This would have to be the read of the entire weekend — Brilliant
“….Everywhere I looked, students were crying and consoling one another. The university had brought in therapy dogs, so that students could stroke them to alleviate their anxiety. At other campuses there were reports of colouring books and Play-Doh being provided to relieve stress.
On Columbia’s Low Steps, a large safe space had been assembled, at the centre of which students took turns to express their terror and revulsion at the news of Trump’s victory. A student told me they had just written their will because they expected to “end up in a puddle of blood” soon. One enterprising young man held a sign saying “free hugs”. He wasn’t short of customers. “This isn’t just a gimmick,” he said after our reassuring embrace. “This is an expression of a deep-seated need for bodily affection right now.”
They were behaving like toddlers deprived of their latest episode of Peppa Pig. As though their civilisation had crumbled overnight and the barbarians were hammering at the gates of their campus. What happened to the spirit of ’68, when Columbia’s radical students occupied university buildings in Harlem and fought with police to protest against gentrification? In just over a generation they’ve moved from marching with Black Panthers to petting therapy labradors called Mollie.
What is surprising to Lukianoff is that so much of the intolerance he sees today is coming from students rather than nannyish administrators and right-on faculty members. “Students were the best constituency for campus free speech, until 2012,” he says. “That’s been the big shift.”
So what happened to the students? The problem starts young. In fact, the real crisis that Haidt and Lukianoff identify is not political or ideological but one of mental health. And the most significant cause is not a lily-livered university system that appeases its fragile post-adolescents but overprotective parenting that fails to equip children to deal properly with confusion and adversity.
In Haidt and Lukianoff’s view, many of today’s kids just can’t cope with the real world. They have become snowflakes…”
READ ON — Rise Of The Snowflake Generation
“….In November 2016, just a few days after the election of Donald Trump, I joined a campus walkout at Columbia University in New York. The entire country was still reeling from the surprise result, but on elite liberal university campuses the atmosphere was closer to hysteria. Everywhere I looked, students were crying and consoling one another. The university had brought in therapy dogs, so that students could stroke them to alleviate their anxiety. At other campuses there were reports of colouring books and Play-Doh being provided to relieve stress.
On Columbia’s Low Steps, a large safe space had been assembled, at the centre of which students took turns to express their terror and revulsion at the news of Trump’s victory. A student told me they had just written their will because they expected to “end up in a puddle of blood” soon. One enterprising young man held a sign saying “free hugs”. He wasn’t short of customers. “This isn’t just a gimmick,” he said after our reassuring embrace. “This is an expression of a deep-seated need for bodily affection right now.”
It wasn’t hard to empathise with these students. It had been a nasty, often racist campaign and an angry reaction on campus was to be expected. But the tone of their response surprised me. They were behaving like toddlers deprived of their latest episode of Peppa Pig. As though their civilisation had crumbled overnight and the barbarians were hammering at the gates of their campus. What happened to the spirit of ’68, when Columbia’s radical students occupied university buildings in Harlem and fought with police to protest against gentrification? In just over a generation they’ve moved from marching with Black Panthers to petting therapy labradors called Mollie.
Two people who would be unsurprised by this story are Greg Lukianoff and Jonathan Haidt, who have become lead chroniclers of what they describe as the “coddling of the American mind”. This also happens to be the title of their new book, which seeks to explain the roots of the new campus culture.
This latest book is an extension of a magazine story they wrote in 2015, when the issue of student intolerance and extremism was first emerging. It has exploded since then.
The pair have a specific term for the kind of behaviour I saw at Columbia — “catastrophising” — the act of turning bad and unwelcome events into disastrous ones. They believe that an entire generation of students has been brought up as frail and coddled, allergic to opinions and events that diverge from their sanctioned world view.
According to Haidt and Lukianoff, the outward manifestation of this trend is a new form of campus radicalism, notable for its fusion of intolerance and fragility, that has arisen in the past five years. The students who engage in this new extremism demand safe spaces and trigger warnings — written alerts that flag potentially distressing material. They are quick to point to microaggressions and call out white supremacy. They think in binary terms, dividing the world neatly into good and bad actors, instead of multifaceted and flawed human beings. Their arguments tend to be driven by emotions, how something makes them feel, rather than pointing to facts or rationality. And they view hurtful speech as a form of violence, thus the fad for “no-platforming” — disinviting speakers deemed insufficiently aware of social justice issues.
A resort to victimhood is often preferred to dignified opposition — or what British classicist Mary Beard has called “unbatterability”. Demands for retraction have replaced rebuttals; a common response to an unwelcome opinion is: “You can’t say that.”
As a pair of broadly centrist liberals, this kind of coddled extremism bothers Haidt and Lukianoff deeply. The trend is most apparent in the US, but it is also a growing presence in Australian and British universities, where speakers such as Germaine Greer and Peter Tatchell have been no-platformed in recent years and a culture of offence-taking has developed.
