Apropos of the last post, here’s a 32-minute video of psychologist Jonathan Haidt lecturing as part of the William F. Buckley program at—of all places—Yale University, where the Halloween Costume Fracas just occurred. (Haidt also went to Yale as an undergraduate.)
He’s playing two opposing roles: as representatives of both “Coddling University” and “Strengthening University”, characterizing the discussion we’ve been having about “student psychological safety” versus “free speech.”
This is a clever way to make one’s points, for it’s clear which side Haidt is on, although some (including me) might find the talk a bit heavy-handed. Still, given the political climate among students at universities like Yale, I think it’s pretty brave of Haidt to give a talk like this.
As always, readers’ opinions are welcomed in the comments.
If there is a proper time for sarcasm this would be it. Hopefully no one was offended beyond recognition.
Coddle University…perfect! 🙂
Haidt makes the observation (?) that children become stronger from shocks.
Clearly, there is an optimal level of shock that will vary per child and by age; once this level is exceeded, the child can be damaged for life. The same thing could be argued for the immune system and bones.
I had the same thought.
And while we do grow intellectually by having our ideas challenged, people are also surely stymied if their value as persons is constantly undermined — i.e. by racism, sexism, homophobia etc.
I thought it was good talk, overall, but possibly a little bit ‘black and white’, ironically.
Agreed.
There was a Cosby show where they were encouraging one of their kids to go to, I think, Howard University, which was a predominantly black school. I think the base argument was that such an environment was racially affirming and it put the student in a better position after college to deal with racial hostility.
I don’t see this a disputing, in general, the idea of an intellectually diverse college experience.
I taught at a predominantly minority high school school (at the time) and I found that these schools can be extremely useful for congealing, as Sidney Poitier would say, the person so that when they do go out to college they were ready for mild to moderate racism. Not that that justifies racism, but the effects are not as are mitigated by strong self esteem.
I think that’s where the Cosby show was going with that. It’s similar to the fact that people who grow up in well-adjusted environments tend to respond to stress better later in life.
There are things that have happened to me, especially in childhood, that I recognize as having done permanent damage, but those same things have had positive effects too.
Sure, it’s possible to turn lemons into lemonade.
A person who was abused as a child might become an advocate for the underdogs of society, for example. I would bet, though, this person still suffers from depression and impaired relationships.
I don’t see it as turning lemons into lemonade. (That phrase is one that really annoys me, so forgive me if I sound a bit harsh here. It’s not personal.)
I don’t suffer from depression. There are many people who have had wonderful lives that do suffer from depression. There are a lot of factors, many of them genetic, when it comes to any illness. I don’t think anyone (including me) can assume anything about a person based on one bit of information. You’ve jumped to abuse, which wasn’t what I was thinking of when I wrote the above. It was more that we all have different experiences that contribute to the person we are today, and some of the bad stuff has made me a better person.
Well, sometimes you can draw conclusions based on one bit of information; at least statistical conclusions. People who experience abuse are more likely to suffer from all sorts of mental health issues as adults. Are there contributing factors? No doubt; even cigarettes aren’t guaranteed to cause lung cancer.
I didn’t infer from your comment that you experienced abuse, I was just trying to keep the discussion general and not relating to any particular person, which would just be anecdotal.
Part of the difficulty of this sort of discussion is the way that it can morph into other discussions due to the slipperiness of the terms. You use the phrase “better person”, which isn’t necessarily the same concept as “resilient” or “anti-fragile”.
Sorry. I got a bit carried away there. I actually agree with most of what you said above, so it would have been better if I had just shut up. Unfortunately, I’ve never been very good at that.
We like you just the way you are. 🙂
Aww, thanks 🙂
Yes. Running makes bones stronger, but they also break. I don’t care if they grow back stronger. Breaking them is not part of fitness training.
Wasn’t it Nietsche who said “that which does not kill us, only makes us stronger”? (Twilight of the Idols, apparently.)
It’s a wonderful statement, but sadly not always true. I think one could teach a philosophy course simply by taking common aphorisms and discussing the situations in which they were true vs when they were not.
It would probably be a reasonably interesting way of doing it.
I remember reading that in Nietzsche and it was taken out of context…ie: there was more to it.
But of course, what doesn’t kill us doesn’t always make you stronger. My friend’s mother survived cancer and it’s harsh treatment, but the chemo crippled her and caused neuropathy so she isn’t at all stronger.
I reacted to that too.
There are some research that point to that the immune system gets successively weakened over adult life by attacks. Similarly, epidemiologists have at least one model where measles incapacitates the immune system for years, and may be one of the large global killers when that is taken into account.
Also, more or less impeding et cetera scar tissue doesn’t seem to exist in that black & white hypothesis.
How good the research is I don’t know, but I’m wary of the idea.
The context of this video is “free speech” versus “student psychological safety”. Isn’t it much easier to psychological damage someone in an environment where there is no free speech?
