Go ahead, laugh at them. Call them thin-skinned, lily-livered, self-righteous. They always find a way to take offense. That’s just how—as you’ve surely heard—today’s college students roll.
Consider the evidence. Recently students have expressed many concerns that their elders describe as hypersensitivity gone haywire. In March, The New York Times reported on campus discussions of “microaggressions,” subtle slights of one’s race, ethnicity, gender, or sexual orientation. This spring, commencement speakers at several prominent institutions withdrew amid students’ opposition to their views or affiliations. By then the nation had heard all about “trigger warnings": Students on various campuses have called for alerts about assigned texts (yes, old sport, even The Great Gatsby) that might upset or traumatize them.
So when something awful happened this past May, perhaps nobody should’ve been surprised by how a student newspaper at the University of California at Santa Barbara reacted. After the fatal shootings of six students near the campus, The Bottom Line’s editors opted against immediately publishing an article, to protect student journalists from “emotional harm.”
These developments raise a question. Are the future caretakers of civilization made of marshmallows?
Yes, say the pundits. Lately commentators have ridiculed students for an array of sins (“overreaching sensitivity,” “longing for an ‘offenseless’ society”). The Daily Beast’s jab at undergraduates (“The Oh-So-Fragile Class of 2014 Needs to STFU and Listen to Some New Ideas”) bore this blunt conclusion: “Young people are the worst.”
But the kids-these-days diss simplifies the complexity of 21st-century students. They are a diverse bunch with varying needs and wants, some more serious than others. They carry immense expectations through higher education’s gates, and in the name of compassion and competition, colleges strive to serve. If students are soft, campuses help make them so.
“What happens on college campuses has as much to do with the institution and the adults within it as anything that the students bring,” says Richard Arum, a professor of sociology and education at New York University. “There’s a dynamic in place where colleges are catering to them as consumers and clients. They are increasingly making decisions to keep students happy.”
That means trade-offs. The rise of the consumer ethos has sapped colleges’ commitment to learning, argue Mr. Arum and Josipa Roksa, an associate professor of sociology at the University of Virginia, in Academically Adrift: Limited Learning on College Campuses. Yet the “delivery of elaborate and ever-expanding services,” the authors concede, might also have positive consequences. Generally colleges have become more responsive to students, which hardly spells doom.
Just how responsive an institution should be, however, is debatable. The line between care and coddling can be blurry. Critiques of the college experience often mention the physical comforts that students now enjoy. The high-rise dorm. The fancy gym. The cafeteria featuring omelets with your choice of 17 locally sourced ingredients.
Those amenities are tangible expressions of a broader goal. Colleges continue to grapple with many dimensions of comfort—intellectual, cultural, social—and how much of it to provide. The challenge, some administrators and professors say, is making students uncomfortable in some ways but comfortable in others. Challenge their ideas and assumptions here, support their identities and interests there.
On an increasingly diverse campus, striking that balance is difficult. Some students stroll in, convinced that they own the place; others slink along, lugging problems and doubts. So, go ahead, laugh at college students. But maybe, just maybe, not all of them deserve it.
When colleges first entered the business of tending to students’ personal needs, the streets were full of Model Ts. During the 1920s, the problems that students experienced as they adjusted to campus life became a widespread concern. Then, as now, those problems included frustration with large, impersonal classes, and depression.
Previously, college leaders had assumed that participation in extracurricular activities worked against students’ academic performance. That notion faded as more and more research suggested a connection between personality development and achievement. Gradually a host of academic, social, and psychological programs grew. In 1924 the American College Personnel Association was founded to lead the burgeoning student-affairs profession.
Its purpose? To reduce the “psychic dislocation of college” by giving students more individualized attention, says Christopher P. Loss, an associate professor of public policy and higher education at Vanderbilt University, who describes the rise of student services in Between Citizens and the State: The Politics of American Higher Education in the 20th Century. Eventually educators were focused on the “whole student.”
At least half of all students who enrolled in college in the 1920s left without earning a degree, typically in their first year. Although attrition then had many causes, Mr. Loss has found, colleges embraced extracurricular programs as the primary solution to the dropout problem (then known as “student mortality”). So began freshman week, orientation classes, clubs, honors programs, social events—myriad ways to make students feel at home.
“There’s been an ongoing tension between being efficient and effective in handling this massive student body on the one hand,” Mr. Loss says, “and providing personalized instruction and care on the other.”
