BY JOHN K. WILSON
Jonathan Haidt, a professor of psychology at New York University, and Greg Lukianoff, president and CEO of the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (FIRE), have written a new book, The Coddling of the American Mind: How Good Intentions and Bad Ideas Are Setting Up a Generation for Failure.
Haidt and Lukianoff’s best-selling book has received laudatory reviews from many places. This is not one of those laudatory reviews. Although I agree with many things they write, and share their general outlook in opposition to safetyism (protecting people from any possible harms, including offensive ideas) and in favor of free speech, I want to focus on my disagreements because dissent is more interesting and more important.
Back in 2015, I criticized the Atlantic article Haidt and Lukianoff wrote that this book is based on. Their thesis was simple: “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.” As I wrote: “Unfortunately, their thesis is dead wrong: they completely misdiagnose the problem on campus, blaming a massive generational psychological shift for censorship on campus, instead of the real cause: a political problem of powerful administrative structures promoting repression at colleges.”
Now they have expanded their article into a longer, and worse, book that aims to diagnose the safetyism ills of our entire culture, not just universities. But the book is deeply flawed when it examines campus free speech, because it is based on a dubious and unproven premise, and because Haidt and Lukianoff identify the wrong underlying causes of campus censorship today.
Haidt and Lukianoff ask, “Why did things change so rapidly on many campuses between 2013 and 2017?”(15) The problem is that the premise is flawed. There has been no rapid change on college campuses in the past five years. Critics point to a few anecdotes (Middlebury! Berkeley!) and imagine we’re in the middle of a grand cultural revolution that no evidence actually supports.
According to Haidt and Lukianoff, “Something began changing on many campuses around 2013, and the idea that college students should not be exposed to ‘offensive’ ideas is now a majority position on campus.”(48) Their basis for this is a 2017 survey where 58% of college students agreed that it is “important to be part of a campus community where I am not exposed to intolerant and offensive ideas.”(48) But 45% of conservatives also agreed, and it’s not surprising that most students want a college community that’s tolerant of them. The same survey found that 91% of college students agree that it “is important to be part of a campus community where I am exposed to the ideas and opinions of other students, even if they are different from my own.” This is not evidence of a censorship revolution caused by safetyism.
The cause of this alleged spike in censorship (which they offer no evidence to show), according to Haidt and Lukianoff, is that “Students were beginning to demand protection from speech….”(9) The problem on campus is distorted policies enforced by administrators, not the distorted thinking of students. There’s a simple reason why: students do not have power. No one really cares what they think. As has always happened, students who think badly may indeed demand censorship. Well, get in line. There’s a whole of other people—administrators, trustees, politicians, donors, advocacy groups—who also want censorship and have far more power and money than students do.
Safetyism is not the cause of campus censorship; safetyism is the excuse given for a small proportion of censorship cases. You could eradicate safetyism entirely, and it would not change campus censorship much at all.
At the core of the book are these three “Great Untruths”:
#1: “What doesn’t kill you makes you weaker,” or the idea that exposure to offensive or difficult ideas is traumatic.
#2: “Always trust your feelings,” or the notion that feeling upset by an idea is a reason to discount it.
#3: “Life is a battle between good people and evil people,” or homogenous tribal thinking that leads people to shame those whose views fall outside that of their group.
These “great untruths” denounce straw figures constructed from simplistic attacks that bear little resemblance to the actual concerns and tactics of activists.
Great Untruth #1: “What doesn’t kill you makes you weaker.”
The problem with this idea is that Haidt and Lukianoff are wrong. Most of the time, harmful things do make you weaker, which is why we try to avoid being harmed. Haidt and Lukianoff would certainly not apply their theories on this point to campus censorship. They don’t celebrate repression as a way to toughen up its targets and make them stronger. To the contrary, they understand that censorship and fear weaken their victims and universities, and that we need to oppose repression because it harms us all and makes us weaker.
The key in understanding harm is to distinguish between actions and ideas. Harmful actions (violence, threats, punishments, discrimination, censorship) need to be stopped because they endanger people and their rights. Harmful ideas are different. Harmful ideas shouldn’t be banned in the same way that harmful actions are. Harmful ideas even have the potential to be good if used and understood in the right way. But instead of making this key distinction, Haidt and Lukianoff spout their gym coach nonsense about how suffering makes you stronger.
