Goodwill Hunting

Glory be to God on high, and on earth peace, good will towards men.

Goodwill is rarely practiced when needed most.

A conversation with a good friend the other day, a dedicated public school teacher with several advanced degrees and a long successful career in teaching at both the grade school and college levels, confirmed that rather than good intentions being assumed, the opposite is true. Parents, often indifferent or unwilling to provide their children with a sense of virtue and self discipline, too easily assume a teacher is at fault when their children's behaviour, most often a mirror and predictor of home life, is questioned and challenged.

In the workplace and the classroom, as much in the public square and on or in social media, rational debate is becoming exceedingly rare. Conflict is catastrophic rather than an opportunity to stretch understanding and to achieve consensus. The terms by which people are forced to operate - conditions introduced by people seized by a pathological fear and a need to control others to minimize an imagined threat - are tumourous, cancers that multiply on the power fed them, summary judgements imposed by narcissistic individuals motivated by their own self righteousness. The harbingers of cancel-first-ask-forgiveness-never consider themselves so much better than others that they need to confine and conscript others to their twisted and fragile way of thinking. They invent fantasy, avoid reality, and perpetuate collision and abuse.

The cancel culture bullies are complacent thinkers, unmoved by the damage they inflict on others who refuse to be bullied by young fascists who are the heirs of dysfunction herded in their families by parents who are indifferent, indulgent, or authoritarian, parents who are loathe to correct their children for fear of loss of relationship, or laziness or an unwillingness to do the job of a truly loving and caring parent. And so, children are becoming more and more narcissistic, more easily manipulated, more willing to engage in the manipulation of their peers, and thus more destructive. They are, as my teacher friend would say, more interested in making a point than making a constructive contribution (to class and society).

Dealing with Difficult Students: the Narcissist

April 7, 2010 | Faculty Focus, Magna Publications

Editor’s Note: The following is an excerpt from the whitepaper Coping with Seven Disruptive Personality Types in the Classroom. This post deals with the narcissistic student.

Students with a narcissistic personality style are apt to challenge instructors on relatively minor matters, as well as cast scathing aspersions on their professors’ characters and their very qualifications to teach.

For example, one rather young, unmarried, and childless psychology instructor at a Midwestern college once complained about how some of her older students who were parents would blister her with complaints that she did not know enough about the psychology of children because she didn’t have any.

A pertinent question here is how they even knew that she had no children. In this particular case, she had shared this personal information with them when they pressured her to disclose it. Clearly, there was no reason for her to share this information with her students, and they were crossing personal boundaries by pressuring her to disclose it. Had she remained tight-lipped about her personal life, she might have averted this particular form of attempted denigration and devaluation.

This struggling instructor merely needed to be reminded that there are many people with children who have poorly understood and atrociously raised them. Conversely, there are many people who do not have their own children but who, like she does, understand the psychology of children exceptionally well. In other words, having children does not necessarily qualify a person to teach child psychology, and not having children is not a disqualifying factor for this assignment.

How to Respond

This type of student can be very hard on an instructor’s confidence and sense of self-worth. When confronted with a student who challenges your worth, remind yourself that you were hired to do your job based upon the strength of your qualifications.

Keep in mind, for your own protection, that self-entitled students do not respect personal boundaries or privacy especially well. They may attempt to intrude on your privacy by asking inappropriate questions. Try to refrain from answering personal questions asked by students with personal self-disclosures unless you are absolutely certain that your disclosures provide an absolutely relevant and positive contribution to the topic under discussion.

A short, straightforward comment to inappropriate inquiries is all that is required, such as, “I’m sorry, but information about my personal life is neither relevant nor essential to the topic under discussion, and therefore I prefer to maintain my personal privacy here and will do all I can to respect and protect yours.” That should suffice.

There is some indication that this current generation of college students includes more people who exhibit self-entitled behavior. Assuming this is correct, we can expect to have to deal with more narcissistic traits than we might have seen a mere generation ago. In the past, students seemed to be somewhat more deferential, more conforming, and more self-sacrificing than are some of the students we are seeing on campuses today. If this is the case, then instructors will have to adjust their behavior accordingly to accommodate the growing presence of certain narcissistic characteristics among their students.

Mirror, mirror on the wall, who is the fairest of them all?
Not thee, O queen!

The preceding article was written in 2010! It's twelve years later and the narcissists have multiplied to such an extent that campuses are infested with teenage and twenty-something barbarians bent on remaking the world in their self-adulatory image.