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 psychological background and cause of the problem:
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.
Lukianoff and Haidt impute the problem to the atmosphere of greater protectiveness that coincided with parents becoming more worried about and attentive to their kids’s welfare (children can no longer ride their bikes around the neighborhood or go out on their own without parental supervision, something that was unthinkable when I was a child), and to the increasing polarization of American life and politics: an “us versus them” mentality. (They don’t dig deeper than this.) Another cause—to me an important one—is the rise of social media. The authors laud that media as a tool for increasing the connectivity among people, but also warn of its side effects:
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.
And this doesn’t just affect colleges, but even adults, and adults in the atheist “movement”. The infusion of that movement, which once looked so promising, with diverse notions of “social justice”—notions that often conflicted with each other (and I do see a natural but not inevitable nexus between atheism and creating a better world)—when combined with the naming and shaming implicit in social media, has produced a sad debasement of online atheism. It’s not just college students who are afflicted with distorted thinking and identity-politics sensitivity, for at this very moment a prominent atheist blog network is falling apart, ripped asunder by internecine fights about Proper Thinking. But I digress.
The solution. It involves using methods from CBT to help students. Here are Lukianoff’s and Haidt’s proposals:
a. Change government policy.
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.
b. Abandon university restrictions on speech:
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.
c. Abandon trigger warnings, which don’t work. Lukianoff and Haidt cite research showing that the way to desensitive students to potentially “traumatic’ material is not to censor it, but to expose them to it:
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.
They make one more suggestion that seems reasonable, and is probably the most effective thing universities could do to ameliorate the problem, but it seems to me unworkable, as it implies to an already overly-sensitive group of students that they need therapy. Imagine!
d. Teach CBT to incoming college students.
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.
I’m familiar with freshman “orientation sessions”, a lot of which are frankly ludicrous, trying to shame and bully new students into a “politically correct” frame of mind, one that comports with the college’s need to eliminate anything that might considered offensive. Those should be ratcheted down, but I don’t think CBT is practical here. As I said, students will already be offended at the notion that they need tools to correct any warped thinking. That implies that they’re capable of or prone to warped thinking, a suggestion that’s already “offensive,” though Haidt and Lukianoff mean it in the best way possible.
