If Books Could Kill

The Coddling Of The American Mind

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TRIGGER WARNING: if you're a SNOWFLAKE college professor afraid of how your students are expressing themselves, you might need a SAFE SPACE, because Michael and Peter are discussing "The Coddling of The American Mind," a book about campus culture that's light on facts and heavy on cherry-picked anecdotes.

CORRECTION: The Socrates quote mentioned at the end of this episode is apocryphal. We thank the listeners who pointed this out for refusing to coddle our American minds.

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Thanks to Mindseye for our theme song!

Peter: Michael. 


Michael: Peter. 


Peter: Have you read The Coddling of the American Mind? 


Michael: I have not, because I'm a millennial and I can't handle challenging ideas. 


[If Books Could Kill theme music]


Peter: Today we're talking about The Coddling of the American Mind, a book about campus culture by Jonathan Haidt and Greg Lukianoff. 


Michael: Finally, a couple of middle-aged men complaining about what the kids are doing. [Peter laughs] The bravery. 


Peter: When I was doing background research for this book, I ended up becoming kind of fascinated with the origins of our modern campus culture discourse. If you go through all the op-eds and think pieces, you can actually sort of see that at some point during the first half of 2015, there was a wave of writers suddenly talking about the hypersensitivity of college students. There is a March 2015 New York Times article about safe spaces at Brown University that gets a ton of attention, and we'll talk about it a bit later. Vox publishes a piece titled I'm A Liberal Professor And My Liberal Students Terrify Me. National Review publishes a piece comparing modern campus culture to both McCarthyism and the Salem Witch trials. 


Michael: Now we're talking. I love a good the college students are snowflakes, and that's why they're just like Hitler. I love that. Hate it when the kids exaggerate. 


Peter: And you had Jonathan Haidt writing a piece about the new political correctness for New York Magazine. I don't know that this was caused by anything as much as it's just the momentum of the discourse, but it's probably worth noting that in January of 2015, the Charlie Hebdo shootings happen. I don't want to get too aggressive with my causal diagnosis here, but I do wonder whether a discussion of free expression migrated into the realm of American campuses, and that sort of what made really made this take off. 


Michael: Or, Peter, the college students are just terrible and we noticed, someone's got to talk about the kids. 


Peter: So, to give you a little taste of what this discourse was like at the time, I'm going to send you a bit from that Vox piece. The piece is by a professor writing under the pseudonym Edward Schlosser. He is purportedly hiding his identity due [Michael laughs] to his fear of retaliation from students. He writes about an incident where a student complained about a lecture of his in 2009, and the student called him like a communist just based on some pretty bland liberal takes about the recession. 


Michael: Okay. 


Peter: And he tells the story of how administration sort of quickly realized that the complaint was bullshit. They rolled their eyes a little bit and they disposed of it, and that was that. So now you can read this. 


Michael: Okay. He says, “In 2015, such a complaint would not be delivered in such a fashion. Instead of focusing on the rightness or wrongness or even acceptability of the materials we reviewed in class, the complaint would center solely on how my teaching affected the student's emotional state. And if I responded in any way other than apologizing and changing the materials we reviewed in class, professional consequences would likely follow.” I love these, where it's like I've made up something in my head and gotten mad about it. 


Peter: My wife has a friend who absorbs way too much true crime content, and as a result is convinced that there's, like, a real risk that she's going to get murdered. 


Michael: Right. 


Peter: This is the academic equivalent of that, where they are reading these little anecdotes about students going wild and getting professors fired, and they're like, “Oh, no, I'm going to get fired.” No, probably not. Relax. 


Michael: All of this is probably based on you reading other articles about people also imagining a multiverse where they get fired. 


Peter: Yes. 


Michael: It's just like a bunch of arch conservatives, like, pooping back and forth forever. 


Peter: So, that's a little taste of the discussion that's happening. This discourse carries on throughout the summer of 2015. Enter our authors, Jonathan Haidt and Greg Lukianoff. Haidt is a social psychologist. Lukianoff is a constitutional lawyer for FIRE, the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education. Group that's very invested in free speech on campus. 


Michael: Right, that basically exists to promote this moral panic and make this seem like a problem worthy of national concern. 


Peter: In September 2015, they write a lengthy piece for The Atlantic titled The Coddling of the American Mind. How Trigger Warnings Are Hurting Mental Health on Campus. [Michael laughs] Do you remember this piece? 


Michael: I have read sections of this piece over the years. [sighs] I can't place it on the timeline where it lands in relation to the Oberlin Sandwich story, which I think of the psychotomimetic example of campus culture bullshit. But this was after a wave of scare stories and really a lot of these aging, middle aged dudes grasping around for ways to substantiate the feelings that they had. They couldn't really come up with that many firings, and they couldn't actually find places where people were having their speech suppressed, so they landed on trigger warnings. It's just like something nice that teachers started doing for students, like, no schools required them. This was the only way they could cast students as totalitarian. They just leaned into it, even though it makes no sense. 


Peter: Haidt and Lukianoff what sets their piece apart is that most of the discourse to this point has centered around professors. Professors are worried about oversensitive students, getting them fired. Haidt and Lukianoff purport to be focusing on the students themselves, saying that the psychology of modern students is counterproductive to their own mental health. 


Michael: Because what we're really in it for is to help the students be better, even though we've dedicated our entire careers talking about how the students are full of shit and too weak. 


Peter: So, that angle combined with, I think, their ostensible expertise in psychology and free speech law, lands them a book deal. And in 2018, they published this book, The Coddling of the American Mind: How Good Intentions and Bad Ideas Are Setting Up a Generation for Failure. 


Michael: I wonder if there's anything else that might have set up that generation for failure, because any economic trends, no, it's definitely the trigger warnings. 


Peter: The first section of the book is about the bad ideas that they believe are spreading on college campuses, which they very dramatically call The Three Great Untruths. [chuckles] I will send them to you. 


Michael: Oh, okay. 


Peter: I guess I knew that the word untruth was a word. 


