Welcome to the fun-free university: the return of in loco parentis is killing student freedom

Reason, Oct, 2004 by David Weigel

Schools started this battle with a handicap. During the last decade, more and more students have been diagnosed as overstressed or treated for depression while still in high school. In February 2003, after tracking student complaints from 1989 to 2001, researchers at the University of Kansas found that the number of students diagnosed with depression had doubled while the number of "suicidal" students had tripled. The proportion of students taking psychiatric medication rose from 20 percent to 25 percent.

In response to such trends, college administrators started making pharmaceuticals and therapy sessions more readily available on campus. Elite universities have been able to provide the most buffers against mental illness claims. According to the May 2002 issue of Psychology Today, 2,000 Harvard students had sought counseling in one year. Fully half of them walked away with a prescription for antidepressants. Students who lived on campus had access to free massages and an ever-expanding mental health center.

The overarching goal of these programs is not to eliminate stress or wean students off medication. It's to stop lawsuits, and the ugliest lawsuits of the last decade have concerned students who killed themselves while enrolled, even though studies (including one conducted by the MIT task force appointed after Scott Kreuger's death from alcohol poisoning) have shown that most students who commit suicide never seek counseling.

At the University of Illinois, counselors work with residential assistants to monitor students who attempt or seriously consider suicide. Such students are ordered into four weeks of assessment sessions under the university's watch. Those who refuse get the Keri Krissik treatment--they're no longer students. The New York Times Magazine called Illinois' approach" a highly successful, model plan" for colleges that want to keep their undergrads under control.

How to Think

As the protective mind-set returned, it jibed with administrators' desires to make their campuses placid in every possible way. Alcohol and drug policies had emerged in a national context, justified by laws beyond the university's control, while mental health policies were driven largely by the threat of lawsuits. But administrators didn't need anyone to force their hands to insert speech standards and "hate crime" prohibitions into campus life. In 1987 the University of Michigan responded to a handful of anonymous racist fliers with new campus regulations aimed at suppressing offensive speech. The speech code, the first to end up in court, prohibited "any behavior, verbal or physical, that stigmatizes or victimizes an individual on the basis of race, ethnicity, religion, sex, sexual orientation, creed, national origin, ancestry, age, marital status, handicap, or Vietnam-era veteran status." A university pamphlet, soon withdrawn, explained that such "harassment" would include hanging a Confederate flag on your dorm room door or being part of a student group that "sponsors entertainment that includes a comedian who slurs Hispanics."