The Myth of the Campus Coddle Crisis: The Coddling of the American Mind

by John K Wilson, Academe Blog:  https://academeblog.org/2018/12/28/the-myth-of-the-campus-coddle-crisis-the-coddling-of-the-american-mind/

Jonathan Haidt, a professor of psychology at New York University, and Greg Lukianoff, president and CEO of the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (FIRE), have written a new book, The Coddling of the American Mind: How Good Intentions and Bad Ideas Are Setting Up a Generation for Failure.

Haidt and Lukianoff’s best-selling book has received laudatory reviews from many places. This is not one of those laudatory reviews. Although I agree with many things they write, and share their general outlook in opposition to safetyism (protecting people from any possible harms, including offensive ideas) and in favor of free speech, I want to focus on my disagreements because dissent is more interesting and more important.

Back in 2015, I criticized the Atlantic article Haidt and Lukianoff wrote that this book is based on. Their thesis was simple: “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.” As I wrote: “Unfortunately, their thesis is dead wrong: they completely misdiagnose the problem on campus, blaming a massive generational psychological shift for censorship on campus, instead of the real cause: a political problem of powerful administrative structures promoting repression at colleges.”

Now they have expanded their article into a longer, and worse, book that aims to diagnose the safetyism ills of our entire culture, not just universities. But the book is deeply flawed when it examines campus free speech, because it is based on a dubious and unproven premise, and because Haidt and Lukianoff identify the wrong underlying causes of campus censorship today.

Haidt and Lukianoff ask, “Why did things change so rapidly on many campuses between 2013 and 2017?”(15) The problem is that the premise is flawed. There has been no rapid change on college campuses in the past five years. Critics point to a few anecdotes (Middlebury! Berkeley!) and imagine we’re in the middle of a grand cultural revolution that no evidence actually supports.

According to Haidt and Lukianoff, “Something began changing on many campuses around 2013, and the idea that college students should not be exposed to ‘offensive’ ideas is now a majority position on campus.”(48) Their basis for this is a 2017 survey where 58% of college students agreed that it is “important to be part of a campus community where I am not exposed to intolerant and offensive ideas.”(48) But 45% of conservatives also agreed, and it’s not surprising that most students want a college community that’s tolerant of them. The same survey found that 91% of college students agree that it “is important to be part of a campus community where I am exposed to the ideas and opinions of other students, even if they are different from my own.” This is not evidence of a censorship revolution caused by safetyism.

The cause of this alleged spike in censorship (which they offer no evidence to show), according to Haidt and Lukianoff, is that “Students were beginning to demand protection from speech….”(9) The problem on campus is distorted policies enforced by administrators, not the distorted thinking of students. There’s a simple reason why: students do not have power. No one really cares what they think. As has always happened, students who think badly may indeed demand censorship. Well, get in line. There’s a whole of other people—administrators, trustees, politicians, donors, advocacy groups—who also want censorship and have far more power and money than students do.

Safetyism is not the cause of campus censorship; safetyism is the excuse given for a small proportion of censorship cases. You could eradicate safetyism entirely, and it would not change campus censorship much at all.

At the core of the book are these three “Great Untruths”:

#1: “What doesn’t kill you makes you weaker,” or the idea that exposure to offensive or difficult ideas is traumatic.

#2: “Always trust your feelings,” or the notion that feeling upset by an idea is a reason to discount it.

#3: “Life is a battle between good people and evil people,” or homogenous tribal thinking that leads people to shame those whose views fall outside that of their group.

These “great untruths” denounce straw figures constructed from simplistic attacks that bear little resemblance to the actual concerns and tactics of activists.

Great Untruth #1: “What doesn’t kill you makes you weaker.”

The problem with this idea is that Haidt and Lukianoff are wrong. Most of the time, harmful things do make you weaker, which is why we try to avoid being harmed. Haidt and Lukianoff would certainly not apply their theories on this point to campus censorship. They don’t celebrate repression as a way to toughen up its targets and make them stronger. To the contrary, they understand that censorship and fear weaken their victims and universities, and that we need to oppose repression because it harms us all and makes us weaker.

