Over the past year or two, issues surrounding the exercise of free speech and expression have come to the forefront at colleges around the country. The common narrative about free speech issues that we so often read goes something like this: today’s college students -- overprotected and coddled by parents, poorly educated in high school and exposed to primarily left-leaning faculty -- have become soft “snowflakes” who are easily offended by mere words and the slightest of insults, unable or unwilling to tolerate opinions that veer away from some politically correct orthodoxy and unable to engage in hard-hitting debate.
This is false in so many ways, and even insulting when you consider the reality of students’ experiences today.
In truth, while there is significant cause for concern about the level of anxiety experienced by students today, they are, on average, probably the least coddled generation of students ever. For example, at the University of Washington, where I serve as president, 34 percent of our students are the first in their families to attend college and about a third of our in-state students are Pell eligible, which in general means they come from families making less than $40,000 a year. College students today are also more ethnically diverse than at any other time in the past.
By contrast, college used to be something for mainly upper-class white men, with coeducation by gender or class not becoming common among the top universities until the ’60s or ’70s. Universities’ curricula and even buildings were designed for them. I lived at home when I attended the University of Miami, so my first college living experience was when I went to Yale University for graduate school. My hall featured a small bedroom attached to each larger bedroom suite with a fireplace and window seat. Those small rooms had been built for the valets that many students brought to college with them. Talk about coddled!
And indeed, students of that generation rarely had their tolerance or opinions tested by difference, because their life was almost entirely lived out within a homogeneous environment of eating clubs, secret societies and fraternities -- the original “safe spaces” where students did not need to deal with true socioeconomic diversity, and with that, diversity more generally.
Moreover, for today’s college student, the pressure to succeed is great because the cost of failure -- perceived and actual -- is much higher. “Gentlemen’s C’s” from a “good” college no longer automatically lead to a high-paying job in the financial sector.
There is, no doubt, some orthodoxy of perspectives when it comes to social mores, and it is no longer acceptable for students to openly speak in a manner that is frankly sexist, racist or homophobic. In more recent years, that orthodoxy has also unfortunately spilled over to target conservative political views more generally, which is something we must work harder to address. But far from being an “echo chamber,” college is often the most diverse place -- racially, politically, economically -- many students have or will ever encounter. They routinely navigate a world of differences that was uncommon, if not unheard-of, for college
