Photo Credit: Nicolas Scola
By: Wesley Liu
This year, Penn quietly saw one of the highest volumes of “wellness concerns” ever filed. Advisors described inboxes overflowing with reports, not of mental health concerns or assault, but of political disagreements, tense group projects, awkward moments in club meetings, or offhand comments someone interpreted as invalidating. The system designed for students in real distress has increasingly become a general complaint line for everyday discomfort. National data show the same pattern: the American College Health Association reports that student use of campus mental-health systems has risen far faster than rates of diagnosable disorders, suggesting a wave of “distress reports” rather than clinical crises.
One advisor at Penn put it simply: “Half of the wellness cases I get aren’t wellness. They’re conflict.” And yet, at the same time, real incidents of racial hostility, such as the racist video circulated in Penn group chats last fall, receive slow, opaque, and often unsatisfying responses. Black students interviewed by The Daily Pennsylvanian said the institution’s silence “felt like neglect,” and that none of them believed the University genuinely cared about them.
This imbalance reveals a larger problem: students expect the University to manage every interpersonal, emotional, and political tension. Yet the more we assign Penn the role of parent, the worse it becomes at doing the things that actually matter.
This is often mistaken for a debate about institutional neutrality. It isn’t. Neutrality is about whether universities should issue political statements. The deeper issue is that students now expect universities to regulate their emotional lives, mediate every disagreement, and deliver moral clarity whenever reality feels uncomfortable.
These expectations are rising even as trust in higher education collapses. According to Gallup, public confidence in universities has fallen from 57% in 2015 to just 36% in 2023—the lowest level on record. Meanwhile, Inside Higher Ed found that 29% of students say their trust in their own institution declined during their enrollment, often due to inconsistent responses to discrimination or campus conflict.
The paradox is stark: students trust universities less than ever, but demand more from them than at any point in modern memory.
Part of the issue is structural. Student-facing administrative roles across American universities have grown by more than 60% since the 1990s. Penn mirrors this trend. Wellness offices, inclusion offices, bias-response teams, conflict-mediators, and student-support divisions now form a dense bureaucratic network. These offices are often staffed by well-intentioned people doing important work, but their existence signals to students that every negative experience has an institutional remedy. A sharp critique becomes “trauma.” A difficult seminar becomes “harmful.” A disagreement becomes “an unsafe environment.”
This overreliance becomes most visible when the University confronts genuinely serious incidents. When UMOJA and DAAP demanded transparency after the racist video incident, they were met with vague administrative emails and references to “ongoing investigations,” without clarity or consequence. Students told The Daily Pennsylvanian they felt unprotected and unheard. The University felt omnipresent when it came to mediating classroom tension, but absent when addressing racism.
This dual failure, overreaching in trivial matters while failing to act decisively in serious ones, is what happens when a university tries to be everyone’s caretaker and moral authority. When every emotional discomfort becomes an administrative case, the institution loses the capacity to focus on genuine wrongdoing. When every political tension becomes a demand for institutional endorsement, urgent local crises get buried. And when students outsource their emotional and social lives to administrators, the institution stretches thin and inevitably disappoints.
Students also lose something essential in the process: the ability to navigate conflict themselves. Increasingly, students approach college not as a space where difficult conversations and disagreement are expected, but as an environment that should insulate them from discomfort. That expectation reshapes campus life: students become quicker to escalate, slower to communicate, and less confident in their own ability to resolve tension without an authority figure’s involvement.
Universities cannot cultivate leadership while encouraging dependency. They cannot nurture intellectual maturity when discomfort is treated as pathology. And they cannot meaningfully protect marginalized students when bureaucratic systems are clogged with ordinary interpersonal friction.
To be clear, this is not an argument for ignoring these issues. Students deserve safety, fairness, and genuine support, especially in the face of racism, discrimination, or mental-health crises. But there is a difference between support and governance. A university can provide resources, counseling, and fair processes. It cannot guarantee emotional stability, fix every miscommunication, or function as a surrogate for community, family, or civic life.
Penn needs a return to role clarity. It is a university, not an emotional concierge, not a moral tribunal, and not a substitute parent. It is responsible for investigating racism seriously and transparently, not for soothing every discomfort students experience in a seminar.
The real question is not “Why didn’t Penn fix this?” but “Why are we expecting it to?”
If we stop insisting that universities act like parents, they can start acting like universities again.
Wesley Liu is a sophomore studying Philosophy with a minor in Political Science from San Francisco, CA. He is also the opinion editor at the Penn Post. His email is wesl@sas.upenn.edu.