Great Untruth #2: “Always trust your feelings.”
Attacking your opponents as “emotional” is a classic example of lazy argumentation.
Not only is it mostly inaccurate, but even when it is accurate, it’s irrelevant to any philosophical debate. And it’s hypocritical.
The book reveals that the origin of this project was Lukianoff’s struggles with depression, and how he found a cure in Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT). Obviously, if you believe that something may have saved your life, you have a deep emotional attachment to it and want to share it with others, as Haidt and Lukianoff do in the Appendix (“How to Do CBT”) and in their recommendations to train all students in CBT.
The fact the Haidt and Lukianoff denounce “emotional responses” in a book devoted to Lukianoff’s emotional response to CBT reveals this kind of hypocrisy, but it also shows how incorrect they are. Just because Lukianoff is emotional about CBT doesn’t mean he’s wrong. I’m emotional about censorship, but I’m still correct to favor free speech and logical in my arguments. Merely because some people get upset about racism doesn’t mean that their arguments can be dismissed as “emotional.” There is nothing more cringe-worthy than watching two white guys condescendingly tell women and minorities that they’re being “emotional” for criticizing racism and sexism.
Consider Haidt and Lukianoff’s deeply misguided attack on the concept of microaggressions. They accuse people who discuss microaggressions of being emotional and claim that activists “encouraged them to engage in emotional reasoning.”(40)
Haidt and Lukianoff assert that students are being told to “always trust your feelings.” Who, exactly, is telling them this? They quote no one in their book who makes an assertion like this. Instead, Haidt and Lukianoff merely criticize a 2007 article by Derald Wing Sue and colleagues who popularized the idea of microaggressions. Haidt and Lukianoff write, “Unfortunately, when Sue included ‘unintentional’ slights, and when he defined the slights entirely in terms of the listener’s interpretation, he encouraged people to make such misperceptions.”(40)
I can’t find anywhere in Sue’s article where it says that microaggressions are always defined “entirely in terms of the listener’s interpretation” and some parts of Sue’s article directly contradict that idea (“persons of color may be unable to determine whether a microaggression has occurred”). Even if Sue had made this claim, one article’s interpretation from 10 years ago about the meaning of microaggressions is far from definitive. There’s absolutely no evidence that anyone defines microaggressions entirely in terms of the listener’s subjective interpretation rather than an objective understanding of the evidence.
Bizarrely, Haidt and Lukianoff instead argue that microaggressions should be defined solely based on the offender’s emotional state. This is the flip side of “trust your feelings”: it’s trusting the feelings of people who commit microaggressions. In other words, if you don’t personally feel like you’re being racist, then you can’t be racist, no matter how racist what you actually did is. This approach urged by Haidt and Lukianoff is purely emotional reasoning: You’re not being racist unless you feel racist, that is, you intend to be racist. This standard of trusting the offender’s feelings in every case is deeply misguided. After all, Donald Trump routinely will declare that he’s not sexist or racist despite a long litany of racist and sexist words and actions.
According to Haidt and Lukianoff, “the microaggression concept reveals a crucial moral change on campus: the shift from ‘intent’ to ‘impact.’”(43) One section of the book is titled “Microaggressions: The Triumph of Impact Over Intent.”(40) Imagining that “aggression” is always violence is deeply mistaken. Imagining that “aggression” can only happen if someone intends to be aggressive is contrary to all logic and evidence.
Haidt and Lukianoff claim, “If you bump into someone by accident and never meant them any harm, it is not an act of aggression, although the other person may misperceive it as one.”(40) That’s obviously wrong. Consider this example: a guy at a concert physically pushes his way through the crowd to get to the front. Is he being aggressive when he bumps into people? The answer should be easy: Yes. But Haidt and Lukianoff argue that the answer is subjective based on the emotions of the guy. If he intended to be aggressive, then it’s aggressive. But if he’s an oblivious asshole, then it’s not aggressive. And this same standard could apply to other topics. If a man harasses someone, then it can’t be harassment unless it was intended to be harassing. Their subjective “intent” standard relies on the emotions of the offender (“intent”) to be the sole determinant of what has happened. The notion that there is no such thing as unintentional racism or sexism strikes me as shockingly ignorant.
