Are There Still Ivy-Covered Walls?

My students often refer to their lives on campus as occurring within a bubble. They mean thereby to be both self-deprecating and self-critical about their self-absorption. Since there’s ample evidence that their general levels of knowledge about current—let alone past—events is, shall we say, unimpressive, this self-criticism is probably a good thing. Certainly the leadership of my institution has enthusiastically joined the general movement across higher education to promote civic engagement. 

But two pieces in my morning email inbox left me wishing that life on campus were more bubblicious. The first was William McGurn’s column in the Wall Street Journal . A snippet:

Let’s stipulate for the record that in places filled with young people with raging hormones, there will be sexual encounters. Let’s stipulate too that by their nature most of these encounters will not be public (leaving aside the University of Southern California student who did it on a rooftop with a woman in full view of fellow students). Throw in booze, and it’s not hard to sympathize with university officials stuck sorting out the he-said-she-saids.

Before we extend too much sympathy, however, it’s worth asking how much our colleges and universities have brought this upon themselves. In days past, the dean responsible for standards of student behavior was a figure of great sport (see “Animal House”). Of course, that was understood to be part of the job: the willingness to be the adult.

Today deans have given way to lawyers. The consequence has been endless gestures to raise “awareness,” constant upgrading of procedures, and the proliferation of committees—all designed primarily to limit the institution’s civil liability . . . .

In the meantime, the students have picked up on the signals and the potential liability. Gone are the days when a loutish student might be called into the dean’s office, threatened with suspension, and find himself saying “I’m sorry.” Now when students go in for meetings, they have the family attorney in tow.

What an odd place this is making our campuses. On the one hand, we have more Take Back the Nights, more sensitivity courses, and more performances of the Vagina Monologues than we’ve ever had. On the other hand, the same people who give us these things keep telling us the problem they are designed to fix is getting worse.

The second piece was a brief interview with the author of this new book (a college president and an attorney (a combination with which I am intimately familiar).  Again, a snippet:

Q: How do you see the Constitution influencing the shape of private higher education in the United States, given that private colleges are not state actors?

A: I argue that there is a “shadow constitution,” a blend of statutes, contracts, and customs, providing a network of principles that often mirror the protections that derive directly from the Constitution, providing legal or customary protections that largely reflect constitutional principles and doctrines. Some constitutional norms get reinforced through a blend of federal, state, and local statutory law, and may bind private institutions. Civil rights laws are a good example. Often, however, the influence of constitutional principles on private institutions is more cultural than legal. Private institutions will “borrow” constitutional notions such as due process or freedom of expression, acting as if they are state schools. The borrowing may be formalized, through such vehicles as faculty contracts, or be more the stuff of custom and convention. My claim is that these various forces create a kind of “constitutional unconscious,” in which the values and habits of thought that emanate from formal constitutional law are absorbed into the larger societal bloodstream, including higher education.

I’ve certainly seen evidence of this borrowing from what I would rather call judicial (not constitutional) culture in recent deliberations at my institution about revisions of the Honor Code, which students seem to regard as more an adversarial legal document than a statement regarding our expectations of members of our collegium . They regard themselves above all as bearers of rights, not as members of a community.

In other words, they (and we) bring attitudes from our legal and political culture on to the no-longer hallowed grounds of our campus. They think they know what they’re entitled to and, as consumers or clients (anything but students), they know what they want.

I don’t mean to blame the students (I still regard them that way); they don’t know any better.  But, increasingly, rather than address their “innocence” (I could have used a harsher term), we in the higher education “business” embrace it, thereby effacing the distinction between college and real life.  What’s left is not education, but rather consumption, a shopping mall, not a college.