You Are Here to Be Disturbed

Are we living through a plague of hypersensitivity?

Most readers will be aware of campaigns to dampen hateful speech, to stop “microaggressions,” and to get professors to supply students with “trigger warnings” — verbal trailers or coming attractions — when anticipating visual and verbal disturbances. It’s as if we need the equivalent of G, PG, PG-13, R, and X ratings for both texts and talk. Those who want mandatory warnings believe they are straightforward remedies for a straightforward problem: Vulnerable people need to be protected from upset. If the demand for comfort collides with the need for truth, or with the needs of an atmosphere of intellectual give and take, the truth must be more prettily wrapped. At my own university, advocates of trigger warnings counted “roughly 80 instances of assault” in Ovid’s Metamorphoses alone. Though Metamorphoses is neither a Sadean revelry nor a snuff movie, some students find it deplorable that they’re required to read the book without a prior alert.

The counterargument is not hard to make. No one ever promised that the truth would be comforting. History, Western and otherwise, is (among other things) a slaughterhouse. The record of civilization is a record of murder, rape, and sundry other brutalities. As for the discomfort that may be occasioned by the discovery — even the shock — of this record, discomfort is the crucible of learning. The world is disconcerting. The proper way to begin understanding it is to accept the unwritten contract of university education: I am here to be disturbed.

Excesses of censorial zeal are easy to recognize, and pseudosolutions that require tiptoeing through minefields are easy to decry. The more deeply interesting question is: Why are we having this discussion at all? Deploring is simple, but grasping is hard.

The closer you look, the higher the questions pile up. Are more students arriving at college already feeling rattled? Is sexual assault on campus more common than ever, requiring new levels of preventive intervention? Or is the fear of rape, surely realistic up to a point, inordinate?

Does a troubling curriculum suggest an abundance of troubled minds? Is there an epidemic of fragility? Of the fear of fragility? Or both? (Are they the same thing?) Maybe more traumas — more date rapes, more racial “microaggressions” — lie in wait for unsuspecting students nowadays. Does the clamor for the right to be undisturbed emanate from a particular set of students, or does it reflect a more sweeping incidence of disturbance? Is there a climate of contagion? Is fragility the new normal?

It is, of course, conceivable that sensitivity in the face of ugliness is on the upswing even if presumably objective measures of the ugliness are not. In other words, if we are living through an epidemic of thin-skinnedness, the problem of explanation is only kicked backward into the mists of obscure causation. Why should so many skins be so thin nowadays?

It is, of course, impossible to say anything terribly precise about phenomena so hazy as psychic tendencies and aggregate trauma. That said, we have some surveys to consult. Please supply these data with requisite grains of salt before rushing to interpretation.

There is ample reason to believe that more college students now than 20 or 30 or 40 years ago consult campus counselors to deal with one stress or another. According to the most recent survey (September 1, 2012 to August 31, 2013) of the Association for University and College Counseling Center Directors:

For what it’s worth, concern about sexual assault actually dropped almost two percentage points just as the campaign for trigger warnings was revving up.

But how do students, in aggregate, feel? It’s an absurd question, but there are data that help us reformulate it in a more interesting way. Intriguing is the annual UCLA Higher Education Research Institute (HERI) survey of freshmen. It’s national, and it spans more than 40 years. Last year’s survey found that incoming students’ “self-rated emotional health dropped to 50.7 percent (rating themselves as ‘above average’ or ‘highest 10 percent’ compared to people their age), its lowest level ever and 2.3 percentage points lower than the entering cohort of 2013.” When HERI first asked students to rate their emotional health, in 1985, the proportion who said either “above average” or “highest 10 percent” was 63.6 percent. Either first-year students are reporting more honestly, or they’re feeling more troubled.

The 2014 report went on to say that “the proportion of students who ‘frequently’ felt depressed rose to 9.5 percent. … Counseling centers on campus report … record number of visits.” One high-ranking campus counselor with whom I spoke noted the growing numbers of students who seek psychological counseling while attending his college. Today, on his campus, roughly half of undergraduates seek help at least once during their time in college. When he started out in his position, 20-some years ago, less than one-third as many did so.

Wait times to see counselors are rising, for as fast as new staff are added, so much faster is the growth in demand. Depression and anxiety are the most common complaints. High levels of stress (“frequently overwhelmed by all I have to do”) were reported by 16 percent of freshmen in 1985; in 1998, by almost twice as many, 29.6 percent. A 2012 study by the American College Counseling Association concluded that 37.4 percent of college students seeking counseling had “severe psychological problems,” more than twice as many as the 16 percent who did in 2000. One-quarter of all the students served by the counseling centers were taking psychotropic medications. Eighty-six percent of counseling directors observe that the proportion of incoming students who arrive at college already taking what they call “psychiatric medication” has been growing. Do the drugs help, or is there a dependency loop in which the expectation of psychotropic relief actually spreads psychic suffering? How many students have benefited from psychotropic drugs helping them make it into college in the first place (SSRIs, ADHD meds, etc.), as opposed to those who are damaged by them?

