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.