It’s no secret American culture has long been fascinated with youth and the university. And from Yale and Mizzou in 2015 to Berkeley this February and Middlebury just a few weeks ago, it’s clear we’re living in unrestful times to be on a college campus.
Still, the sheer amount of keystrokes recently spent fretting over the State of The American College Student can hardly be explained by these factors alone. A familiar fascination with college students is being stoked by a modern form of media: the amateur video and its internet platform. Armchair critics shouldn’t let this presentation skew their judgement of university students as a whole.
Recent campus tumult shares a common thread: easily watchable clips have been viewed hundreds of thousands of times on the internet.
Want to watch Yale students shout curses at their professor-in-residence? If you have one minute and 20 seconds, you can do that (as people have done more than 700,000 times). With only a little more time, you can watch photographer Tim Tai get shoved by Mizzou protesters. Take 45 minutes, and you can watch the whole first act of the protest drama at Middlebury.
All of these videos are appealingly amateur, gritty and personal. Cameras are jostled, f-bombs dropped, voices raised and all with no cable news voice-over to dilute the action. Such videos give the impression of a raw insiders’ glance into the psyche of the American college student and the political state of campus. It’s great entertainment — reality TV meets ideological conflict meets the intellectual future of the nation.
But the popularity of such videos and the discussion surrounding them advances an availability-biased view of what the university environment is really like. In other words, the fact that such videos make images of obnoxious actions on campus more available leads to such actions being judged as more common in the public psyche.
This is a problem, because most college students and professors are much more moderate than those who have gained YouTube infamy. Most discuss and engage with opposing ideas civilly. Most would never turn to — or tolerate — violence.
Times change, and the ways we communicate change. Of course, this affects the way we judge the morality of those around us. As it does, we should keep in mind that there will always be some people doing things we disapprove of. And many people doing things right.
