In 1955, sociologist Albert Cohen published a now classic title in the criminological canon, Delinquent Boys. The book attempted to explain what Cohen described as “non-utilitarian” delinquency: acts of defiance demonstrating no objective purpose. There was no remunerative value to the actions, no obvious emotional fulfillment motivating them. Often these acts occurred in a gang setting, imbuing them with a collective quality. The question presented itself of what rationale might explain these acts of defying authority.
The angst-fueled gang violence Cohen analyzed bears a disturbing resemblance to the seemingly nihilistic violence that plagued elite Western campuses in the wake of Hamas’s October 7 terror attacks. In both cases, deeply antisocial behaviors are fueled not only by racial bigotry, but also by a tragic deficit of transcendent meaning in young lives. If they want to stem the tide of chaos, universities—and American institutions more broadly—need to offer young people a more compelling vision of purpose-driven communities. Campus administrators have a duty to use their vocation to excite student intellect and actively promote character formation.
Cohen’s young informants provided a few key insights, which he ultimately theorized as a process of status frustration. Generally, the youth lacked any sophisticated conceptual framework to grasp and unpack their psychological drives. Nor were they articulate enough to effectively communicate their thought processes. Nevertheless, with their input, Cohen was able to offer a coherent story of the factors underpinning their behavioral patterns.
Many of the gang members he interacted with were ethnic minorities. They were confronting the challenges of assimilation common to the immigrant experience. In the domestic context that includes parents laboring long hours while their children reach for the American dream, with school offering a promise of opportunity. A routine part of that narrative means submitting to an alien set of values for that promise to be fulfilled.
These young people—and many immigrants more broadly—experienced the educational system as a cultural gatekeeper to the path to middle-class success. Teachers are not only expected to inspire a yearning for knowledge, but to help students master the habits of submitting to mental, behavioral, and institutional standards. All this requires significant capacity for deferred gratification, as students must suffer the tedium of school and the rigor of homework, trusting that their patience allows their teachers to invest in their human capital.
Alas, those without strong social bonds outside of school often fail to internalize such values. Social instability abbreviates time horizons and makes future prospects seem abstract at best, irrelevant and unobtainable at worst. A marginalized student who fails to measure up to what Cohen called “middle-class measuring rods” grows disenchanted with what seems a false promise of a better tomorrow. Commonly, disenfranchised students seek solidarity in each other. Not unlike Augustine’s analysis of his youthful theft in the Confessions, manifesting a disordered but real hunger for communion, Cohen found that gang formation, with an alternative set of expectations, provides a concrete communal solution to individual life challenges.
We see an analogy between these psychological pressures and recent waves of campus activism. Like the status-frustrated, first-generation youth trapped in schools providing content they find irrelevant to their circumstances, many college students are finding difficulty identifying the origins of their frustrations, which often play out in destructive and antisocial behavior. Campus authorities are rarely competent to acknowledge, much less shame, disruptive behavior among students as long as the disruption is framed as morally righteous. An especially surprising feature of recent student activism is antisemitism—a phenomenon thought safely purified from campuses since the days that a more genteel version almost prevented Cohen himself from pursuing a PhD.
The institutional setting of higher education long took seriously a responsibility for setting strict social boundaries. The enjoyment of intellectual liberty depends on strictly regulated behavior. The citadel of knowledge held the ramparts by cheerlessly, but resolutely, enforcing discipline on those who upset the ecological balance in which ideas could be examined, debated, and developed. A marketplace of ideas requires an eager defense of a rule of law in the commons. Those who failed to respect institutional norms would be “rusticated”—removed from the civilized common space of the campus to the distance and privacy of the countryside.
Historically, prevailing norms are responsive not only to students but to faculty. It is the professoriate’s conception of the telos of the university that sets the tone for student behavior. So long as the end of higher education was widely thought to be seeking and sharing truth, strict behavioral boundaries were understood to be not only compatible with, but necessary for, intellectual freedom. As a new mission for the university—social justice—takes priority, not only the purpose of intellectual freedom, but the norms which support it, change.
In 2016, Jonathan Haidt pointed to a central challenge facing campus administrators. He found it increasingly difficult to ignore a choice: whether universities’ defining mission is the pursuit of truth or the pursuit of “social justice,” however conceived. While this may sound simplistic, many of the principles embedded in these alternatives are inimical to one another. Take for example the practice of campus administrators issuing indignant declarations in response to current events. In a university conceived as a social justice agent, these are necessary and expected. In a university serving intellectual formation, such declarations are not only superfluous to the ordinary proceedings of campus life, they tend to model grandstanding, hasty judgment, and virtue-signaling—all obstacles to the pursuit of truth.
Administrators’ interests are not obviously linked to those of faculty and students. The fact that administrative growth has far outstripped faculty and student growth means that campuses are now populated with figures who have a different interest in student behavior than faculty, and who find it easier, and more pressing, to defer to the concerns of activists rather than of educators.
