The Importance of Dumb Mistakes in College
The Importance of Dumb Mistakes in College
Because in 1985, a college student could get a little self-righteous, make a bad decision, face consequences
and then go home, having learned a “valuable lesson.”
These days I work as the senior communications officer at another college, where I spend
a healthy fraction of my time dealing with students who’ve made mistakes of their own.
If a Williams student spray-painted “Corporate Deathburgers” on a local building today (not
that they ever would), it wouldn’t be hard to imagine someone posting the security footage online.
Thirty years ago, college students could have tried out radical ideas about limiting free speech in print.
I might have been a longhair with spray paint when I got arrested,
but the arresting officers also marked me as a white University of Michigan student.
And the video would live on: another student weighed down by the detritus of his or her online life.
But my family and friends — and perhaps most important, my college, the University of Michigan — never learned about the episode (until now).
They’re also different from me in many ways: less Grateful Dead and Dead Kennedys, much more technology.
But readership would have been largely restricted to campus, and the paper would have been in circulation for only a day or two.
This shift in the visibility of college students has changed the work my colleagues and I do as educators, too, and not for the better.
Because in 1985, a college student could get a little self-righteous, make a bad decision, face consequences
and then go home, having learned a “valuable lesson.”
These days I work as the senior communications officer at another college, where I spend
a healthy fraction of my time dealing with students who’ve made mistakes of their own.
If a Williams student spray-painted “Corporate Deathburgers” on a local building today (not
that they ever would), it wouldn’t be hard to imagine someone posting the security footage online.
Thirty years ago, college students could have tried out radical ideas about limiting free speech in print.
I might have been a longhair with spray paint when I got arrested,
but the arresting officers also marked me as a white University of Michigan student.
And the video would live on: another student weighed down by the detritus of his or her online life.
But my family and friends — and perhaps most important, my college, the University of Michigan — never learned about the episode (until now).
They’re also different from me in many ways: less Grateful Dead and Dead Kennedys, much more technology.
But readership would have been largely restricted to campus, and the paper would have been in circulation for only a day or two.
This shift in the visibility of college students has changed the work my colleagues and I do as educators, too, and not for the better.
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