A quite informed and nuanced discussion by Columbia's Todd Gitlin at CHE, though behind their paywall; an excerpt:
Excesses of censorial zeal are easy to recognize, and pseudosolutions that require tiptoeing through minefields are easy to decry. The more deeply interesting question is: Why are we having this discussion at all? Deploring is simple, but grasping is hard.
The closer you look, the higher the questions pile up. Are more students arriving at college already feeling rattled? Is sexual assault on campus more common than ever, requiring new levels of preventive intervention? Or is the fear of rape, surely realistic up to a point, inordinate?
Does a troubling curriculum suggest an abundance of troubled minds? Is there an epidemic of fragility? Of the fear of fragility? Or both? (Are they the same thing?) Maybe more traumas — more date rapes, more racial "microaggressions" — lie in wait for unsuspecting students nowadays. Does the clamor for the right to be undisturbed emanate from a particular set of students, or does it reflect a more sweeping incidence of disturbance? Is there a climate of contagion? Is fragility the new normal?...
There is ample reason to believe that more college students now than 20 or 30 or 40 years ago consult campus counselors to deal with one stress or another. According to the most recent survey (September 1, 2012 to August 31, 2013) of the Association for University and College Counseling Center Directors:
"Anxiety continues to be the most predominant presenting concern among college students (46.2 percent; up from 41.6 percent in 2012), followed by depression (39.3 percent, up from 36.4 percent in 2012), and relationship problems (35.8 percent, unchanged from 2012). Other common concerns are suicidal ideation (17.9 percent, up from 16.1 percent in 2012), alcohol abuse (9.9 percent, down from 11 percent in 2012), and sexual assault (7.4 percent, down from 9.2 percent in 2012)"...
Intriguing is the annual UCLA Higher Education Research Institute (HERI) survey of freshmen. It’s national, and it spans more than 40 years. Last year’s survey found that incoming students’ "self-rated emotional health dropped to 50.7 percent (rating themselves as ‘above average’ or ‘highest 10 percent’ compared to people their age), its lowest level ever and 2.3 percentage points lower than the entering cohort of 2013." When HERI first asked students to rate their emotional health, in 1985, the proportion who said either "above average" or "highest 10 percent" was 63.6 percent. Either first-year students are reporting more honestly, or they’re feeling more troubled....
Why should more students feel stressed, anxious, depressed, even suicidal? Economic unsettlement might well be a factor. (But socially rooted anxiety was not born yesterday. When I was in college, anxiety spread like nuclear fallout from bomb tests.) Today, famously, competitive fervor is fierce. More of today’s students are employed while in college, or expect to be, and this double duty may well be another source of stress. In 2009, according to HERI, about one-quarter of all students worked six to 20 hours per week, and of them, almost one-quarter reported "occasionally" or "frequently" missing classes for that reason. An additional one-eighth reported working off-campus more than 20 hours per week, of whom more than half at least "occasionally" missed classes. Meanwhile, debt mounts. College anxiety seeps down into grade school....
I do recommend the whole article.
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