42
votes
"The university campus is rapidly becoming a locus of infantilizing social control that any independent-minded student should seek to escape"
Link information
This data is scraped automatically and may be incorrect.
- Title
- The Coddling of the American Undergraduate
- Word count
- 1442 words
I went to a school that enacted this policy and it is one of the things that ruined me academically that first year. Like many people in the US, school cost way more than I could afford with my piddly savings account from a few summers of working in a factory, so I got a job while going to school.
The first year, I was required to live on campus, and I was required to get the dining hall pass. Living on campus meant that I had to travel to and from work at awkward times, and the food policy meant that I was paying a premium for three meals a day, two of which I rarely had a chance to eat.
I could have (and did, in subsequent years) rented an apartment with a kitchen for a fraction of the cost with some friends, learned to cook, and had a more reasonable time commuting to and from work. Instead, I spent the first year of college sprinting to work, to the dining hall, to class, and to the mandatory dorm meetings. I was absolutely burned out and did alarmingly poorly in my classes.
These policies are either intentionally antagonistic to students without money, or they are the dreams of some rose-tinted-glasses wearing alumni that had their best years at school 40 years ago in a different academic world.
I think the trouble is that it is hard to enact policies that work for everyone. My university also required me to live on campus during my first year and have the dining pass. I was 17 and suddenly living 1000 miles from my home town. The policy definitely benefited me. My brother's university did not have the policy and he ended up living in an off campus apartment by himself for his entire time there and in my opinion that was a mistake. He retreated into himself and it allowed his innate anxiety and introversion to get to an unmanageable place. He never ended up connecting with his campus community or making new friends. For every instance of a policy benefitting someone is there is likely also a counter instance of it harming someone else.
To your point about the policies being antagonistic towards students who are working off campus jobs, I think the entire freshman experience universities aim for is an issue if you do not or can not register as a non-traditional student. The schedules are not set with an expectation of students having outside obligations and many universities restrict parking for 1st year students (as mine did) or all undergraduates in general. Balancing the needs of students who are also working is incredibly challenging and is something that many universities lack.
I think it's not intentionally antagonistic, but rather is a byproduct of a series of bad incentives, and well-meaning but foolish leadership.
The mandatory housing thing is a bit of a mixed bag, and I do see advantages to it, because it did help me break out of my small-town-redneck mentality in a big way. But 100% agreed that many places didn't give enough priority to making it affordable or accommodating. Your food plan was particularly bad, as the colleges I attended starting in 2002 all had a 'flex' plan of some sort which was essentially just food credits that you could spend as you desired, including with off-campus participating restaurants, which made both more affordable, as it was something like $1 = $1.80 in food credits.
I'll expand more in a separate top level later, as I think the article has some good points, but also a lot of problems to address, and this is part of it.
Yeah, those policies can fuck off. I got out of it by going to a community college for my first two years and then transferring to a university for the rest.
The sole reason I was able to make it through college without debt was that I lived with my mother the whole time, in an apartment within bicycling distance of both schools. I would not have taken kindly to being forced to give that up for a living situation that was worse in nearly every way.
Ive been involved with higher education either as a student or employee for most of my adult life. I've got a bit of insight to both the inner and the outer workings. None of my direct experience is with Ivy League, but I think it applies broadly.
A lot of the imitating of Ivy League is a byproduct of US News & World report rankings in particular. Everyone keeps chasing the list for prestige, and over time anything a more prestigious university does is going to be chased by other universities also seeking to boost their prestige. Much like teaching to the test, a lot of bad decisions get made while trying to improve their US News rank. This is not a new thing, the strive to imitate has always been happening.
There's a lot of ranting about affirmative action that I'm not going to waste any further breath on. Organizations that complain loudest about affirmative action are the ones who generally are in the greatest need of it. But my biggest problems of the article can all trace back to one of their sentences:
Maybe not love....but society as a whole has a responsibility to foster a feeling of safety for everyone.... and a university is not exempt from that. If anything, they should be setting the example.
As such, I think the author is overly dismissive of almost all of the safety issues. Some colleges are in high-crime areas, and provide supplementary police forces to aid the local police. Pitching campus safety is a really big deal when there are concerns about gunshots going off less than a mile away.
Sexual assault is one of the biggest problems facing Americans. This is not a "new" thing, it has been a core theme of improvement on campuses for decades. Much of what they complain as "paternalistic" is really just the continuing attempts to make any headway against this problem. The so-called "Sex Manual" they linked is mostly just a list of examples of non-consensual sex and how the university will respond when reported. It's really basic consent concepts, and most people complaining about it complain that it extends above and beyond criminal definitions of rape...which is a really weird take. I'd consider it a pretty good thing to let universities kick problematic people out before they're required to turn them in to the police.
