Book Review - The Coddling of The American Mind - Wall Street Journal

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‘The Coddling of the American Mind’ Review: Fragile, Fearful, Feeling Aggrieved
Thanks to well-meaning, if misguided, parents and educators, students can’t see nuance, and they don’t feel tough enough to handle debate.

Review by Laura Vanderkam - the author, most recently, of “Off the Clock: Feel Less Busy While Getting More Done.”

Sept. 9, 2018


For most of the past few decades, college students have been proponents of free speech, despite occasional bouts of protest and indignation. But something changed about five years ago. Students began demanding “trigger warnings” for certain material in their classes. Some demanded that anything “triggering” be removed entirely from the curriculum so that no one might feel traumatized. They lobbied for “safe spaces” where they could avoid being exposed to uncomfortable ideas. Members of what psychologist Jean Twenge calls “iGen” (born after 1995) moved from challenging controversial speakers to hounding even very liberal members of their own communities who wrote or said something that was deemed offensive.

“What is new today is the premise that students are fragile,” write Greg Lukianoff and Jonathan Haidt in “The Coddling of the American Mind.” “Even those who are not fragile themselves often believe that others are in danger and therefore need protection.” The debate narrows as everyone censors others as well as themselves.

Mr. Lukianoff (president of the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education) and Mr. Haidt (a professor at NYU’s Stern School of Business) argue that this new vulnerability is a result of the ways in which the first social-media generation has been raised. Well-meaning parents and educators have inculcated in young people three bad ideas, what the authors call “the Great Untruths”: that what doesn’t kill you makes you weaker; that you should always trust your feelings; and that life is a battle between good and evil people. Students can’t see nuance, and they don’t feel tough enough to handle debate.

Tales of political correctness run amok—indeed, many of the incidents recounted in “The Coddling of the American Mind”—are nothing new to anyone who has been paying even fitful attention to college trends. Messrs. Lukianoff and Haidt differ from many other critics of campus excess in that they do not think of themselves as conservative or even right of center. “Neither of us has ever voted for a Republican for Congress or the presidency,” they write.

Despite the “coddling” angle of the title, Messrs. Lukianoff and Haidt try not to fall into the trap of claiming that modern young people are uniquely lazy or whiny. In any case, they write, “by the standards of our great-grandparents, nearly all of us are coddled.” What is more, members of iGen have been better at avoiding arrest or pregnancy during their teenage years, and better at graduating from high school, than recent generations born before 1995. They are, in short, not without inner resources.

Still, there is a problem. The authors write with concern about the rise of anxiety and depression among young people, whose teenage foibles can be broadcast widely in the era of social media and who have not—at least among the privileged sorts who show up at elite colleges—experienced the unsupervised, risk-taking play that teaches emotional regulation and social problem solving. Messrs. Lukianoff and Haidt understand why young people want to feel mentally safe on college campuses. “If members of iGen have been risk-deprived and are therefore more risk averse,” they write, “then it is likely that they have a lower bar for what they see as daunting or threatening.”

That said, the authors also think it’s a terrible idea for the adults who run colleges to cater to this need. They believe that such coddling especially hurts young people already prone to anxiety. They note that one of the most effective treatments for anxiety is cognitive behavioral therapy, which teaches people to overrule their immediate emotions and see themselves as tough enough to survive life’s slings and arrows. They also believe that coddling hurts the cause of social justice that is so dear to students themselves. Few arguments are sharpened through groupthink; most are improved by facing skepticism or different points of view. “A community in which members hold one another accountable for using evidence to substantiate their assertions is a community that can, collectively, pursue truth in the age of outrage.”

Given such a clear diagnosis, it is unfortunate that many of the proposed solutions in “The Coddling of the American Mind” are less than satisfying. The authors pinpoint, as one cause of hollow debate, the changing ratio of conservative to liberal faculty over the decades (from 1-in-3 or so in the mid-20th century to much lower in some fields now). But colleges are unlikely to start a conservative-hiring program, even if they add “viewpoint diversity” to the normal diversity statements, as the authors suggest. Nor will anyone champion a campaign to “discourage the creep of the word ‘unsafe’ to encompass ‘uncomfortable.’ ” Students paying upwards of $50,000 per year for college probably feel entitled to seek comfort even if it isn’t especially good for them. The admonition to parents of future college students to “encourage your children to walk or ride bicycles to and from school” (to gain a sense of independence) is nice but probably insufficient on its own. No doubt there are walkers and bike riders among irate students demanding trigger warnings.

The authors’ most compelling idea is that elite colleges show a preference for students who are mature enough to engage with the world as it is rather than demanding a world of safe spaces. Nothing would encourage teens to work or do full-time community service for a few years—or serve in the military—like Harvard declaring a desire to fill its freshman classes with people who have done such things.

Until then, unfortunately, the emphasis on safety will continue, and people on all sides will be poorer for missing the great debates that make higher education worthwhile.