Welcome to the Fun-Free University

The return of in loco parentis is killing student freedom.

David Weigel from the October 2004 issue

(Page 3 of 3)

Krissik eventually settled with Stonehill, but the courts neglected to ask why, after they'd relieved colleges of the need to nanny their students, the college wouldn't damn the consequences and let her study. The lawsuit provides an answer.

Just as colleges have calculated the legal risks of letting students get away with drinking or recreational drugs, they remain in danger of being held responsible when students face mental collapse or attempt suicide. If administrators had moved on and handed their wards more lifestyle freedom after in loco parentis ended, they'd have room to dodge these bullets. But since they had accepted responsibility for keeping kids off the bottle, it was easy for lawyers to make them responsible for the rest of the pressures of campus life.

Schools started this battle with a handicap. During the last decade, more and more students have been diagnosed as overstressed or treated for depression while still in high school. In February 2003, after tracking student complaints from 1989 to 2001, researchers at the University of Kansas found that the number of students diagnosed with depression had doubled while the number of "suicidal" students had tripled. The proportion of students taking psychiatric medication rose from 10 percent to 25 percent.

In response to such trends, college administrators started making pharmaceuticals and therapy sessions more readily available on campus. Elite universities have been able to provide the most buffers against mental illness claims. According to the May 2002 issue of Psychology Today, 2,000 Harvard students had sought counseling in one year. Fully half of them walked away with a prescription for antidepressants. Students who lived on campus had access to free massages and an ever-expanding mental health center.

The overarching goal of these programs is not to eliminate stress or wean students off medication. It's to stop lawsuits, and the ugliest lawsuits of the last decade have concerned students who killed themselves while enrolled, even though studies (including one conducted by the MIT task force appointed after Scott Kreuger's death from alcohol poisoning) have shown that most students who commit suicide never seek counseling.

At the University of Illinois, counselors work with residential assistants to monitor students who attempt or seriously consider suicide. Such students are ordered into four weeks of assessment sessions under the university's watch. Those who refuse get the Keri Krissik treatment -- they're no longer students. The New York Times Magazine called Illinois' approach "a highly successful, model plan" for colleges that want to keep their undergrads under control.

How to Think

As the protective mind-set returned, it jibed with administrators' desires to make their campuses placid in every possible way. Alcohol and drug policies had emerged in a national context, justified by laws beyond the university's control, while mental health policies were driven largely by the threat of lawsuits. But administrators didn't need anyone to force their hands to insert speech standards and "hate crime" prohibitions into campus life. In 1987 the University of Michigan responded to a handful of anonymous racist fliers with new campus regulations aimed at suppressing offensive speech. The speech code, the first to end up in court, prohibited "any behavior, verbal or physical, that stigmatizes or victimizes an individual on the basis of race, ethnicity, religion, sex, sexual orientation, creed, national origin, ancestry, age, marital status, handicap, or Vietnam-era veteran status." A university pamphlet, soon withdrawn, explained that such "harassment" would include hanging a Confederate flag on your dorm room door or being part of a student group that "sponsors entertainment that includes a comedian who slurs Hispanics."

Ironically, a one-time member of Berkeley's Free Speech Movement seized on this approach when she became an administrator. Annette Kolodny, a dean of the University of Arizona's College of Humanities, used her 1998 book Failing the Future to explain why colleges needed to regulate what students said. In concert with other administrators, Kolodny had stiffened penalties for offensive speech and created workshops in which new students could have their values certified or corrected. Her bogeyman was "antifeminist intellectual harassment," and her polices were designed to bring contrary speech out into the open, so it could be "readily recognized and effectively contained."

By the start of the 1990s, Kolodny's view of campus speech was the norm. Harvard law professor Randall Kennedy told The New York Times in 1991 that speech codes made sense, and that their opponents were just warring against 1960s values. Journalists had gotten some taste of universities' strange speech standards through The Dartmouth Review, a conservative newspaper whose editors were punished for articles that would have been protected anywhere else in New Hampshire. But they didn't comprehend how strict the standards were until codes at Stanford, the University of Wisconsin, and George Mason University were challenged in court and overturned. Based on these cases, schools learned how to design speech restrictions that were more likely to pass legal muster.

The speech codes, increasingly unpopular but largely still in effect, contain more than a whiff of the omnipotence administrators enjoyed under in loco parentis. Students are not treated as the adults that Dixon made them out to be. Instead they're young minds that need shaping. In most cases the bodies formed to govern speech -- student judicial boards, special committees -- are uniquely able to adjudicate without explaining their standards for punishment.

Universities' speech restrictions, unlike their recreational policies, do more to attract lawsuits than to repel them. NCHERM offers a seminar on how administrators can thwart the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education and the American Civil Liberties Union. But there hasn't been any measurable trend toward saving face by scrapping these rules. They're seen as too important to ditch -- and that's illustrative of the way universities view their students.

Back in Control

Four decades after in loco parentis started to stagger, college students would be hard pressed to name their new personal liberties. Yes, they no longer fear "double secret probation." And when administrators crack down, they will almost always at least provide a reason. But today's students may be punished just as hard as their predecessors -- often harder. They've discovered that social engineers have a hard time turning down the opportunity to control things.

The expanding control over college students has had repercussions in the rest of America. Campuses are proving grounds for make-nice public programs. They've provided laboratories to test speech codes and small, designated "free speech zones" for protests. (Such zones marginalize and effectively silence dissent, which is one reason they've been adopted by the major political parties for their national conventions.) The stiffening of campus law also illustrates the trend toward greater control of adults' personal behavior.

In loco parentis could be overturned only once. After 1974, students should have had an arsenal of new rights. But parents never stopped believing that universities were responsible for shaping their kids, and schools have nervously assumed that too much freedom will bring about the system's collapse.

It won't. College students will drink, despair, play loose with hygiene, make dirty jokes. Before in loco parentis made its comeback, they were thriving. Meanwhile, the changes that really worried academics in the 1970s -- demands for new disciplines, shrinking core curricula -- are settling into permanence. It's the most enjoyable effect of the '60s student revolts that's being whittled away.

Comments

Trackback| 12.29.09 @ 8:30PM

credit repair al, on credit repair al, links to this page. Here’s an excerpt:

I wanted to commend the webmaster for running a great site.

nfl jerseys|11.8.10 @ 2:44AM|#

xte

log in or register to reply

CHEAPWOMEN UGG BOOTS|11.24.10 @ 3:12AM|#

The prestige of negotiating bulk Uggs Australia Outlet cloud has evolved into the current day can fit into Ugg Boots On Sale boots and stores up

log in or register to reply

CHEAPWOMEN UGG BOOTS|11.24.10 @ 3:29AM|#

We also access the comment made central identical analyze acclaimed name cast away ahead of the curve of Women Uggs . We will access the application for the precision Ugg Sheepskin Boots we are in the bazaar in both winter and summer. These auction access ugg been

log in or register to reply

CHEAPWOMEN UGG BOOTS|11.24.10 @ 3:49AM|#

The cheapest Ugg Boots On Sale boots are hot topics these days. But have no fear about it. Your ISP loved the Ugg Classic Boots On Sale boots to central storage. ?

log in or register to reply