COLUMN: Coddled college student narrative is unproductive

The journalistic pieces that decry the slow death of free speech at the hands of liberal universities show a peculiar trend of employing liberal rhetoric to do so. A recent piece for The Atlantic invokes the authority of various respected feminists and feminist organizations to illustrate how federal sexual harassment policies impede academic freedoms. This article comes from the same author as the one I addressed in the last installation of this column, who referred to UCLA students protesting the Kanye Western party as “[squandering] their inheritance.”

By pandering to liberal-democratic sensibilities such as freedom of speech and feminism, pieces like this imply that millennials need to be protected from themselves, that what they often want is no good for them but this hypocrisy is unbeknownst to them. However, this rhetoric is merely appropriated for the purposes of what Lindy West describes as a “flippant and condescending” agenda. The broader aim of this agenda is merely to bolster fears of the “progressive bogeyman du jour, political correctness, and all its sinister attendants: microaggressions, the supposed erosion of free speech and the “‘right not to be offended.’”

Rather than making a careful and critical examination of problematic policy, the article cheaply antagonizes student populations.

Targeting federal policies set forth by the Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights is a well-founded position. The over-reaching nature of the policies is covered eloquently by Harvard Law professor Janet Halley in a guest piece for Boston’s NPR news website. Halley’s piece is in fact quoted at length in Conor Friedersdorf’s Atlantic article.

Such a position is also taken by Nadine Strossen in a speech given at Harvard University, which is the basis of The Atlantic article. Quotes from this address constitute at least 50 percent of the article. Friedersdorf also draws strongly upon Strossen’s authority as a feminist and a professional. The subtitle to the article defines Strossen as “A prominent, feminist professor of law” and the first paragraph refers to her as “one of the most accomplished legal professionals of her generation.” The second paragraph details the highlights of her CV: editor of the Harvard Law Review, first female leader of the American Civil Liberties Union, a “staunch feminist” and a guest star in the Broadway production of The Vagina Monologues.

The excerpts quoted from Strossen’s speech center around the federal policies, the pressure they put on universities via funding channels and their legal implications. The article gets dicey when Friedersdorf asserts that she “lamented that whereas students once fought for freedom as government officials sought to stifle it, today students are demanding that the university keep them “safe” from disturbing ideas.” Unlike the other premises, this is paraphrased and not directly quoted. Here, agency and fault is transferred from policy to university students themselves.

Whether or not this transfer of agency is made in Strossen’s actual speech, the resemblance to other pieces run by Friedersdorf and The Atlantic at large is remarkable. It fits conveniently well into the recurring narrative I can’t seem to escape in my research for this column. Again, this narrative hinges upon the agency of a liberal millennial student archetype in the bringing of their own doom.

Such a discussion derails focus from legitimate policy criticisms and aligns itself with an unproductive yet increasingly popular debate about generational culture. As Lindy West points out, the whole “coddled co-eds” campaign actually comes from a place “symptomatic of our culture’s deep investment in minimising and normalizing sexual assault.” The invocation of feminist authority here serves a superficial purpose. Strossen and Halley — and, through their authority, feminists as a whole — become mouthpieces contributing to a narrow discourse in which they never actually enrolled.

Ultimately, it is illogical to use the motifs of the coddled millennials narrative to place the brunt of blame for inadequate policy onto college students who did not write it.

Kristen Woodruff is a senior majoring in classics. Her column, “Old School, New Tricks,” runs  every other Wednesday.