(Nov. 12.) The infantilization of college students has reached epic proportions. The latest evidence comes from the top-ranked undergraduate school for journalism in the country, Northwestern University.
There, editors of the Daily Northwestern have published what amounts to an apology for practicing journalism — a cringe-inducing bow to the oh-so-tender feelings of their fellow students, especially ones made verklempt by the exercise of free speech by others.
At issue was the newspaper’s coverage of protests against a speech on campus last week by former U.S. Attorney General Jeff Sessions. Demonstrators made clear they were protesting not just the content of his remarks on policies, but the very fact that he had been invited to speak on campus.
Naturally, the student daily covered the speech and the protests. Later, though, its editors apparently felt bad that covering protests actually meant covering the protesters.
Here’s how the Daily’s apology, published Nov. 10, put it: “We recognize that we contributed to the harm students experienced, and we wanted to apologize. … One area of our reporting that harmed many students was our photo coverage of the event. Some protesters found photos posted to reporters’ Twitter accounts retraumatizing and invasive. Those photos have since been taken down.”
Let’s hit the pause button. Students involved in a public protest trying to shut down the free speech of a former major U.S. government figure are here portrayed as not just traumatized, but “retraumatized” by seeing photos of themselves at their own protest. Reminders of their public actions in a public space are not just invasive but actually do “harm.”
Forget what this says about how crazily oversensitive they are; this “reasoning” is to logic what funhouse mirrors are to visual perspective. The distortion of reality is severe….
[For the rest of this column on this latest example of collegiate snowflakery, please follow this link.]
