The Coddling of the American Undergraduate

Rita Koganzon
Hedgehog Review

Excerpt: When I was a graduate teaching assistant at Harvard University a decade ago, one of my students missed a final exam because he forgot to set his alarm. I didn’t learn about this because he told me, in person or even by email; nor did he apologize for his oversight or ask if he could make up the exam. Instead, in the manner customary at Harvard, I was informed by a message from his “Residential Dean,” a faculty member living in the dorms whose job was to liaise between delinquent students and their professors, in part by composing their excuses for them.

This is not some recent, overzealous response to the outsized demands of student activists; it is, rather, an old model that Harvard and only a few other very selective colleges have long followed, but which other schools all over the country now strive to imitate.

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