Why Students Don’t Suffer (Part I)
The best American college students are perhaps the most prepared, accomplished, and engaged students ever with stellar academic accomplishments and active civic engagement.[1] At the same time, they also might be the most frightened and anxious ones, too, being mediated with mood-stabilizing drugs and monitored by compliance offices about what to say and think.[2] This paradox is a reflection of the ever-widening chasm between, on the one hand, the remarkable external achievements of these students and, on the other hand, the paucity of examination about their interior lives, unless it is the therapeutic speech of empowerment and identity politics. Students seemingly move from one achievement to the next without suffering any setbacks in either external affirmations or interior reflection.
In these essays I will argue that the external achievements and affirmations of students and the lack of self-examination of their interior lives is a result of the university seeing them as commodities and customers rather than human beings who need cultivation. Students consequently see suffering – to be vulnerable, exposed, and unguarded – as a type of personal weakness and moral failing because it does not affirm their external accomplishments. There is to be no discrepancy between the flatness of one’s interior life and the mountain of achievements in the external one. To do so otherwise is tantamount to admitting failure.
The exception to this is identity politics where suffering is acceptable because of one’s race, ethnicity, gender, class, or sexuality and seen as a badge of honor to be expressed in ideological cant. For those students who do not belong to a suspect class, they are expected to acknowledge and share in the suffering of these groups. But instead of generating genuine sympathy and empathy, these students only confirm their meritocratic superiority by publicly acknowledging their moral smugness in being self-aware. Rather than trying to understand the feelings and situations of the less fortunate and undertaking concrete action to help, students resort to ideological and emotive language.
In spite of their best intentions, offices of diversity need to address the problem of suffering in a way to cultivate the interior lives of all students so that they can sympathize and empathize with others. By suffering, I mean the acknowledge of one’s own inadequacy of being dependent upon another person; and by empathy, I mean the understanding and recognition of the feelings and situations of those who are less fortunate. Instead of promoting an ideological agenda, the university, with its administrators, staff, and faculty, should focus on developing the interior lives of their students under the guidance of reason, logic, and evidence. By doing so, students will recognize the gap between their external and interior lives and thereby may recognize that suffering, to sympathize and empathize, is not a sign of powerlessness but the beginning of the path towards wisdom.
Students’ Character
The best college students are excellent test-takers, have impressive resumes, and dutifully fulfill the requirements to receive an A in their classes.[3] They are respectful to authority, accept the ideology of diversity, and are advocates of social justice.[4] They are David Brooks’ “organizational kids” that he had described a generation ago and are the crowning achievement of the American education system in its project to mold students’ characters to be flexible, nonjudgmental, and acquisitive in accumulating various skill sets and ways of knowing. [5] They see themselves as citizens of the world and look forward to participating in a globalized economy where they can live anywhere, perform any task, and make friends with anyone.
Yet students are not motivated by a love or passion of learning for its own sake but rather out of a fear or anxiety of being left behind in a winner-take-all world.[6] A globalized economy has made it more difficult to secure a middle-class lifestyle, the orthodoxy of diversity and groupthink has made it challenging to publicly proclaim otherwise, and the unmooring of knowledge into postmodernism has made it impossible to determine what is precious and valuable, much less what constitutes one’s own self-worth.[7] Formed by a childhood of constant test-taking, scheduled activities, and technological surveillance, today’s students respond by accumulating achievements upon achievements and skill set upon skill set in the effort to steel themselves against to the uncertainty of their future.
In this resume arms race against one another, students are taught that suffering is a sign of weakness: to be vulnerable, exposed, and unguarded are signs of a personal and moral failing. To be left behind in the globalized economy is to be one of life’s losers. Hence, the constant need and continual efforts for external affirmation – whether in social media, academic achievements, or social status – to validate their choices, career paths, and even spouses. Suffering in this sense – to acknowledge dependence upon another person and thereby recognize one’s own inadequacy – is to be squeezed out at all costs in the process of college admission, summer internships, and profitable jobs afterwards.
