Are university students really ‘snowflakes’?

How many times have we heard college administrators claim they must silence certain perspectives on campus because their students are allegedly made “uncomfortable” (or worse, such as sick or threatened) by opinions disapproved by the administrators?

Such a claim raises a whole series of questions.

Are the students really such “snowflakes”? Do the administrators realize they are insulting their own student bodies by labelling them as such? Who gets to decide what opinions “snowflakes” cannot be permitted to hear lest they shiver/quiver, shake and quake? When an administration mixes its mission to combine therapy with education, does it not diminish the latter, and implicitly declare that its students are to that extent actually or potentially sick?

Recently a Harvard teacher, Tarek Masoud, was brave enough to declare that the students on that campus are not in fact ” ‘snowflakes’ with fragile psyches,” but rather fully competent, indeed “eager” he said, to debate controversial issues.

When he and a junior lecturer proposed a course entitled “Hard Questions: Searching for Veritas Across Deep Divides,” it was vetoed by Harvard’s vetting committee. The students were thus denied the opportunity to debate such topics as the legacy of colonialism (good or bad?), affirmative action (justice or discrimination?), and gender (biological fact or social fiction?).

(See Masoud, Tarek, “Students Aren’t the Obstacle To Open Debate at Harvard”, The Wall Street Journal, Feb. 24-25, 2024, p. C3.)

To guide the totalitarians at Harvard, I modestly suggest a poll of the students themselves. They could be asked directly: Do you consider yourself a “snowflake”? Do you enjoy being treated as such? Would you like the opportunity to hear and debate dissenting views on controversial subjects? Would you shrivel up if confronted with such views? Or, rather, are you made uncomfortable by being confined in a “learning environment” where it is risky to voice certain viewpoints?

A second modest suggestion might also be entrepreneurial. Make up tee-shirts bravely declaring: “I AM NOT A SNOWFLAKE!” Market them on-line to students who are tired of being insulted by their college administrators and professors, and who wish to declare their independent eagerness to consider and debate dissenting opinions.

The results of such a poll and declarations might chasten college administrators from being so presumptuous about the fragilities of their students.  Frankly it is amazing to observe how obliviously administrators of “elite” campuses such as Harvard are willing to broadcast to the world that their students, despite being carefully admitted as a diverse group of the “best and brightest”, are in fact a select group of incompetents.

George W. Shuster was a Phi Beta Kappa graduate of Yale, a National Science Foundation Fellow at MIT, and graduated from Yale Law School in the same class as Bill and Hillary Clinton.