Back in my day (1981-1985), you couldn't swing a dead cat on a college campus without hitting a demonstration for or against a midnight showing of the anti-abortion documentary Silent Scream, watching Jews for Jesus slug it out with Campus Crusade for Christ, and catching hecklers giving hell to members of the Committee in Solidarity with the People of El Salvador (CISPES). It was a time for choosing, all right, and just about every possible issue under the sun was debated loudly and fiercely.
Then there's today's campuses, I note in my latest Daily Beast column, which discusses Georgetown administrators' attempt to redact a video of a protested lecture by Christina Hoff Sommers.
Every time we seem to have reached peak insanity when it comes to the intellectually constipated and socially stultifying atmosphere on today's college campuses, some new story manages to reveal vast new and untapped reservoirs of ridiculousness. In a world of trigger warnings, microaggressions, and official apologies featuring misgendered pronouns that start a whole new round of accusations, wonders never cease…. What the fuck is wrong with kids these days and, more important, the supposed adults who look after them? They act as if they are raising human veal that cannot even stand on their own legs or face the sunlight without having their eyeballs burned out and their hearts broken by a single deep breath or uncomfortable moment. I'm just waiting for stories of college deans carrying students from class to class on their backs.
I graduated college way, way back in 1985, with a double major in English and psychology. Perhaps not surprisingly, my first job out of school was pumping gas and doing oil changes at a Sunoco gas station (for which I'll always be grateful).
I'm confident that today's millennials are actually going to be just fine. Like all of us did, they hide what they really think from adults, especially in school settings. They will take over the world and leave it better than they found it. But in them meantime:
Today's students are even less prepared to deal with anything approaching the real world than those of us who graduated into a world that didn't even pretend to care what our senior thesis was about. Take it from me, kiddos: The whole world is a microaggression when it isn't openly kicking you up and down the street. And if your vast clone army of administrative busybodies can't fully protect you from disappointment on campus, they're even more useless once you've graduated and start paying off your student loans.
コメント