Greg Lukianoff: The Coddling of the American Mind

thanks so much for having me it's always really fun to be in Chicago I really do love Chicago it always makes me question if I really am half Russian if I can barely handle your cold I'm really proud to be invited here and I'm really happy to be talking to an audience that's concerned about high schools even though I run an organization that's primarily concerned about freedom of speech due process academic freedom and higher education I want to do a lot more of outreach to students at a lot earlier ages to give them inspiring philosophical explanations of why free speech matters for a compassionate pluralistic successful democratic society in a way that I don't I think unfortunately isn't being explained very well at the moment so I definitely am happy to talk more about that during questions so coddling of the American mind how good intentions and bad ideas are setting up a generation for failures of course the title of my and Jonathan Heights book it's Browns height he his name it's kind of funny I'm I'm used to being the one whose name actually gets mangled the most so it's nice to have a co-author who actually gets it gets more of it than I do so what do I mean by coddling now that's my son Maxwell he turns one on Friday that's for a couple months ago and I'm actually I'm on record saying this in all sorts of ways I'm not a big fan of the title coddling of the American mind partially because I think the problem isn't quite with the connotation of coddling all we mean and we explained this in the book is all we mean is over protection and that over protection can sometimes have negative consequences but keep in mind over protection is always sort of specific to what your situation is and honestly this age there's not a lot you can do to sort of over cuttle your kid it's it's actually a pretty pretty fun stage but they but just as you know our grandparents knew just as our great-grandparents knew just as modern psychology knows that a virtue becomes a vice have taken a bit too far that's a lot of what our book is really about is sort of trying to remind people of the wisdom of the Ancients and how it actually has a lot of grounding made as laws support and in modern psychological ideas particularly cognitive behavioral therapy so I'm gonna go backwards a little bit here and I want to give everybody here my goal for tonight is to really give a sense of the situation that I've seen on campus in my at this point nearly twenty years working out of and free speech on campus and I'm gonna paint a picture that's actually a lot more nuanced than I think people are used to hearing and a lot and with some stereotypes not exactly not exactly applying but actually getting to some of the findings of the book of the very end annex and hopefully by the time we get to the some of the assertions we make it the book at the end it'll make a lot more sense why we were why we made them in the first place so my first book in 2012 was called unlearning liberty and at the time the situation on campus was unlike at the stereotype that heard was that students were absolutely the best constituency for freedom of speech on college campuses they got you know there are fans of Dave Chappelle they got everything from you know racy humor to offensive movies to provocative professors they were generally better about free speech than in fact a lot of professors and certainly better than a lot a lot of administrators but of course you know when a lot of people think about the situation on campus when it comes to freedom of speech the first thing that comes to mind is political correctness a term that I don't really love either partially because it means such wildly different things to conservatives or liberals when when uh conservatives here at they think brainwashing and when liberals here at least of my age they think flight-attendant instead of Stewart hysts which you know isn't the end of the word world really but I've seen you know argument I've seen both kinds of political correctness of my time on campus but I want to give you an idea of some of the cases that I've been fighting just a little bit more background I went to law school specifically to do First Amendment law this was my passion from a very early age I took every class that Stanford offered in first amendment and then when I ran out I did six credits on censorship during the Tudor dynasty as an independent study I when I told one of my friends about that he looked at me with horror and said who's making you do that and I realized oh wow I'm a nerd for this huh I love this stuff but even and then I worked for the ACLU of Northern California in 1999 and even with that background I was still shocked at how easy it was to get in trouble on college campuses in starting in 2001 so my book the big story in my book is the Valdosta State University this is a case that's I could take the whole night to explain the case because it is absolutely horrifying example of censorship on campus but not looking like you'd expect to make a long very long story quite short a student was kicked out of college without so much as a hearing because he was a clear and present danger because of this Facebook collage that he placed up he was he's an environmentalist and he was upset that the university was deciding to do a parking garage project when they thought they were more environmentally