So it's not that students are suddenly empowered to speak out. HAIDT: Well, students have been very outspoken about these issues for as long as I've been in the academy - in fact, when I was a student in the '80s.

That some of them - and again, this is not most - but a subgroup were becoming kind of thin-skinned and sometimes kind of vindictive in ways that just were hard to understand.Īlthough, we should point out the other view on this - right? - is that these students are speaking out for the first time, whereas before maybe they did not feel empowered to do so if someone were to say something that they would perceive as racist or misogynist or that that did, quote, unquote, 'trigger' a past trauma. And so a lot of us began to feel we don't understand our students. Just - there seemed to be a lot more conflict over things that seemed not malintentioned, often even helpful. Nationally, people are complaining about Halloween costumes or not even the costumes but the possibility, a memo, about Halloween costumes. So, you know, I showed a 19th-century painting of Ulysses tied to a mast, and it showed the sirens, and the sirens are topless as sirens tend to be, and someone complained that this was sexist for me to show this. JONATHAN HAIDT: But then suddenly around 2014, students began objecting to things that we thought were just strange and sometimes objecting in ways like not coming to talk to us but reporting us to authorities. They're used to students being provocative, and that was the starting point for Rachel Martin's conversation with Jonathan Haidt. Both have spent a lot of time in classrooms. The book is called 'The Coddling Of The American Mind.' It's written by free speech activist Greg Lukianoff and New York University Professor Jonathan Haidt. INSKEEP: A new book argues that such efforts on campus are harming an entire generation's intellectual development because they're shutting out ideas. UNIDENTIFIED PROTESTERS: (Chanting) Hey, hey, ho, ho, Charles Murray has got to go. INSKEEP: In Vermont, students at Middlebury College shouted down controversial speaker Charles Murray. UNIDENTIFED PROTESTERS: (Chanting) Shut it down. You may recall that last year, students at the University of California at Berkeley demanded the cancellation of speeches by conservative commentators Milo Yiannopoulos and Ann Coulter. College campuses face a question - how to balance free speech against demands for safe spaces and trigger warnings.

Book coddling of the american mind