Don’t Smother Your Students

I’m reflecting on the only sad part of a college experience that was otherwise fantastic: the spirit-crushing administrative bureaucracy endemic to universities. Classes and professors taught us to be unrelenting in the pursuit and defense of truth and goodness, but it was typically administrators and their litany of rules that stifled any attempts to actually do anything with what we had learned.

You can observe this phenomenon in the various offices of “student engagement” or “student affairs” that govern extracurricular initiatives at many universities. America’s youngest, brimming with creative force, are conditioned from the beginning of their adult lives to submit every endeavor to the scrutiny of an administrative machine made up of people whose only expertise is slowing things down. Student extracurriculars don’t matter much beyond campus, but the habits of mind that universities inculcate in their graduates do. More often than not, the process of starting a new club, a new paper, or any other initiative amounts to exercising deference to authority. Students are encouraged to not disrupt the status quo even if they observe its failures. 

The process usually goes something like this. You have an idea for a new organization or project. In order to operate on campus, you must subject this endeavor to layers and layers of bureaucratic review. The idea eventually stalls and dies, or is so thoroughly watered down into a nondisruptive form that it no longer accomplishes its original aims. For an idea that does get cleared and becomes “official,” every decision and activity is then subjected to various requirements and investigations. Administrators assume that students are malicious, or uninformed, or incapable. Ambitious students are therefore incentivized to work outside of these “official” parameters, but of course they’d be punished for doing so. 

A personal example: A group of us saw our university’s low free-speech ranking and prevailing habit of one-sided, unproductive discourse and took action. We created a new paper that editorialized outside of the liberal campus orthodoxy and created a new debate union that brought controversial issues into sophisticated and open-minded debate. We were thwarted possibly because of our political slant (a multimillion dollar bureaucracy insulated within a university is likely to be quite liberal). But mostly, this was the system working exactly as designed. An arbitrary three-month period of “probationary review” before we could host a single debate. A cease-and-desist request for distributing our paper on campus without permission, with no steps recommended to gain permission. A student conduct meeting for advertising our club through flyers that couldn’t be approved because the club was still pending official approval, which it couldn’t gain without recruiting a sufficient number of members . . . 

So often these processes smother spontaneous genius, fast-acting executions of grand visions and principles, which we ought to encourage in young people. An enterprising student who hopes to be an enterprising citizen should be able to create something with the help of the school’s administration — not in spite of it.