The influx of veterans on the original GI Bill cemented student services as a primary function of colleges. And long after the erosion of in loco parentis as the basis for discipline and social control, Mr. Loss writes in a forthcoming essay, the doctrine continued to compel colleges “to care for and nurture their students in order to help them steer clear of the innumerable academic and emotional challenges of going to school.”
Are the future caretakers of civilization made of marshmallows? If students are soft, campuses help make them so.
In the 1960s and 1970s, as institutions enrolled more and more black students, “diversity” was the key word in student affairs. Later, cultural programs and support services designed for students of various racial and ethnic backgrounds became the norm. Conceptions of diversity today go well beyond demographics. Many colleges now try to accommodate the broad spectrum of a student’s identity: sexual orientation, religious beliefs, and political views, for instance, or hardships faced as a combat soldier or a victim of sexual assault.
“There’s an almost infinite array of personal experiences, traumas, and tragedies that can shape or condition your capacities to be a member of a college community,” says Mr. Loss. “What role does the college have to play in order to ensure that all students are treated fairly?”
An increasingly large one. Generally, educators believe they have a moral responsibility to develop students beyond the classroom. Those who are happy and “engaged” are more likely to succeed and graduate, which is also good for the bottom line. So colleges are canvassing students and alumni to gauge their satisfaction.
To that end, Augustana College, in Illinois, is trying to determine whether it inadvertently “privileges” extroverted students, making it easier for them to find a niche. In surveys of freshmen, the college includes a three-item scale, “Comfort With Social Interaction,” which asks how they feel about meeting new people and interacting in unfamiliar settings. Researchers use the scores, along with responses to other questions, to determine how personality might affect students’ sense of belonging on the campus. “We’re asking, Have we created this environment where we suck the oxygen out of the introverts in the room?” says Mark Salisbury, assistant dean and director of institutional research and assessment.
Such sophisticated inquiry suggests a level of concern that once would have seemed outlandish. In the age of Starbucks, where each cup bears a name, students—and the parents they call and text daily—expect a lot more than they used to. “It’s part of the movement for individualization,” says Jean Twenge, a professor of psychology at San Diego State University and author of Generation Me: Why Today’s Young Americans Are More Confident, Assertive, Entitled—and More Miserable Than Ever Before. “On many campuses, there’s this idea, ‘I paid my money, thus I want this customized experience.’ "
Customization means more options. But how many aspects of college should be optional?
Philip Wythe, a junior at Rutgers University, has thought carefully about that. In February, Mr. Wythe wrote a column for the New Brunswick campus newspaper in which he described trigger warnings on syllabi as “psychological protection for those who need it.” Such warnings originated in feminist forums online, where they flag content that victims of sexual abuse might find distressing. Recently students on several campuses—Rutgers, UC-Santa Barbara, the University of Michigan—have called for their use in academic courses. A panel of students and faculty members at Oberlin College is weighing the issue.
Importing trigger warnings to the classroom, Mr. Wythe argues, would help students prepare themselves for emotionally hazardous material and avoid it if necessary. A trigger warning for The Great Gatsby, he suggests, might include the words “suicide” and “domestic abuse.”
Mr. Wythe recounts in an email the experience of a close friend, a young woman at Rutgers, who suffered a panic attack in class. While watching a film in which the protagonist describes being sexually abused, Mr. Wythe writes, his friend started shaking and crying. Eventually she ran out of the room.
By his description, the woman had been “triggered,” or reminded of a past trauma. Colleges have an obligation, he says, to try to prevent that, by warning students about material that deals with violence and sexual assault. “Trigger warnings aren’t for able-minded students who are prone to sensitivity,” he writes. “It’s about individuals with disabilities, such as PTSD or severe anxiety disorder, which can disrupt daily life.” More such students are going to college than ever before.
Mr. Wythe’s views are informed by his experience in a high-school health class. During discussions of sensitive topics like depression and suicide, he explained in a recent interview on HuffPost Live, students were assured that if they felt uneasy at any point, they could approach the teacher and request “an alternate plan.”
So Mr. Wythe has come to see the issue as a matter of transparency. “These are students trying to change the course of their own education, as in saying what they would like in the classroom, what they’re comfortable with in the classroom,” he said in the interview. In other words, they’re consumers, making buying decisions. A trigger warning, he says, can help a student decide whether to skip a class on a given day—or whether to take that course in the first place.
