Forever Young

Greg Lukianoff’s group, FIRE, has fought for the free speech rights of students against those who would silence them, whether because the speech is too controversial, hurtful, uncomfortable or disagreeable.  When asked by Michael Yaki, member of the United States Civil Rights Commission, why college students should be entitled to free speech, Greg replied:

And if you’re saying that basically we should—that maybe below-graduate-level study should be ruled the same way high school students should be—I would disagree with you.

One of them is the moral and philosophical underpinnings of the 26th Amendment.  Essentially, we have decided in this country that 18-year-olds… that is considered the age for majority.

We also send our 18-year-olds to war.  Unless you’re actually also willing to make the argument that nobody below the age of, I don’t know, 22 should go to war, and we repealed the 26th Amendment, we’ve got a serious problem.


Greg’s points here are legal, that the law says 18-year-olds are grown-ups and so we should treat them that way, entitling them to the right of free speech.  Eric Posner says they’re a bunch of babies, and need to be coddled and hand-held, protected from speech that makes their baby brains hurt and their baby eyes cry.

Lately, a moral panic about speech and sexual activity in universities has reached a crescendo. Universities have strengthened rules prohibiting offensive speech typically targeted at racial, ethnic, and sexual minorities; taken it upon themselves to issue “trigger warnings” to students when courses offer content that might upset them; banned sexual acts that fall short of rape under criminal law but are on the borderline of coercion; and limited due process protections of students accused of violating these rules.

Well, yeah. Sure.

There is a popular, romantic notion that students receive their university education through free and open debate about the issues of the day. Nothing could be farther from the truth. Students who enter college know hardly anything at all—that’s why they need an education.

This is obvious from the other side, though it eludes almost all students and most academics as well.

And this brings me to the most important overlooked fact about speech and sex code debates. Society seems to be moving the age of majority from 18 to 21 or 22. We are increasingly treating college-age students as quasi-children who need protection from some of life’s harsh realities while they complete the larval stage of their lives. Many critics of these codes discern this transformation but misinterpret it. They complain that universities are treating adults like children. The problem is that universities have been treating children like adults.

Babies. See? Told you.

If college students are children, then they should be protected like children. Libertarians should take heart that the market in private education offers students a diverse assortment of ideological cultures in which they can be indoctrinated. Conservatives should rejoice that moral instruction and social control have been reintroduced to the universities after a 40-year drought. Both groups should be pleased that students are kept from harm’s way, and kept from doing harm, until they are ready to accept the responsibilities of adults.

In contrast to Greg’s argument, which aligns with one driven home in the 1960s that if a person is old enough to die for his country, he’s old enough to vote (and imbibe intoxicating liquors).  And old enough to be allowed to express his thoughts, no matter how stupid or wrong.

If you look at the argument from a purely legal or logical perspective, Greg wins the point. But then, you can’t deny that Posner’s characterization of the special snowflakes and delicate teacups nails it.  Anyone who is a college “survivor” knows it’s true, that these kids just can’t seem to handle mature expression or relationships without crying.

Adding to his point, Posner writes:

[T]he universities are simply catering to demand in the marketplace for education. While critics sometimes give the impression that lefty professors and clueless administrators originated the speech and sex codes, the truth is that universities adopted them because that’s what most students want. If students want to learn biology and art history in an environment where they needn’t worry about being offended or raped, why shouldn’t they?

And despite the chicken and egg debate potential, the fact is that students don’t merely accept being infantilized, but demand it, protest for it, walk around campus with mattress for it.  Why not let the babies have what they want?  If they need another four years of being treated like helpless, mindless, whimpering children, then give ’em their silly tummy rub and make them happy.

Of course, that means that those who aren’t so special, so delicate, so insipid, are constrained by the lowest common denominator.  The tyranny of the majority, with the majority being crying babies, vetoes the rights of others to be big boys and girls.

But if we accede to their childish demands in college, allow them to construct this safe place where their feelings, inane as they may be, trump all else, what changes when they leave university to take their place among grown-ups?  How do they come to realize that there is a big world out there filled with people who don’t think they are the most fabulous, brilliant, wonderful snowflakes ever? How can they accommodate all the haters, like the boss who tells them their work isn’t great, or the judge who says “denied” when they are certain their argument was brilliant?

There will come a day of reckoning for all the teary-eyed children who were raised on the belief that the world must conform to their personal feelings. It won’t be a happy day for most, as it flies in the face of everything their mommies and teachers have told them about how the world exists to cater to their sensitivities, but it’s gonna come no matter what.

Is that the day they enter college or the day they graduate?  And aren’t the rights of those who mature earlier, the few who realize the sun doesn’t revolve around their feelings, worthy of a little Posner love?

15 thoughts on “Forever Young

  1. David M.

    You’re right, we’re not all egomaniacal narcissists who need the world to revolve around them and get upset when things don’t conform to our personal preferences. For example, I’m totally down with your gratuitous use of “swag” and now, apparently, “boyz”. (Maybe you just like R&B? Or 90s movies? Or Wiz Khalifa?)

