In recent years behaviours on university campuses have created widespread unease. Safe spaces, trigger warnings, and speech codes. Demands for speakers to be disinvited. Words construed as violence and liberalism described as ‘white supremacy’. Students walking on eggshells, too scared to speak their minds. Controversial speakers violently rebuked – from conservative provocateurs such as Milo Yiannopoulos to serious sociologists such as Charles Murray, to left-leaning academics such as Bret Weinstein.
Historically, campus censorship was enacted by zealous university administrators. Students were radicals who pushed the boundaries of acceptability, like during the Free Speech Movement at UC Berkeley in the 1960s. Today, however, students work in tandem with administrators to make their campus ‘safe’ from threatening ideas.
Jonathan Haidt and Greg Lukianoff’s new book, The Coddling of the American Mind: How Good Intentions and Bad Ideas Are Setting Up a Generation for Failure, persuasively unpacks the causes of the current predicament on campus – which they link to wider parenting, cultural and political trends. Haidt is a social psychology professor at New York University and founder of Heterodox Academy. Lukianoff is a constitutional lawyer and president of the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education. In 2015, they wrote The Atlantic cover story of the same name.
Haidt and Lukianoff’s explanation for our era of campus craziness is primarily psychological. In sum, a well-intentioned safety culture which has led to ‘paranoid parenting,’ and screen time replacing unstructured and unsupervised play time, has created a fragile generation. Haidt and Lukianoff focus on people born after 1995, iGen or Generation Z, who began attending college in the last five years – just when things started to escalate.
This cohort is experiencing a dramatic rise in anxiety, depression and suicide. When they arrived on campus, in an increasingly polarised political climate, they were unprepared to be intellectually challenged. They – or at least the ‘social justice’ activists of this generation – responded by creating a culture of censorship, intimidation and violence, and witch hunts against non-believers. Universities, led by risk adverse bureaucracies, are treating students like customers and allowing an aggressive, censorious minority set the agenda.
The dangers of safety culture
Haidt and Lukianoff focus on the unintended consequences of safetyism – the idea that people are weak and should be protected, rather than exposed, to challenges. Safety culture has the best of intentions: protect kids from danger. It began with a focus on physical safety – removing sharp objects and choke hazards, requiring child seats, and not letting children walk home alone. Safety, however, has experienced substantial concept creep. It now includes emotional safety, that is, not being exposed ideas that could cause psychological distress. Taken together, the focus on physical and mental safety makes young people weaker.
Humans are what author and statistician Nassim Nicholas Taleb calls ‘antifragile’. We ‘benefit from shocks; [humans] thrive and grow when exposed to volatility, randomness, disorder, and stressors and love adventure, risk, and uncertainty’. Peanuts are a case in point of needing to be exposed to danger to build resilience. From the 1990s, parents were encouraged to not feed children peanuts, and childcare centres, kindergartens and schools banned peanuts. This moratorium has backfired. The LEAP study (Learning Early About Peanut Allergy) found that not eating peanut-containing products during infancy increases allergies. The researchers recruited 640 infants with a high risk of developing peanut allergy. Half were given a peanut-containing product. The other half avoided peanuts. The study found that 17 per cent of those who did not consume peanuts developed an allergy by age 5, compared to just 3 per cent of those who did consume the peanut-containing snack. Our immune system grows stronger when exposed to a range of foods, bacteria, and even parasites.
Antifragility applies to emotional health as well. When you guard children against every possible risk – do not let them outside to play or walk home alone – they exaggerate the fear of such situations and fail to develop resilience and coping skills. Stresses are necessary to learn, adapt and grow. Without movement, our muscles and joints grow weak. Without varied life experiences, our minds do not know how to cope with day-to-day stressors. Measures designed to protect children and students are backfiring. Fragility is a self-fulfilling prophecy. If you think certain ideas are dangerous, or are encouraged to do so by trigger warnings and safe spaces, you will be more anxious in the long run. Intellectual safety not only makes free and open debate impossible, it setting up a generation for more anxiety and depression. (...)
Feelings over debate
There is a link between rising mental health issues, safety culture and campus trends. It is notable how often students put censorious demands in the language of feeling safe. Students demand trigger warnings because ideas are emotionally challenging, safe spaces to hide away from scary situations, and the disinvitation of controversial speakers to feel safe on campus. While it is important to show courtesy in public debate, it is patently absurd to suggest that simply hearing an idea you dislike makes you unsafe in any meaningful way. As the old saying goes, ‘sticks and stones may break my bones, but words will never hurt me’. In fact, the opposite is true, post-traumatic growth is a real phenomenon: difficult situations do make us stronger. (...)
Safety culture undermines the entire purpose of a higher education. Universities exist to challenge students, to expand their worldview and develop their critical thinking. This is done by hearing and responding to ideas that make us feel uncomfortable. Efforts to censor speakers because they make some people feel ‘unsafe’ prevents the necessary process of argument and counter-argument in the pursuit of finding the truth.
Debate on campus is already undermined by the lack of viewpoint diversity – most academics come from a similar political pedigree, meaning students have fewer opportunities to be challenged in the first place. A lack of exposure to different ideas means a much more limited and weaker education. As British philosopher John Stuart Mill wrote, ‘He who knows only his own side of the case knows little of that.’ In other words, to make an argument thoughtfully, it is necessary to understand the counterfactual of one’s own argument.
