The Coddling of the American Mind

by Greg Lukianoff

  Establish a practice of not responding to public outrage. Strong and clear policies on free speech and academic freedom are useless if the people at the top aren’t willing to stand by them when the going gets tough and the leadership faces a pressure campaign—whether from on or off campus. A university will find it easier to stand by these principles if the president publicly commits to them at the start of each year, before any controversies break out. Of course, if a student or faculty member’s speech or behavior, whether online, in class, or in other campus settings, includes true threats, harassment, incitement to imminent lawless action, or any other kind of speech that is not protected by the First Amendment, the university should act. But even in these cases, university presidents should not act rashly; they should follow their own written policies and disciplinary procedures, which should be designed to ensure that any accused faculty member or student gets a fair hearing. The more reactive universities are to public outrage or illiberal demands for censorship and punishment, the more outrage and illiberal demands they will receive. In an age when outrage can be swift and intense but has a short half-life, universities should allow time for tempers to cool. This is particularly important for protecting junior and adjunct faculty, who can be fired far more easily than tenured faculty.

  Do not allow the “heckler’s veto.” University presidents must make it clear that nobody has the right to prevent a fellow member of the community from attending or hearing a lecture. Protest that does not interfere with others’ freedom of expression is protected speech and is a legitimate form of productive disagreement. Boisterous protests that briefly interfere with the rights of other audience members may even be allowed. But if the sum total of protesters’ actions substantially interferes with the ability of audience members to listen, or the speaker to speak, then those who are responsible for the interference must face some punishment. Prospective students should avoid attending colleges that allow hecklers to disrupt events with no penalty.10

  2. Pick the Best Mix of People for the Mission

  Admit more students who are older and can show evidence of their ability to live independently. As we said in the previous chapter, adulthood is arriving later and later, and this trend has been going on for decades.11 We believe there would be many benefits to students, to universities, and to the nation if a new national norm emerged of taking a gap year, or a year of national service, or a few years of military service, before attending college. Prestigious universities have enormous power to promote that new norm by announcing that they will give preference to students who take time off in ways that prepare them for independence. If universities stop admitting so many students whose childhoods were devoted to test prep and resume building and start admitting more students who can demonstrate a measure of autonomy, the culture on campus is likely to improve dramatically.

  Admit more students who have attended schools that teach the “intellectual virtues.” If prestigious universities draw heavily from schools that emphasize intellectual virtues, like the one we described in the previous chapter, and that give students practice in debate, then many more K–12 schools will adopt this approach. The next generation of college students will be better prepared to engage with challenging ideas and diverse fellow students.

  Include viewpoint diversity in diversity policies. Diversity confers benefits on a community in large part because it brings together people who approach questions from different points of view. In recent decades, as we noted in chapter 5, the professoriate and the student body have become more diverse by race, gender, and other characteristics but less diverse in terms of political perspectives. We suggest that universities add “viewpoint diversity” to their diversity statements and strategies. This does not require equal or proportional representation of political views among the faculty or students, and it does not require that all viewpoints be represented, but it does commit the university to avoiding political uniformity and orthodoxy. 12

  3. Orient and Educate for Productive Disagreement

  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 a 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. In summer reading suggestions and in orientation materials for new students, universities should clearly embrace the message of Ruth Simmons, former president of Brown University and the first black president of an Ivy League university: “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.”13 Explain that classrooms and public lectures at your university are not intellectual “safe spaces.” (Of course, students have a right to freedom of association, and they are free to join and create those elsewhere, on their own time.14) Discourage the creep of the word “unsafe” to encompass “uncomfortable.” Show students the short video clip we described in chapter 4 of Van Jones urging them to forswear emotional “safety” and instead treat college as “the gym.”15

  Explicitly reject the Untruth of Emotional Reasoning: Always trust your feelings. In orientations, colleges should emphasize the power of the confirmation bias and the prevalence of cognitive distortions. It is challenging to think well; we are easily led astray by feelings and by group loyalties. In the age of social media, cyber trolls, and fake news, it is a national and global crisis that people so readily follow their feelings to embrace outlandish stories about their enemies. 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. Emphasize the importance of critical thinking, and then give students the tools to engage in better critical thinking. One such tool is CBT. It is relatively easy to train students in CBT directly, or to offer free access to websites and apps that they can use on their own. (See Appendix 1.) Another tool is the OpenMind program, which equips students with the skills to navigate difficult conversations (see OpenMindPlatform.org).

