"The Coddling of the American Mind"

In the name of emotional well-being, college students are increasingly demanding protection from words and ideas they don’t like. Here’s why that’s disastrous for education—and mental health.

The Atlantic: The Coddling of the American Mind

Something strange is happening at America’s colleges and universities. A movement is arising, undirected and driven largely by students, to scrub campuses clean of words, ideas, and subjects that might cause discomfort or give offense. Last December, Jeannie Suk wrote in an online article for The New Yorker about law students asking her fellow professors at Harvard not to teach rape law—or, in one case, even use the word violate (as in “that violates the law”) lest it cause students distress. In February, Laura Kipnis, a professor at Northwestern University, wrote an essay in The Chronicle of Higher Education describing a new campus politics of sexual paranoia—and was then subjected to a long investigation after students who were offended by the article and by a tweet she’d sent filed Title IX complaints against her. In June, a professor protecting himself with a pseudonym wrote an essay for Vox describing how gingerly he now has to teach. “I’m a Liberal Professor, and My Liberal Students Terrify Me,” the headline said. A number of popular comedians, including Chris Rock, have stopped performing on college campuses (see Caitlin Flanagan’s article in this month’s issue). Jerry Seinfeld and Bill Maher have publicly condemned the oversensitivity of college students, saying too many of them can’t take a joke.

Read the rest, and consider that the article is two years old. Academia's psychosis had only deepened since then. And yes, some law professors now do refuse to teach rape law or any other law relating to sexual matters.

Plante is one of many academics who increasingly find themselves walking on eggshells to avoid offending their students. Some law school professors have stopped teaching rape law due to complaints from students who claim the subject is traumatizing—even though educating students about this important topic should be more important than making everybody in class comfortable all of the time. 

If professors want to warn their students before discussing particularly disturbing subjects, that’s fine. But it’s concerning that strenuous objection from the students is leading academic to stop teaching these subjects entirely.

But why stop there? Jesus died, but we can't talk about that:

Students in a Bible course at the University of Glasgow are being given trigger warnings before being shown images of the crucifixion — and permission to skip those lessons altogether if they are worried they’ll feel too uncomfortable.

Universities are significantly oriented therapeutically and this increasing trend is overwhelming the educational emphasis.

Outside of hospitals, the university has arguably become the most medicalized institution in Western culture. In 21st-century Anglo-American universities, public displays of emotionalism, vulnerability, and fragility serve as cultural resources through which members of the academic community express their identity or make statements about their plight. On both sides of the Atlantic, professional counselors working in universities report a steady rise in demand for mental-health services.

Among academics there is widespread agreement, too, that today’s students are more emotionally fragile and far more likely to present mental health symptoms than in the past. There is little consensus, however, about why this is so. Marvin Krislov, the president of Oberlin College, has more questions than answers on this score:

I don’t know if it’s related to the way we parent. I don’t know if it’s related to the media or the pervasive role of technology—I’m sure there are lot of different factors—but what I can tell you is that every campus I know is investing more resources in mental health. . . . Students are coming to campuses today with mental-health challenges that in some instances have been diagnosed and in some instances have not. Maybe, in previous eras, those students would not have been coming to college.

Observers of the educational scene have known for years that the very class of students demanding protection from being offended or being exposed to "triggering" material are also the same ones who very hostilely and sometimes violently strike back at persons they classify as aggressors or oppressors. The Atlantic's article calls this "vindictive protectiveness," and recounts how a student at the University of Michigan who poked fun at "what he saw as a campus tendency to perceive microaggressions in just about anything." Retribution was harsh.

A group of women later vandalized Mahmood’s doorway with eggs, hot dogs, gum, and notes with messages such as “Everyone hates you, you violent prick.” When speech comes to be seen as a form of violence, vindictive protectiveness can justify a hostile, and perhaps even violent, response.

Understand that today's college students are tomorrow's business operators and future managers. They will bring this kind of disfunctionality with them. In fact, it's already been in the workplace for some years. Just a few days ago I met a man with whom I fell into a long conversation that rambled through many topics. At one point he said that he has a difficult time hiring young men or women in his business. "They can't communicate clearly and don't think ahead well." It's not going to get better any time soon, either.

Update: Your tax dollars at work and where else but the University of California system? I'm not even going to print the headline, so click here if you dare.