The Review: Coddling students and social control

Plus: Don't miss this demented movie before it disappears. ADVERTISEMENT [The Review Logo]( You can also [read this newsletter on the web](. Or, if you no longer want to receive this newsletter, [unsubscribe](. In 2008, a dean at the University of Chicago began to execute a plan to increase on-campus undergraduate residency — with the eventual goal that 90 percent of students would live on campus. Similarly, the University of Virginia’s [2030 Plan]( to increase undergraduate campus residency by establishing “a series of residential communities that will house all first- and second-year students on grounds and provide ways for third- and fourth-year students to stay connected to their residential communities.” Related efforts can be found at many other institutions. The ideal seems to be something like the residential house systems at Yale and Harvard Universities. There are surely many reasons colleges want this, including to expand revenue and alumni giving. But in a recent [essay]( in our pages, Rita Koganzon fingers a different motivation: social control. In a college landscape ever more encrusted with student-life deanlets, residential communities — “these bubbles of integrated and fully facilitated living and learning” — subject students to the perpetual surveillance of their elders. Such oversight, Koganzon says, is bad for students, even when they like it. She begins with an example from Harvard, where she was a graduate student and teaching assistant. When one of her students missed a final exam, the student himself didn’t bother to get in touch. “Instead, in the manner customary at Harvard, I was informed by a message from his ‘residential dean,’ a faculty member living in the dorms whose job was to liaise between delinquent students and their professors, in part by composing their excuses for them.” Koganzon sees this sort of oversolicitousness as a signature of what could be called in loco parentis redux. In the old model, colleges policed their students’ social lives and sharply limited opportunities for premarital sex, which was the main concern. Back then, “students were the children; faculty and administrators were the adults with punitive authority.” This old-fashioned situation became intolerable to students, who had largely dismantled it by the mid-'70s. But now, Koganzon says, a “new paradigm emphasize[s] the egalitarian, nurturing, and intimate elements of family relationships, while downplaying the hierarchical aspects.” The new paradigm is concerned with a lot more than just buffering interactions between students and their professors. Beneath its soft and welcoming exterior, Koganzon suggests, it bristles with directives and prohibitions that make the old model look simplistic and quaint. Constantly on the lookout for harms, “students are being prepared for a life of continued monitoring and restriction in professional and social life, a lifetime of dependence on the adult analogs of student-life administrators and grievance officers.” Koganzon’s advice to students? If you have the chance, flee. You’re better off living off campus. Read “[The Coddling of the American Undergraduate]( SPONSOR CONTENT | The University of Oregon [Rhodes Scholar, Campbell Trophy winner found paths to success at the university]( NEWSLETTER [Sign Up for the Teaching Newsletter]( Find insights to improve teaching and learning across your campus. Delivered on Thursdays. To read this newsletter as soon as it sends, [sign up]( to receive it in your email inbox. The Magic of the Past If you’re a subscriber to the Criterion Channel, you have until the end of the month to [watch]( Ken Russell’s 1971 film The Devils, a demented Vanessa Redgrave vehicle about a group of 17th-century French nuns who become — or pretend to become — demonically possessed. The possessions and very public exorcisms of the nuns were elements in a plot against a priest in the town of Loudun, Urbain Grandier, whose defense of Loudun’s political autonomy was an obstacle to the centralizing ambitions of Cardinal Richelieu. Grandier (played in the film by Oliver Reed) is accused of using sorcery against the nuns; after a show trial, he is burned at the stake. Richelieu is memorably played by the poet Christopher Logue, in one of his very few film roles. (Logue also played “the spaghetti-eating fanatic in Terry Gilliam’s Jabberwocky,” Wikipedia notes.) The film is based on Aldous Huxley’s 1952 popular history The Devils of Loudun. Huxley’s book is more attentive than Russell’s film to the ambiguous dynamics by which the nuns and their politically motivated exorcists cooperate to produce the illusion of demonic possession; for both parties, Huxley suggests, the performance had a way of becoming real for its performers. Neither Huxley nor Russell entertains the possibility that the nuns were genuinely possessed — although, as Huxley writes, the Catholic Church, long after it had exonerated Grandier for any involvement, continued to insist on the possibility that the demonic possession itself was real. In a recent essay in The New York Review of Books, Erin Maglaque [criticizes]( the historian Carlos M.N. Eire’s attitude toward the magical happenings of early modern Catholicism, which is rather different from Huxley’s and Russell’s. Eire’s They Flew: A History of the Impossible (Yale University Press, 2023) describes instances of divine levitation by figures like Teresa of Ávila, as well as other miraculous abilities afforded the super devout — like bilocation, whereby one can be in two places at the same time, for instance a convent in Spain and a wilderness in the New World, converting natives. In “this deeply unserious book,” Maglaque writes, Eire insists “that these miracles actually happened.” Maglaque shares Eire’s concern about the hermeneutic blinders we moderns might bring to the study of more enchanted ages, but she sees his solution as a kind of faux-naïve credulity. “I am sympathetic,” she writes, “to some of the problems Eire identifies in our dominant approach to the study of early modern religion. But they do not mean we need to become re-enchanted, were such a thing even possible; or that, as other historians have suggested, we might fracture into two academies, the secular and the nonsecular.” Watch Ken Russell’s The Devils [here](. Read Erin Maglaque’s “Wings of Desire” [here](. ADVERTISEMENT SUBSCRIBE TO THE CHRONICLE Enjoying the newsletter? [Subscribe today]( for unlimited access to essential news, analysis, and advice. The Latest THE REVIEW | ESSAY [The Coddling of the American Undergraduate]( By Rita Koganzon [STORY IMAGE]( Colleges want to exercise total social control over students’ lives. That’s bad for everyone. ADVERTISEMENT THE REVIEW | ESSAY [Your Pay Is Terrible? You’re Not Alone.]( By Kevin R. McClure [STORY IMAGE]( Higher education has a compensation problem. THE REVIEW | ESSAY [How Queer Theory Turned Its Back on Gay Men]( By Tae-ho Kim and Blake Smith [STORY IMAGE]( When anti-normative faux-radicalism devours a field. THE REVIEW | OPINION [More Colleges Are Swearing Off Political Positions. They’re Getting It Wrong.]( By John K. Wilson [STORY IMAGE]( The Kalven Report, which first articulated the concept of institutional neutrality on controversial topics, was supposed to protect faculty members, not silence them. Recommended - “Why had these peoples deliberately chosen a life of almost-perpetual motion?” In Aeon, Cecilia Padilla-Iglesias [writes about]( her time among the Mbendjele BaYaka, “one of the few remaining mobile hunter-gatherer groups in the world today.” - “They would come out of the house and one guy would come out with a machete and one guy would come out with an AR-15. That was just to pick up the mail.” A joint investigation by ProPublica and The Frontier [looks at]( Chinese organized crime in Oklahoma. - “As to M.F.A.s, perhaps they are above all sad because they leave so many writers with nothing but an audience of students.” In The Point, the NYRB Classics’s editor Edwin Frank [talks with]( Scott Sherman. Write to me at len.gutkin@chronicle.com. Yours, Len Gutkin SPONSOR CONTENT | The University of Bath [Tackling Global Challenges]( Discover how researchers at the University of Bath use the latest technologies to track the evolution of bacterial infections to prevent escalation into pandemics. FROM THE CHRONICLE STORE [Fostering Students' Free Expression - Buy Now]( [Get 12 Months]( [of Chronicle Reports]( [Order our new]( Digital Reports Bundle and save on a year’s worth of in-depth reports. 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