  Explicitly reject the Untruth of Us Versus Them: Life is a battle between good people and evil people. Look closely at how identity politics is introduced to first-year students, especially in summer readings and orientation materials. Draw on readings that take a non-moralistic, systems-level approach to understanding social problems. Given the diversity of the incoming class, including international students, it is a good idea to talk about the many ways that students may unwittingly offend or exclude one another, especially in this technologically supercharged age. Encourage politeness and empathy without framing issues as micro-aggressions. Try instead to use a more charitable frame, such as members of a family giving one another the benefit of the doubt; when problems arise, they try to resolve things privately and informally.

  4. Draw a Larger Circle Around the Community

  Throughout this book, we have emphasized a basic principle of social psychology: the more you separate people and point out differences among them, the more divided and less trusting they will become.16 Conversely, the more you emphasize common goals or interests, shared fate, and common humanity, the more they will see one another as fellow human beings, treat one another well, and come to appreciate one another’s contributions to the community. Pauli Murray expressed the power of this principle when she wrote, “When my brothers try to draw a circle to exclude me, I shall draw a larger circle to include them.”17 Students, professors, and administrators can all play an important role in widening that circle.

  Foster scho
ol spirit. Some colleges work hard, in the opening weeks, to foster “school spirit” and forge a common identity. School spirit may sound trivial, but it can create a community of greater trust within which harder issues can be tackled later on.

  Protect physical safety. We have argued throughout this book that emotional comfort should not be confused with physical safety. But as we showed in chapter 6, we live in a time when extremists increasingly use the internet and social media to threaten and harass students and professors, particularly those who are members of historically marginalized groups. Sometimes the threats leave the internet and come to campus. Universities must pay for adequate security; they must respond vigorously and work with campus police, local police, the FBI, and other authorities to investigate and punish threats and acts of violence, and they must do so consistently. Given frequent reports from students of color across the country regarding how they are sometimes treated by campus and local police, it is essential that police take extra care not to treat them like potential criminals. It is vital that students from all backgrounds are safe from physical attacks and know that their campus police are there to protect them.

  Host civil, cross-partisan events for students. When a campus group invites speakers not for the quality of their ideas but for their ability to shock, offend, and provoke an overreaction, it exacerbates the mutual-outrage process we described in chapter 6. There are many organizations that can help bring interesting and ideologically diverse speakers to campus who can demonstrate the value of exposure to political diversity. If you are a student, try to enlist your school’s College Republicans and College Democrats to cohost events. Whether or not you succeed, consider starting a chapter of BridgeUSA, a student-run network that hosts constructive political discussions.18

  IDENTIFYING A WISE UNIVERSITY

  Five questions alumni, parents, college counselors, and prospective students should ask universities:

  What steps do you take (if any) to teach incoming students about academic freedom and free inquiry before they take their first classes?

  How would you handle a demand that a professor be fired because of an opinion he or she expressed in an article or interview, which other people found deeply offensive?

  What would your institution do if a controversial speaker were scheduled to speak, and large protests that included credible threats of violence were planned?

  How is your institution responding to the increase in students who suffer from anxiety and depression?

  What does your university do to foster a sense of shared identity?

  Look for answers that indicate that the institution has a high tolerance for vigorous disagreement but no tolerance for violence or intimidation. Look for answers that indicate a presumption that students are antifragile, combined with the recognition that many students today need support as they work toward emotional growth. Look for answers that indicate that the institution tries to draw an encompassing circle around its members, within which differences can more productively be explored.

  Many U.S. universities are having difficulties these days, but we believe the problems we discussed in this book are fixable. Combined with the changes we suggested in the previous chapter, the changes in this chapter can strengthen a university’s ability to pursue the telos of truth. A school that makes freedom of inquiry an essential part of its identity, selects students who show special promise as seekers of truth, orients and prepares those students for productive disagreement, and then draws a larger circle around the whole community within which everyone knows that they are physically safe and that they belong—such a school would be inspiring to join, a joy to attend, and a blessing to society.

