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”?]
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. Tripod: none. Lighting: Overhead track with LED bulbs from Costco. Then I uploaded two copies to YouTube: