More On The Dalton School Kerfuffle

When I posted Sunday on rhw headmaster's resignation at the uber-elite Dalton School, I thought it would be an easy short post on a day when I'd be preoccupied with installing my new desktop. But then yesterday I heard that Megyn Kelly, of all people, had gone public with scolding the headmaster, and a few people had noticed, so I wondered what else was up.

Let's keep in mind that Kelly is still presumably rich following her settlements with Fox and NBC, and at least arguably still famous, though she's past her sell-by date. But she destroyed her career doing as the lizard people told her to do in 2016, trying to ambush Trump, so I'm not sure why she's hanging around. The elites don't like her, and she doesn't like them -- unless they continue to fawn over her, which they aren't doing.

It turns out that Kelly has had a running Twitter feud with New York elite schools and New York itself since last year. She pulled her kids out of the equally tony Collegiate and Spence Schools, for wokeness, but remember that she went on Bill Maher to talk about it. It ain't about the kids.

Then I found a long piece in Vanity Fair from last Thursday, only days before the Dalton head's resignation, which clearly indicates that the conflict had been brewing for some time. And it sounds more and more like a tempest in a teapot.

The public blowup came in December, splashed across the pages of the New York Post: A handful of teachers at the Dalton School, one of New York City’s elite Upper East Side private schools, had written an eight-page, 24-point thought-starter document that aimed to reimagine Dalton’s approach to diversity and inclusion, bringing it more in line with the progressive facade it has long worn.

But this was just at Dalton, which as the srory implies had somehow been lagging behind the woke trend. Megyn herself came out last fall, according to the Maher story linked above:

Kelly first announced this decision in November 2020, citing as the catalyst the school’s curriculum which had “gone off the deep end” in terms of its left-leaning ideology, though critics have highlighted Kelly’s controversial past as an indication that she may be overreacting or deflecting from more important issues. One highlight from Kelly’s career in controversy was defending blackface costumes on Halloween, which lead to her termination from NBC.

So this is starting to look more and more like an intramural controversy among people who appear to be in the elite but are deeply insecure about it. A key indicator that they've arrived, among this particular set, is their kids' expensive private schools. So they're basically playing ain't-it-awful among themselves over things like the price of beachfront estates in the Hamptons. With a lot less effort, they could do a little research and networking and simply find a good school outside that social orbit, but they'd have to drop the mental habit of relating everything in their lives to that social orbit.

And of course, if they sent their kids to some school that just focused on real education, they'd lose the chance of getting them into Harvard. Which for the kids' sake would be all to the good, but that's not who we're dealing with.

So in the Twitter thread in which Megyn scolded Dalton, someone followed up:

Knew this one was coming. He totally deserved it, but I wonder if the board was just upset at all the publicity.

I'm afraid the issue is less that the kids are having wokeness shoved down their throats because it's a bad thing than it's OK if the plebs's kids have it in plebs schools, but our kids don't deserve it, because they're special.