The key in understanding harm is to distinguish between actions and ideas. Harmful actions (violence, threats, punishments, discrimination, censorship) need to be stopped because they endanger people and their rights. Harmful ideas are different. Harmful ideas shouldn’t be banned in the same way that harmful actions are. Harmful ideas even have the potential to be good if used and understood in the right way. But instead of making this key distinction, Haidt and Lukianoff spout their gym coach nonsense about how suffering makes you stronger.

Great Untruth #2: “Always trust your feelings.”

Attacking your opponents as “emotional” is a classic example of lazy argumentation.

Not only is it mostly inaccurate, but even when it is accurate, it’s irrelevant to any philosophical debate. And it’s hypocritical.

The book reveals that the origin of this project was Lukianoff’s struggles with depression, and how he found a cure in Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT). Obviously, if you believe that something may have saved your life, you have a deep emotional attachment to it and want to share it with others, as Haidt and Lukianoff do in the Appendix (“How to Do CBT”) and in their recommendations to train all students in CBT.

The fact the Haidt and Lukianoff denounce “emotional responses” in a book devoted to Lukianoff’s emotional response to CBT reveals this kind of hypocrisy, but it also shows how incorrect they are. Just because Lukianoff is emotional about CBT doesn’t mean he’s wrong. I’m emotional about censorship, but I’m still correct to favor free speech and logical in my arguments. Merely because some people get upset about racism doesn’t mean that their arguments can be dismissed as “emotional.” There is nothing more cringe-worthy than watching two white guys condescendingly tell women and minorities that they’re being “emotional” for criticizing racism and sexism.

Consider Haidt and Lukianoff’s deeply misguided attack on the concept of microaggressions. They accuse people who discuss microaggressions of being emotional and claim that activists “encouraged them to engage in emotional reasoning.”(40)

Haidt and Lukianoff assert that students are being told to “always trust your feelings.” Who, exactly, is telling them this? They quote no one in their book who makes an assertion like this. Instead, Haidt and Lukianoff merely criticize a 2007 article by Derald Wing Sue and colleagues who popularized the idea of microaggressions. Haidt and Lukianoff write, “Unfortunately, when Sue included ‘unintentional’ slights, and when he defined the slights entirely in terms of the listener’s interpretation, he encouraged people to make such misperceptions.”(40)

I can’t find anywhere in Sue’s article where it says that microaggressions are always defined “entirely in terms of the listener’s interpretation” and some parts of Sue’s article directly contradict that idea (“persons of color may be unable to determine whether a microaggression has occurred”). Even if Sue had made this claim, one article’s interpretation from 10 years ago about the meaning of microaggressions is far from definitive. There’s absolutely no evidence that anyone defines microaggressions entirely in terms of the listener’s subjective interpretation rather than an objective understanding of the evidence.

Bizarrely, Haidt and Lukianoff instead argue that microaggressions should be defined solely based on the offender’s emotional state. This is the flip side of “trust your feelings”: it’s trusting the feelings of people who commit microaggressions.  In other words, if you don’t personally feel like you’re being racist, then you can’t be racist, no matter how racist what you actually did is. This approach urged by Haidt and Lukianoff is purely emotional reasoning: You’re not being racist unless you feel racist, that is, you intend to be racist. This standard of trusting the offender’s feelings in every case is deeply misguided. After all, Donald Trump routinely will declare that he’s not sexist or racist despite a long litany of racist and sexist words and actions.

According to Haidt and Lukianoff, “the microaggression concept reveals a crucial moral change on campus: the shift from ‘intent’ to ‘impact.’”(43) One section of the book is titled “Microaggressions: The Triumph of Impact Over Intent.”(40) Imagining that “aggression” is always violence is deeply mistaken. Imagining that “aggression” can only happen if someone intends to be aggressive is contrary to all logic and evidence.

