I read a book: Let's discuss The Coddling of the American Mind by Greg Lukianoff and Jonathan Haidt.

Author's note. I began this post in Feburary after finishing the book but it fell by the wayside as my workload for the semester increased. I'm procrastinating a big paper right now, which makes it the perfect time to wrap up and publish the post. 

I don't write here enough and have been thinking of ways to encourage myself to do a bit more writing. One thought that came to mind was to review books I've been reading. I don't read much fiction or other kinds of literature these days (meaning since college). What I do read is split between readings for courses and books which interest me for their controversial or heterodox arguments. Part of trying to avoid building an epistemic bubble is seeking alternative ways of viewing the world. Given my doctoral studies, it's probably not surprising that two of the recent books I've read are about the US university system. I'll be talking about one here.

The Coddling of the American Mind: How Good Intentions and Bad Ideas are Setting Up a Generation for Failure is a book which feels true. The centering of academic inquiry and free speech mesh with many values which I hold and feel are important to well functioning societies and robust university systems. I also appreciate how the authors put forward a more personal and caring argument for the mental and emotional well-being of students and university faculty. Lukianoff and Haidt are clear that the intent of their book is to make people's lives less stressful and encourage resilience in a generation of students who are experiencing unprecedented levels of anxiety and depression. The book is divided into four parts which I'll summarize and then move into making some commentary. I am planning to spend more time on the arguments so you'll see shorter summaries of the specific examples the authors use to illustrate their position. (As an aside, the authors helpfully offer bullet-point summaries at the end of each chapter, a strategy reminiscent of the hyperemetic articles published by Business Insider. I'm not sure when this trend started or what it's for but it is super helpful when writing summaries)

Part I: Three Bad Ideas

Lukianoff and Haidt begin with three bad ideas, they call them the "great untruths," which they claim have taken root in our culture and, especially, in our schools. The first great untruth is "what doesn't kill you makes you weaker." This inversion of the classic aphorism is a nice summary of their worry that we, as a society, are sheltering our children from any and every source of adversity in the name of keeping them safe. Without facing challenges, children don't learn and don't mature into "capable adults." The authors are critical of the ways in which trauma, originally a concept reserved for physical damage to the body and mental damage from extreme duress, has been broadened into a more general form of trauma which now includes upsetting language. They state that these broadened claims to trauma are not grounded in legitimate psychological research. The result of these appeals to safety and overprotection are that young people are deprived of a chance to become "anti-fragile" which, in turn, means they are more fragile, more depressed, stressed, and anxious than they otherwise might be. This includes an argument that overprotection makes young people more likely to see themselves as victims.

The second great untruth is "always trust your feelings." Here, the authors criticize practices and policies which encourage people to act and think in ways which their emotions direct them. Trusting your feelings, the authors say, means that a person who says something which upsets you is wrong if you feel they are wrong. Lukianoff and Haidt would like a clearer and more meditative distinction between, for example, aggressive speech intended to hurt and microaggressions which are not intended to hurt. They write that schools are encouraging students to interpret the actions of others in the least generous way which discourages empathy and increases feelings of stress and anxiety surrounding social interactions. One crucial component undergirding the logic of Coddling's project is introduced in this chapter: Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT). In short, CBT aims to help patients understand how their active thought processes can be influenced by "automatic" processes. These automatic processes are not usually helpful and generate "cognitive distortions" which cause, among other things, depression and anxiety. One crucial distortion is emotional reasoning - allowing your emotional state to drive the way you think and act. By calling on students to always trust their feelings, rather than encouraging empathy or self examination, schools are encouraging students to engage in emotional reasoning and, therefore, encouraging mental illness.

The third great untruth is "life is a battle between good people and evil people." Lukianoff and Haidt push against a specific vision of identity politics which they see as creating eneminity based on binary understandings of oppressor and oppressed. They contrast common-humanity identity politics with common-enemy identity politics, noting that creating a common-enemy is a great way to organize politically but doesn't reflect the reality of any group's composition. Where there is not a unified good "us" and a unified evil "them" the logic of a common enemy creates one. This leads to lashing out, unwillingness to discuss problems, and creates a call-out culture among students detrimental to their education. Universities need free inquiry, analysis of dissenting ideas, appeals to evidence, and "intellectual honesty" in order to educate students. A culture which encourages professors and other students to call-out for their firing, disinvitation, or outright harassment damages schools' ability to educate. There's an interesting (I think) discussion of intersectionality in the chapter as part of the problem. The authors rightly note that intersectionality is a diverse set of ideas and that its functioning largely depends on who's writing about it and from which perspectives. They don't aim to wade into that debate so much as to note that it's being taken up is as a way to group people into oppressor/oppressed identities - which is not what intersectionality means. The adoption of intersectionality by the public, they argue, has led to an "us vs them" mentality.