Michael: Yeah. If only we had a three letter shorter word for such a thing. The opposite of truth. Okay. It says, “One, what doesn't kill you makes you weaker. Two, always trust your feelings. Three, life is a battle between good people and evil people.” 


Peter: Yeah. So, my question to you, Mike, is have you ever in your life encountered a person who believes a single one of these things? 


[laughter] 


Michael: No. I was just about to say. This doesn't sound like it's a list of hegemonic ideas. 


Peter: Right. 


Michael: This sounds like it's a caricature. 


Peter: I'm deep in, like, left-wing weirdos in my life. 


Michael: Yeah. Same. 


Peter: And I have never met anyone who believes that you should always trust your feelings or what doesn't kill you makes you weaker. 


Michael: Peter, I live in Seattle. These are my people. This is my world. I have never in the deepest, darkest crystal yoga, Instagram comments seen anybody express anything like this. 


Peter: The idea that college students are in a bubble, super prominent. But I don't remember any time in my life where I was exposed to more different ideas than college just sort of by the nature of it. The people who are in bubbles are like the 48-year-olds watching Fox News every night, freaking out about this stuff. 


Michael: Yeah, yeah, or reading the Atlantic. 


Peter: Right. 


Michael: And also, we talked a couple of weeks ago about how Clash of Civilizations is still one of the most commonly assigned books on college syllabi. Like, the idea that every kid goes to college and just immediately goes into the gender studies program just completely ignores the fact that a ton of people go to college and go into STEM fields or into economics. 


Peter: That's the thing it’s like, there is so much right-wing ideology in the ideas that are considered worth entertaining by the institutions who they hire, etc. 


Michael: I learned from a podcast called 5-4 that law schools are actually quite conservative, if you're familiar with that. 


Peter: Sounds like a cool podcast that people should subscribe to. 


Michael: With handsome-- [crosstalk] 


Peter: [chuckles] I mean, to be clear, this is the entire premise of the book. It's built around thesis that these ideas are spreading on college campuses and that we should all be worried. Every other part of the book relies on this being true. If the argument is, well, look, I think that modern college students have a slightly different view of what harm is relative to myself, that's not a book. No one's going to buy that book. You need them to believe that what doesn't kill you makes you weaker. That is the first untruth that they start off with. The untruth of fragility they call it, what doesn't kill you makes you weaker. Now, again, no one believes that, nor did they provide even one example of anyone saying anything like this. 


Michael: Oh really? [laughs] 


Peter: Nothing.


Michael: They don't even bother, they just skip straight to the debunking? 


Peter: Yeah. That said, I will say thesis here is relatively clear. They're arguing that sometimes injuries of various types physical, mental, emotional, can actually make you stronger and therefore efforts to insulate yourself from harm can be counterproductive at times. 


Michael: Sure. 


Peter: They lead off with an analogy about peanut allergies. 


Michael: Oh, this fucking thing. This is like a weird right-wing Substack trope that like peanut allergies are fake or something. 


Peter: It is. Yeah. The prevalence of peanut allergies among children more than tripled between the mid 90s and 2008. Some research has shown that it was likely because parents and schools were avoiding nuts in case any children were allergic, which in turn prevented immune systems from developing resistance. So, allergy rates went up. So, in the analogy, the peanut is racist comments [Michael laughs] and you have to build up your immunity to racist comments, otherwise you'll end up being allergic. 


Michael: I mean, look, I am not allowed to sit in judgment of anyone else's try-hard metaphors must mine be judged. It's both a totally asinine metaphor because human biology does not work the same as exposure to ideas. But can also it's kind of a perfect metaphor because if somebody says, “Hey, I'm allergic to peanuts,” and you're like, “Oh, somebody didn't get enough as a kid.” You're just a huge fucking asshole. And if some teenager who's like a member of a minority group is like, “Hey, don't say slurs around me,” and you're like, “Can't handle it, baby?” You're just a prick. 


Peter: This research on the heritability of IQ is produced in a facility that also produces racism. 


Michael: Yeah. 


Peter: The reason that you know this is a terrible analogy is because you can easily just craft the opposite analogy. Like, what about seatbelts. Seatbelt use was promoted and mandated by law. Injuries and fatalities went down. Ipso facto, being cautious is good and effective. 


Michael: Right. Nobody's talking about building up their car crash immunity. 


Peter: Such a stupid fucking analogy, I can't even believe it. 


Michael: It's unbelievable. 


Peter: What Haidt and Lukianoff failed a lot of this around is the idea of cognitive behavioral therapy, which involves exposure to things that bother you, that can trigger you, etc. So, what they're saying is, “Look, the way that we treat a lot of trauma is by exposing you to things that trigger those traumas.” And so, children are sort of doing the wrong thing. They're doing this backwards and it's like, okay, I hear you in like this narrow sense, but we're talking about controlled therapy settings, not the discourse online or whatever the fuck or the discourse on college campuses. 


Michael: Right. If somebody has arachnophobia, you shouldn't just, go and put a tarantula on them and be like, “You're welcome.” The place where the analogy totally breaks down is that being exposed to bad ideas is not inherently worthwhile being exposed to flat earth or like, sasquatch is real. That doesn't do anything for you intellectually, because those ideas are fucking wrong. 


Peter: And because you only have so much time to entertain so many ideas. Maybe we should narrow it down to some interesting ones. 


Michael: Yeah, yeah. This entire discourse is based around stripping all of these concepts of all of their specificity and saying just platitudes, being exposed to challenging ideas is a good thing. Well, depends on which ideas they are. So, it's like they don't actually believe this. 


Peter: Cognitive behavioral therapy and their belief in it is sort of a big underlying theme in the book. It's their basis for the whole coddling concept. We're being too soft on the kids. They need to be exposed to bad, unpleasant things sometimes because that's how you learn to resist them. The primary example that they use of this type of thing is from Brown University in 2015, where there was a debate held on campus concerning rape culture, and some students organized a safe space room on campus with soothing music, blankets, cookies, coloring books, Play-Doh, and people trained to handle trauma. 


Michael: Argh.