Among faculty, the rise of “critically informed pedagogies” further undermines the potential for good faith exchange of ideas that the pursuit of truth relies upon. Especially in its most popular variant, intersectionality, the critical approach inculcates a victim identity. Whether adopted sincerely or cynically, one accrues credibility to the degree one can meaningfully lay claim to having been victimized. The source of the alleged oppression is often some force that is truly overwhelming and is likely to be nebulous and abstract, such as climate change, sexism, or systemic racism.
More than anything else in the world, students are starved for a sustaining sense of “meaning,” that is, of identity and purpose in relation to something higher, outside of themselves.
Students experiencing such problems, far too complicated and historically entrenched to control, are going to suffer—perhaps with serious mental health consequences. As Haidt has explored in his recent book, The Anxious Generation, college students are now coming of age while marinating in a miasma of ennui, their minds pulverized by a continuing refrain that they lack the agency to control their own fate.
In this environment, a chimeric solution readily appears to some students in the way that gang activity appears to disconnected youth: activism. The beauty of activism is that it offers not only the intoxication of doing something (anything!), a rare enough experience for many young people, but it also gives concrete action to the dignity of a noble cause.
Immediate action before careful deliberation, however, is typically under-informed and anti-intellectual. Especially for the most complex problems, understanding the nuances of historically embedded issues requires a dedication to learning that only earnest study can yield. Few are willing to sacrifice, and those who do are often sobered toward more measured reactions upon realizing the difficulty of the challenge. We can respect youthful eagerness and enthusiasm to change the world—but we also believe students should feel energized to wonder why and for what they should give their lives. Rather than being shaped and informed, if the spirited force is uncritically endorsed by cowardly campus officials, it leads to meaningless sloganeering, annoying disruption—or at worst, it threatens collective violence, as we have seen recently directed at Jews on various campuses.
Campus administrators have now appropriated from faculty the responsibility for forming student character. Theoretically, this permits faculty to apply their expertise to publishing and crafting engaging course experiences, but it is not enough to ensure that students are encouraged to follow a clear path to knowledge of self and subject matter. As faculty lose the authority to shape student behavior, their role is replaced by bureaucratic mandates aimed at a kind of security, but not at the pursuit of truth.
Even the student-teacher relationship itself has been subjected to the designs of management, complete with training of various types, quasi-legal oversight, and accountability measures to enforce compliance. A professor’s willingness to form character along with intellect diminishes as the extent of, and cost of violating, bureaucratic norms increases.
Students once attended universities wanting to be formed by them, to join a culture. More common today, with the waning presence of academic voices in the public square, and inspired by the rise of the online “influencer,” students have come to see academic institutions as platforms from which to advance their personal interests. From an institution willing to share its authority, the university has become a commodity to be leveraged by a consumer.
Yuval Levin, in The Fractured Republic, has described how this corrosive trend distorts the actual social purpose the university can be thought to serve, fostering functional democratic order. Administrators, tempted by myopic concern over student satisfaction, too often capitulate to youthful whims rather than redirecting them toward more fulfilling obligations.
At stake is not simply the purpose of the university, then, but the role of the university in the key social process of identity formation. The hijacking of this function from internal institutional pressures comes as demographic trends make youth identity a crucial concern for society writ large. As growing numbers of freshmen come from experiences of divorce, after the forced separations of Covid lockdowns, and with the digital technological revolution unsettling basic social experience, the rising generation has experienced unprecedented atomization. Friendship, especially for young men, is an increasingly precious commodity because it is becoming vanishingly rare. The erstwhile bonds of community, family, and faith are atrophying. This is an unfortunate trend, especially because Levin highlights the value of these interpersonal institutions of life that comprise civil society and play a vital role in our development of a sense of self.
More than anything else in the world, students are starved for a sustaining sense of “meaning,” that is, of identity and purpose in relation to something higher, outside of themselves. Where might they look for transcendent purpose? How is this amorphous property to be found, if the institutions that were once inspired by transcendent purpose have neglected and forgotten it? No wonder many students seek it through the most basic and “real” of human interaction, standing shoulder to shoulder, shouting shibboleths, raising a flag, targeting an enemy across the quad.
Activism can be criticized for its ideological errors, but few activists are moved by argument because they are not fundamentally motivated by ideas. Like Cohen’s gang activity, much modern student activism has its source in a more existential motivation: it is a desperate grasp at meaning. Walker Percy said that the self can never be encompassed by a theory, and that therefore “the self finds itself ever more conspicuously without a place in the modern world.” Students in the grip of ideology aren’t given meaning by the ideology, they are given meaning by their relation to it, by the cause and purpose it gives them—not a theory about reality, but a story about themselves.
Percy also said, “The only other sign in the world which cannot be encompassed by theory is the Jews, their unique history, their suffering and achievements[,] … and their presence in the here-and-now.” Perhaps this accounts for the shocking rise of activism embodying the world’s oldest hate. The wider society has been shocked by the revival of antisemitism, but they have been more shocked at campus administrators appallingly reticent to curb it. The rise of anti-Jewish hostility in elite institutions indicates the human hunger for identity, and the need for social forces to channel that hunger lest it manifest itself only in dehumanization and destruction. Young people will seek identity and purpose concretely offered, even if that is in gangs or racialized protests. More than ever, the stewards of higher education need to take seriously their responsibility to shape and nourish selves seeking higher purpose.
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