The topic of a previous article which many thought just couldn’t be true has now reached a wider venue.
The Chronicle of Higher Education picks up where The Brown Daily Herald left off — highlighting student protesters and their complaints about the “difficulties” of balancing activism and coursework.
Highlighted is one of the founders of the University of Missouri’s “Concerned Student 1950” group, Maxwell C. Little, who says he was “tired all the time — physically, mentally, and emotionally” — last fall due to all of his protesting.
“Every time I would go home, I would shed tears,” says Little. “I couldn’t comprehend my work because, to be honest, when I had to catch back up it was tough. All I could think about was the movement and what to do next.”
Little also complains about the nastiness directed towards him on social media for his demonstrations — he was “tarnished and destroyed” by it.
At one point it became too much. He starting taking days off of Twitter and deactivated his Facebook account.
During those tense months on the Missouri campus, Mr. Little and fellow activists talked about mental health a lot. As awareness of mental-health issues has spread, and a bruising season of public protests has worn on, students have raised questions about what their universities should do to support the mental health of campus activists.
CUNY Hostos Community College “historian of student activism” Angus Johnson says that “[i]nstead of the ‘macho vibe’ of activists 40 years ago […] activists today are more concerned with taking care of one another.”
Interestingly, Johnson contends that students today are far less coddled than those of 50 years ago.
“This idea that the American academe is an ivory tower with a bunch of babied, coddled students just doesn’t reflect the reality of the American university today.”
Hmm, sacrificing schoolwork to protest a perceived offensive Halloween costume is “less babied” than doing so to protest a war for which non-college youth were drafted to fight? Complaining about microaggressions is “less coddled” than … burning draft cards?
Brown University senior Justin Gaines, who was featured in the Daily Herald article, says “[s]tudents don’t choose to be an activist.”
“Protesters don’t want to protest all the time, Gaines says, but if no one else is addressing critical issues, there’s no choice but to stand up.”
Students don’t choose to become protesters …?? As Jerry Seinfeld once joked, such individuals must be “prisoners of inertia.”
Clarence E. Lang of the University of Kansas adds that colleges “need to acknowledge the effects that lasting stigmas over mental-health issues can have on politically engaged students.”
One way in which his institution has “sympathized” with activists is by not dismissing “the 150 students in the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences who had failing grades at the end of the fall semester.”
That’s sure sounds like great preparation for the real world, doesn’t it? I’m sure future employers will gladly make accommodations for these folks when they fail to show up for work, or do not perform as required, because they were out protesting something.
Better yet, as Ben Shapiro wrote, “The parents of these dolts should be ashamed they’re spending hundreds of thousands of dollars to turn their teenagers into useless members of society more focused on feeling microaggressed than learning life skills.”
RELATED: Former Ivy League scholar turns whistleblower: Professors? Snobs. Young radicals? Coddled.
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