Peter: I poked around on this. From what I can tell, the anecdote is true. This safe space existed as described, and some students, at least one student involved, made a comment that was like, “I needed the safe space because I was being bombarded with a bunch of ideas that went against my closely held beliefs.” Conservative media latches onto that quote, which is just one kid who was like, 19, talking off the cuff to a reporter. 


Michael: Yeah. 


Peter: They're like, “Look, these kids are literally wrapping themselves in blankies to avoid ideas they don't like.” 


Michael: But then what's so weird to me is why isn't this a challenging idea that the conservatives need to be exposed to. I thought were into challenging ideas. That's a challenging idea. Let's have blankets and Play-Doh and therapists for kids that are rigged victims. 


Peter: The whole point is that these people want to boost certain conservative ideas. But they don't feel super comfortable defending those ideas directly. So, they shift the discourse into, “Well, hear them out.” They don't want to have to get into a conversation about rape culture. So, what do they do? They move a step away from that conversation and say, “Well, the real problem is that you won't engage with the conversation.” 


Michael: It also does overlook the very real problem of sexual assault on college campuses. 


Peter: Right. 


Michael: It's very odd to look at the phenomenon of campus rape and be like, “These are the people I'm singling out for criticism.” 


Peter: I think it's a way of indirectly rolling your eyes at someone's trauma, because maybe it's true that some of those students or all of those students are not processing the trauma in a healthy way by creating a safe space that looks like this. Maybe that's true. I'm not a psychologist. I don't know. Obviously, Jonathan Haidt thinks that's true, but that's not the shape that the discourse took. The discourse was sneering. 


Michael: Right. 


Peter: If you sincerely believe that they're reacting to trauma, that's not an empathetic response, to say the least. 


Michael: It's focusing more on what is annoying to you personally than what is a problem societally. 


Peter: I mean, yeah, there are 20 million college students or so in this country. And if you want to find a handful of examples of them doing something stupid, you easily can. But it doesn't prove a trend. And when they do try to use actual data to show a trend, you can immediately see that the argument is weak. 


They point to a 2017 study where 58% of the students said that they agree with the statement that, “It's important to be part of a campus community where I am not exposed to intolerant and offensive ideas.” 


Michael: Got them. 


Peter: That same study found that 92% of students agreed with the following statement, “It is important to be part of a campus community where I am exposed to the ideas and opinions of other students, even if they are different from my own.” They don't mention that statistic. I had to go pull it out of the study. But keep in mind, they are writing a whole book about how students are increasingly rejecting the ideals of the free exchange of ideas, while the data that they are selectively using shows that students actually overwhelmingly embrace those ideas. 


Michael: And they're not giving you any comparison to other societal groups. If this is something about elite liberal colleges, then you should compare it to other colleges. If this is something about how colleges are coddling students, then you should compare that to non-college educated students. And you should probably also compare that to older people, like how many boomers think that it's important to be exposed to other ideas. That's the problem with these books and these articles is they always present you this data in a vacuum. 


Peter: On to untruth number two, always trust your feelings. 


Michael: This is the Yoda untruth. 


Peter: Once again, I have to preface this by saying that no one actually believes that you should always trust your feelings. 


Michael: No one thinks that. 


Peter: I have never witnessed a single person, even in the depths of social media, sincerely say that. 


Michael: Facts don't trust my feelings. 


Peter: Much of the chapter centers around the supposed epidemic of campus speakers being disinvited based on their controversial views. 


Michael: Love it. 


Peter: They say that this is a product of students acting emotionally. They pose the rhetorical question, “Should a student saying, 'I am offended' be sufficient reason to cancel a lecture?” 


Michael: This is such a funny example to use for this, because this is the opposite of students saying to trust their feelings. This is students saying these ideas are intellectually invalid. 


Peter: Yes, but you only feel that they're invalid, Michael.


Michael: Oh, yeah. [laughs] 


Peter: You feel based on your review of the literature. 


Michael: Right. On your reading. 


Peter: They're sort of operating out of this framework that being offended is like, inherently irrational or emotional. It's reasonable to be offended by Nazis or by pedophilia or by someone who is killing puppies. 


Michael: One of the things that changed my mind on this was, I believe it was a New Yorker article that actually interviewed one of these "oh so scary campus activists" who was protesting a speaker. What the protester said was that a lot of these speakers are invited to give commencement speeches and other things that are mandatory for students. 


There's a huge difference, actually, between just, like, a random person comes to talk on a campus on, like, a Wednesday night, you can go or not go versus to get your diploma, you have to actually sit through a speech by, I think it was Condoleezza Rice that they were protesting. And when college campuses invite speakers to talk, they are conferring some of their prestige onto the speaker. If somebody says, “Oh, I'm regularly invited to give talks at Harvard,” that is some prestige that person is using. And it's actually quite reasonable for members of this institution to say, like, “I don't think that our prestige should be shared with this person. This person does not deserve it.” 


Peter: Also, if you're just a 22-year-old without access to power, you only have so many opportunities in your life to scream at Condoleezza Rice, and I think you got to take them. I've sent you a chart from the book that shows disinvitation attempts by year. 


Michael: Oh, fuck off. I know this chart. I know this chart very well. 


Peter: I love this chart. 


Michael: Good God. 


Peter: Tell me what you're seeing. Tell me what you're seeing. 


Michael: So, okay, this is a chart that tracks disinvitation attempts by year and source of criticism over time. So, it starts in 2000, and it goes to 2017. And starting in 2008, you can see the lines diverge where the left-wing disinvitation attempts start spiking and the right-wing disinvitation attempts stay flat. So, what I'm supposed to be learning at a glance from this chart is that, like, wow, the left has really gone off the rails. Look at all these disinvitations. 


Peter: The bottom line is that in 2016, there were 42 attempted disinvitations. So, if you look at the numbers, that has approximately doubled in the span of a few years. 


Michael: Huge. 


Peter: On the other hand, these numbers are unbelievably insignificant. 


Michael: It's like you think that the left-hand axis is some sort of truncation, it means like 42,000, [Peter laughs] 4200 or something. It's like no, no, it's fucking 42. 42 disinvitation attempts. 


