Coddling College Students

Then the subtitle: How Good Intentions and Bad Ideas are Setting Up a Generation for Failure. You read that and are instantly agreeing or outraged. Home run.

Their thesis? Well, you just read it in the subtitle.

Their argument? Beginning with the set of students arriving at college in 2013, there has been a generational shift. These new students are crippled by three things.

First, they are fragile. The have grown up in a world in which the adults around them constantly tried to remove all obstacles. They are used to getting their way. If you say “No” to them, they crumble. They avoid risky endeavors. They want everything to be safe and certain.

Second, the new generation of students firmly believes that their emotional reaction is a sure guide to truth. “This makes me angry or sad or uncomfortable” means the same thing as “This is wrong.” There are no unpleasant truths in their world. “I feel this should be so, therefore it must be so.”

Third, they divide the world into good (people who agree with me) and evil (people who disagree with me). Since Nazis are in the second category, everyone else who disagrees with me is equivalent to a Nazi. Thus, “You disagree with me” is quite literally the same things as “You deny my right to exist.”

Combine those three things and what do you get when the students enter college? You get the constant stream of stories of campus protest we have seen in the past few years. From Yale exploding about Halloween costumes to a mob at Middlebury sending a professor to the hospital to Oberlin losing a $44 million lawsuit, colleges are full of outraged students protesting nonstop. “Crybullies,” as Roger Kimball memorably labeled the protesters.

Lukianoff and Haidt argue that the characteristics of the students, coupled with the nature of school administrators has led straight to his mess. There are lots of people to blame for the fact that students have become this way: parents, lower levels of schools, the political climate, and the colleges themselves.

While reading the book, it was very hard not to immediately realize the authors were describing the type of college at which I work and the type of students at this college. In other words, this is the best book I have read describing the current generation of college students.

Or so I thought.

I read this book with one of my reading groups this semester. (If you want to know more about the assorted reading groups, subscribe to the Newsletter!) The discussion with the students was fascinating and rather encouraging.

Students split on whether they liked the book. The difference was illuminating. None of the students in this reading group fits the description above of “coddled.” The difference in their reactions to the book turned out to be who the student thought the book was describing. The students who thought the book was describing the other students in the college liked it; it struck them as an accurate portrayal. The students who did not like it read it as a personal attack, and since it was not an accurate portrayal, they disliked the book…intensely.

In the discussion, however, both the students who did and did not like the book agreed very strongly on one thing: their generation is no different than any previous generation. When I say they were adamant on this point, it is an understatement. I tried very hard for a long time to make the argument that their generation was indeed different, that they were more fragile, more inclined to say “I feel therefore it is true,” more likely to divide the world into good and evil. I did not even make a dent in their absolute assurance that their generation was not different.

How did they deflect all the counter-arguments? They simply accepted that, yes, in fact, a set of students in their generation is, for example, incredibly fragile. They all have stories of classes in which other students used “I am uncomfortable with what you are saying” as a counterargument. The have all seen, and many have actually been victims of, the “If you don’t agree with me, you are evil like the Nazis” argument. But, they do not think it is accurate to impute those behaviors to the entire generation.

Which leads to the hopeful note. It is obviously true that any characterization of a generation does not mean that every single member of that generation fits the description. So, while some students do match Lukianoff and Haidt’s definition of coddled, some students do not. What percentage of students fit into which camp?

When you see what is happening on colleges, and even more so when you work in one of these colleges, there is no doubt that there are almost daily examples of the sort of behavior described in this book. It is everywhere. But, and this is the fascinating thing, what percent of the student body is responsible for all this activity?

What if, for example, only 30% of the student body fit Lukianoff and Haidt’s characterization? What would happen? Well that would be more than enough students to generate all the endless stories. That means, however that 70% of the students are not like that at all.

Then when we look at college students in previous generations, there was always a set of students who fit the “coddled” description. I was in college in the 1980s, and I knew students who were fragile, I knew students who were certain that their emotions were a good guide to truth, and I knew students who hurled the label of Nazi at anyone with whom they disagreed.

Consider, for example, these song lyrics:

Come mothers and fathers
Throughout the land
And don’t criticize
What you can’t understand
Your sons and your daughters
Are beyond your command
Your old road is rapidly agin’
Please get out of the new one
If you can’t lend your hand
For the times they are a-changin’

Isn’t it obvious that this in the anthem of the modern college student? That song was written, by the way, before I was born. 

So what has changed? What if it isn’t really a change in the students at all?  What if the change is simply in the College Bureaucrats?

As I have thought about this idea, it does not seem all that far-fetched. Take a college-bound kid from any era. What is constant? The desire to grow-up and become an independent person. College is the first time in life when a child becomes an adult and gets to decide how to spend the day.

So, college students are naturally trying to create the adult world the way they want it to be. Once upon a time, a college set rules. Lots of rules. There were not just graduation requirements, but professors set their own rules on how classes would be structured and students would be evaluated. Dormitories had all sorts of rules on what you could or could not do.  Colleges held out the threat of expulsion if you crossed too many lines.

Now, a new set of bureaucrats is in town. And these bureaucrats enable the worst student behaviors. A student complains about something, it doesn’t matter what. The initial bureaucratic response is now: how do we eliminate whatever it is the student is complaining about? There is not an evaluation of whether the complaint is justified or whether the complaint is about something inherent to the structure of college or even whether there are other students who share the complaint. Instead, the problem must be fixed.  Instantly.

Students figured this out. The also realized that some complaints jump to the top of the priority lists of school bureaucrats. 

An example: microaggressions. How did this become a thing? It was not the students who invented the idea of microaggressions and introduced them to college campuses. It was the administrative apparatus, abetted by sympathetic faculty, who introduced the idea of microaggressions. Students figured out that if they complain about a microaggression, there are large numbers of college bureaucrats who leap into action.

Microaggressions are a fantastic means of making sure there is always something to protest. There are virtually no macroaggressions on college campuses anymore. So, can we declare victory? Can we be proud of that fact? Of course not. You see, there are endless microaggressions. What constitutes a microaggression? Well, for example, asking what constitutes a microaggression is itself a microaggression because someone could construe the question in a negative manner.

If this argument is right, then Lukianoff and Haidt are casting their net too widely; the solution here is not at all about changing the way children are raised. (It is desirable to change the way children are currently being raised for other reasons, just not this one.) The solution is simply to get a better set of college bureaucrats.  Indeed, as the authors note, the problem has crept downward, so we will need a better set of high school bureaucrats too. 

But, is their subtitle right that this is a generation doomed to failure? Well, I am absolutely certain that none of the students with whom I discussed this book are doomed to failure. Indeed, if you are looking to hire someone, you really want to hire one of these students. (Convincing them to work for you, however, may be tough—they will all have many options.) And while this subset of students is unusual (after all, they are willing to spend a couple of hours multiple times a semester reading and arguing about books with me), maybe the majority of college students today are also not doomed to failure.

Then, after I had written all this, one of the students in this reading group forwarded an announcement about an activity which the College organized for the college students yesterday:

What does $70,000 a year buy? A blow-up T-rex sprinkler meeting a blow-up unicorn sprinkler!

QED

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