How I Learned That College Students Aren’t Snowflakes
August 15, 2025
For years I threatened to teach a course called “Books You’ll Never Read in College.” It wasn’t only that I had grown tired of hearing students parrot the ideological orthodoxy on campus. My main concern, as a teacher of applied ethics, was that many of my students were reluctant to talk about important social, moral and political issues.
When I asked my students to share anonymously what topics they would do their best to avoid in the classroom, the list included pretty much anything controversial: guns, religion, pronouns, the Middle East, abortion, LGBTQ rights, socialism, sexism in the workplace, transgender athletes in sports, parallels between transgenderism and transracialism, race, policing, support for or opposition to President Trump and “anything that might anger others.”