Peter: That's right. Right. 


Michael: [chuckles] Who fucking cares? 


Peter: There are in excess of 4500 degree granting institutions of higher education in the United States. If each of them hosted 20 speakers a year, which is an extremely low estimate, that would mean that for every 2100 or so speaker invitations, you're getting one attempt to disinvite a speaker. That's 20 speakers per college per year. If it's 100, then we're talking about less than 1 in 10,000. 


Michael: Right. 


Peter: These are unbelievably minuscule numbers. 


Michael: This is one of the weirdest things about the “data" in this book is that if you actually look at it doesn't illustrate their point. It illustrates exactly the opposite. If there's tens of thousands of speakers being invited to campus every year, a lot of those people probably are really controversial, and a lot of them probably just give their talks and everybody goes home and maybe there's a tense Q&A. The mismatch between left-wing disinvitations and right-wing disinvitations. The most obvious explanation for that is that there is now a huge media apparatus that exists almost exclusively to freak out about left-wing disinvitations. So, of course, you're going to have more reports of disinvitation attempts because there's like, hotlines and shit. 


Peter: Not just that, but this is a time in which this sort of how liberal college kids are trying to cancel speakers, that discourse picks up. What that results in is conservative student groups trying to troll liberal students by engaging with speakers who they know are going to cause a shit storm. 


Michael: Yeah, yeah, yeah, that's a good point. 


Peter: By the way, did you catch the last sentence in a little paragraph describing the chart. 


Michael: Oh, God. Asterisks show where the solid line would have been had Milo Yiannopoulos been removed from the data set. What? 


Peter: This data set is so small that they had to control for Milo Yiannopoulos. 


Michael: [laughs] For the protest against someone who's genuinely extremely odious and deserves to be protested. 


Peter: So, all of these things are feeding into one another to drive these numbers up, and you still only get to 42. 


Michael: It is very funny to me how much time conservatives spend whining about the marketplace of ideas behaving like a market. 


Peter: Did I ever tell you that I was disinvited from speaking at a school. 


Michael: Because of your tweets, Peter, I would disinvite the shit if I saw your tweets. 


Peter: No. The 5-4 crew was once invited by a student group to speak at a law school. At the request of the student who thought he would get into trouble, I will not name the law school. We were invited and then the student came back in a panic, saying, “I raised this to administration for approval and not only did they say no, but I might be in trouble here for even suggesting it.” 


Michael: Oh, wow. Okay, so they said hard no. Like, really no. 


Peter: Just to circle back on some recent developments in my life, disinvited from campus, fired from my job, all for speech related things. Where is my fucking Tucker Carlson two minutes? 


Michael: I know. But then this to me, this is so revealing of the entire thing is that no one actually cares about people being disinvited from fucking campus talks. No offense, but you have a podcast that goes to tens of thousands of people. Your views are widely accessible. This is a minuscule component of whether or not speech is free, especially now, at a time when anyone can set up a social media account, anyone can set up a Medium account, anyone can self-publish a book. Speech has never been freer in literally, human history. It's like, I care so much about free speech that I've made it my entire career, as these guys basically have. But I also care so little about it that I only care about this extremely narrow slice of “censorship.” They've chosen the one place that conservatives can claim oppression. 


Peter: I just remembered that I was also once invited to speak at a law school on the condition that we not make fun of any professors. [Michael laughs] We had no plans to, but we just said no as a matter of principle. 


Michael: Yeah, I think that's fair. I think that's fair. 


Peter: [laughs] All right. Let's move on to untruth number three. Life is a battle between good people evil people. 


Michael: Something you hear all the time. That's something I learned at a drag brunch. 


Peter: This one is about what Haidt and Lukianoff say is “Students tendency to place people in one of two categories, either good or evil, and then act accordingly. And that is their framework for a discussion of identity politics.” 


Michael: The kids are too into their groups. 


Peter: This is one of the weakest parts of the book. It lacks both anecdotes and data. [Michael laughs] And they say that there are two types of identity politics, shared humanity identity politics, which appeal to shared morality and use unifying language and were embraced by Martin Luther King Jr. Common enemy identity politics, which involve mobilizing one group against another and were embraced by Adolf Hitler. Again, this chapter is a critique of students who supposedly act like everyone is either good or evil. And the authors are like, “Okay, so you have two types of identity politics, the Martin Luther King Jr. kind and the Hitler kind.” 


Michael: There's two kinds of 19-year-olds. 


[laughter] 


Peter: The two genders. Martin Luther King Jr. and Hitler. Do we really need to invent cute subcategories of identity politics to distinguish between MLK and Hitler? 


Michael: Yeah, yeah, yeah. 


Peter: Isn't the operative distinction that one was against oppression on the basis of identity and one was for it. 


Michael: Isn't this also the argument against social change throughout history was it like, you're doing it wrong. I would be fine with this if you ask me. Oh, my God. It's John Gray. It's like if you ask me, could you not be racist. Rather than, would you not be racist. But that is not how social progress works at any point in history. 


Peter: It's hard to parse this and engage with it seriously because you're pointing out that it's unserious. Now, there are parts of this chapter that I think are relatively inoffensive. They talk about the dangers of groupthink and tribalism and how mentally categorizing someone as a member of the outgroup can lead to unfairly characterizing their actions and their intentions. But what they do not do is provide any data or research showing that this is a demonstrable problem among college students in particular. 


Michael: Right. 


Peter: Obviously, like, tribal thinking pretty prevalent across society. Given thesis of the book, the obvious question is whether the younger generation is more susceptible to this stuff. They don't even try to address that. 


Michael: It's also very funny to criticize 19-year-olds for being too fragile and then immediately be like, “When you call me racist, you're being like, Hitler. You guys are totally Hitler right now.” 


Peter: The last thing I want to add in this section is that a lot of what they are ascribing to a new desire among young people to punish their opponents. Frankly, I don't see a lot of evidence that it's not basically 100% social media. A, the ability of some college kid to cause a ruckus on campus is now way higher than it was when I was in college. B, someone who is on the right is being constantly exposed to the excesses of the left because social media accounts are taking that content, filtering it, boiling it down, and throwing it at their face. 


