By Professor Doom
“Stop hassling me, man. You’re always
riding me.”
--classic
complaints from a hippie teenager.
Every culture of worker has its own slang, and
today I’ll talk about a word that readers outside of higher education might not
know, “snowflake.”
A snowflake is a
special student. I don’t mean “special ed” or as we call it nowadays, “special
needs.” A snowflake in higher education is a student that just needs special
attention.
“Can I have an extra 10 minutes to take this
quiz?”
Now, snowflakes
have always been around. In the past, it was usually just a student that tended
to inject irrelevant (but perhaps funny) comments in class, or noisily shift
his desk multiple times during a lecture.
Me,
starting class: “So, whose burger and fries is this?
Snowflake
strolling in, shake in hand: “Mine, I had to go to the bathroom.”
--honest,
that smell is a bit of a distraction during class. Snowflakes don’t care how
their needs affect others.
Snowflakes have
definitely multiplied over the years. Instead of one snowflake a semester, or
one snowflake a class, I now have a score or more of students each requiring
something special for every assignment.
I sometimes
wonder about these snowflakes when they leave the safe spaces of our campus.
How do they make a life for themselves, always asking for special bonuses,
bonuses they’ve never earned? Often when I see student protests, all I see are
snowflakes, holding signs and angrily asking for moar.
It’s those
protests that are worrisome, with whole banks of snowflakes screaming in pain
from offenses nobody can glean. Snowflakes are starting to snowball, and then
appeal for more special needs from admin. Why is this happening now?
I’m hardly
the only to notice the blizzard of snowflakes on campus nowadays, but rather
than be mystified, the professor linked above is trying to make sense of it.
Let’s see what he
has to say:
Schwartz writes in the book that “this is a self that is touched by nothing but love. The problem is that nobody is touched by nothing but love, and so if a person has this as an expectation, if they have built their sense of themselves around this premise, the inevitable appearance of the something other than love blows this structure apart.”
I’m not so
convinced at this. Granted, it’s been years since I went to public school, but
I found endless hostility and hate in such places…the bullying was remarkable.
Are they really idyllic love-fests now? I have my doubts, but perhaps I’m
simply ignorant of what our public schools are like these days.
“the
oversensitivity of individuals today, including political correctness and
microaggressions, all stem from this idea that people operating under the
notion of the pristine self view you as evil because you are showing them
something other than love.”
Now, this I
can agree with, as I’ve certainly had my share of students turning very
hostile, very quickly, once it becomes clear that I do have some actual rules
that need to be followed, even for snowflakes. It’s striking how quickly they
can turn…and how quickly they escalate. Within minutes of my treating my
students like adults, I get calls from admin, because the snowflakes know to
appeal to admin when they don’t get what they want.
Schwartz
points to the rise of helicopter parents and capitulating campus
administrations as contributing to this phenomenon.
Again, my
own eyes agree with the professor’s words. How many riots and altercations at
our campuses could have been prevented if admin had shown a little spine far
earlier? One can only guess, but I bet if admin were more concerned about
education than growth (such as would happen if admin were drawn from the
educators instead of a mercenary class), there’d be far fewer climbing walls
and safe spaces on campus, and possibly a few more study sessions.
Ultimately, the
professor blames the rise of the snowflake on political correctness:
“…there is
clearly an element of irrationality in political correctness. It is a form of
censorship without a censor; we impose it on ourselves. Yet, it keeps us away
from the reasoned discussion of social issues which everybody can see are
important, consequential, and desperately in need of wide-ranging analysis. It
does so through an emotional power that is rarely gainsaid and which anyone can
see is ultimately against everyone’s interest.”
As I’ve mentioned
a few times, there’s a self-destructive quality to the ideology of political
correctness. The professor agrees with me, and believes that political
correctness (and, presumably, the ideology that spawned it) is on the wane. The
recent political election doesn’t give me much hope for that anytime soon, even
as I know the self-destruction must come someday.
The professor is offering his book
for free if you’re willing to jump through a few hoops to get it.
While understanding the origin of the snowflake is of merit, I think it’s more
important how to be rid of them. Real snowflakes are easily dispelled with
heat, and a similar application of heat needs to be applied here, namely, by
doing some very simple things:
1 1) End the
student loan scam. Honest, most snowflakes aren’t paying their own way.
Granted, most students on campus aren’t paying their own way, but being
responsible for your own education is the first step to being a responsible
adult.
2 2) Make
education the primary goal of higher education. Enough with the climbing walls
and campus-wide recreational activities provided by admin. I don’t even blame
snowflakes for thinking college is all about pleasing them when our campuses
offer so much entertainment on-site.
3 3) Make it
easier to get punted off campus. So many policies have been enacted over the
years to keep snowflakes in college long past the time they should have left.
These policies were enacted by admin focused on growth over everything, and
they’ve done great harm to education. A short list of such policies? Allowing
withdrawal from an infinite number of courses, allowing to drop a course
without academic penalty 12 weeks into a 15 week semester, and allowing
cheating students to remain on campus are just a sampling of policies that we
should never have tried…but they’re contributing to the problem.
Would these changes get rid of all
the snowflakes? Of course not, but it would thin their numbers down to a mere
dusting, to the point that professors wouldn’t have an extra “snowflake” class
every semester, just to deal with all the special cases and special needs and
special things this “special” caste of students now requires.
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