Pity the Poor Harvard Undergrads

Crybabies on the Charles, or How the Meritocrats Mistook an Easy A for Genuine Accomplishment

One of the high points in the movie Oppenheimer comes after the physicist tells President Harry Truman that he feels he has “blood on his hands.” Truman, unimpressed, calls him a sniveling crybaby and tells his aides, “I don’t want to see that son of a bitch in this office ever again.”

I felt like Truman when I read the Harvard Crimson’s story on students’ reactions to a university report showing that grade inflation has rendered Harvard transcripts about as meaningful as a participation trophy.

There, amid the Georgian brick and the $60-billion endowment, the children of America’s meritocracy confessed their anguish. “I was crying all day,” said one. Another called the revelation “soul-crushing.” A third worried that a heightened emphasis on academics “attacks the very notion of what Harvard is.”

Oscar Wilde once said you’d have to have a heart of stone to read about the death of Little Eva in Uncle Tom’s Cabin and not laugh. Likewise, you’d need a heart of stone not to snicker at Harvard tears.

But mockery only gets us so far. The spectacle is ridiculous, yes—but also revealing. These young people, so gifted and so bereft, are not anomalies. They are what our society now produces when it succeeds.

The tragedy of the Harvard crybaby is not fragility; it is emptiness.

This essay is about what we have done to the highest achieving young people in America—not just at Harvard but at other elite universities. It is about how we have professionalized childhood, turning the messy business of growing up into a managed process of optimization. It is about how, in eliminating risk from development, we have eliminated development itself.

The Theater of Fragility

Once, the elite signaled its superiority through a stiff upper lip. Now they signal it through emotional vulnerability. Stoicism has given way to the aesthetics of exhaustion. In a culture where suffering is proof of sincerity, fragility has become a virtue.

These are the most “self-aware” young people in history—which means that they have mastered the vocabulary of psychotherapy. They apologize for their “privilege,” confess their “imposter syndrome,” and narrate every inconvenience as “a moment of growth.”

They are fluent in emotion but illiterate in grit.

They are the products of a system that does not understand the dynamics of maturation. They have been spared risk, friction, and failure—and in the process, deprived of the very experiences that build a self.

From Coddling to Conditioning

Jonathan Haidt and Greg Lukianoff call this coddling and blame parental overprotection for campus fragility.

William Deresiewicz, in Excellent Sheep, describes elite students as “anxious, timid, and lost, with little intellectual curiosity and a stunted sense of purpose.”

David Brooks has written about young people trapped in “the organization kid” mindset—accomplished but risk-averse, impressive on paper but uncertain about what they actually believe or want.

But the problem runs deeper than helicopter parenting or the pressure to perform. We have engineered childhood into a continuous audition—and then we’re shocked when young people arrive at adulthood still waiting for someone to tell them what to do next.

From preschool through college, high achievers move through a system built to eliminate anything unexpected or eccentric. The unstructured afternoon—just messing around—has been replaced by piano or violin lessons and travel soccer.

The playground where kids once made up their own games is now monitored by anxious adults.

By the time these kids become teenagers, doing anything spontaneous feels dangerous.

Even rebellion has been tamed. Students are told to “speak their truth”—but only in the right language. To “find their passion”—but with a faculty advisor or parent’s approval. To “take risks”—as long as those risks come with a safety net. They’re free to be themselves, but only if that self looks good on a résumé.

The result is paralysis. They can navigate a bureaucracy but not an unscripted world. They’re perfectly capable—as long as someone else has set the rules.

Remembering Bildung

The Germans once had a word for what we have lost: Bildung. It meant more than education. It meant the shaping of the inner self through freedom, experience, and error. It was the process by which a person became not merely competent but whole.

The classic Bildungsroman—Goethe’s Wilhelm Meister’s Apprenticeship, Mann’s The Magic Mountain, Hesse’s Siddhartha— follow someone growing up through disappointment, love, and loss. The point is always the same: you can’t mature without risk. Real knowledge starts with being humbled. You don’t get autonomy as a gift—you earn it.

Our culture has preserved the concept but drained it of meaning. We promise “transformative experiences” that come prepackaged: study abroad, leadership retreats, and service learning. These are billed as encounters with the world, but they’re really just lines on a résumé.

Bildung once meant learning through hard-won experience. We have replaced it with learning about life—preferably for credit and with Wi-Fi.

The Loss of Real Experience

The modern meritocracy has pulled off something remarkable: it’s eliminated actual experience while constantly talking about how important experience is.