Historically, campus censorship was enacted by zealous university administrators. Students were radicals who pushed the boundaries of acceptability, like during the Free Speech Movement at UC Berkeley in the 1960s. Today, however, students work in tandem with administrators to make their campus ‘safe’ from threatening ideas.Jonathan Haidt and Greg Lukianoff’s new book, The Coddling of the American Mind: How Good Intentions and Bad Ideas Are Setting Up a Generation for Failure, persuasively unpacks the causes of the current predicament on campus – which they link to wider parenting, cultural and political trends. Haidt is a social psychology professor at New York University and founder of Heterodox Academy. Lukianoff is a constitutional lawyer and president of the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education. In 2015, they wrote The Atlantic cover story of the same name.
Haidt and Lukianoff’s explanation for our era of campus craziness is primarily psychological. In sum, a well-intentioned safety culture which has led to ‘paranoid parenting,’ and screen time replacing unstructured and unsupervised play time, has created a fragile generation. Haidt and Lukianoff focus on people born after 1995, iGen or Generation Z, who began attending college in the last five years – just when things started to escalate.
This cohort is experiencing a dramatic rise in anxiety, depression and suicide. When they arrived on campus, in an increasingly polarised political climate, they were unprepared to be intellectually challenged. They – or at least the ‘social justice’ activists of this generation – responded by creating a culture of censorship, intimidation and violence, and witch hunts against non-believers. Universities, led by risk adverse bureaucracies, are treating students like customers and allowing an aggressive, censorious minority set the agenda.
The dangers of safety culture
Haidt and Lukianoff focus on the unintended consequences of safetyism – the idea that people are weak and should be protected, rather than exposed, to challenges. Safety culture has the best of intentions: protect kids from danger. It began with a focus on physical safety – removing sharp objects and choke hazards, requiring child seats, and not letting children walk home alone. Safety, however, has experienced substantial concept creep. It now includes emotional safety, that is, not being exposed ideas that could cause psychological distress. Taken together, the focus on physical and mental safety makes young people weaker.
Humans are what author and statistician Nassim Nicholas Taleb calls ‘antifragile’. We ‘benefit from shocks; [humans] thrive and grow when exposed to volatility, randomness, disorder, and stressors and love adventure, risk, and uncertainty’. Peanuts are a case in point of needing to be exposed to danger to build resilience. From the 1990s, parents were encouraged to not feed children peanuts, and childcare centres, kindergartens and schools banned peanuts. This moratorium has backfired. The LEAP study (Learning Early About Peanut Allergy) found that not eating peanut-containing products during infancy increases allergies. The researchers recruited 640 infants with a high risk of developing peanut allergy. Half were given a peanut-containing product. The other half avoided peanuts. The study found that 17 per cent of those who did not consume peanuts developed an allergy by age 5, compared to just 3 per cent of those who did consume the peanut-containing snack. Our immune system grows stronger when exposed to a range of foods, bacteria, and even parasites.
Antifragility applies to emotional health as well. When you guard children against every possible risk – do not let them outside to play or walk home alone – they exaggerate the fear of such situations and fail to develop resilience and coping skills. Stresses are necessary to learn, adapt and grow. Without movement, our muscles and joints grow weak. Without varied life experiences, our minds do not know how to cope with day-to-day stressors. Measures designed to protect children and students are backfiring. Fragility is a self-fulfilling prophecy. If you think certain ideas are dangerous, or are encouraged to do so by trigger warnings and safe spaces, you will be more anxious in the long run. Intellectual safety not only makes free and open debate impossible, it setting up a generation for more anxiety and depression. (...)
Feelings over debate
There is a link between rising mental health issues, safety culture and campus trends. It is notable how often students put censorious demands in the language of feeling safe. Students demand trigger warnings because ideas are emotionally challenging, safe spaces to hide away from scary situations, and the disinvitation of controversial speakers to feel safe on campus. While it is important to show courtesy in public debate, it is patently absurd to suggest that simply hearing an idea you dislike makes you unsafe in any meaningful way. As the old saying goes, ‘sticks and stones may break my bones, but words will never hurt me’. In fact, the opposite is true, post-traumatic growth is a real phenomenon: difficult situations do make us stronger. (...)
Safety culture undermines the entire purpose of a higher education. Universities exist to challenge students, to expand their worldview and develop their critical thinking. This is done by hearing and responding to ideas that make us feel uncomfortable. Efforts to censor speakers because they make some people feel ‘unsafe’ prevents the necessary process of argument and counter-argument in the pursuit of finding the truth.
Debate on campus is already undermined by the lack of viewpoint diversity – most academics come from a similar political pedigree, meaning students have fewer opportunities to be challenged in the first place. A lack of exposure to different ideas means a much more limited and weaker education. As British philosopher John Stuart Mill wrote, ‘He who knows only his own side of the case knows little of that.’ In other words, to make an argument thoughtfully, it is necessary to understand the counterfactual of one’s own argument.
by Matthew Lesh, Quillette | Read more:
Image: uncredited
