What’s Happened To The University?

A sociological exploration of its infantilisation

Frank Furedi

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN: 9781138212916
• eBook ISBN: 9781315449586
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Sociology
• Index: Social Sciences

The radical transformation that universities are undergoing today is no less far-reaching than the upheavals that it experienced in the 1960s. However today, when almost 50 per cent of young people participate in higher education, what occurs in universities matters directly to the whole of society.

On both sides of the Atlantic curious and disturbing events on campuses has become a matter of concern not just for academics but also for the general public. What is one to make of the growing trend of banning speakers? What's the meaning of trigger warnings, cultural appropriation, micro-aggression or safe spaces? And why are some students going around arguing that academic freedom is no big deal?

What's Happened To The University? offers an answer to the questions of why campus culture is undergoing such a dramatic transformation and why the term moral quarantine refers to the infantilising project of insulating students from offence and a variety of moral harms.

1
The Weaponisation of Emotions

The powerful authority that therapy culture has come to exercise over higher education first became clear to me in the winter of 1999. As I waited to meet a friend in the lobby of the University of London Union, my attention was drawn to a large poster displayed prominently on the wall, advertising one of the innumerable helplines that cater for university students. In bold black letters it proclaimed: ‘The stiff upper lip went out in the 40s.’ It seemed to me then that this in-your-face celebration of emotionalism contained an important statement about our times.¹ The stiff upper lip had become disparaged by a sensibility that celebrated the display of fragility. The twenty-first-century university would be an institution wedded to the new ethos of helplines, support groups, counselling services, mentors, facilitators and emotional conformism.

In Anglo-American universities today, the public display of emotionalism, vulnerability and fragility serve as cultural resources through which members of the academic community express their identity and make statements about their predicament. Newly arrived students have gone through a process of socialisation that encourages them to demand validation and, when it is not forthcoming, disposes them to display anger and outrage.

One disturbing illustration was provided by a widely reported controversy at Yale in November 2015. It began with a campus-wide email from Yale’s university committee on intercultural affairs, reminding students to beware of wearing culturally sensitive costumes on Halloween: the kind of infantilising communication about student behaviour that has acquired a ritualistic character on American campuses. However, this time a member of faculty, Erika Christakis, took exception to its paternalistic tone and passed on a message from her husband, Nicholas Christakis – Yale professor of psychology and master of the university’s Silliman College. The message suggested that ‘if you don’t like a costume someone is wearing, look away, or tell them you are offended’, and concluded that ‘free speech and the ability to tolerate offence are the hallmarks of a free and open society.’²

The email provoked a number of students to object that cultural sensitivity was far too important an issue to be trumped by freedom of expression. Both Erika and Nicholas Christakis were denounced for ignoring important racially sensitive issues. In line with the therapeutic ethos that dominates campuses, the protestors framed the issue of racial sensitivity through the psychological language of emotional harm; and as evidence, they drew attention to the damage caused by the Christakis email to their own state of mind.

According to a report of the meeting arranged by Yale President Peter Salovey with the undergraduates who felt upset by Erika Christakis’s email, the ‘students openly grieved, sobbed, and shared stories with faculty.’ Some apparently took exception to the fact that the members of the university administration did not respond to them through the language of emotion. Lex Barlowe, the president of Yale’s Black Student Alliance, complained that that ‘even the students’ discernible pain in the room sparked no visceral empathy.’ In her account of this meeting, Barlowe appears incredulous that the administrators did not respond emotionally to students’ account of ‘really deep trauma’. She noted that ‘the administrators were not emotional at all, which was part of what was strange and difficult for us’ – apparently, ‘they were calling on people as if we were having a regular meeting despite the fact that people were in tears’.³ In the end, Salovey embraced the idioms of emotional correctness, informing the public that he heard the students’ ‘cries for help’, and promised to deal with their ‘great distress’.