I think “Strengthening University” makes the point:
In search for the truth some cognitive dissonance is inevitable and even necessary. Trying to avoid it can be harmful.
In the present context, the statement is probably true, but since Haidt mentioned bones and the immune system, he had more than the present context in mind.
All systems become brittle if you push them too far. It’s not just about how hard you push the system, but the rate at which you push it. In the same way one can acclimatize one’s body to certain poisons by staying with a small dose and building up, one can also strengthen one’s character – for a lack of a better word – by gradually increasing the psychological stresses one is exposed to.
The principle remains the same though.
So, if you start with small amount of sexual abuse and then build it up over time, the child will remain unharmed and become stronger?
Obviously, I don’t buy that and you probably don’t either. Nor can a body acclimate itself indefinitely to increasing amounts of poison. These analogies work only very slightly before they lead one astray.
That’s not what I wrote; perhaps I didn’t make myself clear. Child abuse is by definition more severe than many other types of “bad experience.” It seems that you’re suggesting I claimed that different categories of experience are comparable (setting aside the problems with establishing what those categories are). They’re not; or else there wouldn’t be categories. What I meant was that within any single category, there is a range, and that limiting oneself to a single category at a time, one may generally see an ability to “immunize” oneself. The specifics of each category must be examined individually.
Similarly, I did not say that acclimatization to poison can continue indefinitely. Every system has a breaking point, acclimatized or not.
You and I are not disagreeing, as far as I can tell.
The only issue I have with Strengthen U is that bit at the end about the inclusion of conservatives to counter the discrimination endemic at PC unis. I think that any active or unintended bias against republicans or libertarians or other right-aligned people is unacceptable, but I understand that the faculty in the hard sciences, where political allegiance is unasked and irrelevant, is overwhelmingly liberal too.
So what’s going on here? Are there hordes of conservative economists, sociologists, etc bagging groceries? Or is the present anti-science and anti-intellectualism in modern conservatism turning republicans away from academia, and academics away from the GOP?
It’s not clear to me that conservatives have ever been well-represented within academia. Perhaps the openness to experience that characterizes liberalness is a prime requisite for the scholarly life?
Professors are drawn from the pool of PhDs, not the pool of all citizens, and for whatever reason, PhDs tend to be more liberal.* So the fact that most professors are on the left side of the political spectrum shouldn’t be that surprising. You’re drawing marbles from a bag in which more of them are blue rather than red, and you’re ending up with more blue marbles. This should not surprise anyone.
*The correlation is not strong and AFAIK we’re not sure which influences the other; does a liberal attitude encourage higher education or does higher education encourage a liberal attitude? Or maybe they’re both dependent factors on some third variable. But for whatever reason, the correlation exists.
The Pew data says that 56% of those who have attended graduate school identify with the Democratic Party or lean Democratic, compared with 36% who align with or lean toward the GOP. To me suggests that the correlation is pretty strong; it might be stronger yet for those that actually complete the PhD program.
I wonder what the relationship is outside of the US?
There’s potential for a lot of factors. When a place has no women, it CAN be that no women applied, but it also can be that they are being systematically ignored by the majority.
If you look around you can find plenty of cases where conservatives (not the Huckabee type) do get a lot of political heat in academia. Just look what happens when an academic dares to support Israel. There is a strong narrative even in academia that tends to automatically buy into the lefty trend du jour (my wife works at a major university and sees this first hand).
In the sciences you will find political conservatives.
Conservatives are not necessarily GOP. Also, if truth really is the final arbiter at Strengthen U, then any conservatives who are as crazy as yer common or garden variety RWNJ will be quickly weeded out.
Agreed a bit heavy-handed, but not that far off the mark.
Pretty much right on the mark, imo.
I did not find it heavy handed at all.
University is a place to learn and be challenged, a place to learn how to defend your beliefs, or change them in the face of evidence. University is a place to grow as a person, not be sheltered like a child.
I’ve been reading too many stories where a misguided desire to avoid offense, which no one actually has a right to, trumping real human rights like freedom of speech and freedom to assemble.
The one thing that I wonder about the universities that do coddle is what is going to happen to those students once they get into the real world and they find others who profoundly and vehemently disagree?
Would you reasonably say that the parents coddled prior to the university?
I have no idea tbh.
I have no idea either, but I think there’s enough to suggest coddling begins far earlier, with, e.g., the “everyone’s special” attitudes in schools that was lampooned in The Incredibles.
/@ / Girne (Kyrenia), Cyprus
Sub
While the Strengthen U stuff is good, it’s obvious the Coddle U stuff is just a great big straw man, a misrepresentation that no one can take seriously.
Strawman? From the Judith Shulevitz NYT article shown in the video about Brown University:
The safe space, Ms. Byron explained, was intended to give people who might find comments “troubling” or “triggering,” a place to recuperate. The room was equipped with cookies, coloring books, bubbles, Play-Doh, calming music, pillows, blankets and a video of frolicking puppies, as well as students and staff members trained to deal with trauma.
