April 2015
On
campuses across the country, authoritarianism is back in vogue. Orwellian
concepts like “free speech zones,” pens into which those who intend to speak
freely and openly are consigned so as to not offend the fragile little porcelain
dolls who presumably make up the majority of the nation’s student bodies, are
condoned. Classes for which students pay exorbitant and inflated prices to
attend are canceled so as to allow enrollees to attend progressive protests.
Even at the graduate level in exclusive institutions like Harvard, students pen mortifying manifestos
touting their victimhood and insist that this dubious claim should yield them
even more privilege and freedom from labor and scrutiny.
These
are the actions of children, and that’s exactly what University of Chicago Law
School Professor Eric Posner has called them. “Students today are more like
children than adults and need protection,” read the subhead in a controversial
piece he wrote for Slate. But Posner is not lamenting the retarded emotional and
intellectual growth of the next generation of Americans; he is celebrating it.
In a fantastically self-contradictory essay on the subject,
Posner averred that America’s college students are little more
than infants who demand to
be mollycoddled
by the benevolent autocrats at
the head of the classroom.
“There is a popular,
romantic notion that students receive their university education through free
and open debate about the issues of the day,” Posner wrote. “ Nothing could be
farther from the truth.”
“Students who enter
college know hardly anything at all—that’s why they need an education,” he
continued. Take that, America’s public high schools. “Classroom teachers know
students won’t learn anything if they blab on about their opinions,” Posner
added. “Teachers are dictators who carefully control what students say to one
another.”
To an extent, he is
correct when he contends that professors police their students’ speech and
writing, and most responsible teachers would never allow certain dangerous ideas
to take root among their students. This does, however, defeat the purpose of
education. Colleges should be places where students are able to freely explore
intellectual concepts, even dangerous and prejudicial notions, with the idea
being that daylight is the most potent disinfectant.
Posner contended
that the speech most in need of policing is the kind that might offend those
young folk who are consumed by identity politics. Homophobic or anti-Semitic
rhetoric is offensive, but those concepts are not as a pressing a threat to
liberty today as are, say, erecting complex ideological justifications for
censorship while contending that this suppression of free thought is not only
noble and righteous but clamored for by the insipient masses.
And here we
encounter the first of Posner’s glaring self-contradictions. He contended that
it is the educator who serves as benign “dictator” when enforcing codes of
appropriate thought, but Posner later asserted that it is the student who
demands paternalism from his or her educators. “While critics sometimes give the
impression that lefty professors and clueless administrators originated the
speech and sex codes, the truth is that universities adopted them because that’s
what most students want,” Posner argued. “If students want to learn biology and
art history in an environment where they needn’t worry about being offended or
raped, why shouldn’t they?”
There
is something
pathological in causally
equating rape, as violent and invasive a
crime as anyone can imagine, with an individual conducting a subjective
assessment of their sensitivities and determining that they have been slighted.
It is a logician of suspect ability who determines these two offenses to be of
roughly approximate gravity.
This staunch defense
of what a vocal minority of hypersensitive youth construe to be offensive
suggests that Posner is engaged in a defense of his own preferred codes of
conduct more so than he is upholding the values of his charges.
Which leads us to
Posner’s second contradiction: The professor explicitly insisted that
college-age young people “are children” and should be treated as such. “Not in
terms of age, but in terms of maturity,” he condescended. “Even in college, they
must be protected like children while being prepared to be adults.”
Now, who knows?
Perhaps Posner’s pupils really aren’t ready to leave the nest. It’s not
impossible, especially given the dominant impulse among America’s elites to file
down life’s sharp edges, that the students in Posner’s classroom are
ill-equipped to navigate the world around them. But no sooner does Posner assert
that he is surrounded by children inhabiting the bodies of adults that he
asserts that the process of mental if not physical maturation has grown stunted
over the years.
“Society seems to be
moving the age of majority from 18 to 21 or 22,” Posner insisted. “Perhaps
over-programmed children engineered to the specifications of college admissions
offices no longer experience the risks and challenges that breed maturity. Or
maybe in our ever-more technologically advanced society, the responsibilities of
adulthood must be delayed until the completion of a more extended period of
education.”
Again, Posner is not
entirely off base in his diagnosis of a social ill (though he doesn’t seem to
consider it such). The process of maturation is decelerating over the
generations, but his prescription for addressing this issue is to reinforce the
conditions that he admits might have led to this lamentable state in the first
place. If modern children are spared the “risks and challenges that breed
maturity,” the solution to that problem is not to create hermetically
sealed
environments in which the
perennially pubescent
subject
is cosseted
in a
cocoon of inoffensive ideological homogeneity. Posner laments the suboptimal
state of affairs, but defends his role in perpetuating them.
If Posner is truly
broken up about the vulnerability of the next generation, and it’s not at all
clear that he is, than one might expect him to take his own advice and to stop
treating young adults like infants. Not because they are ready for that
challenge, but because they are not. Unless the graduating student chooses to
continue his or her education, or ascends directly to a position with an
anti-defamation league, no one in the world outside gives a whit about their
fragile egos.
The best gift that a
teacher can give a student is to disagree with them, even to regard their views
as dangerous. If that sounds irresponsible, educators, trust a conservative with
a post-graduate degree: It is not a rare occurrence. But the goal shouldn’t be
to censor or shame them, but to make them defend their ideas for their peers.
That adversity forces growth. It places demands on the individual to be
compelling and comprehensive. The earlier a student learns that it is his or her
job to please others and not to find themselves or to be comfortable with their
own idiosyncrasies, the faster they will become productive and resilient members
of society.
Posner doesn’t
misdiagnose the problem with the class of 2019, but he does fail in the effort
to proscribe the correct remedy. The cure for the problems associated with
perpetual adolescence is not to create a safe space for that cancer to
metastasize. It is incumbent on a well-trained surgeon, as it were, to excise
the tumor.
Hotair.com, February 13, 2015.
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