It's Friday, February 17, 2023.

I'm Albert Molar, and this is The Briefing, a daily analysis of news and events from a

Christian worldview.

We're going to get to questions shortly, but first I want to address a very interesting

issue that's been raised in the media, and the immediate focus is on college and university

campuses, but I want to argue that this is a far more widespread issue.

The headline in the Chronicle of Higher Education, and that's very much like a Wall Street Journal

or New York Times of the Higher Education Industry, and here the article begins with the

headline, everyone is talking about belonging.

Now, the word belonging has to be put in quotation marks as if it's a strange term of art.

The article goes on to describe in great detail how colleges and universities, largely

driven by the impulse of diversity and inclusion and all the rest, how they are trying to help

students to feel like they belong on the space of the college or university.

Now, in the background of this, our other headlines telling us that college students are now

more emotionally brittle than they were in the past, and that COVID has exacerbated a

situation.

It's also affecting high school students and middle schoolers, teenagers and young adults.

They are having difficulty.

They are increasingly emotionally fragile, and they do not know their place in the world,

and many of them say they do not feel that they belong on the college or university campus.

Now, that becomes an immediate issue, just in practical terms for colleges and universities,

because as the Chronicle of Higher Education's Adrian Lou points out, students who do not

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