How Colleges Promote Psychological Frailty

Clay Routledge:

Administrators at the University of Florida recently notified students that a 24-hour counseling hotline is available to anyone who feels offended by Halloween costumes. Other colleges, in an attempt to pre-empt the psychological threat of offensive costumes, have created and distributed Halloween costume guidelines to help students make appropriate choices if they decide to dress up.

The University of Wisconsin at LaCrosse, for example, encouraged students to attend a special seminar titled “Is Your Halloween Costume Racist?” while Tufts University went a step further, sending a letter to students in fraternities and sororities indicating they could face investigation(by university police) and punishment for making the wrong costume choice.

Of course, this issue is not about Halloween. More and more colleges are creating “bias response teams” that students can contact if they feel they have been victimized by microaggressions. There is an increasing demand for safe spaces and trigger warnings to protect students not from physical danger, but from ideas, course material, and viewpoints they may find offensive. Conservative speakers are being banned from campus because students claim to find them threatening. Professors are being investigated for not being sufficiently politically correct in class, failing to predict what material might trigger students, or refusing to use gender neutral pronouns that are not even part of the English language.

Even more concerning perhaps are recent moves to create racially segregated student retreats, student unions, and campus housing in the service of offering marginalized groups places of refuge and healing.