Rita Koganzon published an essay in the New York Times earlier this week that follows some familiar reasoning to argue that the current generation of college students should be less protected from consequences of their actions and treated more like full adults. For some reason, I found Koganzon’s analysis less annoying than some other writers in this space, like Jonathan Haidt, perhaps in part because she historicizes the present moment more than some critics do.
However, I still think there is both some history that needs to be added to the picture and some more expansive thinking about the underpinnings of the status quo. There’s much more involved in how we got to the current situation, and there’s much more going on that might prevent any attempt to move beyond it.
Koganzon lays out the basic historical arc behind current campus policies directed at student life as follows: first, there was the in loco parentis model in which institutions exercised enormous control over the private lives of their students and made regular use of disciplinary authority to enforce their rules. Then, in the 1960s and early 1970s, this gave way to the “bystander era”, in which undergraduates were regarded as legal adults and university administrations only very reluctantly and minimally governed their private conduct. This in turn transitioned to the current “caretaker era” which is not quite a re-installation of in loco parentis, but nevertheless involves substantial administrative intervention into student life. As Koganzon observes, the caretaker era differs in part because it is motivated first and foremost by the minimization of legal liability.
Koganzon recognizes that the central animating principle of mid-century in loco parentis rules was control over the sex lives of college students and secondarily, to control their participation in political movements. That’s not a surprise, since Koganzon’s scholarly work focuses on the tension between the basic imperatives of liberalism and the need for children to be under the authority of parents or guardians. Some current advocates of free speech on campuses tend to forget the latter point in particular: well into the 1960s, many American universities banned or restricted groups and speakers who were viewed as left-wing, including people associated with the civil rights movement. In more recent times, we tend to forget how student activism in the 1960s often aimed to challenge both kinds of control at once. It’s also important to emphasize something that comes up in Koganzon’s essay, which is that drinking was not very regulated, generally only inasmuch as it might lead to rowdy behavior off-campus. That’s partially because in most U.S. states, 18 was the legal age for alcohol consumption, and informally, many bars and restaurants sold alcohol to even younger customers. But on many campuses, monitoring sex lives and monitoring political convictions seemed perfectly aligned.
I think that seeing those constraints as in loco parentis, about the extension of legal childhood, is where Koganzon’s narrative isn’t quite on track, though her scholarly work on this is much more expansive. Because I think monitoring sex lives and monitoring political convictions were not activities restricted to people with the legal status of children in 1950s and 1960s America—to some extent this was about the extent to which liberalism on paper was abraded by lived experience. Bourgeois life generally enshrined both kinds of social and professional surveillance, albeit with some important exceptions. Extramarital affairs were generally politely ignored or even expected for heterosexual men, for example. But left-wing political affiliations or activist commitments were a professional risk for everybody at that time, even after McCarthyism’s intensity ebbed somewhat.
I think this is important to recognize because it was equally the case for the bystander and caretaker eras. Academic institutions have such a total vision of their own cultures and practices that they can tempt people within their confines to think that their history stands apart from the wider society. The rapidity of the transition from attempted regulation of student sexuality to the bystander era’s complete administrative divestment from student sex lives is really striking, but it is also completely synchronous with a wider legal and social assertion of sexual privacy for heterosexuals (the monitoring and regulation of queer sexuality continued into the 1980s). By the time I arrived as an undergraduate at a smaller liberal-arts university in the early 1980s, I did not even have the faintest sense that the university cared whether I was sexually active or not beyond their willingness to supply birth control to students. It also had no interest whatsoever in the political affiliations of students, and largely tolerated and patiently waited out campus protests. We were all arrested once for a divestment protest that involved blocking access to the main administrative building, but that was a highly choreographed episode of civil disobedience: the police arrested us peacefully, we were charged and then the charges were dropped, and the university made no disciplinary charges against us. My university at that time was also famously disinterested in student drug or alcohol use, even as the drinking age crept up to 21. The key point is that the bystander view matched a broader social ethos. I was also part of a generation that had “free-range childhoods”, from families where the lives of adults and children were sharply separated and where children were substantially left to manage their own friendships and activities within the home, within community, and at school.
This point covers the caretaker era as well. The growth of a caretaker approach within universities was synchronized by the arrival of students who had lived caretaker childhoods and had caretaker educations. What I think Koganzon is underestimating is a kind of dialectical relationship between the total social experience of generations both in and out of educational environments. We free-range children had good things to report about our experiences but also many fearful or traumatic things. I walked through the creek by myself to and from middle school, but no teacher or administrator was there to do anything when I was getting my face dragged along a rusty fence during recess. My partner and I didn’t have to listen to endless training sessions about consent in order to build a healthy consensual relationship on our own, but when people in our dorm experienced sexual assault, the university was reluctant to do anything at all—because when universities stopped caring if students were having premarital sex, they also stopped caring if a woman was drugged at a fraternity party and raped. When my undergraduate university looked the other way during the highly amusing and fun event where some students tossed dime bags of pot on the dining room tables, it also turned to be looking the other way when two students assembled a full-scale pharmacy of illegal drugs in a dorm room, which led to multiple students getting sick from a bad batch of MDMA.
