The cover story for the September issue of The Atlantic is a curious one, a long one, and well worth a read. “The coddling of the American mind” has two authors, Greg Lukianoff and Jonathan Haidt. Lukianoff is president of FIRE (the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education), and has done great work trying to keep campuses from quashing free speech. In contrast, Haidt is an academic social psychologist at New York University, and has written extensively—and often perceptively—on human morality.
This is an odd collaboration, but it works well for the article, which attempts first to recount and diagnose the attacks on free speech at American colleges (you’ll be familiar with some of the examples, but others are new and disturbing), and then to figure out how to treat students in a way that will mitigate these attacks. The first part is Lukianoff’s purview, the second Haidt’s. Haidt draws connections between student behavior and the type of distorted thinking that’s treated with cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT).
Further, in a supplementary backstory piece online, both men have experience with the other’s area: Lukianoff suffered from deep depression that made him ponder warped thinking, while Haidt encountered the hypersensitivity of today’s students while teaching at NYU.
I’m not going to summarize the piece in detail, as you really should read it as a Professor Ceiling Cat Recommendation™. I will, however, give some quotes—more than usual with an eye toward those with limited time—dividing the article into subtopics.
The problem (this will be familiar to regular readers):
A movement is arising, undirected and driven largely by students, to scrub campuses clean of words, ideas, and subjects that might cause discomfort or give offense. Last December, Jeannie Suk wrote in an online article for The New Yorker about law students asking her fellow professors at Harvard not to teach rape law—or, in one case, even use the word violate (as in “that violates the law”) lest it cause students distress. In February, Laura Kipnis, a professor at Northwestern University, wrote an essay in The Chronicle of Higher Educationdescribing a new campus politics of sexual paranoia—and was then subjected to a long investigation after students who were offended by the article and by a tweet she’d sent filed Title IX complaints against her. In June, a professor protecting himself with a pseudonym wrote an essay for Vox describing how gingerly he now has to teach. “I’m a Liberal Professor, and My Liberal Students Terrify Me,” the headline said. A number of popular comedians, including Chris Rock, have stopped performing on college campuses (see Caitlin Flanagan’s article in this month’s issue). Jerry Seinfeld and Bill Maher have publicly condemned the oversensitivity of college students, saying too many of them can’t take a joke.
. . . Two terms have risen quickly from obscurity into common campus parlance. Microaggressions are small actions or word choices that seem on their face to have no malicious intent but that are thought of as a kind of violence nonetheless. For example, by some campus guidelines, it is a microaggression to ask an Asian American or Latino American “Where were you born?,” because this implies that he or she is not a real American. Trigger warnings are alerts that professors are expected to issue if something in a course might cause a strong emotional response. For example, some students have called for warnings that Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart describes racial violence and that F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby portrays misogyny and physical abuse, so that students who have been previously victimized by racism or domestic violence can choose to avoid these works, which they believe might “trigger” a recurrence of past trauma.
A bactrian example. This is bizarre but by no means unusual. I give one example, but there are many similar ones in the article.
These examples may seem extreme, but the reasoning behind them has become more commonplace on campus in recent years. Last year, at the University of St. Thomas, in Minnesota, an event called Hump Day, which would have allowed people to pet a camel, was abruptly canceled. Students had created a Facebook group where they protested the event for animal cruelty, for being a waste of money, and for being insensitive to people from the Middle East. The inspiration for the camel had almost certainly come from a popular TV commercial in which a camel saunters around an office on a Wednesday, celebrating “hump day”; it was devoid of any reference to Middle Eastern peoples. Nevertheless, the group organizing the event announced on its Facebook page that the event would be canceled because the “program [was] dividing people and would make for an uncomfortable and possibly unsafe environment.”
The press has typically described these developments as a resurgence of political correctness. That’s partly right, although there are important differences between what’s happening now and what happened in the 1980s and ’90s. That movement sought to restrict speech (specifically hate speech aimed at marginalized groups), but it also challenged the literary, philosophical, and historical canon, seeking to widen it by including more-diverse perspectives. The current movement is largely about emotional well-being. More than the last, it presumes an extraordinary fragility of the collegiate psyche, and therefore elevates the goal of protecting students from psychological harm. The ultimate aim, it seems, is to turn campuses into “safe spaces” where young adults are shielded from words and ideas that make some uncomfortable. And more than the last, this movement seeks to punish anyone who interferes with that aim, even accidentally. You might call this impulse vindictive protectiveness. It is creating a culture in which everyone must think twice before speaking up, lest they face charges of insensitivity, aggression, or worse.. . . In this essay we focus on a different question: What are the effects of this new protectiveness on the students themselves? Does it benefit the people it is supposed to help? What exactly are students learning when they spend four years or more in a community that polices unintentional slights, places warning labels on works of classic literature, and in many other ways conveys the sense that words can be forms of violence that require strict control by campus authorities, who are expected to act as both protectors and prosecutors?
But vindictive protectiveness teaches students to think in a very different way. It prepares them poorly for professional life, which often demands intellectual engagement with people and ideas one might find uncongenial or wrong. The harm may be more immediate, too. A campus culture devoted to policing speech and punishing speakers is likely to engender patterns of thought that are surprisingly similar to those long identified by cognitive behavioral therapists as causes of depression and anxiety. The new protectiveness may be teaching students to think pathologically.. . . Because there is a broad ban in academic circles on “blaming the victim,” it is generally considered unacceptable to question the reasonableness (let alone the sincerity) of someone’s emotional state, particularly if those emotions are linked to one’s group identity. The thin argument “I’m offended” becomes an unbeatable trump card. This leads to what Jonathan Rauch, a contributing editor at this magazine, calls the “offendedness sweepstakes,” in which opposing parties use claims of offense as cudgels. In the process, the bar for what we consider unacceptable speech is lowered further and further.