friendly and also less expensive ways to deal with congestion on campus he was brought into the president's office and dressed down for an hour and a half for this his temerity and writing an article for the student newspaper for contacting trustees saying we really shouldn't do this project there's less expensive ways to do it and during the course of being dressed down by the university president he was once again reminded that this parking Grouch project was supposed to be part of the president's legacy to the University it's a little sad and so you know he's a really nice kid so he felt you know very he was apologetic he didn't he didn't want to upset the you know president Sakurai but then he was like what just happened well why was I just dressed down for an hour and half by the president of my university about my what I have every right in the world to protest so we put up this is actually a recreation of the of the collage you put up very faithful recreation just the original version was just Xerox to death um and this is the the poster he put up on Facebook and he was kicked out of school for it can anyone in the audience guess why what's terrifying about this what's frightening you right now about it the small text oh I hear you ma'am I hear you yeah I just I just found out I need 150 s I didn't know that was a thing before so with the argument that the university president and now since we were able to do discovery in this case we found out the university president had been having meeting after meeting over the course of months about what to do about Hayden Barnes and it's kind of comical to watch it in some ways because most of his staff was like it's a student who doesn't want your parking garage brunch and there's not really anything you can do about it but after Hayden posted this on Facebook he said aha memorials happen when people are dead so therefore this is a threat on my life yeah stretching it a little bit to say the least nobody around him believed him and if anybody has any doubt about whether or not there was this was seriously taken as a threat to to facts so that was like to remind people the student in question is a Shambhala Buddhist it's the same kind of Buddhism that I study we have lots of pictures of him they were sitting in lotus position he's also a decorated EMT so like a genuine hero so not the right guy to pick on for this and to show you how sincere their belief that their lives were an imminent danger from this and they use the term clear and present danger the letter kicking him out by the way which is adorable if you're a First Amendment person it's just so far off base but they slipped a note under his door saying basically dear clear and present danger who is very dangerous to this University please help yourself off this University you have 48 hours to go by and they stapled the collage to it and it's kind of like if you really think someone is a real threat you don't invite them to politely leave the campus so this actually ended up being about a million dollar lawsuit and those are the kind of cases I was dealing with around the time that I wrote on learning liberty and this is still one of the most outrageous cases I'd seen but to give you a picture of some of the other kind of cases we've seen it fire you know some are some are absolutely absolutely do deal with political correctness and I define political correctness more or less as meaning a in some cases a little bit prim and proper speech policing but the people who are involved in this case and what these cases actually look like also don't fit people's stereotypes in a lot of cases so for example the the person in the corner at the fire podium is chris lee he made the mistake of trying to do a comedy musical at washington state university in the spirit of South Park and he ended up getting in serious trouble with it with his administration for making a comedy musical that's that story is also an unlearning liberty this is a student with the student with Cornel West pointing Adam I had the temerity and this is a much more recent case to invite John Derbyshire to Williams College in order to debate him about some of some racist things John Derbyshire had published it was supposed to be a debate but Williams College decided no we're not going to allow you to have this person even for the purpose of debate stepped foot on this campus on the bottom that's actually a piece of art that a very brave artist from Turkey someone who's actually been willing to stand up to the Erawan regime in in Turkey which is you're playing fast and loose with your life certainly your freedom if you do that these days and at University of Iowa he put this piece are work up that if you see it from a distance it looks like Klan robes but if you come up to it and you actually see what it is it's newspaper clippings of stories of lynchings of stories of racism in the United States it becomes really clear that what this is is a reminder of our horrible past when it comes to race relations and of the Klan but this was taken down at University of Iowa because even though it was absolutely decidedly an anti-racist statement students didn't care they they they they found it offensive no matter what and it had to go and the middle one is of course Notre Dame versus the Klan it's sort of a classic fire case this involves a janitor who was working his way through school so