While sexual relationships between faculty and students are generally prohibited (for good reason), I've never heard of a policy banning relationships between grad students and undergrads. The Agnes Callard story that was linked was obviously not read very well...halfway through she states that what happened with her is a good thing because it was a situation where abuse of power could happen and it didn't because people followed the rules. This is not coddling, this is insuring professors don't get to dangle grades for sexual favors.
They also misrepresent the "formalizing of mentorship." Just because tools have been provided to help students seek what they otherwise might not have does not mean that the old ways are not able to be utilized. I for one would have loved a more formal mentor program to have been available when I was a student, because I have crippling social anxiety and that would have helped me get over that barrier. And the thing is...these programs are working. We see students getting better grades and better graduation rates since these sorts of programs were implemented.
Is it really coddling or censorship when Yale sends out the annual "Please don't do blackface for a Halloween costume?" No, it's Yale trying to avoid embarrassment since it's been a somewhat recurring problem, the earliest I recall being around 2007. I didn't read the email, but I'm pretty sure it said "Please be mindful of others," not "you'll be expelled if we catch you wearing blackface."
Anyhow, there are definitely problems with universities, but trying to foster a safe campus is not one of them, and as such a lot of this article comes off more like a boss complaining about not being able to grab their secretary's ass anymore than somebody concerned that students will be ill-prepared for "the real world."
Unless things have significantly changed, the guiding principle of policy around relationships is generally don't sleep with your students. So graduate students should not be allowed to have sexual relationships with undergraduates in classes where they are teaching or a TA. It's reasonable to expect this to apply to undergraduates acting as TAs as well. In both cases there are complexities around preexisting relationships, especially in cases where a particular required course might only have one section, but the general idea is to prevent the same sorts of problems of abuse around classes and power.
It may be the author is treating policies aimed at those circumstances as being generally applicable.
Thanks for this comment. There's a lot to be said about the problems with higher education these days but this article clearly starts from the assumption that college students are too coddled and works backward from there. To be clear they are, just not (mostly) in the ways described in this article.
I won't disagree, but I wonder how much is "coddling" vs "accommodating." And how much is the university's fault vs the broader "helicopter parenting" leaking forward into adulthood. I can promise you the University has no love of Helicopter Mom....they create a lot of work nobody wants to do.
A whole lot of the world suffers from depression and ADHD. Wouldn't it be nice if we collectively worked towards a world where we accommodated them instead of the more common "sorry you missed the deadline because you couldn't muster more than staring listlessly at the ceiling, fuck you go file for unemployment." An accommodating economy is a flexible economy, and is one that is much less likely to burn people out.
Well for coddling I was thinking more along the lines of conflict avoidance and refusal to engage with difficult subject matter, something that is a real problem with young people that corporate social media's puritanism has made worse. But otherwise I totally agree with you, I think that being a little accommodating would go a long way. Surely some people are just going to take advantage of such a system and we can deal with the assholes but nobody wants to miss deadlines. If it's happening consistently there must be a deeper problem.
I'm one of those annoying people who advocates for kids to stop immediately going to college after they graduate high school. I think you should try to have a solid idea of what you want to do as a career first, and then decide if college is even necessary for that career path. I see far too many young people put themselves in astronomical amounts of debt because they've been told all their life that they have to go to college or they won't get a job.
Until college becomes affordable again, stop going into major debt at age 18 :)
An interesting article you might enjoy. Gift link: Americans Are Losing Faith in the Value of College. Whose Fault Is That?.
The following except give the gist, but I highly recommend reading the whole thing and reviewing the plots.
And if you borrowed money but never graduated, you are especially disadvantaged in wealth accumulation.
So I wouldn't say that no 18 year old should go straight to college. But you should go into a four year program with a good understanding of what you want out of it.
Community colleges are a great starting point to get a two year degree, and you can transfer to a four year if desired.
I will say that I think everyone can benefit from a traditional education in that it exposes you to many concepts that you might develop an interest or appreciation in, often later in life. And it can help you learn to reject life on the default, avoid autopiloting through life, and be skeptical. But we need to better share those costs across society, because it is society which benefits from a well educated populace, not just the individual.
I learned to enjoy the arts and humanities and classic literature later in life thanks in part to my education. While I am personally enriched, my life has also taken me to be involved in public policy, and society benefits from me having a wide view of things and an open mind. Society also paid for more of the costs of my education than it does for students who attend the same universities today, yet many of those students will go on to benefit society as much or more than me.
I think this is the best option for 90% of highschool grads. Most do not have the discipline or required background to really begin studying in their area of interest. Hell, most don't even have an area of interest at the end of highschool. If you play right (exploring electives while knocking out gen eds, selectively using Pell grants [in the US] and sometimes paying out of pocket for your exploratory electives) then you can transfer in 1.5-3 years to a university with all your basic/general coursework done, having a very good idea of what field you want to work within, focus almost entirely on the upper level coursework for your major, AND still have sufficient government grants left over to cover tuition at a state school (assuming you transfer to a university in a state where you have residency).
