From Anti-Establishment To Auntie Establishment
Students marching on campus these days are demanding everything short of a 24-hour hug-giver in every dorm room.

Many of their demands are about more bureaucracy and more caretaking -- "more connection with with the Man, not less," as Harvard Law School prof Jeannie Suk puts it in her New Yorker piece, "A New Family Feeling on Campus." By family, she's talking about "in loco parentis" -- students demanding more authority on campus.

The list of concrete demands recently announced by student activists at Yale is decidedly not anti-establishment. They seek more connection with the Man, not less. Many of their calls are for more bureaucracy: the creation of an academic department, the hiring of more employees for cultural centers, and the development of training, surveys, and reporting requirements (borrowed from the now established Title IX school bureaucracy). But it is in the demands for more mental-health services, for stipends and food for students in need during breaks, for dental and optometry care, and for eight financial-aid consultants that we most clearly see their yearning not only for safety but for a safety net. The Million Student March demonstrations at multiple campuses last week, in support of free tuition, cancellation of student debt, and a fifteen-dollar minimum wage for campus jobs, went directly to the point. At Amherst College, the student emphasis is on apologies to current and former students from the president and chancellor for the institutional legacy of everything from white supremacy to cis-sexism to mental-health stigma. These demands for administrative affirmation of students' needs are far from a rejection of the institution. Instead, they reach for a familial embrace.

These campus administrations need to do the opposite of what they are doing. They need to stop giving in to these students' demands, and truly behave as the stern father and just say no.

It really is quite amazing how "radicalism" on campus these days involves calling for more of Big Daddy.