But social media has also fundamentally shifted the balance of power in relationships between students and faculty; the latter increasingly fear what students might do to their reputations and careers by stirring up online mobs against them.
The biggest single step in the right direction does not involve faculty or university administrators, but rather the federal government, which should release universities from their fear of unreasonable investigation and sanctions by the Department of Education. Congress should define peer-on-peer harassment according to the Supreme Court’s definition in the 1999 case Davis v. Monroe County Board of Education. The Davis standard holds that a single comment or thoughtless remark by a student does not equal harassment; harassment requires a pattern of objectively offensive behavior by one student that interferes with another student’s access to education. Establishing the Davis standard would help eliminate universities’ impulse to police their students’ speech so carefully.
Universities themselves should try to raise consciousness about the need to balance freedom of speech with the need to make all students feel welcome. Talking openly about such conflicting but important values is just the sort of challenging exercise that any diverse but tolerant community must learn to do. Restrictive speech codes should be abandoned.
Universities should also officially and strongly discourage trigger warnings. They should endorse the American Association of University Professors’ report on these warnings, which notes, “The presumption that students need to be protected rather than challenged in a classroom is at once infantilizing and anti-intellectual.” Professors should be free to use trigger warnings if they choose to do so, but by explicitly discouraging the practice, universities would help fortify the faculty against student requests for such warnings.
Finally, universities should rethink the skills and values they most want to impart to their incoming students. At present, many freshman-orientation programs try to raise student sensitivity to a nearly impossible level. Teaching students to avoid giving unintentional offense is a worthy goal, especially when the students come from many different cultural backgrounds. But students should also be taught how to live in a world full of potential offenses. Why not teach incoming students how to practice cognitive behavioral therapy? Given high and rising rates of mental illness, this simple step would be among the most humane and supportive things a university could do. The cost and time commitment could be kept low: a few group training sessions could be supplemented by Web sites or apps. But the outcome could pay dividends in many ways. For example, a shared vocabulary about reasoning, common distortions, and the appropriate use of evidence to draw conclusions would facilitate critical thinking and real debate. It would also tone down the perpetual state of outrage that seems to engulf some colleges these days, allowing students’ minds to open more widely to new ideas and new people. A greater commitment to formal, public debate on campus—and to the assembly of a more politically diverse faculty—would further serve that goal.
Here’s the response article circulating today:the trigger warning myth.
Link:
http://www.newrepublic.com/article/122543/trigger-warning-myth
Coddled students aren’t the cause of a mental health crisis on campus. They’re just pawns in the culture wars.
Thanks, not sure why my link failed
I think the response article is largely talking past the original, addressing pedagogy rather than policy. It also implies that professors have some responsibility for mental health screening. There are a few lines like this, “an office hours summons is really all we need to determine whether the student might need help from a mental health professional, or was just trying to game the system.” There are also some comments about following up with students who are thought to have mental health needs. These lines disturb me a bit because it would, I think, violate a boundary if I were to try and make armchair diagnoses or suggest to a student that they might have mental problems. That’s another can of worms. It also doesn’t address the pedagogical concern that professors are not likely to correctly understand what may be triggering to students who are truly suffering from PTSD. I’m that case the practice is just a self-serving show of “concern.” If there is no evidence to close the feedback loop and verify that your warnings are truly helpful to those who truly need it, then they are nothing more than theater.
When I was a kid we used to ride in the back of a pickup truck, our hair in the wind. We also used to walk, alone, down to the ice cream shack.
Try that today, and busybodies will call the cops on your parents.
Unbelievable.
Maybe because those are both risky behaviors for children, that have nothing to do with political correctness or sensitivity.
Oh, yeah, riding in the back of a truck is risky as all hell. I didn’t mean to imply that it wasn’t.
But, there is a certain moral panic, cops being called on parents, etc, when children are *ever* left unsupervised, for any reason.
The cops were called on a woman who was at a job interview, with her kids 30 feet away and under constant watch by her.
I think the data show that, in fact, it’s less risky for children than before, although I suppose you could impute that to increased supervision. At any rate, the risk of a free-roaming child coming to harm, especially if it’s been taught to avoid strangers, is very low. I, for one, LOVED my freedom when I was a kid.
There’s also the matter of balancing short-term risks and long-term ones.
As an analogy, I think most people would realize that raising a child in an hermetically-sealed sterilized clean room would simultaneously minimize the child’s short-term risks of disease but be disastrous for the child’s long-term ability to deal with infection. At the other end of the spectrum, sending the child to play in a cholera-infested cesspool isn’t a very good idea, either.
Child-rearing today has gone much too far in the direction of the clean room, to the point that many children are utterly unable to deal with even the slightest hint of disappointment. Had they instead been given plenty of opportunity to fail and be insulted and the like, they’d breeze through the stuff they’re so terrorized of without even realizing that there was anything there to be afraid of in the first place.
And, of course, that’s not to endorse bullying or reckless endangerment or the like. “Balance” is the key….
b&
This!
