M. Simon’s post about Vietnam reminded me what it was like to be a college student during that period. Many young men whose parents could not afford college (or whose grades weren’t good enough) were drafted and sent to war.
Why?
Because there was a war, and because there was a draft, that’s why. It just so happened that this particular war sucked, but the principle was the same as in World War II. It was considered the patriotic duty of young men to go off and fight in the nation’s wars.
Whether mandatory wartime service is a good thing or not can certainly be debated, but the topic reminded me of an inane piece by University of Chicago Law Professor Eric Posner, who claims that college students are children, who should not have the same rights as their elders, and who should not be allowed free speech on college campuses:
Lately, a moral panic about speech and sexual activity in universities has reached a crescendo. Universities have strengthened rules prohibiting offensive speech typically targeted at racial, ethnic, and sexual minorities; taken it upon themselves to issue “trigger warnings” to students when courses offer content that might upset them; banned sexual acts that fall short of rape under criminal law but are on the borderline of coercion; and limited due process protections of students accused of violating these rules.
Most liberals celebrate these developments, yet with a certain uneasiness. Few of them want to apply these protections to society at large. Conservatives and libertarians are up in arms. They see these rules as an assault on free speech and individual liberty. They think universities are treating students like children. And they are right. But they have also not considered that the justification for these policies may lie hidden in plain sight: that students are children. Not in terms of age, but in terms of maturity. Even in college, they must be protected like children while being prepared to be adults.
There is a popular, romantic notion that students receive their university education through free and open debate about the issues of the day. Nothing could be farther from the truth. Students who enter college know hardly anything at all—that’s why they need an education.
Got that? By his logic, young draftees and volunteers in the armed forces are not young men and women, but children. So, according to this thinking, are all students, regardless of age.
While it is not entirely clear exactly how the professor defines childhood (he does not specify an age cutoff), his contention that college students are children might not play well with the many college students who decided to get degrees after serving in the military or working in the real world. These people would be adults by any reasonable standard, and there are many of them attending college:
Thirty-eight percent of those enrolled in higher education are over the age of 25 and one-fourth are over the age of 30. The share of all students who are over age 25 is projected to increase another twenty-three percent by 2019.
That those who are 25 and older are adults by any conceivable definition of the word is so obvious that it really shouldn’t require debate. Except, apparently, for Professor Posner, who has taken it upon himself to label a large number of adults as children undeserving of the same rights other Americans take for granted.
Let me admit my bias here. I am a student at a local community college, and about to acquire a degree in Welding. I am 60, and while that would undoubtedly place me in or near the outlier area of a normal bell curve, there are plenty of older adults attending community college.
In fact, the average age of a community college student is 29.
But never mind that. If you enter college for any reason, at any age, you become a child in need of protection and indoctrination. For that, libertarians and conservatives should rejoice.
If college students are children, then they should be protected like children. Libertarians should take heart that the market in private education offers students a diverse assortment of ideological cultures in which they can be indoctrinated. Conservatives should rejoice that moral instruction and social control have been reintroduced to the universities after a 40-year drought. Both groups should be pleased that students are kept from harm’s way, and kept from doing harm, until they are ready to accept the responsibilities of adults.
I’m so glad someone thinks I am in need of protection and need to be shielded from responsibility!
I feel much safer now.
Comments
6 responses to “Up with childhood!”
Thanks!
There was a debate back in the day:
“Old enough to fight, why not old enough to drink?”
And some states lowered their drinking age to 18. Until the war was over and the Feds gave them an “incentive” to raise it back to 21.
In 1967 I was 18 and mature enough to get drafted ;but not mature enough to vote or drink!
I am going to accept Posner’s implied position: 18 year olds who continue in school are children who need supervision; 18 year olds who go to work or enter the military are self-governing adults.
Two hundred years ago, the transition to adulthood and adult responsibility occurred at 14. It was the Progressive movement of the late 19th and early 20th Centuries that changed that. Even as late as WW II, 18 years olds were adults with some restrictions (voting, hard liquor).
The adult 18 year olds in the work force should enjoy full adult freedom: freedom of speech and association, booze, cigarettes, sex, porn, …
The 18 year old children in college should have none of these.
Heinlein got it right in “Starship Troopers.”
I don’t think that most college students today realize that the Vietnam war was on a completely different scale than the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. When American soldiers were killed in Iraq and Afghanistan at the peak of those wars, perhaps a dozen were killed in a bad week. In Vietnam, 200 American soldiers were killed, on average, every week, and that went on for years. 200 a week. The Vietnam war was on a different scale of death.
Posner has this opinion now because he thinks that students might have a different opinion.
If he felt he could rely on them to agree with him, then he would have said that of course students are adults and need to be listened to carefully.
Posner – “Universities have strengthened rules prohibiting offensive speech typically targeted at racial, ethnic, and sexual minorities;”
Males are the sexual minority nationally and also on most university campuses. Was Posner merely guilty of a grammatical error, or was he being willfully misleading, or is he stupid? My money’s on stupid.