not exactly you know your typical privileged oppressor at University at Indiana University Purdue University Indianapolis quite a mouthful and the book he was reading is Notre Dame versus the Klan it is about the defeat of noted of the Klan when they marched on Notre Dame in 1926 I think I always get confused cuz my dad my father was born in 1926 so I always I always got these men mixed up and this joyously celebrates the fact that that Notre Dame students came out and fought with the Klan in the streets at Notre Dame and won and so this is a joyously anti-racist book now to be clear even if he was reading mine comp it stills protected but it's incredibly ironic nonetheless that this student was found guilty of racial harassment because the cover of the book made people uncomfortable the cover they literally judged a book by its cover and this student was found guilty of racial harassment without so much as a hearing so these are actually fairly typical cases and I would call these political correctness cases they just don't necessarily fit people's stereotypes of what political correctness on campus looks like so I'm gonna talk about I'm gonna talk about six different trends that I've seen on campus and it's a good way to explain how we got to where we are on campus and the first trend for most of my career it was usually administrative overreach administrators who were just going a bit too far and a lot of these attempts at the time when I was studying cognitive behavioral therapy myself for to deal with my own you know depression and anxiety it seemed that universities were regulating life on campus to such an extent that they seemed that very small areas where they weren't regulating it to death could lead to the sky to fall as we would say like horrible things and one of the great examples of this are the ever tenacious speech zones that pop up at universities and have popped up at universities all throughout my career free speech zones are one way that administrators refer to zones that are actually severe limits on freedom of speech on campus that where instead of saying you can always protest at Hyde Park you can always protest at this is in this gazebo they become the only place that you can protest on campus and that in a lot of cases you have to ask advance permission to use the free speech zone so here's some here's some classic ones oh you have to keep it so this is the University of Cincinnati this was a tiny little free speech zone you can barely see it here we put a green pushpin here to point it out the green pushpin is about a hundred times bigger than the free speech zone this is the famous free speech swamp at University of Hawaii at Hilo these were students who were trying to hand out god forbid copies of the Constitution and later to protest the NSA and they were told by administrators at one they had to limit themselves to the swamp that they needed advance permission for and when they said that doesn't sound right at the school bound by the First Amendment their response of the administrators which is not a good fact if you're going into a lawsuit was this isn't the 60s anymore you can't just protest anywhere and actually we were kind of like as far as the law is concerned it is kind of still the sixties in some ways I saw this in person I was unwilling to go down into it because of all this electrical stuff over here and I didn't really want to get electrocuted I always include this one because it's just the saddest little freak each zone I've ever seen in my life the free speech zone is just these two squares right here on either side of this sad little bulletin board and this is Blinn College in Texas where they were trying to tell a student that well you've got you got a reserve this in advance I'm to have the luxury of this free speech zone at Blinn College and this one I say for last it's actually the the oldest one on the list but this was definitely me sort of getting my feet wet with just getting fed up with free speech zones Texas Tech University expected all 28 outlets and students on it's physically massive campus one of physically one of the biggest schools in the country 28,000 students that if they god forbid they all want exercise their freedom of speech they had to fit it this gazebo free speech gazebo which is something that their PR department should have known just didn't sound all that great I had one of my friends and and to be clear by free speech activities I'm not just talking protests I'm talking handing out flyers I'm talking getting people to sign petitions I'm at West Virginia University they literally said that all First Amendment activities had to be limited to their free speech zone and of course we're like okay First Amendment activities include what you wear what you read I don't think you really know the law all that well if you're making that argument I had one of my friends do the dimensional analysis of the free speech zone at Texas Tech University and if God forbid all 28,000 students wanted to exercise or free speech rights at the same time you would have to crush them down to the density of uranium-238 as photos like oh that's really funny I'm like no no it's really Jerry going to 38 it's a very serious friend of mine um so yeah so these and what I what I feel like I feel like the message that they're sending students is that free speech is something that you should be very afraid of