A well known Swedish psychiatrist and author, David Eberhard, addressed this issue in a widely noted book back in 2006, with the suggestive title “I trygghetsnarkomanernas land: Sverige och det nationella paniksyndromet” (roughly translated), “In the land of security addiction: Sweden and the national panic syndrome”.
As Chief Physician at the psychiatric emergency ward in one of the biggest hospitals in Stockholm, he had begun to wonder about the situation he found himself in, where he for example regularly had to admit young teenagers who had suffered complete mental breakdowns for what in relative terms were trifles. A failing test in school, a boyfriend breaking up etc.
He asked the older staff if it had always been this way, and they said no, and that it was a recent phenomena.
The hypothesis he formed was that these children had been so sheltered and pampered in life, that they never had been forced to really learn how to face and live through a disappointment or how to handle risks. This insight led to the book, and a huge controversy in Sweden, since it seemed to indicate a fatal flaw in the reigning ideological movement.
But I have a feeling he is absolutely correct, and that the data and history support him in this and will prove him right.
Sadly not translated into English.
Could it also be that there is an inordinate amount of pressure on kids these days to be perfect, to succeed, and that this makes them self-hating perfectionists?
That might definitely be one factor to take into consideration, but if I understand the idea correctly, in this case, the culprit is not thought to be high stress (directly) but rather a failure to developed a robust and sound self image, mental strategies and cognitive abilities to cope with disappointment and failure.
Things we all probably need to learn (the hard way) and are develop through experience.
Having taught high school from approximately 1990-2010 i must say that I don’t think today’s kids are under any more pressure to succeed and excel than I was in the 60s. There is a lot more whining going on about the stress and pressure, but in our day we just got on with it! We worked hard ( and also played pretty hard:-). Stress in school ain’t nothin’ compared to the stresses of “real life.” Don’t get me atarted on all the “no deadlines” policies which were being implemented around the time I quit teaching…(I must sound like a real curmudgeon, but I really loved most of my students; the admin policies and some of the helicopter parents not so much.)
Gotcha.
Here is another question, that came to me a few minutes ago.
People have mentioned culture. There is such an information overload that it’s hard to stand out. A lot of emphasis is placed on being special, unique. On standing out. Just look at the Lady Gaga and Kim Kardashian phenomenoms. Everyone wants to be noticed. You don’t exist unless you are special, unless you are validated as a unique, wonderful human being in some way.
So, getting the vapors over every little thing is a way to get people to pay attention to you, isn’t it? You *demand* respect, in fact, no, you are *owed* respect because damn, you ARE unique, you ARE special, and people should recognize that. And because you are so fragile and unique, you need not feel bad for being so demanding, because your cause is *righteous*.
Haven’t we all always wanted to be special and unique, but preferably not for having an overly large ass-LOL. Granted the celebrity culture spreads info and garbage so much more quickly now, but I still don’t see how this brought about the special snowflake phenomenon.
Merilee,
I concur, I think they are, at bottom (hihi), quite separate.
The thing with Sweden is that over most of the last 40 years, competition has been made anathema in the Schools and society at large, and pupils didn’t actually get grades until they were 14 (8th Grade). There was even a big push to obliterate grades completely.
Beyond that, these children probably grew up in one of the most physical, social and economically secure society in human history.
I wonder if the casual chain actually is backward, i.e. that much of the hype and stress seemingly brought on by Facebook et al today, might to a degree be a consequence of a stunted personality, emotional and cognitive development.
The wider argument being, that the human brain uses environmental input (even events we deem as highly negative) as critical “scaffolds” and calibrators for its development, to some degree as the immunological system seem to need an amount of microbial challenges to set itself up properly, (with a nod to Ben’s analogy).
Very well put, Leafs ( hey, are you a Maple Leafs fan?). Not enough innoculation against reality.
Haha, alas no. I usually only watched hockey when the big tournaments came around, VM, Olympics etc, but Mats Sundin has always been a favorite of mine. Heard he did well over there 😉
A very apt analogy.
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I suspect a good part of the reason behind the hyper-vigilance regarding anything child related involves an escalation of the so-called Mommy Wars. If some mothers make a huge freaking deal about how their love and concern for their children makes them X or not-X, sooner or later other moms (or dads of course) are more or less shamed into the same behavior. You don’t want to stand apart from the crowd of Those Who Truly Love Their Children.
This can rapidly get out of control.
That’s why we should be prepared to fight fire with fire.
If you love your children, you won’t smother them and deprive them of all the sacred freedoms we as adults hold dear. I mean, what kind of sick pervert wants to play Big Brother to young kids and control their every move?
b&
There were two kids who were (gasp!) walking alone and someone called the cops on them. It was in the US but I’m not sure where.
Kids can still do all that stuff in Rarotonga (where I was for the last 2 weeks). In many ways Raro is about 50 years behind New Zealand, and much the better for it.
cr
That reminds me of this video in which a young American living in Germany describes the freedom children have here (especially the freedom to get hurt by own stupidity 🙂 ). And he makes an important point: Wussy kids eventually grow up into wussy adults.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0y0Yopba8Xc#t=6m20s
(#10 at 6:20)
But alas, one can see a growing trend to wussification especially at universities.
What is really weird about all this is how Americans always were really good at getting things done. They never worried too much that not everyone agreed or that some people would feel bad. They listened to some opinons, made a decision & got on with it. What will this weird movement do to that great cultural aspect?