Combined, Coddling's three great untruths lead to psychological harm, reduced academic inquiry, and a sense of stress and malaise among students who are increasingly anxious about the people and ideas they encounter. In the second part, they apply this interpretive lense to specific events which they argue are otherwise incomprehensible to many outside observers.

Part II: Bad Ideas in Action

This section of the book brings forward examples of specific events which were harmful to universities, students, faculty, and others. Each example showcases one or more of the effects of the great untruths and how they act in conjunction to undermine the purpose of universities and students' learning and growth.I don't intend to spend a lot of time going over each specific example but I will highlight them here.

• Feb. 2017 "Milo Riot" at the University of California at Berkeley in which violent protesters successfully stopped Milo Yiannopoulos. The authors cite students interviewed in the media who state that their physical violence was a form of self defence against speech they felt was itself violent. They add that the student status of many of the protesters is in dispute, with some potentially being non-student members of "antifa" groups. However, surveys indicated 20-30% of students felt it was sometimes acceptable for other students to use violence; although, far fewer said they would resort to violence themselves. 

• Spring 2017 protests against Charles Murray's book talk at Middlebury College. The primary point here is that faculty who invited Murray were target by students who disagreed with his invitation to talk and that one faculty member was verbally and physically assaulted by a student while trying to exit the speaking venue. 

• Spring 2017 at Claremont McKenna College saw students protest Heather Mac Donald's book talk for The War on Cops. This led to Pomona College and Berkeley rescinding speaking invitations for Mac Donald following outcry form their student bodies. 

• Aug. 2017 "Unite the Right" neo-nazi rally and counter-protest which resulted in the death of one peaceful counter-protester. Lukianoff and Haidt say this raised tensions on college campuses significantly. 

• Reed College's perennial sit-ins and "white-out" which entail refocusing curriculum away from Eurocentric authors and trying to have a day on campus free of white students and professors.

• Oregon State saw protests at the president's "State of the University" who sought greater representation in the largely white administrative offices.

Lukainoff and Haidt's point here isn't to directly criticize (although they definitely include condemnation of violence). Rather, they want to question the idea that words are violence because they feel that considering words violent has dangerous ramifications, some of which are playing out in these examples. They argue that "[i]nterpreting a campus lecture as violence is a choice, and it is a choice that increases your pain with respect to the lecture while reducing your options for how to respond" (p. 95). Instead, the authors think students should cultivate the Stoic ability to not be emotionally reactive. They connect this with CBT and Buddhism explicitly and thing we all ought to prefer a world where people choose not to be emotionally harmed, stressed, or made anxious by the extreme and provocative behavior of others. This would allow for the clearer use of reason and argument against poor reasoning and poor argument, ultimately making everyone stronger for it.

Similarly, Lukianoff and Haidt write about how coddling encourages "witch hunts" among college students. By seeing everyone as good or bad, students lump people into groups with little semblance to their actual beliefs or work. Professors targeted in some of the events mentioned above, for example, worked on issues related to LGBTQ equality, protecting constitutional rights through the ACLU, or had hoped to use the speakers as an example of differing points of view which were absent on campus. Coddling makes the case that this leaves students and faculty isolated, afraid to present their ideas, and hurts the educative mission of higher education because opposing views can't be vetted against each other or weighed on the merits of evidence.

Part III: How Did We Get Here?