In the wider culture, that meant that parents suddenly were afraid for their children, sometimes without any actuarial justification in terms of actual risks to them. But it also meant that parents spent more time with their children, sharing cultural and social life, often forging far closer emotional bonds. Many parents in my generation are slow to push children into autonomous adulthood not because they are coddling their children but because they actually enjoy their company, because they have developed a sense of family that is extended across and through generations. That gets redoubled by the negative generational experiences many of us are having with the consequences of geographic dispersal—parents far away, siblings far away, and the difficulties those pose when people need the kind of support that a family can provide.
Koganzon is also completely right about another underpinning of the caretaker era, which is that some institutions of higher learning are now sitting on top of asset-based wealth that they are almost monomaniacally obsessed with protecting, and even the tuition-dependent institutions are newly aware of their physical plant and infrastructure as material assets that can be threatened by lawsuits, by major shifts in fixed costs like health care and energy, or by the “unfunded mandates” of various compliance regimes, both governmental and otherwise. The crisis of the last year with student protests has made even the richest institutions aware of how much of their presumed wealth can be yanked away from them by a donor class who are increasingly inclined to exert their influence and authority in openly oligarchic ways. The obsession with safety—and the contradictions of that obsession—is as much about financial management as anything else. But that also is a wider sociocultural formation: the American upper middle-class is generally an asset class now who think about safety in the same way as universities both because all institutions with asset-based wealth have to and because they personally have to safeguard their assets in the same fashion, and face some of the same risks from liability exposure.
What all of this means is that a desire to unravel the contradictions of the caretaker era requires a wider social transformation that resonates across a much wider range of experiences and ideas about how to live. I think you can see how under-imagined the alternative is so far in Koganzon’s essay, which more or less implies that students need to be exposed more to the consequences of their actions, whether that’s public drunkenness or protest.
That presumes two things: that exposure to those consequences is important for the development of a different kind of adult maturity across the society and that those consequences should be punitive. In my earlier newsletter this week, I argued something similar about democratic action, that communities that fuck around in elections should get to find out when their representatives have extremist or dysfunctional plans. I suppose I would say that there’s a difference between learning the hard way about the natural or material consequences of behavior and learning the hard way because there is a set ideological conviction that a certain behavior ought to be punished, that you have to create consequences that would otherwise not exist.
If I’m warned that using a chainsaw is dangerous, and informed of the frightful injury statistics associated with chainsaw usage, and I then stupidly decide to cut down a heavy tree limb while holding a chainsaw in an arc above my head, you can argue that I deserve the almost inevitably catastrophic injury that will follow. Moreover, you could reject any system that would allow me to transfer that blame to the manufacturer or anyone else. On the other hand, if I’m maimed but survive, my insurance is going to pay the cost of my medical care and my physical therapy, and my family is likely to going to have to change their lives to help me. It’s not as if in rejecting safety, we move to a world where getting the horns after messing with the bull leaves us with a bunch of dead and injured men whose mistake costs only them.
For that to happen we’d have to pass a law that says “injuries from unlicensed chainsaw usage are exempt from being covered by insurance and lead to a mandatory jail sentence of no less than ten years”. Or “it’s illegal to help someone injured from improper chainsaw usage, they have to be left alone in a pool of blood until they die.” That’s kind of forcing the consequences into a new realm. I feel that at least some people who share Koganzon’s concerns about the caretaker era are reaching in this direction, towards what we might call an enforcement era, a belief that not only does exposure to risk create a more balanced kind of adult maturity, but that this maturity requires that we impose risks in the form of regulation and punishment where natural risk seems insufficiently punitive.
This is an ethos that is still alive inside the caretaker university, in some fashion. There are still faculty, for example, who think that the value of grading is that it provisions punishment as well as reward, that the reason you want to weed out some students from some courses of study is to safeguard certain professions for the truly worthy but also to provide proper motivation to students to excel. The belief in extrinsic motivation runs deep in education, as it does in the world. As does the belief that punishment for error must be imposed by human systems where we believe it will not be provided naturally by the world.