    But starting off this post with Bob Dylan and ending with Paul Simon? Damn. When we come here, I and your other young readers have the right to have our minds enriched, and some of us, including me, may feel uncomfortable being exposed to music that old and wack. Putting the Bob Dylan song in the title is a step in the right direction, but don’t be ableist. Just put “trigger warning: old people” in the title and it’ll be all good.

    Sincerely,

    1. SHG Post author

      Closing with Dylan was just too obvious. Sorry about the lack of trigger warning, though, as I can understand why going from Dylan to Simon would induce trauma.

  2. Jyjon

    This is a tad off topic I realize.

    “Society seems to be moving the age of majority from 18 to 21 or 22. ”

    Wouldn’t that mean that they can’t legally sign all that debilitating loan paperwork?

    Make the banks realize what they’re gonna loose and I’m sure the accountants will put an end to this idiocy.

  3. Fubar

    “We are increasingly treating college-age students as quasi-children who need protection from some of life’s harsh realities while they complete the larval stage of their lives. Many critics of these codes discern this transformation but misinterpret it. They complain that universities are treating adults like children. The problem is that universities have been treating children like adults.”

    Trigger warning required by terms of doggerel license: bad biology ahead may cause heads to explode spontaneously.

    We are pollywogs by diagnosis.
    College then takes our tails by aptosis,
    Transforms us from larval
    To full adult marvel
    When we drop dead from atherosclerosis.

  4. Not Jim Ardis

    There will come a day of reckoning for all the teary-eyed children who were raised on the belief that the world must conform to their personal feelings. It won’t be a happy day for most, as it flies in the face of everything their mommies and teachers have told them about how the world exists to cater to their sensitivities, but it’s gonna come no matter what.

    I used to agree here, but more and more I’m seeing people past college expect and demand that the world conform to some idiotic, fluffy model where all offense is banished to the Land of Nod.

    Look at, for example, Gamergate and those who oppose it – there is a real demand by a segment of the population that games not offend in any way (kill is bad, “damsel in distress” tropes be abolished, etc), and those who don’t believe as they do are figuratively burned at the stake.

    Justine Sacco was not beset by college students, but by people who at least claim to be adults.

    I’m not sure that “the day will come” anymore. It seems that reality is being forced into compliance with the poor darlings’ feels.

    1. SHG Post author

      Gamers may be an anomaly, as it’s a manifestation of prolonged adolescence in itself. Or, it may be a different problem, that the teacups as a whole carry their expectations forward into adulthood. If so, that’s the scariest proposition of all, millennials coming of age without ever growing up.

      1. Not Jim Ardis

        I hope you have booze on hand for the next few years, because I suspect that is exactly what we’re going to see.

    2. David M.

      I don’t know, man.

      Supreme Student Courts? Yeah. Academics who’re forced to teach, have no prestige or control over their students, and want to look socially avant-garde to make up for it? Apparently so. Maybe even the guys behind some world-changing app, who’ll pat themselves on the back for their nonjudgmental beanbag chairs and managing style until the investors get pissed and force them out.

      But everyone else who’s afraid of microaggressions and offended by ableist slurs is going to run into a brick wall. I’m an undergrad; I’ve temped for a court, worked for a management consulting firm, and my college recently hired me as a translator. If I ever whined about a work assignment like those Columbia law students (or sent my boss a letter like Della Kurzer-Zlotnick’s), I’d be out on my ass, even here in socialist Germany. Entitlement doesn’t come with a lot of leverage.

      1. Not Jim Ardis

        They won’t run into a brick wall because the ones that go before them brow-beat others into changing society to conform to their delicate sensibilities.

        Our vertical invasion by barbarians was lost years ago. All we’re seeing is the expanding of the beachhead.

  5. David

    Some college students want to be treated like adults. In fact, that is why they went to college.

    I remember leaving my rural home at seventeen years old for college life in the big city. College was great. I was responsible for myself, as my family lacked the financial means to support me.

    I had adult responsibilities, like getting a job and paying my own tuition. I found myself in adult situations, like having sex and drinking alcohol. I enjoyed some adult conversations, about multiculturalism and sex and philosophy.

    Eric Posner would take that type of experience away from me, all so that colleges can protect the spoiled brats who refuse to grow up and take accountability for themselves.

    1. Patrick Maupin

      > I had adult responsibilities, like getting a job and paying my own tuition.

      But if you were doing it today, would you be able to pay your own tuition? There’s big bucks to be made in infantilization; convince the parents the kids aren’t grown until they’re 27, and you can squeeze (some of) the parents for a lot more tuition than any kid could afford, never mind that you’re jeopardizing the parents’ retirement.

  6. Rebecca

    “Society seems to be moving the age of majority from 18 to 21 or 22. ”

    Sure, unless you’re a minor charged as an adult. And according to the FAFSA, students are dependent until they’re 24, no matter how long they’ve been paying their own bills. If you’re a kid, whether you have the rights of an adult or the protections afforded to a child is largely arbitrary, it seems.

    1. SHG Post author

      FAFSA isn’t about the child, but about the parents’ financial liability. Entirely different issue. The minor charged as adult, on the other hand, is an anomaly driven by tough on crime’s separation of doctrine from reason.

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