In The Coddling of the American Mind, Greg Lukianoff and Jonathan Haidt argue that three “Great Untruths,” or bad ideas have gained a strong foothold among young people, especially those on college campuses.
These beliefs insulate students from ideas with which they disagree, are deeply dangerous to free expression and are harmful to students’ emotional development. By succumbing to their own sense of fragility and wrapping themselves in the cloak of victimhood, young people today are developing cognitive patterns similar to those of people suffering from anxiety and depression.
Ultimately, young people must develop the skills and fortitude to feel empowered. Being exposed to controversial ideas and unpleasant experiences is a vital part of human development. The key is not to crumple and retreat into learned helplessness in the face of adversity; but rather, to overcome it and emerge better and stronger.
In this summary, we’ll explore:
The first bad idea is that exposure to adversity or discomfort is inherently damaging. This is a falsehood—stressors and risks are necessary parts of human emotional development. And young people are no exception.
The people and institutions that are most responsible for young people’s healthy development—parents, teachers, schools, universities—have actively shielded them from any form of adversity.
This is the ideology of safetyism—the idea that one’s freedom from emotional discomfort trumps all other moral concerns and trade-offs. In this formulation, “safety” increasingly means being sheltered from opinions that one doesn’t agree with.
It is unsurprising that this idea of safety is prevalent among the members of Generation iGen, who can best be described as social-media natives. In the online worlds of Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram, one truly can curate a world populated only by those who share one’s cultural, aesthetic, and political preferences. Unfortunately, they expect to be able to replicate this in the real world.
This language of safety and trauma is now applied to experiences and topics where it never would have been before. Increasingly, students conflate trauma with emotional discomfort. But emotional discomfort is simply not the same as trauma. At many colleges, students claim that mere exposure to certain classroom materials is traumatic and threatens their emotional and psychological well-being.
This is inherently poisonous to the atmosphere of free discussion of ideas, which is supposed to be a hallmark of academia.
The second bad idea is that you must always trust your emotions.
Too often, emotional reasoning causes us to misperceive the world around us. For young people, emotional reasoning can cause them to feel intentional slights where there are none and strengthen the desire to shelter themselves from emotionally triggering experiences—even speech that they merely disagree with.
Emotional reasoning can have negative consequences. It often leads to negative cognitive feedback loops. Individuals who suffer from anxiety and depression often start from a place of low self-esteem. And because they feel so badly about themselves, they selectively seek out “proof” to confirm their negative self-beliefs. These “proofs,” in turn, further reinforce the original negative beliefs.
Alarmingly, these patterns of negative thought are strikingly similar to the ways in which overprotected university students interpret speech or ideas with which they disagree. Not only is this disruptive in a classroom setting, but it also inhibits the development of critical thinking—the skill that enables people to absorb new information and revise incorrect beliefs.
Another dangerous manifestation of emotional reasoning can be seen in the phenomenon of so-called “microaggressions.” Microaggressions are minor, often inadvertent slights that members of minority groups are often exposed to in the course of daily life. An excessive focus on these incidents can cause the recipient to misperceive intentional slight where there was none.
One more product of faulty emotional reasoning is the phenomenon of de-platforming. De-platforming occurs when controversial guest lecturers, speakers, or debaters who are invited to a university campus to discuss issues are unable to speak due to protests by student activist groups.
The third bad idea is that the world is defined by a black-and-white struggle between the forces of good and evil. Psychological research shows that the human mind is hardwired to sympathize with members of our in-group and fear and distrust members of an out-group.
Identity politics is a form of political mobilization based on some shared group characteristic, often race, ethnicity, nationality, gender expression, or sexual orientation.
Common-enemy identity politics uses the alleged threat of a shared adversary to mobilize its supporters. Usually, the enemy is cast as an oppressor and the mobilized group casts itself as a marginalized population struggling to remove its shackles.
This contrasts with common-humanity identity politics, as practiced by the Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., which grounds its appeal in a universalist message of justice and decency.
Call-out culture is the public shaming of “oppressors” on campus, often for the most trivial offenses. Social media makes call-out culture much more pervasive and cruel, as it gives the online attackers a sense of anonymity that allows them to relax their moral inhibitions.
Call-out culture has a chilling effect on free speech on campus, as students, faculty, and administrators are forced to resort to self-censorship out of fear of being socially vilified for politically incorrect opinions.
These bad ideas have major consequences. Their first negative impact is that they have convinced students that violence and intimidation are acceptable—even necessary—responses to speech that they dislike.
One disturbing idea is that certain forms of speech ought to be considered a form of violence. The logic of this argument is that inflammatory speech can cause emotional distress. Emotional distress, in turn, can have harmful effects on one’s physical health. Therefore, since some forms of speech can lead to physical harm, such speech ought to be considered the moral equivalent of physical violence.
By this logic, of course, almost anything could be considered an act of violence, since anything is likely to be emotionally stressful to at least someone. This becomes an open invitation for a listener to respond to nearly any speech with which she disagrees with actual violence.
In March 2017, an outbreak of violence occurred at Middlebury College in Vermont. There, controversial right-wing author Charles Murray was scheduled to speak. Murray, in his 1994 book The Bell Curve, argued that social and economic inequality is the result of innate genetic differences that render blacks, Latinos, women, and the poor intellectually inferior to white men. Students at Middlebury responded by rioting, destroying property, and even physically threatening Murray and members of the faculty.
The second negative impact of these ideas is that they have led to ideological orthodoxy and groupthink on college campuses—and the persecution of those who are perceived to be dissenters.
As opinion within academic circles has grown more uniformly left-wing, it has become less tolerant of diverging viewpoints. Scholars increasingly evaluate one another’s work not on its merits, but on the basis of whether or not it deviates from shared left-wing orthodoxy.
Recent years have seen a disturbing willingness within academic journals and publications to censor views that contradict left-wing orthodoxy, particularly when it comes to matters of race and class. One professor who merely questioned the fairness of a “Day of Absence” (during which white students were asked by activists not to come to campus for a day) was vilified, harassed, and attacked by students and even fellow faculty—and eventually forced to leave the campus.
It’s important to understand why young people have come to adopt these attitudes. In this section, we’ll explore political polarization, rising rates of depression and anxiety, the influence of social media, an inordinate concern for children’s safety on the part of parents, the bureaucratization of universities, and changing norms around social justice as possible root causes.
On and off campus, the stark ideological differences between the left and right have led to "negative polarization”—political mobilization centered not on positive support for one’s preferred party, but hatred and fear of the other party.
Left-wing campus activism has invited a fierce reaction from the right, with right-wing media like Fox News often cynically amplifying and highlighting high-profile incidents of left-wing campus activism. The vicious cycle of action, reaction, and counter-reaction further divides the nation and makes it impossible to engage in any meaningful dialogue across the partisan divide.
Recent years have seen a troubling rise in the number of teens and adolescents who report feeling anxious or depressed. Suicides and self-harm are up since the dawn of the
2010s, especially for adolescent and teen girls, after remaining relatively steady for decades.
Scholars have noted that social media and excess screentime is highly correlated with depression, anxiety, and self-harm among young people.
If you are unpopular or feel that you are being excluded, social comparison sites like Facebook and Instagram provide minute-by-minute confirmation of your isolated social status by broadcasting the glamorous and fulfilling experiences that everyone else is enjoying. Saturation in the world of social media has left today’s youth more depressed, anxious, and fearful than ever.
Today’s parents limit the independent activities of their children to a far greater extent than previous generations of parents, depriving them of growth-enhancing opportunities to take risks and learn from mistakes.
This prevents young people from learning how to realistically evaluate risks when they become adults. They then carry this attitude to college and expect to be protected from “violent” and “dangerous” speech and opinions.
Because higher education is such a big business, universities now require a large, professionalized bureaucracy of administrators to manage them and ensure steady revenue.
As a result, colleges increasingly see students as customers—valuable assets whose needs must be catered to. Fearful of offending valuable customers, administrators have promulgated onerous campus “speech codes” that define what ideas and modes of expression are and are not acceptable on campus. These codes are absurdly vague, arbitrarily enforced, and deeply damaging to free speech on campus.
So many of these campus issues revolve around evolving notions of justice. iGen grew up during an era of immense social and political turmoil, particularly around questions of identity and racial and gender equity. As such, they are highly skeptical of traditional racial, gender, and class hierarchies.
