What’s Happened To The University?: A sociological exploration of its infantilisation 1st Edition

This is a very interesting and important book. It explains how we have reached the point that University of Michigan law students are being offered Play-Doh to help them calm down after the presidential election. It explains trigger warnings, microaggressions and their connections with identity politics and the ‘medicalization’ of the classroom. It explains the ‘it’s all about me’ higher education generation. It explains how the modern university has become infantilized.

The essential point is that once upon a time we went to college to be tested—to be tested on our ideas, on our knowledge, on our ability to meet challenges and expand our horizons. Now students come to college to be validated. The ethos of the elementary school has been transferred to higher education. Students want the ‘adult’ equivalent of bluebird stickers affixed to their papers; they want pats on the head; they want encouragement. They want their ‘victimhood’ to be acknowledged, respected and rewarded. They have spent most of their lives under adult supervision and they are comfortable with administrators and counselors telling them what to do and how to think. They want safety; they fear discomfort. They do not value academic freedom or freedom of speech if those bedrock principles impinge on their world in ways that upset them. And they are the judges of what upsets them. Perceived slights may be completely unintentional, but if they are ‘perceived’ they are absolutely real.

Talcott Parsons described this elementary and secondary school model as “permissive therapeutics”; permissive therapeutics are now the operating pedagogical principles in higher education. There are two basic problems with this: a) they destroy the content, quality and integrity of higher education; and b) they are inordinately expensive to implement. Hence (in part), the absurd costs of contemporary higher education—armies of tutors, handholders, counselors and ‘diversity industry’ non-teaching academic staff are hired. They displace tenure track faculty (and bury the faculty in rules, processes and shibboleths). The instructional budget shrinks; tenure track faculty are replaced by contingent faculty without job security and the possibilities of controlling and intimidating the faculty multiply.

One simple example: a teacher calls on a student in class. The student perceives that s/he is being oppressed and complains. Another student perceives that s/he is being oppressed because s/he is not being called on. Both students are ‘uncomfortable’. Some may be overly sensitive; others may be unprepared for class and don’t want to be embarrassed; they know that if they play the ‘discomfort’ card they can go to class without having to read the material. Since the teachers can be reported to the political correctness and identity politics apparatchiks or savaged on anonymous student evaluations they take the path of least resistance and stop calling on students in class. ‘Comfort’ is restored; the students learn less and do not need to be accountable.

We now pay much more for ‘higher education’ and get much less. How did we arrive at this insanity? The short answer is that College of Education pedagogy has been extended to the world of putative adults. Activists in support of identity politics and faculty obsessed with race/class/gender victimology embraced the template. Corporate administrators anxious to please students so that they could collect their tuition and featherbed their bureaucracies were only too happy to join in the effort.

For the longer explanation, read this important book. One caveat: the book is styled with very small type and 40+ lines per page of text. Someone failed to proofread it, because it is filled with errors—misspellings, omitted words, and so on. The book is still very readable; social science jargon is kept to a minimum. The errors do not impact intelligibility but they are annoying.

Bottom line: a very important book.

This book serves a useful purpose in collating examples of the breadth of "political correctness" in its broadest and multifarious aspects. It was disappointing, as an American, to learn that the problem seems ubiquitous in the Anglophone world; my perspective has allowed me to believe it was American, or at worst North American. (To what degree it has also debilitated non-Anglophone institutions isn't clear.) But one downside of the book is that it is much too discursive. One has the impression throughout most of it that it consists of an assemblage of anecdotes (both disappointing and droll) embedded in much too many words, as if to qualify as a book it had to be expanded adequately--perhaps so. One cannot severely criticize the absence of a really clear and convincing solution to the degradation of so-called higher education, and suppression of independent and challenging thoughts by political bullies, but one is left with serious disappointment that someone moved to write a book on this topic has not taken up the cudgels to fight furiously to restore sanity to universities. Perhaps academic pressures require such a book to have a more neutral, clinical tone, than a polemical one. In any event, one is left with the thought that perhaps there needs to be an Association of Academically Rigorous Institutions to which universities willing to ascribe to the recent principles of the University of Chicago could join. They could thereby distinguish themselves from the pusillanimous kindergartens now passing for educational institutions and appeal to those students and parents who seek the emotional and intellectual challenges which eschew trigger warnings and safe spaces. It isn't clear that there is any other way to restore sanity, and excellence.

Furedi's courageous presentation of what has been obvious to so many university teachers for a decade or more is a breath of fresh air. As colleges and universities sell more and more degrees to hapless first-generation students who are often not prepared to read basic literature (philosophy, creative writing, science), the trend becomes more understandable, thanks to Professor Furedi. College is for this group is an extension of failed or incomplete socialization at home and during the first 12 years or more of schooling ((including the institutionalized forms of child abuse and neglect known as preschool ane daycare). Open presentation of challenging ideas has been replaced very often by a sort of pseudo group therapy where adolescents may present their identity formation, confusion and occasional crisis as a topic, instead of a theorem, principle, concept, or text to be elucidated by someone with many years of reading and reflection (the professor). Instead of such guided exploration, we have the medicalized ("therapeutic") classroom. Ongoing childhood-preserving "activities" supported by safe spaces, worries about microaggressions, and trigger warnings insulate students from confrontation with their received opinions and media-ted "information" in a four year adventure of self-discovery. Congratulations to Furedi!