College Students Are Sooo Sensitive...

According to recent and widespread media coverage, the college bubble is bigger than ever. Colleges, claim the media, have been churning out a generation of graduates with worthless degrees. Worse, students are coddled, privileged, wholly lacking in resilience, and driving their campuses off the cliff of political correctness. What are we supposed to do about this crisis?

I suggest we reframe the alarmists' claims. These pundits rarely set foot on college campuses. They critique colleges and students from afar or by using singular anecdotes to justify broad conclusions. I visit more than a hundred colleges each year, and here's what the pundits don't get: Students are so sensitive, and this is one of their best qualities.

This tail end of the Millennial generation venturing through their college years has emerged as social justice champions, so much so that "Sensitives" might be a more accurate term than "Millennials" to describe them. What a marvelous quality to possess, to be champions for social justice. If administrators are perplexed by this, and media commentators are vexed by it, consider that American society was transformed by youth culture in the 1960s.

Student protests bookended by Berkeley in 1964 and Jackson State in 1970 marked the power and investiture of the student social justice movement. Today's champions of social justice on college campuses are a cyclical revisitation of that era, and will likewise leave their own indelible mark on our society.

"...Here's what the pundits don't get: Students are so sensitive, and this is one of their best qualities."

We may not agree with their every aim and tactic, but this segment of the Millennial generation has a voice, is dedicated to causes they believe in, and is motivated to reshape the world in their image. I'd rather this than cynicism, pessimism or apathy. If right now they want to eradicate every vestige of slavery and fire every dean who is slow to enact a meaningful diversity plan, we need to understand that their methods will mature with time, as will their expectations and demands.

Eventual maturation may be little consolation when facing the myriad of issues that came to a head in 2015 and will likely reemerge and expand in 2016 with the impending return of students to campuses. Thus, educators should be returning with the goal of helping students to better grasp the ways in which the subjects and impacts of their protests are both complex and rife with varying shades of grey. To take but a few examples from 2015:

• Woodrow Wilson segregated government agencies during his presidency, but appointed the first Jew to the Supreme Court. How should Princeton reckon with that mixed legacy as it reviews the names of its schools, buildings and other campus memorials to Wilson?

Our role as educators is to facilitate a forum for these ideas, and to offer a reasonably safe environment for students to hone their messaging and calibrate their sensitivities. For each list of demands students present, we should see opportunities to make colleges better places. Telling this generation of students, "slow down" and "change takes time" does not resonate, so we need to shift our approach.

Why wait for the disruption that results from a protest if a campus climate committee or inclusion task force can get out ahead of turmoil? Higher education has been slow to respond to the phenomenon of the social justice champion as a generational shift, perhaps seeing in later Millennials a contrast with the values and traits of the first Millennials to attend college, but I see an evolution, instead.

"Higher education has been slow to respond to the phenomenon of the social justice champion as a generational shift ... but I see an evolution, instead."

It's possible to be resilient and still want a safe space. Perhaps the rub is in how we use the term "safe." It's possible for the privileged to experience disempowerment and exclusion. It's possible to acknowledge a new politics of language that avoids gratuitous exclusion and marginalization without the thought-policing that has come to characterize old-school political correctness. It's possible to validate pedagogical concerns about re-traumatization without threatening academic freedom or labeling everything with trigger warnings. It's possible to usher in a new era of sensitive and inclusive dialogue that is not hyper-sensitive. It's possible to improve the campus sensitivity to microaggressions without making them punishable offenses.

If you look carefully at many of the anecdotes the pundits use to impugn higher education, they're often pointing fingers at the wrong targets. Intolerance for course content is more common in parents than students. Lessons on micro-aggressions originate mostly with administrators, not students. Policies on offensive speech are crafted by diversity and inclusion personnel.

So, are the campus leaders reflecting the desires of students, or attempting to shape them? Should it be entirely one or the other? The pundits forget that our job as educators is to meet the needs of this generation, not to change their fundamental orientation and worldview to match ours.

Since we can't change their worldview, bemoaning and demeaning it won't help. We can't really stop the protests and surely we can't contain social media, so I suggest we move toward the protestors, not away from them. With social media as an unprecedented multiplier and amplifier, today's social justice champions may be as effective or more effective than their hippie progenitors. I, for one, am glad for that.

Brett A. Sokolow, Esq., is the President and CEO of The NCHERM Group, LLC, one of the country's leading higher education law practices. www.ncherm.org