The coddling of the American Mind

[beamMe]

A very interesting read from The Atlantic on "trigger-warnings" and "micro-aggressions" on todays campuses in the US.

Two terms have risen quickly from obscurity into common campus parlance. Microaggressions are small actions or word choices that seem on their face to have no malicious intent but that are thought of as a kind of violence nonetheless. For example, by some campus guidelines, it is a microaggression to ask an Asian American or Latino American “Where were you born?,” because this implies that he or she is not a real American. Trigger warnings are alerts that professors are expected to issue if something in a course might cause a strong emotional response. For example, some students have called for warnings that Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart describes racial violence and that F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby portrays misogyny and physical abuse, so that students who have been previously victimized by racism or domestic violence can choose to avoid these works, which they believe might “trigger” a recurrence of past trauma.
Some recent campus actions border on the surreal. In April, at Brandeis University, the Asian American student association sought to raise awareness of microaggressions against Asians through an installation on the steps of an academic hall. The installation gave examples of microaggressions such as “Aren’t you supposed to be good at math?” and “I’m colorblind! I don’t see race.” But a backlash arose among other Asian American students, who felt that the display itself was a microaggression. The association removed the installation, and its president wrote an e-mail to the entire student body apologizing to anyone who was “triggered or hurt by the content of the microaggressions.” -- The Atlantic

 

[JoeZhang]

A very interesting read

In what way? You've dumped a bit quote but haven't outlined how or why it is worth reading.

 

[Jedi_Master]

For articles like this - before I even read them I usually look up the authors.

First we have Greg Lukianoff whose most recent book is:
Unlearning Liberty: Campus Censorship and the End of American Debate

Amazon Link

Blurb:

First Amendment lawyer Greg Lukianoff reveals how higher education fails to teach students to become critical thinkers: by stifling open debate, our campuses are supercharging ideological divisions, promoting groupthink, and encouraging an unscholarly certainty about complex issues.

Lukianoff walks readers through the life of a modern-day college student, from orientation to the end of freshman year. Through this lens, he describes startling violations of free speech rights: a student in Indiana punished for publicly reading a book, a student in Georgia expelled for a pro-environment collage he posted on Facebook, students at Yale banned from putting an F. Scott Fitzgerald quote on a T shirt, and students across the country corralled into tiny “free speech zones” when they wanted to express their views.

But Lukianoff goes further, demonstrating how this culture of censorship is bleeding into the larger society. As he explores public controversies involving Juan Williams, Rush Limbaugh, Bill Maher, Richard Dawkins, Larry Summers—even Dave Barry and Jon Stewart—Lukianoff paints a stark picture of our ability as a nation to discuss important issues rationally. Unlearning Liberty: Campus Censorship and the End of American Debate illuminates how intolerance for dissent and debate on today’s campus threatens the freedom of every citizen and makes us all just a little bit dumber.

As you might imagine - this book is well loved by right wing websites and organizations - who use the anecdotes within it as an example of the PC sickness that is infecting the great United States of America.

Greg is also the president of the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education or FIRE.

Link

That organization has taken some rather controversial stances in recent years, particularly focusing on free speech rights on college campuses.

The other author is Jonathan Haidt - a professor who's newest book is "The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided by Politics and Religion."

Blurb:

A new theory of how the brain constructs emotions that could revolutionize psychology, health care, law enforcement, and our understanding of the human mind
Emotions feel automatic to us; that’s why scientists have long assumed that emotions are hardwired in the body or the brain. Today, however, the science of emotion is in the midst of a revolution on par with the discovery of relativity in physics and natural selection in biology. This paradigm shift has far-reaching implications not only for psychology but also medicine, the legal system, airport security, child-rearing, and even meditation.


Leading the charge is psychologist and neuroscientist Lisa Feldman Barrett, whose theory of emotion is driving a deeper understanding of the mind and brain, and what it means to be human. Her research overturns the widely held belief that emotions are housed in different parts of the brain, and are universally expressed and recognized. Instead, emotion is constructed in the moment by core systems interacting across the whole brain, aided by a lifetime of learning.

Are emotions more than automatic reactions? Does rational thought really control emotion? How does emotion affect disease? How can you make your children more emotionally intelligent? How Emotions Are Made reveals the latest research and intriguing practical applications of the new science of emotion, mind, and brain.

Frankly that all sounds like word salad rubbish to me, but there you have it.

Now on to the article itself:

I was immediately put off by opening salvo - a cavalcade of anecdotes ripped free from context and with no additional information provided as to the long term response from the various parties, including university administration is used to extrapolate some "new" theory - that some unnamed "movement" is attempting to create something called:

You might call this impulse vindictive protectiveness. It is creating a culture in which everyone must think twice before speaking up, lest they face charges of insensitivity, aggression, or worse.

