Atlantic reader Adam Needelman agrees with the sentiment of the previous reader who called Lukianoff and Haidt “grumpy old men”; he calls their essay “a lazy rehash of the same cyclical generation bashing we get every ten years.” He also sees a double standard:
The section of the essay hyperventilating about trigger warnings complains of a “chilling effect” on “teaching and pedagogy.” It fails to mention that chilling effects are incumbent on the cowardice of those being chilled. Why is it that when professors so fear criticism that they choose to compromise on their principles and job performances, it’s not discussed as being too thin-skinned, but when students fear offense, it is?
Furthermore, why is it when Jerry Seinfeld essentially says “I am a grown man and professional comedian, but I will not perform at colleges because I am worried the kids may be mean to me,” we call the kids thin-skinned, but not the man deathly afraid of criticism? Could it be because we have emotional attachment to the idea of younger people being more thin-skinned?
Haidt responds first:
Mr. Needelman asserts that what the faculty fears is being criticized. It is not. It is being brought up on charges before the university’s Equal Opportunity Commission, or some other internal body that is charged with investigating all student complaints.
Under the 2013 Department of Education revised guidelines that we describe in the article, any student who deems what a professor says to be “unwelcome” can file harassment charges. These charges must be adjudicated by some body created by the university. This adjudication forces the professor to spend dozens of hours to write defenses, sit through testimony, and respond to official emails. It is a nightmare and a time drain dropped into a busy semester.
See what happened to Laura Kipnis. This happened to me too, in a more abbreviated form. I am now gun-shy; I am afraid of offending the most sensitive student that I can imagine, and so I am now a more cautious, less spontaneous, and less interesting teacher.
Lukianoff responds at even greater length:
Being concerned about some negative trends resulting from decisions made by educators and parents over the past couple decades doesn’t sound like to me like “generation bashing,” as the reader put it. Jon and I are concerned that society is telling students that they are far more fragile than they actually are, and we believe that is not only harming their mental health, but also selling them short.
As for our “hyperventilating about trigger warnings,” our argument is that trigger warnings do not necessarily help the people they claim to help, people who suffer from PTSD, and might put professors in a position where they have to fear for their jobs if they cannot live up to the impossible task of predicting everything a student might claim is offensive and warrants a trigger warning.
He goes on to cite many examples of professors facing much more than just hurt feelings:
In the article we cite a letter written by seven humanities professors who said their colleagues were being called on by administrators investigating student complaints that they had included “triggering” material in their courses, with or without trigger warnings. The professors’ main concern was that professors couldn’t possibly anticipate everything that might upset students, no matter how many warnings they administered or how they adjusted their course materials.
If Mr. Needelman is saying that professors should be able to handle criticism, I absolutely agree. But it’s not mere criticism these professors fear. They aren’t worried about getting their feelings hurt; they fear for their jobs.
This is not an irrational, hypothetical fear. In hundreds of cases I have seen in my work, dozens of which are recounted in my book Unlearning Liberty, I’ve seen professors get in trouble for clearly protected speech related to the content of their courses. They’re not being paranoid to be concerned about the consequences of offending.
In 2011, University of Denver professor Arthur Gilbert was suspended and found guilty of sexual harassment after two anonymous students filed complaints about the sexualized nature of his course on the history of America’s drug wars, a course that quite explicitly included several sections on taboo sexual themes.
And just last week, Alice Dreger resigned her professorship at Northwestern’s Feinberg School of Medicine, citing continuing censorship by the University, specifically its ongoing censorship of the faculty-produced medical journal Atrium, of which Dreger is an editor. These are just a couple of the cases I’ve seen where professors had to worry about their job security after engaging in clearly protected speech.
As for Mr. Needelman’s recharacterization of what Jerry Seinfeld said about performing on campuses, I think he’s missing the crux of the argument Seinfeld and his fellow comedians are making. I am an executive producer of an upcoming documentary called Can We Take Joke?, in which we interview a half-dozen major comedians about the problems comedy faces on campus and in general. The comedians who say they don’t want to play campuses are not saying that they’re afraid of going on campus— they’re saying it’s a pretty lame experience because students are so quick to claim offense.