In effect, some of the students reacted to Erika Christakis’s criticism of the infantilisation of undergraduates by demanding to be treated as if they were fragile children in need of paternal validation. Writing in the Yale Herald, Jencey Paz, an undergraduate, complained: Nicholas Christakis is ‘the Master of Silliman College, it is his job to take care of us, and he is failing’.⁴ Paz reported, ‘I have friends who are not going to class, who are not doing their homework, who are losing sleep, who are skipping meals, and who are having breakdowns.’ Paz’s lament about the trauma inflicted on students by one blunt email meshed with a critique of the attempt to deal with the issue through the medium of rational debate. ‘But we don’t want to debate more,’ she argued – ‘Christakis needs to stop instigating more debate,’ because people were ‘hurting’.

Debate and, by implication, disagreement and criticism were portrayed as harmful to the conduct of campus affairs. This episode shows that at least a section of the university community has become alienated from what has served as the lifeblood of academic life.

Paz’s demand ‘to be taken care of’ by a faculty member resonates with the spirit of our times. So does the strategy of dramatising the psychological harm caused by the ideas communicated through an email. However, arguably the most significant feature of this incident at Yale is the self-conscious manner with which the angry students endowed the narrative of emotionalism with moral authority. The complaint that members of faculty were ‘not emotional’ but attempted to respond to the students with a dispassionate language indicates the low esteem accorded to reason. From the perspective of the Yale protestors, the very attempt to instigate debate not only ignores the pain suffered by students but also contributes to the harm they experience. The only response from faculty that was acceptable to the students was the validation of their pain. Without such validation, the students felt entitled to feel disrespected and badly treated.

It is this association of freedom of expression with the infliction of emotional injury that represents one of the most distinct features of the illiberal zeitgeist. Once debate is perceived as a medium for inflicting discomfort, and once freedom of expression is seen as a risk factor for causing emotional pain, the status of academic freedom and of free speech is irrevocably compromised. They become negotiable commodities to be traded for emotional well-being.

The cultural script of vulnerability

It is not possible to understand the incident at Yale, let alone the prevailing ethos motivating the conduct and attitude of many young people in higher education and the numerous disputes surrounding campus politics, without an overview of the cultural idioms and ideals influencing their behaviour. The language of emotionalism, which draws attention to the fragile identity of students, draws on cultural resources that prevail throughout society. The terms used at Yale referring to trauma, mental breakdown or pain have become taken-for-granted concepts through which people give meaning to the problems of life.⁵ As Mark Neocleous observes, ‘“That was really traumatic!” is now thought to be an appropriate response to any event that would once have been described as “rather unpleasant” or “quite difficult”’.⁶

The transformation of dramatic psychological conditions, such as trauma, into banal cultural concepts has important implications for the way that people make sense of their predicament. As the experience of discomfort becomes equated with psychological damage, people’s perception of everyday reality alters. Because the statement ‘I am offended’ or ‘I feel uncomfortable with your words’ draws attention to psychological harms, it legitimates the call to end discussion. It also entitles people to protection from both criticism and judgement. This reframing of existential problems as emotional deficits has become integrated into the cultural vernacular, to the point that they are available for ‘the construction of everyday reality’.⁷

One of the clearest manifestations of this trend is the widespread and unquestioned use of the term ‘vulnerable’. Vulnerability and its companion terms, ‘vulnerable groups’, ‘the vulnerable’ and ‘the most vulnerable’, are used to represent and characterise a growing range of groups and people. The terms ‘vulnerable man’ and ‘vulnerable women’ hint at unspecified deficits yet can also connote the positive attribute of someone in touch with their feelings.

