How We Can Help Students Survive in an Age of Anxiety

This semester, a student at Macalester College took his own life.

It was not the first time during my tenure as president that I have had to speak with grieving parents, stand in our chapel and find words when there are no words, and worry about the impact of a death on all the members of our community and especially on our other students.

Four days earlier, a gunman had walked into Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School, in Parkland, Fla., and killed 17 people, including 14 students. It was at least the 25th mass shooting in an American school since the attack in Columbine, Colo., in 1999. For the 25th time, we offered prayers and platitudes and little else, aside from the prospect of pistol-packing geometry teachers.

We are profoundly failing our students. They seem in many ways so accomplished, so engaged with the world, yet they are also extraordinarily anxious, depressed, and overwhelmed.

I have thought a great deal about why this particular generation of young people seems burdened by the weight of worries and fears that were not absent from, but seemed to be felt less keenly by, previous generations. And I begin by reminding myself that a high-school junior today has lived her entire life in a post-9/11 world. She has lived, that is, in a world in which the most visible and powerful civic emotion seems to be fear: fear at airports, fear at stadiums, fear in schools, fear broadcast constantly across the bottom of our television screens or across the faces of our phones.

I remember a time when the world did not seem to be a scary place. I wonder whether that 16-year-old young woman can say the same thing.

Today’s students have also lived most of their lives in the shadow of a systemic financial collapse. Some of us can still remember the extent to which the worldview of our parents or grandparents was shaped by having grown up during the Great Depression. While the Great Recession was objectively not as severe, it has led to a level of economic anxiety among today’s college students that I did not see even a decade ago. They do not seem to expect that their quality of life, economic or otherwise, would be better than that of their parents.

Then there are all the forms of social media by which our children are engulfed. Their mistakes are preserved and publicized. Their views are caught up in an endless cacophony of intense online disagreement. They are forced to compare the reality of their lives to the curated, excitement-filled, ultimately fictional existences splashed across Facebook pages.

And then, finally, there are guns. Always, there are guns. We seem afraid of everything — immigrants and the poor, terrorists and taxes — except the one thing we should truly be afraid of: the hundreds of millions of guns in the United States. We have made guns, tools designed to kill, into the symbol of our freedom, while the rest of the world stares in disbelief. This is not inevitable, it is uniquely American, and it is within our ability to change. Our children might be less disturbed by the actual fear of guns than by the sorry spectacle of a society in thrall to its own violent past and present.

So before we bemoan the lack of resilience among today’s high-school and college students, before we wonder why so many children are being medicated from a very young age, before we wonder why colleges, which were never designed to be mental-health providers, cannot meet the demand for counseling services, we should take responsibility for the environment we have created and ask ourselves what we can do to make it healthier for children now and in the future.

We can stop being so afraid. I don’t mean that we should stop fearing those things that are legitimately dangerous, but that we should try as a society to build our policies and our practices around hope rather than fear, around trust rather than suspicion. Doing the right thing, being courageous, being humane, inevitably entails risk, and we should be willing to accept that risk both to create a just society and to model bravery for our children. If we try to wall ourselves off from the rest of the world, if we describe a landscape of “American carnage,” if we distrust anyone whose appearance or faith or customs are different from our own, how can we be puzzled if we raise a generation of anxious and frightened young people?

As for social media, we can no more return to a world without it than we can return to a world without the combustion engine. But just as we are (or should be) trying to progress to a world beyond fossil fuels, just as we are trying to come to grips with the profoundly destructive side effects of our technological genius, we should look frankly at the impact of social media on our lives. We cannot allow the computer engineers at Google, Facebook, and Twitter to become the social engineers of our future.

If I were king of the world, I would eliminate the comments section of every online publication, make 21 the minimum legal age for Facebook use, and eliminate Twitter. And I would require that everyone who works in Silicon Valley take courses in history, philosophy, and psychology.

Since I’m not king of the world, I encourage all of us to think about how we can limit the role of social media, particularly in the lives of young people, and about how to eliminate as many guns as we possibly can. We should be smart enough to figure out how to permit people to shoot ducks or deer and at the same time to make it illegal to possess an AR-15 assault rifle. And if it came down to a choice between preserving duck hunting and saving the lives of children, the decision for me would be easy.

The most important step we can take on college campuses is to name the problem. It is both ironic and destructive that students who feel isolated are surrounded by hundreds of others who feel the same way. Our desire to market residential colleges as leafy oases of fun and communal engagement can prevent us from speaking honestly about the prevalence of anxiety and can actually worsen that anxiety among students who feel left out of the party. We can also make mental-health education as important a part of new-student orientation as we have, rightly, made Title IX training.

We get the society we deserve. We elect the leaders, we make the laws, we create and sustain the civic culture. The problem is, our children get the society we make for them, whether they deserve it or not.

It should not be the case that so many college students cite anxiety as a major health concern, or that 6-year-olds have to participate in active-shooter drills, or that anyone has to stand up, whether in a chapel at Macalester or a high school in Florida, to mourn the preventable death of a young person. Right now, it seems that our students are not being well-served by the society we have made for them. If we are not sufficiently motivated to improve it for our own sake, we should be motivated to improve it for theirs.

Brian Rosenberg is president of Macalester College.