Haidt and Lukianoff argue, “Teaching students to use the least generous interpretations possible is likely to engender precisely the feelings of marginalization and oppression that almost everyone wants to eliminate.”(46) What nonsense. First of all, the notion that people who discuss microaggressions are using “the least generous interpretation possible” is obviously false. “Micro” is never the prefix used in the least generous interpretation possible. Second, the idea that talking about racism creates oppression has absolutely no evidence to support it, and Haidt and Lukianoff don’t bother to cite any evidence. This kind of concern trolling—we all want to end racism, so please stop talking about racism in order to avoid upsetting people and making them become racist—is ridiculous.
The problem with microaggressions is not that people have the wrong opinions about what is racist or not. People should be free to argue about what is racist and what’s not. The potential danger is that microaggressions might be punished by campus regulations, but that’s a theoretical problem of bad policies, not bad thinking by people who want to criticize bigotry. Haidt and Lukianoff offer no examples of any college policies that prohibit microaggressions.
Great Untruth #3: “Us versus them.”
Haidt and Lukianoff write, “The Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. epitomized what we’ll call common-humanity identity politics” because he “appealed to the shared morals and identities of Americans by using the unifying languages of religion and patriotism.”(60) They add, “There has never been a more dramatic demonstration of the horrors of common-enemy identity politics than Adolf Hitler’s use of Jews to unify and expand his Third Reich.”(63)
There is no better example of “good vs. evil” thinking than claiming that we have to choose King or Hitler as our models. And the notion that “religion and patriotism” help unify us by appealing to a common humanity is a laughable claim in the age of Trump. The fact is, everybody tends to invoke common enemies, including Haidt and Lukianoff.
Haidt and Lukianoff have a blind spot that’s common among people who denounce Manichean thinking. They ignore their own Manichean tendencies. The whole idea of FIRE is deeply Manichean: FIRE is the good, and the censors are evil. That’s a story FIRE tells over and over again. And it’s a true story. They urge “taking a generous view of other people”(14) which is odd considering how thoroughly they denounce people who invoke concepts like microaggressions. For example, Haidt denounces the president of LSU for once saying something as innocuous as, “we’ll keep you safe here.”(199) But there’s nothing wrong with physical safety, and no reason to believe that this president was promising psychological safety by banishing any ideas that students might find offensive.
By psychologizing the problem of censorship, Haidt and Lukianoff lead us down a delusional path. They imagine that if only we could persuade people to talk about our common humanity, rather than our common enemies, we would eliminate the motivation to censor. But that’s an impossible task, and the only way to achieve it would be by massive repression of those who talk about common enemies.
The problem is not that some people have bad ideas. The problem is when institutions use censorship to try to suppress bad ideas. When you decide to target bad thinking rather than censorship, as Haidt and Lukianoff do in this book, you’re actually contributing to the problem. Many readers may respond to Haidt and Lukianoff’s book, as many conservatives have responded to the PC wars on campus, by concluding that we don’t need to get rid of campus censorship, we just need to start censoring the bad ideas. If common-enemy identity politics is the ultimate source of evil on campus, why shouldn’t we strive to eliminate it by firing the professors who are spreading these terrible ideas like a plague?
Haidt and Lukianoff seek to medicalize the campus free speech problem and offer their preferred mental health approach of CBT as the solution. If only we could cure these poor unfortunate young’uns and their sick thoughts, they think, the campus free speech problem would be solved. The entire history of higher education begs to differ with them. If we had censorship before safetyism (and we obviously did), that suggests safetyism isn’t the core cause of repression on campus. Every generation brings a few new excuses for censorship. But these generational differences are of little importance. Even if you could banish safetyism from the world, people would gravitate to another reason for silencing views they don’t like.