The trouble arises when people stop focusing on ensuring equal access to opportunities and start focusing on the equality of material outcomes. Such a shift in attitudes toward social justice began before iGen. An excessive fear of groups being overrepresented or underrepresented leads to the imposition of quotas, in which individuals are judged not on their merits, but on their membership in a particular group.
We’ll now focus on solutions that parents, teachers, professors, and administrators can employ to push back against the three bad ideas and their harmful consequences.
Parents should give their children more opportunities to exercise their independence, starting at an early age. This can be as simple as allowing them to enjoy more free and unsupervised play. When they notice conflicts arising among children during play, they should resist the temptation to intervene or make them “play fair.” Parents would also be wise to periodically ask their kids what new challenges they want to take on. Even small milestones like walking to school or friends’ houses on their own can be remarkably self-affirming for kids.
Parents also would do well to teach their kids not to rely on their emotions as their sole guide for interpreting reality. For example, a parent might explain that reality can exist independently of one’s feelings by pointing out that even if someone feels that it’s snowing outside, they might be incorrect—it either is or isn’t snowing. One has to appreciate facts as well as feelings.
Parents should also impress upon their children that no one is purely good or evil. All of us are complex beings with the capacity to do both good things and bad things based upon our circumstances and our state of knowledge at a given time. Even when children are wrong, parents should listen respectfully to their opinions and try to use reason to guide them toward more correct and accurate patterns of thought. This will teach a child that she is not a bad or immoral person simply because she is wrong about something or is in disagreement with someone.
Schools should put greater emphasis on recess, with less adult supervision. While kids should always be kept safe, the definition of “safety” should be narrowed to mean only physical safety. School administrators should also strictly limit the use of devices on school property, as they have been shown to disrupt the learning process and increase anxiety and depression.
Universities can make a more robust commitment to academic freedom by eliminating campus speech codes. University administrators and presidents should also be more willing to stand up to student outrage. While protestors certainly have the right to voice their opposition to a speaker’s ideas, they do not have the right to prohibit others from hearing a speech or lecture on campus.
Ultimately, higher education must be about the fostering of wisdom. True wisdom lies in exploring new ideas, confronting entrenched orthodoxies, and having the intellectual strength to reject wrongheaded ideas and accept new knowledge. This commitment to wisdom and truth is real social justice—and it’s what will yield the greatest good, both for students and the society to which they belong.
In The Coddling of the American Mind, Greg Lukianoff and Jonathan Haidt identify
three “Great Untruths” or bad ideas that have gained a strong foothold among young people, especially those on college campuses. Lukianoff, president of the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education, and Haidt, a social psychologist and professor at New York University, argue that these ideas have exerted a pernicious influence on the thinking of today’s young people and poisoned the atmosphere on college campuses. The three bad ideas are:
These ideas are at odds with traditional teachings about how young people gain wisdom, psychologically damaging to young people, and harmful to the free debate of ideas in a democratic society. The most pernicious manifestation of the Great Untruths has been shielding young people from speech and ideas that they deem “offensive” or “dangerous.”
This ranges from the “trigger warnings” placed on educational materials (which serve to warn students that the text may contain content that will be distressing or “triggering” to students), to the de-platforming of speakers on college campuses whose views are considered outside the realm of “acceptable” debate.
All of this insulates students from ideas with which they disagree. Students themselves have become more strident and militant in their demands for safety from ideas, often going so far as to claim that speech that they deem offensive is the equivalent of physical violence.
This, in turn, is deeply dangerous to the free expression of ideas and, ultimately, to the students’ own emotional development. By succumbing to their own sense of fragility and wrapping themselves in the cloak of victimhood, young people today are developing cognitive patterns similar to those of people suffering from anxiety and depression.
Exposure to hardship and conflict is an important part of emotional development—they are experiences that young people must overcome in order to lead stable, successful, and fulfilling adult lives.
Of course, young people do face genuine struggles:
The professors and administrators who run college campuses must be sensitive to these experiences of today’s students and update prior assumptions and ways of working. But by building a protective bubble around the young people whose intellectual and moral development they are responsible for, these adults are doing the rising generation no favor.
Ultimately, young people must develop the skills and fortitude to feel empowered. Being exposed to controversial ideas and unpleasant experiences is a vital part of human development. The key is not to crumple and retreat into learned helplessness in the face of adversity; but rather, to overcome it and emerge better and stronger. These are the challenges young people must not shy away from, but embrace.
In this summary, we’ll explore:
The first of the three bad ideas we will explore in this summary is that one should avoid adversity and discomfort at all costs.
This is a falsehood—stressors and risks are necessary parts of human emotional development. In this chapter, we’ll explore:
Attempts to insulate children and young adults from danger often backfire in unexpected ways. After reported cases of peanut allergies began to rise in American children during the 1990s, schools and daycare centers adopted strict “no-peanut” rules, forbidding parents from packing them as snacks for their children, or even from packing snacks that came from a facility where peanuts might have been processed.
But studies showed that these responses to the allergy outbreak were actually its cause; by refusing to expose their children to peanuts, these overprotective parents unwittingly compromised the ability of their children’s immune systems to process the enzymes found in them.
Studies later showed that children who had had no exposure to peanuts were more likely to develop an allergy than those who had. Being exposed to small amounts of potentially dangerous substances is how our bodies learn to process them.
The same holds true of our ability to process emotional distress. We need to be exposed to stressors and setbacks in our youth in order to become emotionally secure adults.
Young people are not fragile like glass, nor are they resilient like plastic. They’re more than resilient—they are antifragile. Things that are antifragile are not only capable of withstanding stress, they actually thrive on and require it.
Despite the inherently antifragile nature of young people, the people and institutions that are most responsible for their healthy development—parents, teachers, schools, universities—have actively shielded them from any form of adversity. Most worrisome, this attitude has even spread to speech itself.
The idea has now taken root that offending speech is equivalent to physical violence. This is the logic of safetyism—the idea, increasingly accepted among students of Generation iGen (those born after 1995, discussed in greater detail shortly) that one’s emotional safety trumps all other moral concerns and trade-offs.
In this formulation, “safety” increasingly means being sheltered from opinions that you don’t agree with. Everyone is certainly entitled to physical safety and freedom from abuse—but you’re not entitled to safety from ideas.
It is unsurprising that this idea of safety is prevalent among the members of Generation iGen, who can best be described as social-media natives. In the online worlds of Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram, you truly can curate a world populated only by those who share your cultural, aesthetic, and political preferences.
Having grown up in this digital environment, it is no wonder that Generation iGen expects it to be replicated in the real world. We see this most clearly in the demands of today’s college students for “safe spaces” where they can literally be sheltered from offending viewpoints.
In one case at Brown University, students demanded (and were given) a separate physical space on campus where they could be shielded from a debate featuring a guest speaker whose beliefs challenged some widely held views in progressive circles on the existence of a rape culture in America. This was despite the fact that the students who did not wish to hear the speaker or participate in the debate also had the option of simply not attending.
These demands for safety only make sense if young people believe they are inherently fragile and will suffer genuine harm from exposure to viewpoints different from their own.
The mental health community used to have clear and objective standards for what constituted emotional “trauma.” Trauma was caused by emotionally shattering events that fell outside the bounds of normal human experience—things like rape, kidnapping, war, or torture. Events like the loss of a loved one or the end of a relationship, while certainly painful, would not qualify as traumatic.
In recent years, however, some parts of the therapeutic community have begun watering down the definition of trauma to include anything that the alleged sufferer claims is emotionally harmful. In other words, the definition of trauma has gradually become more subjective, defined exclusively by one’s personal experiences.
But emotional discomfort is simply not the same as trauma. The language of trauma has escaped the bounds of the psychiatric world and made its way into spaces where it formerly had no presence, namely college classrooms. At many colleges, students claim that mere exposure to certain classroom materials is traumatic and threatens their emotional and psychological well-being.
This poisons the free discussion of ideas, which is supposed to be a hallmark of the academy. Moreover, avoidance is precisely the incorrect way to overcome post-traumatic stress disorder. Those who have experienced trauma overcome the experience by exposure therapy, in which they gradually learn to face their fears.
Through this process, they regain the fortitude needed to navigate through the trials and tribulations of ordinary life. Avoidance only instills helplessness and ensures that the patient remains defined by their traumatic experience.
In the last chapter, we examined the destructive idea that you should avoid adversity and exposure to conflicting ideas at all costs.
In this chapter, we’ll explore the second of the three Great Untruths: Always trust your emotions. Specifically, we’ll look at:
Our picture of reality is actually deeply shaped by our emotions. Our perceptions derive much more from how our minds interpret what we see, rather than from an objective and rational assessment of reality. A metaphor for thinking about the human mind is of a human rider sitting atop an elephant.