Except that it follows from what actually has happened on campuses. Is it a straw-man to highlight what has happened?
I wish you were right, but all the examples in the talk regarding ‘safe places’, micro-aggression etc… are taken from real life.
Great talk – he hit on so many excellent points. I am sharing this with a number of colleagues who will enjoy the humor and underlying truth of the topic.
Haidt sounds a bit like Mr. Deity.
As already noted, a bit of ironical black-and-white in some instances, re assumed anti-fragile systems, or on CBT which is criticized – I am unclear on if it has any acceptable empirical support.
But also a bit pomo grey elsewhere. It is a good thought, perhaps cuddling 😉 re politics, that “hypocrisy” means there are no absolute facts. But there are, as we can now see in physics, chemistry, biology. Haidt as a psychologist may straddle both worlds, but he was also concentrating on repeatable results.
So, yes, clever but a bit rough at the edges. It must be hard to come up with material for the forth-and-back divide, so I would tend to give him more leeway than usual.
A fair assessment.
CBT seems to have empirical support, but a lot of low quality (wikipedia).
It may have some good tricks for controlling our emotions like promoting indifference and low expectations.
Funny enough it’s criticized for treating people as if they have no free will.
Mob rule, vague censorious demands,mandatory’re-education’ programs and frightened administrators (not to mention the Department of education’s push in FAVOR of strong speech codes.
I fear this battle is already lost.
http://m.columbiatribune.com/list-of-demands-from-concerned-student-group/pdf_345ad844-9f05-5479-9b64-e4b362b4e155.html
🐾
Notes 001
The thing we see at Coddling University is unfortunately not yet well described and understood. I guess we can all observe the following things:
A) Seemingly small issues spark major outrage and rip entire communities apart, whether it’s hot beverage proposals in confined spaces, fictional characters in print and as polygons, or Halloween costumes. At we least we can say it’s not about rape-death of thousands in a warzones or widespread abuse under a religion. We typically have 1st world problems, or something very close to it.
B) Somehow a group that consistently identifies as concerned about “social justice” cranks it up to eleven. As Nigel says, ten is maximum, but eleven pushes it over the cliff. There can never be “agree to disagree”. The other side (marked as opposite of the social justice group) must leave, their ideas must be removed and purged and an example must be made that nobody ever tries to emulate their behavior, or say similar things as them. This is often accompanied by widespread demonization, slander, libel, defamation, smearing or howevere you want to name it.
C) What is true is consistently unimportant. Sometimes the social justice group will say so openly. This seems to come about as they see the current (small) instance as representative of some endemic, larger problem which they are actually concerned about. As such, when people are falsy accused of rape (for example) and the accusers can no longer pretend it happened, they’ll shift towards that it still important to blame someone because society, the false-accused etc. could learn something from it.
D) A certain vocabulary and assumptions are always floating around the social justice people, which point to a postmodernist, intersectionality feminist, identity politics, standpoint theory, critical race theory type of ideology.
E) Let’s make up a model of conflict to illustrate the situation, and because I’m pompous, let’s claim it The “Aneris Model of Discord”
I argue that such social justice proponents (called social justice warriors, SJW regressive left, the faction) have a strong drift towards higher numbers in my discord model (in some sense more meta). They are evasive of substance, and quickly move on to grabbing the prerogative of interpretation, invent motives of their opponents and quickly try to get them banned or hamstring them so that they cannot clarify or clear up (or cannot be heard anymore). You can see this in the fantastical claim that opponents of them wanted Freeze Peach, untrammeled free speech when there were always were moderated spaces and basic decency and respect without “safe spaces”.
I see this even on the Rational Wiki where SJWs very quickly do Othering, then try account right shenanigans simply for disagreements on talk pages.
I could go on about the specifics of the ideology, my point here is that there is more to it than just being cuddled. There is a postmodernist ideology, set of beliefs, behaviours, attitudes maybe even personality traits (I suspect they tend to be “feelers”) connected to it.
“Safe Spaces” ensure the prerogative of interpretation (they are about ideology), trigger warnings are about removal of unwanted ideas, smearing and character assassinations, and no platforming are about removal of people who could spread such unwanted ideas. The specatcles and chilling effects are about “immunizing” the audiece against these unwanted people and ideas, making them heretics and ideas heresy.
The effect is that you cannot even say something on e.g. Richard Dawkins without also having to write some disclaimer that you not always agree with him etc. (thereby the negative views get perpetuated!). This also harks back to (5) in the makeshift model where labels represent issues as in (1). Nobody knows anymore what the argument or the issue was, we only remember how it was labelled (“he’s a sexist”) and only the label gets passed around, making it often impossible to clear anything up.
In sum, this is the one of the most pernicious ideologies that emerged in the recent times. And sadly, the US secular movement, in particular the conference going atheist-skeptics movement is immersed to the chin in it.