"Blue Angel" by Francine Prose

Blue Angel

Prose has taught writing at numerous colleges and is clearly appalled by the puritanical mood on campus today. Yet her dissection of the chilly campus climate goes way beyond simple p.c.-bashing. Things weren’t so good in the old, pre-feminist days, either; Swenson’s wife, Sherrie, the college nurse, has seen enough students “destroyed by faculty Romeos.” But nowadays the students seem oddly childish and fearful. At the heart of the malaise lies an odd sense of entitlement — the students’ insistence that they don’t have to hear anything they might find disturbing or that might make them feel “unsafe.” Salon