The rider, representing reason, can do her best to attempt to direct the elephant. But the elephant, representing emotion, is far more powerful and has its own will; it will only comply with the rider’s commands if those commands are not in conflict with its desires.
The elephant (emotion) governs our unconscious, automatic thought processes. Too often, however, this sort of emotional reasoning causes us to misperceive the world around us. For young people, emotional reasoning can cause them to feel intentional slights where there are none and strengthen the desire to shelter themselves from emotionally triggering experiences—even speech that they merely disagree with.
(Shortform note: Want to learn more about the interaction between emotion and reason? Read our summary of The Happiness Hypothesis.)
Emotional reasoning often leads to negative cognitive feedback loops. Individuals who suffer from anxiety and depression often start from a place of low self-esteem. Because they have such low self-esteem, they selectively seek out “proof” to confirm these negative beliefs.
One way they do this is through catastrophizing, turning minor setbacks into disasters.
Another symptom is generalization: taking one setback and re-casting it as a comment on one’s entire experience in life. A third symptom is mind-reading, assuming (nearly always falsely) that others have a negative opinion of them, without any proof.
These “proofs,” in turn, further reinforce the original negative beliefs. People suffering from depression cherry-pick negative experiences and discount positive interactions in order to fuel their negative self-image, in which they are deeply emotionally invested.
Emotional reasoning is totally at odds with what modern psychology says about healthy thinking. Cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT) challenges patients to consciously question their ingrained patterns of negative thinking. Practitioners encourage patients to label these thoughts as they happen and identify more positive (and realistic) ways of interpreting the events in their lives.
This disrupts the pattern of negative thinking. Thus, instead of thinking, “I’m stupid and worthless and doomed to a life of failure” after performing poorly on a test, a patient undergoing cognitive therapy might reorient their thinking toward something more along the lines of “It was just one test; it doesn’t define my life.” Over time, the patient’s automatic thought patterns become more positive. CBT can be remarkably effective at breaking the negative mental model.
(Shortform note: If you’re interested in learning more about CBT, read our summary of Cognitive Behavior Therapy: Basics and Beyond.)
Alarmingly, these patterns of negative thought are strikingly similar to the ways in which overprotected university students interpret speech or ideas with which they disagree.
In a college American literature class, for example, students might be asked to read Mark Twain’s The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, a novel that famously features characters using anti-black racial slurs that were common in everyday parlance at the time it was written, in the 19th century.
Twain was not attempting to promote white supremacy by having his characters use these words—he was merely accurately representing the speech of the real people he encountered in his travels along the Mississippi River during the antebellum era. The novel and the characters in it represent a window into how Americans of the time thought about race. Thus, it is a legitimate work for students to explore in a college setting.
But a student who objects to the racial slurs in the book might demonstrate negative thinking by overgeneralizing and labeling, assuming that Twain and the professor who assigned the book are racists. The student might go even further and feel that the entire university is biased against her and that the assignment of the book renders her learning environment unsafe and
hostile.
Not only is this disruptive in a classroom setting, but it also inhibits the development of critical thinking—the skill that enables people to absorb new information and revise incorrect beliefs.
If you believe that the mere presence of ideas with which you disagree constitutes an existential threat to you, you will never be able to grapple with those ideas and grow intellectually.
Another dangerous manifestation of emotional reasoning can be seen in the phenomenon of so-called “microaggressions.”
Microaggressions are minor slights that members of minority groups are often exposed to in the course of daily life. A microaggression might occur when a white person instinctively crosses the street when they see a black person coming their way, or when a person of color is automatically assumed to be a member of the waitstaff at an office cocktail party.
These experiences can be deeply emotionally painful for those on the receiving end of them, particularly as they build up over time. This is why it’s important to be respectful and mindful of one’s potential cultural blind spots, particularly when in diverse company—as one often is on a college campus.
But an excessive focus on these incidents can cause the recipient to perceive an intentional slight where there was none. This sort of mind-reading is a classic symptom of negative-feedback loop thinking, wherein one assumes the very worst about people.
Undoubtedly, some microaggressions are intentionally hostile But often, another interpretation is available:
Believing that microaggressions indicate deep-seated and personal hostility encourages listeners to constantly take offense to the world around them.
Certainly, a diverse college campus presents no shortage of opportunities for offense-taking, if you choose to have such a defensive mindset. Inevitably, you are going to encounter people who come from different ethnic or socioeconomic backgrounds than your own. If you come to interpret every innocent misunderstanding as a deliberate expression of racism, sexism, homophobia, transphobia, xenophobia, or other form of prejudice, you will soon find yourself in a battered emotional state.
What may be most harmful about the inordinate focus on microaggressions (and the heavy-handed efforts by student groups and even some university administrators to curtail them) is their tendency to conflate impact with intent. The term itself encourages this attitude—an act of “aggression,” by definition, cannot be accidental. Ultimately, a deep belief in the pervasiveness and power of microaggressions only encourages you to feel more marginalized and disempowered, as you’re forever at the mercy of omnipresent forces of oppression.
The last product of faulty emotional reasoning among young people that we’ll discuss in this chapter is the phenomenon of de-platforming.
De-platforming occurs when controversial guest lecturers, speakers, or debaters who are invited to a university campus to discuss issues are unable to speak due to protests by student activist groups. These groups often stage attention-grabbing protests, boycotts, walkouts, or disruptive displays of heckling in order to intimidate the speaker or pressure the university to rescind the invitation.
Unfortunately, many of these student-led actions against speech have proven successful. This use of the “heckler’s veto” deprives others of the opportunity to hear the speaker, resulting in intellectual impoverishment for everyone. These de-platforming or disinvitation attempts stem from the same patterns of faulty thinking and emotional reasoning we’ve discussed so far—a belief that one’s safety is threatened by exposure to opinions with which one disagrees and an unhealthy focus on the oppressive power of microaggressions.
In the years since 2009 (and especially since the 2016 election), these efforts have become more common on the political left, usually targeting conservative speakers. While some of the speakers targeted by these protests have been right-wing provocateurs like Milo Yiannopoulos (whose goal is to provoke shock and outrage), many have been mainstream conservative commentators and policymakers.
In fact, many of the targeted speakers at universities are themselves left-leaning, including Clinton administration Secretary of State Madeline Albright and Obama administration Attorney General Eric Holder.
It is a cognitive distortion to believe that merely hearing ideas you disagree with causes you psychological harm. It is also deeply harmful to the process of learning and intellectual development. Learning is about forcing you to think. It is often meant to be uncomfortable, as it forces you to engage critically, be open to new information, and challenge long-held beliefs.
In the last two chapters, we explored two of the Three Great Untruths that many young people (especially left-wing college students) have come to accept:
In this chapter, we’ll explore the third bad idea—that the world is defined by a black-and-white struggle between the forces of good and evil. This type of thinking is highly psychologically damaging to those who succumb to it and dangerous to academic freedom on campus.
In particular, we’ll examine:
Psychological research shows that the human mind is hardwired to sympathize with members of our in-group and fear and distrust members of an out-group.
The most consequential human conflicts are those between groups—nation vs. nation, white vs. black, straight vs. LGBTQ, rich vs. poor, and so on. Despite our potential to think in terms of this us-against-them, black-and-white view of the world, this type of thinking often doesn’t inform our day-to-day interactions with other people.
Most of the time, we successfully navigate through life while working and sharing space with people from backgrounds different than our own. It often takes conflict or deliberate activation of this innate tribalism to force us to consciously think in terms of group difference and group identity.
Identity politics is a form of political mobilization based on some shared group characteristic, often race, ethnicity, nationality, gender expression, or sexual orientation. This is in contrast to traditional political mobilization, which is usually oriented around some shared material goal or interest (as with labor unions or an industry lobby).
There is nothing wrong with identity politics per se—people who share common identity characteristics usually do have interests in common, and it makes sense for them to band together to advance the causes they care about.
Identity politics can be affirming and constructive when they follow the common-humanity model, most famously practiced by the Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. Although King was specifically fighting to address the legal, political, economic, social, and physical injustices faced by African-Americans since before the founding of the United States, he grounded his appeal in a universalist message that spoke to the nation’s shared sense of justice and decency.
In speaking to white Americans and to those who were skeptical of civil rights advances for African-Americans, King evoked the common “civic religion” of the United States, drawing upon the lofty rhetoric of the Declaration of Independence and the US Constitution. He cast the movement he led not as a battle of black Americans against white Americans, but as a struggle to uplift all Americans.
