New Book Takes On The Coddling Of American Minds

Rachel Martin talks to co-author Jonathan Haidt, who argues in a new book that a culture of "safetyism" — including safe spaces and trigger warnings — is setting up a generation for failure.

STEVE INSKEEP, HOST:

College campuses face a question - how to balance free speech against demands for safe spaces and trigger warnings. You may recall that last year, students at the University of California at Berkeley demanded the cancellation of speeches by conservative commentators Milo Yiannopoulos and Ann Coulter.

INSKEEP: In Vermont, students at Middlebury College shouted down controversial speaker Charles Murray.

INSKEEP: A new book argues that such efforts on campus are harming an entire generation's intellectual development because they're shutting out ideas. The book is called "The Coddling Of The American Mind." It's written by free speech activist Greg Lukianoff and New York University Professor Jonathan Haidt. Both have spent a lot of time in classrooms. They're used to students being provocative, and that was the starting point for Rachel Martin's conversation with Jonathan Haidt.

JONATHAN HAIDT: But then suddenly around 2014, students began objecting to things that we thought were just strange and sometimes objecting in ways like not coming to talk to us but reporting us to authorities. So, you know, I showed a 19th-century painting of Ulysses tied to a mast, and it showed the sirens, and the sirens are topless as sirens tend to be, and someone complained that this was sexist for me to show this. Nationally, people are complaining about Halloween costumes or not even the costumes but the possibility, a memo, about Halloween costumes. Just - there seemed to be a lot more conflict over things that seemed not malintentioned, often even helpful. And so a lot of us began to feel we don't understand our students. That some of them - and again, this is not most - but a subgroup were becoming kind of thin-skinned and sometimes kind of vindictive in ways that just were hard to understand.

RACHEL MARTIN, HOST:

Although, we should point out the other view on this - right? - is that these students are speaking out for the first time, whereas before maybe they did not feel empowered to do so if someone were to say something that they would perceive as racist or misogynist or that that did, quote, unquote, "trigger" a past trauma.

HAIDT: Well, students have been very outspoken about these issues for as long as I've been in the academy - in fact, when I was a student in the '80s. So it's not that students are suddenly empowered to speak out. It's that many students seem to be interpreting things not through the lens of is this right or wrong, or even is this offensive or acceptable, but is this dangerous or safe? And this, we think, is what is so damaging.

MARTIN: You identify three great untruths. You want to tick through those? I know we could talk for a long time about each of them, but can you explain what they are?

HAIDT: Sure. So my first book was about these psychological ideas that the ancients had - East and West. And what Greg and I found is that on college campuses nowadays, you can find areas in the curriculum or various departments where students are being taught exactly the opposite. So the first great untruth that we talk about is what doesn't kill you makes you weaker. So obviously, everybody knows the, you know, the great truth is what doesn't kill you makes you stronger because people are anti-fragile. We actually need challenges. We need to sometimes even be afraid in order to overcome our fears. And if we try to protect kids from that, we actually are damaging them. The second great untruth is always trust your feelings. Students are, again, increasingly told that their feelings are a legitimate guide to reality...

MARTIN: You don't think students should trust their feelings?

HAIDT: Well, the whole point of cognitive behavioral therapy is that we engage in emotional reasoning. This is what people do, and this is what anxious and depressed people do a lot more, is if I feel unsafe that means I am unsafe. If I'm not fully comfortable around someone, that means they don't like me, and that is often wrong. But when people's feelings become acceptable as an argument in class, we are doing the opposite of teaching them critical thinking skills.

MARTIN: And lastly, life is a battle between good people and evil people?

HAIDT: Oh, yes. This is the most important one. So my second book was all about how we are by nature tribal creatures. We are so good at dividing ourselves into us and them and then hating them and organizing to fight them. So that's wonderful if you're doing a gang fight or a war, but a college is a special place. What we're trying to do is turn down the tribalism, turn down the combat mode. And only then can we engage in curiosity mode or truth-seeking mode. So to the extent that we play up identity, to the extent that as soon as students arrive on campus, they're often hit by a lot of programming that emphasizes identity issues, that encourages them to see each other in terms of their identities. This is so contrary to the most basic principles of social psychology, which are that we should be emphasizing our common identity, our common humanity, and then we'll be much better able to deal with issues of injustice and exclusion.

