close-minded,' or, worst of all, 'intolerant'.

So, too the humanities are in decline. This is partly because it is difficult for a university to justify the existence of a field of study determined precisely to cultivate our moral and aesthetic judgment while still asserting non-judgmentalism as the highest ideal. Witnessing the total lack of self-confidence of the Humanities, students flock instead to vocational training or the grievance-mongering departments.

It is still possible to find small pockets of students at Yale who are actually interested in the life of the mind, and there is at least one department that still really teaches a non-politicized core curriculum centered around the Western canon (the Yale Humanities department), and we non-conformists have done our best to ignore those who have been calling bigots for our attempts at cultivating the life of the mind in preparation for responsible leadership. Despite all the mandatory nonsense on campus, I will still praise Yale 99 times for every 1 time I criticize it, for the university still provides magnificent opportunities to those who know where to look to get a great education, and who are willing to put up with stigma and insults. It still provides an opportunity. But it no longer demands that its students become truly educated. It has other fish to fry.

Unfortunately, the problem will not be easily solved. The reigning academic orthodoxy, nihilism, states that there is no truth. Since there is no truth, all knowledge is political; facts and reason are merely justifications for various power structures. So, we can forget about accuracy and reason, and devote ourselves instead to enforcing attitudes we desire, and affirming the narratives which reinforce the right political beliefs. Until academe can once again believe in truth, in beauty, and in goodness, and believe that it has a duty to impart knowledge of these to its students, the university will continue to fail in its purpose.

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Matt Shaffer is a student at Yale University