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February 1 - March 13, 2025
Many campuses have become less like scholarly monasteries and more like luxurious “country clubs.”
offensiveness alone is no justification for banning or restricting speech—especially
Overreaction and overregulation are usually the work of people within bureaucratic structures who have developed a mindset commonly known as CYA (Cover Your Ass).
“victimhood culture,” and they interpreted it as a new moral order that was in conflict with the older “dignity culture,” which is still dominant in most parts of the United States and other Western democracies.
In an optimally functioning dignity culture, people are assumed to have dignity and worth regardless of what others think of them, so they are not expected to react too strongly to minor slights.
Perspective is a key element of a dignity culture; people don’t view disagreements, unintentional slights, or even direct insults as threats to their dignity that must always be met with a response.
They defined a victimhood culture as having three distinct attributes: First, “individuals and groups display high sensitivity to slight”; second, they “have a tendency to handle conflicts through complaints to third parties”; and third, they “seek to cultivate an image of being victims who deserve assistance.”65
when administrative remedies are easily available and there is no shame in calling on them, it can lead to a condition known as “moral dependence.” People come to rely on external authorities to resolve their problems, and, over time, “their willingness or ability to use other forms of conflict management may atrophy.”
A university that encourages moral dependence is a university that is likely to experience chronic conflict, which may then lead to more demands for administrative remedies and protections, which may then lead to more moral dependence.
Intuitive justice is the combination of distributive justice (the perception that people are getting what is deserved) and procedural justice (the perception that the process by which things are distributed and rules are enforced is fair and trustworthy).
Paul Bloom reviewed the research on fairness in children and concluded that “humans naturally favour fair distributions, not equal ones,” and “when fairness and equality clash, people prefer fair inequality over unfair equality.”
proportionality or merit is the most common and preferred principle children and adults use for allocating rewards outside a family.
“equity theory,” the major theory of distributive justice in social psychology.10 Its core assertion is that when the ratio of outcomes to inputs is equal for all participants, people perceive that to be equitable, or fair.
An early study testing equity theory found that when people were led to believe that they were being overpaid for a job, they worked harder in order to deserve the pay—to get their ratio back into line.
people are much more willing to accept a decision or action, even one that goes against themselves, when they perceive that the process that led to the decision was fair.
If you want to motivate people to support a new policy or join a movement in the name of justice, you need to activate in them a clear perception, or intuition, that someone didn’t get what he or she deserved (distributive injustice) or that someone was a victim of an unfair process (procedural injustice).
proportional-procedural social justice as the effort to find and fix cases where distributive or procedural justice is denied to people because they were born into poverty or belong to a socially disadvantaged category.
It is among the most important requirements of a democratic society that it provide a way for people and groups to make new claims about justice. An open democratic society considers such claims, debates them, and then acts on claims that combine compelling arguments with effective political pressure.
seemingly fair processes can sometimes lead to a group that is in the minority getting entirely shut out at the end of the process.
justice is never the enemy of truth.
Justice requires truth and honesty, and justice is entirely compatible with the purpose, values, and daily life of a university.
“equal outcomes” in these cases doesn’t necessarily mean fifty-fifty; it means representative of the overall student body,
More generally, equal-outcomes social justice activists seem to believe that all institutions and occupations should mirror the overall U.S. population: 50% female, roughly 15% African American, 15% Latino, and so on. Any departure from those numbers means that a group is “underrepresented,” and underrepresentation is often taken to be direct evidence of systemic bias or injustice.
The available research suggests that girls and women are often as interested as boys and men in getting physical exercise, but not in playing team sports.
if boys and men are more interested, on average, in playing team sports—then universities cannot achieve the equal-outcome target just by offering equal opportunity.
When the federal government pressures universities to achieve equal outcomes in the face of unequal inputs, administrators do what they can to protect the institution. That might require them to violate procedural justice, distributive justice, and honesty along the way.
The university as a whole is still spending far more money on men’s sports than on women’s sports, and if you endorse equal-outcomes social justice, you’ll say that the unequal treatment of rowers is necessary in order to compensate for the money spent on male athletes elsewhere.
Most people want individuals to be treated well, and they recoil from cases where individuals are treated unfairly in order to bring about some kind of group-level equality.
Ideas may be accepted not because they are true but because the politically dominant group wants them to be true in order to promote its preferred narrative and preferred set of remedies.
if activists embrace the equal-outcomes form of social justice—if they interpret all deviations from population norms as evidence of systemic bias—then they will get drawn into endless and counterproductive campaigns, even against people who share their goals.
be willing to entertain the possibility that people of different genders and people from different cultures may have different preferences.
there has been a shift, particularly in middle-class and wealthier families, to more intensive and overprotective parenting, and that this is, in part, a response to unrealistic fears of abduction, and to somewhat more realistic fears about admission to prestigious universities.
That is the epitome of safetyism: If we can prevent one child from getting hurt, we should deprive all children of slightly risky play.
Prepare the child for the road, not the road for the child.
kids need some unstructured, unsupervised time in order to learn how to judge risks for themselves and practice dealing with things like frustration, boredom, and interpersonal conflict. The most important thing they can do with that time is to play, especially in free play, outdoors, with other kids.
Resist the urge to jump in and help them when they’re struggling to do things and seem to be doing them the wrong way. Trial and error is a slower but usually better teacher than direct instruction.
Let your kids take more small risks, and let them learn from getting some bumps and bruises.
Learn about Lenore Skenazy’s Free-Range Kids movement, and incorporate her lessons into your family’s life.
Start letting your kids walk places and play outside as soon as you think they are able. Send them out with siblings or friends. Tell them it’s OK to talk to strangers and ask for help or directions, just never go off with a stranger. Remember that the crime rate is back down to where it was in the early 1960s.
Visit LetGrow.org,
Encourage your children to walk or ride bicycles to and from school at the earliest ages possible, consistent with local circumstances of distance, traffic, and crime.
Find ways for kids to get together in nearby parks or in specific backyards. You’ll need to work out boundaries and guidelines with other parents to be sure that the kids are safe from major physical risks, that they know to stick together and help one another, and that they know what to do when someone gets hurt. Kids are likely to develop more maturity and resilience in such groups than in supervised playdates or adult-organized activities.
Send your children to an overnight summer camp in the woods for a few weeks—without devices.
Encourage your children to engage in a lot of “productive disagreement.”
Grant offers the following four rules for productive disagreement:10 Frame it as a debate, rather than a conflict. Argue as if you’re right, but listen as if you’re wrong (and be willing to change your mind). Make the most respectful interpretation of the other person’s perspective. Acknowledge where you agree with your critics and what you’ve learned from them.
Teach children the basics of CBT.
Parents can get an accessible overview of CBT from reading Dr. Leahy’s book The Worry Cure. Also, Freeing Your Child From Anxiety, by Tamar Chansky,13 is recommended by the Beck Institute,14 which is another great resource for cognitive behavioral therapy.
Teach children mindfulness.
“mindfulness” means “paying attention in a particular way: on purpose, in the present moment, and nonjudgmentally.”
“Mindfulness for Children” guide, by David Gelles,21 and Cognitively-Based Compassion Training from the Emory-Tibet Partnership.