MARTIN: Although, can you make the argument that, in colleges especially, this is the place where you are supposed to learn how to grapple with difficult ideas in the real world? And so why not set up buffers to kind of curate those debates, trigger warnings or allowing certain students to opt out of certain assignments?

HAIDT: Well, on the surface, that sounds very sensible, reasonable and nice. But Americans have been grossly overprotecting their kids since the 1990s. So our kids have already had - they've already gotten the kid-glove treatment. College is their first chance to really get out of that. There already are enormous buffers and safeguards. We have wonderful norms of civility. But actually, here I'd love to turn to one of my favorite quotes in the book. This is from Van Jones. So, you know, Obama's green energy czar. He's been just speaking wonderfully about the political situation in this country and the need to deal with it more productively. So when he was at the University of Chicago, he was asked by David Axelrod about all this stuff, about trigger warnings or, you know, what should universities do to protect students from politically offensive speakers. And he says - this is amazing - he says I don't want you to be safe ideologically. I don't want you to be safe emotionally. I want you to be strong. That's different. I'm not going to pave the jungle for you. Put on some boots and learn how to deal with adversity. So Van Jones really gets anti-fragility. He really gets that that great untruth - what doesn't kill you makes you weaker - is wrong. It's terrible advice for how to deal with students.

MARTIN: The book is called "The Coddling Of The American Mind," written by Jonathan Haidt and Greg Lukianoff. Thank you so much for your time, Jonathan.

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Harvard’s Jewish president wants to restore faith in higher education

Harvard University Jewish students take note: You may want to be on your best behavior during High Holiday services.

Lawrence Bacow, who began his new position as the Harvard president on July 1, and his wife, Adele Fleet Bacow, plan to spend some of the High Holidays at religious services at the Ivy League school’s Hillel. The Jewish couple met on the campus more than 40 years ago, when Bacow began Harvard Law School, he recalled.

Attending student services was a habit he picked up in his previous job, president of Tufts University, a nearby Boston-area school.

“We plan to follow a similar pattern and split our time between our synagogue, where we have deep ties and have belonged for a very long time,” Bacow told JTA in a recent conversation at his spacious new office in Loeb House, a stately early 20th-century building within the gates of Harvard Yard. “From time to time we’ll be spending time with the students.”

Rabbi Jonah Steinberg, executive director of the Harvard Hillel, told JTA in an email: “Students in our community are thrilled at seeing someone who cares so deeply about Jewish identity and tradition assume the presidency of Harvard. It will be a joy to have Larry and Adele as part of our Jewish community.”

Bacow, 67, said he intends to draw on that identity and tradition in restoring faith in higher education, a field under scrutiny for its enormous price tags and perceptions of elitism and political bias. He is concerned about affordability, and that the value of higher education is now questioned among parents and the broader public.

“These are tough times for higher education,” Bacow acknowledged in the conversation with JTA.

Bacow, a longtime advocate for public higher education, intends to use his new high-profile leadership position to impart the “enduring values of colleges as enablers of the American dream,” citing himself as a good example.

As the son of immigrants who had nothing when they arrived in this country, he credited higher education with allowing him to succeed. Bacow wants to ensure that opportunity is available to future generations — and now he has a national platform to address the subject.

“I really see this in many respects as a call to public service,” he said, and not just a chance to lead Harvard.

Appointed in February as Harvard’s 29th president, Bacow succeeds Drew Gilpin Faust, the college’s first woman president, who stepped down in June after serving 11 years. He is the school’s third Jewish president, preceded by Neil Rudenstine (1991-2001) and Lawrence Summers (2001-2006).