The author makes a good distinction between psychological and political causes of campus censorship. In my experience he is exactly right; however I would suggest that the political causality extends further back from university administration. They are effectively just the order takers. The primary source may often be federal government, especially the policies and agenda of the previous administration, which devoted its 8 years to identity politics in ways, and to lengths, not generally appreciated. Indeed the campus protest, free speech and safetyism contention is centered almost exclusively around personal identity. While one would hope that healthy campus debates and forceful argument would erupt over, say, the global war on terror, or perhaps even the scientific and technical merits of nanoparticulate polymerization effects in solar cell performance, it is instead over the availability of transgender compliant bathrooms, for example, or the asserted intelligence distribution across racial categories (“The Bell Curve” violence at Middlebury College). And in that regard it is indeed a political party opportunism directed at the college constituency that is responsible for the effective codification of personal identity activism, and with it, a perceived legal obligation of college administrations, to comply with federal law (civil rights interpretation) or even merely White House preference. It is important to keep in mind how central the university constituency was to the Obama administration–and how significant university experiences and culture were in shaping the former president (and First Lady). This in my experience is the source of radically heightened social contention and sensitivity that has created an effective campus culture program (at least in the undergrad colleges in the Humanities). As for FIRE may I add that, in addition to the author’s accurate criticism of them, it is in my experience an organization that is largely engaged in commercial opportunism including the promotion of convenient contention and controversy, and not often with especially refined strategic or causal insight. They are really a law firm and media company focused on the higher education market. Thank you and regards.
Coddling” is sometimes simplistic, I agree. But this review of the book is equally so. For example: “What doesn’t kill you makes you weaker.” The review reverses this mantra with the claim that “most of the time, harmful things do make you weaker, which is why we try to avoid being harmed.” Ironically, this claim is no more substantiated than the one that says trauma always makes you stronger. The effects of trauma are obviously far more complicated than the either/or of weaker/stronger. The authors would have been better to have said “What doesn’t kill you does not ALWAYS make you weaker.” And speaking of the word “always,” the review completely ignores the decisive role this term plays in the axiom: “Always trust your feelings.” They are not saying that feelings are always wrong. As CBT therapists, they are arguing that many feelings stem from cognitive distortions, such as magnification and catastrophizing. They are not attacking their opponents as emotional. Which is why I find it borderline ad hominem (or at least mean spirited) to exploit Lukianoff’s struggles with depression as an example of how he is also emotional (who isn’t?). Moreover, it dismisses their use of CBT by saying that they have “a deep emotional attachment to it.” You can literally discredit any theory by saying its adherents are “just being emotional,” which means the review betrays the emotional reasoning it critiques. On the issue of interpreting feeling microaggressed according to “the least generous interpretations,” the review also misses the mark: “‘Micro” is never the prefix used in the least generous interpretation possible.” That’s a nice sound bite. But it’s very misleading. Microaggressions are EXPANSIONS not contractions of the commonly understood manner of identifying racist and other forms of oppressive language. For example, you are introduced to an Asian person at a party in Los Angeles who tells you they studied at Berkeley. You then ask “where are you from?” and are accused of being racist. That’s both ungenerous and paranoid when all you really wanted to know was whether he grew up in southern or northern California. Illiberal censorship, exaggerated senses of harm and so on are REAL problems at American universities. Pretending these are just myths is misguided.
Thanks for your response. The issue with “always” is that it creates a straw enemy. No one actually ever says “always trust your feelings,” so it becomes easy to refute an absurd position. That’s my complaint here. As for Lukianoff, I’m making the opposite argument of what you claim. I’m saying that Lukianoff’s arguments for CBT should not be dismissed even though he has an emotional attachment, and criticizing people for being emotional is ultimately an empty argument. And regarding microaggressions, sometimes they are ridiculous expansions of the meaning of racism, and sometimes they are accurate assessments of racism. It depends on how they are applied. It is extreme to say that asking “where are you from?” is racist. It is not so extreme if you only ask that of Asian-Americans and follow up with “no, where are you really from?” As I argue, the cause of censorship is censorship, not people talking about racism. So the key problem with microaggressions would be if they are used to punish speech (which, so far, doesn’t seem to happen), not if some people interpret them in ungenerous ways.
Of course it is really easy to refute “always trust your feelings”–but only if you read that aphorism in such an absurdly literal way. Yes, no one actually “says” that. I also don’t think the authors mean that people are consciously thinking that either. They are suggesting that in many cases people who feel they have been microaggressed are misreading highly ambiguous situations and instead are going with their “gut.”
By the way, a much stronger analysis of these issues has been made by Scott O. Lilienfeld in “Microaggressions: Strong Claims, Inadequate Evidence.” He recommends the “abandonment of the term ‘microaggression,’ and calls for a moratorium on microaggression training programs and publicly distributed microaggression lists pending research to address the MRP’s scientific limitations.”
