In a letter dated January 1969, Sowell offers his thoughts in response to the social and academic upheaval taking place at Cornell University, where he endured a brief stint teaching (or at least attempting to teach) economics. Sowell had a hard time understanding how or why the administration of the university was allowing the students to engage in all manner of disruption to the educational aims of the university under the guise of agitating for social justice:

Many of their adult hangers-on romanticize or condone these things as excusable in the great struggle The System. In thirty eight years, I have never encountered a single person who believed in everything about the existing society, but the idea that the agonies that have plagued man for thousands of years, in every part of the globe, under all kinds of arrangements, are going to be gotten around by changing something called The System or by being obnoxious to something called The Establishment seems optimistic beyond words. I guess it is the naive optimism of the revolutionaries that is so hard to take, including their naive optimism about themselves in failing to see how much of what they do is part of the general cussedness of man and has no real connection with the ideals they espouse~ p. 73-74

This hardly requires an further commentary from me.

Enjoy the rest of your Tuesday aternoon.