Education / Schools, Free Speech, Politics

Missouri Professor Opts For Coddling Kids Over First Amendment Rights Of Journalists

“Special snowflakes” are not born; they are made.

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Complaints about the mollycoddling of the “special snowflakes” of Generation Y have become de rigueur for good reason. If that mollycoddling can be reduced to a relatively compact, objective description, this may be it: Many of today’s youngsters suffer from an ill-founded sense of entitlement created in part by adults who try to protect kids from the natural consequences of the kids’ own actions.

After all, the crotchety hordes are not clamoring to decry the Gen Y kiddo who feels special after developing a groundbreaking gene therapy in between running a five-minute mile and practicing cello for the philharmonic’s first chair. Rather, critics complain about participation trophies in Little League, delusional job aspirations of entry-level employees, and excessive “trigger warnings” in college classrooms.

The problem is not young people wanting good things like success or respect. The problem is young people expecting good things like success or respect without regard to what, if anything, they have done to earn those good things.

Being the “best you you can be” is not always enough. Depending upon who the “best you” turns out to be, it might not even be usually enough.

Even the most fragile, hypersensitive Gen Y’er did not emerge from the womb bratty and self-righteous — accomplishment though it is to get through that birth canal. Nope. “Special snowflakes” are not born. They are made.

They’re made by parents, teachers, and coaches who doggedly shield kids from the brutalities of cause and effect. Behind every snowflake is an adult doing his or her damnedest to assure that kid that everything will be alright, no matter what; that the word “truth” doesn’t become incoherent when the words “your” or “my” precede it; and that one person’s sincerity calls for another person’s obedience.

Confronted with the wide world of crap known by some of us as “life,” lots of young people demand gentle treatment. Personal discomfort is not an option. Lots of well-meaning grown-ups perpetuate this set of expectations, confusing insensitivity with injustice, objective standards with abuse.

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For an illustration of this phenomenon, look no further than Missouri.

The University of Missouri has churned out plenty of stories in recent weeks. University president Tim Wolfe resigned in response to student protests calling for radical reform of how the University handles race issues on campus. Even momentarily setting aside questions about what the proper institutional response to poop swastikas actually is, some of the adults at the University of Missouri have contributed more than their fair share to the controversy.

Melissa Click, assistant professor of mass media, along with Janna Basler, the school’s assistant director of Greek life, appears to have threatened and tried to intimidate student journalists who were peaceably documenting and reporting on the protests of their fellow students. Photographer for the MU school newspaper Mark Schierbecker filmed Click and Basler aggressively insisting that Schierbecker and fellow student journalist Tim Tai keep their distance from the protest taking place in the University’s Carnahan Quad.

The video shows Basler yelling at and pushing Tai, and Click striking Schierbecker’s camera and telling him to “get out.” When he refuses, Click calls out to the crowd for “some muscle” to “get this reporter out.”

Click claimed she was defending the protesters’ privacy and dignity.

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Indeed, the protesters had earlier posted printed signs and messages on social media demanding that members of the press stay out of what the student protesters referred to as their “safe space.” For example, a Twitter account affiliated with the movement, @ConcernedStudent1950, tweeted: “We ask for no media in the parameters so the place where people live, fellowship, & sleep can be protected from twisted insincere narratives.”

Now, to be fair, I also prefer for the media to stay out of my “safe space.” I’m not sure how much “fellowshipping” I routinely do, since I don’t know whether bitching and gossiping with friends while a few notches south of sober counts. But I certainly don’t like the press corps gawking at me while I sleep. “Twisted, insincere narratives” often amuse me personally, but, sure, go ahead and keep those out of my “safe space” too.

That’s why I chose to situate my “safe space” in my home. That’s why I sleep in my bedroom, which, any nasty rumors to the contrary notwithstanding, is not a public forum.

In contrast, the protesting University of Missouri students, whose privacy good Professor Click and Ms. Basler so fiercely defended, chose to plop down their “safe space” smack dab in the center of public space. Camping out in the Quad may be a good choice if you want to attract attention to your fight against injustice. It’s a bad choice, though, if what you are after is privacy.

You might hope that a professor with ties to the School of Journalism, such as Melissa Click (who held a courtesy appointment that she just resigned in the wake of the controversy), would recognize the confrontation between the young protesters and the young journalists as a golden teaching moment, an opportunity to encourage mutual respect for the dual rights of peaceful assembly and a free press. Likewise, you might hope that a university administrator responsible for promoting student growth and development through campus organizations would appreciate the lessons that students might learn from experiences like this one.

More modestly, you might hope simply that Click and Basler wouldn’t become squawking harpies attacking people like photojournalist Tim Tai, who carried himself with more dignity, composure, and apparent knowledge of First Amendment law than one can reasonably expect from a kid who may not even be able to buy his own beer.

You’d hope.

Instead, a teacher and an administrator were willing to neglect the First Amendment liberties of journalists in order to insulate student protesters from the natural consequences of their actions. Although Click and Basler have apologized for their actions, one must still wonder how they got into this situation in the first place.

Ordinarily, if you choose to protest in a public forum, then you must accept that the public and the press can observe and scrutinize your protest. Civil disobedience or social activism, however justified on the merits, doesn’t mean you get to keep complete control of your story.

Here, the protesting MU kids strong-armed journalists and spouted a stream of bad arguments about why the media shouldn’t get to cover what the kids don’t want the media to cover. When lines like “we don’t consent to you taking our photographs” don’t work, given that they have no reasonable expectation of privacy while in plain public view, the crowd starts shouting about respecting the “humanity” of the protesters, whatever that’s supposed to mean here.

And the adults, including Click and Basler, shout right along with them.

At the risk of gritting my teeth about kids getting off my lawn: this tableau captures why members of Generation Y are going to yank our feeding tubes and smother us with pillows when we’re old and caring for us becomes inconvenient for them. One day, these kids will take our incessant need for trifles like “sustenance” or “basic hygiene” as failure to “respect” their “humanity.” When they do, we’ll have people like Melissa Click and Janna Basler to blame.

The University of Missouri announced yesterday that law professor Michael A. Middleton will take the helm of the ailing university. Perhaps, as he tries to heal the school’s race-relations wounds, he can also help his faculty and staff brush up on their appreciation of the First Amendment.

Tamara Tabo is a summa cum laude graduate of the Thurgood Marshall School of Law at Texas Southern University, where she served as Editor-in-Chief of the school’s law review. After graduation, she clerked on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit. She currently heads the Center for Legal Pedagogy at Texas Southern University, an institute applying cognitive science to improvements in legal education. You can reach her at tabo.atl@gmail.com.

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