A Culture of Comfort
June 24, 2025
From antiquity onward perspicacious observers of human nature have maintained that it is in the crucible of adversity from which strength of character is forged; that the challenges of hardship, disappointment, and adjustment to changing circumstances set in motion a course of personal growth which, in time, fortifies the mind and heart, endues resilience in recovering from setbacks, and thus inculcates the courage and confidence necessary to the pursuit of a successful and useful life.
All of this, however, is denied to one who is overly shielded from vicissitudes, who is blanketed with uninterrupted comfort, whose character remains unprepared to meet future exigencies.
Unfortunately, such an enervating culture of comfort appears to have overtaken W&L in its drive to wokeness. Take the sanitizing of Lee Chapel: i.e., the removal of George Washington’s and Robert E. Lee’s portraits, the closing off of the Valentine Recumbent Statue of Lee, etc. Administrators defended this action by claiming that currently enrolled students were “offended” by having to sit in a chapel that displayed visual representations of Lee and Washington. Both men were summarily condemned in their young minds as deeply committed advocates of the institution of slavery, a false notion which arose from ignorance.
A similar example is afforded by Garland Tucker’s recent eyewitness report on the 2025 graduation exercises at W&L. Of the Baccalaureate service, in particular, he reports that no prayer of any kind was offered, indeed no mention of the Almighty under any appellation whatsoever was made, nor, consequently, any appeal that Divine blessing attend the young graduates as they advance to the next scenes in their lives.
The “sermon” was delivered not by the University Chaplin (there no longer is one) or another clergyman, but rather by Dr. Ansel Sanders, who, according to Garland, “exalted graduates to formulate their own list of principles and priorities . . . with clearly no evidence of the Judeo-Christian principles that undergirded the W&L I knew.” All this empty posturing presumably undertaken to avoid offending any in the audience who might be unsympathetic to religious sentiment and its associated convictions. Again, the priority is given to comfort.
It must be remembered by those fostering the culture of comfort at W&L that the college years are a time not for coddling and comforting young minds, reducing them to a kind of torpid, debilitating languor; but rather college should be a time of confronting them with realities, both agreeable and disagreeable, in order to develop in them a discriminating judgment and, above all, a passion for truth. This is a process of growth in which the student will sometimes be abashed, sometimes confused, and, yes, sometimes offended, but it is the road we fallible mortals must walk if we are to attain usefulness and virtue.
Perhaps no one has addressed the role of adversity in life more forcibly, in both her career and writings, than Helen Keller. She was born in 1880 in Tuscumbia, Alabama, where she was struck permanently deaf and blind at the age of 19 months, yet she rose to become one of the most distinguished and admired persons of recent times. It is fitting to close this letter with one of Keller’s most famous statements of conviction:
“Character cannot be developed in ease and quiet. Only through experience of trial and suffering can the soul be strengthened, vision cleared, ambition inspired, and success achieved.”
Respectfully,
Kenneth G. Everett, ‘64