Julie Lythcott-Haims, a former dean of freshmen at Stanford University, is the author of "How to Raise an Adult: Break Free of the Overparenting Trap and Prepare Your Kid for Success." She is on Twitter.

During college I subscribed to the conservative student newspaper The Stanford Review because its viewpoints — about affirmative action, apartheid and the merits of a Western-only canon — were diametrically opposed to my own. I learned plenty from those pages and usually strengthened my own rationale. It was a valuable aspect of my intellectual development.

When I was a college dean working with millennials, I worried about the growing number for whom childhood had been a padded cell devoid of emotional upset (feelings were validated, ideas and efforts were praised, problems were handled, fairy tales were made kinder) and for whom the routine challenges of life at college required a parent’s assistance. Today’s college students ask for “trigger warnings” when upsetting ideas might be discussed. I think it’s fine if the purpose is to steel a person for an upsetting conversation, but not when it’s used to insulate a person from having to contend with upsetting material at all.

It’s not the students who need to be kept safe from ideas — it’s the very ideal of ideas that needs to be kept safe from fragile young adults with their fingers in their ears.

Students who won’t hear other perspectives are essentially sticking their fingers in their ears and pretending the issue is not open to discussion. It seems like the inevitable whimper (tantrum?) of kids finally learning that outside their home and desired social media streams people can and do disagree, that even controversial and offensive ideas merit discussion, and that in the real world adults are interested in getting to sound, informed conclusions rather than in everyone being happy and getting along.

What’s to become of the intellectual capacity of American citizens or our democracy itself if our young can no longer go to college and be challenged by the free exchange of ideas? If we weren’t talking about millennials maybe we could simply shake our heads. But millennials — the largest generation in American history — will soon define how America does business, how America thinks and feels, and whether America holds fast to its free speech ideals. And here’s a harbinger of what could come: Generation Z — behind millennials — were offered the original episodes of Sesame Street with this warning: “Intended for grown-ups, and may not suit the needs of today’s preschool child.” If Oscar the Grouch is too mean, is America still America?

It’s not the students who need to be kept safe from ideas — it’s the very ideal of ideas that needs to be kept safe from fragile young adults with their fingers in their ears, for the sake of that young adult and for the sake of us all.



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