You are Enough
Installment 3 - The Sporeminaries
Even now, they still charm — ivy on the walls, banners in the wind, musty lecture halls. They were once called universities. We came to call them Sporeminaries.
Seminaries had lured the wannabe Pharisees, teaching magical arts of “ministry”. “Wow, I can be a priest. I can leverage the threat of hell to glean privilege.” Privileverage. But the universities proved even worse. At least seminaries had the same root as “semen” — seed, with some nod toward fruitfulness. Colleges were worse: denatured dens, which broadcast degrees under the grander name of “universities,” produced mere minor irritations: credentials without substance, confidence without competence, fun facts without fruit.
It was here the teaching of “You are enough” was not only tolerated but canonized. Degrees were offered in diversity — programs designed to validate, never to quicken. Administrators multiplied, soothing and placating. And faculties? Science without rigor. History without context. Philosophy without truth. Literature without allegory.
Those hard things to teach — anything algebra-based, the disciplines of discovery, the suspension of judgment, the strict rules of scholarship — all threatened supportive course evaluations. And nothing threatened a professor’s comfort more than unsupportive evaluations. Faculty grew resentful at even the suggestion that the animals ran the zoo (or, for that matter, any other figurative language).
The spores found here especially fertile soil. Professors carried them in their robes, administrators in their memos, students in their slogans. Each class, each workshop, each convocation was another spore-release, filling the air with reassurance: “You are enough. Your opinions are truth. Push your teachers to fill your need for certainty. Push to be gratified in your need to feel like you’re an authority. Let the school know that when you have your degree, you had better be ready — prepared.”
What disappeared in this cloud of spores was toughness. Not cruelty, but the toughness that comes a disciplined mind — the kind that grows when a student faces an unyielding equation, a dead language, the demotion to second chair (horrors!), or a professor who says, “This is not good enough. Try again.” In Sporeminaries, toughness was rebranded as “trauma” or “triggering.” “Safe spaces” mushroomed like fungi after rain, their very existence proof that discomfort was the gravest misery a human could suffer.
Instead of being hardened, students were softened by emotional support. They were trained to demand leniency and to call it justice. Grade inflation became a sacrament. Simplistic encouragement was everywhere: posters shouting “You matter!”, pep talks that substituted for critique, and professors too eager to be “allies” to tell the truth. Encouragement was the craved yeast of the age.
Colleges couldn’t teach what it is to be truly impactful. They didn’t train students in responsibility, didn’t train students to measure their words, their work, their lives against the scale of the whole. To ask: How does this effort contribute to the common good? How does it endure over time? How does it compare with what others have borne or built? Without that sense of the total, every gesture swells into false heroism, and every grievance becomes a crusade. What did college teach: Someone else is responsible for that.
Political correctness and identity politics thrived there. Victimization became a source of moral authority, a kind of counterfeit sainthood. To be offended was to be righteous. To be aggrieved was to be exalted. And every grievance, no matter how thin, was met with solemn validation.
Students came to believe themselves heroes for their tolerance, (yet were intolerant of any voice that questioned their goodness.) Never mind actual skills, or wisdom, or genuine intellectual courage. Instead, YOU ARE NOBLE because you are willing to try DEI-ing.
They left ready for “influencing,” fluent in hashtags and hashtags alone, confident that retweets were courage.
They left not quickened, but puffed — brittle husks convinced they were heroes.
And so, when the demagogues arrived, the people had no defense. Sporeminaries had not trained them against emotional appeals — they had trained them to welcome emotional appeals. Far from hardening souls against manipulation, they softened them, making every appeal sound profound, every silver tongue seem wise.