I’ve noticed that in Canada we are overly obseessed with consensus. We don’t want to make any decision unless everyone agrees – so things move too slowly. I’m always flipping out about this and trying to get people to be harsher.
Well said. Another aspect of being overly harmonious is to wait for everyone to vote because someone could be passed over.
Clear language and a reasonable time after which silent participants are deemed as abstentions help to bring things forward in due time.
I really loved that piece, except they get the causation backwards. It isn’t parents and liberals who coddled children into becoming whining emotive basketcases. Rather, the bloat of academic administration created a situation where administrators are ever searching for new ways to expand their purview of control over students and faculty. We now sit a full 3 decades into the unabated growth of this apparatus. They learn this stuff in freshmen orientation from administrators, not from overprotective parents.
Interesting point.
I think you get close to the mark but slightly miss it. They aren’t looking to expand control, they are looking to increase their customer base, and as businesses know, the customer is never wrong.
But yes, administration policy towards students is definitely a contributing factor. If they focused more on providing education and less on making money, the problem would not be as bad as it is.
Not likely to be fixed in my opinion. Rationality is being ‘bred out’ of the species via conditioning and via the heritable qualities of those having the most offspring.
No, the “Idiocracy” argument is fundamentally flawed (as has been pointed out by numerous advocates of evolution.) Environmental conditioning doesn’t get into the gene. The religious are not less intelligent. After all, virtually all of our ancestors were religious.
Epigenetics holds that experiences ( multigenerational)*does* switch genes on and off. Experiences since conception and then after birth increasingly impact that switching. You are not a fixed organism, ever.
My understanding is that the sort of epigenetic effects you’re talking about do not and cannot work at the broad cultural level. Many generations of religious fundamentalism isn’t going to switch around the gene and create Homo Pious.
But I’m sure Jerry (or others) can better address the specifics here than I can.
As I understand it, this kind of thing has so far only been found in a couple of species under very specific circumstances and disappears or reverts after a generation or two.
There have been studies on lab rats that show an epigenetically “inherited” stress response, which again disappears a generation or two later. Some scientists who should know better have have jumped the gun and extrapolated these studies on lab rats onto humans.
As I understand it, the mechanisms behind such transmission would not be sufficient to pass on highly complex behaviors like the ones being discussed here.
(NB: I have absolutely no qualifications in this area beyond being interested. I am open to being corrected!!!)
Yakuru is right here. Just search for “epigenetics” in the website search box, and you’ll see a ton of posts I’ve made, almost all showing a lack of evidence for any epigenetic modification by the environment that’s transmitted for more than a generation or two.
I read your recent ‘few generation’ post. There are hundreds of experts in the field who think differently. As far back as 2001 Science Mag has treated this seriously and in detail. I’m a layman, so am not saying you can’t be correct. But, the field is growing in leaps and bounds. See :
http://www.sciencemag.org/site/feature/plus/sfg/resources/res_epigenetics.xhtml
I’m not sure at all that the “Idiocracy” argument depends in the slightest on epigenetics. It’s simple breeding – the argument being that more intelligent people simply have fewer children than less intelligent people. Whether it’s true or not I don’t know – or fundamentally care – no kids for me, so it is of academic interest only.
I remember reading one variant of the story back in the early 80s, when epigenetics wasn’t in “popular science”, if it existed at all as a topic. Can’t remember the author though, but I’m sure the trope has been visited by many authors.
Since it’s a topic we often address, I’ll throw in one more possible cause: the sacralization of “faith” and the attendant mollycoddling of all similar “heartfelt beliefs” across a culture.
If what one believes about God, the spiritual, and the supernatural is not open to disconfirmation or debate, then its become untouchable. It’s tribal, personal, and private. We do not question matters of faith or — worse — encourage people to examine and perhaps change their views — because to do so is seen as hurtful and damaging at the most fundamental level.
Ones faith is ones identity. It signals who-you-are and rests in the same category as values, lifestyle, and preferences. It’s routinely classed with race, nationality, or sexual orientation (a classification which in my mind always prompts an internal playing of the little Sesame Street ditty “One of these things is not like the other.”) Faith signals what is untouchable by human reason. Facts are now values. Deeply-held values.
Instead of jockeying their way through the democratic public ground of factual claims then — along with science, politics, and other areas where diversity is supposed to help us catch our errors — religious beliefs and anything which remotely seems to touch upon them are supposed to trigger an immediate disengagement from criticism — and apology if the line has been breached and crossed. If diversity of views is the goal, then critique is a foreign concept. We constantly defer to a mulish need and worship of difference and certainty. After all, we can’t catch mistakes if there are never any objective mistakes to be caught. The mindset of respect-means-acceptance runs all the way down to the Soul. It reveres the soul of the individual and thus eventually permeates the soul of the culture.
So I strongly suspect that this removal of religion and spirituality from the common ground of dispute, argument, and debate helps to either jump-start or entrench the idea that “respecting others” entails tip-toeing our way through the mindfield of the Sacrosanct. Religion and Spirituality both rely on intrinsic aspects of an Honor Culture mentality. Insulting my God, my religion, my creeds … is an attack. It causes invisible harm. And given the nature of the spiritual, reason is an automatic insult. “You said I was wrong. You have damaged my Spiritual quest and commitment. You’ve attacked my core identity.”
De-sacralizing the concept of “Faith” in society then might be one more aspect of addressing the growing hair-trigger sensitivity of the university students. My opinion.