Common-enemy identity politics represents the opposite of King’s vision. It uses the alleged threat of a shared adversary to mobilize its supporters. Usually, the enemy is cast as an oppressor and the mobilized group casts itself as a marginalized population struggling to remove its shackles.
This form of identity politics is difficult to reconcile with the normal democratic process. After all, if one is fighting against an oppressor that threatens your very right to exist, to accept any compromise would be to accede to one’s own destruction. Almost any action can be justified when one adopts this mode of thinking.
One idea that has particularly contributed to these patterns of thinking on campus is intersectionality.
Intersectionality is a theoretical framework that focuses on how systems of oppression can overlap and combine. For example, the racism that black men experience is not the same as the combined racism and sexism that black women experience. The overlapping, or “intersection,” of the two forms of prejudice experienced by black women is a unique phenomenon that must be addressed on its own terms.
Originally put forward by the feminist scholar Kimberlé Williams Crenshaw in 1989, intersectionality offers valuable insights, highlighting how systems of oppression can form a mutually interlocking web. It also helps the general public and policymakers identify sources of disadvantage that might otherwise go unnoticed.
As with identity politics, the problem is not with the idea of intersectionality itself. Rather, the way it is taught, interpreted, and applied in many academic settings encourages young people to view their life and daily interactions through the lens of oppression or privilege. This black-and-white, us-against-them mentality inhibits critical thinking and distorts how students view the world. Life is far more nuanced and complicated than a simple story of oppression vs. privilege.
According to the new understanding of intersectionality, everyone lives along an axis of oppression or privilege according to their identity (white or black, heterosexual or LGBTQ, rich or poor, and so on). Depending on where you happen to land on the axis, it becomes easy to engage in simplified black-and-white moral thinking, labeling straight white men as evil “oppressors” by virtue of their identity, and everyone else as virtuous “victims,” solely on the basis of their non-white, non-straight, non-male identity. This sort of tribal thinking can dangerously cloud one’s moral judgment.
These misapplications of intersectionality teach university students to see sources of difference as more important than sources of common ground, dividing the world up into the privileged and the oppressed.
Under the influences of these and other theoretical frameworks, college campuses have been rocked by student-led protests, often directed at university professors and administrators.
At Claremont McKenna College, a female student of working-class, Latin-American background wrote an article in a student newspaper decrying the college’s lack of diversity and arguing that the culture on campus was primarily grounded in white, middle-class values that made it difficult for students like herself to fully feel a part of it.
In response, the dean of students reached out to the writer and expressed a desire to hear her perspectives on how to make the college a more inclusive and welcoming place for students who did not “fit the mold” at the college (this was the dean’s choice of words in her email).
The student chose to interpret the “fit the mold” comment as the dean telling her that she did not belong at the college—clearly the opposite message from what the dean intended. A full-scale protest against this dean and the university administration ensued, with students staging hunger strikes and demanding that the dean be fired.
Although the college did not fire her, the administration also offered no public defense of her, nor did many of her colleagues on the faculty. Ultimately, the dean resigned due to the stress and often-frightening harassment she faced on campus.
One more outgrowth of this black-and-white approach to conflict is the growth of “call-out culture.”
Call-out culture is the public shaming of “oppressors” on campus, often for the most trivial offenses. Even the slightest deviations from left-wing orthodoxy (such as liking a “problematic” or “offensive” post on social media) can incite a vicious reaction. Social media makes call-out culture much more pervasive and cruel, as it gives the online attackers a sense of anonymity that allows them to relax their moral inhibitions—similar to how group psychology leads participants in mobs to engage in violent actions that they never would in one-on-one interactions.
Some perpetrators of call-out culture may privately feel that the actions of the digital mob are wrong; they nevertheless go along because they feel the need to signal to the group that they are on the “right” side of the conflict (this dynamic is known as virtue signaling).
Call-out culture has a chilling effect on free speech on campus, as students, faculty, and administrators are forced to resort to self-censorship out of fear of being socially vilified for politically incorrect opinions. This is especially dangerous in academic settings, which are supposed to be bastions of free speech and debate.
Ultimately, call-out culture and its harsh “us-against-them” psychology work against many of the goals of left-wing politics, because it alienates potential allies and radicalizes and mobilizes opponents. Columbia University professor Mark Lilla, who describes himself as a “once and future liberal,” argues that the left’s increased focus since the 1960s on sources of difference rather than points of commonality has been central to the Democratic Party’s withering electoral fortunes.
Systemic racism and other forms of marginalization really do exist, and it should be the mission of everyone who claims to be on the side of progress to oppose them. But by antagonizing would-be allies, focusing its ire on the wrong targets, and rooting itself in a politics of division, the modern left has locked itself into a self-defeating cycle. Instead, the left must build bridges, form broad coalitions with allies, and embrace a politics of inclusion.
Discover how you can learn to accept new ideas through exposure to diversity and conflict.
Have you ever found yourself refusing to listen to an idea because you disagreed with it? Describe the situation in a few sentences.
Do you think this black-and-white thinking on your part prevented you from learning? Explain why or why not.
In the future, what steps can you take to open yourself up more to exploring new ideas, even those you dislike or which cause you offense?
In the first three chapters, we focused on the Three Great Untruths. To recap, they are:
In this chapter, we’ll look closer at one of the main effects of these ideas—how they have convinced many students that violence and intimidation are acceptable, even necessary, responses to speech that they dislike.
Specifically, we’ll focus on:
In a 2017 New York Times essay, Northeastern University professor Lisa Feldman Barrett made the argument that certain forms of speech ought to be considered a form of violence.
The logic of this argument is that inflammatory speech can cause emotional distress. Emotional distress, in turn, can have harmful effects on one’s physical health. Therefore, since some forms of speech can lead to physical harm, such speech ought to be considered the moral equivalent of physical violence.
But this is a deceptively simple formulation. By this logic, almost anything could be considered an act of violence, since anything is likely to be emotionally stressful to at least someone. Anything that causes stress would therefore be considered “violent.” A parent telling their kids to clean their room or to do their homework (either of which might trigger stress) would be violent if one carried the premise of Barrett’s argument to its logical conclusion.
Of course, emotional stress, even if it leads to some level of physical harm, is not the same as violence—and neither is the speech that might cause emotional distress.
This attitude toward speech is extremely dangerous. As we explored in Chapter 2, concepts like “white supremacy” or “trauma” have lost much of their once-objective definition, becoming largely subjective in modern left-wing discourse.
These concepts have been watered down to encompass forms of speech and behavior that never used to fall under them. This makes the evaluation of what is “hateful” or “oppressive” entirely up to the listener. Regardless of what was said, if it caused anyone emotional harm, then it can be considered hate speech.
This then becomes an open invitation for a listener to respond to nearly any speech with which she disagrees with actual violence. After all, if one is being “violently” attacked (or believes that others are), then one has a right—indeed, a moral obligation—to respond in kind. Preemptively violent responses to speech (or even intended speech) become not acts of aggression, but rather, acts of self or community defense. If you oppose this physical violence, you are justifying and enabling “hate speech”—and making yourself a deserving target of physical violence.
Not only is this mode of thinking incompatible with the free expression of ideas, it is also psychologically damaging to those who subscribe to it. If you choose to interpret speech that does not 100 percent conform to your own beliefs as a personal and violent attack upon yourself, you will be severely limited in the variety of viewpoints to which you can reasonably be exposed. You will be intellectually impoverished and find your world becoming narrower, angrier, and duller.
These ideas have been given real and often frightening expression on college campuses in recent years, resulting in rioting, mayhem, violence, and intimidation at universities from the University of California at Berkeley to Middlebury College in Vermont.
In February 2017, left-wing protesters at Berkeley assaulted people gathered to hear a talk by right-wing personality Milo Yiannopoulos (a self-described “troll” who admits to making inflammatory statements in order to provoke outraged responses from the left).
The protesters, many of them masked and claiming to be affiliated with the militant anti-fascist group Antifa, intimidated attendees and caused extensive damage to university property. Ultimately, Berkeley gave in to the protesters and canceled Yiannopoulos’s speaking event.
The next month, a similar outbreak of violence occurred at Middlebury College in Vermont. There, controversial right-wing author Charles Murray was scheduled to speak. Murray, in his 1994 book The Bell Curve, argued that social and economic inequality is the result of innate genetic differences that render blacks, Latinos, women and the poor intellectually inferior to white men. Students at Middlebury responded by rioting, destroying property, and even physically threatening Murray and members of the faculty.