In Koganzon’s essay, where I see this vision peeking out is in the discussion of consequences for encampments and other protests in the last year, in the sense that if they are not properly punished, the protesters will not learn the value of following rules. The attraction of that proposition for those drawn to it is precisely that it aligns with their broader set of beliefs, a conviction that if people don’t learn early what we believe they will eventually learn regardless, then they’ll suffer truly harsh consequences for which there is no remedy later on.
The problem here is that we are usually lying our heads off about the inevitability of those lessons. We are confusing an ought-to-be for an always-is, confusing a belief about justice for a real practice of it.
If you don’t learn early not to plagiarize, when you’re finally caught, it will destroy your life! Except, well, not only do a lot of plagiarists either get away with it or move up in a workplace hierarchy to the point that they don’t generate their own text anyway but we’ve also got an entire industry bristling with multi-millionaires that is dedicated to facilitating industrial-scale plagiarism, an industry that is not only escaping punishment but is being lauded by many.
Koganzon’s essay has an underage waiter getting drunk and getting fired the next day because they sleep in or handle orders badly, while the college drunk gets a ride in a college van and gets to sleep through class because the lenient professor doesn’t care what the drunk does. What that doesn’t reckon with is that the non-college waiter is as likely to be fired for arbitrary reasons even if they are working hard and staying on the straight-and-narrow, and that no rewards will come their way in this economy for their proper avoidance of risk. To fix that takes an economy where employers and corporations are as loyal to good and conscientious workers as those workers might be to them. You don’t fix it just by making sure that the college student gets a C minus for too many drunken snoozes through the class. The focus on college campuses is hiding that the entire society isn’t pricing risk correctly, nor rewarding virtuous dedication appropriately.
This is where I think Koganzon’s stated preference for the bystander era is not entirely consistent with what the bystander era actually was. In the bystander era, the universities didn’t care if you set up an encampment or had a protest. They didn’t issue statements of concern about events in the world, and they only very reluctantly agreed to talk at all about what protesters wanted from them. The idea that they would punish students in order to establish there are consequences for a disruptive protest because that’s a true life lesson that would contribute to their development doesn’t make sense in the bystander era. The life lesson you learned in the bystander era might be that wealthy and powerful institutions could wait you out while lightly patronizing you, and that eventually your fellow students would also have their fill of feeling weightlessly self-righteous and want to move on to the next thing. I think those are natural lessons about politics and society that are worth learning, and they didn’t require the artificial creation of weighted punishments for some of us to have learned. Moreover, the reality of protests and political disruption in the wider world is that sometimes they’re not punished at all, and when they are, very unequally so in any number of ways. Look at who is getting jail time for January 6 and who isn’t if you want clarification on that point.
Moving away from the caretaker era can’t just be a matter of exposing students to risk and dismantling systems that make safety the mandatory product of an intrusive regime of surveillance and correction. If the people in charge inside the university and outside of it aren’t equally exposed to the natural consequences of their actions and decisions, all this means is forcefully communicating to students—or perhaps all young people—their relative powerlessness and vulnerability. It means deciding that the lesson you really want to teach is that it’s bad to be powerless and thus you should strive in life for power and wealth in order to be beyond consequences. Arguably, if the caretaker era and the bystander era were both aligned with a wider social ideology that was broadly shared across a generation, then this in fact the new ethos of our time—that there is no safety but in power, and that where power believes people are not being sufficiently punished for the things that power disdains, it will find a way to make consequences where there have been none.
Besides, if you really want to shift hard out of the caretaker era, exposing students to consequences is the least of it, and even distributing consequences to everybody from the Board of Trustees down to a first-year student won’t cut it. Nothing that Koganzon wants is going to happen without dismantling the obsessive concern with liability that is driven by the protection of assets: that is the first and last condition mandating a caretaker approach.
I’d rather find a way to think past the caretaker era’s obsession with safety towards a new social ethos aligned with and arising from the rising generation’s insights into the shortcomings of their parents and the ethos they lived into. One point about Generation Z that older people seem to have a hard time processing is that they seem to have internalized a relative aversion to many risky hedonic behaviors without any intrusive institution forcing them to do so: they drink less, they use drugs less, they have less sex, they drive less, they’re more cautious with money. At the same time, quite reasonably, they trust institutions less, are more pessimistic about their futures, are furious with the inability of existing systems to make any perceptible progress towards self-evidently desirable fixes to major social problems like gun violence or climate change. I think that feels like an evolving ethos that might be matched to a new era in how universities relate to their students. That is an object all sublime, but not one that involves making sure that punishments fit the crime.
Image credit: Photo by The New York Public Library on Unsplash
Closely related to this is the idea of college education as "transformative", which is central to the US vision of higher education. By contrast, Australian universities are entirely in the bystander model. Among other things, that led to the encampments here going very smoothly. University managers were mostly happy to wait them out.
https://doi.org/10.1111/edth.12444