Unfortunately, it seems that determinism rules, and mysticism ( as used by Reg Morrison in _The Spirit in the Gene_) is a genetic predisposition of the vast majority (80%+ isa good guess) So, faith and the sacred seems tied with a Gordian Knot. Mt 2 cents.
Violence, ignorance, and xenophobia are also “genetic predispositions.” That doesn’t mean they can’t be addressed or improved upon. The human being seems wired for a limited but encouraging capacity to adapt and progress through education.
Those who value mysticism also value reason. Genetic predispositions cut many ways.
I often find that many people seem to confuse or mistake heritability with inevitability.
But I think the critical point (or hurdle for many) is to accept that we really are born with this mixed set of both “good” and “bad” forces or proclivities in our heads.
We seem to have a hard time to face up and see ourselves clearly (metaphorically and personally) in the mirror, which of course also probably is a predisposition…
Agree. I think there’s also a tendency to look at genetic predispositions through the lens of the naturalistic fallacy.
Yes, definitely. It is such a tangle of yarn it is hard to know which end you should start to pull at…
Well put.
I completely agree with Sastra. The special deference given to religious beliefs over other beliefs is a big problem imo. I hate the phrases that have come into the US legal vocabulary like “closely held beliefs.” When the closely held belief is white supremacy, quite rightly no one worries about protecting someone’s right to hold that belief. We don’t see bigots crying for their right not to serve people of colour, but literally millions support the bigots who don’t want to bake a cake for a same-sex marriage because: religion.
Religious beliefs shouldn’t have a special place ahead of other unsupported beliefs, and should not be considered the equal of things we can’t change like our gender identity, colour, sexuality etc.
You have to hold such beliefs closely else they’ll fly away …
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Actually…it wasn’t all that long ago that we did see bigots crying for their right to discriminate based on ethnic origin because of their deeply-held religious values. Most famously, the Moronic Church until only very recently. And, a century and an half ago, much of the anti-abolitionist rhetoric was religious, complete with copious Bible verses. I don’t think anybody even pretends otherwise than that the Nazi persecution of Jews was based on religion.
I could go on, but I think you get the point….
b&
If a campus or classroom activity begins with a ‘trigger warning’, is not that very warning possibly triggering?
Indeed. And so it becomes one more thing to be fearful of; half way to phobia.
Anyone who needs to be shielded from the word “violate” needs professional help. (Which I obtained, for myself, when I found that I was getting distraught at the sight of Nazi symbols, despite never having been within 100 miles of a Nazi. But CBT self-help *does* seem a bit ambitious.)
I took an interest in this subject last week when someone was going on about “all the studies” on trigger warnings and PTSD. I have not been able to find any studies on their efficacy. I did find an article titled “Is there a research basis for trigger warnings?” The answer is evidently “no”. Nearly every professional body who has made statements about trigger warnings recommends against them. It’s incredible how much certainty is projected by the activists, and how much the definitions get distorted in the rumor-mill that drives policy action and their deployment in various campuses. Advocates in academia often argue that the warnings are not to promote avoidance or censorship, but the Oberlin policy expressly required warnings for material that can “cause trauma”. If the material itself is deemed as a cause of trauma, then how can we still require students to view it? Doesn’t that invite them to claim they are being traumatized by the curriculum? They can argue that faculty and students just don’t properly understand the purpose and implementation of trigger warnings, but that begs the question of whether it’s wise to implement mandatory policies that require precise understanding of specialized topics.
I would say basically all of the trigger warnings that are called for are not for people suffering from PTSD but instead for people that don’t like the speech or the subject that is going to be discussed.
Here is me going out on the limb. But I would be shocked if anyone had PSTD to the extent that just mentioning a word or subject matter would force them into an episode is able to function in the real world. They would be forced either to stay home or in an in patient care.
I remember once being told that we were going to be discussing material some might find difficult. No one batted an eyelid throughout the class and I felt a bit guilty that I didn’t even recognize what it was I might have been upset by. Perhaps I wasn’t sensitive enough?
What’s the “prominent atheist blog network” that “is falling apart, ripped asunder by internecine fights about Proper Thinking?”
Anyone know? Willing to say?
The founder of this atheist blog network recently left for Patheos:
http://www.patheos.com/blogs/dispatches/
Wow, I did not know that. Good for Ed!
Was there an explanatory post or two?
That would be Free Thought Blogs, I imagine. Ed Brayton has left for Patheos. But don’t worry, in the comment section of a post explaining his decision he has invited someone with whom he disagrees to “Seriously, go fuck yourself. With a chainsaw.” So the vile spirit of SJW self-righteous that his lazy and incompetent management nurtured at FTB will live on.
“…self-righteousNESS…”
Aw, crap. Glad I stopped reading him when I did, then.
Ophelia Benson seems to have left also, which is a shame. However, there are a lot of bloggers still on the network and I wouldn’t characterize it as “falling apart.”
True, there are still lots of bloggers left. There are only two problems:
(1) There are fewer and fewer bloggers left who actually blog about freethought and related issues, and
(2) they may continue to shed members if they don’t at some point slightly broaden their view of what is ideologically acceptable.
Maybe they blog about whatever they want, just as all bloggers do.
Of course everybody is free to do as they wish, one might just wonder if what they do is conductive to their stated goals or actually counter-productive. Just my two cents.
Well, I don’t know what their stated goals are, I do know there are at least 31 separate blogs, many with disparate views.