Bacow, a graduate of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, graduated from Harvard Law and also earned his doctorate from Harvard, in public policy. He’s an economist and a specialist in environmental policy.

After 24 years at MIT, where he taught and served in senior leadership positions, Bacow became president of Tufts. In his decade there, he was credited with transforming the liberal arts school into one with a competitive global presence and expanding accessibility for students from families with low and modest incomes.

Following Tufts, he was a senior scholar at the Harvard Graduate School of Education and at its Kennedy School of Government.

Born and raised in Pontiac, Michigan, Bacow grew up in a family deeply engaged in Jewish life.

His father, Mitchell, who died in 2007, was a refugee who fled pogroms in Eastern Europe. His German-born mother, Ruth, who died in 1994, was a Holocaust survivor — the lone Jewish survivor from her town. Bacow, a warm and engaging conversationalist, spoke openly about their poignant life stories and the influence it continues to play in his personal life and profession.

“I had a very unusual upbringing as a child of a survivor,” he said. “I’ve seen the literature of children of survivors, and that was not my experience. My mother was not protective of me.” Defying some stereotypes about survivor parents, “She actually encouraged me to take risks.”

His mother was beloved for her sunny disposition and was a strong woman, he recalled.

Bacow said his parents instilled in him and his sister a sense of gratitude and a responsibility to share their good fortune.

In his relationships with students, he said he has tried to convey that “all of us … fortunate to study and work at a place like this bear a special responsibility to use this education and this opportunity to make the world a better place and to help those less fortunate.”

At one time his family belonged to the city’s two congregations, Bacow said with a chuckle.

“Life revolved around the synagogue,” he said, where he recalled spending four or five days each week, in Hebrew school and religious services.

It’s a tradition he has carried throughout his life. The Bacows are regular Saturday morning minyan goers at Temple Emanuel, a Conservative congregation in Newton, the Boston suburb where they raised their now-grown sons.

Bacow served for a time on the Hebrew College board in Newton Centre and in 2004 received an honorary degree from there. In a speech at the commencement, he challenged the notion that anti-Semitism was rampant on American college campuses, calling it a “gross distortion,” as described in a recent Harvard Magazine profile.

A critic of petitions on colleges to divest from Israel, including one at Tufts, Bacow nonetheless cautioned in his address that labeling boycott proponents anti-Semitic shuts down conversation. He recommended viewing such disputes as a teachable moment.

Bacow describes himself as a passionate champion of free speech and academic freedom. “Veritas,” or truth, is the Harvard motto. “‘Emet’ in Hebrew,” Bacow said. “Universities are fundamentally about the search for truth.”

Debate is healthy, he believes.

“We need to go out of our way to make sure people don’t feel excluded or marginalized,” Bacow said. But “fundamentally, we have to stand for academic freedom. It’s a core value of the academic mission.”

Over the years, he has shared his expertise with several Hebrew College presidents, including Rabbi Daniel Lehmann, whose presidency did not overlap with Bacow’s time on the board. With that school weighed down by debt, Bacow was generous in offering guidance on a range of issues, from attracting new sources of revenue to expanding student enrollment, Lehmann told JTA in a phone conversation.

“He was comfortable about being explicit about his Jewish commitments,” said Lehmann, now president of the Graduate Theological Union in Berkeley, California. “He wants to see American Judaism flourish. For someone in his position, that is quite remarkable.”

Bacow’s staunch belief in a richly diverse undergraduate experience is being challenged in a high-profile federal lawsuit brought against Harvard by Students for Fair Admissions asserting that the school’s admissions policies discriminate against Asian-American students. It’s a claim the school and Bacow deny. The case is expected to be heard beginning in October.

Harvard attracts more than 40,000 applicants each year and accepts only a small portion, Bacow said. But he said the school embraces diversity in its admissions — from academic and extracurricular interests to geography — to enhance the experience of its students.

