College life under the microscope
How our media culture hinders intellectual growth
The Chronicle of Higher Education | January 2019
Digital self-surveillance and a voracious media have reduced the space for student reflection and experimentation.
Last month, Vanity Fair posted a 4,700-word article on the plight of Trump-supporting undergraduate women at the University of North Carolina.
Pitched as an expose on the “mystifying” Trump backers who somehow manage to live, eat, and study amid widespread liberalism, the piece quoted at length from a handful of “these young women who align themselves with Trump,” aiming to “find out how it feels to be among the most despised women in America.”
I’m guessing it feels worse since this article went to press. Instead of a nuanced exploration of what it means to welcome a politically diverse class on a left-leaning campus — an issue common to just about every public flagship in the country — the VF piece focused on interrogating the half-formed political beliefs of 19-year-olds.
It adds to the growing genre of journalism and social media that makes culture-war sport of undergraduate politics, putting a harsh spotlight on young people at the precise moment we’re encouraging them to take intellectual risks, test new identities, and venture beyond their comfort zones.
Right-wing sites like College Fix and Campus Reform troll the internet for examples of liberal piety run amok, and they don’t make a distinction between administrators, professors, and students. Anything mockable will serve. Meanwhile, left-leaning outlets treat the existence of conservatism on campus as a quirky anomaly, reinforcing the caricature.
The losers in all of this are the students, who arrive with the same mix of earnestness and insecurity they always have. It’s perfectly reasonable for college leaders to face public scrutiny, but can we please hold college students to a lower ideological standard? Questions about curriculum or broad trends in youth politics are fair game, but giving national attention to the regular spats between undergrads feels just plain mean.
“You’re supposed to do some ridiculous things in college that don’t have the same consequences as later,” said Senator Lamar Alexander, speaking this spring at the New York Times Higher Ed Leaders Forum. “I’ve never, in confirmation hearings, for example, thought it was right to say that somebody wrote an article in college and therefore they can’t be a judge. I don’t think that’s right.”
To be clear, Alexander wasn’t excusing bad behavior or a sustained pattern of extremist views. He was just asking for a college grace period when it comes to political ideology. An avant-garde political science paper is not a campaign promise, and an intemperate remark during a philosophy seminar shouldn’t brand someone for life. Unfortunately, a combination of digital self-surveillance and a voracious media have reduced the space for student reflection and experimentation.
It’s hard to overstate the speed with which this happened. I remember working on the college newspaper, all of ten years ago, and getting a few calls from graduates asking if we could expunge raunchy quotes or regrettable viewpoints in online articles. Before digital archives, an employer or a spouse or a Senate committee might never have found an unfortunate tidbit from a college newspaper. Undergraduate life stayed where you left it.
Google changed all of that, and social media has changed it again with shocking speed. Eighty-nine percent of 18 to 29-year-olds use social media, according to the Pew Research Center, which means the next generation is eagerly creating its own public baggage.
We want to believe these online slates can be wiped clean, but there are no guarantees. Just as those embarrassing news stories are the property of the newspaper, social networks retain usage rights over indiscreet photos and long-ago rants. As many a shamed Facebooker can attest, once something enters the public sphere, it’s impossible to reel it back in. “DELETE” is not as final as it sounds.
In October, Vice writer, prolific Twitterer, and Millennial lightning rod Eve Peyser wrote a raw lament about living her post-college years under the glare and pressure of social media. “I don’t know who I am and I feel shame over the infinite ways I’ve misrepresented myself to an audience of cruel strangers,” she wrote. “It’s only natural that as I mature, growing into a person who no longer lives her life as if everyone’s watching and judging, I eventually feel like a victim of my past selves.”
Peyser has taken up journaling, a medium that ought to make a comeback as more of today’s over-scrutinized young people recognize the burdens of thinking aloud in public. I have stacks of notebooks going all the way back to seventh grade, filled with the random musings and strident beliefs that addled my adolescent brain. Blessedly, they’re locked in a trunk, not stored in the cloud.
I only escaped Peyser’s regret because I made it to college in 2004, just before Facebook became a thing, before the iPhone existed, before Twitter turned impulsive reactions into social currency. By the grace of good timing and a luddite disposition, I escaped having my college years digitally documented.
Today’s student aren’t so lucky. Small wonder they’re anxious about their personal lives and pessimistic about the public sphere. A survey 2018 high school graduates by the College Board found that students were eager to vote and volunteer in college, but strikingly less enthusiastic about expressing a public opinion. We may be seeing the cost of turning intellectual development into political entertainment.
Fighting the cultural drift means getting back to the core mission of higher education, insisting on the respectful and open exchange of ideas as the surest way to seek truth. Professors should talk honestly about the ways their own thinking evolved over time. When they trumpet an exciting breakthrough or a catchy research finding, colleges can emphasize the debate and uncertainty that marked the path of the discovery.
Perhaps most importantly, administrators should lean toward grace and understanding in the face of speech controversies, instead of immediately seeking to distance and disavow. Education is often messy and uncomfortable, but that’s the business we chose. Winning the news cycle by placating the loudest voice in the room is too small of a goal for universities, for institutions that should measure time and progress on a much longer horizon.
One line in the Vanity Fair article, coming after several paragraphs of tortured questioning about a sophomore sorority sister’s attitudes on the #MeToo movement, acknowledged this fundamental point: “Gabby seemed to be trying to work it all out.”
Of course she is. We should give her the space to do it.
Eric Johnson works for the University of North Carolina and the College Board.
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Originally published in The Chronicle of Higher Education.