I worked construction/landscaping/food service jobs for four years after dropping out of high school, then once I had a little more maturity and a real desire to learn something I got my GED, went back to community College, and explored my area of interest while doing Gen eds. I changed my major at CC from a humanity to mathematics when I discovered I actually had some talent there and the rest was easy... Or as easy as it can be.
I've taught at universities and see students with the problems being discussed here. They take out loans and grind themselves to dust with stress trying to rush through the degree their parents/advisor/whomever wants for them. Then they quit and deal with the less fun side of student loans, getting a net negative experience.
Now I teach at a community college in the town near my alma matter, and I'm constantly advising students to slow down, explore other areas, and find their talents/interests here before transferring to uni. It works out better nearly all the time.
My partner changed from physics to nursing to aircraft maintenance and repair. If she'd rushed the transfer, then right now she would hate her life, have endless loans, terrible grades, and (if lucky) be on her way to a third or fourth tier grad program in an area she dislikes, assuming she survived undergrad. The downside is that we don't have any income from her yet, but at least this way we're minimizing debt and finding her a job she loves.
Basically you have to know how the system works to play the game well, and very few 17-18 year olds know anything about the working world or their own preferences in that world.
I'm rambling, but really just wanted to offer some evidence in support of the two year college -> uni transfer model. It made my career and totally reshaped how I thought about education. Trade schools are a big part of this too, and I hope to see more integration with vocational training and community colleges as time goes on.
I think every person should work at least a year or two in a customer service or blue collar role before going off to university. Gives people a good taste of the real world and some appreciation for the people who keep everything running too. I know many a college graduate from wealthy families who never had to go through any (financial) struggles in life and it shows.
I don't think that is incompatible with going straight to community college. Indeed, I attended community college for a year or so many years ago, and everyone worked part time or more. Many students were older, but even the folks fresh from highschool had part time jobs. Of course, this was back when I could get a coffee and a bagel for the cafe for $0.75 so maybe things have changed.
I wasn't intending the comment to be a disagreement, just an addition. I also went to community college for a few years, and worked a part time job to help support myself through it.
No worries, and I agree! Have a great day!
I'll join that refrain. One of the best things I did for my personality was working for a temp agency while attending college.
I'll never look at Animal Crackers the same way again. Minimum wage to stand on a 90F factory floor taping pallets together for 8 hours (Two 10 minute breaks and one 30), while there's a ton of 65+ old ladies doing quality control just before the boxing a few feet away, also getting paid barely more than minimum wage.
It was the only job I refused to accept again.
I think it's great to share experiences like this; it helps folks examine their options. Have a great day!
I want to add that there are states that are offering 4 year degrees through community colleges now as well.
I got my Associate's at a community college and now many years later I'm getting my Bachelor's at a different one. I was contemplating going to a university for my bachelor's prior to my state & cc district offering the degree, and hardly any of my courses would have transferred- I'd be spending over 3 years on it. With the community college, I was able to transfer almost everything and should complete the program with under 2 years of enrollment. (I am doing this at a bit of an accelerated rate, including summer and winter courses, but it's still much less work than it would have been with the university.)
That's awesome! Another challenge with transferring to universities is that they often have a minimum number of credits you need to take from them, regardless of what transfers.
Some states have done a good job requiring the community college system and the university system to harmonize their courses to maximize the transferability of credits, but most states haven't.
Have a great day!
I'm with you, and my job is somewhat reliant on continuing high college populations. It's not worth 100's of thousands of undischargeable debt.
I think it will help tremendously if we eliminate or at least drastically reduce the wage gap between blue collar and white collar jobs. That's half the reason that the giant 'push' happened.
The electrician should be making as much money as an engineer....more even if said electrician is doing dangerous stuff like repairing high voltage lines.
The EMT should be paid in line with doctor. In many ways, the EMT is more important to society than the doctor, but the EMTs get paid a pittance by comparison.
And fundamentally I do think everyone would benefit from a proper college education. There's almost no downsides to having a more-educated populous, regardless of their career. But we need to make it free, at least to a point.
The commie in me says that when somebody is going to school for job skills, they should be paid to do so, so they can focus on their studies.
The difference is in schooling time and costs for those things though.
Both engineering degrees and medical school are grueling, long programs. They fundementally have to be. They're doing things on the edges of human knowledge. In many cases they're working with theories and processes that scientists just developed a few years prior, which require a ton of background knowledge to understand. Because of that, they need to spend a ton of time in school. Even if the government paid for that, what real incentive would you have to sit in school and residency for 8 years as a doctor if you made the same as an EMT that went to a 4 month course?
The only people you'd get signing up for that are people that are both independently wealthy and extremely passionate about medicine, which there are very few of.
As hard as they work, an EMT, a paramedic, a nurse, or even a NP can't replace a doctor. They can do 90% of what a doctor does, but in certain cases, you really really need someone who has had the training a doctor has, and without an incentive for people to actually do that training, there no way you'd be able to fill the demand for those positions.