He is familiar with those who compare the claims about Asian-American admissions to the quotas used against Jews applying to Harvard and other colleges in the 1930s and 1940s.

“Sadly, in times past, at many universities, there were quotas against Jews,” Bacow said. “This is totally different. There are no quotas here. We are not discriminating.”

Bacow said the percentage of Asian-American students enrolled at Harvard has increased more than 25 percent in the past eight years and “The data at trial will show that.”

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AUSTRALIAN experts have called for a blanket ban on mobile phones in primary schools after France outlawed the devices

As a safety measure they should be usable as soon as school is out

EDUCATIONAL experts have called for a blanket ban on mobile phones in Australian primary schools to ensure children are no longer distracted, socially isolated, or bullied using the technology.

The call comes as the French Government banned all students under the age of 15 from using smartphones during school hours, and just months after one state launched an inquiry into whether Australia should follow its lead.

Currently, individual schools are allowed to set their own mobile phone guidelines in all Australian states, even though research has shown struggling students get better marks once smartphones are removed from schools.

About 89 per cent of Aussie students admit to using the devices in class.

Extend After School Care chief executive Darren Stevenson backed France’s ban on mobile phone use for young students, saying the devices were an unnecessary distraction for students and encouraged anti-social behaviour. “Mobile phones do not have a place in the school classroom,” he said.

“By and large, mobile phones should be banned from primary schools. Really, they should only be used as a telephone device, when necessary, so a young person can contact a parent or a caregiver. They’re not an effective learning tool.”

Mr Stevenson said he regularly witnessed young students isolate themselves from others to look at their phones and, without guidance or restrictions, the devices could see them fail to develop real-world social skills.

“The mobile phone is a device that can significantly influence the behaviour of a young person, so when they have opportunities to build relationships or work in a team, it takes that opportunity away from them,” he said.

“As adults and professional educators, allowing that is not responsible. That borders on issues around duty of care for young people.”

It’s a proposal backed by incoming University of New South Wales education professor Dr Pasi Sahlberg, who said a “clear ban” on smartphones in primary schools “would be the easiest for everyone,” though he also recommended educating students to regulate their use of technology.

“I have heard hundreds of stories from teachers here and abroad how having your smartphone in your pocket and sensing the incoming messages vibrating (distracts) students’ attention from learning,” he said.

“Many teachers are upset that they have to serve as police officers, hunting down misusers and those who violate in-school or classroom-based rules.”

Calls for Australian guidelines came after the French Government banned all students under 15 from using mobile phones during school hours, preventing children from using the devices between classes.

French Education Minister Jean-Michel Blanquer said the move was designed to limit distractions and cyber bullying, as well as encouraging children to socialise.

“These days the children don’t play at break time anymore,” he said. “They are just all in front of their smartphones and from an educational point of view that’s a problem.”

A study from youth advisory group Year13 found 89 per cent of Australian students had used their mobile phones in the classroom regardless of their school’s policy, and a report from the British Centre of Economic Performance found banning mobile phone in school improved students’ performance by more than six per cent.

“Banning mobile phones improves outcomes for the low-achieving students the most and has no significant impact on high achievers,” the authors concluded.

The NSW state government has also launched a study into the effect of banning mobile phones from schools, releasing terms of reference for the inquiry late last week.

The investigation, led by child psychologist Dr Michael Carr-Gregg, will consider phone bans in France and Albania, as well as the technology’s links to cyber bullying and sexting, with recommendations expected by the end of the year.

But Western Sydney University technology and learning researcher Dr Joanne Orlando said an outright ban on smartphones would not eliminate bullying behaviour and could have a chilling effect on students, particularly in high schools.

“When I talk to teenagers about these sort of bans, they normally saying something like ‘well, that just means I have to use my phone in a less obvious way’,” she said. “It can lead to children being more secretive in their phone use and that means adults and teachers might not be made aware when things go wrong.”

Dr Orlando said students of all ages should be taught about the safe use of technology, including smartphones, and “extensive research” was required before national guidelines could be set.

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