Michael: Peter, imagine if there was social media when we were in college. 


Peter: One thing that I think the younger generation doesn't understand is how often our generation talks about how glad they are that social media didn't exist when we were young. 


Michael: No shit, dude. Oh, my God. This is something I think about all the time. My libertarian phase has been lost to history. 


Peter: When you said your libertarian phase, I flashback to one month in law school. 


Michael: Yeah, and then you met other libertarians. That's basically what happened to me. [crosstalk] I was like, "Oh." [unintelligible [00:30:43]. Oh, interesting. Okay.


Peter: [laughs] When you first are exposed to libertarianism, coming from a leftish perspective, you're like, “Maybe I can do libertarianism without the racism.” And then you absorb the literature a bit and you're like, “No.” 


Michael: You're like, "No. That's their whole thing." 


Peter: No, you actually can't-- they're coming at this from the other direction. 


Michael: [laughs] 


Peter: They're only trying to do the racism. Maybe that's a good segue into the next portion of this book. The first section, again, was sort of the untruths, and this next section is The Bad Ideas in Action, the untruths in action, and they lead off with intimidation and violence. In some ways not the most objectionable part of the book, but there are some pretty dark sides to this chapter. They describe a series of violent or semi violent reactions to campus speakers, all occurring in 2017. They talk about the UC Berkeley protests related to Milo Yiannopoulos, which started off with a group of peaceful protesters and then devolved when a smaller group of mostly non-students turned violent. There's only anecdotal evidence that any of those people were students, and the authors harp on that anecdotal evidence which mostly consists of some tweets. 


They describe the Middlebury College protest of Charles Murray, The Bell Curve author and professor Allison Stanger, who was there to moderate. That occurred in March 2017. There were a bunch of students that showed up to disrupt the speech. When Murray and Stanger left, they were accosted by activists. Her hair was aggressively pulled, and the car that they were in was pounded on until officials cleared a path for them to leave. So, I don't want to downplay these incidents, but it is worth noting that in both cases, the evidence shows the violence was driven by outside groups, organized antifascist activists, not students themselves. So, the authors attempt to characterize the violence as reflective of student ideology does not feel honest. 


Michael: Right. 


Peter: They also talk about Heather McDonald, then antiblack Lives Matter writer who spoke at Claremont McKenna College in April of 2017. In that one, protesters attempted to shut it down. From what I could tell, no actual violence occurred. So, maybe they were running low on spicy anecdotes here, I don’t know. And then they get to Charlottesville. 


Michael: Oh, what? 


Peter: So, in August 2017, Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville attracts a bunch of neo-Nazis and other alt-right types. There's peaceful protest of the rally, and there are also outbursts of violence. Most notably, a right-winger drove his car into a crowd of peaceful left-wing protesters, killing a woman named Heather Heyer. They do condemn the violence that killed Heather Heyer, but what's very telling is that the authors do not use this as an example of the right's intolerance towards alternate viewpoints and peaceful protests. Instead, they quickly pivot to saying that the left used Charlottesville as an excuse to shut down speech from the right, and they spend the rest of the chapter talking about that. 


Michael: Oh, my fucking God. 


Peter: You have this entire book committed to the idea that liberals, especially are engaged in an unprecedented level of censorious conduct on campus, and then they glaze right over the fact that in all of the modern campus culture wars, the only person to be killed was a peaceful left-wing protester. I thought that this was the moral low point of the book. 


Michael: This is the thing with these kinds of books, is that they want to cast one kind of random anecdote as indicative of a larger culture and another kind of anecdote as just like a random lone wolf event with no further significance. But they're doing it exactly wrong, because if you look at the incidents where left-wing protesters went too far, those incidents are almost unanimously denounced by the left. You have presidents of universities. You have heads of student unions saying, “Hey, don't send death threats to this person. Don't throw bottles at this person. We condemn what happened.” And then when you have these outbursts of right-wing violence, you have them celebrated by right-wing leaders. Like, Kyle Rittenhouse is a fucking celebrity on the right. Trump rather famously did not particularly denounce what happened to Heather Heyer. 


Peter: Right. So, that the Trump comments. They even mention critically, this is when Trump famously said "There were very fine people on both sides." The authors talk about that briefly without acknowledging that what they're saying is that from the very top of the conservative political establishment is implicit endorsement of this violence. You have absolutely nothing like that on the left. Nothing. 


Michael: They just have no argument that this represents any kind of culture. 


Peter: They mention a report from FIRE, the organization that Lukianoff works for, they gloss right over this and try to hand wave it away. Very few students report that they might actually participate in violent actions like this. 2% said that they would be willing to disrupt a guest speaker event by making noise during the event. 1% said they'd be willing to use violent action to disrupt it. 


Michael: Right. 


Peter: It's like, "Whoa, woah, woah." What you're saying is that there's a violence problem, and 1% of people are willing to engage, even theoretically, in violence. 


Michael: Right. This is such a classic pattern of the other articles about this that I've read where they cite this overwhelming culture of violence that is taken over the left, and they're about to install authoritarianism and all the slippery slope stuff. And then once you boil it down, what we've basically got here is two anecdotes in which people who were not college students behaved in an indefensible way. One anecdote where violence almost happened. Another anecdote of right-wing violence that is far more severe than anything the left-wing people did. And a public opinion poll that shows 1% of college students say that they're okay with violence. 


Peter: Right. Which brings us to the next section, the next chapter titled Witch Hunts. They cite the sociologist Albert Ferguson as saying that witch hunts have three different characteristics. One, they arise quickly and dramatically. Two, they charge the target with crimes against the collective, and three, the charges are often trivial or fabricated. I guess it never quite hit them at this book. The broader reaction against campus culture kind of fits this description pretty nicely. 


Michael: Literally witch hunt. Yep


Peter: Yeah. 


Michael: Going after 19-year-olds with blue hair, but fine. 



