In hindsight, Georgetown University’s McCourt School of Public Policy saw it coming. As I reported Monday, the school set up a “Self-Care Suite” for students the day after the election, offering opportunities to play with Legos, color with crayons, and eat milk and cookies “in recognition of these stressful times.”
Stressful times, indeed. This is the Kamala Harris demographic, and the school’s administration understood that its student body would need help adjusting to the fact that Donald Trump would soon be their next president.
But Georgetown is hardly an outlier. Across the country, university professors and students took what amounted to a national mental health day as the news of Trump’s victory sunk in.
On Tuesday, Northwestern University offered students a “post-election wellness space” fit with “puzzles, crafts, games, snacks, and a variety of brain break activities,” according to The College Fix. And at Princeton, students who are a part of a climate advocacy group called “Sunrise Princeton” sent an email Wednesday to their peers announcing “a combined art-build and processing space.”
“Last night was devastating to watch,” the email read. “Many of us are feeling frustrated, scared, uncertain—a whole mishmash of (mostly not good) emotions.”
At Michigan State University, assistant professor Shlagha Borah sent an email to her students saying she was “canceling class today to grieve the presidential election results.” “As a queer, immigrant woman of colour [sic], I cannot, in good conscience, go on about my day like everything is alright,” Borah, who teaches a freshman class in “Writing, Rhetoric, and Cultures,” wrote to her students.
At Columbia University in New York City, at least six professors—and probably more—either canceled class, made it optional, or gave students a pass on homework and exams due to the “heightened stress regarding the election,” according to screenshots seen by The Free Press.
“Everyone will get participation points” one biology professor wrote while announcing that an exam review session would be optional. In another class, a professor promised to “replace” students’ midterm exam grades with their final grades if they do poorly “in recognition of the increased stressed [sic] some of you might be feeling because of the election results.” A political science professor also canceled her lecture on “modern polling methods and their blind spots” because “it feels a bit tone-deaf to deliver it today.” Actually, with the polls on the presidential race once again not coming close to predicting the results, it would have been the perfect time for such a lecture.
At Penn, a professor wrote on Canva, a platform used by students to access homework assignments, that he was moving an exam back a week after receiving “a slew of emails this morning with concern about the election results, and its impact on your exam preparation.”
“I agree that this is an emotional time for many of you, and I want to recognize and validate the disappointment many of you expressed,” the professor wrote.
And at Emory School of Medicine, one student (who asked not to be named) told me deans and administrators are sending emails to residents—and even fellows—“to check in postelection, ask if they have feelings of anxiety about the future, and reiterate that they are here for them during these challenging moments.”
Meanwhile, even a public high school is nurturing election trauma: According to an email obtained by The Free Press, the NYC Museum School in the upscale Manhattan neighborhood of Chelsea is offering “one-on-one counseling sessions, group discussions, or classroom activities” to help students and families process “this period” which “may bring a range of emotions and uncertainties.”
Greg Lukianoff, president of the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE) and the co-author of the New York Times bestseller The Coddling of the American Mind, told me that these institutions are the “infantilizing definition of safe spaces.”
“Far from achieving therapeutic goals,” Lukianoff continued, “it tells students they are fragile, helpless, and childish, none of which can be expected to honestly help with mental health. And a more serious higher education industry would understand this immediately.” It’s also yet another reason why Trump supporters have so little patience with the woke left.
“It’s sad to see that they seem to have learned absolutely nothing over the last 10 years,” said Lukianoff.
Frannie Block is a reporter for The Free Press. Read her story “Legos, Cocoa, and Coloring Books for Georgetown Students,” and follow her on X @FrannieBlock.
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