Sunday, October 20, 2013

The Death of the Grown-Up

It will be interesting to see what happens in the aftermath of the Western Washington University party riot.

The President of the university announced that any student who had participated in the riot would be expelled immediately if identified.  There is sure to be pushback from parents of said students if the university follows through on this threat.  I had my doubts that it would ever happen but that remains to be seen.

What I did find interesting was this quote that I stumbled across in an Ed Driscoll article on PJMedia about movies in the 70's.

as Diana West noted in her 2007 book,
The Death of the Grown-Up: How America's Arrested Development Is Bringing Down Western Civilization , (available here at Amazon.com)
Indeed, at the University of Chicago, which may be the one campus where administrators acted swiftly to expel students who had occupied a building, “parents took out newspaper advertisements protesting the draconian punishment visited upon their darlings, thus providing a clue to what had gone wrong with their children.”
Ms West is referring, of course, to the late 60's college riots where leftist students took over buildings on multiple campuses to protest.

However, I've seen too many situations over the past few years where parents defended the horrific acts of their children to have any faith that maybe today's parents, given the opportunity, will sit down with their college age children and have a talk with them about the consequences of their behavior. My suspicion is that much like the situation in Chicago in the late 60's, we will instead see an outcry from these parents about what a good kid Johnny really is and how unfair the university is being. If Western actually follows through with their pledge.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

Did you see the story about the teenagers from at least 6 different highschools who took over a former pro football player's unoccupied house for a huge party? Their parents threatened to sue him because when none of them came forward to apologize for the damage they had caused he published their names (and their twitter feeds and pictures that they, themselves had published) on a website.