That idea frustrates many professors who see an overstated problem. It’s not as if students are always blindsided, as if instructors never preview assignments or contextualize them. One psychology professor who plans to assign a book about sexual abuse this fall says he will first discuss why reading it might be difficult. “Is that a trigger warning?” he asks. “Partly, it’s being a good teacher.”
A trigger warning for The Great Gatsby might include the words “suicide” and “domestic abuse.”
The notion that a book, like a pack of cigarettes, needs a warning label strikes many professors as preposterous. Where to draw the line? Instructors aren’t counselors, nor could they begin to anticipate all of the things that might traumatize someone.
Orange juice, for instance, triggers Mariah Woelfel, a student at DePaul University. She associates it with visiting her brother in the hospital after a car accident left him severely disabled. She opposes trigger warnings, however, because, as she wrote in The DePaulia, they go against “the main purpose of higher-level learning: to explore diversity in ideas, and challenge the ones that you already hold.”
Trigger warnings are evidence that political correctness has given way to something broader, says Karen Swallow Prior, an English professor at Liberty University. “Now, instead of challenging the status quo by demanding texts that question the comfort of the Western canon,” she wrote in The Atlantic this spring, “students are demanding the status quo by refusing to read texts that challenge their own personal comfort.” She calls this “empathetic correctness.”
Empathy is tricky. Where it exists, students may feel secure, and understanding might flow. But it’s hard to cultivate.
Still, colleges should try, says Charles W. Green, a psychology professor at Hope College. Fifteen years ago, Mr. Green, who studies race and racism, helped start a residential academic program, or learning community, for freshmen interested in racial and cultural issues. The goal: to promote inclusion as the predominantly white campus diversified (today 15 percent of its students are nonwhite, up from 4 percent about a decade ago).
“If you’re in the majority and it’s all working for you, it’s hard to see that other people might not be having this lovely time,” he says. “Some people don’t realize how common it is for students to have experiences that leave them feeling as if they are unwelcome on their own campus.”
Mr. Green recalls a black student who was carrying a pizza back to the campus one evening when a group of teenagers surrounded her. When she refused to hand over her dinner, they called her the N-word. The next day, the young woman and several other black students came to his office. They were shaken.
Most incidents he hears about are more subtle. A white student tells a black student not to “play the race card” during a class discussion. A black woman reports that when professors ask students to discuss a topic in pairs, the white classmates to her left and right always turn away from her.
Whether a particular insult is also a microaggression—a subtle conveyance of bias or stereotype—is subjective (“No, where are you really from?” or “I have trouble telling Asians apart”). Some students say hurtful things because they’re bigoted jerks; others, naïve or socially clumsy, don’t mean to offend. The term “microaggression,” like “trigger warning,” comes from the realm of social justice, which increasingly informs discussions of diversity on campuses.
This is especially true at Emory University, where freshmen now discuss microaggressions during orientation. Throughout the year, students in the Issues Troupe write and perform skits to increase awareness of racial stereotypes and cultural differences.
Ajay Nair, senior vice president and dean of campus life at Emory, believes that the modern campus must move beyond traditional multicultural programs. “With multiculturalism, the destination is tolerance, not understanding,” he says. “Our students are pushing back and saying, ‘This doesn’t work; tolerance doesn’t lead to understanding.’ Multiculturalism focuses on celebration instead of social justice and activism.”
Mr. Nair envisions a “polycultural” model that acknowledges multiple identities. A student might be gay and Hispanic, or Asian-American and Christian. The dean has begun restructuring his entire division to reflect that model (think more collaboration, less compartmentalization). The shift serves another goal as well: persuading all students that they have a stake in diversity.
“A straight, white male student has a lot to offer, a particular way of understanding the world,” says Mr. Nair. “As we think about a deeper understanding of diversity, the dialogue can’t just be with certain parts of the community that have been marginalized.”
Talking about microaggressions is a helpful way to frame that dialogue, Mr. Nair believes (as an Indian-American, he recalls being told that his English was “so good,” even though he was born and raised in Philadelphia). Whether such discussions promote understanding, however, is complicated.
Jovonna Jones, a senior at Emory, says the term “microaggression” can help minority students describe their feelings to others. “There are many things my peers have experienced, but we didn’t have a name for it before,” says Ms. Jones, who is black. “It’s another way of trying to explain how racism works to people who still don’t want to hear it exists.”
