The Coddling of the American Mind

[Cindy Claveau]

Why trigger warnings are disastrous for education and mental health.

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.

 

[Pamela]

Why trigger warnings are disastrous for education and mental health.

These snowflakes are all over SL as well. There is a steady stream of them in the official forums. Every tiny inconvenience is a HUGE deal. Everything wrong is due to someone’s deliberate attack, not merely SL malfunctioning as usual. How do such horribly crippled people function in the real world?

 

[Jopsy Pendragon]

Given how much higher Ed costs these days, I'm genuinely surprised that students don't act even MORE entitled and demanding.

 

[Lianne Marten]

That article is three years old. And is a load of horseshit. Let's blame the people having things done to them for what is being done.

The Coddling of the American Mind review – how elite US liberals have turned rightwards

In the decade since the 2008 global financial crisis, while all other forms of consumer debt have shrunk, student loan debt has tripled. Currently around 44.2 million Americans owe a total of more than $1.5tn, and 30% of these are struggling to make monthly payments. Meanwhile, college teachers are increasingly likely to live from contract to low-paid contract. None of this comes up in The Coddling of the American Mind, a book about why young people feel anxious and college is making it worse.

...

The methods they teach come from cognitive behavioural therapy, which Lukianoff credits with having saved his life when he suffered from depression. He and Haidt argue that student demands for social justice are expressions of “cognitive distortions” that CBT can correct, and that the problems that young people and their parents worry about are not as grave as they think; they are simply, as Steven Pinker writes, “problems of progress”. Despite the title, which suggests cultural or civilisational diagnosis, the checklists and worksheets distributed throughout this book make clear that its genre is self-help.

The tips it contains may benefit upper middle class parents. They may benefit students from minority or working class backgrounds who arrive on elite campuses to find that, despite good intentions, those campuses have not fully prepared for them. But the framing leaves no room to consider how historical and social change might legitimately change institutions or individuals, or that individuals might want to change their world. (This framing also explains how they can write hundreds of pages about what’s wrong with contemporary higher education and not mention debt or adjuncts.) The authors cite the “folk wisdom” “Prepare the child for the road, not the road for the child”. They call this attitude “pragmatic”. The prospect that a group of children might get together to build a new road themselves is not one they can countenance.

...

The fact that Lukianoff and Haidt claim authority to police tone becomes clear the first time they discuss the role “overreaction from the right” has played in recent campus wars – at least halfway through the book. They quote death threats that Princeton professor Keeanga Yamahtta-Taylor received in 2017, including “lynching and having the bullet from a .44 Magnum” put in her head. “One might conclude,” Lukianoff and Haidt write, paraphrasing an imagined conservative, that if she and two other professors who received such threats “had spoken in a more deliberative style, befitting a professor, they would have had no trouble”. Should black female scholars really believe that the lynch mob would leave them alone if they just spoke in a more “reasonable” way? No; Lukianoff and Haidt state clearly that some on the right are determined to attack professors perceived as left-wing and that universities often fail to defend them. The authors certainly do not endorse threats of violence. And yet, even as they allow that another professor, the classicist Sarah Bond, came under fire despite speaking in a “scholarly way” and offering “a thoughtful and academic presentation”, they reiterate the contrast articulated by the conservatives they are supposedly criticising. On the next page, when they summarise how the typical “polarisation cycle” proceeds, they say that it is instigated when “a left-wing professor, often black or female, says or writes something provocative or inflammatory”.

...

Like Trump, the authors romanticise a past before “identity” but get fuzzy and impatient when history itself comes up. “Most of these schools once excluded women and people of colour,” they reflect. “But does that mean that women and people of colour should think of themselves as ‘colonised populations’ today?” You could approach this question by looking at data on racialised inequality in the US, access to universities, or gendered violence. They don’t. They leave it as a rhetorical question for “common sense” to answer.

Their narrow perception of history severely limits the explanations Lukianoff and Haidt can offer for the real problems they identify. Can you understand the “paranoia” middle-class parents have about college admissions without considering how many of their children are now downwardly mobile? How are college teachers supposed to confidently court controversy when so many of them have zero security in jobs that barely pay above poverty wages?

