The 13 fourth-year Dalhousie University dental students who allegedly posted misogynistic garbage about their female fellow students on Facebook have been suspended while the school conducts a review of the matter.
When you hear that students have been suspended, you tend to think of 18- and 19-year-olds barely out of high school. Just kids, really. And then you think, well, students of that age do really moronic things at times, but it would be unfair for them to pay for it the rest of their lives by losing their careers over it.
After all, the person a student is at 18 bears very little resemblance to the person he will be at 40.
What gives pause in the Dalhousie case, however, is that these were not kids right out of high school. They were in their fourth and final year of the university’s dentistry program, and they were working on patients. They ranged in age from their mid-20s into their 30s, according to The Coast, an alternative weekly newspaper in Halifax.
As The Coast writer Jacob Boon put it: “Dal’s dental school is filled with grownass adults who are a hair’s breadth away from being licensed medical practitioners. Dalhousie’s program is competitive enough that not everyone who gets in is coming straight from their undergrad. The four-year program is filled with students whose ages range from mid-20s to early 30s. The Facebook group was made for those graduating next year. It’s unlikely those men weren’t treating patients in Dal’s clinic. These aren’t dumb kids — they’re dumb adults. Adults whose daily duties involve caring for the public.”
Exactly. The American Student Dental Association has a piece on its website entitled A Day in the Life of a Dental Student — Fourth Year.
One student, Brandon Berman, wrote: “This year has been more exciting than my third year. You are in the clinic more and the classroom less. There is also the transitional feeling from dental student into doctor as you approach the end of the academic year.”
Throughout his last year, Berman said, he had “begun to think and act like less of a dental student and more like a student doctor awaiting graduation.”
Too bad the Dalhousie 13 didn’t start thinking more like future dentists and less like junior-high kids long before this. To me, the behaviour they are accused of is just one more manifestation of the refusal of many members of their generation to stop prolonging their adolescence and start acting like adults.
Yet, a 29-year-old recently told me that it’s best to prolong childhood because “you have to spend so much time as an adult, so why not be a kid as long as you can?” A boy who was a Goth in my son’s high school class is still dressing like one today at age 28. When does someone like that put on a shirt and tie and start behaving like a grown man?
That old 1960s mantra, “don’t trust anyone over 30,” is back, but with an entirely different meaning. In the past, it meant the over-30 crowd was too “square” and over the hill to understand youth; today, it’s because the over-30 crowd can’t be trusted to act like adults.
It’s unbelievable that 13 dental students were allegedly functioning at such a juvenile level that they were naïve enough to believe that Facebook afforded them some privacy. Remember the song, Good Time Charlie’s Got the Blues? There’s a line in it that goes “You’re not a kid at 33.”
When will adults, such as these students, decide to leave adolescence behind and grow up?
Naomi Lakritz writes for the Calgary Herald.