Because sometimes, people just want to help people. My sister didn't spend another 4 years in school to become a childhood therapist for the paychecks, she ended up taking a pay cut....she did it because she wants to help break abuse cycles more than push paperwork.
Howso? Especially since my statement is conditional on education being either completely free or negative-cost. If anything, having EMT being a stepping stone into doctor could probably resolve a lot of those residency problems.
I personally would like to remove everyone whom is only becoming a doctor for the paycheck from the occupation. They're the ones least likely to be doing a genuinely good job. And much like teachers and teaching, I've only met a small handful of doctors that were not genuinely interested in medicine. I truly believe if EMTs and doctors got paid within 10% of each other, there would still be a lot of upward mobility to doctors, if only because a doctor doesn't spend as much time scraping people off pavement at 2AM.
One of my strong beliefs is that only sociopaths do things purely because of the dollar amounts on a paycheck. Otherwise people are doing what they do either because they feel trapped and unable to do anything else or that they genuinely feel some level of satisfaction from doing what they do. The former being a problem for society to solve and the latter being something that should be encouraged and rewarded.
And one last thought to bear in mind: I'm not saying doctors should explicitly be paid less (though fixing tax brackets would definitely impact them somewhat). I'm saying EMTs should be getting paid a lot more. If a doctor is making $300k annually, an EMT should be making at least $200k. Right now they're making more like $40k.
The reason for the US's doctor shortage isn't rooted in salary but rather the limited number of residency slots, which artificially depresses the supply of doctors.
Increasing doctor pay won't increase the number of doctors -- in fact, we're seeing something like the opposite. Clinics are replacing general practitioners with less expensive nurse practitioners.
This is fair, and I didn't know that, so thank you for enlightening me.
In a broader sense, in a market economy I do still think there's justification in maintaining higher pay for positions that fewer people can do, and which require a much higher upfront investment (in the case of doctors the cost and long hours of education and residency), both from a moral standpoint and especially from a practical standpoint.
However, I don't know enough about how well doctors and EMTs and NPs are paid, the current market demand for all of those positions, the current cost of medical school and about a thousand other factors to even attempt to have an informed opinion about whether those salaries are currently where they should be, and if they should change, in which direction and by how much though.
This is a whole other topic that could be spun off into, but many GPs/PCPs are moving towards some concierge medicine for various reasons. Many individuals think that doctors in those fields are not as bright as other graduates seeking specialties with higher pay, but often, this isn't true, and many actually want to help patients. Usually, insurance and hospital systems prevent them from fully doing that due to their own profit mechanisms.
The problem is that insurance only pays out per patient, so you get your 15-minute rushed appointment that your provider cycles through to the next person on the list. Compare that to a concierge-like service with all sorts of levels, from a flat monthly membership of $100-300 up to 6-figure individual private treatment.
Not only do providers get paid better, but they can also spend more time, say an hour, per patient working through to give quality care by controlling their numbers. The flip side is that it raises the barrier of entry to cost even MORE than our current expensive broken healthcare system where many people can't even afford the 'baseline' treatment. Another reason EDs are so crowded all the time...
I’m deeply skeptical that the undergrad premed STEM grind meaningfully contributes to better patient outcomes. Theoretically, you’re correct that the knowledge is necessary for physicians to understand new research and improve their practice. In practice, that duty falls to a small number of elite physicians on the state board of best practices and all that cell biology was for nothing. It’s like we train them to start a PharmD program, then shunt them off to earn their MD or a surgical residency.
Don't assume that the way the US does it is the way it has to be. In the US, medical students need to get a four year degree (pre-med) and then apply to medical school. In the UK, medical school doesn't require an undergraduate degree. It does take five years, though, and getting in isn't easy.
Based on this article: Studying Medicine In The US Vs The UK
I'm very lost when it comes to the topic of how to best train doctors. On one hand, having them know a wide range of topics seems to be important, but even here in the US where it's an 8 year thing, most doctors don't tend to know a lot about nutrition, which is the one thing that will have the greatest impact on a person's health. Maybe instead we should make it easier for people to get an appointment with a specialist so they have a great deal of knowledge in a specific subfield?
When I was in school, this was a huge conflict in goals between students and professors. This was a campus near a base, so there were a lot of non traditional students who wanted to make sure they could secure work after their enlistment finished. A large number of the students were there to prep for a career; many came from underserved communities and grew up poor. The professors declared over and over that their goal was to prepare students for research and further degrees, not for work. They actually seemed to look down on the very idea of work training.
It's possible I had this experience because I was a computer science student, but I think it's probably pervasive.
There is definitely conflict there. Universities often really want to foster innovation and forward-thinking. They don't want to be a rubber-stamp for occupational training.