Then, too, there is the question of the declining stigma of mental upset. Counseling services are easier to come by than in past decades — there are more counselors on staff, their budgets have grown, and they are more accessible. So supply might well be cultivating demand. To what degree? It’s not knowable.

Leave aside the question of why students consult counselors, and suppose that they do experience more travail than before. Why should more students feel stressed, anxious, depressed, even suicidal? Economic unsettlement might well be a factor. (But socially rooted anxiety was not born yesterday. When I was in college, anxiety spread like nuclear fallout from bomb tests.) Today, famously, competitive fervor is fierce. More of today’s students are employed while in college, or expect to be, and this double duty may well be another source of stress. In 2009, according to HERI, about one-quarter of all students worked six to 20 hours per week, and of them, almost one-quarter reported “occasionally” or “frequently” missing classes for that reason. An additional one-eighth reported working off-campus more than 20 hours per week, of whom more than half at least “occasionally” missed classes. Meanwhile, debt mounts. College anxiety seeps down into grade school.

For what it’s worth, depression rates in general, not just on campus, have been going up for decades. During the decade from 1991-92 to 2001-2, according to one study, major depression among American adults more than doubled, from 3.33 percent to 7.06 percent. There’s a “cohort effect.” People now in their 20s are more likely to be depressed than were people now in their 50s when they were in their 20s, and similarly for other age groups. The campus mystery turns out to be only a chapter in a larger mystery about the collective state of mind.

The subjects of student labor and debt raise another question: Are the ranks of the especially anxious, depressed, and otherwise destabilized swelled by the many students who are the first in their families to attend college? So much is surmised by journalistic reports and by one college administrator I have spoken with, a man who deals regularly with such students — who haven’t read widely, don’t bring much cultural capital to campus, and might be especially prone to feeling awkward, timid, and outclassed. Indeed, students at several universities are talking online openly — but anonymously — about what it’s like to run out of money while classmates chat about their delightfully pricey spring-break vacations.

For example, much distress is reported by students who post on a Facebook page called Columbia University Class Confessions. On this site, which went up on March 22, several hundred postings testify to injuries of class. Some students say they’ll be homeless once the dorm closes for the summer, others that they resort to sex work to keep going. One writes:

Shall we surmise that first-gen malaise contributes to an overall malaise that, in turn, can worsen curriculum shock? A recent article in The New York Times, by Laura Pappano, notes the numbers involved: “Of the 7.3 million full-time undergraduates attending four-year public and private nonprofit institutions, about 20 percent are the first in their families to go to college.”

But not so fast. Pappano goes on to dash cold water on the hypothesis that distress among first-gens contributes significantly to overall distress: “While the number has ticked up as college-going has increased over all, the proportion has actually declined from 40 years ago, when 38 percent were first generation, according to the annual UCLA survey.” All in all, then, the first-gen fish-out-of-water hypothesis lacks explanatory power.

Now we enter the realm of higher, perhaps airier speculation. Has American culture fueled an expectation of comfort? These days, we’d rather say, “I’m uncomfortable with what you say” than “I disagree with you.” We’d rather say, “I’m a little bit disappointed with you” than “You disgust me” or “You’re wrong.” (Interestingly, usage of the phrase “a little bit” tripled in the Google Ngram database from 1964 to 1970. Since then usage dipped, only to resume its climb in 1980, surpassing the previous peak by 1993.)

We talk readily about “comfort zones.” The term does not seem to have been used much before the 1990s. A Google Ngram search for “comfort zone” shows a tenfold increase from 1965 to 1996 (with a slight downturn over the following four years). Another Ngram shows that the word “comfortable” slid from 1916 to 1964, then started rising at a rate considerably greater than the earlier slide, almost doubling from 1964 to 2000. Maybe “a little bit” and “comfort zone” soared in the 60s because rising hostilities in American life called forth a spate of euphemisms to muffle the noise. Maybe a lot of Americans didn’t discover they wanted a “comfort zone” until they were radically discomfited.

In particular, have students grown more consumer-minded than their predecessors? Does online obsession feed distraction, a predisposition to thoughtlessness, a hunger for instant gratification and an intolerance for the unexpected? Are the screen-obsessed young so “mesmerized by their own looking,” as Jodi Dean, a professor of political science at Hobart and William Smith Colleges, argued in Blog Theory (Polity, 2010), so accustomed to online comfort zones, that they bridle more than ever before at challenges to what they hold dear or the reasons they hold it dear?

John Ehrenreich, a clinical psychologist and professor of psychology at the State University of New York College at Old Westbury, in a forthcoming book, points to a clamor of individualism that arises from, and accentuates, the socially driven strains on social solidarity. Today’s young people are “me directed.” They are what they want and what they have, not what they have accomplished. Ehrenreich maintains that they exhibit “greater narcissism, unrealistically high self-appraisal, and an increased focus on immediate gratification and on external goals such as money, image, and status.” On those measures they contrast with the identity norms of earlier white-collar generations, which were identified, influentially, by the sociologist David Riesman in The Lonely Crowd (1950): first, the inner-directed, who learn self-acceptance and the cultivation of competence by internalizing parental (usually paternal) norms; and then the outer-directed, who take their cues from media and peer groups.

