As illiberal as college students can be in restricting free speech, college bureaucrats are all too willing to infantilize them and act like helicopter parents.
The rise of the “Bias Response Team” at more than 100 colleges is bad enough. As Catherine Rampell wrote in The Washington Post, “When in doubt, blame any unsatisfactory encounter on bias, and call in the authorities.”
Some incidents are as serious as racial slurs and swastikas. Many, however, tend to be juvenile pranks, but send students to the nearest administrator’s office to demand restrictions.
Administrators are all too happy to comply.
“Rather than confronting, debating and trying to persuade those whose words or actions offend them, students demand that a paternalistic figure step in and punish offenders … And administrators appear ready and willing to parent,” Rampell wrote.
That might help a college avoid bad press and phone calls from irate parents. Universities, after all, are a business, and they hate it when their glossy promotional materials get contradicted by images of drunken college students burning couches or worse. Acting as parents isn’t only giving students what they demand — it’s practical protocol to keep enrollments up.
What students demand has departed from what could challenge them intellectually. It’s one thing to report Nazi imagery to the university. It’s another to demand the university shut down unpopular opinions.
“Colleges are supposed to be places where young adults develop the critical thinking and social skills to peacefully, productively engage with people with whom they disagree, whose ideas they may even find detestable. But today’s students — and tomorrow’s workers — are discouraged from resolving such conflicts on their own,” Rampell noted.
Turning a college degree into a commodity — one more certification needed to secure a job — can undermine higher education as a rigorous learning environment. Students can’t learn opposing views unless they confront them. The best place for that to occur is somewhere that prioritizes an atmosphere of open discussion. If students demand something lesser, and colleges appease them, their education weakens, as does the realm of political discussion throughout civil society.
If colleges fail students in that way, they fail the future. Students deserve some of the blame for ludicrous demands, but the institutions themselves have enabled such behavior.
