Colleges Are Creating ‘a Generation of Sanctimonious, Sensitive, Supercilious Snowflakes,’ Sessions Says

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Attorney General Jeff Sessions thinks college students these days have some growing up to do, and besides the kids themselves, who’s to blame? Many of the nation’s colleges, which are creating and coddling “a generation of sanctimonious, sensitive, supercilious snowflakes,” he said in a speech on Tuesday.

Sessions delivered that broadside against higher education at a summit for high-school students sponsored by Turning Point USA, a conservative group that rails against colleges and professors deemed hostile to the right. The education secretary, Betsy DeVos, will speak on Wednesday with the group’s founder, Charlie Kirk.

In his prepared remarks, Sessions began with the story of how he once was a persecuted conservative student in Alabama, and how he and his fellow students had rallied against “Democrat George Wallace and then his wife Lurleen, who were leaders of the segregationist movement.”

He then warned the high schoolers at the conference that some people would try to silence them, and he listed a series of controversies on campuses, including the College of William & Mary, Middlebury College, and the University of California at Berkeley, where violent protests over a speaker prompted President Trump to question whether its federal funding should be pulled.

Sessions’ Justice Department has made what he considers campus censorship a part of its agenda. Most recently the department filed a statement of interest in a lawsuit against Berkeley that argues the institution selectively enforced its speaker policies to censor conservative students. It was the fourth such case during Sessions’ time as attorney general.

In his speech, Sessions invoked well-worn stereotypes, often favored by critics on the right, about college students.

“Through ‘trigger warnings’ about ‘microaggressions,’ cry closets, ‘safe spaces,’ optional exams, therapy goats, and grade inflation, too many schools are coddling our young people and actively preventing them from scrutinizing the validity of their beliefs. That is the exact opposite of what they are supposed to do,” Sessions said, according to his prepared remarks.

“After the 2016 election, for example, they held a ‘cry-in’ at Cornell, they had therapy dogs on campus at the University of Kansas, and Play-Doh and coloring books at the University of Michigan,” the attorney general continued. “Students at Tufts were encouraged to ‘draw about their feelings.’ Rather than molding a generation of mature and well-informed adults, some schools are doing everything they can to create a generation of sanctimonious, sensitive, supercilious snowflakes. That is a disservice to their students and a disservice to this nation.”

During the speech the crowd started chanting, “Lock her up,” a favorite call of Trump supporters regarding Hillary Clinton, Politico reported. Sessions chuckled, and repeated the chant himself, according to The Washington Post.

“I heard that a long time over the last campaign,” he said.

Sessions has used similar rhetoric before. In a September appearance at Georgetown University, he decried college campuses as “an echo chamber of political correctness and homogenous thought, a shelter for fragile egos.” And one of his top lieutenants, Jesse Panuccio, delivered a similar message in January while demanding that colleges punish students who interrupt controversial speakers.

Chris Quintana is a staff reporter. Follow him on Twitter @cquintanadc or email him at chris.quintana@chronicle.com.