Are liberals ever going to catch on to the higher education mess? Well, at least one has, if I’m correct in identifying Froma Harrop columnist as a liberal (if not, sorry, Froma).
Harrop’s column, headlined “Higher Ed Needs Major Disruption,” manages to highlight several different weaknesses of current higher ed. I suspect that future historians will wonder, as she does, that society and government have encouraged people to take on more debt than they have accumulated on their credit cards for, in Harrop’s words, “multimillion-dollar pay packages for college presidents, country-club campus amenities and, increasingly, an expanding army of administrators tasked with micromanaging the drinking habits, sex lives and sensitivities of people who in any other American context would be considered adults.”
That last point is worth underlining. We have the state legislatures of New York and California passing laws requiring affirmative consent to every separate act of sexual embrace by people who are in colleges and universities, but not by people of the same age and same legal status as adults who are not enrolled.
What’s the rationale for excluding them? It’s ridiculous to believe that rape and sexual assault (often defined as including inadvertent pats on a clothed backside) is especially prevalent on campus and not as common in the milieus of relatively downscale non-students of the same age.
Of course, when you think about it a bit, you’ll realize that having such laws applicable to enrolled students provides justification for hiring lots of administrators — facilitators, liaisons, advisers, deanlets — at six-figure salaries with plenty of benefits.
Harrop makes a case for MOOCs as an alternative for those concerned about “the high cost of post-adolescent day care.” If college and university students want the legal status of adults, they should be treated as adults. That means no more demands for “safe spaces,” for “trigger warnings,” for instructions on what costumes are permissible for Halloween. Why do students — or at least some small but noisy proportion of them — want to be treated like children?