I'm going to keep this section brief. Although it offers some potential causes for Coddling's crisis coming to a head right now, I think it actually needs the least summarization. Most of what is written here has been widely discussed in both academia and public for many years. Anyone I expect to have reading this blog, has likely encountered forms of these arguments before. That said, I will return to chapter 7, the one about anxiety and depression, again in my commentary on the book. So, how did we get here? According to Lukianoff and Haidt:

• people are more politically polarized than ever before, especially young people
• young people suffer from anxiety and depression at higher rates than before and those rates are growing
• parents are increasingly overprotective and overbearing, leading to a kind of paranoia about their children's' wellbeing and success while children become used to parents organizing their lives
• children don't play anymore - especially with regard to the kinds of risk-taking and resilience rough forms of play had in earlier generations' childhoods (see also the previous point)
• the concept of safety has become a bureaucratic modus operandi whereby schools and higher ed. feel compelled to do everything necessary to make students feel safe and undisturbed, including emotionally and intellectually safe
• and, finally, people are increasingly focused on distributive justice as opposed to procedural justice leading to disproportionate views of what constitutes justice - in other words, simply redistributing based on outcomes without addressing systemic causes of injustice is not lasting or meaningful justice

These six trends are increasingly effective in modern life and are increasingly impacting the lives of young people. Because of these trends, the authors argue, the terrain of higher education is ripe for the kinds of strife and free speech issues outlined in prior chapters. 

Part IV: Wising Up

Again, I am going to keep this section short. It actually is the shorted section of the book and largely offers unobjectionable remedies. It's broken into three sections: Wiser Kids, Wiser Universities, and Wiser Societies. Overall, children should be permitted more freedom, including freedom to make mistakes so they can better conceptualize taking risks. Part of this, Lukianoff and Haidt think, is to teach children that their own thoughts can be their worst enemies, not other people. Drawing on CBT, they would prefer young people learn how not to let things emotionally disturb them. This also has the benefit of letting them see people as complex beings with mixes of right and wrong, good and bad. Also limit screen time because the internet makes everything worse. Schools ought to be a part of this by breaking from the trends of safetyism and all young people should find work or community service before college. 

Likewise, universities, are at their best, say the authors, when they make freedom of inquiry a key part of their institutional identity. They would like to see selective schools admit more students who are older, are employed full or part time, or who have had careers and families (this is already the norm among "non-selective" schools which educate the vast majority of americans in high ed. - read: community colleges). Additionally, universities should hire faculty with greater viewpoint diversity, even if those views are unpopular. Orthodoxy in a university setting harms academic inquiry and denies students the chance to evaluate alternative viewpoints. They are careful to say this does not mean representing all views, just that schools could hires some conservatives from time to time and it wouldn't be super terrible. And, universities should make "productive disagreement" more central to their mission. Disputing and evaluating ideas is key to the kind of work we expect modern citizens to do, so schools should encourage that, not eject unpopular views. 

The final chapter, on a better society, ends on a positive note. The authors point to a number of "green shoots" where schools, universities, companies, and governments are making progress along the lines of what Lukianoff and Haidt call for in the preceding chapters. They pitch this as a bit of intellectual honesty on their part and an effort to avoid one of CBT's "cognitive errors", catastrophizing. They see, instead of a dark path ahead, a chance to turn away from coddling and toward anti-fragility and growth. 

Mission Accomplished?

This January, Jeffery Sachs, an economist, argued that the crisis was over. In 2016 the total number of speaker disinvitations (successful and unsuccessful) was 43. In 2017, the number was 38. In 2018, the number was 9. In 2017, 28 professors were terminated, demoted, fired, or forced to resign for politically controversial speech. In 2018, the number was 8. Finally, the number of institutions given a "red light" rating for their campus speech rules continued its decade long decline to 28.5 in 2018. All of this data come from FIRE, the campus free speech advocacy group founded by Coddling author, Greg Lukianoff. What gives? Well, Sachs concludes by writing:

it may make sense at this time to rethink the link between conditions on campus and larger generational trends. According to one popular theory, young people today subscribe to a “culture of victimhood,” one that fosters in students a feeling of vulnerability and intolerance. Maybe, maybe not. But considering how quickly the situation on campus has changed, there is reason to doubt the theory’s ability to explain student behavior.