Moreover, it is extremely misleading to say the authors are criticizing students for being emotional. Of course, that argument is a dead end and it makes a straw man of their book. These are psychologists, after all. Do you really think they are dismissing students’ emotions tout court? As for the claim that “So the key problem with microaggressions would be if they are used to punish speech (which, so far, doesn’t seem to happen),” I think that simply is not true. We all know of a number of cases where students have accused professors or racism (Yale being a famous one), or violating Title IX (Kipnis). You don’t think the ordeal Kipnis went through was punishing—notwithstanding her being able to keep her job? I know of several cases at American universities that you will never hear about because the faculty members involved don’t want it to be public knowledge. For example, a friend and colleague was accused of racism on utterly specious grounds. She was exonerated and yes she still has her job, but she went through months of hell. Moreover, a website still exists accusing her of precisely the racism for which she has been exonerated. Is that not punishment? I absolutely agree with the point about corporate risk management. However, it is not the administrators that invented ideas like “microaggressions.” It is not administrators who conflate white supremacy with racism. It is academics who push these ideas.
Finally, it just distorts the book to claim that it places all the blame on students. They write, for example: “A prime example of how some professors (and some administrators) encourage mental habits similar to the cognitive distortions is their promotion of the concept of ‘microaggressions.'” There are many players at fault here. The most likely scenario is that students have internalized the bad ideas being promoted by their professors and administrators.
One issue I did not mention before, but has been bothering me is the claim that “There’s absolutely no evidence that anyone defines microaggressions entirely in terms of the listener’s subjective interpretation rather than an objective understanding of the evidence.” Consider the following from Sue et al:
“First, the person must determine whether a microaggression
has occurred. In that respect, people of color rely
heavily on experiential reality that is contextual in nature
and involves life experiences from a variety of situations.
When the flight attendant asked the senior author and his
colleague to move, it was not the first time that similar
requests and situations had occurred for both. In their
experience, these incidents were nonrandom events (Ridley,
2005), and their perception was that the only similarity
‘connecting the dots’ to each and every one of these
incidents was the color of their skin. In other words, the
situation on the plane was only one of many similar incidents
with identical outcomes. Yet the flight attendant and
most White Americans do not share these multiple experiences, and they evaluate their own behaviors in the moment through a singular event (Dovidio & Gaertner, 2000). Thus, they fail to see a pattern of bias, are defended by a belief in their own morality, and can in good conscience deny that they discriminated (D. W. Sue, 2005).”
How can there be any objective evidence for Sue’s claim that he was microaggressed? Everything in the above passage suggests the final judgment lies with the alleged victim. The situation he describes is so incredibly ambiguous there really is no way to resolve what the white flight attendant was thinking/feeling. And is this not precisely an example of the “trust your feelings” mantra? Why can’t Sue simply conclude from the ambiguity of what happened that its meaning cannot be finally deciphered? He talks a lot about the invisibility of microaggressions, by which he means sometimes both victims and perpetrator cannot see them. Perhaps in many cases they cannot see them because they don’t exist. Or, perhaps they remain invisible precisely because you can’t peer inside everyone’s heads. Some things are unknowable.
So for those reading and commenting on this post, do not think for a minute that “there is nothing to see here.” “Coddling” might not be the most rigorous analysis of the problem. But THERE IS a problem.
I don’t think the authors are criticizing students for being emotional. I think they are dismissing ideas they don’t like as emotional, and that’s a lousy argument.
In the cases you mention (Kipnis and Yale), no one was punished, and I’ve never heard those framed as issues of microaggressions by the critics of Kipnis and the Yale professors. Is it punishment to have a website accusing you of racism? Absolutely not. Punishment means official discipline by an institutional body, not criticism.
As for Sue et al, they are simply observing that when faced with ambiguous situations, people of color tend to see racism, and white people tend to dismiss racism. I don’t read that as Sue et al claiming that microaggessions must be defined subjectively, just that we should take them more seriously than those who dismiss them entirely (or who want to abolish the term).
To say “some things are unknowable” such as racism goes way too far in dismissing the possibility of racism and our ability to rationally perceive it. There are lots of problems here, and the authors and you correctly point out some of them. But I’m arguing that this book is a poor framework for understanding those problems and refuting the views of their opponents.
