I find his writing brilliant, puzzling and reprehensible in roughly equal parts ... Mr. deBoer grumbles, with ample justification, that all his fellow left-wingers want to talk about are small-bore identity issues and nonsense poses like defunding the police, but he doesn’t offer much to the young radical, either.
How Elites Ate the Social Justice Movement... eschews the rigors of social science, relying instead on the approachable yet deceptive consolations of anecdote ... DeBoer follows a long line of pundits in suggesting, without much justification, that elite campuses are reliable microcosms of wider societal trends ... Perhaps most important, it is impossible to assess whether DeBoer is carelessly generalizing when he offers up colorful examples of leftist hysteria ... Time and time again, DeBoer punts on the difficult questions, choosing instead to substantiate sweeping empirical claims by appealing to affect, anecdote and atmosphere.
DeBoer does not merely disagree or dispute, he heckles. Everywhere he looks he finds hustlers and dupes ... Strong stuff, but deBoer has combed through the reporting faithfully. He’s less convincing when he reaches for broader arguments.
