Institutional Infantilization
Ivy League College Students Are Treated Like Babies
After Donald Trump won the election on November 5th, many colleges, and universities decided it was good to let students take off class and they thought it was good to provide the students with crafts, cookies, Legos and the like because those students were extra stressed.
Colleges & Universities like these view their students as weak, fragile, “victims” of the election results and Trump voters. Truthstream Media did a great video on this:
From “Colleges Deploy Meditation and Baked Potato Bars to Combat Election Stress” by Johanna Alonso on Inside Higher Ed:
Lego Sets and Cookies
Some conservatives have criticized the trend as coddling college students, saying that such events, which often feature stereotypically childlike activities like arts and crafts, are akin to infantilization. They argue that students should be capable of managing their own anxieties during stressful times.
“Folks, this isn’t funny anymore. It’s disturbing to treat adults like fragile children,” wrote Robert Pondiscio, a senior fellow at the conservative American Enterprise Institute, in a post on X about a self-care event reportedly scheduled at one Washington, D.C., university that is slated to include building with Lego blocks and eating cookies.
Kelly Brown, the director of counseling, health and wellness services at the University of Puget Sound in Washington—where a slate of more than a dozen election-related wellness events was planned for the days surrounding the election—disagrees with the idea that such events infantilize students.
“I do think the rhetoric that goes around [during] the elections, with the past few election cycles, is really different from what I grew up with … we’re constantly hearing messages that are ‘If you don’t do it this way, everything is over,’” said Brown. “I don’t think of it as coddling. I think of it as paying attention to the environment around us.”
Among the events planned in the coming days at the university: a space to “recharge” and participate in crafts, like decorating canvas bags, on Tuesday; a “Pause for Paws” event where students can drink hot chocolate and spend time with “furry friends” on Wednesday; and a Thursday “Postelection Processing Space” that will feature a baked potato bar and time to talk about where the results stand so far.
You have to ask yourself, “Is this real life?” Is this really where we are at? Are our college students this fragile?
I was at college when 9/11/01 happened. I remember being in my room in the dorm watching the coverage on TV. Due to a leak in my room’s ceiling, I was in a different room that morning and was scheduled to move back into my dorm room (after they finished working on the ceiling). I still moved all my boxes from the temporary room back into my dorm room that day. Being in Pennsylvania (a state in which one plane went down) our college canceled classes for the day. But that was it. I was back to work and class the next day.
My mother died in 2003 (when I was a senior ready to graduate) and I was set to give my Tutorial (a sort of dissertation) presentation in front of my 3 college professors the next day. They said I could put it off, but I decided to just do it. I could not see the point of putting it off since that would just cause more nervousness or fear rather than just ripping it off like a bandaid. My father had flown out to be with me so because I did it that day he was able to see it as well.
But when I think of what I went through as a college student compared to what they’re doing now it boggles my mind. I’m just sitting here, feeling speechless (for the moment).
Anyone doing this is in fact infantilizing young adults. Kelly Brown, a counselor, said, “we’re constantly hearing messages that are ‘If you don’t do it this way, everything is over,’” in order to suggest that this time is different so they need to be treated differently. Yes, the media is catastrophizing and they didn’t use to do that as much. But everything will not be over if Trump wins. That’s the thing that counselors should be doing, questioning the catastrophization!
If someone feels extreme emotions like this sort of fear, then they need to question their beliefs. Isn’t it odd to them that so many people are not afraid? Why do they think people, including many women like myself, are not afraid to vote for Trump? Questioning these beliefs would help to alleviate some of the fears.
I do not care if they want to get together and question their beliefs. But we all know what would happen. People would cling to their beliefs and say that anyone who disagrees is “evil.” It’s the drama triangle perspective. They cannot see any way out of it.
People in these “higher”-education places of “learning” think that Trump is provably evil, an obvious “persecutor” and if you question that then you are a “persecutor” as well. So they see themselves as “victims” and Trump voters as “persecutors” and the college is trying to coddle them because there’s nothing else it can do. They’ve been captured by this Drama-Triangle ideology.
If the colleges didn’t give in to this, the students would complain that they were not being sensitive enough. The students would then turn the colleges or universities into “persecutors.” And I don’t feel sorry for the institutes. They created this mess by not enforcing boundaries in the first place and by promoting this victim mentality.
When I think that supposed lawyers and doctors of the future are coming from these institutions I think their degree will be worthless at best and a detriment (red flag) at worst. When they can no longer get hired with the degree, they should apply for a Borrower’s Defense to Repayment to get their student loans discharged. We want these institutions to stop lying about how worthwhile their degrees will be.
BTC Donation Address: bc1q4s6h8rhyqawqlz46ppc3zc5v43duycp8m57h9p
@boriquagato has talked about people who don't simply have ideas & opinions, but whose ideas & opinions become, if not their entire identity, then at least a major portion of it. In my observation that phenomenon is rampant on the left, and given how left-wing elite colleges and universities are, people who fit that description comprise a hefty percentage of their students, faculty, and administrators. Such people experience disagreement, whether in conversation or at the ballot box, literally as personal attacks, and rather than trying to teach them to separate their beliefs from their identities, these elite institutions are doing the opposite -- much like when they push students to constantly scan everything they hear for "microaggressions" and "triggers."
Encouraging students to soothe themselves with cocoa and coloring books because their political party lost an election validates the discomfort that they feel as a direct result of fusing their beliefs with their identities and reinforces to them that it's normal to feel so profoundly attacked and upset over an election. It's deeply unhealthy cultish behavior by both the institutions' students and the institutions themselves.
Election stress? Fragile college students? What has our world become?
Elections are expected (the run on schedule). There should be no surprise involved, adults (should we actually call college students "kids"?) should understand that some candidates will win, others will lose.
After an unpredictable catastrophe, "9/11", "John Kennedy's assassination", "the explosion of the space shuttle" there is reasonable justification to cancel classes for a day. Distracted students aren't likely to be focusing and learning what they should. Election results shouldn't be that much of a distraction. Are we teaching our students that a factory production line should be shut down when something happens that half the population isn't happy about?