I largely agree with Sachs and want to make a closer consideration of some of what is argued in Coddling. I think it's somewhat obvious given the decline in disinvitations, terminations, and restrictive speech codes that the crisis may be a bit overblown. I'm still close enough to my college years that I remember numerous campus events which made people uncomfortable. Christian preachers of one kind or another were a common feature of the common areas on campus most springs. They'd shout and directly insult students passing by (one devout christian routinely made an effort to call young women our for masturbation and fornication and gaggles of men would stop to watch the ensuing shouting match). Most students simply passed them by. Even when the whole quad outside the bookstore was taken up with displays of mutilated fetuses from anti-abortion speakers, it barely registered to most students and this was (and maybe still is) an annual occurrence. I recall that Clarence Thomas gave the speech at graduation one year to considerable controversy given his alleged sexual harassment of Anita Hill. People protested and there was a petition to disinvite him. Such is campus life. It's been that way for a long time and questions of free speech and inquiry on college campuses go back generations.

In an interview about Coddling, Jonathan Haidt makes what I think is an important admission,

but [unlike the broad data about depression and anxiety] the linking of that [depression/anxiety] to political demands for safe spaces and other kinds of protection - that is not national. So, as I travel around, I find that in the Northeast, especially at liberal arts colleges, but in the Northeast and right along the West Coast, there it's the rule. That is, it's generally happening.

He goes on to reference an ongoing discussion with Jeff Sachs (yes, the same Sachs) in which it's made clear that this kind of behavior is not happening at the vast majority of American colleges. Haidt says the politicization of fragility is not happening everywhere. I'm left wondering why, then, Lukianoff and Haidt felt compelled to write this book.

Creating Mental Illness on the Intersectional Left

The answer to this question lays in the few spots in the book where I think the argument exposes itself for critique: Intersectionality, CBT and Stoicism, Distributive Justice, and the connection between those things to the rise in mental illness among young people. The thrust of this book seems to be less about the crisis of free speech on campus (that has declined dramatically in only a year's time and that one author admits is really just about a small percentage of schools) and more about positing a connection between mental illness and social justice warriors. That is, Lukianoff and Haidt introduce us to the notion that anyone who feels threatened by white supremacy, patriarchy, or political violence, anyone who seeks to redress systemic inequality via redistributive practices, and anyone who wants to be emotionally invested in who they are is mentally ill. They are depressed, anxious, and prone to making cognitive errors and distortions. Do you object to a misogynist twitter troll giving a speech after hours on your campus? You're in need of Cognitive Behavioral Therapy. Do you think centuries of real, historical oppression via the transatlantic slave trade followed by another century of real legal discrimination means African Americans deserve real monetary redress? You're allowing your emotions to get the better of you! Best to be dispassionate like the Stoics and embrace procedural change.

Intersectionality

What's wild about the extremity of these claims Coddling is making isn't that they're extreme but that they seem, to the authors, to be rather banal. In their discussion of intersectionality in chapter 3, Lukianoff and Hiadt rightly reference Kemberle Crenshaw's legal scholarship in which she coined the term but they quickly move beyond Crenshaw's insights and toward more popular notions of intersectionality. Their argument here is that intersectionality's purpose is to identify axes of oppressor and oppressed creates more tribalism and acts against "common-humanity politics". In other words, intersectionality creates common enemies and feeds into the negative cycles they outline in part II.

I don't think this could be further from the truth. Indeed, intersectionality is rooted in understanding the material conditions of a person's life. Crenshaw didn't create a theory, she created a mode of analysis. Crenshaw's insight was that we could better understand how laws impact people if we more closely examine how they and the people around them handle questions of identity. She argued effectively that we might better understand, say, Jonathan Haidt if we saw not just that he is white, male, Jewish, or a university professor but as all of those things. The law, according to Crenshaw, didn't see people as a whole but as distinct identity subgroups - something any teacher will immediately recognize as inadequate.

But, Coddling needs to do two things here. First, it's responding to the increasing popularity of intersectionality in an increasingly and proudly diverse public. Young people are far more diverse than older generations. White students are already the minority in many public school systems but remain a majority on campuses, especially selective ones. This leads to real instances of discrimination on campus and one response is for students of color and their allies to emphasize the importance of identity - namely that many identities exist on campuses and people of color do belong at these institutions. Intersectionality is a clear framework for not just celebrating the many overlapping kinds of people you find on campuses, it's a framework for advocating that they are treated more equitably. What Lukianoff and Haidt describe as encouraging common-enemy identity politics is really this generation's embracing of common-humanity identity politics.

