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For a Stanford Applicant, Perseveration Pays Off
You can say that again. But why?
By ELLIOT KAUFMAN / Wall Street Journal
April 6, 2017
Stanford University offered admission to only 4.65% of applicants this year, but that may not be low enough.
Every year, Stanford asks its applicants an excellent question: “What matters to you, and why?” Ziad Ahmed of Princeton, N.J., summed up his answer in three words. His essay consisted of the hashtag “#BlackLivesMatter” repeated 100 times. He got in.
Mr. Ahmed rejected the premise that he should explain his views. “The insistence on an explanation is inherently dehumanizing,” he told the website Mic. Mr. Ahmed, who is not black, considers himself “a BLM ally.” As anyone on a college campus today knows, the role of an “ally” is not to ask questions, or to answer them.
That’s how identity politics works. Men are shamed out of their positions on abortion (except one position) because who are men to tell women what to do? White people cannot have positions on racism (again, except for the correct one) because who are the privileged to tell the oppressed how things are? Truly public discourse becomes offensive and impossible.
So Mr. Ahmed got his point across: The teenager evidently finds the Black Lives Matter movement worthy and important. But saying it once would have made that clear. The endless repetition seems designed not just to pre-empt but also to prevent any argument in response.
The Danish philosopher Søren Kierkegaard, in “Concluding Unscientific Postscript” (1846), tells the story of a young man who escapes from a mental asylum. He quickly realizes that to evade detection, he needs to convince the mentally sound that he is one of them. He reasons that if he sticks to the objective truth, no one will doubt his sanity. Consequently, every step he takes and to every person he meets, the patient repeats, “The Earth is round. The Earth is round. The Earth is round.” He is returned to the asylum immediately.
Why? Is the Earth flat? Do black lives not matter? Are blacks always treated equally in America? Of course not. The truth that black lives matter—and that racism still exists—is obvious, just like the roundness of the Earth. That is the problem. These truths are so self-evident that repeating them without adding anything substantive seems crazy. It eliminates the possibility of conversation.
Yet no one questions Mr. Ahmed’s mental health. On the contrary, adult society celebrates him at every turn. Princeton and Yale have accepted him too. Mic reports that he was previously invited to the Obama White House and “recognized as a Muslim-American change-maker.”
It is no longer madmen who merely repeat obvious truths. Now the success stories do it too. The society in Kierkegaard’s parable immediately recognized that mindlessly repeating the truth was a sign of something wrong. Our society applauds it. That is the chilling part of this story. The young man or the society—it is no longer clear who has escaped from the asylum.
Mr. Kaufman is a junior at Stanford.
You can say that again. But why?
By ELLIOT KAUFMAN / Wall Street Journal
April 6, 2017
Stanford University offered admission to only 4.65% of applicants this year, but that may not be low enough.
Every year, Stanford asks its applicants an excellent question: “What matters to you, and why?” Ziad Ahmed of Princeton, N.J., summed up his answer in three words. His essay consisted of the hashtag “#BlackLivesMatter” repeated 100 times. He got in.
Mr. Ahmed rejected the premise that he should explain his views. “The insistence on an explanation is inherently dehumanizing,” he told the website Mic. Mr. Ahmed, who is not black, considers himself “a BLM ally.” As anyone on a college campus today knows, the role of an “ally” is not to ask questions, or to answer them.
That’s how identity politics works. Men are shamed out of their positions on abortion (except one position) because who are men to tell women what to do? White people cannot have positions on racism (again, except for the correct one) because who are the privileged to tell the oppressed how things are? Truly public discourse becomes offensive and impossible.
So Mr. Ahmed got his point across: The teenager evidently finds the Black Lives Matter movement worthy and important. But saying it once would have made that clear. The endless repetition seems designed not just to pre-empt but also to prevent any argument in response.
The Danish philosopher Søren Kierkegaard, in “Concluding Unscientific Postscript” (1846), tells the story of a young man who escapes from a mental asylum. He quickly realizes that to evade detection, he needs to convince the mentally sound that he is one of them. He reasons that if he sticks to the objective truth, no one will doubt his sanity. Consequently, every step he takes and to every person he meets, the patient repeats, “The Earth is round. The Earth is round. The Earth is round.” He is returned to the asylum immediately.
Why? Is the Earth flat? Do black lives not matter? Are blacks always treated equally in America? Of course not. The truth that black lives matter—and that racism still exists—is obvious, just like the roundness of the Earth. That is the problem. These truths are so self-evident that repeating them without adding anything substantive seems crazy. It eliminates the possibility of conversation.
Yet no one questions Mr. Ahmed’s mental health. On the contrary, adult society celebrates him at every turn. Princeton and Yale have accepted him too. Mic reports that he was previously invited to the Obama White House and “recognized as a Muslim-American change-maker.”
It is no longer madmen who merely repeat obvious truths. Now the success stories do it too. The society in Kierkegaard’s parable immediately recognized that mindlessly repeating the truth was a sign of something wrong. Our society applauds it. That is the chilling part of this story. The young man or the society—it is no longer clear who has escaped from the asylum.
Mr. Kaufman is a junior at Stanford.