Why I’m doubling down on millennial college students

After the election, I was going to leave my college students mid-semester. Just stop showing up to class and move out of town. I felt I had good reason to.

Before joining the faculty at Marquette University a year ago, I’d worked as a criminal defense lawyer specializing in death penalty cases in Southern California. My job was to figure out how to persuade a jury of strangers to see society’s worst murderers as human beings. And now, with ballot measures affirming public support for the death penalty in California and other states, my career switch into the ivory tower seemed like a cop-out. There was a lot of humanizing yet to do.

But my angst went far beyond the narrow world of capital punishment. I was dismayed to see the election portending disturbing developments in broader issues that the death penalty is bound up with. Economics. Equality. State power over individual lives. I wanted to be fighting on the front lines. Why waste another minute in a classroom?

Then I saw the tweet that went viral: the clairvoyant passages by the late philosopher Richard Rorty, warning that working class resentment would empower a “strongman” who would undo decades of advances in social justice.

I thought about the students in the very first introductory criminology course I taught as a fledgling professor last fall.

I thought about my surprise realizing how ready they were — eager, even — to understand victims and lawbreakers alike with empathy.

I thought about the many hallway chats I’ve had with students since then — evidence to me of the famous progressivism that millennials bring to social issues.

And then, with sadness, I thought about how much I now take their compassion for granted. Because if the nation is heading into dark times, this could well be the peak before a long, indefinite decline.

The open hearts and minds of the millennial generation are the nation’s best antidote to the anger and bigotry that have dispersed like a toxin across the land. The young people I see every day stand primed to call out these dangers for what they are. And they are uniquely equipped to cultivate in themselves and in others the deep empathy our country will need.

It is for these reasons that I’m not giving up my post. Instead, I will double down on the future of this exceptional generation to keep their exceptional sensibilities alive for as long as possible.

Next semester, I’ll be teaching a new course called “Empathy, Crime, and Justice.” The reading list includes two books, placed side by side, that tell two human stories: Ta-Nehisi Coates’ personal education on the vulnerability of black bodies alongside J.D. Vance’s quest for dignity amidst the decay of white Rust Belt society. These are recent works whose insights would have helped me years ago on two capital cases — the African American gang member from inner-city Los Angeles, and the white meth addict from neighboring exurban Riverside County.

The message of the course will be gentle but clear. We must personally identify with the fear and deprivation shared among too many who call this country home. We must see in our neighbors something of ourselves.

So yes, there’s a lot of humanizing yet to do. But I’ll remain right here, surrounded by these open hearts and minds. Together, we’ll inoculate ourselves with empathy. Together, we’ll forge our intellectual and emotional defenses against what is to come. And, when we’re ready, empathy will be the contagion we will together spread — across races, across classes, across generations.

Jesse Cheng is an assistant professor of Social and Cultural Sciences at Marquette University.