I have been reading about the various protests going on at universities around the country with a mixture of pleasure and sadness. The pleasure comes from the fact that our students are exhibiting passion for a cause, worrying about something apart from how much they will be able to earn when they graduate. My sadness comes from the realization that so many of our students, particularly students of color, feel that they are not fully a part of the university communities in which they live and study.

The stories of racism and insensitivity shown to students on campus just make my heart ache. I have spent virtually my entire adult life as a university teacher — it is what I love — and it is very painful for me to realize that so many of the students at Kansas University feel unwelcome or unwanted. How can we, as teachers, possibly do our jobs if our students do not believe that we truly care about them as individual human beings?

As I have been thinking about the protests of the past few weeks, my mind has gone back to a concept that universities have almost totally abandoned: the idea that the university stands in loco parentis, in the place of the students’ parents. During much of the 20th century this idea was dominant on American campuses. There were things about it that students didn’t like; for instance, mandatory times at which students had to be in their dormitories, serious policing of student behavior including alcohol consumption, etc.

These were the things against which my generation of students in the late 1960s and early 1970s rebelled. I remember clearly telling one dean at Haverford, the small Quaker college I was fortunate enough to attend, that if I was old enough to be drafted into the army I was old enough to stay out all night drinking whatever I wanted.

But there was another side of the concept of the university standing in loco parentis which, in retrospect, I think that we need to recapture. That is the notion that the university community is a family and that a parent loves his children equally and does not love one better because he is more talented in some way or because one has red hair rather than brown. So should it be on our campuses.

We, the permanent members of the university, the faculty and the administration, must again think of our students not simply as consumers or as threatening radicals disturbing the status quo but as our beloved children for whom we want all the best that can be. We must care for each and every one of them equally regardless of race or religion or sexual identity. They must all be our academic children to whom we owe a duty of care and instruction and, at times, discipline, but, always motivated by deep caring and the realization that they have been entrusted to us to educate, to nurture, and to empower. Talk is not enough.

Clearly, there are problems on our campuses that affect our students. We must act to make sure these problems are solved and with dispatch because students are with us only for a brief time. If we do not act and solve problems quickly, then we let down those students who suffer while we dither. Perhaps, if we can convince all of those students who feel disenfranchised, unwanted, uncared for and unsafe that we truly do care and that we will do all that we can to ensure that all will be treated equally as cherished members of our university family, then, perhaps, we can, at long last, go about the job before us: education.?

— Mike Hoeflich, a distinguished professor in the Kansas University School of Law, writes a regular column for the Journal-World.