Haidt and Lukianoff claim, “If you bump into someone by accident and never meant them any harm, it is not an act of aggression, although the other person may misperceive it as one.”(40) That’s obviously wrong. Consider this example: a guy at a concert physically pushes his way through the crowd to get to the front. Is he being aggressive when he bumps into people? The answer should be easy: Yes. But Haidt and Lukianoff argue that the answer is subjective based on the emotions of the guy. If he intended to be aggressive, then it’s aggressive. But if he’s an oblivious asshole, then it’s not aggressive. And this same standard could apply to other topics. If a man harasses someone, then it can’t be harassment unless it was intended to be harassing. Their subjective “intent” standard relies on the emotions of the offender (“intent”) to be the sole determinant of what has happened. The notion that there is no such thing as unintentional racism or sexism strikes me as shockingly ignorant.

Haidt and Lukianoff argue, “Teaching students to use the least generous interpretations possible is likely to engender precisely the feelings of marginalization and oppression that almost everyone wants to eliminate.”(46) What nonsense. First of all, the notion that people who discuss microaggressions are using “the least generous interpretation possible” is obviously false. “Micro” is never the prefix used in the least generous interpretation possible. Second, the idea that talking about racism creates oppression has absolutely no evidence to support it, and Haidt and Lukianoff don’t bother to cite any evidence. This kind of concern trolling—we all want to end racism, so please stop talking about racism in order to avoid upsetting people and making them become racist—is ridiculous.

The problem with microaggressions is not that people have the wrong opinions about what is racist or not. People should be free to argue about what is racist and what’s not. The potential danger is that microaggressions might be punished by campus regulations, but that’s a theoretical problem of bad policies, not bad thinking by people who want to criticize bigotry. Haidt and Lukianoff offer no examples of any college policies that prohibit microaggressions.

Great Untruth #3: “Us versus them.”

Haidt and Lukianoff write, “The Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. epitomized what we’ll call common-humanity identity politics” because he “appealed to the shared morals and identities of Americans by using the unifying languages of religion and patriotism.”(60) They add, “There has never been a more dramatic demonstration of the horrors of common-enemy identity politics than Adolf Hitler’s use of Jews to unify and expand his Third Reich.”(63)

There is no better example of “good vs. evil” thinking than claiming that we have to choose King or Hitler as our models. And the notion that “religion and patriotism” help unify us by appealing to a common humanity is a laughable claim in the age of Trump. The fact is, everybody tends to invoke common enemies, including Haidt and Lukianoff.

Haidt and Lukianoff have a blind spot that’s common among people who denounce Manichean thinking. They ignore their own Manichean tendencies. The whole idea of FIRE is deeply Manichean: FIRE is the good, and the censors are evil. That’s a story FIRE tells over and over again. And it’s a true story. They urge “taking a generous view of other people”(14) which is odd considering how thoroughly they denounce people who invoke concepts like microaggressions. For example, Haidt denounces the president of LSU for once saying something as innocuous as, “we’ll keep you safe here.”(199) But there’s nothing wrong with physical safety, and no reason to believe that this president was promising psychological safety by banishing any ideas that students might find offensive.

By psychologizing the problem of censorship, Haidt and Lukianoff lead us down a delusional path. They imagine that if only we could persuade people to talk about our common humanity, rather than our common enemies, we would eliminate the motivation to censor. But that’s an impossible task, and the only way to achieve it would be by massive repression of those who talk about common enemies.

The problem is not that some people have bad ideas. The problem is when institutions use censorship to try to suppress bad ideas. When you decide to target bad thinking rather than censorship, as Haidt and Lukianoff do in this book, you’re actually contributing to the problem. Many readers may respond to Haidt and Lukianoff’s book, as many conservatives have responded to the PC wars on campus, by concluding that we don’t need to get rid of campus censorship, we just need to start censoring the bad ideas. If common-enemy identity politics is the ultimate source of evil on campus, why shouldn’t we strive to eliminate it by firing the professors who are spreading these terrible ideas like a plague?

Haidt and Lukianoff seek to medicalize the campus free speech problem and offer their preferred mental health approach of CBT as the solution. If only we could cure these poor unfortunate young’uns and their sick thoughts, they think, the campus free speech problem would be solved. The entire history of higher education begs to differ with them. If we had censorship before safetyism (and we obviously did), that suggests safetyism isn’t the core cause of repression on campus. Every generation brings a few new excuses for censorship. But these generational differences are of little importance. Even if you could banish safetyism from the world, people would gravitate to another reason for silencing views they don’t like.