Real experience has rough edges. It’s what happens when the world doesn’t care about your feelings or plans. But we’ve sanded down every environment young people enter.

School isn’t about discovering things—it’s about following instructions. Internships aren’t real work—you mostly watch from the sidelines. Service learning isn’t about helping people—it’s about how good helping people makes you feel.

My father joined the military in 1938 at 18. He didn’t get out until 1946. That’s what real experience used to look like—eight years when nobody was managing your development or protecting you from difficulty. You just lived, and living shaped you.

Now? Failure—which used to be how people learned—is just “feedback.” Disappointment means you need therapy. Struggle gets repackaged as “growth mindset.” Nothing messy is allowed to happen.

We’ve built a system so protected that nobody inside it can actually grow up.

Education in Life

A real education—the kind that gives you courage, compassion, and a sense of what matters—mostly doesn’t happen in classrooms. It happens through work, love, and loss: the job that has to get done, the heartbreak you can’t avoid, the failure you can’t spin into something positive.

A semester abroad isn’t Bildung. Working abroad for people who don’t give a damn about your résumé might be. An internship isn’t Bildung. Getting fired from a job you actually needed could be. A seminar on empathy isn’t Bildung. Falling in love with someone who turns your whole worldview upside down is.

Real education starts where supervision stops. It teaches you perspective, humility, and gratitude—the knowledge that pain doesn’t last forever, that failure teaches you things success never will, and that life has its own plans no matter what yours are.

There’s an old saying: Man plans, God laughs. A real education is learning to laugh too.

The Cult of Career and the Crisis of Meaning

At the root of all this lies our new religion: careerism. We have made professional success the moral axis of existence—the measure of worth and the substitute for adulthood. Every other institution—family, faith, neighborhood—has been subordinated to it. Adolescence now lasts until the first major promotion, which is to say indefinitely.

Our highest-achieving young people aren’t lazy—they’re true believers. They worship achievement. The résumé is their religion. They chase excellence like their lives depend on it, terrified of being ordinary.

We don’t ask who someone should become anymore, just what job they should get. We’ve given them everything except a reason that any of it matters.

What Was Lost

It’s worth remembering what childhood used to be like—not because the past was perfect, but to understand what we gave up.

Kids used to spend hours in groups with no adults around. They made up games, settled arguments, and figured out who was in charge. They got hurt and bounced back. They learned how to judge risk, what was fair, and how to fix a friendship after a fight. This wasn’t just fun—it was how they learned to be people.

Now those opportunities are gone. The kid who never climbs a tree never learns what it feels like to fall—or that you survive falling. The kid whose parents solve every argument never learns that you can fight with someone and still be friends afterward. We replaced the playground with the scheduled playdate. We replaced scraped knees with therapy appointments.

Kids who never get to figure things out on their own don’t learn that they can. They grow up waiting to be told what to do. They show up at college anxious—not by accident, but because we trained them that way. We taught them that life is something to be managed by experts, not something you just live.

Universities inherit this problem, but they also make it worse. Instead of recognizing that students need to be challenged, they add more protection. Instead of treating students like adults who can handle difficulty, they treat them like fragile children who need constant professional supervision. They finish what we started: turning young people into permanent dependents.

The question is whether any of this can be fixed—whether institutions built around credentials and liability concerns can go back to actually educating people. Or whether we’re stuck with what Tocqueville warned about: that democracy’s promise of equality will end in a “soft despotism,” a vast tutelage that infantilizes those it claims to serve.

From Diagnosis to Action

How can elite colleges—built around avoiding risk and managing liability—actually help students grow up without turning it into another checkbox exercise that sounds like a parody (”mandatory resilience training”)?

Here’s what they could do.

1. Value Real Work, Not Just Credentials

Selective colleges love polish. They should value experience instead. Real work—retail, restaurants, construction, taking care of people—teaches what fancy internships don’t: how to show up on time, take orders, deal with difficult people, and accept criticism. It teaches you the difference between trying hard and getting results, between earning something and feeling entitled to it.

Admissions offices that actually cared about character would reward students who’ve lived, not just ones who’ve achieved. A student who worked night shifts at a hospital has learned more about being human than one who spent summer “shadowing” at a prestigious office.

2. Make Students Handle Their Own Problems

Universities need to stop treating students like children. When students need help or accommodation, the first step should be talking to their professor—not filling out a form for some office. Teach them to explain what they need, work out solutions, and take responsibility for what happens.

This was John Henry Newman’s point in The Idea of a University: higher education isn’t just about transmitting information. It’s about teaching judgment. And you learn judgment through conversation, not paperwork.

