On gender equality and the equating of outcome inequality with discrimination (see post #18 above), Jordan Peterson has a brief video up worth watching (trigger warning for the “coddled”): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PhpowcYxPkw
There is plenty of thought out there that runs counter to the orthodoxy that unequal outcomes = discrimination. I would recommend Peterson and Steven Pinker to get started.
However, most white men are not CEOs or political leaders or other top 0.1% or 0.01% types.
Most white men, along with most other people in the US, are looking at the prospect of downward economic mobility in the future and for their kids, due to increasing concentration of economic gains to the richest (already a trend, since millennials other than the richest are poorer than their boomer parents were at the same age). Unfortunately, when faced with what looks like a competitive negative sum game, many people, including many white men, play up their victimhood and blame or scapegoat others based on identity characteristics, rather than looking at economic and government policy trends that are behind the issue.
This isn’t just college. At my kids’ very, very liberal suburban Boston high school “white boys” are not allowed to freely express opinions. (For what it is worth…we are a very liberal family.) The social justice warriors were fine with people saying “lose the privilege” every time a white boy spoke. My kids quickly learned NOT to have opinions…or rather, only express opinions at home. And don’t try to do anything with a social impact if you are a white boy - that is just you “flexing your privilege”. It is just sad.
The book is an excellent book. And we need to get back to a society where we can disagree respectfully and not be triggered and hurt and whiney and expected everyone to be worried all the time. (Let the fireworks fly!)
blossom, I have no idea what you are responding to in post 18. I was not responding to your post 16 or addressing “systemic power imbalances” in 17 but merely noting that (and agreeing with Haidt’s point) that the “victimhood culture” engenders unproductive fragility using personal experience and perspective coming from a background that had to deal with adversity.
At my kids school, no one speaks. Literally, both the conservative and the liberal kids are so worried about those who take offense and the resulting parental backlash that no one discusses anything substantive. My kid couldn’t believe the debates we had in public school in NY in the 70s. Now, even the debate club cant discuss legalization of pot, or abortion, or gay rights, because some parent will be upset.
So grateful for my dd’s high school that had a club to debate current events. Lots of ground rules for civilized discussion, but a super great group that taught my daughter how to have an intelligent debate on polarizing issues without resorting to name calling and such. A sister school “banned” all political discussions. To me, that was a huge mistake.
I think this is a thoughtful review of the book and some of its major points:
https://greatergood.berkeley.edu/article/item/are_college_students_really_against_free_speech
And again, my memory may be hazy, but I think the authors said they focused on events at more “liberal leaning” schools because historically such colleges had been considered places where free speech and freedom of expression were more accepted and encouraged.
They also talk about how at many colleges the faculty is heavily made up of professors who consider themselves left-leaning or liberal (esp in the humanties, they have data and research on this), and that fact (that there are fewer professors who are conservative) can create an echo chamber and an environment where there is less discussion or consideration for other viewpoints because everyone already agrees with each other.
I’ve read this book and it has nothing to do with the issues of white males as victims or toxic masculinity that others have mentioned. The focus of the book is not political and they aren’t pointing the finger of blame at liberals or conservatives, but rather looking at societal changes and how those have affected the generation that started arriving on campus around 2013 (which they refer to as iGen or Gen Z). And by “coddled” they don’t mean spoiled, but rather that students are treated as though they are extremely fragile and in need of constant protection. Their main thesis is that students are actually “antifragile” and that challenges make you stronger and more resilient. The book’s subtitle is “How Good Intentions and Bad Ideas Are Setting Up a Generation for Failure.”
They point out that the iGen students were the first to have lived most of their lives with smartphones and social media. The book looks at how this generation was parented – not just helicopter but safety obsessed. They contend that parents’ behavior has been shaped by (1) exaggerated fears of the dangers lurking in the everyday world, and (2) anxiety about the competition for college admissions. They contend that this, combined with the amount of “screen time” for kids today, has resulted in a generation deprived of the chance to engage in unsupervised play and learn to problem solve, deal with risks/mistakes and to negotiate conflicts with peers face-to-face. This generation is much more likely to have delayed doing things like getting a driver’s license, getting a part-time job, traveled independently, etc. This is also the generation with a huge spike in diagnoses of anxiety and depression and with greater rates of suicide or self-harm. I should add that the book looks at a wide range of influences, not just parenting but broader societal issues.