They accept it because that's what society has deemed they need to be somewhat. But people whom are passionate about teaching, learning, and discovery are going to be very irritated with the "but I just need job skills" mentality.
I get the frustration as well. College may teach you skills that help you in a career, but it's definitely not vocational training. Part of the point of college is to teach you a variety of topics so you can leave as a well-rounded person instead of an employee.
The water has gotten muddied since so many jobs expect bachelor's degrees for positions that could be done by someone with a GED, but college is supposed to create critical thinkers, not just people who can follow instructions.
I’ve worked jobs like that. As a contractual obligation to our clients, HR was strict that we only hire graduates of accredited schools. The supposed critical and logical thinking skills were not manifested compared to the general population. Even if they were, independent thought was not desired (at least among the front-line staff).
I think the requirement of a bachelor's degree in jobs that shouldn't require them leads to students who go to college out of obligation instead of a desire to learn. As they say, "Cs get degrees" and it's possible to graduate college even if you have the same high school mindset of doing the bare minimum to pass the class.
College teaches critical thinking skills, but the students have to put some effort in if they want to get those. Some jobs also actively discourage independent thinking which I think can undo critical thinking skills.
C’s get degrees, though picking the wrong field to graduate with a 2.3 means you’d be better off never attending in the first place, since you’d need graduate education to earn a job in the same field. Too many of my classmates got their degrees, but lacked the required secondary skills to translate their education into meaningfully increased employment opportunities.
I feel like this advice only applies to the almost uniquely stupid college system in America. In most functioning first world countries, post-secondary education is much more affordable.
https://www.businessinsider.com/cost-of-college-countries-around-the-world-2018-6
Yes, the advice about not going into crippling debt to go to college only applies to countries where you have to go into crippling debt to go to college.
Perhaps your opening sentence could be edited for clarity? I’m certainly not suggesting it’s necessary, just throwing ideas around…
I’m definitely an outlier but I knew what I wanted to do at 8 years old (programming) and followed through on it. Although I do think if I got the right job the formal education would have been unnecessary.
I agree with this, at least in the case where you don't have a solid idea of what you want to do as a career first. I consider myself fortunate because I had a pretty good idea of what I wanted to do and ended up with a great career in that field, but my niece and nephew who are currently in college went in not being so sure. My nephew ended up switching majors, and still likely won't be working in his chosen degree (architecture). My niece chose Psychology just for lack of other interests, and also likely won't be working in that field when she graduates next year. Thankfully, both of them went to affordable state schools, have decent jobs, and therefore won't be saddled with tons of debt. But that's not the case for many.
Once you figure it out, you might even find out that a degree isn't even necessary. I actually think that my nephew would've been better off with a trade than trying to pursue a 4-year college degree (he'll likely wind up down that path anyway), but his mom really wanted him to go to college for whatever reason.
I'm sorry I don't think I understand your comment.
You said you didn't have to go into debt for your first college education because your parents paid for it, that option is not available for the vast majority of people.
I think it's crazy that the author has problems with universities' COVID policies and lauds the efforts of Fraternities to fight for their right to paarty.
I have a little bit of sympathy for the concerns about strict social controls over more nebulous, and sometimes abused, issues but the overall picture painted here is leaning into objectivism.
Yes, Universities are a bit authoritarian. They mass together a huge number of kittens (young adults) and try to create an environment that tries to benefit as close to all of them as possible with the funds allowed. If we hypothesized the ultimate university learning experience for a single student with all the facilities, resources, tuition, support, nutrition, social life, etc tailored to their needs and rhythms: Then scaled that up to facilitate every student in a large university the costs would be astronomical. I imagine the GDP of a medium sized European country. So instead of a one-on-one tutorship, 40 -70 or more students are timetabled into a lecture theater. Instead of getting handed every library resource you require to keep for the rest of your life you are loaned for a short period a copy, if available, if in the library's holdings. Etc etc.. For universities to work within their budgetary constraints and strive towards the ideal situation for all requires students to bear a certain amount of collective responsibility. To turn up to lectures on time. To not disturb others in class. To return books to the library in time. To treat other students with respect. To treat staff with respect. To maintain shared resources such as labs and workshops. Etc etc..
This however creates a problem for the Right. Students that can appreciate collective responsibility and the benefits of a collective society have a much greater chance of respecting: civil rights and gender equality; that people that have suffered intergenerational injustice need a more proscribed environment so that they can have something approaching an equal opportunity of outcome; the benefits of unionizing; global inequalities and injustices. etc etc.. The right doesn't like this potential. They'd rather students were taught to be objectionists to a degree or inculcated into the prevalent inverted totalitarianism. Insulated in their own meritocracy. Appreciative of the righteousness of a hierarchy that they have good prospects in. And that the weak fall to the gutter (rather than have a letter written for them by their house dean - which could be catalyzed by any number of unfortunate private circumstances).
