An over-protection of millennials minds has led to a pervasive fear on college campuses – students fear being offended and professors fear offending them.
Academic leaders at the nation’s universities view their students as “customers” whom they are unwilling to offend, writes Jonathan Cole for The Atlantic. Presidents, provosts, and professors often feel pressure to be “politically correct” and preserve “safe spaces” in order to ensure job security and the campus reputation.
Robert Hutchins, the president of the University of Chicago during the McCarthy period, experienced the same tension, stating, “The question is not how many professors have been fired for their beliefs, but how many think they might be.”
While a physically safe environment is essential to learning on college campuses, an intellectually “safe” one may not be quite as necessary.
“Education should not be intended to make people comfortable, it is made to make them think,” former University of Chicago President Hanna Holborn Gray wrote in the school’s 1967 Kalven Committee report. “Universities should be expected to provide the conditions within which hard thought, and therefore strong disagreement, independent judgment, and the questioning of stubborn assumptions, can flourish in an environment of the greatest freedom.”
Professors today are encountering more pressure than ever to walk on eggshells to avoid offending students. Rani Neutill, a former Brandeis University professor who once taught a class on sex and the cinema, told Salon that one student requested an email notification the evening before a class in which material could “set off students.” Such an email notification would now be referred to as a “trigger warning,” designed to alert students to class material that may be offensive to them. Many professors include these warnings with certain classes or with textbooks that contain sensitive or polarizing material.
Professors also experience accusations when their class content may be offensive to their students. Students demanded that Andrea Quenette, a professor at the University of Kansas, lose her job after she answered, “As a white woman I just have never seen the racism. It’s not like I see ‘[the N-word]’ spray-painted on the walls” after a student asked her how to deal with discrimination on campus.
Quenette is now on paid leave while the matter is reviewed.
Timothy M. Wolfe, former president of the University of Missouri, also experienced outrage from the student body that led to his resignation. The students complained that he had not dealt correctly with racism on campus, resulting in a strike by some of the football players.
He wrote in an email that Gary Pinkel, the football coach at the time, “missed an important opportunity to teach his players a valuable life lesson.”
It appears as though students would rather demand the removal of controversial ideas and opinions rather than welcoming the opportunity to take advantage of the First Amendment and debate them. This attitude leaves professors and administrators with no choice but to toe the line in an attempt to be politically correct and maintain as much campus peace as possible.
“As abhorrent as some speech is, and I certainly think [some] is, the administration of a university should not be in the position of policing it, because it’s a very slippery slope,” Bettina Aptheker said. Aptheker is one of the leaders of the Berkeley Free Speech Movement. “A lot of us liberal types… could say racism is on the upswing, and I agree with that. But I don’t think the solution to that is restricting freedom of speech.”
