The Coddling of the American Mind: How Good Intentions and Bad Ideas Are Setting up a Generation for Failure

by Jonathan Haidt

Kerr predicted that as faculty increasingly focused on their own departments, noninstructional employees would take over in leading the institution. As he anticipated, the number of administrators has climbed upward.13 At the same time, their responsibilities have crept outward.

Some administrative growth is necessary and sensible, but when the rate of that expansion is several times higher than the rate of faculty hiring,15 there are significant downsides, most obviously the increase in the cost of a college degree.16 A less immediately obvious downside is that goals other than academic excellence begin to take priority as universities come to resemble large corporations—a trend often bemoaned as “corporatization.”

“The fundamental cause [of campus intolerance],” he suggests, “isn’t students’ extreme leftism or any other political ideology” but “a market-driven decision by universities, made decades ago, to treat students as consumers—who pay up to $60,000 per year for courses, excellent cuisine, comfortable accommodations and a lively campus life.”

Even at public universities, 18-year-olds are purchasing what is essentially a luxury product. Is it any wonder they feel entitled to control the experience? . . . Students, accustomed to authoring every facet of their college experience, now want their institutions to mirror their views. If the customers can determine the curriculum and select all their desired amenities, it stands to reason that they should also determine which speakers ought to be invited to campus and what opinions can be articulated in their midst. For today’s students, one might say, speakers are amenities.

The consumerization theory fits with the trend toward greater spending on lifestyle amenities, which schools use when they compete with other schools to attract top students.

To comprehend those events, we need to understand other forces acting on administrators, including the fear of bad publicity and threats of litigation. Administrators are bombarded with directives (from in-house counsel, outside risk-management professionals, the school’s public relations team, and the upper echelons of the administration) that they must limit the university’s legal liability in everything from personal injury lawsuits to wrongful termination, and from intellectual property to wrongful-death actions.

These codes teach students to use an overbroad and entirely subjective standard for determining wrongdoing. They also exemplify the Untruth of Emotional Reasoning: Always trust your feelings.

Overreaction and overregulation are usually the work of people within bureaucratic structures who have developed a mindset commonly known as CYA (Cover Your Ass). They know they can be held responsible for any problem that arises on their watch, especially if they took no action to prevent it, so they often adopt a defensive stance.

At New York University in 2016, for example, administrators placed signs in the restrooms urging everyone to take a “feel-something say-something” approach to speech. The signs outline for members of the NYU community how to report one another anonymously if they experience “bias, discrimination, or harassment,” including by calling a “Bias Response Line.”37 NYU is not an outlier; a 2017 report by FIRE found that, of the 471 institutions cataloged in FIRE’s Spotlight on Speech Codes database, 38.4% (181) maintain some form of bias reporting system.

In 2013, the Departments of Education and Justice issued a sweeping new definition of harassment: any “unwelcome conduct of a sexual nature,” including “verbal, nonverbal, or physical conduct.”57 This definition was not limited to speech that would be offensive to a reasonable person, nor did it require that the alleged target actually be offended—both requirements of traditional harassment claims. By eliminating the reasonable-person standard, harassment was left to be defined by the self-reported subjective experience of every member of the university community. It was, in effect, emotional reasoning turned into a federal regulation.

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. Of course, full dignity was at one time accorded only to adult, white men; the rights revolutions of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries did essential work to expand dignity to all. This is in contrast to the older “honor cultures,” in which men were so obsessed with guarding their reputations that they were expected to react violently to minor insults made against them or those close to them—perhaps with a challenge to a duel. In a dignity culture, however, dueling seems ridiculous. People are expected to have enough self-control to shrug off irritations, slights, and minor conflicts as they pursue their own projects.

They noted that the emerging morality of victimhood culture was radically different from dignity culture. 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.”

This “feel something, say something” approach is likely to erode trust within a community. It may also make professors less willing to try innovative or provocative teaching methods; they, too, may develop a CYA approach.

This chapter is about social justice. We will explore the meaning of this term and embrace one version of it while criticizing another. The term is a lightning rod in the left-right culture war, so this is a good time for us to lay our cards on the table, politically speaking: Greg identifies as a liberal with some sympathy for libertarian perspectives. Before FIRE, he worked for an environmental justice group; he worked for an organization that advocates for refugee rights and protections in Central Europe; and he interned at the ACLU of Northern California.

Neither of us has ever voted for a Republican for Congress or the presidency. Both of us share most of the desired ends of social justice activism, including full racial equality, an end to sexual harassment and assault, comprehensive gun control, and responsible stewardship of the environment.

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).

But as the review by Starmans, Sheskin, and Bloom indicates, proportionality or merit is the most common and preferred principle children and adults use for allocating rewards outside a family.