...

For all their self-conscious reasonableness, and their promises that CBT can master negative emotion, Lukianoff and Haidt often seem slightly hurt. They argue that intersectionality theory divides people into good and bad. But the scholars they quote do not use this moral language; those scholars talk about privilege and power. Bad is how these men feel when someone suggests they have had it relatively easy – and that others have had to lose the game that was made for men like them to win. Their problem with “microaggressions” is this framework emphasises impact over intentions, a perspective that they dismiss as clearly ludicrous. Can’t these women and minorities see we mean well? This is the incredulity of people who have never feared being stereotyped. It can turn to indignation, fast.

...

The core irony of The Coddling of the American Mind is that, by opposing identity politics, its authors try to consolidate an identity that does not have to see itself as such. Enjoying the luxury of living free from discrimination and domination, they therefore insist that the crises moving young people to action are all in their heads. Imagine thinking that racism and sexism were just bad ideas that a good debate could conquer!

 

[Free]

This thread could use a trigger warning.

 

[Kamilah Hauptmann]

Furthermore.

The Economy Killed Millennials, Not Vice Versa - The Atlantic

 

[Cristiano]

I will never forget a post I saw on Tumblr complaining that an image of a pomegranate needed to have a trigger warning on it for gore. It represents how ridiculous that whole culture of trigger warnings have become. Are there legit triggers for people? Absolutely, and providing warnings on sensitive topics is not unreasonable - but the idea that everyone has to abide by that is absurd.

 

[Veritable Quandry]

I have been in higher ed for a long time and I have yet to meet a triggered snowflake. A small number of cases get a disproportionate amount of press.

 

[Dakota Tebaldi]

That article is three years old. And is a load of horseshit. Let's blame the people having things done to them for what is being done.

The Coddling of the American Mind review – how elite US liberals have turned rightwards

I've been kind of looking for a counterpoint of the Coddling article since I read it - at the time I disagreed with a lot of it but didn't like have the ability really to convincingly make an opposing argument. But it upset me how a lot of people either didn't notice or didn't care that complaining about whiny liberal kids in school was just the framing, and these authors' real intentions were to push the practice of a specific type of auto-psychotherapy, even going so far at the end of the article as advocating that colleges give incoming students "a few group training sessions" and encourage them - i.e., very non-mental health professionals - to start practicing this "therapy" on each other. That sounds bizarre and extremely dangerous to me.

Mental health therapies are a mixed bag, and what works very well on one person might be counterproductive to someone else's progress. I get that when somebody has a breakthrough for themselves because of one certain technique it gets people really excited and they just want to tell the whole world about this thing that was exactly what they'd been waiting for all this time and finally found...but there is no technique that is so widely successful that it should be used or taught to everyone by default. Actual mental health professionals should be deciding what kind of therapy, if any, a person needs; not the kid sitting next to them.

 

[danielravennest]

How do such horribly crippled people function in the real world?

If my temporary live-in helper is any indication, they don't. He's a student attending a local community college, and helping me with physical work around my 3 acre property in return for food and a place to sleep. 35 years old, and not yet 2 years through college. Spends most of his off-time staring at a computer screen. Doesn't really know how to cook or other practical stuff. He's not stupid, we can talk tech stuff just fine, but not motivated. Originally he was going to get a part-time job to help pay for school. Didn't even make it to work the first day. Instead, went shopping and bought a little laptop. I've had to lend him clothes because he didn't have anything suitable for winter. He's leaving in 9 days to head back to his parent's place.

 

[Lady Darnk Juniorette]

All I ever see is people getting triggered by the thought of trigger warnings.

 

[Free]

All I ever see is people getting triggered by the thought of trigger warnings.

Spoiler: TRIGGER WARNING

 

[GoblinCampFollower]

I have been in higher ed for a long time and I have yet to meet a triggered snowflake. A small number of cases get a disproportionate amount of press.

