I’m getting really tired of the endless articles that claim young people are increasingly likely to be emotionally fragile to the point of near incapacitation because professors make them this way. This is patently ridiculous because our students are way to old for us to mold their personalities. They come to us like this, and all we can do is find ways to educate them in spite of this grave defect.
The reason why people get this way are consumerism and death of Fordism.
1. Consumerism.
A student was writing a quiz once but was unprepared and couldn’t answer some of the questions. He became extremely agitated and demanded I give him his money back (sic!) because I made him feel (sic!!!) stupid.
Consumer mentality suggests that emotions are a consumer good, just like a cell phone, a bike or a hamburger. Just like hamburgers, emotions originate outside of oneself and can be obtained from their creators in exchange for money. The student was convinced that he’d paid not to be assisted in acquiring knowledge but to be given positive emotions that professors will manufacture for him. When he experienced negative emotions instead, he perceived the situation as an aggrieved consumer who’d been sold a malfunctioning call phone.
I managed to talk the student down from his enraged and erratic behavior by addressing him like a two-year-old: processing his emotions for him and returning them back to him in a safe format. Obviously, I’d rather not have to do that but what can I do if instead of being taught this useful skill in childhood, the fellow was handed a credit card and told to go buy himself pleasant emotions?
2. Death of Fordism.
The time when the market valued uniformity and conveyor – belt behavior on the part of workers is long gone. As Zygmunt Bauman pointed out, today people go on the job market to sell their complex and unusual personalities. But since most don’t have interesting personalities, they sell idiosyncrasies and invented collections of traumas instead.
When a consumer meets a post-Fordist worker, we get these showily fragile individuals who fake being overly emotional because they believe it sells.
Clarissa's Blog 
I agree with this totally. I cannot abide emotionally fragile students who have been so applauded all their lives that they cannot imagine how or why they would be criticized for anything. They just think of college as another thing they can buy to make them feel good. Wrong. I tell them that it’s better for them to get used to honest, constructive criticism in college than for the real world to eat them alive. But they don’t believe me when I tell them the real world is not going to treat them like special little precious people. They think I’m just being mean because I’m a bitch. Many of them get it later on and come back to thank me, or email me and such. But it takes a while for them to be thankful that someone treated them like a capable adult instead of a simpering child.
I do think that parents promote infantilizing children, too. I try not to do that with my own kids.
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“… our students are way too old for us to mould their personalities …”
I suspect students in these “market economy universities” are moulded in the way you’d mould instant custard — they’ve taken on the shape of the container they’ve been “poured” into, by their parents and their early teachers in part, but mostly by over-exposure to media and their easily co-opted friends.
Insofar as their opinions go, I continue to refer to Gasset and how he pointed out that most people don’t actually possess opinions anyway, but instead have become assorted grab-bags full of sentiment and feeling.
Thus you’re at little risk of coming up against hard opinion in many students, and even if you do, most of the “container” you’re dealing with is still full of sentiment and feeling. (In fact, if you do come up against consistent hard opinion within the “market economy university”, take special care of these people: they’ll eventually form what passes for the intellectual elite because they’re the only ones who will actually understand the stakes.)
Instead, you’re primarily at risk of offending sentiment and feelings, and that students who believe they’re in “market economy universities” act in ways that reinforce their “goodfeels” and dispense with their “badfeels”, to use language suitable for inclusion into the Twelfth Edition Dictionary of Newspeak.
Imagine a future in which the world is Chauncey Gardner, and then imagine putting a boot across its face — forever.
[torrents of “badfeels” may at this point commence, now that I’ve invoked Orwell in a sham parody kind of way, since we were on the way to “being there” anyway …] 🙂
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You are absolutely right, what they consider opinions are actually vague feelings of inexplicable comfort or discomfort. It’s very hard to engage with that on an intellectual level.
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There isn’t any intellectual engagement with it at all, and in fact the state of being involved in this situation should properly be called “entitlement” …
We may as well construct an Eric Berne-like “game” out of this and call it “Entitlement”, in which the gamer seeks to conflate his or her inner emotional state with an external material situation orientated toward typical gain-seeking or conflict-avoiding ends.
Intensionality meets extensionality for the purpose of creating a “harm-free” map of the territory in which the gamer can never be hurt for being flatly wrong.
