For Goodness’ Sake Don’t Give Them Ideas...

From the Department of Questions One Should Never Have to Ask:

How would you feel if you had studied for your university degree but were unable to graduate because you were overweight?

Alarmed, especially as a member of the 'leisured' discipline. The rationale for this idea:

"[That] we are responsible for their total well-being, not just the academic, but the emotional and psychological state of our students."

Which is simply false. Universities typically do invest a lot in student welfare provision, but students are adult human beings and as such their 'total well-being' is largely beyond the grip of the institution. (If I get upset about the government's foreign policy, is the University responsible for making me feel better? Trivially, no. Should it punish me for not cheering up in short order? No again, not least because that would be ludicrously counterproductive.)

If we parse 'responsible for' as something like 'culpably part of the causal origins of', then simply put, even the famous Durham Bubble isn't that totalising, and neither, I should imagine, is the presumably utopian campus of Lincoln University, Pennsylvania. If we read it as 'having a duty of care towards', the madness is a little less obvious, but the portent is to turn an academic community into some kind of cult-cum-asylum in which the student's whole being is supposed to be turned over to the academic hierarchy.

Our lot may have their foibles, but on the whole they just teach people about biopower...