The Importance of Dumb Mistakes in College<br />Because in 1985, a college student could get a little self-righteous, make a bad decision, face consequences<br />and then go home, having learned a “valuable lesson.”<br />These days I work as the senior communications officer at another college, where I spend<br />a healthy fraction of my time dealing with students who’ve made mistakes of their own.<br />If a Williams student spray-painted “Corporate Deathburgers” on a local building today (not<br />that they ever would), it wouldn’t be hard to imagine someone posting the security footage online.<br />Thirty years ago, college students could have tried out radical ideas about limiting free speech in print.<br />I might have been a longhair with spray paint when I got arrested,<br />but the arresting officers also marked me as a white University of Michigan student.<br />And the video would live on: another student weighed down by the detritus of his or her online life.<br />But my family and friends — and perhaps most important, my college, the University of Michigan — never learned about the episode (until now).<br />They’re also different from me in many ways: less Grateful Dead and Dead Kennedys, much more technology.<br />But readership would have been largely restricted to campus, and the paper would have been in circulation for only a day or two.<br />This shift in the visibility of college students has changed the work my colleagues and I do as educators, too, and not for the better.