Say what???

That's a big jump.

Then after making this jump - the authors then attack the effects of this new "vindictive protectiveness" even though they haven't proven it even exists.

Chuckle.

The next section has the standard laments about the deleterious effects of political ideology and safety regulations on innocent children that are now so soft they can't stand against the bracing wind of sexual harassment and racism.

Then the authors make some random observations about social media and then tie it all up in a neat bow by talking about the increase of mental illness - of course they "do not mean to imply simple causation" but I mean look at the facts people! Safety regulations, ideology and Facebook coinciding with increase of mental illness - that can't be an accident!

I skimmed the rest to be honest, as it became apparent that the pattern was to point out some outrageous event or anecdotal complaints from a professor or a group of students to skip about through a grab bag of theoretical objections to a list of hot topic buzzwords. It became rather tedious after a while.

The only conclusion the authors make that I can somewhat agree with is:

The biggest single step in the right direction does not involve faculty or university administrators, but rather the federal government, which should release universities from their fear of unreasonable investigation and sanctions by the Department of Education. Congress should define peer-on-peer harassment according to the Supreme Court’s definition in the 1999 case Davis v. Monroe County Board of Education. The Davis standard holds that a single comment or thoughtless remark by a student does not equal harassment; harassment requires a pattern of objectively offensive behavior by one student that interferes with another student’s access to education. Establishing the Davis standard would help eliminate universities’ impulse to police their students’ speech so carefully.

There is some need, in my opinion, to refine harassment standards at a Federal level, but it is not a glaring need, and individual institutions should still be free to set their own standards in free marketplace.

The rest of the conclusions - like the article itself - are sort of vague whining about "kids these days" and the people who listen to them.

 

[BigJake]

There's one thing we have to thank David Horowitz for (silver linings on an otherwise horrendous turd): he provided a living object lesson in the necessity to be wary about culture warriors inflating scattered examples of on-campus silliness into "a crisis!" or "worrying trend" of their choosing, and made clear that it's frequently a good idea to consult with the people actually experiencing and teaching on those campuses before one goes endorsing this sort of thing. This can often be done with a minimal amount of Googling and make the resulting conversation, hopefully, more interesting or at the very least more accurate.

Sarah Seltzer surveys some of the basic reasons to be wary of the latest trend in campus culture warriorism, the "coddling of the mind" think piece:

1. Most of the examples to support these pieces are purely anecdotal:

In the case of the campus “sensitivity” trend piece, the same four or five incidents are getting brought up over and over again. There’s the “Oberlin incident,” in which an Oberlin committee recommended some fairly stringent trigger warning guidelines — guidelines that were then rejected. The Columbia incident was student letter to the editor about Ovid, which expressed the views of exactly two people: the people who wrote the letter. No policy was changed as a result. In almost none of these incidents has an administration or school actually cracked down on free expression — and almost universally, when there was some sort of unfair punishment, a general outcry ensued. These cherry-picked stories, upsetting as they are, do not constitute a crisis.

. . .

Interestingly enough, a takedown of the recent Tinder panic at the Science of Us makes a similar point:

“The plural of anecdote is not data.” This is a well-worn nerdism, but it reveals an important truth: When we consider our experiences and those of our friends and family, we’re only getting a tiny chunk of the full story of humanity…This is worth keeping in mind whenever a new moral panic is afoot.

. . .

2. Conservatives are in fact more likely to be “sensitive” and “babyish” about content, yet all the alarm is about liberalism.

Perhaps the biggest national threat to academic freedom right now is Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker (currently a serious presidential candidate!) actively fighting his own university professors from the top down. And he’s a legitimate contender! Why aren’t magazine cover stories up in arms about this, for instance?

In Wisconsin, legislators have just lowered the high bar for dismissing tenured faculty at the direct demand of Scott Walker and the state Republican regime. Shared governance, in which the Wisconsin university system once led the world, has been reduced to a mere advisory process. In practice, this means that decisions about academic programs – and the faculty who work on them – will be made by administrators who are either themselves political appointees or who serve at the leisure of these appointees.

A recent op-ed in the Washington Post also used facts and numbers to push back on the idea that “political correctness” was a left-wing phenomenon. Citing a survey about censorship, Catherine Rampell noted that: “In almost every category, Republicans were more likely than Democrats to endorse book bans.” Why is no one calling these censorious types squeamish babies who demand to be coddled?

. . .

4. There are crises in academia, but they are not solely curricular or student-caused.

The perilous state of adjunct professors, and all professors’ vulnerability to administrative interference, are major issues facing the academy. Furthermore, many of the teachers and professors I spoke to this spring said that the commodification and packaging of school is a culture shift that gets conflated with the “PC” issue.

