What Doesn’t Kill You Makes You Weaker?

A NOTE ON “THE CODDLING OF THE AMERICAN MIND”

“Help me find my trigger.” Yep, a student actually asked a faculty member this on a college campus in America. Instead of realizing that it is in fact a good thing to not be triggered (meaning, you will not potentially be traumatized by what is about to be shared), this student was seeking help to identify a topic they should be sensitive toward. But we’re getting ahead of ourselves. Let’s go back to 2015.

That was the year a cover story for The Atlantic titled “The Coddling of the American Mind,” gained national attention. It was written by a constitutional lawyer and a social psychologist at New York University who study American culture wars. The authors, Greg Lukianoff and Jonathan Haidt address a concern that more and more college students across the U.S. are demanding they be protected from ideas and words they don’t like. Lukianoff and Haidt were fueled by the mental health crisis among Gen Z and the dramatic rise in anxiety, depression, and suicide rates in 2012 that no one could quite explain. They share how this trend of coddling is disastrous for both education and mental health:

“Something strange is happening at America’s colleges and universities. A movement is arising to scrub campuses clean of words, ideas, and subjects that might cause discomfort or give offense. Last December, Jeannie Suk wrote in an online article for The New Yorker about law students asking her fellow professors at Harvard not to teach rape law—or, in one case, even use the word violate (as in ‘that violates the law’) lest it cause students distress. In February, Laura Kipnis, a professor at Northwestern University, wrote an essay in The Chronicle of Higher Education describing a new campus politics of sexual paranoia—and was then subjected to a long investigation after students who were offended by the article and by a tweet she’d sent filed Title IX complaints against her” write Lukianoff and Haidt.

The article is littered with other situations where offended students win the battle and well-meaning educators are charged for teaching what they likely have taught for years. Ten years since the article’s publication, the topic has only become more applicable. Lukianoff and Haidt go on:

“The current movement is largely about emotional well-being… It presumes an extraordinary fragility of the collegiate psyche, and therefore elevates the goal of protecting students from psychological harm. The ultimate aim, it seems, is to turn campuses into “safe spaces” where young adults are shielded from words and ideas that make some uncomfortable. And more than the last, this movement seeks to punish anyone who interferes with that aim, even accidentally. You might call this impulse vindictive protectiveness. It is creating a culture in which everyone must think twice before speaking up, lest they face charges of insensitivity, aggression, or worse.”

“There’s a saying common in education circles: Don’t teach students what to think; teach them how to think. The idea goes back at least as far as Socrates. Today, what we call the Socratic method is a way of teaching that fosters critical thinking, in part by encouraging students to question their own unexamined beliefs, as well as the received wisdom of those around them. Such questioning sometimes leads to discomfort, and even to anger, on the way to understanding. But vindictive protectiveness teaches students to think in a very different way. It prepares them poorly for professional life, which often demands intellectual engagement with people and ideas one might find uncongenial or wrong. The harm may be more immediate, too. A campus culture devoted to policing speech and punishing speakers is likely to engender patterns of thought that are surprisingly similar to those long identified by cognitive behavioral therapists as causes of depression and anxiety. The new protectiveness may be teaching students to think pathologically.”

“Are we atrophying? Do we recognize that a little bit of rub is what’s needed to get stronger?”

To illustrate this point, Lukianoff and Haidt point out that it is a misguided practice, according to the most basic tenets of psychology, to attempt to help people with anxiety disorders by telling them to avoid the things they find fearful. Even cognitive behavioral therapy, a widely accepted practice in both inpatient and outpatient therapy, teaches critical thinking skills, which require one to ground their belief in evidence rather than emotion. Lukianoff and Haidt site two definitions for the term “emotional reasoning” and evidence that higher education in America has embraced it:

“[David D. Burns, author of Feeling Good] defines emotional reasoning as assuming ‘that your negative emotions necessarily reflect the way things really are: I feel it, therefore it must be true.’ Leahy, Holland, and McGinn [authors of Treatment Plans and Interventions for Depression and Anxiety Disorders] define it as letting ‘your feelings guide your interpretation of reality.’ But, of course, subjective feelings are not always trustworthy guides; unrestrained, they can cause people to lash out at others who have done nothing wrong. Therapy often involves talking yourself down from the idea that each of your emotional responses represents something true or important… Emotional reasoning dominates many campus debates and discussions. A claim that someone’s words are ‘offensive’ is not just an expression of one’s own subjective feeling of offendedness. It is, rather, a public charge that the speaker has done something objectively wrong. It is a demand that the speaker apologize or be punished by some authority for committing an offense.”

What does all this mean? The authors are saying that to let your emotions rule what you will or will not listen to is only a detriment to yourself and your development, and universities are not serving students well by allowing the hypersensitivity. In a world where trigger warnings are commonplace, students are not being prepared to handle difficult ideas and situations (which life will no doubt throw at them!).

In their book that followed the article, Lukianoff and Haidt share three Great Untruths they believe are behind free-speech controversies at American universities. We won’t spoil them all, but Great Truth #1 pleads us to consider the idea of antifragility. They describe how humans don’t just have the ability to simply endure stress, but actually grow and thrive as a result of it. Just like we need gravity and exercise to keep our muscles from atrophying, if we are not exposed to difficult circumstances (and instead are protected from any possibility of encountering them), it is likely we will have difficulty navigating them when they come. Lukianoff and Haidt write the solution to it all rather simply: “Rather than trying to protect students from words and ideas that they will inevitably encounter, colleges should do all they can to equip students to thrive in a world full of words and ideas that they cannot control.”

It begs the question for us all: Are we atrophying? Do we recognize that a little bit of rub is what’s needed to get stronger? And are universities in America still the “marketplace of ideas” they claim they want to be in their freedom of expression and academic freedom policies? The answer lies in students’ willingness to hear and consider the opinions of those they do not agree with.

“The Coddling of the American Mind” was originally published as an article in the Atlantic in 2015 by Greg Lukianoff and Jonathan Haidt. When the topic gained America’s attention, the authors published a book with the same title in 2018. In 2024, Korchula Productions made “The Coddling of the American Mind” documentary that follows the stories of five university students whose experience of college wasn’t quite what they’d hoped. The film explores similar themes to the original article and addresses the same question: Why are Gen Zer’s so anxious and depressed? The students share their lived experiences of how hypersensitivity and their campus’ protection from difficult concepts contributed to their emotional fragility, and how they decided to start thinking for themselves. The film can be streamed on Amazon, Apple TV, Google Play, and Substack.

Quotes in this article are from “The Coddling of the American Mind” written by Greg Lukianoff and Jonathan Haidt, originally published by The Atlantic in 2015.