As Chris Rock said in a 2014 interview, “This is not as much fun as it used to be.” I don’t think Chris Rock is afraid of anyone, but if you’re getting the impression that some students will intentionally misinterpret your jokes and not even allow you to be, as Rock says, “offensive on your way to being inoffensive,” we should consider what kind of environment we’ve created.
Can you imagine Chris Rock doing a comedy bit like the following one on a college campus today? (NSFW, because Chris Rock):
Want the last word here? Email hello@theatlantic.com and I’ll update the post with your best counterpoints. And to keep track of the whole ongoing debate on the new campus P.C., head here.
Greg Lukianoff and Jonathan Haidt, authors of the current Atlantic cover story “The Coddling of the American Mind,” were eager to respond to a half-dozen of the most forceful criticisms from their readers selected from the hello@ account. Here’s Sebastian:
As a member of the class of 2014 at an American university, I knew I was in for a treat from the first line of the essay: “Something strange is happening at America’s colleges and universities.” I immediately thought of the grumpy old man, sitting on his front porch, lecturing at anyone who will listen about “kids these days” and “the problem with young people.”
Sure enough, in the second section we get: “Childhood itself has changed greatly during the past generation. Many Baby Boomers and Gen Xers can remember riding their bicycles around their hometowns, unchaperoned by adults.” This is a terrific new twist on an old classic: “In my day, we walked to school through the snow and the rain, uphill both ways!”
Lukianoff responds to his young reader:
We’ve seen a number of variations of this criticism: questioning why we should listen to “grumpy old men.” (By the way, I’m 40. I know that’s old to some of you, but maybe not so much to others).
While I’m hesitant to call this critique an argument, as it doesn’t substantively address what we talk about or propose in the article, I do understand where it is coming from. We can all recall eye-rolling moments when we saw older folks lecturing the younger generation about how hard it was in “their day,” and it may often be a good idea to take these nostalgic remarks with a grain of salt. Our memories can be tricky things, and psychology shows that we’re not all that good at remembering how good or bad things were in the past and are prone to revising and overgeneralizing.
But is my reader saying that generational critiques are presumptively meritless? To treat an older person’s critiques or advice as merely deluded nostalgia is essentially to say that people from older generations have no wisdom to offer younger generations. As people who take seriously even the advice of ancient thinkers, we simply don’t believe that’s true.
But I want to go one step further: it’s easy to roll your eyes at someone who says “it was harder in my day,” but does that mean he or she is wrong?
My father was born in 1926 in Yugoslavia and his father died when he was six years old. He lived through the terror of the Nazi occupation and World War II.
His father fought in both World War I and the Russian Revolution (he was evacuated in the Crimea on a British hospital ship while in a typhoid-induced coma), horrors I can barely imagine. His grandfather was a serf, a piece of owned property living in what would today be considered the grossest poverty. And they did all of this without media to distract them, without antidepressants, and even without aspirin or penicillin.
My point is that it’s pretty likely that your grandmother and grandfather, like mine, did in fact have it a lot harder than you do, and they learned a lot from those challenges. They lived in the daily presence of disease, death, back-breaking labor, and violence, whereas we live in what scholars like Steven Pinker have called the most peaceful and nonviolent period in human history. As a result, your grandmother and grandfather would likely see colleges’ efforts to protect students from offensive or disturbing content as not only an unnecessary luxury, but also harmful, as they know full well that they and those who came before them learned from the challenges they faced.
Growing abundance and comfort are undoubtedly good things, but they do come with consequences. These consequences are what I call “problems of comfort,” an idea I elaborate on in my short book Freedom From Speech. For example, political polarization is a “problem of comfort,” as it is the product of societal improvements like increased mobility, which has allowed people to move to like-minded neighborhoods, and availability of media, which allows people to get their information from news sources tailored to fit their preexisting worldviews.
Similarly, political correctness and the new “vindictive protectiveness” we discuss in the article arose from a good thing: a desire to be more sensitive, particularly towards the vulnerable. What we are examining in the article is whether these well-intentioned efforts have created their own problems: increased anxiety, depression, and an inability to entertain opposing viewpoints.
To say that progress does not sometimes create new problems is to be blind to history. And examining history and where these new problems came from so we can remedy them is why it can be valuable to listen to the “grumpy old man.” Indeed, that’s a piece of wisdom your grandmother probably could’ve told you.