Ultimately, they really undermined all of the subtleties of their efforts by tying their attack on the natural collective sensibility, engendered by the administration of a University within budget, in with resistance to lockdowns. Universities are potentially one of the worst places to be in a pandemic, for various well documented reasons, so a tight lockdown is imperative to prevent them from becoming a wellspring of infection for the cities they reside in. That lockdowns became such a political football, is to my mind, emblematic of a deeply cynical partisanship. I would even go so far as to say, because of the lives lost to these crude political calculations, that its denunciation should have been treated as a criminal act.
Here's the other thing the author misses: Universities almost universally hated COVID lockdowns and tried to ditch them as soon as possible to keep that on-campus learning alive. A bunch of colleges all tried to re-open in person in the Fall 2020. Guess what happened? They often had to shutdown within days or weeks as large outbreaks immediately began and issue refunds to people or face a lot of bad PR.
Enrollment numbers have (rightfully) dropped in the wake, as people wised up to the fact that when remote learning, cost matters a lot more than prestige.
I work in a UK University so my experience was slightly different. Inasmuch that the government was more ideologically against lockdown than even the university executives so it's hard to say at what point they would have pushed for reopening on their own. Though when the government decreed we open we didn't see much by way of full-blooded resistance from the executives.
I don't know that I follow the full breadth of your argument, but I think you are saying that the lockdowns were being forced on the universities as a partisan issue by the right?
I don't think I would agree with that, if that is what you intended to convey. Many republican controlled state governments kept public institutions open, while democrat controlled states tended to keep them closed longer.
I do also feel that parts of your comment are reductionist in implying that right-leaning students dislike agreeing to school and social rules and norms. As someone who has worked in education for a long time, I've seen little correlation to a desire to disrupt class or campus life based on political or social leaning.
I hope to help all my students, whether I agree with their politics or not, to develop critical thinking, empathy, and skepticism in examining new information before accepting it as true. If I'm successful in that, then their personal politics in the moment shouldn't matter as they will have their whole lives to evolve them. However, if I discard their questions or act dismissive, they will likely become entrenched, just as I would've be behaving towards them, a supposed role model.
And you've identified the real problem the right has with education. Empathetic thinkers do not bode well for authoritarian dogmatic belief structures.
All of the other bad words the right has for education is mostly just trying to avoid stating that what you do is exactly what they don't want you to do.
I think another way to say this is that higher ed should (in my opinion) be about helping people develop their own morals, thoughts, opinions, and beliefs, rather than relying on an outside authority.
Looking at the right and the changes to the GOP, many people have expressed confusion to me about how all of the old venerated figures, from General Mattis to Senator McCain came to be discarded by the base. But to me the answer was simple. The GOP base has for years had overlap and correlation with demographics that source their beliefs from external authorities. All the base did was update their source of morals to Trump.
To be clear, I see the same behavior from groups on the left, enforcing social shibboleths to purity test group affiliation on social issues.
I suppose what I wanted to point out is that we should aim to do better, and help people be individuals who can inspect and accept or reject an external claim. And I don't see a difference in my day to day campus life between students, not external political parties but individual students sitting in front of me, in their willingness to learn and reflect based solely on political leaning. I see many across the spectrum listen and engage. I also see some minority across the spectrum refuse to listen to anything they don't already agree with.
So I don't think it's fair to characterize any broad group of students as being unwelcome or a problem to campus life and norms.
Well said. And to be clear, I don't think broad groups of students are unwelcome or problematic at most campuses, at the actual institutional level of administration/faculty....at least not the way its often pitched in hit pieces and lawsuits.
There's nothing wrong with many values and policies traditionally seen as "conservative values," it's just that these often need to be reconciled against what I'll deem "failings of tradition." Academic settings tend to foster that reconciliation and breeds a lot of liberalism out of it....which is why a lot of the religious right that took over the Republican party has a lot of problems with academia.
I very much agree; thank you for the great discussion!
Eh.. Not at all. I was saying that vocal resistance to lockdowns was a partisan issue on some obtuse libertarian angle. The lockdowns themselves were the best advice at the time by epidemiologists given a relatively unstudied virus in full pandemic.
And the other point I was saying that the 'authoritarian' solutions to providing education can lead to understanding collective responsibility. I'm not presenting some kind of dichotomy where the left are behaved and the right are not. For one students, like most adults, aren't crystalline politically resolved entities that act wholely in consideration of their political outlook. And secondly, any number of different view points can end up at the same conclusion of being respectful in class.
My contention is that some on the right dislike the potential for empathic critical thinking so are often attacking higher education for its 'wokery' and that this article is a nuanced example of such.
Much appreciated, thank you for the clarification! Have a great day!
Oh you too. Best of luck.
Like a few of the other commenters here, I also work in Higher Ed and have done so for the past 22 years (not in direct student interfacing positions, to be fair).