Chillingly, these violent riots were justified in the name of stopping violence, because the rioters believed that speech by these (admittedly controversial and deliberately provocative) right-wing speakers itself constituted an act of preemptive violence that denied students from historically marginalized groups “the right to exist.”
This kind of thinking is the essence of destructive common-enemy identity politics. It is inherently poisonous to free debate. If you believe your opponents in a debate are attempting to do violence to you or negate your very existence, then violence is the only possible response.
If speech with which one disagrees is a form of violence, then it logically follows that a community would seek to suppress such “violence” in the name of community safety. After all, no community or group would tolerate open displays of physical violence—so why should speech violence be treated any differently?
In this chapter, we will examine the other main consequence of the three bad ideas—the development of rigid ideological orthodoxy and groupthink on campus. Specifically, we’ll explore:
The French sociologist Emile Durkheim, who wrote during the 19th and early 20th centuries, argued that the natural human tendency toward tribalism and us-against-them thinking (a phenomenon we explored in Chapter 3) often expresses itself through the fostering of internal group cohesion and the suppression of dissent.
This quest for ideological purity tends to be strongest during moments where the group feels itself under siege both from internal disunity and external threats. According to Durkheim, participation in group rituals and public affirmations of shared belief are powerful tools for the achievement of internal cohesion.
Unfortunately, this can quickly lead to the establishment of group orthodoxy and persecution of those who are perceived to be dissenters. These episodes of persecution nearly always:
One can see similar patterns of thinking among today's students on American college campuses, with their eagerness to root out and silence perceived ideological deviations.
Although we’ve focused a lot on the attitudes of students, they are by no means the sole perpetrators of this groupthink mentality on campus. In many ways, they are merely responding to the growing uniformity of opinion among their professors.
While professors have always leaned left (especially in the humanities and social sciences), leftist academics have gained a dominant position within academia, far outnumbering conservative or right-leaning professors—often by margins of five-to-one.
As opinion within academic circles has grown more uniform, it has become less tolerant of diverging viewpoints. This lack of viewpoint diversity is antithetical to the scholarly and intellectually stimulating environment that is supposed to define university life.
It is certainly true that everyone, including university professors and researchers, believes that their opinions are correct. Because we believe this, we tend to engage in confirmation bias, seeking out evidence that confirms our beliefs, while ignoring evidence that contradicts our beliefs.
But in an academic setting featuring a healthy diversity of viewpoints, rigorous peer review of a professor’s writing and research holds this impulse in check—essentially, the faculty’s confirmation biases cancel each other out. In such a well-functioning marketplace of ideas, it is difficult for rigid orthodoxy and groupthink to take hold.
But the exploration and vetting of diverse ideas are impossible under the conditions of strict ideological uniformity that exist on today’s college campuses. Scholars increasingly evaluate one another’s work not on its merits, but on the basis of whether or not it deviates from shared left-wing orthodoxy. As we’ll see, this growing intolerance for ideological impurity creates an environment where professors are vulnerable to witch hunts—often led by their colleagues.
Recent years have seen a disturbing willingness within academic journals and publications to censor views that contradict left-wing orthodoxy, particularly when it comes to matters of race and class.
In 2017, the feminist philosophy journal Hypatia published an article titled “In Defense of Transracialism,” by Rhodes College assistant professor Rebecca Tuvel. Tuvel argued that the growing acceptance of transgender people and the simultaneous condemnation of transracialism (the belief that people should have the freedom to choose their own race and be able to transition to another racial group) represented a contradiction.
Tuvel argued that one’s choice of gender identity and one’s choice of racial identity both raised similar moral and ethical concerns and were worthy of respect. Her article caused an uproar, as people from across academia penned an open letter to Hypatia demanding that Tuvel’s article be retracted—a severe sanction usually reserved for instances of outright fraud or plagiarism.
These critics did not argue that Tuvel’s findings were factually incorrect or that they needed further study. They argued that simply publishing the piece was “transphobic” and amounted to an act of “violence” against transgender people and people of color.
The letter did not address the merits of Tuvel’s arguments; rather, it focused on her word choice in the article, lambasting her for using terms such as “transgenderism” and for “deadnaming” a famous trans woman (by referring to her pre-transition name).
Many of Tuvel’s colleagues sympathized with her plight but refused to publicly come to her defense for fear of angering the digital mob. The Tuvel affair was the epitome of a modern-day academic witch hunt—an unthinking mob using the persecution of an innocent to foster in-group cohesion and individually signal their ideological purity to one another.
These intolerant attitudes have filtered down to the students themselves. At Evergreen State College in 2017, a politically progressive biology professor named Bret Weinstein wrote an email on a faculty listserv questioning the wisdom and fairness of a planned “Day of Absence,” in which white students were asked by the organizers to stay away from campus.
Although he believed his email to be innocuous and sent in good faith, Weinstein soon saw it set off a firestorm of controversy at the college. Days after sending the email, a mob of students invaded Weinstein’s classroom, surrounded him, and refused to allow him to leave. Over the course of several days, students occupied various administrative buildings across campus, barricading university officials inside (including university president George Bridges). In the end, Weinstein and his wife (also a professor) were forced to leave the university and seek employment elsewhere.
The incident represented a total capitulation to a violent mob by the leadership of an American college. No students were punished for their intimidation tactics and disruption of the learning process.
So far, we’ve focused primarily on attitudes and actions taking place on America’s college campuses, exploring the growth of far-left ideology among both students and professors—and the resulting intolerance on their part toward anyone who even appears to deviate from this orthodoxy.
In the next few chapters, we’ll examine the reasons why young people have come to adopt such attitudes. In this chapter we’ll explore:
Left-wing campus activism is taking place within a climate of rising partisan polarization in America. Political science research shows that there has been a massive divergence on issues between self-identified Democrats and Republicans since the mid-2000s. The Pew Research Center cites a whopping 21-percentage-point disagreement in 2011 between the two parties on basic policy questions—up from just six points in the mid-1990s.
Politically divisive events like the 2003 invasion of Iraq, the 2008 financial crisis, the election of the nation’s first black president, the rise of the Tea Party and Black Lives Matter movements, and the 2016 election of Donald Trump have only amplified the division.
The stark ideological differences between the two party coalitions have dramatically raised the stakes of political competition. Each election cycle becomes a life-or-death struggle between starkly opposed candidates and parties. This has fuelled the growth of what political scientists label “negative polarization”—political mobilization centered not on positive support for one’s preferred party, but hatred and fear of the other party.
In Chapter 3, we explored how this sort of us-against-them thinking represents a threat to academic freedom. It is also dangerous to healthy democratic politics.
We can even see this in the geographic and social landscape of the United States. Americans increasingly live in politically homogenous communities and have fewer and fewer cross-partisan personal relationships. Democrats and Republicans live in worlds that are becoming more and more separate. Thanks to social media platforms like Facebook and Twitter, Americans can easily narrow their news consumption to include only slanted and partisan information that confirms their pre-existing beliefs.
(Shortform note: Want to learn more about the deeper trends driving political polarization in America? Read our summary of How Democracies Die.)
Given this rising climate of political mistrust, hostility, and polarization, it’s no wonder college campuses (which have always been strongholds of the left) have become even more strident in their politics.
But this has invited a fierce reaction from the right end of the political spectrum, with right-wing media like Fox News often cynically amplifying and highlighting high-profile incidents of left-wing campus activism. The vicious cycle of action, reaction, and counter-reaction further divides the nation and makes it impossible to engage in any meaningful dialogue across the partisan divide.
Moreover, the actions taken by many on the far right against campus leftists often constitute grave threats to campus safety. Several of the students who participated in the protest at Evergreen State College reported receiving rape and death threats from the right via email and social media. In 2017, a Princeton professor called President Trump a bigot during her commencement remarks at Hampshire College. She was besieged with specific and credible death threats after Fox News publicized her speech.
The right targets even those academics who do not make provocative political statements. In 2017, a University of Iowa professor named Sarah Bond published an article in an academic journal in which she discussed Greco-Roman white marble statues. These statues were originally painted in vivid color, but the paint deteriorated over the millennia, leaving us only with the white marble we see today.
Bond argued that the whiteness of these statues contributes to modern-day white supremacist ideas that equate “whiteness” with aesthetic beauty and with humanity’s highest cultural achievements—in no small part because they contribute to the anachronistic belief that ancient Greeks and Romans were “white” (a racial concept that simply did not exist in the classical world).
