This summer, I worked at a real estate investment firm. Although I was doing interesting and challenging work, I was also treated like a typical intern. I had to fulfill tedious obligations that higher-up coworkers didn’t want or have the time to do. Sometimes, I experienced the irritation of supervisors and coworkers, which often included them raising their voices at me and visibly showing their displeasure. Most importantly, I had to meet expectations to be worth the investment made by my boss.

While I had a successful internship, I definitely experienced some culture shock upon leaving the Brandeis campus and entering the real world, where meritocracy rules.

Looking back on my time at Brandeis so far, I believe I felt this way because of the Brandeis culture of regressing students entering adulthood into permanent children. Even though I am ardently against this culture, it ended up seeping into my own psyche, giving me a false sense of what life outside of Brandeis is really like.

This is because the Brandeis administration is largely unhelpful to students seeking to be independent and proactive in progressing their careers and acting like responsible adults. It perpetuates a pervasive culture of dependency.

I experienced this firsthand when I went to Hiatt Career Center to learn how to build my network and make connections with alumni. I figured that Brandeis, as a reputable American institution of higher learning, would have some sort of database or other methodology that tracked alumni to help current students enter the hypercompetitive job market.

Shockingly, no such help was available. While Hiatt, of course, is helpful in some ways, including resume building, limited career fairs and “Handshake” — which does serve as a useful tool to find potential internships and full time jobs — the ability to hear straight from Brandeis students who actually went through the hiring process and succeeded was virtually nonexistent. In terms of helping students make the valuable connections they would need to be self-sufficient and successful after graduation, Hiatt was essentially useless. I had to do all of my networking alone, scouring LinkedIn for hours and luckily securing a few informational phone calls. 

When I look at Brandeis, I also see a school with an administration and faculty that prides itself on enforcing “safe spaces,” making sure no one’s feelings are ever hurt and bending over backwards for the loudest, most self-victimizing liberal voices on campus. 

For example, just last year, many leftist students ardently demanded that the Brandeis administration implement a set of orders to fight the allegedly racist system on campus. While this particular group of students occupied Bernstein-Marcus, yelling for “change” for weeks, they presented only evidence of statistical disparity in students and faculty of color, which, in my view, does not necessarily mean racism; much more must be presented to make any legitimate case that someone or something is racist. Nevertheless, Brandeis leadership eventually capitulated and is putting in place most of the provisions the students wanted, including hiring new diversity officers and working to recruit and retain more faculty members and students of color — which basically amounts to affirmative action. 

The really troubling part here is the fact that the University acquiesced to these demands in a way that no company or business would ever do. Indeed, businesses and even governments have handled union strikes with a no-nonsense approach in the past, firing striking employees — sometimes en masse, such as with air traffic controllers in 1981. 

To make things even worse for today’s student activists, the unsavory message of “everyone’s a racist,” coupled with the sit-ins and aggressive demonization of their opposition, could lead to a similar or even worse fate. In uncritically bowing to pressure — which reinforced these students’ collective sense of entitlement and legitimized their actions — Brandeis has done the student body a grave disservice. In the real world, all of us will be in for a rude awakening.

Just based on my short summer in the real world, I can tell that Brandeis hurts students — rather than helps them as it claims — by appeasing special interests and surrendering to frivolous complaints fueled by political correctness. Instead of empowering us to succeed, Brandeis encourages us to believe that everything we don’t like must be due to someone being out to get us.

In doing so, Brandeis propagates the idea that human self-determination is a farce and that the success of students who fit neatly into a victim class is implausible — it’s all likely to be quashed by society’s hatred in the end. The only possible solution then is to give students concessions and perks that they haven’t actually earned. This helps no one — that is, if you believe that college is supposed to prepare students to one day emerge from the comfortable cocoon of academia and enter the real world.

From personal experience, it’s safe to say that had I asked my supervisor or boss this summer for a “safe space” to shield me from hurtful comments or to protect me from things I thought were unfair or just plainly didn’t like, I’d be laughed out of the room — or worse, let go.

Meanwhile, making good choices, having personal responsibility and bettering oneself — all of which are within one’s control and can lead to a prosperous career and fruitful life — are conspicuously not mentioned in response to student dissatisfaction at Brandeis. Why does our University prefer to participate in hanging victimhood perpetually over the heads of its students? Does Brandeis favor allowing students to believe that America is so hateful that they cannot succeed on their own merits? Why does Brandeis want students to believe that their tactics of badgering, confrontationally accusing others of nefariousness and then demanding concessions will ever actually work in any job in any part of the country?

This ridiculousness falls into a pattern of other instances in which Brandeis has sanctioned childish student behavior. For example, Ayaan Hirsi Ali, a prominent and inspirational women’s rights leader who speaks out against Islam, had her honorary degree rescinded in 2014 after an initially small band of leftist students and faculty didn’t like what she had to say about Islam and decided they wanted her gone.

Again, the administration’s response to this incident sent the subliminal message that we can shut up the people who say things we don’t like. And the only reason that free speech hasn’t been more of a pressing issue on campus since then is that Brandeis has painstakingly tried to mollify the leftist students on campus with bland, leftist speakers. This conceals a cancer that is still metastasizing underneath the bandaid. To state the obvious, these suppressive tactics wouldn’t play well in any work dynamic whatsoever.

Brandeis fosters a culture in which college students are rewarded for complaining and scapegoating, where students are kept from hearing things they don’t like and where the career center lacks basic networking services. This has an adverse effect on students who aspire to actually make a living after they graduate. This culture has denied students the opportunity to use their university as a test drive in preparing for the real world, where they learn to adequately brace themselves for and deal with dog-eat-dog, performance-based and often brutally honest work environments. With this approach to education, everyone ends up getting hurt.

Unless and until Brandeis drops the politics and coddling for an educational environment that prepares students for what actually exists outside our campus bubble, students risk never achieving what’s truly possible. Brandeis must admit that it is seriously harming students so that it can actually start producing adults who are ready and capable to take on all the challenges America will inevitably face.