Haidt and Lukianoff draw on some notable recent examples from US universities to illustrate their point. The most revealing story is the now notorious Yale Halloween row of 2015, when the university’s Intercultural Affairs Committee sent an email to students guiding them on how to avoid giving offence through their choice of fancy dress.
Erika Christakis, a professor, gently objected to the directive in an email to her students, suggesting that they might be better off deciding how to “dress themselves”. Christakis was pilloried: more than 740 Yale students, alumni and faculty members signed an open letter that described her email as “offensive”.
Her husband Nicholas Christakis, another Yale professor and master of a student college, also was vilified when he stepped in to defend her. In one remarkable video, he was surrounded by outraged students, many in tears, who accused him of fostering violence on campus. “I am sick of looking at you,” one told him. “You are disgusting.” Another student said: “It is your job to create a place of comfort and home.” Both professors ended up stepping down from their pastoral positions.
Universities, say Haidt and Lukianoff, should have open debate and free inquiry coded into their DNA. But they are struggling to fulfil their prescribed role. “The reason this is so troubling is that universities actually could be key institutions that can reduce polarisation in our society,” Lukianoff says. “Unfortunately, a lot of them now do the opposite.”
Campus extremism is helping drive what Haidt calls a “polarisation cycle”, where even trivial new absurdities — protests against white students making sushi, cannabis-themed parties being accused of appropriating Caribbean culture — are seized on by the right-wing media and held up as examples of a decadent and lost society, ultimately driving support for Trump and the alt-right. Much to the chagrin of the Left, Haidt places blame on both sides. “There is certainly a moral panic on the right about free speech,” he says. “But there is also a very real problem on campus. If university life becomes just like every other part of life, where it’s us versus them and to hell with the truth, then we should just shut ’em down.”
Haidt identifies several causes for the emergence of this volatile snowflake culture. One is “historically low levels of viewpoint diversity on campus”. Most US campuses used to count one conservative professor for every three liberals. That number is now more like one in 10. “Some faculties are 30 to one,” Haidt says. “Sociology, gender studies, history, anthropology … Many departments don’t have a single conservative in them at all.” An unchallenged left-wing orthodoxy is the result.
He also says new responses to social justice concerns, such as microaggressions and trigger warnings, although well meaning, have become counter-productive through a process of “concept creep”. Take cultural appropriation. “As with all these concepts there is something good, right and true about it,” Haidt says. “If white record producers find black bluesmen in the 1940s or 50s and take their music and make a lot of money, then they are appropriating something. They are taking something. That’s a problem.
“But if two white women start a burrito shop in Seattle, they’re not taking something from Mexicans. That’s culture. That’s normal. That’s creativity. That’s cultural exchange.”
He sees the growth of “illiberal” identity politics, where each individual can speak from the perspective only of their group identity, as having the opposite of its intended effect, which is more fairness. By separating people into silos of gender, race and sexuality, you end up bolstering their sense of tribal identity, causing more division and discrimination, not less.
“If we were Russian saboteurs,” Haidt says, “if Vladimir Putin created an intellectual warfare unit and wanted to get Americans to lock themselves into combat with each other, he would do pretty much what we’re doing on campus.”
What is surprising to Lukianoff is that so much of the intolerance he sees today is coming from students rather than nannyish administrators and right-on faculty members. “Students were the best constituency for campus free speech, until 2012,” he says. “That’s been the big shift.”
So what happened to the students? The problem starts young. In fact, the real crisis that Haidt and Lukianoff identify is not political or ideological but one of mental health. And the most significant cause is not a lily-livered university system that appeases its fragile post-adolescents but overprotective parenting that fails to equip children to deal properly with confusion and adversity.
In Haidt and Lukianoff’s view, many of today’s kids just can’t cope with the real world. They have become snowflakes. The consequences are severe. Anxiety, depression and suicide among young people have all rocketed in recent years, particularly for girls. In 2006, the proportion of US girls reporting a major depressive episode was 12 per cent. In 2016, it was nearly 20 per cent. Similarly, in 2007, the suicide rate among US males aged 15 to 19 was 11 per 100,000. By 2015, this had risen to 14 per 100,000.
What is driving this rising affliction? Lukianoff sees it as a by-product of huge advances in safety and technology. “Our lives are ever more comfortable, which is good,” he says. “But that gives us problems of progress. We recoil violently from discomfort.”
A familiar culprit is, of course, digital culture and social media. The book leans heavily on the work of US psychologist Jean Twenge and her analysis of “iGen”, the post-millennial generation, born after 1995. Twenge attributes the surge in youth mental health issues directly to the rise of smartphones and excessive screen time, which have made deep inroads into the amount of time children spend playing sport, reading books or talking face-to-face. Haidt believes it was iGen’s arrival at university around 2013 that helped unleash the recent spate of intolerance. Their entry into the workplace has just begun.