The consistent finding in equity theory research is that in most relationships, people keep close track of how much reward each person is reaping (their outcomes, such as pay and perks) in proportion to how much they are contributing (their inputs, such as hours worked and the skills or credentials they bring).

People are not just being greedy. 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.

His central finding is that 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.

Much of the left-right divide on social policy involves how far the government should go to equalize opportunity for children who are born into unequal circumstances (and whether it is the federal government, state governments, or local governments that should be responsible for that equalization).

Using that definition of social justice, we’ll define 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.

when such injustices are pointed out, members of the majority group are often motivated to ignore or deny them.

Harvard legal scholar Lani Guinier explored cases like this in her 1994 book, The Tyranny of the Majority.23 She pointed out that seemingly fair processes can sometimes lead to a group that is in the minority getting entirely shut out at the end of the process. In the high school example above, it’s quite possible that 100% of the songs chosen would be those nominated by the white students. If that example seems trivial to you, just imagine that you’re choosing state legislators instead of songs. Guinier suggested some alternative ways that communities could run elections and divide electoral power, ways that would not exclude or disadvantage minorities.

But the principle she was elaborating is sound, even if her preferred methods are open to debate. This principle—the need for democracies to protect the rights of minorities—was one of the reasons that the U.S. Constitution’s first ten amendments (the Bill of Rights) were added so quickly. (You don’t need a Bill of Rights to protect the rights of the majority in a democracy, because the vote already does that.)

It is exactly what those social workers called for when they defined social justice as the quest to “open the doors of access and opportunity for everyone, particularly those in greatest need.” Proportional-procedural social justice is justice, and 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.

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.

But 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. Along the way, they will reinforce the bad mental habits that we have described throughout the book.

Something is going badly wrong for American teenagers, as we can see in the statistics on depression, anxiety, and suicide.

That is the epitome of safetyism: If we can prevent one child from getting hurt, we should deprive all children of slightly risky play.

To return to the example of peanut allergies: kids need to develop a normal immune response, rather than an allergic response, to the everyday irritations and provocations of life, including life on the internet.

The gift begins with the recognition that 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.

Assume that your kids are more capable this month than they were last month.

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.

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.

Help your kids find a community of kids in the neighborhood who come from families that share your commitment to avoid overprotection.

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.” As psychologist Adam Grant notes, the most creative people grew up in homes full of arguments, yet few parents today teach their children how to argue productively; instead, “we stop siblings from quarreling and we have our own arguments behind closed doors.”

Children (like adults) are prone to emotional reasoning. They need to learn cognitive and social skills that will temper emotional reasoning and guide them to respond more productively to life’s provocations.

Thoughts are not always true. I might be thinking it’s raining outside, but then I go outside and it’s not raining. We have to find out what the facts are, don’t we? Sometimes we look at things like we are looking through a dark lens and everything seems dark. Let’s try putting on different glasses.

Teach children mindfulness. According to Jon Kabat-Zinn, professor of medicine emeritus at the University of Massachusetts Medical School, “mindfulness” means “paying attention in a particular way: on purpose, in the present moment, and nonjudgmentally.”

Give people the benefit of the doubt. Use the “principle of charity.” This is the principle in philosophy and rhetoric of making an effort to interpret other people’s statements in their best or most reasonable form, not in the worst or most offensive way possible.

Practice the virtue of “intellectual humility.” Intellectual humility is the recognition that our reasoning is so flawed, so prone to bias, that we can rarely be certain that we are right.

Having people around us who are willing to disagree with us is a gift. So when you realize you are wrong, admit that you are wrong, and thank your critics for helping you see

Look very carefully at how your school handles identity politics. Does it look and sound like the common-humanity identity politics we described in chapter 3? Or is it more like common-enemy identity politics, which encourages kids to see one another not as individuals but as exemplars of groups, some of which are good, some bad?

Give more recess with less supervision. Recess on school property generally provides an ideal and physically safe setting for free play.

A simple way to give kids more unsupervised play time in a physically safe setting is to create an after-school play club by keeping the playground (or a gymnasium) open for a few hours after school each day.28 Such free play, in a mixed-age setting, may be better for kids than many structured after-school activities.

Discourage the use of the word “safe” or “safety” for anything other than physical safety. One of Jon’s friends recently forwarded to him an email that a third-grade teacher sent to parents about recess and about children forming “clubs.”

If we mandate inclusion in everything and teach kids that exclusion puts them in danger—that being excluded should make them feel unsafe—then we are making future experiences of exclusion more painful and giving kids the expectation that an act of exclusion warrants calling in an authority figure to make the exclusion stop.