Peter: They kick it off by comparing atrocities in Mao's China to modern day campus culture warship. 


Michael: Oh, fuck off. 


Peter: This is a quote, “As historical events, the two movements are radically different, most notably in that the Red Guards were responding to the call of a totalitarian dictator who encouraged them to use violence. While the American college students have been self-organized and almost entirely non-violent. Yet there are similarities, too. For instance, both were movements initiated by idealistic young college students fighting for what seemed to be a noble ideal.” 


Michael: The fact that one of them was top down and killed hella people, and the other one is bottom up and didn't do anything. 


Peter: Yeah, there are some differences. One is a massive totalitarian nation state, and the other is a small group of non-violent student activists. 


Michael: This is like me comparing you to Ted Bundy and being like, “Well, Peter didn't kill anybody, and Ted Bundy did. But there are similarities.” 


Peter: [chuckles] Look, I have brown hair, too. I get it. I get it. I get the comparison. It's time for a little case study. As I've mentioned, nearly the entire book a collection of anecdotes, many characterized in ways that feel flagrantly dishonest. One of those is about University of Pennsylvania Law School professor Amy Wax. I thought it would be worth exploring this one because I happen to know a good amount about the controversy, and part of that is because I took a class with Amy Wax when I was in law school at the University of Pennsylvania. 


Michael: No way. Really? 


Peter: I do consider myself a bit of a subject matter expert on this fucking lady. So, in August 2017, Wax and another law professor wrote an opinion piece for The Philadelphia Inquirer titled Paying The Price For The Breakdown Of The Country's Bourgeois Culture. The piece argued that many modern social problems could be traced to the decline of bourgeois values, such as hard work and getting married before having kids. The most controversial line was, “All cultures are not equal, or at least they are not equal in preparing people to be productive in an advanced economy.” She claimed that this was about culture and not race, but many people read it as a pretty clear racist dog whistle. The story that Haidt and Lukianoff tell is that the next week, a collection of students, alumni, and Penn law faculty condemn the peace. They characterize this as a witch hunt and argue that none of these people addressed the substance of Wax's claims. 


What they inexplicably leave out is that almost immediately after the op-ed was published, Wax did an interview with the Daily Pennsylvanian, the Penn student newspaper, where she touted the superiority of Anglo-Protestant culture and said, “I don't shrink from the word superior, and everyone wants to go to countries ruled by white Europeans.”

 

Michael: Whoa. Holy shit. So, the dog whistles just like a whistle? 


Peter: Yeah. Haidt, Lukianoff leave this out of the book. I presume to make it look like Wax's colleagues were maybe unfairly assuming that her statements were racist, when in fact she was openly endorsing the idea that white European culture is superior. 


Michael: All she did was say that one race was superior to another. And these kids—


Peter: Is that what racism is these days, folks? They also left out some controversial portions of the original essay. Like, she claims that the birth control pill has contributed to social decline. They omit that, presumably so that the reader does not have to do a double take and think a little bit about who they're defending. 


Michael: A good sign when you're drawing attention to a real societal problem is when you have to constantly lie to get people worked up about it. 


Peter: Their claim that no one substantively addressed her arguments is also just an outright lie. Several of her Penn Law colleagues provided detailed rebuttals to her statements about, the measurable impact of cultural values, which Haidt knows because one of them, Professor Jonah Gelbach, engaged Haidt in a blog debate on the subject shortly after it happens. They even quietly drop a citation to his rebuttal at the end of the very sentence that claims Wax's colleagues never rebutted the substance of her claims. Transparently dishonest. As someone who was very familiar with this whole situation, I was like, "No fucking way." 


Michael: So, were you one of the campus activists at the time, Peter? 


Peter: No, no. When I was at Penn, racism was allowed and okay. I will say this about Amy Wax at Penn. First, she is one of those nightmare professors that everyone fears because she genuinely revels in making students uncomfortable. If a student was doing poorly during a line of questioning from her, she would be far more likely to stick with that student. Most professors move on because they want productive discussion. 


Michael: Human dignity. 


Peter: If she got the sense that someone was out of their depth, she would just hammer them continuously. She loved it. At the time, although unbeknownst to administration, she was engaging in debates on a couple of blogs about race. She was having these really weird conversations that basically were about how she believed that black students in her classes and in her children's classes when they were growing up tended to be more disruptive, lower performers, etc. As this whole debacle unfolded in 2017, she made the claim that no black student has ever finished in the top of her class and that she was unfamiliar with any black student at Penn finishing in the top 25% of the class, something like that. The dean immediately put out a statement being like, “That's just not true. That's just not true.” 


Michael: It is very funny to me in these books about the campus kids are so terrible, whatever. All of the anecdotes are basically like, this person who is famously a piece of shit, experienced consequences. First, they came for the pieces of shit. 


Peter: When I first read that she was embroiled in controversy, it just felt so affirming. I was like, you mean the fucking worst person I've ever met. [Michael laughs] All right, case study number two, [laughs] Evergreen State College. 


Michael: Oh, fuck off. This is close to home for me. I know many people who went to Evergreen, and I'm vaguely familiar with this. Isn't this-- it was like a white day of silence, something-something. 


Peter: Yes, yes. All right, so small progressive college in Washington state. Students don't receive grades, but instead narrative evaluations of their work. They don't have majors but design their own course of study. 


Michael: This has become such a trope on the right, like this. They love shitting on this college. And every time I want to defend it, I do remember the person who I know who majored in outdoor recreation at [Peter laughs] and it's like, "Oh-kay." 


Peter: Well look, that is a bullshit major, but I majored in political science. [Michael laughs] Are they out of control? Perhaps. But are majors real? No. You can't tell me that majors are real. There is annual Evergreen State College tradition called the Day of Absence, where students of color would stay off campus to raise awareness about their contributions to campus life. 