I think this author took their angle and then wrote the piece to satisfy that. Everything is framed as "university administration" does X or imposes Y. They make it seem like all of this is just university administrators making up rules to "indoctrinate" a "liberal agenda" into schools. Maybe I'm extra sensitive to this, but again I see an aggrieved conservative that is upset their worldview is falling behind popular opinion. The parts about dating and sex and consent really stand out to me in that regard.
What is fully ignored and/or lost in the argument the author is making is that college is a big business, and most universities implement policies due to market forces. Students (or maybe even more so, their parents) are the ones pushing for these types of changes.
The university I work at is in an urban area. When I first attended here in the late 90s, the off campus areas were more rundown and more dangerous than they are today. The university has worked with the city and locals to "improve" the off campus area by knocking down old buildings, renovating buildings, and generally "cleaning up the place." ALL of that was spurred by angry parents and students, probably rightfully so. Students should not have to walk home in fear every night just so they can "feel what the real world is like." I think someone else said it in another comment, but everyone deserves to feel safe and as a society that's about the least we can do.
I do feel that children today are less resilient than I was in a similar time in my life, but that's just me applying my perspective backwards to kids today. I may be wholly wrong about it! But to say that college and university administrators are making a bunch of weak-minded individuals is far from the truth, IMO. I think it has a lot more to do with a large number of factors beyond any one institution's, person's, or political agenda's control.
I’d also like to highlight this as a cause for inflated college costs. Outside of the Ivies and the Ivy Techs, there’s a vast middle ground where prospective undergrads simply aren’t qualified to attempt to rank them by academic outcomes. Give the future students an idea that major&career distribution probably have more influence over postgraduate salaries than alumni network or reputation, and they’re now shopping by comparing whether they want better frats and a big pool in the gym, or departmental keggers with the grad students and a climbing wall (with a small pool).
[Also, I think I grew up in the same town as the university you described, but it’s equally likely that it’s not a unique situation]
Absolutely. Those amenities cost money, and most universities get their main funding from tuition so future students pay the price, literally. The big universities are diversifying their income streams in sometimes smart (funded research - either from government or private businesses) and sometimes not-so-smart (privatizing or leasing assets) ways. Others, like WVU, are slashing programs to cut costs.
I think another area that isn't really looked at as far as I know is the increased costs that regulations add to a university budget. Meeting federal information security requirements to get research projects is costly. Providing the support staff to deal with NIL deals and NCAA compliance cost money. Generally running a world class educational institution is going to be more expensive now than it ever has been. So you have ballooning non-instructional staff costs, which also feeds into a salary arms race to attract the right people to the right jobs (even laying aside the extremely high paying coaching salaries that many top tier schools offer).
All of these things, in conjunction with a general trend in reducing the ways kids can get loans just continues to pile up the costs and then lessens the return on investment for many students.
Quite possible. I try not to out myself too much on public forums, but it's the capital city of the state and has one of the largest universities in the country. Our sports fans are pretty universally reviled. Shouldn't be too hard to figure it out from there. ;) (It's not Texas lol)
In their writing, I think the author has mingled many different forces, which may come together at some universities, but I don't think is universal.
I've worked in higher ed for decades, and much of that time has been at R1 land grant universities with at least one residential campus. I've generally seen students have a positive experience in their first year in the dorms, while simultaneously enjoying their escape to nearby apartments. Often, friendships formed inside the dorms turned into roommates. I've seen some universities build up dorm housing as a solution to the housing crunch in the surrounding city, while others push it more from a campus life perspective.
I'm not personally a fan of trying to mandate where young adults live, but there are some good reasons for encouraging the housing. As a volunteer advisor for student organizations, I often helped students facilitate events, and have fond memories of seeing the students pull off some big effort, and then raucously head over to the cafeteria for late night milkshakes and hamburgers. Or pull all nighters at the library with stops to the adjacent cafes. Many of these opportunities were aided by the dense on campus housing facilitating proximity.
However, I never saw signs of the paternalism that the author describes in the housing. There were no curfews, or residential faculty writing excuses, etc. Housing was, well, housing. It didn't change how you interacted with the rest of the campus. There were floors or buildings separated by sex, but there were plenty of coed common spaces, which facilitated game and movie nights, study groups, and other activities that are unlikely to have occurred as often at scale without communal living arrangements. These things help many students, especially international students, participate in social activities. I'm sure the things that the author describes do happen, but I would address that as a separate issue that can happen to intersect housing, but isn't unique to it.
I do agree with the general gist of the authors point, in that we aren't preparing students to meet the world as it is by trying to make campuses a bubble. We should make campuses an environment to develop intellectually and emotionally, and allow for failure and growth. But we shouldn't coddle, because the world won't coddle when they leave.
I think the book they mention, the coddling of the American mind, does a better job of breaking up the distinct forces at play and discussing them. Though I would criticize the book in that it spends much of the time discussing extreme examples of where things have gone wrong.
I have seen forces at work pushing to do things I would consider coddling, and disagreement, and reactionary behavior on both sides. And I can see where at some universities it bleeds into housing.