Right-wing media wilfully misrepresented the content of the paper, claiming that Bond believed that the use of white marble in and of itself was racist and that anyone who enjoyed classical art was therefore a white supremacist. Online right-wing mobs harassed Bond, issued the now all-too-familiar threats of violence, and called for her firing.
University administrations have failed to defend professors from violent online threats made by off-campus right-wing provocateurs—just as they previously failed to stand up for faculty threatened by left-wing militancy on campus.
This further contributes to the chilling effect on free expression, as professors are left with no choice but to self-censor, lest they face withering abuse from either the left or the right. The zone of acceptable discourse continues to narrow from both ends of the political spectrum.
In the last chapter, we looked at how the rise in safetyism and militancy on campus in part reflects the broader political polarization and sharpening of political disagreements that have defined American life for most of the 21st century.
But heated partisanship is not the only broader contextual factor at work in the transformation of college campuses. The students themselves are vastly different from those who graduated just a few short years before. In this chapter, we’ll explore:
Recent years have seen a troubling rise in the number of teens and adolescents who report feeling anxious or depressed. Even more disturbing, one in five teen and adolescent females now meet the criteria for depression.
Suicides and self-harm are up since the dawn of the 2010s, especially for adolescent and teen girls, after remaining relatively steady for decades. What is driving this trend?
In Chapter 1, we introduced Generation iGen. This is the cohort of young people born roughly after 1995. In contrast to the older Millennials, iGen spent its entire formative years with access to the internet—especially social media.
Social media can fundamentally alter one’s social relationships and interactions with the world. iGen was the first generational cohort that was able to cultivate an online persona and interact almost exclusively with a world of virtual friends.
With the proliferation of iPhones and other smartphones, all of them loaded up with social-media apps, the online world is inescapable and ever-present.
Prolonged interaction with platforms like Facebook and Instagram transforms these online spaces into the “real” world for many young people. As a result, many adolescent psychologists believe that inordinate engagement online is delaying true emotional and social development is being delayed for young people, depriving them of formative experiences and relationship-building skills in the real world.
Social media can be harmful for young people’s mental health, beyond its tendency to crowd out opportunities to develop social skills and independence. Scholars have noted that social media and excess screentime is highly correlated with depression, anxiety, and self-harm among young people.
Social media provides young people with a window into the lives of everyone in their peer group. More than ever before, teens and adolescents can see what their friends are up to at any given moment. This can have negative consequences for their emotional well-being.
Seeing all of the exciting parties and social events that your friends are participating in (and that you’re not) can trigger intense feelings of FOMO (fear of missing out) and even worse, FOBLO (fear of being left out). If you are unpopular or feel that you are being excluded, social comparison sites like Facebook and Instagram provide minute-by-minute confirmation of your isolated social status by broadcasting the glamorous and fulfilling experiences that everyone else is enjoying.
This sharpening of feelings of exclusion has proven particularly harmful to young women, whose reported rates of depression, anxiety, self-harm, and even death by suicide have risen far more sharply than those of boys—indeed, one in seven college girls today believe themselves to be suffering from a mental disorder.
This is because the social lives of teen and adolescent girls tend to be more centered around dynamics of inclusion and exclusion. The ability to filter one’s appearance and curate one’s image on social media also leads to unrealistic expectations of physical beauty for young women, who already face great pressure and anxiety about how they look.
The pressure to project an online persona of beauty and popularity becomes all-consuming and inescapable, leading to further anxiety and insecurity. Since young women also report using social media more frequently, they are also at greater risk than their male counterparts.
All of this helps explain the situation on campus and the demands for protection. Because today’s young people have had fewer independent and unsupervised experiences, they are less emotionally equipped to navigate the real world—and for many of them, college is their first taste of independence. On top of this, their saturation in the world of social media has left them more depressed, anxious, and fearful than ever.
More than anything, safetyism is a response. Faced with a cohort of perpetually scared and anxious students, it’s not surprising that university administrators respond by coddling these young people and protecting them from “harmful” speech and opinions.
Of course, the more oppressive manifestations of safetyism, like call-out culture, only increase these anxieties. Coddling students only reinforces their negative cognition, affirming them in their beliefs that the world is a dangerous and scary place that they must be shielded from.
As we know, this is precisely the opposite of how one overcomes irrational anxieties. The attitudes that parents, professors, and university administrators are taking toward students will only reinforce their sense of helplessness and teach them that every minor misunderstanding or transgression is the product of deliberate and vicious hostility.
Safety parenting is a major component of the broader phenomenon of safetyism. This style of parenting traces its origins back to the 1980s and 1990s.
That era saw the rise of 24-hour cable news. Much of the programming on these new news networks focused on high-profile abductions and murders of young children. Breathless news coverage of kidnappings and other similar tragedies convinced a nation and a rising generation of parents that there was an epidemic of child kidnappings at the hands of violent drifters and lurking sexual predators. This all took place within the broader context of a crime rate that began to climb in the 1960s and didn’t come down until the 1990s.
But the phenomenon of child abductions was always more media myth than reality. The overwhelming majority of child disappearances result in the safe return of the child to his or her parents. Moreover, nearly all of the kidnappings that do happen are at the hands of family members or other individuals known to the abductee—in the US, only about 100 children out of a population of 70 million are abducted by a stranger per year.
In reality, the world is far safer than the parents of iGen imagine it to be.
As a result of their misplaced sense of fear and overhyping of perceived dangers, today’s parents limit the independent activities of their children to a far greater extent than previous generations of parents.
Parents also face pressure and judgment from other parents when they are believed to have placed their children in “danger.” In the most over-the-top cases, neighbors have called the police on parents for such things as being late to pick their kids up from school or leaving children in the car while they run a brief errand.
As a result of these social pressures and improper assessments of risk, today’s kids are far less likely to engage in even the most routine activities that entail some measure of independence, like walking alone to a friend’s house or going to a public restroom unattended.
There has been a sharp drop in unsupervised, unstructured play. This is actually a vital part of childhood development, as kids learn to deal with moderate levels of risk and fear from games involving hiding, exploring, or climbing trees. Such activities are also an important part of socialization, as kids learn to manage different personalities, resolve conflicts, and negotiate disputes.
Because they haven’t learned proper modes of conflict resolution, they are also more likely to rely on authority figures and mechanisms of external control to resolve disputes—hence the demands that university administrators “ban” disagreeable speech.
While these losses may seem trivial, they prevent children from learning how to realistically evaluate risks when they become adults.
The excessive concern for their safety also teaches children that the world is a dangerous place that they must be shielded from at all times. That they then carry this attitude to college and expect to be protected from “violent” and “dangerous” speech and opinions becomes less surprising when we consider how they were parented.
As we discussed in Chapter 1, kids are antifragile—they benefit from exposure to mild risks and setbacks. No one would argue that kids should be put into mortal danger or be exposed to severe psychological trauma, but overcoming some measure of adversity gives young people the confidence that enables them to thrive later in life.
The rise in safety parenting has been far more notable within privileged families. These are typically households with two married, working parents, who earn an income that places them on the higher end of the socioeconomic ladder.
Such parents are far more likely to closely regulate their children’s activities both inside and outside of school. Rather than allowing children to engage in unstructured activities with peers, these parents fill their kids’ schedules with “stimulative” activities like music and language lessons—often in the hope that these will ultimately help them secure admission to elite universities.
This represents a sharp contrast to the parenting norms within working-class families. These families are more likely to feature a single parent or a sole breadwinner and reside on the lower end of the socioeconomic ladder. Children of these less-privileged backgrounds tend to be given a greater degree of independence and unsupervised play.
These different class-based approaches to parenting also help to explain the fragility of today’s college students, largely because it is precisely these same privileged kids who are far likelier to be at college in the first place (especially the elite institutions where so many episodes of campus unrest have unfolded). Because they’ve been raised in a world that places their emotional safety above all else, it’s no wonder that they come to see the learning process solely through the lens of safety rather than knowledge.
The attitudes and expectations of privileged parents have also profoundly reshaped the educational system. As colleges and universities have become more exclusive and expensive, the competition for admission (particularly at elite institutions) has taken on a cutthroat character.
Even in kindergarten, which was once almost entirely oriented around free play and socialization, teachers now drill math and reading content into five-year-olds. Outside of school, privileged kids fill more and more of their free time with lessons and extracurricular activities, standardized test prep courses, scheduled playdates, and tutoring sessions.