You know, you don’t really have to defend FTB to me. I still enjoy reading Pharyngula and Alethian Worldview, for example, even if I wouldn’t feel as safe expressing disagreement over there as I do here, for example. But, um, Ophelia Benson? Obviously her views were too disparate in the end, so stuff isn’t quite that simple.
tomh wrote:
“Maybe they blog about whatever they want, just as all bloggers do.”
I assume you didn’t have Ophelia Benson in mind when you wrote that?
I don’t know what your point is. She wrote about whatever she wanted, people argued with her, she didn’t like it, and left. No one kicked her out, she left on her own.
Phil Mason (‘Thunderf00t’) wrote about what he wanted to write about, and was then kicked out of FTB within a week or two…
Huh? She was run out of town by a disgusting, baying mob. Because she would not answer yes or no to the question “A transgendered person is a woman. Full stop. No discussion of this topic is even allowed.” For me the statement that a transgendered person is a woman is the start of a very long discussion. Not the end of one. If you try to argue that a woman is not a ‘social construct’ or sex is not a ‘social construct’ you will be banned from that crazy site. Sorry, make that you will be ban-hammered by the flaccid one, PZ Myers.
“She was run out of town by a disgusting, baying mob.”
A ridiculous statement. But if you want to argue about it, FTB is the place to do it, not here.
I find the current climate on university campuses extremely unwelcoming and profoundly disrespectful of my academic and social heritage. I most emphatically do not at all feel safe in places like that. I find the attitude these students have towards me and those like me to be highly insulting and offensive.
Yet, if I demand that my “concerns” be “addressed” by fully embracing the open and free exchange of all ideas, from warm and fuzzy to cold and heartless…well, I’ll get viciously attacked. By kids proclaiming they’re doing it in the name of making everything safe.
b&
I have a similar opinion and although what you say has humour in it, it is actually true that this behaviour is an affront.
That last sentence says it all. Some of the behaviour by those stopping free speech is amongst the most appalling I’ve ever seen in this context. It’s nasty, vicious and personal, and the deliverers of it would never survive a similar attack sent back at them.
In an earlier age, children misbehaving like this would be called spoiled brats throwing temper tantrums and would be sent to their rooms until they calmed down and were ready to apologize for their inappropriate behavior. I think we would do well to return to such pedagogical techniques.
b&
Reblogged this on dyke writer and commented:
Sacred Cows make the best Hamburgers.
http://dykewriter.wordpress.com/2015/08/11/modern-englishes-greeks-are-triggery-and-grammar-is-racist/
I just wonder how these people/students make out in the real world, assuming most of them do go to work somewhere. Are there any recent studies to show the affect or results of this protection behavior while in school.
I would just think many of them have a hard time making the transition. How could you not have trouble functioning in nearly any job if you were constantly trying to be politically correct and not offending anyone or always being offending yourself.
One of the best articles I’ve read in a while.
I see skeptics share articles with [trigger warning] written on them who also share articles about the dangers of positive thinking. In the rush to show our sensitivity, we often engage in irrational behaviours we’d have no trouble calling out in others. Indeed, I think we’d better understand how religious people could propagate certain absurdities if we looked into the reason we engage in certain tribal behaviours related to issues we care about…
These kids are all suffering from something but I can’t put my finger on it. It makes me angry and sad at the same time and I have to wonder if these kids have experienced any real hardship in their lives. If not, their behaviour should be a trigger warning because they devalue the experiences of those who have truly suffered.
The narcissism of it makes me angry.
Yes I think that is it too. I’m so tired of the “me me me”. I have cousins in their late 20s & early 30s & the amount of “me” on their FB pages is maddening.
Unfortunately a fair proportion of crap comes from some perverted new definitions of feminism.
Isn’t that what university/college is about? Learning to think? I know it was for me, thanks to some great professors, to quote one: “Now disagree with me already!” I loved that guy, his classes were great. That was 30 years ago and in Germany, but I think the general idea is the same.
I really wonder how these students will fare in the modern working world, how will they cope with a*hole bosses and coworkers, who don’t subcribe to this ‘special snowflake’ paradigm?
No, it’s about getting a better-paid job. Isn’t that the ONLY metric of value?
[/sarcasm]
Never mind your sarcasm…that’s exactly the primary stated reason for the overwhelming majority of Americans in college, and why they’re told they need to go to college in the first place.
b&
In the words of Frank Zappa, “Yeah, totally committed to the fifty bucks”
And why they borrow tens of thousands of dollars to do so.
…and how colleges can get away with charging the ludicrous tuition fees they do….
b&
A 4th solution would be to have incoming students read this article. I imagine most students don’t think they are hyper-sensitive and/or don’t understand how it manifests in the college culture. Being introduced to the problem (malady?) might go a long way in mitigating it.
Yes, giving this article to new students and then having them discussing it might be a really good thing to do!
Vaccination by intraocular injection. You’ll have the anti-vaxxers up in arms.
Or should it be interaural injection?
Seems like american campuses could use some lessions in chutzpah, Berliner Schnauze [1], or similar, more direct forms of communication.
There should be more exchange programs to expose the students to less political correct (sub-)cultures. 🙂
[1] http://www.live-like-a-german.com/germany_related_articles/show/The-meaning-of-Berliner-Schnauze
“but I don’t think CBT is practical here”
I think there are wise lessons we can learn from CBT and the Stoics.
Life can be very rough. One of the secrets of a happy live includes lowering your expectations to a reasonable level, and being somewhat indifferent to others people’s opinions.
