The real victims of campus activism are the students

The Coddling of the American Mind: How Good Intentions and Bad Ideas are Setting Up a Generation for Failure. By Greg Lukianoff and Jonathan Haidt. Penguin Press; 352 pages; $28. Allen Lane; £20.

AFTER John McCain died, a clip from his run for the presidency in 2008 resurfaced on social media. “No, ma’am,” he tells a woman at a rally who describes Barack Obama as “an Arab” who can’t be trusted; “he’s a decent family man, a citizen.” To many observers, the incident epitomised McCain’s integrity. A few heard something different—an implication, in that “No, ma’am”, that Arabs and good family men were mutually exclusive categories. Rather than exhibiting a now-antiquated bipartisan civility, McCain had betrayed his unconscious prejudice.

That response encapsulates some of the disturbing intellectual trends chronicled in “The Coddling of the American Mind”: a willingness, even eagerness, to take offence; a determination to interpret other people’s words as bleakly as possible, regardless of intent; and a Manichean world view in which a political opponent must always be wrong. On the contrary, plead Jonathan Haidt and Greg Lukianoff, “A faux pas does not make someone an evil person.” Along with other shibboleths that have taken root in American universities—and spread beyond them, and beyond America—this kind of hypersensitivity closes down debate, the authors say. It also leaves young people ill-equipped for life’s inevitable frictions.

Their book grew out of an article in the Atlantic in 2015. As they point out, the sort of shenanigans that concerned them then, such as the rise of “trigger warnings” and “micro-aggressions” and the hounding of teachers for imaginary thought-crimes, have multiplied and worsened. In “The Coddling” they narrate a few of these rumpuses, such as the riot over a visiting speaker at the University of California at Berkeley in 2017, and what, in effect, was a student coup at Evergreen State College in Washington in the same year. Staff who should have known better have sometimes been complicit in the mayhem.

For all these lurid episodes, though, the big problem on many campuses is less vigilantism than self-censorship. As the authors note, “students at many colleges today are walking on eggshells”. The main victims, they emphasise, are not disinvited speakers but the agitators themselves, whom they see as worryingly fragile and confused. Just as many Americans describe commercial wants as needs (“I need a Coke”), so too many students mix up the concepts of safety (which it is the authorities’ job to ensure) with emotional comfort (which is nobody’s look-out). They construe objectionable opinions as invalid, even as a form of violence. They are prone to “catastrophising”, or interpreting as disastrous what is merely undesirable.

Three basic misconceptions underpin this hypochondriacal outlook, Mr Haidt and Mr Lukianoff write. First, that a person’s feelings, such as over whether a remark is racist, are always right. Second, that humankind can be split into good and bad people, whereas, as Solzhenitsyn put it, “the line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being”. Finally, that risk is best avoided, or “What doesn’t kill you makes you weaker”.

A further dispiriting conviction lurks at the heart of modern campus radicalism: the notion that each racial group, gender and sexuality is fundamentally different, destined (at best) to coexist in siloed spaces, safe or otherwise. As the authors lament, that diverges sadly from the ideal of common humanity that informed both the civil-rights movement and, later, the drive for gay equality.

What has gone wrong? A lot, they contend. The Western world is safer for children than ever, yet because its perils are more widely advertised, it feels more dangerous. Parents have become overprotective, inducing anxiety in their offspring long before they get to college. Social media exacerbate the nerves through perpetual judgments, comparisons and opportunities for bullying. They amplify bad news and isolate teenagers from contrary opinions. Technology also helps to isolate them literally: time spent in sociable and risky play is declining.

Tellingly, the cohort that most exhibits these symptoms are not millennials but “iGen”—people born from the late 1990s, who grew up with Facebook and Twitter and began to matriculate in 2013. They also reached adulthood in an atmosphere of political rancour, in which partisan allegiance was increasingly determined by shared enmities rather than values, and as America’s first black president was succeeded by a man who numbers some “very fine people” among the neo-Nazis who marched in Charlottesville.

If the causes of these shoddy intellectual habits mostly lie beyond the campus, so, the authors argue, do the consequences. “Nothing is of more importance to the public weal, than to form and train up youth in wisdom and virtue,” reckoned Benjamin Franklin, one of many thinkers cited in “The Coddling”. If the Enlightenment values of reason and empiricism wither at universities, they will struggle in the outside world too.

Just kids

All that is true and alarming. Mr Haidt’s and Mr Lukianoff’s analysis is wise and scrupulous. Still, another form of oversensitivity may colour the angst about campus activism—namely that of older people towards the antics of youngsters. That is especially true of events at elite institutions. Their alumnae tend to feel proprietorial about their alma maters; those who did not attend them often resent those who have. In reality, only a minority of students take part in the more egregious sorts of disorder that “The Coddling” documents. In the spectrum of threats to Western democracy, cock-eyed campus politics may not entirely deserve the attention it attracts.

Another mitigating factor—which Mr Haidt and Mr Lukianoff acknowledge—is that, in the headline incidents, at least, bolshie students are not the only blameworthy parties. Harassing speakers is always wrong; but sometimes the inviters and the barrackers are engaged in a cycle of provocations rather than a profound contest of ideas. The principle of free speech means Milo Yiannopoulos, a bilious provocateur who occasioned the Berkeley riot, is entitled to his views. It does not require colleges to welcome him.

Moreover the boundary between discomforting opinions, which ought to be accommodated, and the abhorrent kind is unstable. In 2018, for instance, speakers who maintain that women are too intellectually feeble to vote, or who advocate eugenics, are unlikely to receive invitations even from impish contrarians; both were mainstream positions in the fairly recent past. By contrast, the beliefs that homosexuality is sinful, or that women belong at home, just about lie within the sphere of legitimate discussion. In 50 years they may not—and impatient students will complain about something else.