  CONCLUSION

  Wiser Societies

  This is a book about wisdom and its opposite. It is a book about three psychological principles and about what happens to young people when parents and educators—acting with the best of intentions—implement policies that are inconsistent with those principles. We can summarize the entire book by contrasting the three opening quotations and the three Great Untruths.

  PSYCHOLOGICAL PRINCIPLE

  WISDOM

  GREAT UNTRUTH

  Young people are antifragile.

  Prepare the child for the road, not the road for the child.

  What doesn’t kill you makes you weaker.

  We are all prone to emotional reasoning and the confirmation bias.

  Your worst enemy cannot harm you as much as your own thoughts, unguarded. But once mastered, no one can help you as much, not even your father or your mother.

  Always trust your feelings.

  We are all prone to dichotomous thinking and tribalism.

  The line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being.

  Life is a battle between good people and evil people.

  In Part I, we explained the three psychological principles and showed how some recent practices and policies on many campuses encourage students to embrace unwisdom rather than wisdom. In Part II, we showed what happens when students embrace all three untruths, within an institution that has low levels of viewpoint diversity, weak leadership, and a high sense of threat (caused in part by a real escalation of political polarization and provocations from off campus). In Part III, we showed that there is no simple explanation for what is happening. You have to look at six interacting trends: rising political polarization; rising rates of adolescent depression and anxiety; a shift to more fearful, protective, and intensive parenting in middle-class and wealthy families; widespread play deprivation and risk deprivation for members of iGen; an expanding campus bureaucracy taking an increasingly overprotective posture; and a rising passion for justice combined with a growing commitment to attaining “equal outcomes” in all areas. In Part IV, we offered suggestions based on the three psychological principles for improving childrearing, K–12 education, and universities.

  We discussed some alarming trends in this book, particularly in the chapters on America’s rising political polarization and rising rates of adolescent depression, anxiety, and suicide. These problems are serious, and we see no sign that either trend will be reversing in the next decade. And yet we are heartened and persuaded by cognitive psychologist Steven Pinker’s argument, in Enlightenment Now, that in the long run most things are getting better, quickly and globally. Pinker notes that there are many psychological reasons why people are—and have always been—prone to catastrophizing about the future. For example, some of the problems we discuss in this book are examples of the “problems of progress” that we described in the Introduction. As we make progress in such areas as safety, comfort, and inclusion, we raise our expectations. The progress is real, but as we adapt to our improved conditions, we often fail to notice it.

  We certainly don’t want to fall prey to catastrophizing, so we should look for contrary evidence and contrary ways to appraise our present circumstances. Here’s a powerful antidote to pessimism—a quote that was first brought to our attention by science writer Matt Ridley in his 2010 book, The Rational Optimist:

  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, when we see nothing but improvement behind us, we are to expect nothing but deterioration before us?1

  Those words were written in 1830 by Thomas Babington Macaulay, a British historian and member of Parliament. Britain’s best days were certainly not behind it.

  Pinker and Ridley both base their optimism in part on a simple
observation: The more serious a problem gets, the more inducements there are for people, companies, and governments to find innovative solutions, whether driven by personal commitment, market forces, or political pressures.

  How might things change? Let us sketch out one possible vision, drawing on some “green shoots” that we already see. These are countertrends that may already be under way today, as this book goes to press in May 2018.

  1. Social media. Social media is a major part of the problem, implicated both in rising rates of mental illness and in rising political polarization. But after two years of scandals, public outrage, and calls for government regulation, the major companies are finally responding; they are at least tweaking algorithms, verifying some identities, and taking steps to reduce harassment. In the wake of the Cambridge Analytica fiasco, there is likely to be far more pressure applied by governments. Parents, schools, and students will respond, too, gradually adopting better practices, just as we adapted (imperfectly) to life surrounded by junk food and cigarettes.

  Green shoots: Facebook2 and Twitter are both hiring social psychologists and putting out calls for research on how their platforms can change to “increase the collective health, openness, and civility of public conversation.”3 We hope to see some substantial changes in the next few years that will reduce the polarizing, depression-inducing, and harassment-supporting effects of social media. A partnership between Common Sense Media and the Center for Humane Technology (founded by a coalition of early employees at Facebook and Google) is working with the tech industry to lessen the negative effects of device use, especially for children. Their campaign, The Truth About Tech, informs students, parents, and teachers about the health effects of various technologies, and aims to reform the industry so that tech products are healthier for users.4