Haidt also points out the role college Presidents are playing to exacerbate this:
"The university Presidents, faced with demands from students, cannot say no. So the students give them an ultimatum, demanding that they (capitulate). So all over the country, these Presidents are giving in, they're caving in, they're validating this victim narrative, and they're promising to do things - like more micro-aggression training, more diversity training -which are going to make things worse."
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Well, now there's the thing. University presidents can say "no." They, as Haidt points out regarding professors, just don't want the hassle. Well, excuse me, but dealing with that "hassle" is part of the job of educating young people.
Young adults are in college as much to learn about physics, math, history and so on as to learn how to be a mature adult. It's why kids leave home and live as part of a campus community -- to learn how to handle themselves as adults in a multifarious community. [1] One aspect of that lesson involves learning how not to be a victim, and the other part entails learning how not to be brute. It's about learning how to be a well balanced, I suppose some might call it "well adjusted," member of society.
When a university president and his staff acquiesce to the demands borne of a student's bruised feelings, they deny the kid part of their education. They also tacitly cede part of their job as the educator, the one with the knowledge and experience students are there to obtain and vicariously learn from, that the student is better suited to teach himself. Well, if that be so, why does the institution, its administration and instructors exist?
Colleges and universities, as successful corporations and individuals generally do , need to say: "This" is the kind of place this institution is, and you can come here to learn or you can choose a different school, but if you come here "such and such" is what you'll experience, "thus and such" are among the challenges you'll have to learn to overcome, and you can come here and do so, or you can go elsewhere, but this institution isn't changing merely to assuage your tender feelings and desire not to be put on the spot.
One doesn't matriculate to a school to change the school, one goes there to be changed, to be developed by the school. That only happens when the school doesn't mollycoddle its students. I happen to construe doing that as a dereliction of their duty as presidents, deans, chancellors, etc. The core reason those people have those roles is to guide young people and strengthen them, and part of that of that requires saying -- at the right times, but not all the time -- "get over it; deal with it in a rational and civilized manner."
I've said this several times on USMB and I practice it all the time in my life. One simply does not need to react to every damn slight that others may direct one's way. Yet reacting to everything seems to be the norm, and I really don't know why. Among the lessons of my youth was learning what to dignify with a response and what to dismiss, to consign to ignominy by simply ignoring it. Well, if one didn't learn how to do that before graduating from high school, college is about the last good place to do so.
Am I suggesting that one should ignore every slight? No, of course not. Instances of personal effrontery are best and most often rightly ignored because all of it is just words, and most of it comes from sources that, if one ignores them and their speaker, have no real impact on one's life. Moreover much of it is intended to make one descend to the speaker's level. And what good comes of that? None. On the other hand, slights that are symptomatic of a actual ill in society, one that is larger than just one's own hurt feelings, a slight that is a manifestation of something that needs correcting in order to improve the community/culture/society itself, well, that should not be ignored.
For example, when on USMB someone takes to attacking another member personally, the point of objection to the attack should not be that an individual was berated, but rather that by forbearing the slight, we permit a boor to distract and divert the conversation from its purpose and contributes to there being chaos in the community. And, if I'm honest, though I don't care much for being insulted, I care even less for general chaos and incoherent or uncompelling discourse.
It comes down to there being a time and place for everything. One's singularly hurt feelings rarely if ever alone make for the right time, place or reason to get in an uproar over slights real or imagined.
Note:
- Who the hell ever condoned the notion of allowing college undergraduates to attend and not live on campus is beyond me. That strikes me as among the worst ideas any college ever implemented. Even for myself, the experience of living and interacting closely with peers who had very different backgrounds than I proved as informative as anything I learned in the classroom. I say that as someone who went to boarding school for junior high and high school where I learned how to live in "household" and as part of a close community of people who were not related to me. What made living on the college campus different was that most people weren't just like me -- smart, industrious, well traveled, broadly exposed to what life offers, curious, sporting, good humored, etc. -- which they all were in junior and senior high. Even the handful of black kids were; they just happened to be black.