All I ever see is people getting triggered by the thought of trigger warnings.

Right!

I'm convinced that the special snowflakes who get triggered by everything are rare to the point of being a myth. The millions of "regular" people who are horrified by the idea of of the dreaded SJW are the real hysteria.

And comedians are mostly just butthurt that they can't make young people laugh anymore with side busters like "Gay jews, am I right?!"

 

[Bartholomew Gallacher]

Yes, they are triggerend by Halloween and such at e.g. Yale:


And a lecture held at Yale, Coddling you vs. tighten you which was already too much for some youngsters to listen to; but probably, as always, more hype than reality how far spread those are:

 

[GoblinCampFollower]

Yes, they are triggerend by Halloween and such at e.g. Yale:


And a lecture held at Yale, Coddling you vs. tighten you which was already too much for some youngsters to listen to; but probably, as always, more hype than reality how far spread those are:

Those kids looked ridiculous, but that didn't look like a very big crowd to me. At worst, we aren't talking about a huge number of students, just a loud minority that will mostly grow out of it. ALSO, the description and editing of that video took as much out of context as possible to make sure they looked really stupid.

Also, notice that it's only a few of them who are actually losing their minds. Most of the students look like they are watching this exchange because they are bored.

College age kids can be weird. It's not a new thing in this generation.

 

[Jopsy Pendragon]

I will never forget a post I saw on Tumblr complaining that an image of a pomegranate needed to have a trigger warning on it for gore. It represents how ridiculous that whole culture of trigger warnings have become. Are there legit triggers for people? Absolutely, and providing warnings on sensitive topics is not unreasonable - but the idea that everyone has to abide by that is absurd.

Infinite number of monkeys rule: Absurdity isn't just likely, it's guaranteed anytime you deal with populations of a certain size or larger.

And that goes for the people processing complaints as well as those making complaints.

One never need look far to find an anecdote of absurdity proving that 'the system is flawed' because anytime people are involved... it simply is, by transitive properties, absurd.

Same thing goes for system security, there's no such thing as 'chance'. Some ratio of the population of users WILL always try to exploit a security system. Their success is certain, the only variable is time.

 

[Jopsy Pendragon]

All I ever see is people getting triggered by the thought of trigger warnings.

I know it's difficult for you honey, but can you show me on the dolly where the bad lady said you were expressing microagressions?

 

[Myficals]

Oh, is it time for the "I don't know what a trigger warning is, but I've seen teenagers misusing the concept on Tumblr, therefore it must be bullshit" thread again?

 

[Lady Darnk Juniorette]

Yes, they are triggerend by Halloween and such at e.g. Yale:


And a lecture held at Yale, Coddling you vs. tighten you which was already too much for some youngsters to listen to; but probably, as always, more hype than reality how far spread those are:

College kids gonna college kid.

I love how the concept of "over zealous college kid" is made over to be some new thing, like it hasn't always been.

Yet again youtube wasn't around back then to make money off of dishonest alt right/edgelord clickbait.

 

[Myficals]

Yes, they are triggerend by Halloween and such at e.g. Yale:

You like bringing this video up as an example of people being special snowflakes. I wonder, what do you know about it's provenance? Do you know why Halloween has upset a crowd of mostly black students at Yale?

The man under attack is Professor Nicholas Christakis, his wife, Professor Erika Christakis was part of the Yale faculty too. As a pair, they acted as advisors/mentors to one of the undergraduate colleges. A few days earlier, and in response to concerns raised by college multi-racial groups, the university Deans sent out advice to Yale students to avoid racially insensitive costumes like turbans, Native American headdresses and blackface. Some of the students under the Christakises didn't like this advice and brought their concerns to Erika. In response to these students, she then sent an email to the students of the college basically saying if you want to wear blackface go ahead, and if you don't like seeing blackface, look away. In the email, she explicitly noted her husband agreed with this stance.

I don't know about you, but I don't think a video of black students getting upset at a professor who's defending other students right to wear blackface, is a particularly good example of "special snowflakisim" gone mad.