Gil Troy: The Quest for Values at Universities
[Gil Troy is professor of history at McGill University.]
Lighten up, last Monday's Gazette editorial counselled. So what if Playboy magazine declared McGill University "North America's 10th-best party school"? Yet after the fall football hazing scandal, with another elite institution Duke University roiled by rape allegations against its lacrosse players, McGill's distress is understandable and laudable. This is not a PR problem. This issue gets to the essence of McGill's mission as a university, which educators have too long neglected.
Far too many universities these days offer safer, alcohol-besotted variations of William Golding's 1950s classic, Lord of the Flies. Golding described how shipwrecked schoolchildren without authorities or civilizing standards descended into savagery. Many modern students are morally shipwrecked, cast on an island inhabited by peers, operating in an ethical vacuum and mocking any authority.
The university all too often teaches that God is dead, clergymen are hypocrites, moral systems are illegitimate and religious people are kooks. The media present a parade of incompetent leaders and flawed institutions, all heroically exposed by noble reporters or Jon Stewart-like cynics. Popular culture preaches that parents are fools, idealists are suckers, tomorrow might never come, and it is best to live for the moment. Add to that nihilistic brew gobs of leisure time, disposable income, and raging hormones, and boom - Playboy becomes the arbiter of university life.
If all this freedom and partying at least created mass happiness, we could accept The Gazette's argument that "as long as McGill also maintains its academic excellence, what could be wrong" with being "a great party school"? But one of the great unaddressed issues in universities today is how much mass misery there is.
From the number of students seeking psychological help to those on psychiatric drugs, from the number of young men struggling with serious addictions to the number of young women coping with unwanted pregnancies, psychological distress is a campus epidemic.
Saturday night's hearty partiers are often the weekday's walking wounded. Administrators soft-pedal it, professors ignore it, gallant university health- services workers live it, feel it, but don't quite know what to do about it.
Yes, it is hard to prove that the immorality breeds the misery. Our society has so medicalized psychological and behavioural issues that we prefer blaming our genes to taking moral responsibility for actions.
And, yes, I teach hundreds of smart, savvy, idealistic, good kids, neither monks nor monsters, who are hip enough to have fun by Playboy standards but self-controlled enough to live full, balanced lives. But campus life often tests their moral mettle, and at best the university is a neutral moral context - when it should be a nourishing moral and intellectual hothouse, helping students stretch their minds, bodies, and souls.
Morality should not be oppressive, ethical spurs need not be guilt trips. Moreover, the quest for values is neither the province of conservatives nor anathema to liberals - conservatives who claim a monopoly on morality are as wrongheaded as liberals who have abdicated any stake in the debate to avoid appearing judgmental. In fact, heightened moral sensitivity is likely to result in more feminism and more activism on Darfur than to create new prudes or teetotalers.
The question is, rather than waiting for the next scandal, what are universities prepared to do to raise these issues? And, of course, is there anything universities can do to change the culture, on campus and off?
Throughout the 1960s and 1970s, universities abandoned their roles as moral tutors or character builders. By the time I graduated from college in 1983, college dormitories had become pricey Sodoms and Gomorrahs. Scenes of Bacchanalian excess played out nightly, with no supervisors in sight. Every Sunday morning my sneakers went squeak, squeak, squeak along the sticky, beer-drenched hallways.
By the 1990s, student supervisors had returned to most dormitories, cracking down on under-age drinking. Campus lawyers implemented these changes, not educators, fearing university liability in lawsuits. The message wasn't "don't do it," it was "don't do it where we might be implicated," and "if you do do it - whatever it might be - don't get caught!"
Modern student life demands more visionary approaches. Universities need to do what they do best - teach, challenge and present alternative viewpoints. Draconian regulations will fail. Intelligent, embracing conversations might help. Administrators and, most important of all, professors, need to start exploring with students questions about good and bad, the nature of personal responsibility, the value of self-discipline, and how one lives a good life.
Just asking the questions will help shape the answers - and change campus dynamics. Perhaps every semester universities will take a page from something the city of Chicago did, inviting students from across the disciplines to read one book in common - and perhaps that book will address ethical questions and concerns beyond "how do I raise my grades" or "how do I get a job when I graduate?"
The editorial preceding the Gazette's charge "Eat, drink and be studious," presented the predictable findings that "parents have far more influence than they think" in shaping their children. Lo and behold, kids bombarded with unedited media messages whose parents failed to educate them about sex plunged into risky behaviors far earlier than others.
"Speak up, parents: kids do listen," the editorial's headline proclaimed. It's time to say, "Speak up, professors and administrators, students do listen" - and who knows, if we jumpstart such a conversation - society might also benefit from some moral clarity - and uplift.
