Out-of-province students, please stay home
This is not the time to be welcoming thousands of unsupervised young people to our city, Laura Wenzel says.
Montreal’s universities, fonts of energy and activism, are welcoming back students for the fall term, which will primarily consist of online classes. I don’t know about you, but the impending onslaught of thousands of unsupervised teenagers in our city’s densest neighbourhoods scares me.
We may not know much about the coronavirus, but we do know something about adolescent brain development.
In particular, we know that the prefrontal cortex — the part of the brain that uses reasoning, rather than emotion, to make decisions — is under construction until about the age of 25. So, we can ask our 19- and 20-yearold students to wear masks and to socially distance, and some will make a serious effort to do so, but there will be others simply too cognitively undeveloped to be able to follow rules, study and take out the trash on their own.
Mix this with unfettered access to alcohol, regardless of whether bars, those bastions of healthy behaviour, are open. This readily available substance is proven to have rendered at least one moderately bright person, namely myself at the age of 19, into an insufferable idiot, joking and roughhousing and dispersing droplets all around.
Fortunately, when I was a hard-partying university student, I crossed paths daily with serious, disciplined individuals — rigorous professors, demanding administrators, ambitious peers — whose example and expectations kept me from disappearing entirely off the deep end.
If my network had been primarily online, the hole that I had started digging for myself could have become much deeper.
My teenager, who is a second-year Concordia University student originally from the United States, will take online classes this fall.
The two of us live in Montreal, but if we had still lived in the U.S., I would not allow my teen to return here during the pandemic. My kid wouldn’t want to return, either, since the spontaneous human connections so central to the “college experience” would be missing.
Montreal continues to be hit hard by the pandemic. This is not the moment to be inviting thousands of unaccompanied young people to settle into the city. The universities presumably fear losing the revenue brought by out-of-province students, believing that these students will disappear forever if they are not living in the city even while all their classes are online.
But I wonder how much we would lose in lives should students come back here this fall.
Some parents face other fears: that their child may hate them (temporarily) if they’re not allowed to move to their university city, or may experience a (temporary) delay in the maturation process that living (somewhat) independently can provide. To these parents I would ask, how would they manage the (permanent) guilt should their far-away child find themselves touched by a virus out of control? In that light, temporary setbacks may suddenly seem palatable.
This is not the first time humans have faced events that derailed the plans of entire generations. Many are far more catastrophic: wars, tsunamis, coups d’état, slavery. As John Lennon said, life is what happens to you while you’re busy making other plans. And if one never learns how to manage the unexpected, a college degree is not going to help.
I implore our political, health and university leaders to consider the well-being of the city and the students. Ask students from afar to stay home this fall. Figure out to help the universities survive lost revenue. I implore parents to provide an example of adult behaviour. Encourage your children to practise delaying gratification and to grow and adapt from home. And I implore students: if you truly love Montreal, protect it.
Find creative ways to strengthen your hometown community, and come back to the city when it’s safe for all of us to enjoy being with each other.