Atlantic Magazine’s September 2015 issue has a couple of articles written by old people about how worthless young people are. “The Coddling of the American Mind” writes about students as interested in “microaggressions” as students in Missoula were in partying:
Last year, at the University of St. Thomas, in Minnesota, an event called Hump Day, which would have allowed people to pet a camel, was abruptly canceled. Students had created a Facebook group where they protested the event for animal cruelty, for being a waste of money, and for being insensitive to people from the Middle East. The inspiration for the camel had almost certainly come from a popular TV commercial in which a camel saunters around an office on a Wednesday, celebrating “hump day”; it was devoid of any reference to Middle Eastern peoples. Nevertheless, the group organizing the event announced on its Facebook page that the event would be canceled because the “program [was] dividing people and would make for an uncomfortable and possibly unsafe environment.”
The article points out that being so thin-skinned that you can’t handle hearing someone talk about something upsetting is an official sign of mental illness (see the “Common Cognitive Disorders” list at the end).
“That’s Not Funny!” is a companion piece by the awesome Caitlin Flanagan (not officially “old” but a different generation than today’s college kids). She goes to a convention where colleges book comedians to come to the campus:
I saw ample evidence of the repressive atmosphere that Rock and Seinfeld described, as well as another, not unrelated factor: the infantilization of the American undergraduate, and this character’s evolving status in the world of higher learning—less a student than a consumer, someone whose whims and affectations (political, sexual, pseudo-intellectual) must be constantly supported and championed. To understand this change, it helps to think of college not as an institution of scholarly pursuit but as the all-inclusive resort that it has in recent years become—and then to think of the undergraduate who drops out or transfers as an early checkout. Keeping hold of that kid for all four years has become a central obsession of the higher-ed-industrial complex. How do you do it? In part, by importing enough jesters and bards to keep him from wandering away to someplace more entertaining, taking his Pell grant and his 529 plan and his student loans with him.
But which jesters, which bards? Ones who can handle the challenge. Because when you put all of these forces together—political correctness, coddling, and the need to keep kids at once amused and unoffended (not to mention the absence of a two-drink minimum and its crowd-lubricating effect)—the black-box theater of an obscure liberal-arts college deep in flyover territory may just be the toughest comedy room in the country.
These articles make for fun reading (especially Flanagan’s) but are they covering representative behavior on campus? If American college kids were spending this much time arguing about microaggression, wouldn’t Fortune 500 companies be expanding a lot faster in Asia and Germany so that they could hire young people who were more work-oriented? (Companies could stay in the U.S. and hire older workers rather than recent college graduates but we are all apparently comfortable with age discrimination by U.S. employers (since the media doesn’t bother to cover it).)
[Separately, when will we find a college that shows a genuine commitment to diversity by encouraging older people, e.g., in their 40s or 60s, to enroll as full-time students? How is a group of (mostly American) 18-22-year-olds “diverse”?]
It’s hard to speak to the employment decisions made by every Fortune 500 company, but HSBC just laid off 50,000 employees from Europe and the Americas as it pivots towards Asia, where the bank plans to add many of those jobs back. Obviously, this move is about more than just finding new hires who aren’t insane, it’s also about reducing exposure to the increasingly grubby-handed and increasingly impoverished western social democracies.
This is happening at the intersection of many trends that reinforce the coddling effect:
–“helicopter parents” who constantly clear obstacles from the path of their child, and hope to prevent any and all failure;
–infantilizing younger kids, such that “free range” parenting is not only a thing, it’s a thing that people often call the police over;
–the “filter bubble” that so often keeps our news feeds filled only with things we already agree with, in the name of better catering to our tastes & desires & money-spending hapbits.
We are in danger of losing the idea that it’s important to be challenged, and to go outside of one’s comfort zone. Sometimes it’s hard to distinguish what’s really important and good for us from what we like or what’s pleasant.
I think people need something to believe in in order to feel complete in their lives. For many that used to be religion, which gives adherents the feeling of accomplishing something greater than what each person can do individually. I wonder if the decrease in religiosity in the US has a correlation to the apparent increase in numbers of so-called social justice warriors? Certainly many people seem to strongly believe in oppression by the -iarchy, institutional -isms of their choice, and that complaining about this state of affairs will change things.
Unlike prestige universities, community colleges do plenty of adult continuing education, often in vocational topics disdained by liberal arts colleges. Even places like Berkeley via its Extension program.
Overpaying for ivy-encrusted sheepskin does not make financial sense for someone over 40, since they won’t have enough time to recoup the investment (I suppose Executive MBA programs are the exception that confirms the rule).
SJW’s form a tiny (but noisy) minority on campus so Amazon has plenty of cannon fodder to chose from out of the remaining young ‘uns. In any case, this is the kind of thing you devote time to while you are young and discard later when you have a real life, just as college students of the ’20s stopped wearing their raccoon coats once they graduated.
Harvard Extension typically has a 60 year range from youngest to oldest (source).
Note that in high tech, the coddling continues well into career years, with many perks creating analogies to college experience, even calling an office a campus.
This is all part of a long term trend delaying the end of adolescence from 19 to 29 and perhaps beyond. Sometimes I wonder if it would not preferable to return to the military draft, like Israel, in order to instill maturity into 18-21 yr old men and women.
David, Israel is just following the Swiss model, to which point I’d recommend John McPhee’s work.
Sort of off topic, but another article you can add to your idea that American healthcare is too complicated:
“MU graduate student employees lose health insurance subsidy”
http://www.columbiatribune.com/news/education/mu-graduate-student-employees-lose-health-insurance-subsidy/article_28a9170a-ac0a-550e-9565-58345d6477bd.html
A discussion that includes some MU students can be found here:
http://chemjobber.blogspot.com/2015/08/missouri-cuts-health-care-subsidies-for.html
“Hi! I’m a chemistry PhD candidate at Mizzou. We were notified about this change by email 13 hours before our coverage ended… on a Friday afternoon.”