Sometimes, for instance, her peers call her “sassy,” which she hears as a code word for the stereotype that black women have an attitude. Now and then, students ask to touch her hair; some have just gone ahead without asking. Framing her objections in terms of microaggressions, she says, can be empowering and productive.
But it’s not always easy. When she hears someone say, “Oh, that’s ghetto,” she says, she has to decide whether to explain why that might offend not just her, but many black students. “It can become a very toxic position to be put in,” she says. “What happened to it just mattering that you hurt someone’s feelings?”
Some white students, meanwhile, have complained that diversity discussions shovel guilt down their throats. “Check your privilege,” some are told, meaning that they should acknowledge their advantages in life, and maybe think twice about the views they’re sharing. In April, Tal Fortgang, a white student at Princeton University, wrote a column describing the phrase as a rebuke that “threatens to strike down opinions without regard for their merits, but rather solely on the basis of the person that voiced them.”
Exposing students to unfamiliar ideas has long been a core purpose of higher education. From temporary discomfort comes an essential struggle, writes Tricia A. Seifert, an assistant professor at the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education, at the University of Toronto. “Disequilibrium, cognitive dissonance, challenge—these are the building blocks of learning.”
But is that still in vogue? A national survey of freshmen conducted annually by the Higher Education Research Institute at the University of California at Los Angeles suggests that many students wrestle with the concept. Generally, freshmen say they work well with others and tolerate those with different beliefs. Yet they rate themselves low on their “openness to having their own views challenged.”
These days Netflix recommends a film based on those you like. Spotify suggests a band based on your listening habits. And curated news feeds deliver the political opinions you choose.
“As we have a greater expectation of physical comfort, of an ability to choose what media we want to see, what sources we want to read, it does cultivate, almost inevitably, seeking intellectual comfort,” says Greg Lukianoff, president of the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education. “You want people to agree with you. It’s part of human nature.”
There’s one problem, though. “It’s just not intellectually healthy,” he says.
Kathleen McCartney also thinks “ideological echo chambers” have diminished the appetite for true dialogue on campuses. She is president of Smith College, where some students and faculty members objected to the selection of Christine Lagarde, managing director of the International Monetary Fund, as this spring’s commencement speaker, which they saw as an implicit endorsement. An online petition urging Smith to reconsider the invitation said the IMF had helped strengthen “imperialist and patriarchal systems that oppress and abuse women worldwide.” A few students wrote to Ms. Lagarde, asking her not to come. A week before graduation, she withdrew.
Ms. McCartney insists that she wouldn’t have minded if students had protested during the speech. “That’s fair game,” she says. What troubled her was the impulse to prevent anyone at Smith from hearing Ms. Lagarde. “They had many options between acquiescing and urging her to stay away,” the president says.
Since the episode, Ms. McCartney has heard from members of the Class of 1964, recalling their objections to that year’s commencement speaker, Dean Rusk, then the U.S. secretary of state, who supported the American role in the Vietnam War. Although many students wore black armbands in protest, they sat and listened to his speech.
What might explain why two generations responded so differently? Ms. McCartney cites social media, for one. “Before, you had to walk a petition around campus. Now you can put it online in a millisecond,” immediately attracting like-minded classmates and a broader audience. But there’s something deeper, too. “Maybe in 1964, students felt like the power to say ‘don’t come’ wasn’t there,” she says. “Students are empowered today, and that’s mostly good.”
Mostly. Discussions of microaggressions and trigger warnings often flow from some wish, however vague, to make the world kinder, to make life easier for one’s neighbor. And the pushback against commencement speakers challenges the notion that today’s students are politically apathetic.
But there’s a troubling side to those trends, all of which boil down to scrutiny of words—which words students should say, read, hear. “All these things,” Ms. McCartney says, “can threaten free speech.”
The attention to finely tuned sensitivities, the relentless delivery of more options, more alternatives can also convince students that the world stops for them. The comfortable kid can get far too comfortable.
Recently, Ms. McCartney heard a radio report about how younger students perceive criticism as especially harsh when their teachers grade assignments in red pen. Just for a moment, she imagined Smith students demanding that professors use only black or blue ink. “I hope,” she says, “we don’t have a red-pen movement.”
Indeed, a national campaign about the harm caused by ink colors would be absurd. Life, we know, marks us up in whatever colors it wants. With wisdom drawn from our many years of experience, we tend to laugh at the kids, scoff at their ideas. But we should at least consider the possibility that old people are the worst.