I prefer not to negotiate with someone in a low self-awareness state of existence that tends to come about from the pursuit of this kind of game, and in fact I tend to act in a highly Machiavellian way that is guaranteed to ensure that they “fail faster” so they may get out of the way …
This behaviour helps end the game faster, since I don’t enjoy it and since I refuse to play it with others.
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I agree with this too – although not quite 100%. You are right that we, as academics, do not MAKE these young people fragile, or ill-mannered, or unsuited for graduate employment, or illiterate, or any of the other sins blamed on the professorate. However, I firmly believe that it is not impossible for such young people to overcome these disadvantages – after all, I know myself that I am much more effective at handling my own emotional responses and taking responsibility for articulating concerns or needs in the workplace rather than pouting about my needs not being met than I was 10 or 15 years ago, and that some of that growth is the result of addressing things learnt in childhood that aren’t true or useful to an adult.
Your response in your first example may have been a “learning moment” for that student – he may never have realised that his feelings can be repackaged, that he has that power. You might have made that student a little LESS fragile – so much of this behaviour is about fear and lack of power, and looking for real power starts with self-understanding, kindness and mastery, right?
In other words, it’s TRUE that we don’t cause students to be like this. But it’s not true that we are completely powerless, we can change things!
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I like the blog up to the point on post-Fordism. You’re not selling a complex personality to a factory owner, to anyone in the skilled trades, to an investment banker, to the owner of a law firm, to a manager in IT services, or to a restaurant manager. No, at the entry level, you had better be there on time and do as you’re told, and make sure the coffeepot is full.
You can be complex and eccentric in business after you have achieved success, not before.
Robots are the ultimate form of conformity. Business is moving toward robotics, not away from it. Why? Because they don’t want human idiosyncrasies getting in the way of operations.
What do you call someone who tries to sell his “complex and unusual” personality to a business owner? Unemployed.
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My sister who has her own job recruitment agencies tells me that there’s nothing the job market values right now than unique, interesting people with a story to tell. It’s extremely hard to find them, though.
Of course, she doesn’t get contracts to find factory workers because those jobs were exported a long time ago. She looks for people who want to have life-long careers that might start at something basic but then lead to great growth.
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Different places, different experiences. I know people at Price Waterhouse and Anderson Consulting. If you’re not from one of a small number of schools, mostly Ivy League, you won’t get an interview. If you walk in with too many ear holes, you won’t get an offer. Make partner and you can have personality. Til then, you’re a pawn and you dress just the way the other pawns dress, keep your head down and avoid making mistakes.
There’s an eFinancial newsletter online. Interesting. This is what Goldman and Morgan Stanley are hiring this season. That’s the game to have a shot at the big bucks.
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People from Ivy League schools who detest multiply pierced ears can have amazing personalities. I’m one such person. And if I were in a hiring position – which I’ll never be – I’d never hire people with piercings or tattoos precisely because they are too sheepish and compliant. If people need special clothes or appearance altering techniques to stand out, how is that a sign of having a personality?
It looks like we mean entirely different things when we talk about personalities.
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As Zygmunt Bauman pointed out, today people go on the job market to sell their complex and unusual personalities. But since most don’t have interesting personalities, they sell idiosyncrasies and invented collections of traumas instead.
No, if that’s true, it only applies to some people who have been led to believe they have the privilege of selling their complex and unusual personalities. But very few people in the world actually make a living based on a personality, manufactured or not: reality tv stars, Oprah, Madonna, Martha Stewart, Deepak Chopra, etc. If you make a living based on a persona complex enough to be perceived as a personality, you create jobs. If you go to be employed by someone else, they don’t care about your personality, but many do care about your persona, prefab and hollow to their specifications.
You cannot seriously think that someplace like Amazon, or Facebook or Google cares about your personality as an employee, but they do care about your persona. Those who work there or in certain knowledge worker fields get to fabricate a more complex persona for work than say retail workers, but it’s still a persona.
I do not believe my personality can be reduced to a word cloud or a data mining metrics operation; but I also do not believe that it is something that can be sold. To believe you can sell your personality is to confuse it with a persona.
This kind of confusion is stupid to the point of offensiveness.
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Any recruiter worth a dime sees through constructed personas in a flash.
The modern work place cares less and less about formalities and more and more about uniqueness. The problem is that it’s hard to find people with actual substance because there are not that many.
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