#are reacting to the shortcomings of their more free-range upbringing

[queenlua]

The crisis of the last year with student protests has made even the richest institutions aware of how much of their presumed wealth can be yanked away from them by a donor class who are increasingly inclined to exert their influence and authority in openly oligarchic ways. The obsession with safety—and the contradictions of that obsession—is as much about financial management as anything else. But that also is a wider sociocultural formation: the American upper middle-class is generally an asset class now who think about safety in the same way as universities both because all institutions with asset-based wealth have to and because they personally have to safeguard their assets in the same fashion, and face some of the same risks from liability exposure. [. . .] Moving away from the caretaker era can’t just be a matter of exposing students to risk and dismantling systems that make safety the mandatory product of an intrusive regime of surveillance and correction. If the people in charge inside the university and outside of it aren’t equally exposed to the natural consequences of their actions and decisions, all this means is forcefully communicating to students—or perhaps all young people—their relative powerlessness and vulnerability. It means deciding that the lesson you really want to teach is that it’s bad to be powerless and thus you should strive in life for power and wealth in order to be beyond consequences. Arguably, if the caretaker era and the bystander era were both aligned with a wider social ideology that was broadly shared across a generation, then this in fact the new ethos of our time—that there is no safety but in power, and that where power believes people are not being sufficiently punished for the things that power disdains, it will find a way to make consequences where there have been none.

bleak essay that nonetheless collects a lot of idle thoughts i've had in one place & puts them together with more coherence than i've ever managed