Infantilized Student Protestors
In the New York Times, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill professor Rita Koganzon explains how university tendencies to baby their students have bred unruly protests like the pro-Palestine encampments:
Universities don’t openly describe students as children, but that is how they treat them. This was highlighted in the spring, when so many pro-Palestinian student protesters — most of them legal adults — faced minimal consequences for even flagrant violations of their universities’ policies. (Some were arrested — but those charges were often dropped.) American universities’ relative generosity to their students may seem appealing, especially in contrast to the plight of our imaginary waiter, but it has a dark side, in the form of increased control of student life.
If universities today won’t hold students responsible for their bad behavior, they also won’t leave them alone when they do nothing wrong. Administrators send out position statements after major national and international political events to convey the approved response, micromanage campus parties and social events, dictate scripts for sexual interactions, extract allegiance to boutique theories of power and herd undergraduates into mandatory dormitories where their daily lives can be more comprehensively monitored and shaped. This is increasingly true across institutions — public and private, small and large — but the more elite the school, the more acute the problem.
Universities have employed a facilitator model which limits risks to students, and by extension universities, giving them freedom to misbehave with few consequences after graduating:
The aim of the facilitator model is to create a safe environment offering students a variety of opportunities and choices for personal growth while foreclosing those choices that might result in permanent damage — initially to the body, but increasingly to mind, reputation and transcript. It is sometimes described as a middle ground between the paternalism of in loco parentis and the neglect of the bystander period, but this assessment makes sense only from the perspective of tort law, which is, not surprisingly, because it is largely lawyers who’ve promoted it. From most any other perspective, the model is only a more insidious form of paternalism.
To sum up the facilitator model: It’s not that students don’t have rights; it’s just that safety comes first. Instead of restricting students for the sake of their moral character or its academic standards, the university has reinstated control under the aegis of health and safety. Protection from an ever-expanding conception of harm did not stop at campus alcohol and anti-hazing policies; it necessitated the campus speech codes of the 1980s and 1990s, the expansive Title IX bureaucracy of the 2010s and the diversity mandates of the 2020s.
The failings of this model were exposed when each competing student group appealed to university administrators during the antisemitic encampments:
After pro-Palestinian students set up camps to allege that their universities were complicit in the harm of a foreign genocide, Jewish students alleged that the protests imperiled their campus safety. In response, Muslim students alleged that measures to restrict the protests slighted their safety, and disabled students pointed out that the protests, as well as the university’s response to them, were undermining their safety by blocking their access to campus. All these groups looked simultaneously to administrators for protection. Safety comes first, no doubt — but whose?
Faced with opposing demands from faculty members, donors, the public and even Congress, these universities short-circuited. Responses across the country, especially at elite schools, were arbitrary and inconsistent, punitive one week and lenient the next. By the end of the academic year, the presidents of Harvard and the University of Pennsylvania had resigned, Columbia’s president was barely hanging on (she has since resigned), and the leadership of schools including the University of California, Los Angeles and the University of Virginia were under fire. As the new school year begins, protesters are resuming their campaigns.
Schools seeking reforms which curtail the unruliness of last semester should scale back their bureaucracies:
The sources of the current regime are difficult to disentangle because the incentives to lower academic standards, tighten control over student life and strip student autonomy have come from many directions — legal and regulatory requirements, rankings pressures, faculty priorities, parents’ expectations, changing revenue models and labor markets. It’s impossible to reverse all this in one fell swoop, but reclaiming student independence begins with getting universities to do less — to focus on their core academic mission and leave students to govern their own affairs beyond it. National outrage offers an opportunity for students to take back their independence.
In concrete terms, that might mean scaling back student-life bureaucracies, allowing (even encouraging) students to live off campus, and strengthening student-run institutions, from coffee shops to honor systems. In a decade of undergraduate teaching, I’ve come to believe that students’ own loss of confidence in their maturity and competence is misplaced. I have never experienced a more professional and conscientious disciplinary proceeding than an entirely student-run Honor Committee hearing for an academic dishonesty case at the University of Virginia. (U.Va has since changed its approach, and other universities with honor systems like Princeton and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill have also changed, often with student support, in ways that disempower students.)
If universities are to do less, then students must be prepared to do more, by relinquishing the comfort of leniency and low standards and stepping up to manage their social and academic lives on and off campus, as their peers outside the university already do. Universities, faced with the constant threat of litigation, will be hesitant to extend student autonomy, but they stand to lose their own autonomy if they concede all their institutional decision-making to lawyers and judges.
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