Sample Book Review of the American Mind Meets the Mind of Christ
Affronting popular sensibilities at taxpayers' expense, Leftist excesses on campus reliably inflame middle America. In that location'south a running thread –"campus craziness" – devoted to them on conservative Telly channel Fob News and they were the subject area of a cross bestseller credited with fomenting the United states of america culture wars. Published in 1987, The Closing of the American Mind was a recondite jeremiad against cultural relativism and declining academic standards – not the material of your boilerplate blockbuster. Simply it shifted a million-plus copies. Information technology didn't hurt that author Allan Bloom – egged on by Academy of Chicago colleague Saul Blare who contributed the foreword – could turn a phrase, minting one of the more than memorable descriptions of college leaders caving to bolshie pupil activists: "A few students discovered that pompous teachers who catechized them about academic liberty could, with a little shove, be made into dancing bears."
Past design of its title and subject, The Coddling of the American Listen invites comparison with this well-nigh-namesake. And non a few dancing bears stalk its pages. Simply whereas Bloom trafficked in slashing polemic, authors Greg Lukianoff, chief executive of the Foundation for Private Rights in Education (Fire) which is a kind of ceremonious liberties advancement group for professors and students, and New York University psychologist Jonathan Haidt are reluctant civilization warriors. There's no fulminating against political definiteness (they largely approve of information technology). Instead, they ground their critique of recent campus developments in cognitive behavioural therapy and aboriginal wisdom. Evincing business for student welfare, it might more than aptly be called,The Kids Are Not Alright.
Disinvitation attempts
All the same, it should come with a trigger warning for middle Americans of all nations. Consider the 2015 case of Zachary Woods who in the interests of "[exposing other] students to ideas…they would otherwise not come across…invited Suzanne Venker, a bourgeois critic of feminism" to Williams College, eliciting the post-obit broadside: "When you bring a misogynistic, white supremacist men'southward rights activist to campus in the name of 'dialogue' and 'the other side', you lot are not only causing bodily mental, social, psychological, and physical damage to students, but you are also paying for the continued dispersal of violent ideologies that kill our blackness and brownish (trans) femme sisters… Know, yous are dipping your hands in their blood…"
Venker joined the swelling ranks of those bounced from speaking gigs for views deemed, erm, unspeakable. Excluding cases involving serial alt-right provocateur Milo Yiannopolous, "disinvitation attempts" hit an all-time high terminal year with 33 versus five in 2000, according to FIRE.
And so there's Mary Spellman, ex-dean of students at Claremont McKenna Higher, who in 2015 after reading a student essay expressing unease about an "institutional culture… primarily grounded in western, white, cishetero-normative upper to upper-middle class values", emailed the student soliciting her input on "how we can amend serve students, especially those who don't fit our CMC mould".
"Mould" was a bit of a clanger, but did it warrant a kangaroo court demanding her removal, including 2 students who announced a fast until she was removed? Amid zero public support from campus brass, Spellman resigned.
Not long afterwards, college wardens Erika and Nicholas Christakis were door-stepped past an apoplectic mob accusing them of "stripping people of their humanity", "creating an dangerous space" and promoting "violence" after Erika, in a leaked email, questioned the wisdom of campus authorities policing students' Halloween outfits to guard against cultural insensitivity. "Free spoken language and the ability to tolerate offence are the hallmarks of a free and open society," she wrote. The Christakises were not long for their warden posts; facing outcry, they quit them. The locale for this insurgency: Yale.
Feelings or facts
Videos of these and other incidents recounted by Lukianoff and Haidt may be viewed on YouTube. Y'all can see Spellman being reproached for "partially falling asleep" (taken to connote antipathy). As the authors annotation, she appears rather to exist choking back tears.
What to brand of them? They're anecdotes. Consider their tenor though: objections to opinions couched in phobic quasi-medical terms, the confidence that words pose a concrete menace, conflation of feelings with facts, and readiness to accredit malintent to those institute in mistake.
Even allowing for shifting demographics and the need to legislate for a more than various student populace, Lukianoff and Haidt contend that Us campuses are in thrall to pathologies – "what doesn't impale you makes you lot weaker", "always trust your feelings," and "life is a battle between good people and evil people" – antithetical to all nosotros know virtually homo flourishing, resilience and whatever sense of agency and empowerment.
Implicated in these "great untruths" is overprotective parenting, characterised by a morbid concern with safety and dramatically reduced telescopic for the rambunctious play that inured previous generations to life's stressors. Amid perceived threats from without, this has inculcated a view of life as a morality play and elevated subjective feeling to sovereign condition as the supreme gauge of risk, they write.
Bubbles and pillows
Abetting them is the eclipse of "mutual-humanity identity politics" adept by Martin Luther King, which sought to rally everyone behind goals of inclusion and equity, by "common-enemy identity politics", designating certain groups as foes, and emergence of a make of scholar-activism, extolling "passion" and delivery above disinterested pursuit of truth.
Add a chaser of social media-induced feet and small wonder students repair to "safe spaces" stocked with "cookies, colouring books, bubbles, Play-Doh, calming music, pillows, blankets and a video of frolicking puppies". Calls for books to come with "trigger warnings" or the patrolling of "microaggressions" come with the alacrity once reserved for finding reds under the bed.
The overall impression is of a revved-up allowed organisation attacking its own organs.
The Coddling of the American Mind is prescriptive as well every bit diagnostic. Lukianoff and Haidt seem bent on sparking a movement; coincident efforts include a dedicated website every bit a locus for a community and initiative to promote more intrepid parenting.
Only the book'southward scolding championship scarcely seems conducive to winning over its tremulous subjects, now graduating and presumably seeding the fallacies they're labouring under in the workforce. And much of its advice is directed over their heads at parents of future students (how they can identify campuses with a rock-ribbed delivery to costless oral communication) and college leaders (how they can reform their campuses).
Moreover, while it'southward wreathed in glowing testimonials from luminaries like Steven Pinker, their average age pushes 65. I hope I'm committing the fallacy of undue pessimism, but I predict tough sledding.
Source: https://www.irishtimes.com/culture/books/the-coddling-of-the-american-mind-trigger-warnings-for-a-generation-1.3631971
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