jonathan haidt the coddling of the american mind

They range from overreactions to supposedly offensive emails sent by professors or administrators (at Claremont McKenna, Yale, and, most spectacularly, Evergreen) to the genuine violence at UC-Berkeley (in response to far-right provocateur Milo Yiannopoulos) and Middlebury (protesting Bell Curve author Charles Murray) to students at various institutions seeking to ban other, more moderate conservative figures from speaking on the grounds that their presence would render students “unsafe,” or language to that effect. By safetyism, Lukianoff and Haidt mean a “culture that allows the concept of ‘safety’ to creep so far that it equates emotional discomfort with physical danger,” and which therefore “encourages people to systematically protect one another from the very experiences embedded in daily life that they need in order to become strong and healthy.” Naturally, the book is replete with examples of how safetyism and its symptoms have ostensibly run amok.

That core argument, which was birthed from a similarly titled 2015 Atlantic cover story, is that “a culture of safetyism … through many universities between 20” (emphasis theirs).

Even if its core argument falls a bit short. It’s a generally nuanced, carefully constructed book worth grappling with. I suspect that some left-of-center readers are going to be quick to shove The Coddling of the American Mind: How Good Intentions and Bad Ideas Are Setting Up a Generation for Failure, the new book by Greg Lukianoff, the head of the campus free-speech group the Foundation for Individual Rights and Education and Jonathan Haidt, an NYU social psychologist, into the hot-take pile - but that would be a mistake. Because campus blowups have become more common in recent years, and far more visible thanks to social media, there’s been a glut of half-baked perspectives about what they represent. There’s reason to be skeptical of arguments about “college kids these days.” Whether the subject is trigger warnings, “victimhood culture,” or the supposed death of free speech, college students are an easy punching bag and target for generalizations. Protesters chant during a demonstration at U.C.

Jonathan haidt the coddling of the american mind