The College Fix

The assumption of the delicate student has become secondhand

Florida State University quietly crossed the boundary into self-parody a short while ago. The school is mandating that all incoming students take an anti-stress training program upon arriving at the university, for the purpose of ““strengthen[ing] student emotional and academic coping skills,” which is all well and good. The great irony of this project, however, is the fact that students will be released from the mandate to undergo anti-stress training…if they’re too stressed to do it. (“We’re not out to punish,” one administrator said. What a relief.)

Only on a modern American campus could you find so bizarre and counterintuitive a loophole. It is not even clear what purpose it really serves. If a student is too stressed out to work his way through 30 minutes of gentle slideshows and campus resource advertisements, what is that student even doing at college in the first place? Is that not something of a warning sign? If you’re so harried and emotionally exhausted that you can’t do half an hour of Florida State’s “Student Resilience Project,” how are you even getting out of bed in the morning?

But that is a hallmark of so many campus administrations today: A presumption that their students are indelibly delicate, fragile, utterly breakable. Give them credit, the students have picked up on this: Every time a moderately controversial or contrary opinion is expressed within a quarter mile of school, the usual shrieks of “harm” and “unsafe” will ring out across the campus. Fragility is a lucrative and tactically beneficial thing; with it you can succeed in largely remaking a university in your own image. Plus, you can get out of mandatory freshmen training. It’s a win-win.

MORE: ‘Trigger warnings’ and the shallow insularity of campus politics

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