Recently, Oklahoma Wesleyan University President Dr. Everett Piper penned an open letter calling out the students of his University for being too thin-skinned and sensitive. Though the example given in the article was geared toward a religious topic, it was pointed towards the attitudes many college students exhibit today. He began the letter by explaining how a student complained about a sermon that made him feel bad about himself because the homily on love made him feel bad for not showing love. According to Dr. Piper, the student thought that "the speaker was wrong for making him, and his peers, feel uncomfortable."
"I’m not making this up. Our culture has actually taught our kids to be this self-absorbed and narcissistic. Any time their feelings are hurt, they are the victims. Anyone who dares challenge them and, thus, makes them “feel bad” about themselves, is a 'hater,' a 'bigot,' an 'oppressor,' and a 'victimizer.' "
The President of Wesleyan even goes so far as to say that his students "arrogantly lecture, rather than humbly learn".
College campuses have seen an influx of some sensitivity, but also outspokenness. Our time spent in college is when we, as students, have the chance to create and form our own opinion usually based on the culture that we live in, and the peers that surround us. We come to be prideful of these opinions, and often they veer away from those of our parents. It has been noticed in the past couple of years that there has been a shift in the attitudes, feelings, and the way we talk to each other about important issues. It has become difficult to have a conversation with someone who opposes our views. It is not simply an exchange of opinions and information, it is an argument, lecture, or call-out. When worse comes to worse, we begin attacking each other's grammar, instead of excepting that not everyone sees eye to eye and moving on. There is something wrong on a college campuses when the students who grew up watching Spongebob Squarepants and Family Guy are deterring comedians from doing shows at Universities, because of the politically correct environments. Top comics such as Chris Rock, Jerry Seinfeld, and Bill Maher are among some that have refused to do so.
In a more opinion based article titled "For Thin-skinned Students, We Have Nobody to Blame but Ourselves" written by Kathleen Parker for the Washington Post, Parker contests that, "Instead, let me be the first to say: it’s not the students’ fault. These serial tantrums are direct results of our Everybody Gets a Trophy culture". She continues to say that we as a generation growing up were pampered, and got a trophy for showing up. I think we've all heard this argument used against millennials, and though it is a broad statement I don't necessarily agree with, there is some truth to it. Not everyone grew up like this, I get that, but at the same time as I was growing up I did start to notice the attitudes of adults towards kids and myself as a child being that of not wanting to upset us or having anything seem unfair. Everyone had to get the same amount of candy or praise or whatever. Recently in my job as a Disney Princess, I was Cinderella at a dance camp and the children had drawn pictures of my castle. The teacher wanted me to pick out which drawing was the best. She quickly drew that back and said instead I should give each picture a unique compliment. I tried my best to give each picture a nice yet equal compliment, but it was hard considering they all were basically the same level of kid-drawing-bad. The kids were actually upset that I was not going to choose just one. I personally feel I was doing these kids an injustice by just passing on all their work as equally special. They're not stupid, they know equally special means no one is special. Does this story sound familiar in our own childhoods? "Self-esteem is earned, not bestowed." So is some of our over sensitivity and entitled behavior, not even our fault? It's something to consider.
There are still other voices to consider in this argument. When President Obama was speaking at an education town hall in Des Moines he touched on the subject of student sensitivity. He said that he had heard of college campuses not wanting a guest speaker that was "too conservative" or students not wanting to read a book because it had themes insensitive to African Americans or women. He answers, "I’ve got to tell you, I don’t agree with that either -- that you when you become students at colleges, you have to be coddled and protected from different points of view."
This brings up the topic of trigger warnings that have become popular as well. In an article written for The Atlantic called, "The Coddling of the America Mind" by Greg Lukianoff and Jonathan Haidt the topic of protecting college students from words and ideas they don't like and how it was disastrous for education and mental health. In the article, there are numerous examples of students not wanting to be exposed to something because it made them uncomfortable. Being uncomfortable is really not the worst thing that can happen, and should be occasionally tolerated when it comes to something small like reading material.
And then there are microaggressions.
"Microaggressions are small actions or word choices that seem on their face to have no malicious intent but that are thought of as a kind of violence nonetheless. For example, by some campus guidelines, it is a microaggression to ask an Asian American or Latino American 'Where were you born?,' because this implies that he or she is not a real American."
There was also mention of people complaining about microaggression, who were then targeted for spreading microaggression. Some Asian students on a campus founded a campaign against students questioning their math abilities. But a backlash arose among other Asian American students, who felt that the display itself was a microaggression. The association removed the installation, and its president wrote an e-mail to the entire student body apologizing to anyone who was “triggered or hurt by the content of the microaggressions.” Isn't this all getting a bit tiresome?
In a Psychology Today article, there was mention that teachers were actually afraid of giving their students bad grades because of fear of the students' emotional fragility. Another ridiculous thing is that a professor at Yale just willingly resigned because of the backlash from an email she wrote telling students that it was okay to push boundaries with Halloween costumes. "I have great respect and affection for my students, but I worry that the current climate at Yale is not, in my view, conducive to the civil dialogue and open inquiry required to solve our urgent societal problems," Christakis said in an email to The Washington Post.
The point in all of this is to say that there are many more people out there who think that the climate in our colleges is an issue, and these people are not just the typical card carrying Republicans with Confederate flags attached to their pickup trucks. This is a serious issue that students need to consider for themselves. At the end of the day, it is us we are hurting.
Here are the articles I used as sources, they are interesting reads to find out more information.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/for-thin-s...
http://www.okwu.edu/blog/2015/11/this-is-not-a-day...
http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2015/0...
http://www.today.com/parents/university-president-...
https://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/freedom-learn...
http://news.yahoo.com/yale-teacher-resigns-over-of...