And more detail here:

In The Atlantic's latest cover story, “The Coddling of the American Mind,” Greg Lukianoff and Jonathan Haidt insinuate that trigger warnings and "vindictive protectiveness" are behind the college mental health crisis."A movement is arising, undirected and driven largely by students, to scrub campuses clean of words, ideas, and subjects that might cause discomfort or give offense," they write, adding that a "campus culture devoted to policing speech and punishing speakers is likely to engender patterns of thought that are surprisingly similar to those long identified by cognitive behavioral therapists as causes of depression and anxiety. The new protectiveness may be teaching students to think pathologically." Which is just an academic way of saying that politically correct students are driving themselves crazy.

How have trigger warnings, of all things, been elevated to explanatory value akin to academic and professional pressures, increased accessibility to college, familial and broader economic pressures, reduced sleep, sexual assault epidemics, social media image policing, and any number of other factors that experts have identified as serious contributors to mental health problems on college campuses? I don’t doubt that emotional coddling can play a negative role in the mental health of college students, and so is worth investigating. But I also think Lukianoff, the head Foundation for Individual Rights in Education, and Haidt, a social psychologist at the NYU-Stern School of Business, are granting certain practices of care on college campuses outsized and in some cases misleading roles in the mental health crisis.

I write this as a professor well outside of Haidt’s field, from a pedagogical standpoint; which is to say from one of several very different kinds of caregiving roles on a college campus, one concerned primarily with students’ intellectual development (as opposed to their general mental health in a clinical context). Our national conversations about trigger warnings and political correctness evince a troubling lack of awareness about what it actually looks like in real life to express sensitivities to college students about their apparently increasing anxieties and traumas. We’re still getting trigger warnings wrong.

I never imagined becoming a defender of trigger warnings. This is the first time I’ve written (or spoken) the word “microaggressions” in recent memory. I have been and continue to be a proponent of the idea that the best way to handle wrongheadedness and hate speech is to address these with corrective speech, to present ideas, rationales, and evidence that overwhelm ignorance and bigotry with a blistering light. Accordingly, when vulgar or emotionally challenging material is part of the subject matter I’m responsible for teaching, or serves an otherwise specific pedagogical purpose, I’m not shy about it.

Here’s a brief and by no means exhaustive list of things I’ve carefully selected for college syllabi and deliberately taught in college courses: a pair of poems about impotence and premature ejaculation; a satire about slaughtering human infants and feeding them to the poor; a poem that uses the c-word twice in a mere 33 lines, and describes King Charles II in coitus with a his mistress with the phrase “his dull, graceless bollocks hang an arse”; a novel in which a wealthy man gets his maid to marry him by kidnapping her and continually cornering her with unwanted sexual advances; a graphic history of the torture methods and other cruelties done to African slaves leading up to the Haitian Revolution; a poem written in the voice of a male domestic servant and attempted rapist contacting his victim from prison.

The items on this list, and many others on my syllabi, could be censored by "Social Justice Warriors" from the left, since many of them could be triggering for students suffering from post-traumatic stress. In another context, however, they could be censored from the right, by people who tell the sexual assault survivor balking at a literary rape scene to “grow up,” then turn around and oppose the teaching of sexually explicit material because it’s “trash.”

In both cases, censoring this material is a bad idea, and providing context is the best avenue for explaining why. If you read the list above and wonder how or why any serious person would teach such material at a prestigious (and expensive) college, consider the authors behind the list. It includes works by major, canonical authors from antiquity to the eighteenth century, such as Ovid, Aphra Behn, Jonathan Swift, John Wilmot, Samuel Richardson, and Lady Mary Wortley Montagu. It also includes the historian C.L.R. James’s The Black Jacobins, one of the definitive histories of the Haitian Revolution. Simply put, leaving this stuff off the syllabus because it might be triggering is not an option.

As I’ve explained elsewhere, however, I use trigger warnings in the classroom as a way of preparing students who may be suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder while also easing the entire class into a discussion of the material. The thinking behind the idea that trigger warnings are a form of censorship is fundamentally illogical: those who offer warnings, at our professional discretion, about potentially triggering material are doing so precisely because we’re about to teach it! If we used trigger warnings to say, effectively, “don’t read this, it’s scary,” then there’d be no need to warn in the first place; we’d just leave the material off the syllabus.

It’s true that giving a warning runs the risk of students avoiding or disengaging with the material out of fear of being triggered (in my three years of teaching, students have come to office hours to discuss sensitive material, but not one has left class or failed to turn in an assignment because of a trigger warning). If a student disengages, however, a professor still can (and should) follow up in a couple of ways. One is to have a private conversation with the student about the material, away from the pressures of the classroom; another is to take the student’s response as an occasion to check in with the student and make sure they have access to campus mental health resources. Few of the media voices catastrophizing trigger warnings seem to understand that professors’ interactions with students in the classroom and during office hours are some of the most important ways of catching mental health (or time management, or substance abuse) issues in our students that may need further attention. While the purpose of trigger warnings is not to screen for mental health problems, being attuned to how students are reacting to material, and prompting them to react to the hard stuff, can help us catch problems before they become real catastrophes.

