I'm writing about Haidt and Lukianoff's "The Coddling of the American Mind" and it's interesting how many disconnects there are between their thesis and their evidence. They started with a problem - speech being threatened on campus - and went looking for causes.
The causes ultimately aggregate into what they call "safetyism' where children have been overprotected by parents seeking to prevent them from being harmed, physically, psychologically, etc They believe this overprotection results in students who lack resilience and fear conflict
There's a lot of conflating of overblown parental worries about physical safety v. psychological well-being, but the sum total is that they believe students require more freedom, more agency, more practice at the things that help them be resilient.
They cite evidence of increasing anxiety and depression as evidence children are being harmed, as well as stats on the decline of free play, but they never connect their chief concern (threats to free inquiry) with that evidence, probably because there's no connection.
They also acknowledge class differences, where privileged kids get overprotected while lower lass kids are left to fend for themselves, and further acknowledge that in theory the lower class kids should benefit from learning to be more resilient, but guess what? Doesn't happen!
It doesn't happen because the primary privilege being hoarded is economic. Those upper class kids are stressed out because the system has led them to believe that competition is the only way to maintain (or get ahead) on status and a parent's job is to help with that.
So we have a system where rich kids are worn out trying to compete and maintain that status. Poorer kids need to run a different gauntlet that's at least as stressful because we add in the economic cost of pursuing higher ed.
In the end, I share Haidt and Lukianoff's worry about what we're doing to young people, but the idea that the route to helping them is some kind of platonic idea of "free discourse" on campus is kind of silly. This is a story not of coddling students, but wearing them down.
And as a critique of method, H&L put far too much stock in big idea books like Talib's "Antifragility" and Twenge's "iGen" as authoritative and dispositive. Those books may be interesting, but they're highly highly contested. They're bricks in the argument made of straw
And this isn't to mention the weakness of their free speech crisis case which rehashes all the greatest hits of campus incidents and ignores the speech that happens freely on campuses every single day.
