…go to college to avoid education:
Why is this happening now? How did colleges manage to guide generations of students through offense and outrage, only to founder at the dawn of the 21st century? Haidt and Lukianoff offer some plausible candidates: the increasingly sheltered lives that middle-class children now live, and expect colleges to sustain.”In a variety of ways,” they write, “children born after 1980—the Millennials—got a consistent message from adults: life is dangerous, but adults will do everything in their power to protect you from harm, not just from strangers but from one another as well.” Too, partisanship is higher, and angrier, than it was when I was in college. And today’s students, who live in a world where social media make it easy to launch crusades, may have stronger tendencies in this direction than my generation. (Once upon a time, an offense had to be outrageous enough for people to go to the trouble of exchanging phone numbers, attending meetings and printing fliers.)
There’s also a regulatory component: Under Obama, the Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights has broadened the definition for what constitutes offensive speech. Colleges tremble in fear of lawsuits or visits from regulators, and they send legions of administrators forth to head off any threat by appeasing angry students and making new rules.
But here’s a candidate Haidt and Lukianoff don’t mention: the steady shift toward viewing college as a consumer experience, rather than an institution that is there to shape you toward its own ideal. I don’t want to claim that colleges used to be idylls in which the deans never worried about collecting tuition checks; colleges have always worried about attracting enough students. But cultural and economic shifts have pushed students toward behaving more like consumers in a straight commercial transaction, and less like people who were being inducted into a non-market institution.
Yes. The student-loan program has become a huge disaster.
The Lukianoff-Haidt piece she refers to is here:
There’s a saying common in education circles: Don’t teach students what to think; teach them how to think. The idea goes back at least as far as Socrates. Today, what we call the Socratic method is a way of teaching that fosters critical thinking, in part by encouraging students to question their own unexamined beliefs, as well as the received wisdom of those around them. Such questioning sometimes leads to discomfort, and even to anger, on the way to understanding.
But vindictive protectiveness teaches students to think in a very different way. It prepares them poorly for professional life, which often demands intellectual engagement with people and ideas one might find uncongenial or wrong. The harm may be more immediate, too. A campus culture devoted to policing speech and punishing speakers is likely to engender patterns of thought that are surprisingly similar to those long identified by cognitive behavioral therapists as causes of depression and anxiety. The new protectiveness may be teaching students to think pathologically.
I think we’re seeing a lot of that.
Except that the right not to be offended is not extended to non-Democrats just like freedom of sppech and association.
You are only not allowed to offend Democrats and the of course, can offend you as much as they want. Don’t be so sensitive, they say as the strip you of your culture, ethnicity, and constitutional rights.
If this is as widespread as is being reported, colleges are failing to educate students to live in any other reality than the distorted world of government employment or academia. No one in the real world of private sector employment will long tolerate walking on eggshells to avoid upsetting the perpetually offended. Even if they manage to get hired, they won’t last long in the real world. Perhaps the students and professors know this, which might explain why so many of them look down upon private sector employment. Instead, they dream of working for a non-profit, an NGO, in academia, or for the government where they can sluff off, be sheltered, no little to no work, and inflict their insanity on the rest of us. What they seem not to realize is that without the taxes and charitable contributions from the grubby private sector, none of those other entities can exist.
Also, protecting students and then dumping them into hunting season, no bag limit, is a colossal misuse of society’s resources. Student loans are the tip of the iceberg. A gullible college student or early graduate is exploitable for every trick in the book, including bad jobs, financial scams and bad loans, terrible rental and business agreements, and abusive personal relationships. We aren’t doing them any favors and we’re feeding an ugly ecosystem.
Let them spend some time in a room with Vladimir Putin or Donald Trump.
Reading through the story. I think I have a solution here. People who can be harmed by other peoples’ ideas should be protected from dangerous areas, like universities, by keeping them out. One wouldn’t let a child play in the middle of a busy highway. So why let these children play in the middle of a dangerous university?
Remove them from the university so that they can no longer come to harm. Maybe the safe spaces can be enlarged into a permanent solution for dealing with these poor unfortunates.
Your idea has merit. However, it runs counter to the prevailing forces in today’s society. Instead of keeping universities as the highways of ideas (to play upon your metaphor), they want to first change the colleges (and later the rest of the world) into safe playpens where never is heard a discouraging word and the skies are not cloudy all day. Deer and antelope playing is optional – we’d have to first check with PETA on that.
I think the publicly funded colleges and universities should be REQUIRED to hire professors from both sides if the aisle. They should be REQUIRED to show their curriculum to some type of advisory board or approval board.
If our tax dollars go into supporting and running the Univ of Taxation System, then WE the tax payers should have more input. If the professors and Deans don’t like such a balanced approach, then they can Q-U-I-T!
Private schools, where they get no public funding, can hire Hitler, Mao and Stalin as far as I’m concerned. Then mom and dad can foot the bill for their kid NOT learning anything worthwhile.
Don’t be silly.
Once they get into the outside world, they will DEMAND that the same protection from hurtful ideas and actions be established there. After some very nasty lawsuits, backed by protests, the business world, the information and entertainment world, and everything else will be forced to cave in.
Freedom of speech was nice when it lasted, but it hurt people so.
Unfortunately, many of the SJWs are already in the business world, in HR departments. They are forcing their worldview on the other employees of their companies with the full cooperation of managers, who tend to be PC as well. I know a man who, along with other older men in his company, was told to stop opening doors for women. First offence he’d be sent home for the day; second offence he’d get a week off without pay, third offence he’d be fired. This is official policy, because men opening doors for women is “sexist and insulting patriarchal aggression”. Doesn’t even have to be a complaint by the woman walking through the door. If someone else witnesses the “crime” and complains, the man is punished. The insanity is spreading from the campuses and infecting the real world at an alarming rate.