09/04/2026
📩 Chair's Blog: What Doesn't Kill Us ...
For several years now, I have been, in turn, puzzled by, incredulous about, and despondent over the grievances brought forth by people younger than me (which, in all honesty, is a LOT of people, especially in a University setting). My internal monologue frequently starts with “REALLY? THAT is what worries you?” And increasingly, I have started wondering whether that reaction says as much about me as it does about them.
Now, let me make this clear. Most frequently, people bring very serious issues to me, and those constitute the majority of things I deal with as the Chair. That’s a whole different category — and definitely not the subject of this blog.
Back to the subject of this blog …
It struck me recently, when I was looking at a pain chart in a hospital, what an incredibly subjective way it is to measure pain. How does my 7 compare to your 7? I found myself wondering how much our idea of a “10” is shaped by the worst pain we have experienced before. Depending on one's life experience, that reference point could range from a scraped knee to drug-free childbirth to a horrible accident with a chainsaw to ...
And that’s when something else struck me.
An injustice that looks like a bare “3” on the 1-to-10 scale to me might look very different to someone with a different range of experiences in that domain. We, as parents, mentors, and society as a whole, have worked very hard to make sure that the younger generation has a better and safer life than we did. And perhaps the fact that young people are concerned about things we think of as “minor” is a sign of progress. I emphatically do not want young women to go through my experiences in the workplace (pre-UMD). There are plenty of things we tolerated in the past that absolutely should not be used as character-building exercises for the next generation.
The flip side of the same coin, however, is that in our effort to create a more protected environment, I wonder if we have also removed too many opportunities for young people to discover that they can deal with difficulty. Sometimes you need to struggle with something, and perhaps even fail at it, to figure out that you actually can deal with it.
And while I am not advocating for making a parkour course a required part of education at UMD, I do think it is our responsibility to broaden our students’ life experiences, challenge them in the classroom, and give them opportunities to overcome difficulties in a productive and supportive environment.
I don’t want us to recreate the things that made previous generations "tough". Some of them were awful, and getting rid of them was progress. But I also don’t think removing every obstacle, every disappointment, or every uncomfortable experience from our students’ paths is the right way to go.
What doesn’t kill us doesn’t always make us stronger. But learning that we can get over obstacles probably does.
No actual parkour required.
Read the Chair's Blog and comment below: https://geog.umd.edu/about-us/chairs-blog
