I’m not going to say that college students have it all figured out, or are all perfect. They’re struggling with the present moment just like the rest of us.

But folks, I simply cannot express to you strongly enough how wildly popular press descriptions of college campuses fail to match my own experiences. These bullshit “cancel culture” screeds read to me like Orientalist Europeans describing foreign cultures. They’re just embarrassing.

2/

Don’t get me wrong: college students have all sorts of misconceptions about issues of the day, lose their perspective, and put pressure on people who disagree with them — ••just like the rest of us••.

Are my students worse on these fronts than what I hear in a typical Minneapolis municipal election? No.

Are they worse than what adults post on Nextdoor or FB? Oh hell no.

Are they worse than the very same news orgs publishing pundits who opine about the decline of tolerance? AYFKM.

3/

I have a useful point of comparison: I was once a student on the campus where I now teach. Not quite apples to apples (I’m older, now a prof), but with that grain of salt:

Students are if anything somewhat •more• tolerant of differing views and •more• tolerant of diverse groups who are unlike them than when I was a student. There is if anything •more• assumption that we should reach out across differences and listen.

4/

There •has• been a shift on college campuses, one I suspect is relevant here: expectations of human care from faculty and institutions have increased.

There used to be a much larger tolerance for profs just pushing content at students and letting them struggle. There’s more baseline expectation now that we’ll actually think about whether our pedagogy •works•, and take into account the well-being of our students.

The pandemic massively accelerated that, but it’s a ~20-year trend.

5/

Next time you read a screed against “cancel culture” from somebody who teaches college, ask yourself whether it could in fact be this:

“I’m good at my discipline, but kind of bad at teaching. I cling to broken pedagogical approaches, and am used to making my job easier by not thinking too much about my students as human beings, even if that makes me an asshole. That used to be acceptable, but now people are in my face about it! That wounds my ego. Kids these days!”

6/

BUT! There is a real and important version of that same underlying thought:

Teaching •well• and offering real human care to students both make teaching a whole lot harder. That is •work• right there. And this (reasonable! positive!) shift in expectations means that faculty jobs are harder than they used to be — while at the same time they pay less and less, especially because of adjunctification.

This is not sustainable.

7/

As a faculty member, I’d like to see a whole hell of lot less attention paid the the Cancel Culture Grumpus Patrol, and a whole lot •more• attention paid to this question of how we make human care on campuses something that’s •sustainable•.

The need is real. The challenges are real. And the implications are far more daunting — and far more important.

8/

This isn’t limited to college, and it isn’t even limited to education. Optimization, cost-cutting, downward wage pressure, all these things make human caring •harder•.

The airline rep who leaves you out to dry, the doctor who can’t take time to listen, the developer who makes software that’s not accessible — they’re responding to structural pressures.

We need to give a shit about each other. And if we want that, we have to make giving a shit sustainable.

How? •There’s• the question.

/end