Opinion | With War Raging, Colleges Confront a Crisis of Their Own Making - The New Yor... - 0 views
www.nytimes.com/...alestine-college-campuses.html
education university challenge customer model amusement academic freedom fragility coddle safety
shared by Javier E on 27 Oct 23
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Students, meanwhile, have blasted those administrators for saying too much or too little. They’ve complained about feeling stranded.
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The tense situation largely reflects the intense differences of opinion with which many onlookers, including students, interpret and react to the rival claims and enduring bloodshed in the Middle East. But it tells another story, too: one about the evolution of higher education over the past quarter-century, the promises that schools increasingly make to their students and the expectations that arise from that.
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Many students now turn to the colleges they attend for much more than intellectual stimulation. They look for emotional affirmation. They seek an acknowledgment of their wounds along with the engagement of their minds
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Also, college students aren’t full-fledged grown-ups. They do need guidance, and they benefit from it.
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“The campus protests of the late 1960s sought in part to dismantle the in loco parentis role that colleges and universities had held in American life. But the past two decades have been shaped by a reversal of that, as institutions have sought to reconstruct this role in response to what students and parents paying enormous sums for their education have seemed to want.”
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For us professors, the surrogate-parent paradigm means regular emails and other reminders from administrators that we should be taking our students’ temperatures, watching for glimmers of distress, intervening proactively and fashioning accommodations, especially if there has been some potentially discomfiting global, national or local news event
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where does reasonable consideration end and unreasonable coddling begin? And what do validation and comfort have to do with learning?
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Arguably, everything. If you’re not mentally healthy, you’ll be harder pressed to do the reading, writing and critical thinking at the core of college work
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many schools have encouraged that mind-set, casting themselves as stewards of students’ welfare, guarantors of their safety, places of refuge, precincts of healing.
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But are we responsibly preparing them for the world after college — and for the independence, toughness, resourcefulness and resilience it will almost surely demand of them — when we too easily dole out A’s, too readily grant extensions, too gingerly deliver critiques, and too quickly wonder and sound alarms about any disturbance in the atmosphere?
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We keep witnessing episodes of students taking their colleges to task in ways that smack of entitlement and fragility and are out of bounds
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Hamline’s president, Fayneese Miller, defended that sequence of events by saying that to not weigh academic freedom against a “debt to the traditions, beliefs and views of students” is a “privileged reaction.”
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That’s a troubling assertion, as Tom Nichols wrote in The Atlantic: “If you don’t want your traditions, beliefs or views challenged, then don’t come to a university, at least not to study anything in the humanities or the social sciences.”
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The school is a merchant, a kind of department store, or so a student could easily assume, based on the come-ons from affluent colleges competing with one another for applicants. They peddle tantalizing dining options, themed living arrangements, diverse amusements. They assign students the role of discerning customers. And the customer is always right.
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But in an educational environment, that credo is all wrong, because learning means occasionally being provoked, frequently being unsettled and regularly being yanked outside of your comfort zone,
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most students can handle that dislocation — if they’re properly prepped for it, if they’re made to understand its benefits. We shortchange them when we sell them short