Paradoxically the refusal to acknowledge one’s own suffering encourages a climate to empathize with the suffering of others, particularly with those who are less privileged. To understand and uphold the legitimacy of the feelings and situations of those less fortunate is to reassure students of their own sense of achievement, status, and superiority in this winner-take-all world. Embolden by the offices of diversity on campus, students engage in identity politics and groupthink not to sympathize with the non-privileged – to recognize that their suffering and experience are the same as theirs – but to confirm their sense of achievement, worth, and place in the world.
Thus, the creation of “safe spaces” and the embedment of the ideology of diversity in university life are well-intended but misguided attempts to cultivate students’ interior lives.[8] These policies are well-intended because they try to address the thoughts and feelings of students who believe themselves to be marginalized on campus, tapping into their interior life so that they, and others, can learn from it. However, these policies are misguided because they substitute ideology and emotivism rather than reason and evidence to access students’ interior lives, thereby making them not individual human beings that one can suffer, sympathize, and empathize with but instead groups capable of mobilization for ideological ends.
This lack of an interior life in students, where they can acknowledge their vulnerabilities and therefore need for others, is the source of their suffering. Raised in a world of relentless external affirmations, today’s students were not allowed the space to grow and develop unnoticed, with the trials, errors, and mistakes that life brings with it. Students live in a persistent state of fear of being noticed and shamed if caught flat-footed. Rather than risking embarrassment and humiliation, students have become nonjudgmental and nice, playing it safe where their interior life is defined and shaped almost exclusively by their external one.
Not surprisingly, the absence of a developed interior life leads students to adopt libertarianism or identity politics.[9] The ideology of libertarianism feeds into students’ beliefs of meritocracy, that they deserve what they have and where they are now because of their own singular achievements, whereas identity politics gives permission to empathize with the non-privileged while, at the same time, implicitly reassure themselves of their own merit and superiority. What is missing is a genuine sense of communal politics where people can openly and civilly acknowledge, discuss, and debate their differences. A place where people can disagree without fear of ad hominin reprisal and see whether a common good could be achieved.
Teachers therefore must find a way to cultivate the interior life of students such that it is not dependent upon external affirmation. They should encourage students to take risks and make mistakes. One way to accomplish this is to have students realize that luck had played as much a role in forming who they are as their own efforts and abilities: their success may have been dependent upon factors beyond their control, thereby raising questions about their earned standing and superiority. And if this were the case, then being vulnerable, exposed, and unguarded may be a trait not to run away from but instead to acknowledge and embrace. It prompts students to recognize their own inadequacies and therefore their own needs for another person.
There are a variety of ways that teachers can attempt to cultivate an interior life with an internal affirmation for students. One is to have students read certain works where authors reflect upon their own interior life: Socrates in Plato’s Apology, Crito, and Phaedo; Augustine’s and Rousseau’s Confessions; Marcus Aurelius’ Meditations and Montaigne’s Essays; the autobiographies of Benjamin Franklin, Mahatma Gandhi, Anne Frank, and Nelson Mandela. These and similar readings can reveal to students the richness, diversity, and importance of an interior life, especially when it does not correspond to the external one. These works can provide a template for how students can reflect on their own lives.
The assignments that teachers can give to their students is another way to prompt students to think about their interiority of their lives. Whether it is journal entries, analytical essays, public presentations, or group projects, these assignments are less about mastery of the material than for students to explore questions that do not have a definitive answer. Teachers consequently should evaluate these assignments with this purpose in mind, the cultivation of an interior life, and allow students to revise their assignments in the hope that they learn there is nothing shameful about making a mistake or taking a risk.
If done properly, seminars, small group activities, and the Socratic Method are wonderful ways to teach students the art of inquiry and disagreement where the virtues of magnanimity, corrigibility, and civility can be learned.[10] In these modes of teachings, students can learn to sympathize and empathize with others in a way where reason, logic, and evidence are the conveyers of feelings, attitudes, and moods.[11] It is a way to show students that insight and wisdom can come by being vulnerable, exposed, and unguarded in a setting of equals.
Finally, within the confines of professional expectations and behavior, teachers should be available to meet with students individually to discuss not only their external achievements but also their interior lives. Sometimes what endures more in a student’s mind is a conversation with his or her teacher rather than the content of what the student had learnt that semester. To be respected and loved and to be taken seriously is what most students want as they try to figure out how to navigate their lives in the university. Whether in the classroom or during office hours, it is impossible to know which moment will have a lasting impact on a student. But if teachers can show to students that their interior life can be as rich, if not more rewarding, than their external one, they have done more than enough to help students see there is more to life than production and consumption.
