The Resume Arms Race
It has become much more difficult to gain admission to the top U.S. universities. For example, in the 1980s and ’90s, Yale’s acceptance rate hovered around 20%. By 2003, the admission rate was down to 11% and in 2017 it was 7%.36 So it makes sense that parents have increasingly teamed up with their children to help them pack their resumes with extracurricular activities. It’s what former Yale English professor William Deresiewicz calls “the resume arms race,” and any family that doesn’t come together to play the game puts their child at a disadvantage. “The only point of having more,” Deresiewicz explains in his book Excellent Sheep, “is having more than everybody else. Nobody needed 20,000 atomic warheads until the other side had 19,000. Nobody needs eleven extracurriculars, either—what purpose does having them actually serve?—unless the other guy has ten.”37
Given the fierce competition, parents in some social circles convey a sense of panic about children’s grades, even in middle school—as if not getting an A will determine the course of a child’s life. This would normally be a clear example of catastrophizing, but in some highly competitive school districts, it may not be entirely unrealistic. Julie Lythcott-Haims puts it like this: “Let’s say this is math. If they don’t get an A in sixth-grade math, it means they might not be on track to be in the highest level of math in high school, which means they won’t get into Stanford.”38 So it isn’t surprising that so many parents are hovering and oversupervising, not just to ensure safety but to ensure that children do homework and prepare for tests.39 Some of these parents may think that making sure their children do whatever it takes to succeed in advanced courses helps their children develop “grit.” But “grit is often misunderstood as perseverance without passion, and that’s tragic,” psychology professor Angela Duckworth, author of the book Grit, told us. “Perseverance without passion is mere drudgery.” She wants young people to “devote themselves to pursuits that are intrinsically fulfilling.”40
The college admissions process nowadays makes it harder for high school students to enjoy school and pursue intrinsic fulfillment. The process “warps the values of students drawn into a competitive frenzy” and “jeopardizes their mental health,”41 says Frank Bruni, a New York Times columnist and author of Where You Go Is Not Who You Will Be: An Antidote to the College Admissions Mania. Nowhere is that more apparent than in suicide clusters at highly competitive high schools, such as those in Palo Alto, California, and the suburbs of Boston, which have been profiled in The Atlantic42 and The New York Times.43 In a 2015 survey, 95% of students at Lexington High School in Massachusetts reported “a lot of stress” or “extreme stress” about their classes, and in a 2016 study, the Centers for Disease Control reported that the teen suicide rate in Palo Alto, California, was more than four times the national average.44
And it is precisely these elite, wealthy, and hypercompetitive school districts that provide the largest share of students at the top universities in the United States.45 “Students are prepared academically, but they’re not prepared to deal with day-to-day life,” says Gray, “which comes from a lack of opportunity to deal with ordinary problems.”46 One paradox of upper-middle-class American life is that some of the things parents and schools do to help kids get admitted to college may make them less able to thrive once they’re there.
Childhood as Democracy Prep
The effects of play deprivation and oversupervision may extend far beyond college. Steven Horwitz, an economist at Ball State University in Indiana, took the same research on play that we have reviewed in this chapter and worked out some possible consequences for the future of liberal democracies.47 He drew on the work of political scientists Elinor Ostrom48 and Vincent Ostrom,49 both of whom studied how self-governing communities resolve conflicts peacefully. Successful democracies do this by developing a variety of institutions and norms that enable people with different goals and conflicting desires to resolve their problems while rarely appealing to the police or the state to coerce their fellow citizens. This is the “art of association” that so impressed Alexis de Tocqueville when he traveled through the United States in 1835.
Citizens of a democracy don’t suddenly develop this art on their eighteenth birthday. It takes many years to cultivate these skills, which overlap with the ones that Peter Gray maintains are learned during free play. Of greatest importance in free play is that it is always voluntary; anyone can quit at any time and disrupt the activity, so children must pay close attention to the needs and concerns of others if they want to keep the game going. They must work out conflicts over fairness on their own; no adult can be called upon to side with one child against another.
Horwitz points out that when adult-supervised activities crowd out free play, children are less likely to develop the art of association:
Denying children the freedom to explore on their own takes away important learning opportunities that help them to develop not just independence and responsibility, but a whole variety of social skills that are central to living with others in a free society. If this argument is correct, parenting strategies and laws that make it harder for kids to play on their own pose a serious threat to liberal societies by flipping our default setting from “figure out how to solve this conflict on your own” to “invoke force and/or third parties whenever conflict arises.” This is one of the “vulnerabilities of democracies” noted by Vincent Ostrom.50
The consequences for democracies could be dire, particularly for a democracy such as the United States, which is already suffering from ever-rising cross-party hostility51 and declining trust in institutions.52 Here is what Horwitz fears could be in store:
A society that weakens children’s ability to learn these skills denies them what they need to smooth social interaction. The coarsening of social interaction that will result will create a world of more conflict and violence, and one in which people’s first instinct will be increasingly to invoke coercion by other parties to solve problems they ought to be able to solve themselves.53
This is what Greg began to see around 2013: increasing calls from students for administrators and professors to regulate who can say what, who gets to speak on campus, and how students should interact with one another, even in private settings. The calls for more regulation and the bureaucratic impulse to provide that regulation are the subject of our next chapter.