Sebastian then wrote, unrelated to Lukianoff’s reply:
If you try to think about the history of our species as whole, it does not take long to come to the realization that the overwhelming majority of human life is a cry for help that no one hears. It is war, slavery, and genocide. It is massive and entrenched and unending. It is a cry made by a voice that, yes, is very often emotional, irrational, overgeneralizing, and catastrophizing.
That is the Real Problem. We too often forget it. If young people are more tuned in to the unfathomable suffering going on each day, if we are quicker to remind each other of that suffering, if we have not yet become callous to that suffering, then that is a good thing, and I really hope no young people lose that instinct after reading “The Coddling of the American Mind.”
Because, in case you can’t remember what it feels like to grow up in this world, it’s pretty painful and discouraging. It is the pain of growing up to learn about the patterns of oppression in the world and then experience them, experience young people like ourselves reincarnating the ancient hatreds. It was our collective heart breaking for the first time when we heard the Yale fraternity members walking through the streets chanting “No means Yes, Yes Means Anal!” It was the death of our dreams to realize that millions of Redskins fans gleefully chant a racial slur that invaders used to describe the victims of their genocide.
Mr. Lukianoff and Mr. Haidt, it is condescending, patronizing, and insulting to compare the collective suffering and anxieties of all young people to the irrational fear of elevators. To many, the fear is not misplaced. The suspicion is justified. The dangers in this world are very real, and I do not see how your article or the cause behind it will do anything to remedy that.
There’s quite of chasm between the “ancient hatreds” of “war, slavery, and genocide” and the reprehensible chanting of frat boys or the name of a sports team. There’s something really troubling about invoking them so tightly together.
Disagree? Want the last word on this note? Email hello@theatlantic.com. And to keep track of the entire ongoing debate, here’s the link to our thread page.
I am not an economic determinist; I don’t believe that all social phenomena can be attributed to economic causes. However, the fact that Lukianoff and Haidt don’t once talk about the consumerist revolution in American higher education is astounding. That is, undoubtedly, the #1 reason for the rise in “vindictive protectiveness.”
When money becomes the one and only value within institutions of higher ed, then the people who pay that money—or the people who act as the proxy for that money—will have the final say on what they feel is appropriate to encounter in class. This means edutainment, lessons built around emotional management—not rational or critical discussion about the messy reality of the world. Administrators would sooner censure an “offensive” teacher than lose one tiny part of their budget.
Add to this the reality of a job market that simply cannot absorb new college grads, and a massive debt bubble, and you have the right pieces for the construction of an escapist pleasure dome—a place for students to avoid the impending doom they feel about a vicious world.
Your thoughts? Email hello@theatlantic.com. Haidt and Lukianoff have penned responses to a half-dozen of your most critical emails and we'll be posting them starting Monday morning.
I was in a literature class when my professor read a poem that was in the perspective of someone jumping off a skyscraper. This was the method my sister used to end her life.
For whatever reason, I couldn’t handle it that day and started seeing things. I left the room to get a cup of coffee and calm down. At the end of class, I went back to ask what the homework was, only to find my professor apologizing profusely for selecting that poem despite knowing what happened to my sister. He said he should’ve at least given me a warning.
I was taken aback. I told him that I chose to take a literature class, and he selected a poem that would teach the lesson best to the whole class. I couldn’t handle it, so that was my own responsibility.
Honestly, since all my professors knew I had mental issues, it was quite refreshing just for once to not be singled out, to be treated like a normal person. I seriously don’t understand why people want trigger warnings.
Another reader agrees:
As a dark-skinned Latino gay male, I am deeply alarmed that this new wave of stifling political correctness has swept college campuses. Such efforts and policies are ostensibly used to “protect” students like me from “offense.” But these people do not realize that they’re doing the very thing they accuse the “victimizers” and “oppressors” of doing—condescending to people like me.
This new political correctness simply crystallizes the ugly paternalism the left sometimes inflicts on minorities.
They make me into a one-dimensional caricature of someone so fragile and innocent that my psyche must be protected at all costs. Worse yet, they assume that people like me aren’t mature enough to see the difference between “microaggressions” that are unintentional and thoroughly harmless, and the ones that are harmful. They also assume that people like me aren’t capable of withstanding and countering the latter. We most certainly are. I’m a capable adult who can deftly navigate the arrows of negativity and discrimination aimed at the LGBT and Latino communities without my nannies protecting me.
