By Greg Lukianoff & Jon Haidt
Something has changed on the campus of the American university. Students, particularly those of IGen (born after 1995), are more fragile (while safer than ever before), less given to critical thinking (and more driven by emotions), and more entrenched in an “Us versus Them” mindset (We’re right. You’re wrong). This book addresses what happened and what we can do about it.
The book in a sentence (or two):
“This is a book about wisdom and its opposite." So the authors begin and end The Coddling of the American Mind: How Good Intentions and Bad Ideas Are Setting Up a Generation For Failure. Greg Lukianoff and Jon Haidt are going to take us on a deep dive that explores the changing landscape of America and the American University. "Labeling," the “call out” culture, “microaggressions,” the rising need for “safe space,” the loss of free speech, discomfort mislabeled as “trauma,” “social justice” misdirected toward equal outcomes rather than equality in distributed and procedural fairness, and “identity politics” that make for common enemies rather than true dialogue. Their goal? Wiser kids. Wiser universities. A wiser society.
About the authors:
Greg Lukianoff (Stanford Law), is an expert on matters of free speech and First Amendment issues in higher education. He serves as the president and CEO of the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (FIRE). Jonathan Haidt (Ph.D. University of Pennsylvania) is the Thomas Cooley Professor Ethical Leadership at New York University’s Stern School of Business. Both are self-described liberals. They lean left. Neither has ever voted for a Republican for Congress or the presidency. Their worldview is evolutionary. And they bring –in my opinion– some necessary critique to good intentions run amok in American higher education.
My take on The Coddling of the American Mind:
Lukianoff and Haidt published The Coddling of the American Mind in 2018. I think the need for it is greater than when they wrote it. Like former CNN anchor Van Jones (see video below), Lukianoff and Haidt refuse their liberal counterparts “a pass” when ideological issues violate free speech, when personal autonomy becomes the measure of “right and wrong,” and when group think replaces true dialogue. For the record, the authors pull no punches when it comes to the left and right.
Overview:
In Part I the book examines “three great untruths”:
1. The Untruth of Fragility: What doesn't kill you makes you weaker.
2. The Untruth of Emotional Reasoning: Always trust your feelings.
3. The Untruth of Us Versus Them: Life is a battle between good people and evil people.
The authors demonstrate how these “great untruths” contradict ancient wisdom (ideas found widely in the wisdom literature of many cultures), contradict modern psychological research on well-being, and harm the individuals and communities who embrace them (4).
If the authors have a bent, it is toward Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT). CBT encourages one to push back on cognitive distortions, e.g., catastrophizing– if I do this the world/my world will come to an end; mind reading– assuming one knows what the other is thinking; over generalizing– perceiving a global pattern on the basis of a single event; and negative filtering– prioritizing negative feedback. The authors note that Greg has suffered from bouts of depression throughout his life and has benefited greatly from CBT.
Part II explores multiple accounts of “bad ideas in action.” The authors survey the growing accounts of intimidation and violence and examine modern-day witch hunts on campuses across America. They also explore the “whys” behind this rising phenomenon.
Why are things changing so rapidly? The authors provide their thoughts in Part III:
1. Rising political polarization and cross-party animosity
2. Rising levels of teen anxiety and depression
3. Changes in parenting that exasperate fears
4. The loss of free play and unsupervised risk-taking
5. Growth of campus bureaucracy
6. Increasing passion for (social) justice and what that requires
In Part IV, Lukianoff and Haidt offer suggestions for improving child rearing, K-12 education, and the university. As with the rest of their book, the work is practical and thorough. You can see portions of this summary in My Takeaways below.
Two excerpts worth noting:
The Coddling of the American Mind is so worth the effort. The day I started this book, my reading included Proverbs 23:12, “Apply your heart to instruction and your ears to words of knowledge.” Lukianoff and Haidt provide a generous helping of that.
From "The Untruth of Emotional Reasoning"
Chapter 2, "The Untruth of Emotional Reasoning" connected with me, particularly as it related to microaggressions. I never heard this term in college but find it commonplace today. Citing Derald Wang Sue, microaggressions are "brief and commonplace daily verbal, behavioral, or environmental indignities, whether intentional or unintentional, that communicate hostile, derogatory, or negative racial slights and insults toward people of color" (40).
I appreciate the charity and clarity the authors brought to this subject. "Aggression is not unintentional or accidental" (40). Rather than assuming the worst, would we be better off, the authors ask, if a more charitable interpretation might be warranted by the facts?