We end this chapter, however, on a more positive note. In contrast to all the unwisdom kids are exposed to in the form of the three Great Untruths, here is a better way to frame the experiences of childhood and adolescence. In June 2017, John Roberts, the chief justice of the United States, was invited to be the commencement speaker at his son’s graduation from middle school. Like Van Jones (whom we quoted in chapter 4), Roberts understands antifragility. He wishes for his son’s classmates to have the sorts of painful experiences that will make them better people and better citizens.54 Here is an excerpt from his speech:
From time to time in the years to come, I hope you will be treated unfairly, so that you will come to know the value of justice. I hope that you will suffer betrayal because that will teach you the importance of loyalty. Sorry to say, but I hope you will be lonely from time to time so that you don’t take friends for granted. I wish you bad luck, again, from time to time so that you will be conscious of the role of chance in life and understand that your success is not completely deserved and that the failure of others is not completely deserved either. And when you lose, as you will from time to time, I hope every now and then, your opponent will gloat over your failure. It is a way for you to understand the importance of sportsmanship. I hope you’ll be ignored so you know the importance of listening to others, and I hope you will have just enough pain to learn compassion. Whether I wish these things or not, they’re going to happen. And whether you benefit from them or not will depend upon your ability to see the message in your misfortunes.55
In Sum
The decli
ne of unsupervised free play is our fourth explanatory thread. Children, like other mammals, need free play in order to finish the intricate wiring process of neural development. Children deprived of free play are likely to be less competent—physically and socially—as adults. They are likely to be less tolerant of risk, and more prone to anxiety disorders.
Free play, according to Peter Gray, is “activity that is freely chosen and directed by the participants and undertaken for its own sake, not consciously pursued to achieve ends that are distinct from the activity itself.” This is the kind of play that play experts say is most valuable for children, yet it is also the kind of play that has declined most sharply in the lives of American children.
The decline in free play was likely driven by several factors, including an unrealistic fear of strangers and kidnapping (since the 1980s); the rising competitiveness for admission to top universities (over many decades); a rising emphasis on testing, test preparation, and homework; and a corresponding deemphasis on physical and social skills (since the early 2000s).
The rising availability of smartphones and social media interacted with these other trends, and the combination has greatly changed the way American children spend their time and the kinds of physical and social experiences that guide the intricate wiring process of neural development.
Free play helps children develop the skills of cooperation and dispute resolution that are closely related to the “art of association” upon which democracies depend. When citizens are not skilled in this art, they are less able to work out the ordinary conflicts of daily life. They will more frequently call for authorities to apply coercive force to their opponents. They will be more likely to welcome the bureaucracy of safetyism.
CHAPTER 10
The Bureaucracy of Safetyism
The sovereign power [or soft despot] extends its arms over the entire society; it covers the surface of society with a network of small, complicated, minute, and uniform rules . . . it does not tyrannize, it hinders, it represses, it enervates, it extinguishes, it stupefies, and finally it reduces each nation to being nothing more than a flock of timid and industrious animals, of which the government is the shepherd.
ALEXIS DE TOCQUEVILLE, Democracy in America1
Remember the thought experiment in chapter 2, in which you visited your campus counseling center and the psychologist there made you more anxious rather than less?
Now, imagine it’s a few days after your visit, and you receive an email from the associate dean of students with “Conduct Policy Reminder” in the subject line. You open it nervously, wondering why the associate dean would be reminding you about the conduct policy. You can’t remember doing anything that might violate it. The note reads:
I received a report that others are worried about your well-being. I’d like to meet with you to discuss your options for support and see what I can do to help. . . . Engaging in any discussion of suicidal or self-destructive thoughts or actions with other students interferes with, or can hinder, their pursuit of education and community. It is important that you refrain from discussing these issues with other students and use the appropriate resources listed below. If you involve other students in suicidal or self-destructive thoughts or actions, you will face disciplinary action. My hope is that, knowing exactly what could result in discipline, you can avoid putting yourself in that position.2
You are confused. You didn’t mention anything about “suicidal or self-destructive thoughts or actions” when you visited the counseling center, and you have no intention of hurting yourself. A thousand thoughts rush through your head: How did the associate dean of students find out about your visit to the center? Isn’t therapy supposed to be confidential? Why is the dean sending you a warning and a threat? And can the dean really tell you what you can and can’t say to your friends?
