In the last few years, there has been a widespread movement to protect college kids from their own impending adulthood. Safe spaces with crayons and nap blankets are de rigueur when there might be an opinion offered that the student doesn’t want to hear. The battle against micro-aggressions is being waged on many leafy campuses across the land. Everyone is aggrieved.
There is much to mock about the idea that institutions of higher learning should be shielding our precious snowflakes from anything that might infringe on their established world-view. It used to be that that having your immature belief system shaken was the entire point of college. Not anymore, apparently. Whether it’s fighting culturally insensitive cafeteria food at Oberlin or fighting to remove, ironically, “free speech” fliers at Amherst, college students want to live in a bubble, and administrations want to help them do that.
In the latest edition, Clark University in Worcester, Massachusetts, has hired a chief diversity officer, Sheree Marlowe, to teach students how to avoid micro-aggressing each other. The story starts in a typical ridiculous fashion. Students have been advised to stop saying “you guys” to each other lest someone understand the term to somehow exclude women.
But other micro-aggressions that Marlowe will be targeting include discouraging students from asking black students if they play basketball or from asking Asian strangers for help with their math homework.
Suddenly the issue isn’t so much the coddling of college students, but the extent to which these students are clearly unprepared for the real world even before they arrive on campus. Undergraduate tuition for the academic year 2015-2016 at Clark costs $41,590. How is it possible that an 18-year old arrives at a school costing someone’s annual salary and proceeds to behave in a manner this embarrassing?
The internet is full of examples of what we now call micro-aggressions but were once known simply as rude or nosy comments. Many black women complain of people touching their hair. I can’t imagine my 6-year-old touching even her friend’s hair, let alone a stranger or acquaintance’s head. How do college kids not know better?
A photo-project GLAAD launched in 2015 chronicled comments directed toward the LGBT community such as asking a transsexual person how they have sex.
Parents need to be teaching their kids what is and what is not their business. How anyone else has sex is clearly in the “not” camp. So many other examples of bad behavior, like telling women to smile, assuming someone’s racial background, or asking personal questions of non-friends, should have been quashed well before someone is college-bound.
If it’s true that kids this dense are really heading to college ready to embarrass themselves by asking inappropriate questions of people they don’t know, should universities be in the business of protecting them from it? Clearly, they’ve had a lifetime of protection from the fallout of their stupidity, why continue that? Shouldn’t the new classes be aimed at the person being micro-aggressed — the Asian student who is being approached to help with math homework, say — to teach them to point and laugh at the dolt? That will teach a quicker lesson to the micro-aggressor than any class ever could.
We spend a lot of time worried if the current college generation can hack it in a real world without safe spaces, but there needs to be more preparation before they even begin college to teach them how to coexist. Atlantic Magazine reported that a “2014 survey by the American College Health Association, 54 percent of college students surveyed said that they had ‘felt overwhelming anxiety’ in the past 12 months, up from 49 percent in the same survey just five years earlier.” That’s a serious spike and points more to an unpreparedness to face higher education than anything else.
If we are really letting kids get to college without knowing the appropriate boundaries they need to have with other people then we are failing at a main component of child-rearing. There’s a range of bad behavior here, whether it’s students shutting down speech that makes them uncomfortable or making assumptions about others based on superficial information like race, and we need to start early to teach kids that they live in a world with other people and their experience doesn’t take priority.
That doesn’t mean they should stop saying “you guys,” but it does mean they should not infringe on people’s personal space to touch them or ask them personal or inane questions.
Karol Markowicz is a weekly columnist for the New York Post. She can be followed on Twitter: @karol.
