It's Really The Death Of Humility, Today On Campus
I can't honestly say that I didn't suffer from this myself -- feeling (and acting) like something of a know-it-all in my 20s.

I dragged $25 words into conversations (the verbal equivalent of Macy's Parade floats) with some regularity, thinking it made me look smart.

Looking back, I know it didn't; it made me look insecure, which I was.

I say that with compassion for 20-something me -- silly nervous girl, not sure who I was or what I would do with my life and scared shitless over that.

The thing is, there used to be people who'd kick your smug ass -- not let you get away with all that much besides assholing up a cocktail party conversation or two.

This mostly kept 20-something idiots out of positions of power, which is a good thing. (Yeah, there are some wise old souls in their 20s -- vastly, enormously fewer than than those who think of themselves this way.)

Flash forward to today, and there's a problem.

No longer do college administrators and others in charge give each other a knowing eye about the students who are sure they know everything; now they fork over power to those students: power to decide what all students get to hear and talk about (and even what they can wear on Halloween).

And, sadly, both the students and the universities -- as well as the rest of us -- are the worse for that.

There's a smart essay about this by Lyell Asher at The American Scholar. He starts with a book I loved -- Anna Karenina -- and how Tolstoy keeps leading us to assume we've got somebody pegged, only to twist the angle and show us we actually didn't:

Karenin's solemn, impassive reaction to Anna's tearful declaration of love for Vronsky, for example, seems initially to confirm Anna's description of her husband as a mechanical functionary for whom time is a schedule and life a series of kept appointments. Only later do we learn that the dead look on Karenin's face conceals a man so fully alive to his wife's tears that he had to will himself inert so as not to fall apart. As happens so often in the book, just when we think we finally understand someone, Tolstoy drops a more powerful lens into the scope, or shifts its viewing angle, and we're bewildered all over again.

I didn't like bewilderment when I was in college, and my students don't either. Their lives are chaotic enough without any help from books. So they're just as inclined as I was to bypass complication as a way of preserving the clarity of their judgments, which is precisely what Tolstoy's characters do. Anna needs to construe her husband as an unfeeling machine in order to withstand her own guilt, just as her husband needs to construe Anna as a thoroughly depraved woman so as to sharpen his own hatred. It's one of the book's many indelible patterns: the easiest way to streamline your feelings is to simplify the people who provoke them.

A college ought to be the ideal place to help students learn to resist such simplifications--to resist them not just inside the classroom, in the books they read, but outside in the lives they lead. Rightly understood, the campus beyond the classroom is the laboratory component of college itself. It's where ideas and experience should meet and refine one another, where things should get more complicated, not less.

But what happens when the administrators who supervise this lab--sometimes in tandem with professors who teach the courses--pretend to have so mastered the difficult questions of race, of social justice, of meaning and intention, that they feel entitled to dictate to others? What happens when they so pixelate the subject matter that what emerges is a CliffsNotes version of human experience, the very thing that a college curriculum should be working against?

What happens is that many students will accept these simplifications. Some will even cling to them for dear life. Finally a map--with shortcuts!--and a way out of bewilderment. Feeling offended implies an offense, and where there's an offense there must be a culprit guilty of having committed it. No need to bother with the complexities of context and intention--it says here that "impact" is what matters, that how I feel is what counts. No need to wonder whether an expression of hatred is real or a ruse, isolated or endemic--assume the worst and take the part for the whole.

This is the kind of shortcut-think society we're creating in colleges across America by, effectively, letting the nursery schoolers run the place.

Sure, that sounds insulting -- "nursery schoolers" -- but consider that it's probably pretty accurate.

This current crop of college students, by and large, is the least independent generation ever in this country. We went from pioneering the West to helicopter parented play dates in gated communities where all playground equipment is certified undangerous and no fucking fun.

People who've been raised to be fragile flowers have no business running the show. I didn't have any business running it, either, in my 20s, but at least I wasn't raised in a terrarium.

By letting "safety" be the guiding principle in college -- safety from ambiguity, hurt feelings, unapproved thinking -- we're creating a generation of adult brats who won't know what to do with the rights we have like free speech, except to roll them back, on the grounds that they're "mean."

There's a way out, and it's for some college administrator and then some professors and then some students to start saying no to these overgrown toddlers. No to trigger warnings, microagression-policing, costume-policing, offense-policing, and all the rest.

If you can't handle these things, we need to take care of you, but the institution with dorm rooms is the wrong place for that.

And, if you are not mentally ill, by repeatedly telling yourself that you are injured by the common slights of life, you acclimate your brain's threat detection system to respond to them as if they are actual threats.

Yes, we're putting out a fraidycat generation, psychologically ill-equipped to do much more than point the finger, all, "J'accuse!" at those using unapproved speech or wearing unapproved Halloween costumes.

If that's the new standard, well, why don't we just give it all back to the Brits and say we're done?

via @NAChristakis