Notes
[1] I would like to thank Richard Avramenko for his comments on this paper.
[2] This characterization does not apply to all American college students but, as we will see below, it is a reflection of what is occurring on most college campuses today.
[3] W. Deresiewicz (2014) Excellent Sheep: The Miseducation of the American Elite and the Way to a Meaningful Life (New York: Free Press). For a view that disagrees, see D. Bok (2006) Our Underachieving Colleges: A Candid Look at How Much Students Learn and Why They Should Be Learning More (Princeton: Princeton University Press) and R. Arum and J. Roksa (2011) Academically Adrift: Limited Learning on College Campuses (Chicago: University of Chicago Press).
[4] F. Furedi (2016) What’s Happened to the University? A Sociological Exploration of Its Infanilisation (New York: Routledge); M. Rectenwalk (2018) Springtime for Snowflakes: “Social Justice” and Its Postmodern Parentage (Nashville, TN: New England Review Press).
[5]D. Brooks (2001) “The Organizational Kid,” The Atlantic, April. Available at https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2001/04/the-organization-kid/302164/.
[6] R. Srigley (2015) “Dear Parents: Everything You Need to Know About Your Son’s and Daughter’s University But Don’t,” Los Angeles Review of Books, 9 December. Available at https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/dear-parents-everything-you-need-to-know-about-your-son-and-daughters-university-but-dont/; G. Lukianoff and J. Haidt (2018) The Coddling of the American Mind: How Good Intentions and Bad Ideas Are Setting Up a Generation for Failure (New York: Penguin); B. Denizet-Lewis (2017) “Why are More American Teenagers Than Ever Suffering From Severe Anxiety,” New York Times, October 11. Available at https://www.nytimes.com/2017/10/11/magazine/why-are-more-american-teenagers-than-ever-suffering-from-severe-anxiety.html.
[7] D. Brook (2007) The Trap: Selling Out to Stay Afloat in Winner-Take-All-America (New York: Times Books); F. Furedi (2016) What’s Happened to the University?; M. Rectenwalk (2018) Springtime for Snowflakes.
[8] W. B. Michaels (2006) The Trouble with Diversity: How We Learned to Love Identity and Ignore Inequality (Dallas: Metropolitan); J. H. McWhorter, (2015) “Closed Minds on Campus,” Wall Street Journal, 27 November. Available at https://www.wsj.com/articles/closed-minds-on-campus-1448634626; F. Furedi (2016) What’s Happened to the University? B. Ginsberg (2017) “The Unholy Alliance of College Administrators and Left-Liberal Activists,” Modern Age, 59/3, 17-27; M. Bauerlin (2017) “The Bad Faith of the Professors,” Modern Age 59/3, 49-60; M. Rectenwalk (2018) Springtime for Snowflakes.
[9] P. Wood (2014) “Libertarian vs. Progressives: The New Campus Divide,” Minding the Campus: Reforming Our University, November 30. Available at https://www.mindingthecampus.org/2014/11/30/libertarians-vs-progressives-the-new-campus-divide/; W. Egginton (2018) The Splintering of the American Mind: Identity Politics, Inequality, and Community on Today’s College Campuses (London: Bloomsbury).
[10] D. Hess (2009). Controversy in the Classroom: The Democratic Power of Discussion (New York: Routledge); D. E. Hess and P. McAvoy (2015) The Political Classroom: Evidence and Ethics in Democratic Education (New York: Routledge); L. Trepanier (2017) The Socratic Method Today: Student-Centered and Transformative Teaching in Political Science (New York: Routledge); S. Yaylaci and E. Beauvais (2017) “The Role of Social Group Membership on Classroom Participation,” PS: Political Science & Politics 50/2, 559-64.
[11] Specific examples can be found in and J. von Heyking and L. Trepanier (2012) Teaching in an Age of Ideology (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books) and L. Trepanier (2012) The Liberal Arts in America (Cedar City, UT: Southern Utah University Press).