However, they say there is more to it than this. A culture of “safetyism” has come to dominate parenting. The age at which children are allowed to travel freely on their own has grown older and older. Tragic and heavily reported cases of children being abducted and murdered have caused parents to overprotect.
“Safety has taken on an almost religious quality,” Lukianoff says. “Look at how much progress we’ve made in protecting children. There seemed to be no downside in just getting safer and safer. But what we’re seeing now is that if you do too much of that, children end up not feeling enough control or agency over their own lives. It causes anxiety and depression.”
They use the example of peanut allergies to illustrate their point. In the mid-1990s, four in every 1000 American children under 18 had a peanut allergy. By 2008, this number had tripled to 14 out of every 1000. The cause of this, according to an authoritative report published in 2015, was that the withdrawal of peanuts to protect children had led to more of them becoming allergic, as they were denied the opportunity to develop a tolerance.
Haidt and Lukianoff say the same applies to mental strength. If children live protected, screen-based lives with no exposure to risk or danger, no fear or freedom, then their first exposure to reality, even in the relative safe space of a campus, is likely to be traumatic. Young people will become accustomed to adults resolving their problems, a condition described as learned helplessness. “It is your job to create a place of comfort and home,” as the Yale student told Nicholas Christakis.
Another related issue is the decline of free play. Haidt and Lukianoff criticise the “resume arms race” that has (some) children taking extra French lessons aged six instead of playing outside. Many parents are so busy prepping their children for college that they neglect to equip them with the tools they need to thrive when they get there. Free play, after all, is the earliest training we get for life in a democracy. Skills such as teamwork, compromise and conflict resolution are all developed in the sandpit or the playground. “If we deprived kids of reading until they were 14, we would be harming them for life,” Haidt says. “But what about being independent? What about being outside all by yourself? The same applies.”
So how can we put an end to helicopter parenting? “Talking to other parents, I’ve never met anyone who defended helicopter parenting. We are all opposed to it,” Haidt says. “We all do it, but we don’t want to. So it’s a group co-ordination problem. If we change a few parameters here, I think we are going to get a flood of kids meeting up outside in parks and playgrounds to play. We’re going to get parents backing off.”
Haidt and Lukianoff draw a compelling arc from fearful parenting through to temper tantrums on campus. They advocate for the teaching of cognitive behavioural therapy — learning to read and understand your own thoughts, to see them as just thoughts, to put things in a proper perspective — as a solution to student angst and rage.
But is it all really that bad? Are post-millennials really all a bunch of feeble, depressed tech addicts? The colleges Haidt and Lukianoff identify as having a real problem with campus intolerance tend to be a minority of elite, liberal schools — think Yale and Columbia or Goldsmiths and SOSA (School of Oriental and African Studies), University of London. They’ve been accused of cherrypicking the most extreme incidents on campus to paint an unduly apocalyptic vision of a brattish student body. To many contemporary students, whose voices are barely heard in Haidt and Lukianoff’s book, this is little more than entitled whining from two white male liberal professors; an alarmist jeremiad from two privileged men uncomfortable with the social justice revolution and who are desperately trying to preserve a world in which people like them could have nice, calm, rational debates about progress without uppity students shrieking them down with demands for more equality.
Adam Serwer, a writer for The Atlantic magazine, says “the campus threat-to-free-speech story survives in disproportion to its importance because it involves the children of financial and scholarly elites who drive press coverage; because it allows elders to sneer at a younger generation; and because of conservative media outlets, which see these stories as politically useful and amplify such stories for their audience”.
And what of the Right, unable to bear the sight of black NFL players kneeling in protest during the national anthem, furiously trying to prevent the burning of the American flag, incapable of stomaching the idea of a mosque being built in the vicinity of ground zero in New York? Aren’t they snowflakes too? Why do Haidt and Lukianoff spend so much time punching left?
“If by punching left you mean trying to fix my home then, yes, I’m trying to fix my home,” says Haidt. “I spent a lot of time on political polarisation at the national level, but the national problem is so severe and so intractable that I’ve largely given up on that. I’ve decided that the way to adapt to permanently high polarisation is to fix our institutions. The one that I live in is the university.”
What does he make of the moaning white male critique? “That argument basically illustrates our point,” Haidt says. “Our point is that universities are supposed to be about the search for truth. We’re trying to understand a problem and we’ve offered a diagnosis. If they have a different diagnosis let them put it forward. But if they just attack us for our race or gender, then they are discrediting themselves.”
Perhaps the strongest argument in Haidt and Lukianoff’s favour, though, is this: if you see this issue as being about little more than a few sanctimonious teenagers throwing hissy fits on campus then, yes, it is probably receiving too much attention. But if you accept their premise, that it’s really a story about mental wellbeing and emotional fragility, about a generation acting out because it has been set up to fail by bad parenting and poorly designed institutions, then their message is an urgent one. And it is one that resonates well beyond dusty libraries and manicured quadrangles into all of our lives…”
The Sunday Times Magazine