These changes, Ehrenreich says, make young people today more “vulnerable to emotional distress.” Their individualism is panicky. They lack anchorage. They scramble to mark their self-improvements in a world where it’s become normal to be “awesome” and “amazing.” Their sources of social support have declined. Their expectations of the future are, shall we say, destabilized. Family instability meshes with economic insecurity. They are, know it or not, uncomfortable. All this might well fuel an uproar for comfort.

It’s hard to say anything very rigorous about the incidence of rape, or attempted rape, or date rape, or childhood abuse. The most commonly cited statistic is this: “A 2007 campus sexual assault study by the U.S. Department of Justice found that around 1 in 5 women are targets of attempted or completed sexual assault while they are college students.” In fact, that study involved a web-based survey of undergraduates. The number of students who submitted answers was large (5,466 women and 1,375 men), but the number of universities was not: It was two — one Southern, one Midwestern. The study found:

But even those apparently hard-and-fast numbers are squishy. Without question, sexual assault generates trauma. But it might also generate the expectation of trauma. What precisely can be traced to the danger of rape on campus? The murk goes on.

For one thing, the number of undergraduate women who reported having been the victims of either completed or attempted sexual assaults before they entered college was almost as high as the number who reported being sexually assaulted at college. It is no comfort to women sexually assaulted on campus to know that the chances of being raped, or otherwise assaulted, are roughly the same whether they are on campus or off. In fact, controlling for demographic differences between the two populations, a 2010 study of women ages 18 to 24 found higher rates of sexual-partner violence, physical-partner violence, psychological-partner violence, sexual harassment, and drugged drinks off-campus than on-, although none of the differences were statistically significant.

Rape and other forms of sexual violence are crimes, never to be taken complacently anywhere. But if we are looking for reasons that women in college should be more agitated, more needful of “trigger warnings” and “safe spaces” than women not in college, it’s doubtful that one such reason is a campus-specific “rape culture.”

Is there an academic style at work, an intellectual mood that heightens sensitivity to transgressions committed by words? Beginning in the late 1960s, the humanities and, to a lesser degree, the social sciences have been profoundly affected by what Richard Rorty called “the linguistic turn.” Simply put, in many fields, words mattered more than before. Language was no longer taken to be an incidental element in social processes but “constitutive” of them. (By the way, Google Ngram shows a boom in use of “constitutive,” some fivefold from 1960 to 2000.)

In theory, naming mattered acutely. There were no things without names, not even categories for things. To hold power over language was integral to holding power over bodies. Words were instruments of victimization. To be silenced was to be powerless; to speak was to fight the power. Victims were victimized by words. In the work of Antonio Gramsci and Michel Foucault, social power was reflected, reinforced, even “constituted” by language. In the work of Jürgen Habermas, rationality itself was based on speech.

It seemed to follow, then, that changing the way people speak — and write — was a royal road to social change. The equality movements of the 60s insisted on the power of vocabulary to honor or damage. “African-American” supplanted “black,” which in turn supplanted “Negro.” To insist on “woman” rather than “girl” was to demand respect. To speak the unspeakable (“vagina,” “queer”) was to banish invidiousness. “Enslaved persons” had a humanity that “slaves” did not. “Mrs.” yielded to “Ms.” “Actresses” were grouped with “actors,” “stewardesses” became “flight attendants,” “freshmen” became “first-years.” The right to name oneself became the bedrock of dignity.

This move was particularly conspicuous in the strand of feminism conveyed by the law professor Catharine MacKinnon, who found pornography central to the subordination of women. “What pornography does,” she argued in the ironically titled Only Words, “it does in the real world, not only in the mind.” It discriminates. MacKinnon didn’t have evidence that pornography caused rape. But it is more plausible, and effective, to argue that language and image are crucial to discrimination. Hostile environments can be built with words. Speech acts can amount to sexual harassment. Words matter. They did and do, but they are not omnipotent.

Insofar as arguments about the need for trigger warnings, speech-muffling, and runaway squeamishness rest on beliefs about the practical consequences of speech, they fail. No one knows the effects of nasty talk. Slurs can be denounced as disgusting without requiring censorious policy. Cherry-picked surveys and anecdotes cannot overcome the principle that liberty of speech is too precious to cancel, most especially on campus, where the cultivation of reason is fundamental — for citizenship as well as for learning. Fright in the face of words needs to be tamped down, not encouraged. The burden of proof lies heavy on anyone who insists that the conceivable harms are decisive.

When the uproar subsides, the principle will remain: Discomfort drives education. Discomfort and its odd-duck partner, reason.