The term ‘vulnerability’ is habitually used as if it is a permanent feature of a person’s biography. It is presented and experienced as a natural state of being that shapes human responses, and is a label that frequently describes entire groups in society. That is why it has become common to use the recently constructed concept of ‘vulnerable groups’. This does not simply refer to distinct groups of psychologically distraught, or economically insecure, individuals. Children – indeed, all children – are automatically assumed to be vulnerable. A study of the emergence of the concept of ‘vulnerable children’ shows that in most published literature, the concept is treated as ‘a relatively self-evident concomitant of childhood which requires little formal exposition’. It is a taken-for-granted idea that is rarely elaborated, and ‘children are considered vulnerable as individuals by definition, through both their physical and other perceived immaturities.’ Moreover, this state of vulnerability is presented as an intrinsic attribute: it is ‘considered to be an essential property of individuals, as something which is intrinsic to children’s identities and personhoods, and which is recognisable through their beliefs and actions, or indeed through just their appearance’.⁸

The perception of vulnerability is so deeply immersed in our cultural imagination that it is easy to overlook the fact that it is a relatively recently invented concept.⁹ The term ‘vulnerable group’ did not exist in the 1970s. One study notes that the tendency to frame children’s problems through the metaphor of vulnerability became visible in the late 1980s but took off in 1990s.¹⁰ And when these children turned into young adults and arrived at the university gates, they continued to possess this identity.

The emergence of the term ‘vulnerable student’ ran in parallel with wider cultural trends. Our search of the LexisNexis database of English language newspapers failed to find any references to ‘vulnerable students’ during the 1960s and the 1970s. There were 13 references to vulnerable students during the 1980s, of which seven referred to pupils in schools. The first reference to vulnerable university students appeared in The Times (London) in 1986, The New York Times in 1991 and The Guardian in 1995. But as illustrated in Table 1.1, there was a significant increase in references to vulnerable students during the 1990s, and a veritable explosion of the term in the first decade of the millennium.

Table 1.1 References to vulnerable students in LexisNexis database

1990–1995	55 references
1995–2000	127 references
2000–2005	383 references
2005–2010	1,136 references

During the year 2015–2016, there were 1,407 references to our search term. Even taking into account the likelihood that LexisNexis has expanded the sources cited in its database, the remarkable increase in allusions to the vulnerability of students provides a striking illustration of an important transformation of the way that university students are represented and perceived.¹¹

The idiom ‘vulnerable’ should not be interpreted as merely a new term for the weak or the powerless. Vulnerability is used to signify a psychological attribute that is bound up with the very meaning of contemporary personhood and evokes a distinct approach towards the ideal of human agency. It is integral to the consciousness through which people construct their reality. The tendency to represent vulnerability as an important dimension of one’s identity is both bestowed and embraced. It has also been appropriated by a variety of advocacy organisations and pressure groups to legitimate their cause. That is why people can so readily begin to think of themselves and others as at risk of psychological harm. In this respect, the students at Yale who flaunted their trauma to the university authorities were drawing on a cultural script that shapes people’s behaviour far beyond university campuses.

The twenty-first-century version of personhood communicates a narrative that continually raises doubts about people’s emotional capacity to deal with physical and emotional harms. The transformation of distress into a condition of emotional injury has as its premise the belief that people are likely to be seriously damaged by unpleasant encounters and the setbacks occurring in everyday life. As we explain in Chapter 8, the current discussion of trigger warnings in universities indicates, the term ‘trauma’ can be applied to experiences as banal as being disturbed by reading about distressing events.¹²

Today’s intense sensitivity towards people’s vulnerability to psychological harm is informed by a uniquely pessimistic account of the workings of human subjectivity and personhood. The downsizing of expectations regarding human agency, along with the normalisation of the sensibility of powerlessness, is intimately linked to the wider mood of cultural pessimism afflicting Western societies.¹³ Numerous studies and surveys noted that in the 1970s, trust and respect for the institutions of Western societies took a dramatic fall. From this point onwards, the estrangement of people from politics and public life was closely paralleled by a mood of fatalism and c...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• CONTENTS
• Preface
• Introduction
• 1 The weaponisation of emotions
• 2 The harms of the academy
• 3 Culture war
• 4 Safe space: a quarantine against judgment
• 5 Verbal purification: the diseasing of free speech
• 6 Microaggression: the disciplining of manners and thought
• 7 The quest for a new etiquette
• 8 Trigger warnings: the performance of awareness
• 9 Why academic freedom must not be rationed: an argument against the freedom–security trade-off
• Bibliography
• Index