Colleges are being rocked by an unprecedented mental health crisis.
Suicides across American campuses now exceed 1,000 a year, making them the second leading cause of death for college students.
Nearly three in four student affairs officials say campus mental health has worsened in the last year.
It’s no wonder colleges that are taking in hordes of depressed 18- to 22-year-olds are desperate to do something about it.
But there’s a big problem: Administrators’ pandering attempts to protect students’ mental well-being are often making matters worse.
Safe spaces, trigger warnings and speech codes are frequent strategies of choice to “protect” students from “harm.” Yet it’s a self-fulfilling prophecy: Coddling students produces students who need to be coddled — and who are woefully unprepared for the world that waits on the other side of the ivory tower.
The last thing young people need to be told when they arrive on campus is, “You’re fragile. But don’t worry, we’ll protect you.” Yet this message is loud and clear across campuses.
Colleges like Stony Brook University, a state school on New York’s Long Island, have established so-called safe spaces — often, specific classrooms where students are ensured protection from ideas that proliferate in the rest of the world.
Michigan State University recently unveiled an “inclusive guide” to language, which suggested nixing apparently offensive words like “tone-deaf,” “female” and “insane” from students’ and faculty members’ vocabulary.
As the school said: “The origins of seemingly innocuous idioms or words may be racist, sexist or ableist in nature.”
Meanwhile, Cornell University’s student assembly voted unanimously in favor of requiring trigger warnings before “traumatic” conversations — including suicide, child abuse and xenophobia — in classes earlier this year (the school smartly overrode the vote and killed the policy two weeks later).
And my former school, NYU, has a bias-response hotline listed on the back of student ID cards for reporting offenses on campus — even though it’s difficult to imagine a more unbiased place than an elite progressive university in Lower Manhattan.
According to the school, typical incidents reported to the hotline included “concerns that marketing materials displayed on campus do not accurately represent the university’s diverse population” or “concerns about a culturally insensitive comment.”
During my time there, I encountered trigger warnings in classes, saw speakers like biologist James Watson disinvited from campus, and heard rampant implications from professors and administrators alike that we young adults were in desperate need of ideological protection for the sake of our mental well-being.
What’s more disempowering than the adults around you all agreeing that you’re too feeble to handle reality?
In my upcoming book “The Canceling of the American Mind,” First Amendment attorney Greg Lukianoff and I make the case that these misguided attempts at promoting mental health are actually creating a more fragile and less resilient generation of young people.
Administrators are effectively virtue-signaling by broadcasting their concern for student mental health, then fundamentally undermining it.
While they are right that something needs to be done about the mounting mental health crisis unfolding on campus, the first thing they can do is to quit ideologically bubble-wrapping their students.
Appalachian State University professors Michael C. Behrent and Martha McCaughey argued as much in a recent article about the utopianism of mental health: “In many ways, mental health is a new utopian ideology … Rather than telling students that they should prepare to confront an intellectually challenging environment, universities set them up to expect to be coddled.”
A more meaningful and less performative solution would be to ensure that students have adequate access to mental health services on campus.
And that part of that service is to teach resiliency.
It’s become far too common to “acknowledge” trauma rather than teaching students to work through it.
Some schools are making impactful investments.
After they were rocked by seven student suicides last school year, the University of North Carolina system has rolled out a variety of fixes, including an improved referral process to mental health professionals and a crisis hotline.
They were backed up by Gov. Roy Cooper, who has pumped more than $12 million into the UNC system for mental health initiatives over the past two years.
And here in New York, the SUNY system poured an incredible $24 million into student mental health and wellness services, too (although SUNY Old Westbury, disappointingly, has 15 designated campus safe spaces).
The truth of the matter is that mental health struggles are deeply personal and individual. No amount of administrative action is going to fix the crisis that is plaguing Gen Z.
Colleges need to back kids up with resources, then back off.
Psychologists, not administrators, are the ones who can make a difference.
