https://www.nationalreview.com/2018/09/jonathan-haidt-coddling-of-the-american-mind-college-experience/
Jonathan Haidt on what happens when today’s youth show up at college.
What is happening at American universities? Jonathan Haidt, moral psychologist and critically acclaimed author, provides answers in his latest book co-authored with Greg Lukianoff, The Coddling of the American Mind: How Good Intentions and Bad Ideas Are Setting Up a Generation For Failure, which is now on sale. Yesterday Haidt discussed what’s been going wrong in childrearing in the past few decades. Today he’ll discuss what’s been happening when today’s youth show up at college.
Madeleine Kearns: In your new book you and Greg Lukianoff argue that overprotection is badly affecting the development of young people today. Previously, we discussed where the “bad ideas” referred to in your book’s title originated and the damage they do before young people go to college. Here, we’ll discuss what’s been happening since “iGen” started arriving on college campuses around 2013.
Today’s young people are arriving at university expecting safety, you observe, so why can’t we simply make colleges safe spaces to meet those expectations?
Jonathan Haidt: We certainly could. If someone has a plan for raising kids in a safe space that would extend all the way to the age of 85, and they could be confident that the child will stay in the safe zone as an adult, then you could do it. But if you want kids who will go out and get a job and do something in the wider world, then you have to let them fly on their own at some point. I think it is a national tragedy that Americans — on the whole, not everyone — overprotect their children all the way through high school. If we extend that overprotection through college, it would make things worse.
MK: Some people think the emphasis on safe spaces and microaggressions, etc., is overblown. What do you say to that?
JH: There was a spate of articles in early 2018 arguing that despite the presence of a few dozen high-profile anecdotes, the survey data shows that nothing is really changing.
At Heterodox Academy [a politically diverse community of academics who endorse viewpoint diversity on campus] we claim you can’t think well unless you have good critics. Those articles were written by some good critics, particularly Jeff Sachs [a political scientist at Acadia University in Canada]. And what our good critics have shown us is that nationally representative data on college students doesn’t show big shifts in attitudes about free speech. Rather it shows small shifts in some of the directions we’re talking about — if you limit the analysis to the little data we have on iGen. If you look at Millennials, there are no shifts. The debate helped me to refine my thinking. I now see that if you look at all 4,500 American institutions of higher education you’re not going to see much happening at the great majority of schools, particularly those that are non-selective or non-residential. But if you focus on elite schools, especially in the Northeast and on the West Coast, the dynamic has changed sharply, and the change happened only once iGen began arriving on campus, in 2013. [iGen refers to the generation after the Millennials; it begins with birth year 1995.]
