In this climate, there is little room for students to experiment and screw up. We seem to expect them to arrive at school fully formed. When they let us down by being just what they are — young humans — we shame them.

This shift in the visibility of college students has changed the work my colleagues and I do as educators, too, and not for the better.

If a Williams student spray-painted “Corporate Deathburgers” on a local building today (not that they ever would), it wouldn’t be hard to imagine someone posting the security footage online. Then the outraged calls and emails and tweets would pour in, demanding that the college disavow Deathburger values. I’d be writing news releases explaining that at Williams we take Deathburgers very seriously. There would be op-eds about the Deathburger problem on American campuses today. And the video would live on: another student weighed down by the detritus of his or her online life.

Technology is a lead actor in this drama, but of course, privilege and power influence how the narrative plays out. Some people are given more learning opportunities than others. I might have been a longhair with spray paint when I got arrested, but the arresting officers also marked me as a white University of Michigan student. Had I been someone else, I might have learned a different lesson.

But our response to inequality shouldn’t be to strip the privilege of learning from the lucky few who can already enjoy it. We must expand this universal right to develop and grow.

A commitment to learning isn’t synonymous with freedom from accountability. And it can’t extend into areas like sexual violence or racial hatred. But when it comes to college kids, my worry is that we’ve become unwilling to tolerate innocent mistakes — either that or we have drastically shrunk our vision of innocence.