Making College Students Crazy

There’s more to it than coddling. As you know well, Today’s college students are suffering from declining mental health. What could possibly be the cause?

In a New York Post column Rikki Schlott takes up a thesis proposed by Greg Lukianoff and Jonathan Haidt. She suggests that these students are suffering for having been coddled and swaddled. Academic administrators protect students from the least discouraging word. They shield students from any potentially traumatic image or word.

And she adds another argument, one that we have read previously, namely that trigger warnings are more the problem than the solution. She argues that shielding students from  potentially traumatizing material tends to undermine their resilience and to make them more depressed and more suicidal.

She offers this picture of the state of mind of American college students:

Suicides across American campuses now exceed 1,000 a year, making them the second leading cause of death for college students.

Nearly three in four student affairs officials say campus mental health has worsened in the last year.

It’s no wonder colleges that are taking in hordes of depressed 18- to 22-year-olds are desperate to do something about it.

But there’s a big problem: Administrators’ pandering attempts to protect students’ mental well-being are often making matters worse.

Surely, the intentions are good. But, do we really believe that mental illness is produced by hearing the wrong words or seeuing scary images?

Safe spaces, trigger warnings and speech codes are frequent strategies of choice to “protect” students from “harm.” Yet it’s a self-fulfilling prophecy: Coddling students produces students who need to be coddled — and who are woefully unprepared for the world that waits on the other side of the ivory tower.

The last thing young people need to be told when they arrive on campus is, “You’re fragile. But don’t worry, we’ll protect you.” Yet this message is loud and clear across campuses.

As I noted, this feels like a good idea. But, we should also understand that the students are also being threatened. They are living under constant threat. It does not matter how well they do in their coursework. It does not matter how conscientious they are about doing their homework and their term papers. One wrong word can destroy their academic careers and their lives. Cancel culture has produced anxiety and depression.

Why would they not feel anxious? It is even worse when they do not even know which words and phrases and even looks are now forbidden. That is, they do not always know what counts as thought crimes.

It gets worse. Imagine, for just an instant, that your parents brought you up well. They provided for all of your creature needs, passed on a good reputation and helped you to receive an excellent education. Thanks to your efforts and their support you arrived at a superior university.

Ought you to feel proud of their and even your own achievements? Well, not at all. The prevailing ideology on college campuses declares that your parents are white supremacist scum, venal criminals whose successes were purchased by oppressing certain groups of people.

In that case, you have no business feeling proud of your or their achievements. You must feel guilty. And you must not excel; you must not strive for excellence. You must do penance, that is, you must punish yourself for the sins of your parents and ancestors.

Now, imagine that you belong to a designated victim group. By common theories that means that you are not a male white supremacist. If so, you should certainly feel resentful toward those students who did not suffer from oppression. 

But, then, as Shelby Steele argued over two decades ago, those who benefited from affirmative action programs are not really allowed to believe that they earned their place.

But then, if you belong to an oppressed class, your successes are not successes. They are charity. 

Worse yet, if you belong to an oppressed class, your successes contradict the premise of the prevaling narrative. Your successes suggest that the oppression is not as bad as some think it is. So, you might feel that your success is a betrayal, a betrayal of the prevailing oppression narrative.

In both cases, the case of a member of an oppressor class and the case of a member of the oppressed class, success is tainted. You are being encouraged subtly, to fail, to do poorly, to sustain the prevailing narrative.

It will make you crazy, anxious and depressed. 

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