Amy Jo Clark and Miriam Weaver 1:53 p.m. EDT May 21, 2015
We are raising a nation of wusses.
Practically every week, we read new stories about colleges and universities across the country bending over backward to accommodate students who are “triggered” and who suffer effects of “micro-aggressions” perpetrated against them by people of “privilege” or by the “patriarchy.”
These are the buzzwords that are burrowing themselves like termites into the American lexicon. And it’s our own universities that are cultivating a new generation of entitled, whiny victims, by treating students as if they are fragile and utterly incapable of dealing with adult life.
Don’t believe us? The examples are endless. Depauw University cancelled an entire day of classes to conduct training about micro-aggressions for its students. A University of Michigan student was dismissed from writing for the college paper because a satirical article he’d written was believed to have caused a “hostile environment.” The best part? The article’s purpose was specifically to poke fun at students who are perpetually offended and feel slighted over every last thing.
A student at Columbia wrote an op-ed about how professors need to be more sensitive when teaching classic works of Greek and Roman mythology, because the stories might be too “triggering” for students to handle, due to themes of sexual assault. Georgetown and Oberlin invited Christina Hoff Sommers, “The Factual Feminist,” to speak, and students demanded that her talk be accompanied by “trigger warnings” because Sommers dares to speak out against the commonly regurgitated “1 in 5 women on campus are sexually assaulted” statistic.
The New York Times recently cited an example of college kids demanding "safe spaces," where any speech that could potentially hurt their feelings is banned altogether. And as that column points out, even when universities like Harvard create these ridiculous safe spaces, there are still students who whine that they’re not safe enough, because in order to be a real safe space, it has to be one where they “feel that (they) can express all aspects of (their) identity” without worrying that they might get “judged” or “marginalized.” We’re not making this up.
Some minority students at UCLA staged a “sit-in” against a professor who dared to teach them proper grammar. Apparently, correcting spelling and punctuation errors on assignments was racist and an example of a “micro-aggression” that created a “hostile class climate.”
We could go on and on.
The problem, of course, is that the more universities bow down to these absurd demands by students, the less equipped to deal with actual life the students become.
You may recall that shortly after the Ferguson, Mo., riots, Columbia Law School actually allowed students to postpone their final exams if they felt they suffered “emotional impairment” by the non-indictments of the officers who were involved in the deaths of Michael Brown and Eric Garner. Harvard and Georgetown law school students asked for similar accommodations. At Columbia, the dean arranged for a trauma specialist to hold sessions for interested students.
We maintain that if these law students couldn’t cope with watching news coverage about grand jury proceedings that didn’t relate to anyone they personally knew without postponing their finals, then they are not fit to be lawyers. The schools should never have made such nonsensical accommodations.
Much of this boils down to one inescapable truth: universities are supposed to be places where intellectual debate happens freely, where ideas are challenged openly, where lively discourse is the norm, and where students gain valuable skills and knowledge to prepare them for adulthood in the real world. The fact that colleges now indulge students who whine about micro-aggressions and who create problems where none exist means that they are failing at their primary role. They are encouraging their students to be victims.
Today’s students need a major reality check, or they’ll be in for a rude awakening if and when they land jobs in the real world. Employers won’t create “safe spaces” for them, or issue trigger warnings. Universities do students a major disservice by legitimizing their every inconsequential complaint.
These kids are tomorrow’s leaders. We need to prepare them to lead, not look for “safe spaces” from which to escape their fears.
Amy Jo Clark is known as Daisy, and Miriam Weaver as Mockarena. They write a blog (www.chicksontheright .com) and host the “Chicks on the Right” show on WIBC-FM (93.1), Indianapolis.
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