Lighten up, last Monday's Gazette editorial counselled. So what if Playboy magazine declared McGill University "North America's 10th-best party school"? Yet after the fall football hazing scandal, with another elite institution Duke University roiled by rape allegations against its lacrosse players, McGill's distress is understandable and laudable. This is not a PR problem. This issue gets to the essence of McGill's mission as a university, which educators have too long neglected.
Far too many universities these days offer safer, alcohol-besotted variations of William Golding's 1950s classic, Lord of the Flies. Golding described how shipwrecked schoolchildren without authorities or civilizing standards descended into savagery. Many modern students are morally shipwrecked, cast on an island inhabited by peers, operating in an ethical vacuum and mocking any authority.
The university all too often teaches that God is dead, clergymen are hypocrites, moral systems are illegitimate and religious people are kooks. The media present a parade of incompetent leaders and flawed institutions, all heroically exposed by noble reporters or Jon Stewart-like cynics. Popular culture preaches that parents are fools, idealists are suckers, tomorrow might never come, and it is best to live for the moment. Add to that nihilistic brew gobs of leisure time, disposable income, and raging hormones, and boom - Playboy becomes the arbiter of university life.
If all this freedom and partying at least created mass happiness, we could accept The Gazette's argument that "as long as McGill also maintains its academic excellence, what could be wrong" with being "a great party school"? But one of the great unaddressed issues in universities today is how much mass misery there is.
From the number of students seeking psychological help to those on psychiatric drugs, from the number of young men struggling with serious addictions to the number of young women coping with unwanted pregnancies, psychological distress is a campus epidemic.
Saturday night's hearty partiers are often the weekday's walking wounded. Administrators soft-pedal it, professors ignore it, gallant university health- services workers live it, feel it, but don't quite know what to do about it.
Yes, it is hard to prove that the immorality breeds the misery. Our society has so medicalized psychological and behavioural issues that we prefer blaming our genes to taking moral responsibility for actions.
And, yes, I teach hundreds of smart, savvy, idealistic, good kids, neither monks nor monsters, who are hip enough to have fun by Playboy standards but self-controlled enough to live full, balanced lives. But campus life often tests their moral mettle, and at best the university is a neutral moral context - when it should be a nourishing moral and intellectual hothouse, helping students stretch their minds, bodies, and souls.
Morality should not be oppressive, ethical spurs need not be guilt trips. Moreover, the quest for values is neither the province of conservatives nor anathema to liberals - conservatives who claim a monopoly on morality are as wrongheaded as liberals who have abdicated any stake in the debate to avoid appearing judgmental. In fact, heightened moral sensitivity is likely to result in more feminism and more activism on Darfur than to create new prudes or teetotalers.
The question is, rather than waiting for the next scandal, what are universities prepared to do to raise these issues? And, of course, is there anything universities can do to change the culture, on campus and off?
Throughout the 1960s and 1970s, universities abandoned their roles as moral tutors or character builders. By the time I graduated from college in 1983, college dormitories had become pricey Sodoms and Gomorrahs. Scenes of Bacchanalian excess played out nightly, with no supervisors in sight. Every Sunday morning my sneakers went squeak, squeak, squeak along the sticky, beer-drenched hallways.
By the 1990s, student supervisors had returned to most dormitories, cracking down on under-age drinking. Campus lawyers implemented these changes, not educators, fearing university liability in lawsuits. The message wasn't "don't do it," it was "don't do it where we might be implicated," and "if you do do it - whatever it might be - don't get caught!"
Modern student life demands more visionary approaches. Universities need to do what they do best - teach, challenge and present alternative viewpoints. Draconian regulations will fail. Intelligent, embracing conversations might help. Administrators and, most important of all, professors, need to start exploring with students questions about good and bad, the nature of personal responsibility, the value of self-discipline, and how one lives a good life.
Just asking the questions will help shape the answers - and change campus dynamics. Perhaps every semester universities will take a page from something the city of Chicago did, inviting students from across the disciplines to read one book in common - and perhaps that book will address ethical questions and concerns beyond "how do I raise my grades" or "how do I get a job when I graduate?"
The editorial preceding the Gazette's charge "Eat, drink and be studious," presented the predictable findings that "parents have far more influence than they think" in shaping their children. Lo and behold, kids bombarded with unedited media messages whose parents failed to educate them about sex plunged into risky behaviors far earlier than others.
"Speak up, parents: kids do listen," the editorial's headline proclaimed. It's time to say, "Speak up, professors and administrators, students do listen" - and who knows, if we jumpstart such a conversation - society might also benefit from some moral clarity - and uplift.