The book also gives some interesting background about how they came to write the 2015 Atlantic article. Lukianoff has been with FIRE since 2001. Around 2013 he started to notice a change in the kind of censorship cases that were coming to FIRE’s attention. In the past, the censorship almost always originated from the administration, often based on outside pressure, in a top down fashion. Students were almost always the ones opposing censorship. But around 2013-2014 he noticed a surge in calls from students FOR censorship. And the justifications for censorship changed, with calls being based on notions of “safety” and equating speech with “violence” and “trauma.” The expanded use of the concept of “safety” is a big theme in the book.
Lukianoff reveals that he has suffered from depression for most of his life and was hospitalized for suicidal intentions in 2007. He credits cognitive behavioral therapy for saving his life. And he began to be concerned that the campus speech conflicts showed a lot of evidence of cognitive distortions – catastrophizing, dichotomous thinking, emotional reasoning, blaming/labeling, mind reading, etc. He believes the administrative responses were often the opposite of what CBT would tell you to do and actually reinforced cognitive distortions. That was when he teamed up with Haidt and they wrote their 2015 Atlantic article.
I found the book very thoughtful. For example, they say that instead of dismissively calling someone a “social justice warrior” we should actually discuss what justice means. Justice has procedural aspects as well as what they call “distributive.” And they talk about frameworks for having useful discussions about what is justice and how to achieve it. And they make various suggestions about how to integrate the concepts of CBT, especially into freshman orientation activities to facilitate healthy dialogue.
Regarding (1), the parents grew up during the crime wave, but have retained the resulting fear even as crime has declined since then. Regarding (2), college admissions has become much more competitive since the parents’ generation, and the increasing concentration of the gains of economic growth at the top (trend toward “elite or bust”) induces greater perceived need to compete to avoid downward mobility.
@ucbalumnus Regarding parents exaggerated fears, the authors give examples like the TV show America’s Most Wanted as an example of the type of thinking that led parents to believe that if their kids played outdoors without nonstop adult supervision they’d be sure to be snatched up by a murderous pedophile, when statistically the odds of that were extremely low.
@MWolf you said
I’d just like to point out that FIRE just put out its 2019 list of the Ten Worst Colleges for Free Speech and Liberty University is on the list. https://www.thefire.org/10-worst-colleges-for-free-speech-2019/
“I’d just like to point out that FIRE just put out its 2019 list of the Ten Worst Colleges for Free Speech and Liberty University is on the list. https://www.thefire.org/10-worst-colleges-for-free-speech-2019/“
Interesting list. Strange though considering that in the book the authors point towards schools on both coasts as being where this problem is occurring…
Maybe they need to look at their evidence again as most if not all of those schools are not located on either coast.
Yeah, kids today, I tell ya.
Good thing there were no twitter stories or online video in 1766!!
https://news.harvard.edu/gazette/story/2012/04/harvards-long-ago-student-risings/
(It wasn’t just Harvard though - From 1760 to 1860, wrote historian David F. Allmendinger Jr., American colleges as a whole experienced “a rising curve of collective student disorder.” https://www.jstor.org/stable/3786498?seq=1#page_scan_tab_contents )
Or older adults today.
These awful kids, when WE were young, back in the 1960s and 1970s, we NEVER would have done anything like THAT!! Next, these kids may even take over administrative buildings, have sit-ins, go out and riot in the streets, clash with the National Guard. Worse, they may even write songs about it.
I guess that people either have very short memories, or refuse to read a single book about the history of campus protests. Do they actually think that everything was all rainbows and sunshine across all the campuses, with students calmly walked to classes, discussing Weighty Philosophical And Scientific Topics? Do they actually think that this idyll lasted until… wait for it… Until The Millennials Destroyed It?
Where will YOU be when YOUR selective memory hits?
I read the book. As a conservative I was ready to hate it but I thought it was one of the best books I have read in a long time. It isn’t about victimhood, or any particular racial or ethnic group. It deals with the things people have been taught that are not true and that add to anxiety, depression, and polarization.
It is based on this article they wrote in 2015.
https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2015/09/the-coddling-of-the-american-mind/399356/