The potential for offense taking is almost unlimited. How should you prepare the students to engage with one another in the most productive and beneficial way? Would you give them a day of microaggression training and encourage them to report micro aggressions whenever they see them? To go along with that training, would you set up a bias response team – a group of administrators charged with investigating reports of bias, including microaggressions? Or would you rather give all students advice on how to be polite and avoid giving accidental or thoughtless offense in a diverse community, along with a day of training in giving one another the benefit of the doubt and interpreting everyone's actions in ways that elicit the least amount of emotional reactivity?" (43).
From "The Untruth of Us Versus Them"
As to the staggering growing chasm between right and left (see data on pages 128ff), Lukianoff and Haidt offer this summary: "Common-enemy identity politics, when combined with microaggression theory, produces a call-out culture in which almost anything one says or does could result in a public shaming. This can engender a sense of 'walking on eggshells,' and it teaches students habits of self-censorship. Call-out cultures are detrimental to students' education and bad for their mental health" (77). This focus was also helpful in their conclusion when the authors suggested differentiating between "common-humanity identity politics" and "common-enemy identity politics."
Amen to that!
My takeaways from their conclusions: Here are a few of their conclusions that resonate:
1. Prepare the child for the road, not the road for the child.
2. Your worst enemy cannot harm you as much as your own thoughts, unguarded.
3. The line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being (See Jeremiah 17:9).
4. Discourage the use of the word "safe" or "safety" for anything other than physical safety.
5. Help students distinguish between a critique of ideas and a personal attack.
6. Minimize screen time for all, especially teens (average is 9 hours per day; 2 is better).
7. Including Viewpoint Diversity. This is really a safeguard to "political uniformity and [political] orthodoxy" (258).
8. Discourage the creep of the word "unsafe" to encompass "uncomfortable." Differentiate between physical safety and psychological safety. I encourage you to watch this video of former CNN Anchor Van Jones.
Explicitly reject the untruth of fragility: What doesn't kill you makes you weaker. A university devoted to the pursuit of truth must prepare its students for conflict, controversy, and argument. Many students will experience their most cherished beliefs being challenged, and they must learn that this is not harassment or personal attack; it is part of the process by which people do each other the favor of counteracting each other's confirmation bias. Students must also learn to make well-reasoned arguments while avoiding ad hominem arguments, which criticize people rather than ideas (258-9).
9. Teach productive disagreement (from Adam Grant, 240)
* Frame it as a debate, rather than a conflict.
* Argue as if you're right but listen as if you're wrong (and be willing to change your mind).
* Make the most respectful interpretation of the other person's perspective.
* Acknowledge where you agree with your critics and what you've learned from them.
10. "Concerted cultivation"- "This time-intensive, labor-intensive strategy involves overprotecting, overscheduling, and overparenting children in hopes of giving them an edge in a competitive society that has forgotten the importance of play and the value of unsupervised experience" (236).
Quotes worth quoting:
1. Education: "Education should not be intended to make people comfortable; it is meant to make them think." Hanna Holborn Gray, President of the University of Chicago, 1978-1993
2. Us Versus Them: Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn: "If only ['Us Versus Them'] were so simple! If only there were evil people somewhere insidiously committing evil deeds, and it were necessary only separate them from the rest of us and destroy them. But the line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being" (243).
3. Collision avoidance: One's voice grows stronger in encounters with opposing views... The collision of views and ideologies is in the DNA of the academic enterprise. We do not need any collision avoidance technology here." Ruth Simmons, former President of Brown University and the first black president of an Ivy League university.
4. Our best days are in the past: We cannot absolutely prove that those are in error who tell us that society has reached a turning point, that we have seen our best days. But so said all who came before us, and with just as much apparent reason... On what principle is it that, where we see nothing but improvement behind us, we are to expect nothing but deterioration before us?" Thomas Babintong Macauly, British historian and member of Parliament in 1830.
5. Wisdom and virtue: Nothing is of more importance to the public weal, than to form and train up youth in wisdom and virtue. Wise and good men are, in my opinion, the strength of a state: more so than riches or arms, which, under the management of Ignorance and Wickedness, often draw on destruction, instead of providing for the safety of a people." Benjamin Franklin to Samuel Johnson, 1750.
6. On raising children: Prepare the child for the road, not the road for the child. Folk Wisdom
The authors piqued my curiosity about this book:
I had not read John Stuart Mill's, On Liberty. It's on order!
Conclusion:
Thank you Lukianoff and Haidt! Your research is solid. You treated the “violations” of both the right and the left. You offered critique, rationale, and perhaps most importantly, suggestions for moving forward. Read the Coddling of the American Mind: How Good Intentions and Bad Ideas Are Setting Up a Generation for Failure. If you are in higher ed, use it as a tool to initiate dialogue, the kind that moves us to help build wiser kids, universities, and societies.
