Often erroneously attributed to John Wayne, the quote “This life’s hard, but it’s harder if you’re stupid” actually comes from George V. Higgins’s 1970 novel The Friends of Eddie Coyle. The phrase is spoken by a gunrunner trying not to get killed during a deal, but its applications are truly universal.
Let’s not be so discourteous as to call a certain cadre of today’s college students stupid, but let’s just say Tuesday’s election has left many of them stupefied. Their teachers and administrators made sure of it.
Days before the election, when schools and universities were fearing merely the possibility of a second Trump presidency, reports came out that all distressed students would be appropriately coddled.
The elite New York City high school where comedian Jerry Seinfeld used to send his children announced it would let students stay home Wednesday or whenever the results were determined. We were fortunate to have had a decisive winner. The same lingering vote-counting as four years ago would have left students learning the news Saturday and deriving no benefit from the school’s pampering at all.
Ethical Culture Fieldston School’s principal said in an email that the school “acknowledges that this may be a high-stakes and emotional time for our community.” If there’s any way to describe a presidential election as it relates to pre-K children or K-12 graders whose parents are paying $65,540 per year for their tuition, it’s probably not “high-stakes.”
Seinfeld told the New York Times that because of this type of coddling, he sent his younger son to a different school in eighth grade.
“What kind of lives have these people led that makes them think that this is the right way to handle young people?” he said. “To encourage them to buckle. This is the lesson they are providing for ungodly sums of money.”
This infantilizing isn’t just for the 18-year-old and under crowd, though. Worse, it’s widespread throughout universities, just as it was in 2016. When President-elect Donald Trump was first elected, a dorm at the University of Pennsylvania provided students with “breathing space,” Cornell University students hosted a “cry-in,” and the University of Michigan Law School provided Play-Doh and “positive card-making.” Note that these are Ivy League institutions and a law school.
To cope with the 2024 election, Georgetown University students, most of whom are legal adults, also had resources available to them, including “tea, cocoa, and self-care,” Legos, coloring, and “milk and cookies.”
These are students at Georgetown’s McCourt School of Public Policy, which bills itself as “a top-ranked public policy school” that trains “the ethically-grounded leaders of tomorrow with cutting-edge skills to have a positive impact in the world.” If our leaders of tomorrow are sobbing today over milk and cookies after election disappointment, we have bigger problems than our future president.
Northwestern University, Harvard University, Virginia Tech, Missouri State University, and others have set up similar resources for students, including puppets, therapy dogs, crafts, and “sensory fidgets.”
In a review of the recently published book We Have Never Been Woke: The Cultural Contradictions of a New Elite, Oliver Traldi wrote in City Journal, “In the introduction, [author Musa al-Gharbi] recalls how in the fall of 2016, during his first semester as a doctoral student at Columbia University, undergraduate students claimed to be so traumatized in the wake of Donald Trump’s victory that they couldn’t do their work.”
This state of being is notable not only for its silliness but also for its contrast.
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“As they claimed the mantle of the vulnerable and downtrodden,” Traldi summarizes, “they focused on their own mental health rather than the material struggles of Columbia’s actual working-class community — ’ the landscapers, the maintenance workers, the food preparation teams, the security guards.’”
However they feel about the election, the people who mow lawns, scrub toilets, or install drywall will not be taking days off work to mourn. That is a privilege reserved for those with the least to lose.