A short addendum: as I read this again the distinction between political causality and psychological or social, is more pronounced and due to sharper, strictly legal issues, than perhaps previously discussed. First, as for FIRE and the joint author book, the thesis contained therein is meant to be provocative and sensational which is why it is characterized dramatically as a broad social phenomenon. It isn’t. But it helps sell books. Second, the much simpler causation of what appears to be a campus trend or “movement” is really just corporate risk management. Universities have been so “landmined” with laws, rules, guidelines, and even presidential directive letters, that legal preemption is driving administrative behavior (or indeed “scrubbing” campus culture of potential legal causes-of-action) in order to avoid lawsuits, federal investigations, fines and sanctions–and with that, a threat to rankings, funding, enrollment and the economic interests of the university (or what Chicago calls “our vital interests”). This is especially due to Title VI of the CRA which the Obama administration turned into an effective WMD. Third, this may otherwise be described as an effective federal hostile takeover of US universities. Indeed, is there really any such thing anymore, as a private university? Fourth, by further pressing university administration into obedience, the federal-university nexus is greatly strengthened and able to act as a more consistent and reliable conduit of ideological State influence (some call it indoctrination). At Chicago, for example, the campus is aggressively penetrated with national security, defense, and intelligence recruitment, and as well DOJ, State, DOE and other staffing solicitation. In short, university administrations are taking orders from their federal masters, reinforced by (perhaps even more so than the State itself) enormous political party financial influence. The Obama library and center at Chicago is an example. But the more insidious effect of such politicized university society, is the impact on rational and independent thought. If there is a “trend” it may be the special interest cognitive penetration of our young adults, which of course starts well before college. On the other hand, free speech and free thought have never been free. That is why they are rights fought for, not privileges granted. Regards.
This is such a helpful analysis. There has been some good philosophical work critical of CBT, too, and that dovetails so well with this. My impression from the shorter presentations of this book by the authors (especially Haidt’s recorded talks) was that I had never seen someone so emotional, and emotionally hurt, by the idea that students might not find him moral. That, along with the cravenness of pathologizing of “the other side” combined to give me the (ironic!) impression that something is very wrong with these authors. If you grow up in a diverse enough place you get told things you do are racist routinely– I try to imagine these authors never had that learning/life experience and yet here they are talking about how weak students who point out racism are. It’s too much. I thought I had to be missing something. Anyway, having their poor logic pointed out is a great assistance in ending my own disbelief. I hope the many “opinion writers” who were so thrilled with this book’s diagnosis of their own imagined enemies get to read this.
I have not read the book but did read reviews suggesting it was not what I had feared from the original article. That may be so, but apparently, as John demonstrates, at least in part it does continue in the same vein.
It is interesting that Haidt and Lukianoff trace the origin of their allegedly new student “safetyism” to 2013, because in 2012 in his book, Unlearning Liberty, Lukianoff identified a quite different source for the problem. That book laid much of the blame for anti-free speech policies and practices not on student attitudes but instead on bloated paternalistic campus administrations — as John does here. To be sure, Lukianoff acknowledged that “Campus administrators have been successful in convincing students that the primary goal of the university is to make students feel comfortable.” But it was those administrators, not the students (or the faculty) who he blamed, railing instead against “administrators who present themselves as benign philosopher-kings.” In that book Lukianoff repeatedly stressed that “the actual regimes of censorship on campus are put in place primarily by the ever-growing army of administrators.”
In Lukianoff’s 2012 opinion, administrative bloat was a major driver of both increased tuition and campus censorship. “The rise in cost is related to the decline in rights on campuses in important ways,” he argued. “Most importantly, the increase in tuition and overall cost is disproportionately funding an increase in both the cost and the size of campus bureaucracy, and this expanding bureaucracy has primary responsibility for writing and enforcing speech codes, creating speech zones, and policing students’ lives in ways that students from the 1960s would never have accepted.”
I wonder what changed.
I think Lukianoff, like most good writers, wants to branch out into new areas and find new ways of approaching a familiar subject, and avoid simply repeating himself. In this book, Lukianoff wants to write about bigger social trends (and they try to say this is not mainly a book about academia). You can’t blame safetyism in our culture on college administrators. But you can blame it on larger social trends that are destroying today’s youth, and so that’s what this book tries to do. So I think this is an example of focusing on a small part of the issue with campus censorship (the ideas of students) and then exaggerating its impact on campus and more broadly. And they might be right about these trends in discussing issues such as suicide. But I think they’re very flawed in trying to understand campus censorship as the result of them.