After a couple of years of being ridiculed for demanding “safe spaces” from speakers whose ideas “trigger” them, today’s college students might be expected to stop leaving themselves open to ridicule. But no.
Courtesy of The College Fix comes yet another story of epic campus mollycoddling across the country. Apparently, there’s a nationwide epidemic of students finding final exams so stressful that they need sugar-plum fairies to get them through.
Students’ perceived need to “de-stress” is so acute that some need coloring books, others want to pet miniature horses, others want Legos, and a few were into sessions of “cloud gazing.” Many of these exercises in ultra-de-stressification were officially sponsored or encouraged not just by friendly volunteer outfits but by the metastasizingly large administrative staffs of the colleges themselves.
About the best that can be said about this story is that at least it doesn’t mention Brown University’s earlier resort to Play-Doh and blankies. Do these administrators understand the harm they do by infantilizing their students? Do the students know how pathetic it demand they be infantilized?
Sure, exams can be stressful. And if, as a way to break the tension, a student wants to dig out his old coloring books for a few minutes and laugh, well, more power to him. But do students really need others to organize them into pre-school-like situations, pat them on the heads, and tell them everything is really really truly going to be hunky dory?
When my age cohort was in college, we didn’t have professors who forced us to do Indian fire walks or wear hair shirts to the exams. But we also didn’t ask the Student Affairs Office to show us videos of cute widdle puppies, either. About the farthest we went in self-indulgence during exams would be to go a week without shaving, or maybe pretend we liked it when a roommate thought it was stress-relieving to play Warren Zevon’s “Lawyers, Guns and Money” 50 times in a row at high decibels.
Sure, if some fellow student group wanted to give us free cookies and coffee, or maybe a free cup of draft beer, we’d love it. But we didn’t need or expect somebody to coddle us silly.
College students should come to understand that in the larger scheme of life, exams are at worst only mildly stressful. The real world won’t provide break rooms with silly putty for you to play with. Your bosses on Wall Street or even in your idealistic non-profit of choice won’t give you time and materials to make origami. And you’ll need to discover soon enough that it’s possible to perform under pressure without needing a yoga break.
So grow up, toughen up, and ditch the goat yoga.
Sorry if that sounds a bit snide, but my gosh, I find this sort of foolish pampering to be really triggering.
