A Brief Note Regarding the Public Musings of College Students
For the love of God, stop paying attention.
The hard-working staff here at Spoiler Alerts has noticed that the usual suspects are braying very loudly because some Harvard student organizations said some really stupid things about the recent Hamas attacks on Israel. Many august personages find these student statements objectionable.1 I mean, it’s pretty serious — national political figures like Larry Summers and Ted Cruz and Seth Moulton are weighing in!
So now seems like a good time for the retired but used-to-be-hard-working staff over at Spoiler Alerts to hoist this 2015 column from the archives about how outsiders should assess the musings of college students:
[A] problem that affects the current generation of college students even more is that it is so easy for these contretemps to balloon so quickly into national debates. That’s extremely unfortunate. One of the purposes of college is to articulate stupid arguments in stupid ways and then learn, through interactions with fellow students and professors, exactly how stupid they are. Anyone who thinks that the current generation of college students is uniquely stupid is either an amnesiac or willfully ignorant. As a professor with 20 years of experience, I can assure you that college students have been saying stupid things since the invention of college students.
The difference today is that because of social media, it is easy for college students to have their opinions go viral when that was not the original intent…. If you are older than 22 and reading this, imagine for a second how you would feel if professional pundits pored over your undergraduate musings in real time (emphasis added).
Unsurprisingly, it took less than 48 hours for some of these students to realize that they might have said something stupid and reconsider their words. I suspect that weeks or months from now, more of these students might recognize that their initial rhetoric might have been… oh, let’s use the word “problematic.” And that is okay. Because college students are supposed to be this stupid. It is the only way they’ll learn.
A reminder for everyone who is not a college student or administrator: the musings of Harvard or Tufts students do not — or at least, should not — amount to a hill of beans in the public discourse. Just because it is now possible for outside observers to read these student scribblings does not mean that they should carry any intellectual weight. Just as there will always be people who are wrong on the Internet, there will always be people who are stridently wrong on campus. Shining a spotlight on these statements give them vastly more import than they merit.
As the conflict in Gaza plays out in the weeks, months, and years to come, there will likely be more episodes designed to traumatize observers. My advice to those of you who do not live or work on a college campus: don’t make that trauma any worse by reading what college students have to say. Like everyone else, they are working through some stuff. Please give them the privacy to be galactically, embarrassingly wrong amongst themselves.
Tufts students as well.
I love this column- college really is the last place to be a stupid "kid".
Adulting is hard.
Dan, the issue isn't the students, fully agree that they say stupid things and college is precisely the space to do that. Or it used to be. And that's the issue. Under the guise of hate speech and safe spaces, universities regulate speech on campus, and many "stupid things" that students say lead to discinplinary action. Students have been expelled from college for saying racial slurs, but saying that Hamas was creative is OK without even a clear dissent from the university?
The issue that's really being voiced at-large is that campuses have become bastions of hard-left thinking, mostly unchecked, and anti-Israel and anti-Semitic views are increasingly finding a home on that part of the spectrum. The hypocrisy between how other issues are treated and the slaughter of Jews IS the issue.