CBT and Stoicism

This is really a two-part criticism but I'll group them together because Coddling treats these as homologous views of self discipline. CBT is therapy. Like all kinds of therapy, it is best pursued under therapeutic conditions - like the supervision of of a therapist. This is, in part, because the role of a therapist is to help individuals seeing CBT treatment to see themselves and their thought processes differently. The automaticity that CBT finds in emotional reasoning is automatic for a reason. The individual cannot often recognize the flaws in their logic absent outside perspectives. CBT is well researched and found to be very effective clinically for a variety of diagnosed mental illnesses. Lukianoff and Haidt are calling for a broader kind of public embrace of CBT principles - expanding the scope of CBT from patients diagnosed with depression and anxiety to anyone who may feel stressed or emotional under certain circumstances. My own experiences with CBT lead me to believe it would be helpful even for someone merely seeking assistance in coping with a stressful life. A diagnosis might not really be necessary, but the assistance of the therapist is.

I also find this attempt to broaden the use of CBT odd given the authors' questioning of "concept creep" in relation to trauma. They are sharply critical of the redefinition of trauma from a purely physical injury to a mental injury to anything "experienced by the individual as physically or emotionally harmful" (p. 25). They label this as subjective and claim it enables any person to call themselves traumatized if their feelings are hurt. What am I supposed to make of their rolling CBT out for general public consumption? How is this different from the concept creep they criticize? Now, perhaps I'm willing to be generous because of my experiences with CBT, but Lukianoff and Haidt likely see little harm in the layperson trying to CBT themselves whereas they outline harms in everyone calling themselves traumatized.

And what of Stoicism? Much like CBT, the Stoics believed that the greatest harms that could be done were harms people did to themselves. The Consolation of Philosophy, a parable by Boethius that is cited in the story, argues that the wrongfully accused prisoner awaiting death does not benefit from agonizing over their inevitable death. Indeed, they are making it worse because they can't change the conditions, but they can control their mental state. Accepting death and recognizing that it can't be stopped allows the prisoner to live out their last few hours in relative peace - an improvement according to the Stoics. Of course, in modern times, we find executing the wrongfully accused to be reprehensible and ostensibly built a system of appeals to safeguard against this happening. Of course, we're not doing great on that front, but we aim to get justice right rather than counsel the wrongfully accused to simply accept their deaths.

Much of what we know about Stoicism largely comes from the surviving writings of Seneca and from Meditations by the Roman Emperor, Marcus Aurelius. I find it amazing that there's so much attention around the Stoics but relatively little though given to who they were. Marcus Aurelius was a militaristic, bloodthirsty expansionist. He loved killing barbarians and felt, Stoically of course, that this was the best way to make Rome great again. Seneca, meanwhile, spent his life sucking up to people in power in the hopes of getting into their good graces, and beds. He apparently caused an uprising in Britannia by forcing large loans on the indigenous Britons. He may have been involved in a plot to kill the emperor's wife. Eventually Nero required Seneca kill himself but he failed at suicide, twice. Both men sat at the top of a hierarchy which was not particularly kind to the poor, to non-citizens, to slaves, or to the women. It seems pretty clear Seneca was a bad man. Cicero? Eh. Look him up.

There is another definition which may fit the emotionally detached Stoics a little bit better.

(re)Distributive Justice?

Returning to chapter 11, Lukainoff and Haidt make a lot of hay about the difference between distributive justice, which they define as an attention to the proportionality of outcomes, and procedural justice, defined as how decisions about justice are made and how a person is treated along the way. They argue that social justice is a blend of the two - a proportional-procedural justice. There's not much fault in this definition. People who care about social justice, care that the procedures of justice are fair and that the outcomes of the justice system are broadly equitable. And, Lukianoff and Haidt point to some occasions where even seemingly fair procedures still produce inequitable outcomes. Within this model, justice occurs when the system is transparent and distributes opportunities equitably, especially with regard to constitutionally protected rights. They contrast this with social justice focused exclusively on equal outcomes. Using problems with Title IX as an example, the authors note that the proportional requirements often led to distorted funding provided to some women's sports but not some men's sports and vice versa. Similarly, proportional representation of various identity groups, Coddling claims, fails to account for any individual or group's preferences and produces waste. This also undermines faith in the system as such waste and confusion leads people to doubt the whole endeavour, something which may eventually harm the cause of social justice.

