Robust reality not comfortable

IRECENTLY came across a news story about how a small group of students at Cornell University held a “cry-in” to “mourn” Donald Trump’s electoral victory.

Cornell ranks amongst the top universities in the world and one can presume of course, that it has some of the most ambitious and high-performing students anywhere in the world.

But they were so stunned and traumatised by the election results, according to reports in The Washington Times, that they had to hold a cry-in to comfort each other.

Here in South Africa we would laugh.

But in the United States, there is currently a huge debate about whether universities have become spaces of intellectual infantilisation and political correctness, to the extent that a growing segment of students want to be shielded from difficult debate.

There is an over-generalisation of the definitions of trauma, so much so that any discomfort experienced on campus can be considered an anxiety trigger.

And it is elite universities such as Cornell which are becoming more and more accepting of the emotional sheltering of students.

Bear with me as I tie our context with theirs.

It has become apparent to me, and some other colleagues teaching at elite South African universities, that there is an increasing demand amongst certain segments of the student body to be “sheltered” or to be made “comfortable” while they are at university.

These students usually come from ordinary middle- or upper-middleclass backgrounds and generally do not have that much diversity of life experience before they get to university.

There they experience the new discomforts and difficulties of being at university as akin to psychological trauma.

Prior to coming to university, these students have generally had relatively sheltered, middle-class schooling and lifestyles where they bear little responsibility for much outside of their own teenage things.

This is because their parents were always there to take care of things and ensure that they have generally had stable childhoods, free from the major stresses of the world at large.

In the South African context, some of these students are apolitical and generally want university to be just that.

They refuse to engage with any of the socioeconomic problems faced by fellow students and generally are hostile to anything that would remind them that even though they are paying a lot of money to be at an “elite university”, a large proportion of their peers are not elite and are struggling to remain financially afloat.

Another smaller segment of these students is actually very politicised and cares deeply about social injustice.

However, their expression of their politics is characterised by drawing from any discrimination and pain they have experienced within the middle-class and depending excessively on theory learnt in the classroom rather than from actual life.

This tends to lead to them theorising about injustice from the position of middle-class suburban experience, impervious to how these things actually work in the lives of the poor majority.

This is why the Cornell students felt it appropriate to hold a cry-in to comfort each other over Trump’s victory, which they felt was an injustice.

In my time of working within an elite university, I have encountered so much of this kind of comfortseeking by mostly privileged students (and some staff supporting them).

I think it is strange and it signals an intellectual decline within elite universities because it makes it very difficult to actually speak about reality if this somehow contradicts the worldview of the comfort-seeking students.

In this kind of university, you will see that it becomes increasingly impossible to have debate, to put difficult issues on the table, to contradict dominant political thought lest it hurt students’ feelings or, god forbid, shatter their preconceived ideas or complicate their ideologies.

The remedy is to help students build resilience and mental robustness, and not to pride ourselves in providing mere “comfort”.