3. Actually Challenge Students

Students aren’t hurt by difficult work—they’re desperate for it. The real cruelty is praising them for mediocre effort. Colleges should raise the bar—not with busy work, but with real intellectual and personal challenges.

Make participation count toward grades. Have debates where students argue both sides. Require multiple drafts and make students present their work publicly. Bring back oral exams and senior projects. The point isn’t to humiliate anyone—it’s to show them that real mastery is hard, slow, and worth it.

Dewey said, “Education is not preparation for life; education is life itself.” And life includes failure and embarrassment. Real education has to include those things too.

4. Let Students Run Things Without Supervision

People grow when they’re in charge. Encourage student newspapers, performances, and organizations—without administrators hovering over everything. Yes, students will screw up. That’s how you learn to be an adult.

Push students to do things that make them uncomfortable: running a crisis hotline, acting in a play, editing a publication. These aren’t just activities—they’re how you learn responsibility, how to work with others, and how to keep going when things get hard. Tocqueville called it “the art of association”—learning to manage freedom together.

5. Send Students Into the Real World

Pop the campus bubble. Replace curated internships with actual experiences—teaching kids in struggling schools, working with patients in hospitals, helping people in crisis. Require work that’s physically hard and emotionally difficult. The goal isn’t charity—it’s contact with reality.

A semester doing real work in a difficult environment teaches more about being human than a dozen classes on “global citizenship.” Bildung means learning by doing, not watching.

6. Stop Calling Fragility “Wellness”

The wellness industry treats weakness like it’s virtue and calls it “self-care.” Students don’t need more “stress management” workshops. They need experiences that make them tougher—that teach them they can face hard things without falling apart.

You build resilience through doing hard things, not talking about your feelings. Physical challenges—hiking, sports, dance, martial arts, even gardening—teach you what your body can do.

Working under pressure—staffing hotlines, tutoring struggling students, volunteering in hospitals—teaches you to stay calm when things are hard. Being responsible for something that matters—running a dorm, managing a club budget—teaches judgment because other people are counting on you.

Real wellness isn’t about eliminating stress. It’s about learning you can handle it.

7. Put Growth at the Center of Education

Bildung can’t be outsourced to an office of student life. It has to be central to academics. Let literature, history, and philosophy do what they’ve always done—help people understand what it means to be human. Read stories about failure, tragedy, moral strength, and redemption—Antigone, Lord Jim, Beloved, The Death of Ivan Ilyich. Let students see that suffering is universal and that grace is possible.

Christopher Lasch wrote, “Nothing worth knowing can be learned from success.” You develop moral imagination through defeat. Education’s job is to make that defeat meaningful.

The Lost Art of Maturation

John Henry Newman once said that the purpose of the university was to cultivate “gentlemen.” What he meant was not to instill polish or manners, but to facilitate the transition from youth to adulthood.

Yet today, our most selective colleges seem organized to delay that process. They give students the appearance of maturity—independence, sophistication, and self-confidence—while shielding them from the responsibilities and frustrations that real adulthood requires.

Their students are encouraged to have opinions on every public issue, yet treated as fragile when confronted with ordinary conflict or disappointment. They are taught to speak freely, but also to seek intervention whenever they feel uncomfortable.

Growing up, in any meaningful sense, isn’t automatic. It’s a kind of moral and emotional apprenticeship. It begins when people learn to take responsibility—not just for their work, but for how they treat others. It deepens as they learn to control their impulses, delay gratification, and respond thoughtfully rather than reactively.

Maturity shows itself in the ability to handle frustration without breaking down, to fail without falling apart, and to see disagreement as normal, not as harm.

These lessons are not acquired in classrooms or workshops; they come from daily life—living with people who are different, difficult, and imperfect. Yet many elite campuses now try to remove precisely those challenges. Complex grievance systems and administrative “care networks” step in where patience and negotiation should.

A student who calls an administrator to resolve a roommate dispute never learns to repair a relationship. A student who expects emotional safety in every discussion never learns to think clearly when emotions run high.

Maturity can’t be mandated or fast-tracked. It grows out of confrontation—with limits, with failure, with one’s own weaknesses. Colleges that truly care about student well-being should not try to spare the young from discomfort, but help them learn how to face it.

The aim of higher education should not be just to fill minds, but to teach students how to govern themselves before they presume to guide the world.

The crying Harvard undergraduate is merely our most photogenic symptom. She inhabits a society that confuses safety with meaning and grades with genuine accomplishment.

We have taught our children to perfect their résumés, not their character. The A is no longer a grade. It is the shape of the hole where Bildung used to be.