| A lot has been written about the effect of social media and the AI revolution on young people. Little of it contains any good news. |
| To offer one example, last year Vivek H. Murthy, Surgeon General of the United States in the Biden administration, called the “mental health crisis among young people…an emergency.” He argued that “social media has emerged as an important contributor.” |
| Murthy said it was time to put “a surgeon general’s warning label on social media platforms, stating that social media is associated with significant mental health harms for adolescents.” |
| That is surely right. But beyond social media, other factors have helped create the crisis about which Murthy wrote. |
| One of the most important of them is that the generation of college-aged students in the United States has come of age in a time of war and destruction. Their experience of the world has been shaped by unspeakable scenes of violence or threats of violence with which they are bombarded on a continuous basis. |
| “Raw footage of political assassinations, war crimes, racialized violence, and sexual assault,” a report in Psychology Today suggests, can spread quickly in the wake of acts of violence, popping up in young people’s social feeds without warning or context. |
| That is true not just of what they have seen unfold in Israel, Gaza, and Ukraine. Armed conflict has already played a surprisingly large role in the history of the twenty-first century. |
| The Middle East alone saw wars in 2006, 2014, 2019, and 2023. The end of the war in Afghanistan produced its own picture book of devastation. |
| Closer to home, think about what happened on January 11, 2021. Think about the bombing of Iran’s nuclear facilities, scenes of armed soldiers in American cities, and masked ICE agents using force to subdue unarmed civilians or political leaders. |
| Add to this the murders of Minnesota House of Representatives Speaker Emerita Melissa Hortman and her husband, arson at the home of Pennsylvania Governor Josh Shapiro and his family, two attempts to assassinate President Donald Trump, and the brutal murder of Charlie Kirk. |
| There was nothing subtle about Trump’s renaming of the Department of Defense, making it the Department of War. Neither was Secretary Pete Hegseth’s insistence that the only power that matters is “hard power.” |
| The damage of all that to the worldviews of young people is enormous. They are coming of age in a world in which might makes right, or so they are told by political leaders. |
| It doesn’t matter whether they grow up in a red or blue state, the world of war and violence breeds insecurity, anxiety, aggression, hopelessness, and despair in young people. This is not because they are snowflakes. |
| They are the collateral damage inflicted by war and violence. We know from study after study that what exposure to violence does is not good news. |
| We will be paying the cost for decades. |
| For educators, the fact and impact of all this violence is often unacknowledged. Yet it is real. It shapes the expectations of the students we teach. |
| Those of us who teach at the college level need to come to terms with that impact, first by acknowledging it and then investing in developing educational strategies to help cope with it. |
| This work won’t be easy. |
| In the past, exposure to images of war and violence was episodic at best. For the Baby Boomer generation, they usually came once a day on the evening news. |
| Today, it is hard for young people to escape them. On social media, images of brutality stream constantly. |
| I want my students to be able to read, think, dream, and imagine building a better world. Can they do all this when they are constantly bombarded by images of children slaughtered in this or that military campaign or entire cities reduced to rubble? |
| Numerous studies document the troubling consequences of exposure to violent images. That exposure leads young people to “become 'immune’ or numb to the horror of violence” and to “accept violence as a way to solve problems.” |
| It also shapes their views of the appropriateness of using force as a tool of public policy. A Pew Research Center report found “a generation gap over U.S. military interventions, but it is older Americans, not young people, who typically show the greatest wariness about using military force.” |
| Some college students may even come to believe that it is acceptable to use violence on their own campuses to try to silence speech they find offensive. They may become “less sensitive to the pain and suffering of others” and “more fearful of the world around them.” |
| As Regent University’s Jared Vallorani notes, “Surveys from 2024 and 2025 indicate a concerning trend of increased acceptance of violence among young people, especially political violence. While older generations largely reject violence as a political tool, a significant minority of young adults find it acceptable in some circumstances.” |
| Scholars also contend that a world awash in violence increases neurosis, anxiety, and depression among college students. |
| In addition, college students are more cynical than they have ever been. They think that there is little they can rely on. They see wars they believe are unjust, but don’t think that there is anything that can be done to stop them. |
| Campus protests over the war in Gaza didn’t help in this regard |
| And as the psychologist, Christina Herbin explains, the impact of growing up in an era of war is worse for those who are not cynical, but want to “alleviate another person’s suffering.” Those students may come to believe that they can’t do anything effective about that suffering and end up “in the spot of being really helpless.” |
| I don’t envy those who have grown up at the start of the twenty-first century. They have faced and will face enormous challenges. |
| None is more daunting than the war and violence that are so ubiquitous. |
| Wesleyan University President Michael Roth is right to remind us that “The American pragmatists taught that the mission of philosophy was to help people construct a sense of who they are, what matters to them, and what they hope to make of their lives. That’s also a central part of the mission of higher education.” |
| With nations at war and violence celebrated, with all of that a constant presence in the lives of college students, figuring out what matters and holding onto hope is really hard. That is why it is important not to ignore those experiences in the work that teachers do. |
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