Something has been going wrong on many college campuses in the last few years. “The remedies the book outlines should be considered on college campuses, among parents of current and future students, and by anyone longing for a more sane society.” - Pittsburgh Post-Gazette Lukianoff and Haidt tell us that safetyism undermines the freedom of inquiry and speech that are indispensable to universities.” -Jonathan Marks, Commentary “Their distinctive contribution to the higher-education debate is to meet safetyism on its own, psychological turf. Finalist for the 2018 National Book Critics Circle Award in Nonfiction.The minds they coddle just may be their own. Can’t these women and minorities see we mean well? This is the incredulity of people who have never feared being stereotyped. Their problem with 'microaggressions' is this framework emphasises impact over intentions, a perspective that they dismiss as clearly ludicrous. For all their self-conscious reasonableness, and their promises that CBT can master negative emotion, Lukianoff and Haidt often seem slightly hurt.
Like Trump, the authors romanticise a past before 'identity' but get fuzzy and impatient when history itself comes up.
The rhetorical appeal, here, shares a structure with the appeal that carried the enemy in chief of political correctness to the White House: 'That’s just common sense'. Who will fix the crisis? The people who are already in charge. The citations in this book draw a circle around a closed world. The style that does befit an expert, apparently, is the style of TED talks, thinktanks and fellow Atlantic writers and psychologists. The Coddling of the American Mind is less interesting for its anecdotes or arguments, which are familiar, than as an epitome of a contemporary liberal style. (This framing also explains how they can write hundreds of pages about what’s wrong with contemporary higher education and not mention debt or adjuncts). The framing leaves no room to consider how historical and social change might legitimately change institutions or individuals, or that individuals might want to change their world.
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