Coddled on Campus Students who say they’re ‘triggered’ by Mark Twain are appropriating—to borrow their term—language formerly applied to PTSD victims. Jonathan Marks
http://www.wsj.com/articles/coddled-on-campus-1473722354
In May, student protesters at Seattle University’s Matteo Ricci College bared their psychic wounds. The college had “traumatized, othered, tokenized, and pathologized” them, assaulting their “mental and emotional well-being.” That is, Matteo Ricci had maintained its signature humanities core, with its focus on classics of Western civilization. It had thereby “erased” the “personal and ancestral voices” of some students and neglected their “pain.” The protesters demanded that this “psychologically abusive” behavior end. They demanded a curriculum that “decentralizes Whiteness” and focuses on “systems of oppression,” such as “capitalism.” And they demanded the head of the college’s dean, Jodi Kelly.
Rather than question any premise of the protesters, Ms. Kelly promised a “comprehensive review” of the curriculum “in response to [their] concerns and requests.” Faculty and staff would undergo “racial and cultural literacy training.” Consultants would be hired. Seattle University’s president, Stephen Sundborg, hastened to add that he, too, wished to sit at the protesters’ feet, that he could not “pretend to know how deep their pain goes, the amount of harm it has caused or the extent of our own shortcomings.” Ms. Kelly, placed on administrative leave, has escaped into retirement.
If we resist the urge to pronounce the protesters insane and the administrators craven, we might ask whether student activists are right that even the most liberal campuses in America are bastions of prejudice. In “Campus Politics,” a valuable attempt to understand the protests that have swept American universities, Jonathan Zimmerman, a professor of history and education at New York University, explains why this question is rarely even posed within those universities.
ENLARGE Campus Politics
By Jonathan Zimmerman
(Oxford, 146 pages, $16.95)
Matteo Ricci’s protesters are typical in using the language of psychology to justify their demands. Other generations of protesters, Mr. Zimmerman says, certainly invoked “the language of psychological health and illness,” but today’s protesters use it “as never before.” When students speak of being “triggered” by Mark Twain, for example, they are appropriating—to borrow one of their terms—language formerly applied to victims of post-traumatic stress disorder. This “increased psychologizing of campus politics” makes it hard to challenge activists. “How can you argue with someone who feels pained or traumatized?” At Scripps College, protesters said that even a rather mild, moderated discussion program risked “retraumatizing minority participants” who could expect no “public intervention” when “white participants invalidate[d] the experiences that students of color generously share[d].” The program has been suspended.
Matteo Ricci’s administrators are typical in rolling over. University leaders in the 1960s sometimes considered protesters “an existential threat to the university itself,” Mr. Zimmerman says. Today’s university leaders greet protesters “with explicitly open arms and avowedly open hearts,” as well as apologies and cash. President Peter Salovey of Yale, having already committed $50 million to increasing faculty diversity, handled his protesters by acknowledging their pain, admitting that Yale had failed them and pledging to commit additional resources to their preferred causes.
For Mr. Zimmerman, what sets this round of protests apart is a symbiotic relationship between protesters and administrators, both hyperactively responsive to threats to student mental health and neither sufficiently mindful of threats to the free exchange of ideas. These protesters are “less committed” than their predecessors “to ideals of free speech, which many students see as a potential threat to psychological health.” Administrators still ritually praise untrammeled discussion but have been presiding over restrictive speech codes for more than two decades, quite as if they agreed with one university newspaper’s editorial board that while “it is important for students to challenge each other’s opinions, this should not come at the expense of students’ mental well-being.”
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