In 2017, it was proposed that the tradition be inverted and white students and faculty be asked to remain away from campus. A reportedly well respected and progressive at the time, Professor Bret Weinstein, harshly criticizes this idea. He speaks out and says that there is a difference between students of color voluntarily removing themselves and then asking another group to go away, which he describes as, “A show of force and an act of oppression in and of itself.” Now, according to Haidt and Lukianoff, the day of absence comes and goes without incident. But a couple of months later, students protest outside of Professor Weinstein's classroom, many shouting him down and calling him racist. They then march on the administrative buildings and confront the university president and some others. The confrontation is aggressive. There's video of it. The students are being pretty hostile toward the president, making weird demands like, that he not use his hands while speaking. Students are purposely blocking off the exits so faculty can't leave. 


Professor Weinstein goes on Tucker Carlson to voice his concerns, [Michael laughs] and things escalate. Right-wing media goes ballistic. Conservative groups are coming to the college to protest, tensions exploding all around. 


Michael: I love how in these stories, the structure of these stories is, like, “He was accused of being racist in a later op-ed for Storm Front.” 


Peter: Now, if you listen to that story closely and that's the story that the authors here tell, you might have noticed a slightly weird little fact. I said there were two months between the initial comments he made and the student protest. That is not how angry mobs tend to work. 


Michael: Yeah, yeah, yeah. 


Peter: So, what happened here? What happened is that his comments were made in March, and there were no protests or anything like that. But in May, there was a cafeteria altercation that involved two black students and a white student. The two black students were removed from their dorms and detained by police in the middle of the night, while the white student was not. A group of students marched through the halls in protest. Weinstein exited his classroom to confront them. Contentious exchange ensues, the students then proceeded to march to confront the school president, as I described. 


So, Haidt and Lukianoff are narrating a story where these students are angrily protesting Weinstein's comments. That's the whole point they're making, that these students are responding to mere disagreement with aggressive protest, but that is just not true. What they're protesting is what they believe to be the mistreatment of black students by police and campus administration. 


Sort of circling back, this book is about ideas and how students are so coddled that they can't even tolerate different ideas. When those ideas are directly wrapped up in material differential treatment, are students not allowed to protest that? Are they not allowed to say, "Hey, I think that's racist?" What are you saying these students are doing wrong here? I don't know how you can see it any other way other than Haidt and Lukianoff are saying that there are certain opinions that students should not be able to voice freely. That's all there is to their position. 


Michael: Didn't Weinstein-- did he get fired or something? There was some lawsuit eventually. He became like this huge martyr. 


Peter: He and his wife, who was also a professor there, sued, and they settled and resigned again. 


Michael: They get a big payout. It's like, what's the actual fucking downside here? 


Peter: Right. Nothing. If you're a conservative or a “progressive” making a conservative turn, the absolute best thing that can happen to you is to become embroiled in a campus controversy. 


Michael: Seriously.


Peter: Dollar signs in your eyes as soon as it starts to happen. 


Michael: Yeah. Book deal, podcast, yeah. 


Peter: All right. The next section of the book is about the social and political circumstances that have brought us to this point, and they start off with the political polarization. I actually think their discussion on this is pretty unobjectionable, other than being derivative. What I do want to talk about is one piece of the chapter, "Subtitled outrage from the off campus right," which chronicles some of the ways in which these stories about left-wing campus outrage get fed into the right-wing media ecosystem and then turn into right-wing outrage. 


They returned to Evergreen State College, where the comments by Bret Weinstein supposedly sparked outrage again. Again, he was on Tucker, and there was backlash from the right. Here is where they actually describe some of that backlash. Swastikas show up on campus. Multiple students are doxed by right-wingers online. Their identities and contact information spread across right-wing social media. Hundreds of threats of violence are received by students, including by text messages. Like, literally dozens and dozens and dozens of text messages from random numbers being received by individuals. The neo-Nazi group Atomwaffen Division posted video of themselves walking around campus at night putting up posters that say, “Join your local Nazis and black lives don't matter.” 


Michael: Holy shit. 


Peter: You might notice that this is considerably more severe than anything you've heard about students from either this ordeal or any other ordeal they described, but it is tucked away within a subsection of a single chapter in the middle of the book. 


Michael: Right. 


Peter: Just bizarre and frustrating how much right-wing violence directed at left-wing speech is treated like a side plot here, given that every time it's described, it's far more serious than any of the anecdotes about the conduct of the left. 


Michael: The right-wing stuff seems like organized and kind of top down too. This would all be coming from Tucker and various other right-wing websites, none of whom presumably are condemning this after the fact. 


Peter: Right. They seem to just categorize it as like, “Well, this is not stemming from campus, so it's not what our books about.” [Michael laughs] I guess in a total vacuum, that might make sense if they're like, "Well, we're writing about campus culture," but when they're just talking about how these students were mean to the university president and then it's like Nazis with masks put up signs around campus and spray-painted swastikas and shit. 


Michael: Right. 


Peter: Are you really just pretending that the first thing is worse than the second thing? 


Michael: If they're just saying that, “Oh, it's in a different category,” well, then you should have written about that fucking category. 


Peter: Yeah, absolutely. Yeah, maybe now is a good time to question the overarching narrative here and in the campus culture debates generally, which is that the left in particular is trying to suppress speech that it does not like on campus. Jeffrey Sachs, a political scientist, tracked instances of professors in the US being fired due to political speech from 2015 through 2017 and found that more professors were fired for liberal speech than conservative speech by a factor of about three to one. 


Michael: Holy shit. 


Peter: Now, I will float out the possibility that there are just more liberal professors. It might be that's not in and of itself indicative of, like, a three to one bias. But the media watchdog Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting, FAIR found that the New York Times dedicated seven times as much space to stories about the suppression of conservative speech when compared to stories about the suppression of liberal speech. [Michael laughs] So, the next few chapters of the book and we're rounding the bend here, describe an increase in depression and anxiety among young people, as well as the increase in recent decades of overprotective parenting styles and the decline in unsupervised play by children. 


Michael: Oh, I'm going to have to agree with them on that, aren't I? Oh, that bugs me. 