But I really think the author here would have been better served to address the push for on campus living, and for coddling separately, and then discussed their intersection.
I agree that there is too much coddling in colleges today. My brother is a professor and is continually frustrated at the level of coddling that he's pushed to give students by administration, especially post-COVID. College should be a stepping stone between high school (super-level coddling) and the real world (little to no coddling). He's been told to relax deadlines and such, which is just not something that you get in the real world. Part of a college experience should be teaching you the level personal responsibility required to thrive in the real world. High school and parents just aren't doing that today.
I do think there's a benefit to students living on campus for the first year. Going from living with your parents who feed and clothe you to being completely on your own where you have to figure out how to cook and pay your own bills, on top of the work involved in obtaining a college degree can be an absolute shock to an 18 year old. College housing can be a nice transition between living with your parents and being 100% on your own if it's executed right. The most unfortunate part is the high cost.
I lived on campus my freshman year, and am glad for it. It certainly eased the transition and prepared me for living off-campus with no meal plan beyond that. I also made most of my initial friends group from my dorm. But it needs to be done with an end-goal in mind, and not wrapping students in bubble wrap with curfews and such.
I’d slightly push back on this one. While court dates, weddings, and bill payments are about as hard as deadlines get, many (impossible to judge if most or not) other adult deadlines are far more flexible than the contractual language appears. That or missed deadlines are only a bolded problem for your boss’ boss if you’re not self employed. $300 late booking fee? How about putting the $5700 you budgeted for vacation toward a retirement account instead? Suddenly, that fee goes away and they’re begging to offer you a 10% discount on your travel. It doesn’t always work, but it’s well worth the time to try.
Now that I’ve typed that example, there’s definitely class elements in how lenient adult deadlines are. Working class deadlines are mostly as immovable as teachers threaten; sales reps chasing the wealthy will bend all their internal rules to chase the big commission.
It might be more accurate to say that adult deadlines often require credible reasons to delay, if possible. If you are three months away from a work deadline and an external curve ball comes up, and you tell your boss right away, that's usually going to be fine. If you just miss the deadline and can't explain why other than the work took longer, and you didn't proactively notify in advance, etc, that will be a problem.
Same for the courts. If you have a good reason, most courts will grant extensions to appearances. But you have to tell them as soon as you are aware of the conflict.
In theory, college can help guide students to developing those skills. Did you wake up vomiting the day of the test? Emailing your teacher right away, vs waiting until you get the zero will have a big difference in how it is handled.
I do think many professors handle these situations poorly. In a class of 120, you should just expect ~5 will need makeup exams because life, and have a planned process to deal with it. E.g., take an alternate version of the test one week later. But many faculty get worked up because they just don't have a plan and process in place. Likewise, it would be reasonable to set standards in the syllabus that you notify the instructor as soon as you learn of the conflict, or you forfeit your right to a makeup, etc.
Anyway, I'm rambling now. Have a great night!
If I recall correctly, you can even file an extension with the IRS without penalty, so long as the request is filed before Tax Day.
/r/professors and /r/teachers are my go-to subreddits for read-only doomscrolling, and you are 💯 spot-on with this observation. Of the top posts currently there for the day is a new professor wondering how to handle a student requesting an extension for an assignment due 3 days from now due to a bad breakup. Comments are split between reasonable extension givers and petulant rule enforcers.
Far more than bad news, do not surprise a competent manager. Sadly, people get trained into coverups and clumping all problems due to bosses that enforce consequences for telling the truth (that it ain't happening).
Again, I'd also put some class distinction here. The more frontline an employee, the more objective facts a vindictive boss can point to for assigning blame. Even if the directly responsible employee can prove there was nothing to do, there's almost certainly someone else who is provably the holdup. OTOH, if I blow by a deadline and cost the company $200k in penalty fees [or, more likely, pay $2mil in OT to make the deadline], both my boss and I can point to unexpectedly high attrition and suggest that perhaps payroll could be more generous but otherwise shrug—staff was already at 100% utilization, so where was this manpower supposed to come from?
Yeah, the work one requires a lot of local context, but I think you summarize it well. Don't surprise a competent manager.
With the IRS you can get a no cost extension, and split what you owe into monthly payments without a free as long as it will pay what is owed within 6 months. Which is helpful if you are getting a state refund but owe on your federal.
Have a great night!
This is the key right there. Nobody is required to give you leniency when you don't pay your bills or meet your other obligations on time. Your employer is not required to keep you around when you miss deadlines. Yeah, sometimes it happens. But very often, being late costs you one way or another.
I was expecting this to be another article about parents who have everything for their children.
What it reminded me of is how adults who have never managed their own finances suddenly get dumped into the world of leases, utility bills, and credit cards. With no prep, they end up having to reinvent money management for themselves - or sometimes they ignore it and hope it'll work itself out.