For my money, the original article is not really that interesting. It's just the latest Great Blast of the Trumpet Against the Monstrous Regiment of the "Politically Correct," and as mis-targeted and misconceived as that sort of thing generally tends to be.

 

[Jedi_Master]

Aaron Hanlon put it well:

Which is just an academic way of saying that politically correct students are driving themselves crazy.

That precisely describes the vibe I got from that article.

Thanks for the share BigJake.

 

[BigJake]

Cheers. I forgot to provide the actual link to the first piece quoted from Sarah Seltzer, which is here in its entirety.

 

[Hound of UIster]

A very interesting read from The Atlantic on "trigger-warnings" and "micro-aggressions" on todays campuses in the US.

Two terms have risen quickly from obscurity into common campus parlance. Microaggressions are small actions or word choices that seem on their face to have no malicious intent but that are thought of as a kind of violence nonetheless. For example, by some campus guidelines, it is a microaggression to ask an Asian American or Latino American “Where were you born?,” because this implies that he or she is not a real American. Trigger warnings are alerts that professors are expected to issue if something in a course might cause a strong emotional response. For example, some students have called for warnings that Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart describes racial violence and that F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby portrays misogyny and physical abuse, so that students who have been previously victimized by racism or domestic violence can choose to avoid these works, which they believe might “trigger” a recurrence of past trauma.
Some recent campus actions border on the surreal. In April, at Brandeis University, the Asian American student association sought to raise awareness of microaggressions against Asians through an installation on the steps of an academic hall. The installation gave examples of microaggressions such as “Aren’t you supposed to be good at math?” and “I’m colorblind! I don’t see race.” But a backlash arose among other Asian American students, who felt that the display itself was a microaggression. The association removed the installation, and its president wrote an e-mail to the entire student body apologizing to anyone who was “triggered or hurt by the content of the microaggressions.” -- The Atlantic

Reading this. The problems raised seems more indicative of problems and failures with university and college administration (probably their dependence on tuition money in the face of cuts) than actual academic coddling of students by professors and adjuncts and the article is way too dependent on anecdotal evidence.

 

[beamMe]

A very interesting read from The Atlantic on "trigger-warnings" and "micro-aggressions" on todays campuses in the US.

Two terms have risen quickly from obscurity into common campus parlance. Microaggressions are small actions or word choices that seem on their face to have no malicious intent but that are thought of as a kind of violence nonetheless. For example, by some campus guidelines, it is a microaggression to ask an Asian American or Latino American “Where were you born?,” because this implies that he or she is not a real American. Trigger warnings are alerts that professors are expected to issue if something in a course might cause a strong emotional response. For example, some students have called for warnings that Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart describes racial violence and that F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby portrays misogyny and physical abuse, so that students who have been previously victimized by racism or domestic violence can choose to avoid these works, which they believe might “trigger” a recurrence of past trauma.
Some recent campus actions border on the surreal. In April, at Brandeis University, the Asian American student association sought to raise awareness of microaggressions against Asians through an installation on the steps of an academic hall. The installation gave examples of microaggressions such as “Aren’t you supposed to be good at math?” and “I’m colorblind! I don’t see race.” But a backlash arose among other Asian American students, who felt that the display itself was a microaggression. The association removed the installation, and its president wrote an e-mail to the entire student body apologizing to anyone who was “triggered or hurt by the content of the microaggressions.” -- The Atlantic

Reading this. The problems raised seems more indicative of problems and failures with university and college administration (probably their dependence on tuition money in the face of cuts) than actual academic coddling of students by professors and adjuncts and the article is way too dependent on anecdotal evidence.

How many anecdotes does it take make it a problem?

 

[Timewalker]

For articles like this - before I even read them I usually look up the authors.

First we have Greg Lukianoff whose most recent book is:
Unlearning Liberty: Campus Censorship and the End of American Debate

Amazon Link

Blurb:

<snip>

Lukianoff walks readers through the life of a modern-day college student, from orientation to the end of freshman year. Through this lens, he describes startling violations of free speech rights: a student in Indiana punished for publicly reading a book, a student in Georgia expelled for a pro-environment collage he posted on Facebook, students at Yale banned from putting an F. Scott Fitzgerald quote on a T shirt, and students across the country corralled into tiny “free speech zones” when they wanted to express their views.

<snip>

So are there any links to these cases? I find it very difficult to believe that students can be punished for publicly reading books. Or was it a specific book that was the problem (something on the banned list)? Even so, that's ridiculous.