Peter: Yes. This section was sort of often interesting, a little more directly in Haidt’s lane in terms of his expertise. Now, obviously, they are trying to create a link in your mind between these phenomena, which are pretty demonstrably real and supported by data, and the phenomenon that they're describing on campuses, which are not. But I did feel like I was learning something for the first time in the book. 


Michael: I mean, I feel like the percentage of kids who walk or bike to school has gone from roughly 50% to roughly 10% in the last 50 years. I think that's a genuine American tragedy. But then there's no real generational argument to make because that has much more to do with suburbanization, the design of roads, the way that policing has become much more aggressive on unaccompanied minors. There's sort of specific things there, and you can't just be like, "This generation is too coddled." 


Peter: Yeah. It's very useful to them to be able to point to something for which there is actual data where you can say, “Well, look, this is an actual phenomenon, and so maybe it's related to what's happening on campuses.” They need something that's a little more legitimate in the scientific community to hang their hat on here. 


Michael: Right. 


Peter: Also, some of these chapters are just like miscellaneous complaints that they couldn't fit into other parts of the book. They complain about Title IX gender equity requirements from the 90s for a bit. 


Michael: Sure. 


Peter: Are we just erring out whatever grievances about social justice initiatives that we haven't touched on before? 


Michael: Yeah. 


Peter: The last section of the book is called Wising Up, and it's about the things that we can do at the individual and societal level to address the pressing issues that they have raised throughout the book. 


Michael: Am I supposed to just say slurs to 17-year-olds that I see on the street, like “Peanuts, kids, just eat some peanuts.” 


Peter: [laughs] They list out six principles for raising wiser children, half of which are practical little tips and half of which are bizarrely abstract conceptual principles. 


Michael: Okay. 


Peter: One is limit and refine device time. Cool. Another is the line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being. 


[laughter] 


Michael: I love that. It's just like they've made up this fake thing that kids can't appreciate nuance anymore, and they're like, “Give your kids nuance.” Jesus Christ. 


Peter: [laughs] Oh, man. It's just very telling how half-baked the prescriptive argument here is. The one thing that they give as a prescription, although it's vague, but I think I should address it because it's the best faith argument they make, is that they think that administration is sort of facilitating students to do this or allowing them. They basically want universities to put their foot down, which at least makes sense in the context of their argument, in the context of their broader case here. I don't think that they actually lay out how that would work. 


Michael: Yeah, because the only thing administrators could do is things like banning protests of speakers, which is like, far more worrying than the students protesting the speakers themselves. 


Peter: What they do is they portray universities as limply collapsing under the weight of every student protest. Like, students made these outrageous demands and the university immediately caved. Basically, they don't want universities to cave to those demands. And if you end up looking into it, the demands were relatively reasonable stuff about police presence on campus, etc. But I think that's what they want. They want universities to take a hard line. Whenever students make an ask of the university, the university says, "Go fuck yourself, you bunch of fucking hippies." 


Michael: This is what's so weird about the contradiction at the heart of these arguments, because it's like, you want all of this free exchange of ideas, but you don't want anyone to act on it. What if you invite a campus speaker and that speaker has Holocaust denial publications in their past? You would actually change your tack in that case. You've received new information. But it's like, to them, they've established disinvitations of campus speakers as some sort of fucking front line of American free speech. 


Peter: Inherently bad. 


Michael: Right. But it's like, sometimes that's appropriate. 


Peter: I thought about what about Sam Bankman-Fried or Elizabeth Holmes. What happens when they get busted for fraud and you have a pending invitation? Are you supposed to hear them out? 


Michael: Right. 


Peter: The idea that discourse is just inherently valuable in every situation is obviously bullshit. No one believes it, but it's the fundamental principle that under girds a lot of their arguments, and they don't actually ever really defend it. It's just something that you're supposed to believe in your heart. Free speech is the core of a free society. Big picture. I feel like I was kind of disappointed in this book because—


Michael: Are you pretending you went in with high expectations? 


Peter: It's not that I had high expectations, but I guess I was sort of interested in the prospect of guys with real expertise in psychology and law trying to lay out the case to the best of their ability. I guess my takeaway was, if this is the best the other side can do, a book built on a foundation of straw man arguments reliant almost exclusively on strings of anecdotes rather than data, and then frequently misrepresenting the anecdotes. There's nothing here. There can't be anything here. The idea that there's an epidemic of student-led suppression of speech is just a media created fiction, and there's no data that shows anything other than a tiny handful of incidents per year, whether it's speakers being disinvited or protested or professors being fired. And if that's all there is, then what the fuck are we talking about? 


Michael: Why do you think it's caught on so much because this book is really the tip of a fucking iceberg. And every month there's a new Atlantic article or some cover story somewhere about this stuff. So, what do you think is actually going on? 


Peter: Let me let me read you a quote. Tell me if you know who this is from. “The children now love luxury. They have bad manners, contempt for authority. They show disrespect for elders and love chatter in place of exercise. Children are now tyrants, not the servants of their households. They no longer rise when elders enter the room. They contradict their parents, chatter before company, gobble up dainties at the table, cross their legs and tyrannize their teachers.” Do you know who said that? 


Michael: You want me to say Hitler, but I think it's Martin Luther King. 


Peter: It's Socrates. About 2400 years ago, Socrates was complaining about the kids. 


Michael: Yeah. 


Peter: And I think that that is fundamentally what's happening here. Old folks complaining about the misgivings of younger generations is a tale as old as time. And as you get older, there is some part of your brain that gravitates towards this. I can't explain it entirely, but like watching the younger generation fumble their way through a part of life that we all struggled with to some degree, it conjures up these complicated emotions. And your soul just wants to say, “Fuck those kids, man. They just don't get it.” But you don't really hate those kids. You hate the younger version of yourself that you see in those kids for not having absorbed the wisdom that you have now and you resent God for not letting you replay that moment. And if you can't process all of this, you might just have to write an entire book about campus culture. 


Michael: I just turned 41, so I'm looking forward to this happening to me and eventually telling Tucker Carlson all about it. 


[laughter] 


[If Books Could Kill theme music]


[Transcript provided by SpeechDocs Podcast Transcription] 

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