This scenario is not fiction. In 2015, a student at Northern Michigan University (NMU) visited the campus counseling center to get help in the aftermath of being sexually assaulted the year before. She did not mention anything about self-harm or suicidal thoughts during her session, yet the email she received from NMU’s associate dean of students included the exact text we quoted above. And she was not alone; 25–30 NMU students per semester received a version of that letter—whether or not they had expressed thoughts about suicide or self-harm.3 It was NMU’s policy that students could be disciplined (and even expelled) for revealing these kinds of thoughts to other students. Given that the misguided policy was both stigmatizing and likely to put suicidal students at increased risk, mental health professionals roundly criticized the policy. Nevertheless, in an interview with a local newspaper, the dean defended the practice, claiming that “relying on your friends can be very disruptive to them.”4 Please read that quote again. The dean seemed to believe that if students talked about their suffering, it would harm their friends. It is an illustration of the Untruth of Fragility (What doesn’t kill you makes you weaker) trumping common sense and basic humanity.
What could compel a university—and, in particular, its associate dean of students—to be so callous? This kind of administrative overkill was what first got Greg thinking about the ways in which universities teach cognitive distortions. When he started studying CBT in 2008, he saw administrators acting in ways that encouraged students to embrace a distorted sense that they lacked resilience—acting as if students could not handle uncomfortable conversations with, or relatively small slights from, their fellow students. In order to fully grasp the success of the three Great Untruths on campus, it’s essential to understand how a growing campus bureaucracy has been unintentionally encouraging these bad intellectual habits for years, and how they still do today. This is our fifth explanatory thread.
The Corporatization of College
When the federal Office of Education began collecting data in 1869, there were only 63,000 students enrolled in higher education institutions throughout the United States; they represented just 1 percent of all eighteen- to twenty-four-year-olds.5 Today, an estimated 20 million students are enrolled in American higher education, including roughly 40% of all eighteen- to twenty-four-year-olds.6 In the 2015–2016 school year, the most recent year for which statistics are available, combined revenues at U.S. postsecondary institutions totaled about $548 billion.7 (A country with that GDP, to give a sense of scale, would rank twenty-first, between Argentina and Saudi Arabia.)8 At the end of the 2015 fiscal year, the U.S. universities with the 120 largest endowments held a total of $547 billion.9 U.S. elite institutions draw substantial international enrollment,10 and seventeen of the top twenty-five universities in the world are in the United States.11 The enormous expansion of scope, scale, and wealth demands professionalization, specialization, and a lot of support staff.
In 1963, Clark Kerr, the president of the University of California system, called the resulting structure the “multiversity.” In a multiversity, different departments and power structures within a university pursue different goals in parallel—for example, research, education, fundraising, branding, and legal compliance.12 Kerr predicted that as faculty increasingly focused on their own departments, noninstructional employees would take over in leading the institution. As he anticipated, the number of administrators has climbed upward.13 At the same time, their responsibilities have crept outward.14
Some administrative growth is necessary and sensible, but when the rate of that expansion is several times higher than the rate of faculty hiring,15 there are significant downsides, most obviously the increase in the cost of a college degree.16 A less immediately obvious downside is that goals other than academic excellence begin to take priority as universities come to resemble large corporations—a trend often bemoaned as “corporatization.”17 Political scientist Benjamin Ginsberg, author of the 2011 book The Fall of the Faculty: The Rise of the All-Administrative University and Why It Matters, argues that over the decades, as the administration has grown, the f
aculty, who used to play a major role in university governance, have ceded much of that power to nonfaculty administrators.18 He notes that once the class of administrative specialists was established and became more distinct from the professor class, it was virtually certain to expand; administrators are more likely than professors to think that the way to solve a new campus problem is to create a new office to address the problem.19 (Meanwhile, professors have generally been happy to be released from administrative duties, even as they complain about corporatization.)
The Customer Is Always Right
A hallmark of the campus protests that began in 2015 was irresolute and accommodating responses by university leadership. Few schools imposed any kind of penalty on students for shouting down speakers or disrupting classes, even though these actions usually violated their own codes of conduct. Like George Bridges at Evergreen, many university presidents accepted ultimatums from students and then tried to meet many of the demands, usually without a word of criticism of the students’ tactics.20 Critics of this approach have pointed out that this is the way organizations respond when their governing ethos is one of “customer service.”
Eric Adler, a classics professor at the University of Maryland, distilled the argument in a 2018 Washington Post article. “The fundamental cause [of campus intolerance],” he suggests, “isn’t students’ extreme leftism or any other political ideology” but “a market-driven decision by universities, made decades ago, to treat students as consumers—who pay up to $60,000 per year for courses, excellent cuisine, comfortable accommodations and a lively campus life.” On the subject of students preventing certain people from speaking on campus, he explains:
The Coddling of the American Mind Page 21