Dan Erwin

Should College Students Be Pampered--or Deliberately Made Uncomfortable?

Have we gone overboard on empathy? Has empathetically correct become the new politically correct?

Over dinner with some long-time friends, we were discussing the difficulty their grandson, a recent engineering grad, was having finding a job. Knowing that the religious school he attended was certainly not noted for engineering, I asked why he hadn’t gone to the University of Minnesota. At the “U” he would have gotten a far better engineering education, paid much less tuition and accessed the U’s magnificent engineering career network. 

“He wasn’t comfortable” with the University, his grandmother responded. Without thinking, I blurted out that I thought the purpose of college was to make the student “uncomfortable.” They were silent for a moment, then broke out into laughter, and agreed fully with my conclusion.

Political vs. empathetic correctness
Back in 2014 I first wrote about empathic correctness. While political correctness emphasizes the protection of marginalized individuals and groups, empathetic correctness focuses on protecting individual sensitivities. It shows up as students question the Western Canon and refuse to read materials that challenge their own personal comfort or cause “psychological distress.”

The most jaw-dropping display of empathetic correctness came in a New York Times article reporting on the number of campuses proposing that so-called “trigger warnings” be placed on syllabi in courses using texts or films containing material that might “trigger” discomfort for students. Themes seen as needing such warnings range from suicide, abuse, and rape to anti-Semitism, “misogynistic violence,” and “controlling relationships.” Astonishingly, some of the literary works advocates claim need warning labels for adult college students are often read by high school students, such as The Great Gatsby and the Merchant of Venice...

Top Ten Books for College Orientation

Many students heading off to college for the first time this fall already have a college-level assignment. In preparation for their first year, they’re expected to have read a book over the summer and come prepared to discuss it in class.

It was not just any book, but a “common reading.” It was a specific book selected by their institution to not only create a shared experience, but also planned to be the subject of discussions by college freshmen and their teachers. As you look through the list, compiled by the Chronicle of Higher Education, you’ll notice that many of them are intended to help raise awareness of social issues.

The term “occurrences” refers to the number of colleges using the book in the “one book, one campus” program--not to the fact that I lost the six-grade spelling bee by misspelling “occurrence.” And that’s another fact, jogging my 76-year-old memory. Ha!

Here’s the list of the top ten books, in order of selection numbers. I’ll also add a comment or two about each of the books.

1. Just Mercy: A story of justice and redemption, by Bryan Stevenson (73 occurrences). Bryan Stevenson grew up poor in Delaware, the great grandson of slaves. His grandfather was murdered in a Philadelphia housing project when Stevenson was a teenager. After graduating from college, he went on to Harvard Law, and then began representing poor clients in the South.
2. Educated: A memoir, by Tara Westover (57 occurrences). If you thought Hillbilly Elegie was great, it’s tame in contrast to Westover’s story of going to college with no education. Her ignorance of the Holocaust, and discoveries of Napoleon and Martin Luther King, Jr. as well as the fact of learning that Europe is not a country is all excruciating. Yet soon enough, she’s off to a fellowship at Cambridge University, where a renowned professor exclaims upon meeting her: “How marvelous. It’s as if I’ve stepped into Shaw’s ‘Pygmalion.’”
3. Between the World and Me, by Ta-Nahisi Coates (35 occurrences). The well-known writer and commentator delivers his book in the form of a letter to his son. It overflows with insights about the embodied state of blackness and the logic of white supremacy. If you’re an avid reader you’ll know that a lot of his insights about being Black in a White world are being strongly challenged, making it still more important for the reader.