But the flipside of that is that high expectations and openness to criticism are both important to success.
The solution requires a bit of a split personality. You need to demand perfection but accept whatever you get; carefully consider what other people have to say but don’t be afraid to dismiss idiocy out of hand.
b&
High expectations and openness to criticism play a part in being successful but most humans on this planet will not be really successful (in objective terms) and also have mostly to deal with people who are also not perfect.
Defense against being disappointed without avoiding experimentation becomes for them relatively more important, otherwise they might not be willing to try out something new and risky.
For successful people this might not be much of a concern.
I’d echo the comment about the Stoics. I’ve been reading quite a bit about their philosophy and it seems to me that these college kids could benefit greatly from a bit of Stoic thinking.
Reading the Enchiridion by Epictetus would be a good start. It’s free and can be read in under an hour.
Alas, this generation’s motto is, “TL;DR” — “Too long; didn’t read.” Even this here response to you would be pushing it, so you can imagine the chances of getting them to spend an entire hour on something written millennia ago.
Now, maybe if you make a move out of it with lots of explosions and anorexic women in skimpy clothes and shirtless men addicted to steroids….
b&
TLDR is the funniest short-from ever if you think about it. Is it ironic? self unaware? self referential? Not sure of the word but it’s funny!
Sub
I think the cause for this is the same as for every other form of zealous moralizing: The world is big and bad, but I’m one of the good guys! If everybody’d be like me, the world would be a better place. It follows that everyone who’s not like me is one of the bad guys. So fighting them is just. Plus, if I succeed, there’s this glorious sense of power, which makes me feel less impotent in face of that big bad world.
I believe it’s really just one manifestation of Fromm’s authoritative personality: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Authoritarian_personality
I also think Caitlin Flanagan in the article highlighted here a few days ago pretty much hit the nail on why this is happening now and in this form, a point Lukianoff and Haidt didn’t raise: Colleges now seem to act like service providers wooing for customers, which they have to coddle to keep satisfied, or else they go and take their tuition fees elsewhere. Which gives the students power, and feeds that type of psychological reaction outlined above. Which makes the college administrations cave in even more. And so on.
Just a theory.
Maybe, but the sense of moral power here seems to me to be connected more to an exaggerated sense of fairness than to authoritarianism. It’s as if the college students are taking Everything I Need to Know I Learned in Kindergarten as their main textbook. “Say you’re SORRY when you HURT somebody” — applied to the real world with a child’s level of discernment.
I guess we’re talking about the same thing here: “Authoritarianism” in the sense Fromm used it refers to a) seeking protection from that big scary world by submitting to something more powerful than yourself, like a movement and the ideal it incorporates (god’s plan, the fatherland, the classless society, social justice); b) trying to gain power over others, which also makes you feel less scared.
I would suggest that power (real, not moral), and the desire for it, has quite a lot to do with the situation – though the students who take the lead in this sort of thing are imperceptive and do not know enough about themselves and about life to recognise that power is what they are after and what they are wielding. The students of the 1960s were rather more discerning in that respect, since what exercised them seemed to be political (and in some cases genuinely was), but the same callow-ness and the same bullying, mainly of other students, was on display (Lescek Kolakowski has a good essay somewhere on the ridiculous demands that were being made, and on the cowardice displayed by many academics and university administrations in the face of these demands). In Japan, the squabbles between rival left-wing groups among students lead to deaths – even after I arrived in Japan in the early 70s, there would be the occasional report of some member of a left-wing group, a left-over from the student movement, being ambushed and beaten to death in the streets. A friend of mine who had arrived a year or so before me taught briefly at one very famous university, where he rescued a student from being beaten up by others, and took the trembling student to the staff common room, where all the professors, assistant professors and lecturers did their best too ignore the student’s presence. Subsequently, notices were put up in prominent places saying that ‘B****-sensei is a fascist.’ The Cultural Revolution in China depended on inculcating a few simple ideas into the minds of young people and granting them power to act according to those ideas – and this also depended on the more ideologically-minded taking the lead and creating a climate of fear among young people who otherwise would probably not have acted as they did.
Agree. IMO, this is primarily an ego-driven phenomenon (“ego” in the common parlance sense of the term). Although, I recognize that that characterization might be broad enough to apply to any behavior. But I do think a desire for personal power (“just watch and see what’ll happen if you don’t do as I say”) is a bigger factor than the rise of “helicopter parenting”, which I’m not at all sure is a worsening problem. Conservatives like to clutch their pearls and complain that humanity is growing more murderous, more prone to theft, lasciviousness, etc. But of course, humans have always done those things.
“If everybody’d be like me, the world would be a better place.”
I hate that attitude so much! Beyond the fact that people are individuals and expressions of individuality vary quite wildly, pretty much everyone who exemplifies such an attitude seems to make the world a more boring place.
Whatever happened to ‘be the change you want to see in the world’?
Regarding your final point: twenty years ago, the liberal arts college at which I taught was riding high. The ratio of acceptances to applications was low enough to put the institution in the top twenty-five nationally. The faculty had improved markedly from the school’s church-related years. And the president was an intellectual with a strong commitment to liberal learning and a genuine love of the faculty and its curriculum as the center of gravity on campus. Why, a faculty member could give a student a ‘D’–A ‘D’!–without being called into the dean’s office to justify it.