As to the “trigger warnings” for provocative works of art and literature, this is also a very sad state of affairs. I tend to think the more provocation, the better.
Some of the best works of art, in my opinion, are those of Francis Bacon and Egon Schiele because they leave me with heightened anxiety. I was especially disconcerted to read that Mrs. Dalloway, one of the best novels ever written in the English language, had been given the trigger warning treatment at Rutgers. I read that book for the first time during the depths of a depression that lasted months. But despite the difficulties, I kept reading because the very mental state that that novel explored was the one I was experiencing. Reading that novel while in that frame of mind was one of the most eye-opening and marvelously creative things I have ever done. So to deny college students such life-enhancing engagement with art simply to “protect” them from their own feelings is a travesty.
I hope there is a thorough and sustained backlash against this new political correctness. I agreed with the general goals of the PC movement of the 1980s and 1990s; there needed to be more points of view from historically marginalized peoples in classroom discussions and materials. But I am in deep opposition to this new and more frightening iteration.
What do you think? Email hello@theatlantic.com. The authors of the cover story, Jonathan Haidt and Greg Lukianoff, will be responding to critical emails from readers soon.
The latest Atlantic cover story, “The Coddling of the American Mind,” has gotten a ton of email response from readers. A young instructor at an Ivy League university prefers to remain anonymous because she “enjoys a teaching fellowship that I would very much like to keep”:
I take the health and well-being of my students very seriously. If I believed that trigger warnings and sanitized curricula and what the authors term “protective vindictiveness” genuinely helped my students, I’d be a wholehearted supporter.
Unfortunately, I don’t believe that these measures do make my students safer. They just make schools like mine much lazier.
Vindictive protectiveness focuses ire on individual transgressions instead of systemic problems. It creates an atmosphere in which the administrative elite are more concerned with empty gestures than real change. They would rather use empty gestures—like, say, ousting a professor for making a joke about an assignment “killing” his students—to distract from an absence of real change, like preventing suicides on campus.
And let’s be real: the motivating concern behind top-down enforcement of mental hygiene on campuses is not that a delicate mind might be harmed in the making of their diploma. It’s lawsuits. Lawsuits and bad press. And that makes for really, really bad policy.
I appreciate the distinction drawn in this article between PCness and protective vindictiveness (VP):
[The PC movement] sought to restrict speech (specifically hate speech aimed at marginalized groups), but it also challenged the literary, philosophical, and historical canon, seeking to widen it by including more-diverse perspectives. The current movement is largely about emotional well-being.
This, I think, is the crux of the issue. The original zeitgeist of PC was ultimately productive, not reductive, shifting us towards a broader, richer academia, one that included voices not traditionally heard. VP, on the other hand, silences and excludes.
It’s easier not to read Beloved and Invisible Man—with all their “problematic” themes—than it is to have an honest conversation about the malignant, inescapable legacy of racism in America. It’s easier to drop Ovid’s Metamorphosis from the syllabus than it is to confront the violence and sexual darkness and blood-on-the-tongue humor in every story that humanity has ever told about itself.
In the current culture of VP, it seems, women and people of color are still disproportionately penalized for speaking out and speaking up—which feels like a step back, not forward. It’s not just that VP prevents students from having to think about what upsets them; it’s that it prevents the most privileged students from having to think about what should upset them.
As a woman, the idea of a trigger warning for misogyny seems ludicrous. Misogyny is something I experience every day, on levels both personal and institutional. Academia has never been an exception. It’s impossible not to track that crap into the classroom; we’re mired in it. I don’t leave my womanhood at the door. And a trigger warning for misogyny is exactly that: the implication that femaleness can be compartmentalized.
I wish this was a disclosure I didn’t have to make: I’m a rape survivor. And I would rather read Toni Morrison and have her words wrack my soul than see books like hers, containing stories just a little like mine, vanish from college classrooms. These are books we must read. These are conversations we must have. Not in spite of traumatized students, but because of us.
Have something to add to the debate over the new campus P.C.? Email hello@theatlantic.com. The authors of the cover story, Jonathan Haidt and Greg Lukianoff, will be responding to critical emails from readers in the coming days.