Children come to feel that one poor performance on a test will sink their chances of admission to a good college—and thereby condemn them to a life of failure. This likely plays a role in the mental health crisis among young people that we saw in the last chapter, with suicide clusters occurring at elite high schools around the country.
Explore how an excess focus on safety might come at a cost to healthy social and emotional development.
When you were growing up, were there specific independence-boosting experiences that your parents or caregivers prevented you from having out of concern for your safety? What were they?
Based on what you’ve read in this summary, do you believe that these safety-based restrictions affected your attitudes toward risk as an adult? Explain why or why not.
In the last few chapters, we’ve discussed how evolving social norms and parenting practices combine to make today’s college students more fragile before they set foot on campus. In this chapter, we’ll look at how the policies and practices of university administrators reinforce this culture of fragility on campus.
In particular, we’ll look at:
While most American colleges and universities are still nonprofit organizations, they have nevertheless become enormously wealthy institutions. In just the 2015-2016 academic year, university revenues totaled a whopping $548 billion.
Because higher education is such a big business, universities now require a large, professionalized bureaucracy of administrators to manage them. Often, these administrators are tasked with financially safeguarding the university—successfully marketing it to prospective students, securing large gifts from alumni, and shielding the university from potentially ruinous lawsuits.
The administrators make their living from the university’s largesse, and so have a direct personal interest in ensuring its revenue-maximizing potential. The past few decades have seen the numbers of university administrators skyrocket, with their growth in numbers far outpacing that of professors. These administrators are now the real power players and decision-makers on matters of campus policy—not the professors.
If American universities are revenue generators, then the source of that revenue is the students themselves. Colleges increasingly see students as customers—valuable assets whose needs must be catered to, lest they (or, more realistically, their parents) leave and give their valuable tuition money to a competing institution.
Privileged students know that their families are the financial lifeblood of the university, and as such, have come to demand white-glove treatment from the adults who run the campuses. Colleges now resemble luxury resorts, where students dine on excellent food and enjoy first-class amenities in their classrooms and residence halls.
It is not surprising, therefore, that students have developed a sense of entitlement regarding how they deserve to be treated—and what opinions and ideas are acceptable for them to be exposed to. For many students, professors and administrators are simply customer service representatives.
The corporatization of university life, the interests of university administrators, and the growing fragility and entitlement of today’s students all combine to create an atmosphere on campus that is highly threatening to academic freedom.
Because colleges increasingly fear being sued by students who claim to have been offended by something a student or professor said to them or by something they may have been assigned in class, administrators have promulgated onerous campus “speech codes” that define what ideas and modes of expression are and are not acceptable.
These codes are deeply damaging to free speech on campus and frequently lead to instances of overreaction to and overregulation of ideas. One professor at Oakton Community College who sent an innocuous email to fellow faculty members urging them to honor the struggle of workers on May Day was issued a cease-and-desist letter by the college. His offense? Merely referencing the violent 1886 Haymarket Square Riot in his email, which administrators believed constituted a veiled threat to the university president.
Speech codes also enshrine the kind of emotional reasoning we cautioned against in Chapter 2. Some codes include absurdly vague language, demanding that “no student shall offend anyone on university property.” “Offensive” is not defined by any objective standard, but is determined solely by the “victim.” If it bothers someone, it’s offensive, regardless of intent.
This closely mirrors the phenomenon we observed in Chapter 2 in which the definition of concepts like “trauma” have been watered down and subjectified to such a degree as to deprive them of any practical meaning or application. Moreover, the overhyping of the concept of “microaggressions” enhances students’ beliefs in their own fragility and gives them a low bar for what constitutes bias and/or aggression.
While these speech codes may seem silly and nonsensical (and they are), one should not discount the ways in which they have profoundly reshaped academic life.
Professors now teach in an atmosphere of intimidation, in which using the wrong term or assigning a “problematic” work for students to analyze can lead to social sanction from fellow faculty; student boycotts of one’s class; and disciplinary action by the university, up to and including dismissal.
To avoid running afoul of this intolerant atmosphere or having a bias report filed against them by a student, professors tiptoe around topics that are likely to lead to such controversies. In law schools, for example, professors report being unable to teach topics like sexual assault law. This only serves to impoverish the students intellectually, while ultimately harming the survivors of sexual assaults themselves.
All in all, university life has become defined by a disempowering victimhood culture. This stands in stark contrast to earlier notions of a dignity culture, in which one had a strong enough sense of one’s self-worth to be able to shrug off minor insults. Today, students increasingly cherish and cultivate their status as powerless victims. This ultimately serves to make them morally dependent on the intervention of third-party authority figures such as parents and university administrators.
This unwillingness to solve one’s own problems or peacefully resolve disputes within one’s peer groups is damaging to human development. After students leave their coddled university lives, they will lack the tools to negotiate conflicts and overcome hurdles—and there won’t be any university president to complain to.
So many of the campus-based protests we’ve covered have dealt with evolving notions of justice. In this chapter, we’ll explore:
Political science research shows that people have a strong tendency to form lasting political views during their teens years and early adulthood. For a certain subset of baby boomers, the experiences of the civil rights movement, the assassinations of Robert F. Kennedy and Martin Luther King, Jr., the Vietnam War, and Watergate shifted their political orientation decisively—and permanently—to the left and to the Democratic Party.
A similar dynamic has taken place with iGen, whose members came of age during the period running roughly from 2008-2017. This was an era of immense social and political turmoil, particularly around questions of identity and racial and gender equity. Some of the events from this era included:
Amplified by social media, these movements for justice and equity led by people of historically marginalized groups have profoundly influenced young people’s notions of fairness. Young people today are highly skeptical of traditional racial, gender, and class hierarchies.
Before we delve more deeply into evolving norms of justice and equity, it’s worth exploring how people in a liberal democracy like the United States have customarily understood these concepts. There are two main theories of justice: distributive justice and procedural justice.
Distributive justice is centered around the idea that rewards or benefits received ought to be commensurate with the amount of effort or work one puts in.
If someone is undercompensated relative to their labor, this constitutes a violation of distributive justice; a violation likewise occurs when someone is overcompensated for putting in no effort.
Much of this is rooted in what social psychologists call equity theory—that people will intuitively judge an outcome to be fair if the ratio of outcomes to inputs is equal for all participants. Thus, something like unequal pay for equal work (as when women are paid 70 cents for every dollar earned by a man doing the same job) offends our sense of distributive justice.
On the other hand, procedural justice is concerned with fair and transparent rules and processes.
If rules are vague, arbitrary, or seem to be applied on an unequal basis to different individuals (or to different groups) then it violates our sense of fairness. Social science research shows that people are quite willing to accept outcomes that are disfavorable to them as long as they have confidence that they were given fair consideration and did not suffer any prejudice or discrimination.
A hybrid model, what we might term “proportional-procedural justice” or “social justice,” holds that society has an obligation to ensure that people are not denied either their fair share (proportional justice) or due process (procedural justice) because of their membership in a minority group or other traditionally disadvantaged class.
Convincing members of the majority group of the merits of this approach to justice can be difficult, especially in a democratic society like the United States, where the majority can always outvote the minority. Even nominally “fair” processes and procedures like free democratic elections and referenda can yield injurious results for the minority, simply by virtue of their numerical inferiority.
Members of the majority must therefore be open to understanding how minorities are disadvantaged, and accept that minorities have inherent rights that are deserving of respect and cannot be revoked by a simple majority vote.
Clearly, then, social justice and minority rights are important. The overwhelming commitment to rights for LGBTQA people and racial minorities on the part of today’s university students is noble and worthy of celebration.
The trouble arises when these efforts stop focusing on ensuring equal access to opportunities and start focusing on the equality of material outcomes. Such a shift in attitudes toward social justice began before iGen.
Title IX of the 1972 Education Amendments Act was designed to ensure that female athletes at colleges and universities would not face discrimination in their access to varsity athletic programs. But, beginning in the 1990s, the federal government began to change its interpretation of the statute to insist that colleges receiving federal funds had to work to ensure gender-equal outcomes.
New guidelines told schools that the gender composition of their athletic population had to match the gender composition of their overall student population. But because there was not equal interest in athletic programs among men and women, many schools were forced to either cut male athletic programs and/or artificially inflate the rosters for their female athletic programs in order to meet these quotas.
Episodes like this underscore the problems that come from conflating opportunities with outcomes. An excessive fear of groups being overrepresented or underrepresented leads to the imposition of quotas, in which individuals are judged not on their merits, but on their membership in a particular group.