But is this really what social justice seeks? Is the aim of social justice on campus merely to produce an equality of outcomes through proportionate representation of various identity groups? I'd say no. Social justice has a far broader view, one that extends beyond campus life and into society at large. In my view, social justice encompases all of the above, procedural and distributive. On one hand, we have unprecedented attention paid to who has access to universities, how that access is gained (the unsustainable loans are one example), and whether that access translates into opportunities post-graduation. These are largely questions of procedural justice that seek to make the pathways through higher education more fair. On the other hand, we have unprecedented attention paid to the current unequal distribution of various kinds of capital. How can someone without the opportunity to even pay for the SAT, or a college application, or a bus/train/plane ticket have access to higher education, especially the kind of higher education that Lukianoff and Haidt are thinking about here? These are questions of distributive justice. Distributive justice does not seek an equality of outcomes but rather seeks adequate conditions for all people. It's not about some kind of Marxist abolition of all property into the hands of the public via the state. It's about making sure that the richest country in the world doesn't impoverish a generation of middle class kids making their way through college. When taken together, both views are part and parcel of the modern social justice movement. Advocates of social justice rightly understand that one can't only pursue procedural justice if the underlying society is dramatically unequal. Similarly, simply redistributing all the property in a society does little to address the reasons the property was poorly distributed in the first place.

Whose speech really counts?

In Lukainoff and Haidt's view, there are only some kinds of speech that matter for free speech. First off, any kind of debate seems to quality because they promote the contestation of ideas under the burden of evidence and logic. Similarly, rebutting the ideas, whether internally or publically, of someone you disagree with is productive. Intellectualism, somewhat undefined but I think we can assume a general meaning, is also seen as a virtue. Almost no idea is too far because the worse the idea, the more there is to gain from challenging it. Meanwhile, some kinds of speech do not count. Protest appears not to count. Advocacy appears not to count. Attempts to make the non-course aspects of a school less racist, sexist, ableist, heteronormative, etc. also seem like they don't count. I find this odd, especially given their focus twice (chapters 2 and 7) on the ever-present nature of social media and how destructive that is to children. Wouldn't they also see why, at times where students wish to socialize, enjoy campus life, and maybe just be without having to confront ideas that question their very humanity? I mean, have you heard Milo talk?

Campuses are often residential, especially these elite coastal universities. Some of what proponents of safe spaces aim to do is cut down on the emotional labor of having to be different in a space where most people are the same. Students, especially those of color, aren't feeling stress and anxiety because they were coddled as children - which seems to be the only reason people feel stress in Lukianoff and Haidt's book. Often times they are in situations where the people and institution are not open or accepting of them. They are, in other words, confronting procedural injustice on a regular basis. These students and their allies are asking that their campus not become home to ideas which promote harmful behaviors and policies. Moreover, few to none of the protests and demonstrations were about courses. Instead, objections were most often raised to guest speakers invited by student groups or faculty. The role of guest speakers in a student's collegiate experience is minimal, at best. Yet, Lukianoff and Haidt treat these requests as a serious abridgement of students' educational opportunities rather than the work of people trying to build communities.

Putting it together

What do we do with this odd text? It's a mishmash of ideas that seem to go together very well. I said at the opening of this post that Coddling is a book that feels true. It's written in a way that responds to a lot of what's happening in the world, especially on campuses, but really falls apart under further examination. Not only are the problems chronicled not generalizable to "a generation" as the title proclaims but the crisis appears to have ebbed significantly. The authors advocate for free speech but seem mostly against kinds of speech we expect on college campuses. They mischaracterize both the aims of social justice and the purpose of intersectionality as being about divisiveness and mere redistribution or identity quotas. Anyone who disagrees with their premises is mentally ill and ought to be in therapy to learn about their cognitive distortions.

I'm left assuming the best of intentions on the part of the authors but deeply wary of the world they imply ought to exist were their ideas put into practice. Do we really want a generation of anti-emotional, procedurally obsessed, argumentative, risk takers? Do we want campuses where no ideas are off limits simply because we value the exercise of rebutting them? Clearly I do not, though I'm not sure why Lukianoff and Haidt do.