Put Down the Squishies, We Have a Republic to Save

The University of Michigan has discovered that the best way to prepare students for adulthood is to protect them from anything that might make them uncomfortable.

Beginning in fall 2027, the university’s College of Literature, Science, and the Arts plans to shield first-year students from the consequences of their first-semester grades. Students’ letter grades will not appear on their official transcripts, nor will it factor into their GPAs. Instead, their transcripts will record only “pass” or “no credit.” Michigan says the goal is to help students “curb the mental health crisis unfolding among college-aged individuals.”

A disappointing grade has now become a potential threat to a student’s mental health, and therefore something the institution should work around.

It would be easy to dismiss Michigan’s experiment as an absurdity unique to one university. It isn’t.

I saw the same maladies during my own graduate education in teacher preparation. Instructors carved out the first 30 minutes of class dedicated to “play time.” Several instructors would pass around a bin of toys, so-called “squishies,” and other fidgets while they lectured. One classroom had a “calming corner” outfitted with pillows where students could go lie down if they felt overwhelmed.

There were therapy dogs, breathing exercises, and “self-care” time. Academic material came with trigger warnings. “Microaggressions” were treated as a species of harm. When graduate school became too emotionally taxing, we gathered in “peace circles” to process our feelings.

In case you missed it, this wasn’t elementary school. These were graduate students preparing to become teachers.

Discomfort, from the institution’s perspective, was not something to overcome. It was something the institution felt responsible for removing.

This same line of thinking extended to language. Stanford’s 2022 “Elimination of Harmful Language Initiative,” for example, instructed its IT community to produce alternatives to ordinary words it deemed potentially harmful. “Freshman” was discouraged because it supposedly grouped students according to masculine language. “American” was flagged because it could imply that the United States is the most important country in the Americas. “White paper” was discouraged because, according to the guide, it could carry subconscious racialized associations.

The point is here is not that every administrator who distributes a fidget toy is secretly plotting the destruction of Western civilization. Rather, the point is that these seemingly disconnected practices are manifestations of the same underlying idea: The primary responsibility of education is to protect the student’s emotional state.

That is a radical departure from the original purpose of education.

Beginning with Socrates, the classical tradition understood education as the pursuit of the good, the true, and the beautiful—not merely the accumulation of knowledge, but the formation of people capable of reason, virtue, and self-governance. Plato understood education as the cultivation of the soul; Allan Bloom later argued that a liberal education connects students to the enduring questions of truth, virtue, and human flourishing. A free society depends upon citizens capable of self-governance.

Character formation is the slow, deliberate process of making a person capable of governing himself.

Education therefore cannot be organized around the elimination of every unpleasant experience. Its purpose is not to make students comfortable enough to avoid struggle, but capable enough to meet it.

The job of a teacher is to lift students up, not lower the bar.

The best coaches understand this instinctively. A good coach does not simply allow an athlete to do whatever feels comfortable. He pushes the athlete beyond what he or she thinks they can do because he knows that growth often occurs where comfort ends.

Education should work the same way.

Yet we have become so committed to making education “student-centered” that we have forgotten why we have teachers in the first place. The student does not possess all the knowledge, experience, or wisdom necessary to determine what he or she needs. That is precisely why we have teachers, coaches, mentors, and parents.

The therapeutic mindset reverses this relationship. It takes the ordinary pains of growing up—failure, criticism, disappointment—and recasts them as problems to be managed by an institution.

Michigan removes grades because grades might cause anxiety. Classrooms acquire calming corners because students might become overwhelmed. Adults are given toys because sitting through a lecture without constant stimulation has apparently become too difficult. Language is sanitized because encountering a word with an unpleasant association might cause distress.

In his 1838 Lyceum Address, Abraham Lincoln warned that the greatest threat to the American experiment could come from within. “If destruction be our lot,” he cautioned, “we must ourselves be its author and finisher.” The republic, he understood, required citizens with the character to respect the principles and institutions that made self-government possible.

Lincoln’s warning was that America could “die by suicide.” The surest way to prevent that fate is to educate citizens to be worthy of the freedom they have inherited. A university like UMich, which systematically shields students from the ordinary consequences of their work, is not preparing them for adulthood. It is training them to expect that institutions will rearrange reality around their feelings. Such is hardly the stuff of which a robust republic is made.