BY JOHN K. WILSON
On Friday, op-ed columnist David Brooks of the New York Times published one of his classic tone-deaf attempts to offer big thoughts on our times: “The Age Of Coddling Is Over.”
The headline was absolutely right. Not because the coronavirus has suddenly made us all realize the virtues of hardship, but because the myth of coddling has been exposed for the media hype it always was. Brooks’ column is centered on Greg Lukianoff and Jonathan Haidt’s book The Coddling of the American Mind, which I have repeatedly critiqued.
The small protests across America calling for the country to open up are the embodiment of the anti-coddle mythmakers. These Fox News aficionados think we have been coddling America with social distancing rules, mask wearing, and stay-at-home orders. They believe that what doesn’t kill us will make us stronger, which is exactly what the Haidt/Lukianoff/Brooks line is telling us.
The coddled impulse to shelter and protect ourselves from danger is precisely what has saved thousands of lives during this crisis. By contrast, it’s the arrogant, selfish indifference to danger that has brought us scenes of people packing beaches and yelling at these protests about their need for a haircut.
Conservatives also complained that emergency unemployment benefits would coddle lazy workers who would decide to just sit at home to grab an extra $600. Of course, the trillions of dollars spent to protect large corporations and their investors never gets defined as coddling by Republicans like Brooks.
Brooks makes a number of silly arguments along the way. He complains that at “affluent” high schools (the ones that truly matter, of course), grades have been inflating over the past 15 years “so everybody can feel affirmed.” Coddling has nothing to do with it; it’s all about wealth and privilege, as rising competition for elite colleges leads parents and students to complain more when they get a low grade that might threaten their college applications.
Certainly there are crazy anecdotes about coddling kids (Brooks tells us about parents supposedly going to the toilet with a 9-year-old who is afraid to be alone). But at a moment when an overwhelming threat confronts the country, and the true danger comes from the anti-science, anti-intellectual, anti-government far right represented by Donald Trump who failed and continues to fail to lead, Brooks is quick to assert that the real problem in America comes from progressives trying to keep people safe. The tragedy that surrounds us contradicts every idea that Brooks offers up.
This is an interesting perspective. To be sure, the don’t-stay-at-home movement of virus deniers is appropriating an anti-coddling discourse for their own purposes. And of course we should all be following stay-at-home orders and trying to keep people safe in multiple ways on multiple fronts. However, as a professor I have seen over the last three decades a rise of our coddling students that really is taking place. Thus, some of Haidt’s arguments truly resonate with me. I don’t think it’s entirely fair to use virus deniers who don’t want to stay home in a pandemic to establish that Haidt’s argument was wrong all along.
It would be interesting to see a blog post here addressing how we’ll manage competing needs in higher education settings. For example, how will we balance the need to keep educating students with the need to keep the virus from spreading with the need to go easy on students who are struggling in distance-learning environments (who’d rather be on campus learning face-to-face) and who are struggling with anxiety over the pandemic with the need to acknowledge faculty who are struggling for similar reasons with the need to keep our academic standards high and truly educate the students, etc, etc? There are no easy answers to these competing interests in the higher ed world, but I always appreciate AAUP for attempting to offer guidance and for articulating principles that can help us make better choices.
I agree with Martha M. I have also seen this rise in “snowflake” students who seem to require MUCH more “coddling” than their predecessors from years past. Even before there was a real threat, like the pandemic, many students were “traumatized” by “MICRO-aggressions” (neglecting the fact that “MICRO-” means SMALL) I lost my job as an Adjunct Full Professor at CCNY over just such an incident, and the administration supported the coddling of overly sensitive students.
Read all about it at:
https://www.academia.edu/23593134/A_Leftist_Critique_of_Political_Correctness_Gone_Amok_–_Revised_and_Updated
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