Students claim abuse at Royal Scots Conservatoire

Well, taking the Facebook posting at face value, this Professor Richardson-Webb sounds a bit of a dinosaur — how amazing that the students have not complained about generational issues.

But the self-absorbed generation, who DO on the whole spend too much time on their phone screens, cannot see past THEIR take on everything, so can find cause for complaint on every response made by anyone who does not agree with them in every respect. This is not, and does not in any way constitute, abuse. Insensitivity to the egos of the little dears, perhaps.

The scruff of the neck incident is inappropriate, and borderline abusive. The woman sounds like someone who does not suffer what she rightly or wrongly considers irrelevant very gladly and shoots from the hip. Not a very comfortable teacher, perhaps.

But I did not see much sensitivity in the response to her own accounting of her own experience — recounted, if I understand the account correctly, in a session meant to be both open and confidential.

And I am immediately wary of ANYTHING that depends upon the preposterous canard of “trigger warnings” for its credibility. I have heard of cases in English departments where students must be excused from READING books like Jane Eyre, in case they were orphans, let alone anything (like Tess) in which sex is involved. What they are doing taking English is beyond me — wait till they get to the Jacobean drama. And a good deal of Shakespeare.

There may well be real problems at RCS in need of address. But they will have to do better than this in their litany of woes. In the meantime, I suggest they get a sense of humour, notoriously lacking in the snowflake gang, and try to understand that not everyone was raised like them and different modes of expression need not mean hostility.

I am not sure that the mantra that “sticks and stones may break my bones but names will never hurt me” is, or ever was, entirely true. But those of us raised by it took from it the notion that in life you have to take the rough with the smooth. That meant not winning every race we entered, and not getting a prize if we didn’t. It meant not being spared criticism if we were found to be wrong. It meant being punished if we did something egregious — usually a withdrawal of privileges, like being grounded or our allowance withheld, not just a “time-out.” IT MEANT LOW MARKS IF OUR WORK FAILED TO MAKE THE GRADE. Even failing a course — an almost unheard-of consequence these days.

Too many of these kids have been raised to think they can do no wrong and anyone who does not find them perfect and do whatever they want them to do is “abusing” them. I have seen the terror inflicted on too many professors by school administrators lest they do anything to “offend” the paying customers. Too many of whom cannot spell, let alone use the language with any semblance of correctness, and are either too idle or too ignorant to consider anything like looking up things they are unsure about.

Sounds to me like RCS is a bit of a throwback and tries to treat its students like adults. That does not give them licence to denigrate students for any reason, and they ought to be vigorous in their investigations of complaints. But a lot of this sounds like whingeing.

Snowflakes currently appear to have the upper hand. As do the aggrieved, the easily offended, the self-loving. They have not yet persuaded me of ‘systemic” abuse on any front, though they have made me ponder the vigour of RCS responses to their complaints. It will be very interesting to see how this plays out.

Meanwhile, my visceral response to them is “Grow up.”