Today, that’s all gone. The college yearly struggles to fill its entering class, tuition and fees are forbiddingly steep, and the greater number of ‘full pays’ (as the business model calls them) come from overseas, principally from East Asia. [I should add that students from, say, China, without the requisite speaking and reading skills in English really do require special handling: a recognition of diversity. I only wish they got it. Instead of intensive training in English, they are thrown right into the same classes as native speakers, with (at least in the humanities) predictably bad results.]
Perhaps inevitably–since the prime directive of such an institution is to stay open–college is now an ‘experience’ rather than an education. The ‘experience’ must be a very good one for the students in order to justify the tremendous expense of attaining a bachelor’s degree (easily over $100,000). This justification requires academic and intellectual compromises. Thus the coddling of immature, college-unready (in every way) kids; the emphasis on ‘co-curriculars’ over the classroom; the related obsession with athletics and its bread and circuses; the grade inflation; and, ultimately, the spawning of herds of low-level administrators in the ‘student services,’ many of whom do not themselves come from a liberal arts background (often having some atrocious credential like a B.S. degree in ‘higher education’).
Intellectual curiosity is one casualty of this climate change: a once-magnificent old oak in the middle of the quad, now destined for complete removal. And likewise critical thinking, the means to developing that intellectual curiosity: largely untaught because it is no longer a skill valued by the ‘marketplace.’
{I beg the community’s indulgence for this long post.}
For about one student generation, some federal states here in Germany experimented with tuition fees. They were not high compared to the US (usually 1000€ per year) but nonetheless, there were protests, and they are now scratched everywhere, good riddance. So if you live thriftily, you can get a bachelor’s for less than 20 grands here.
I guess that’s the reason, while “Trigger happiness” has invaded many German campuses too, it’s less pronounced here.
My instinctive reaction when faced with some of the examples quoted from the article would be to ask the person in question whether they have lost their marbles, but of course then I’d be in real trouble, because that is ablist language…
And a micro aggression! You monster! 🙂
“What are marbles?” is the response you would actually get. Is that some kind of candy? a new kind of cool earbud for my iphone?
That, or they’d be playing msrbles on the floor in the corner:-)
I’m all in favor of “safe spaces” — in daycare centers and assisted-living facilities for the senescent. Not so much, on college campuses.
How much infantilizing can today’s students take? Should a student-designated safety patrol inspect every classroom between change-overs? Make sure there’re still little plastic plugs in every exposed electrical socket? Make sure the paste is edible, that the scissors have rounded tips?
The situation regarding speech has descended to theater-of-the-absurd levels, where a topic can no longer be announced even to be criticized. How long before trigger-warning requests are declared verboten, for fear they might themselves trigger others? Today’s students have become as Victorians struggling to communicate that an increase in family size is imminent, while daring not to acknowledge that anyone is pregnant.
We’ve gone from the old days of in loco parentis to just plain loco now, pardners.
I’m so glad I went to college before this movement hit campus. I wouldn’t survive in such a stifling thought police state. It’s perversely Orwellian with the whole mind crime element. Having my worldview challenged in college helped me come to terms with the religious propaganda I had been raised with and I will be forever (figuratively speaking) grateful. The critical thinking skills I gained prepared me to deal with being a responsible adult who could effectively participate in our society. I shudder to think how these kids will react when reality hits them in the face after they graduate. Trigger warning graduates… life is a struggle and can often be cruel.
In law school I took a course devoted solely to studying the First Amendment’s two religion clauses, establishment and free exercise. The professor, my law review advisor, encouraged free-flowing, wide-open discussion among the students, some of whom held near-fundamentalist beliefs. The only prohibition was on personal attacks.
No way today could I get away with the ridicule I regularly heaped on the three Abrahamic religions, comparing them (unfavorably) with hoodoo and voodoo, with white and black magic, with Brazilian Candomblé and West-African Bantu and the animal sacrifices of the Santeria church of the Lukumi Babalu.
What the hell ? are your Campuses turnig into liitle outposts of North Korea where your terrified of saying the wrong thing.?
No. Worse. Terrified of being accused of thinking the wrong thing.
As I remember, when I was in college in the early 1960s, one of the things students were expected to do was “grow up”, not revert to lying in a corner sucking their thumbs because someone said something that upset them. I also remember this phrase that was popular among many students, and I guess could be a “trigger warning” for today’s students: “Life sucks and then you die!”
When I was in school, the popular phrasing was that life’s a beach (with slightly non-standard vowel pronunciation) and then the tide comes in.
b&
This latter day “vindictive protectiveness,” as they call it, is just another pathological manifestation of objective morality. Haidt is perfectly well aware of the fact, says as much between the lines in the article, and describes the phenomenon brilliantly in “The Righteous Mind.” I agree that “cognitive behavioral therapy” won’t solve the problem. That solution won’t come until we begin to grasp the implications of the subjective nature of morality. Until that day, Puritanism, Mencken’s “Uplift,” PC, “vindictive protectiveness,” or whatever the latter day culturally evolved version of the phenomenon happens to be called, will still be with us.
Sounds ominous. what does that mean, for those not familiar with the US “titles” system? Actually, is it even a federal law or (a) state’s law?
Title IX is a federal statute enacted in 1972 that prohibits gender discrimination in federally-funded educational programs. A host of wide-ranging regulations have been promulgated pursuant to it. The statute and regulations have had a huge impact on women’s educational opportunities, and women’s athletic programs, at colleges and universities (almost all of which receive federal funding of some kind) across the U.S.
I finally come around to read this. Very apt article!