Loren Lippincott
We are now in the period between Veterans Day and Thanksgiving. Both are celebrations that cause us to pause and think about our blessings and the acts of courage, selflessness, service and sacrifice of others who have often fought and died to secure those blessings. Many of us are the children of the “greatest generation” who experienced the hardships of the Great Depression followed by the ravages of World War II. That generation’s titanium backbone was forged in the furnace of trials. “The crucible for silver and the furnace for gold, but the Lord tests the heart,” wrote King Solomon, and it’s still true today.
Now, compare that record of fearless heroism with the situation on today’s college campuses where students (and many faculty members) are said to be suffering emotional trauma due to the outcome of the recent general election. Instead of telling students to grow up and get over it, officials are treating their tantrums like some kind of epidemic. For instance, Georgetown University in Washington D.C. has established a “self care suite” to help students recover from the stress of the election. Milk, cookies and hot cocoa were served and the space was supplied with Legos, crayons and mindfulness exercise booklets for the hurting students. Meanwhile, on Harvard’s campus some classes were canceled for students needing time to “process the election results.” And those 20-year-olds who stormed the beaches of Normandy 80 years ago thought they had it tough!
On the West Coast, the University of Puget Sound provided a full week of self care for students stressed out by the election results. The school also offered a therapeutic labyrinth with soft lighting and music to help students recharge their mental health. The same college also provided “support spaces” for certain student groups to talk about their post-election anxiety. Meanwhile, the University of Oregon brought baby therapy goats and dogs to the campus to help soothe the students’ hurt feelings.
When I first heard about these extreme examples of campus coddling from the far out coastal regions of our nation, I thought how grateful I am to live in “John Wayne Territory!” But it didn’t take long to start hearing reports of the same kind of pacifiers being offered to students here in good ole Nebraska.
It was Aristotle who said, “It is the mark of an educated mind to be able to entertain a thought without accepting it.” What ever happened to that model of education? Don’t we send our kids off to college hoping it will sharpen their critical thinking and reasoning skills to help them discern the difference between truth from lies? Don’t we hope they will learn how to turn theory into practice and develop a marketable skill? Instead today we see professors inculcating a victim mentality with the intensity of the manure spreader back on the farm. Instead of helping them adjust to the real world, the universities seem intent on turning students into perpetual adolescents. And all the while we see them hiking the price of tuition so that it has outpaced inflation by more than 170 percent since 2000. Don’t forget, taxpayers subsidize many of these schools, paying for a large percentage of their ever growing budgets. And while only 20 percent of the graduates work in the field they studied in college, many have an average of $40,000 in college debt. Don’t forget the outgoing White House administration wanted you to pay off that debt.
To make matters worse, many students who go off to college only to have the values and faith taught by their parents deconstructed by professors. So not only don’t they learn a marketable skill, they end up with a shipwrecked faith and in deep debt to boot! Sadly, we are allowing these institutions of higher learning to strip our young people of opportunities to mature through experiencing the rigors of life! Sorry, life doesn’t always go your way, Sunshine! As Johann Wolfgang von Goethe said, “Too many parents (and often teachers and administrators) make life hard for their children by trying, too zealously, to make it easy for them.”
Loren Lippincott represents Legislative District 34 in the Nebraska State Senate. Read his column in the Nance County Journal.