This is an inversion of our aforementioned ideas of justice. Fair inequality is far preferable to unfair equality. Sacrificing someone’s individual rights to achieve some goal of group equity intuitively violates our sense of fairness. This is why most people react negatively to the idea of quotas or mandatory proportional representation.
Just as correlation does not mean causation, unequal outcomes do not necessarily mean that there is some underlying injustice. Forcibly pursuing equal outcomes at the expense of individual rights alienates potential allies and ultimately works against the goals of social justice.
In these final chapters, we’ll focus on ways that parents, universities, and young people themselves can break free from the harmful ideas and behaviors we’ve examined in this summary. Specifically, we’ll explore:
Ultimately, these recommendations will prepare young people to be antifragile, autonomous, and take on the challenges of adult life.
Earlier in this summary, we introduced the concept of antifragility—that kids do not suffer from experiencing mild adversity; on the contrary, it makes them stronger. Overcoming difficulty is an essential part of the passage from childhood to adulthood. This is why the excessive focus on safety and efforts by parents to minimize risk, however well-intentioned, actually do great emotional harm to young people.
Because they are deprived of the opportunity to make mistakes, kids do not learn how to properly evaluate risks, gain independence, and navigate interpersonal conflicts without relying on a third-party authority figure, like a parent (or, later in life, a university official).
Parents should give their children more opportunities to exercise their independence, even starting at an early age. This can be as simple as allowing them to enjoy more free and unsupervised play. When they notice conflicts arising among children during play, they should resist the temptation to intervene or make them “play fair.”
Parents would also be wise to periodically ask their kids what new challenges they want to take on. Even small milestones like walking to school or friends’ houses on their own can be remarkably self-affirming for kids. This also teaches them that “stranger danger” is an overhyped myth and that, if trouble arises, they should ask strangers for help.
Parents should pause, take a breath, and remember that the risk of abduction at the hands of strangers is practically zero and that crime in general is far lower than when they were children.
Parents also would do well to teach their kids not to rely on their emotions as their sole guide for interpreting reality. Even teaching children the basic principles behind cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT) can be beneficial.
To recap, CBT teaches people to break the vicious cycle of negative thinking by identifying and labeling untrue negative thoughts in order to foster more positive and realistic views of themselves. Parents can model this behavior by identifying and labeling their own negative thoughts to their children and showing them they’re irrational.
Parents can then use this as a launching pad for deeper discussions about the relationships between feelings and reality. For example, children often have a remarkable ability to understand difficult ideas through the use of metaphors and allegories. A parent might explain that reality can exist independently of one’s feelings by pointing out that even if someone feels that it’s snowing outside, they might be incorrect—it either is or isn’t snowing. One has to appreciate facts as well as feelings.
Lastly, parents should impress upon their children that no one is purely good or evil. All of us are complex beings with the capacity to do both good things and bad things based upon our circumstances and our state of knowledge at a given time.
Black-and-white moral thinking can be highly damaging to a child’s emotional development. Even when children are wrong, parents should listen respectfully to their opinions and try to use reason to guide them toward more correct and accurate patterns of thought. This will teach a child that she is not a bad or immoral person simply because she is wrong about something or is in disagreement with someone.
This, in turn, will teach her to apply this logic to others—that they are not bad simply for having different opinions. She will gain humility (because they will know that they, too, are capable of being wrong) and learn to give others the benefit of the doubt, instead of assuming the worst.
Outside of the home, parents should encourage elementary, middle, and high schools to adopt policies that boost antifragility.
Teachers should stop assigning heavy workloads of homework, especially for younger children. They should instead be encouraged to use the time spent on homework on free play and exploration, where they can learn healthy interpersonal and independence skills from their peers.
Schools should also put greater emphasis on recess, with less adult supervision. While kids should always be kept safe, the definition of “safety” should be narrowed to mean only physical safety. Even if some kids are being excluded or groups of kids aren’t playing “fair,” these are opportunities for kids to explore how to handle rejection and emotional discomfort on their own—which will build their long-term emotional fortitude.
School administrators should also strictly limit the use of devices on school property, as they have been shown to disrupt the learning process and (especially social-media apps) increase feelings of social isolation, which leads to anxiety and depression. As kids get older, educational institutions should be mindful of the fact that today’s youth grow up much slower than previous generations.
Even if they are able to master college-level coursework, students often arrive on campus unprepared for the social and emotional responsibilities of independent living. This is why there is a growing push to delay the admission of high school graduates into college.
Public figures like retired United States Army General Stanley McChrystal propose a “gap year” between high school and college, during which young adults can live and work away from their parents. This will teach them valuable independence and interpersonal skills, hopefully reducing their demands for safety and protection once they do enter college.
A national gap year program would have the added benefit of bringing together young people from diverse backgrounds, better preparing them for the diversity of opinions and experiences they will encounter, both in college and in the professional world after graduation.
Universities themselves are antifragile institutions. An academic institution is strongest when it is home to a diverse range of viewpoints. Scholars with different ideas debate one another and use empirical evidence and research to advance the truth—benefitting the entire university community.
The purpose of a university should be to discover and share truth, across a range of intellectual disciplines. This is the sole standard upon which the quality of a university should be judged. If a university suppresses the truth because of concerns that certain kinds of knowledge are hurtful or politically inconvenient, then by definition it is not a good university.
Ideals like equality and social justice are noble, and fostering them may well be appropriate goals for other institutions. But not for universities. If a university places the promotion of social justice (however it defines the term) as its primary goal and reason for existence, then it is likely to suppress or censor ideas and findings that might conflict with that stated goal.
Universities can make a more robust commitment to academic freedom by eliminating campus speech codes. As we discussed in Chapter 10, speech codes are vague, unenforceable, and render the definitions of “offensive” or “unsafe” speech entirely subjective.
In the case of public universities, which are government institutions funded by taxpayer money, such speech codes present a genuine constitutional question under the First Amendment. In their pursuit of truth, universities must put free inquiry first—even if it leads to unpleasant conclusions.
University administrators and presidents should also be more willing to stand up to student outrage. As we’ve seen, university leadership has all too often given in to the demands of student protestors, often at the expense of the intellectual wellbeing of the broader academic community. While protestors certainly have the right to voice their opposition to a speaker’s ideas, they do not have the right to prohibit others from hearing a speech or lecture on campus.
Universities should strive to welcome a diverse range of viewpoints on campus, among both faculty and students. When a university becomes too uniform in its ideology, it ceases to be hospitable to the kind of rational inquiry that is supposed to define a campus community. Instead, it becomes a rigid and inflexible political faction committed to an orthodoxy.
Universities should pursue diversity of opinion just as they pursue racial or gender diversity. Having a greater variety of opinions on campus will make it clear to students that classrooms are not intellectual “safe spaces,” and that adults engaged in serious study at a university do not need to be “protected” from viewpoints they dislike.
When conflicts do arise, professors should emphasize the use of evidence to disprove one’s opponents, instead of resorting to the language of safety.
Despite the problems we’ve explored in this summary, there are good reasons to believe that the situation is improving.
We’ve talked about how social media companies like Facebook play a negative role in young people’s emotional and social development by increasing their feelings of isolation. Although it’s still early, it appears that these companies are beginning to understand the harmful side effects of their platforms. As a result, they are changing their algorithms and exploring ways to make their products fun and engaging, while minimizing their negative mental health impacts.
Meanwhile, state legislatures across the country are passing laws that give parents greater freedom to allow their children to play outside alone or walk unaccompanied to school—giving them legal protection against wrongful charges of abuse or neglect. On campus, scholars and university administrators are showing signs of a much-needed pushback against safetyism and cancel culture.
Ultimately, higher education must be about the fostering of wisdom. True wisdom lies in exploring new ideas, confronting entrenched orthodoxies, and having the intellectual courage to reject wrongheaded ideas and accept new knowledge. This commitment to wisdom and truth is real social justice—and it’s what will yield the greatest good, both for students and the society to which they belong.
Explore the main takeaways from The Coddling of the American Mind.
Do you think colleges committed to free speech have a responsibility to provide a platform to anyone who wishes to speak, regardless of their views? Are there certain ideas that you would consider to be unacceptable in such a setting? Explain your answer.
How do you think colleges ought to balance the need to provide a platform for a wide range of views against the need to not promote hate speech?
Can you think of a time when you experienced some sort of setback or adversity that taught you how to overcome a challenge? Briefly describe what happened. How do you think your life would have been different if you’d been shielded from this experience?