it has to be very controlled it has to be very regulated and to me that's the form of catastrophizing that's a way of sort of telling students that the world is much scarier and man needs needs the iron hand of free speech zones to keep it from being too chaotic and then of course your speech codes speech zones are a subset of speech codes speech codes unfortunately the modern iteration of them after the great free speech victories of the 1960s and 70s unfortunately speech codes have a second life in starting in the 1980s and like all movements in the history of censorship and I do mean all someone thought that they were doing something very good by passing some of these codes now the first one that I point out is just and it still enforces best I can tell at University of West Alabama a school bound by the First Amendment a ban on harsh text messages for emails now that is the definition of vagueness and overbreadth and when I talk to students I'm like guys every single one of you is guilty of violating this by someone else's definition at some point you're leaving it to the good graces of administrators to decide when they're gonna use this and I have to tell you in my experience you shouldn't really trust them to that power but the bottom one is just a true classic and it does show one of the problems that you see with speech codes is they have a tendency to reappear in 1990 University of Connecticut passed a ban on the use of derogatory names inconsiderate jokes and inappropriately directed laughter a policy so broad and vague that it was laughed at an awful lot by The Hartford Courant by the local newspapers and then ignominiously defeated in a unpublished opinion in 1990 what's amazing is this policy popped up verbatim at Drexel University fifteen years later and I'm always like wondering the only way you could find this code would be googling one of the most laughably unconstitutional codes a university has ever ever passed and just cutting and pasting it into a policy so again I think that this is I think that these send a message that words can hurt you that that basically that people are telling students that they're more fragile than they are that's that's simply an inconsiderately directed joke an inappropriately directed joke could be tantamount to the very real offense of harassment this is Pierce colleges there's another one we pointed out just you know the the slide feet speaks for itself this is one that we're very close I can't talk too much about it but we should have some good news in that case very shortly um but here's some good news and from given how much attention free speech on campus has gotten in the past couple years I do like to emphasize that there you know when people get pessimistic about it I'm saying we've been fighting speech codes on campus and when we first started evaluating them when we first really got our system down pat to evaluate the codes of 450 top schools which is a substantial portion of the entire college population given that we also emphasize large and prestigious schools that 75% of them had speech codes that were what we would call laughably unconstitutional like not close calls now real quick review of First Amendment law public colleges are bound by the First Amendment non-sectarian private colleges are bound by the First Amendment including my alma mater Stanford by state law so it's the one state in the country that actually has a law that applies First Amendment standards even to private schools private schools are generally and very strongly in some states less so and others bound by their promises of freedom of speech so for example Yale Princeton Harvard all promise free speech to high heaven and generally in those jurisdictions courts have found that if you promise it you should deliver it and the standard of course that you deliver is defined essentially by the First Amendment so back in 2007 when we really got our evaluation process down when we published we found that about 75% of schools had red light speech codes we've managed to get that down to actually this is we're not we're gonna be releasing this in a couple weeks but it's down below 30% now and that's the result of a lot of work that's a result of more than 70 lawsuits that's the result of a speech quote of the month program that we've been doing since 2006 every month we named a ridiculously over broad speech code and that's been very effective at getting rid of speech codes just by making them by making them public I do think it's kind of stunning that we've had this program you know since 2006 have a speech code every month and we still have jaw-dropping ones every single month so and the good news is that green light schools are going up University of Chicago shouldn't be a surprise to anybody they've been leaders when it comes to free speech and heterodox thinking we've gone from having only about seven green light schools to we're pushing this is need some updating we're actually getting pretty close to 50 so there is good news on this front and then there are things that just defy everybody's stereotypes about what campus free speech looks like and this is a something we talk about in the in the book and I just always have to mention it because I find it so personally outrageous Northern Michigan University started sending we found out that a student had gone to seek counseling at Northern Michigan University because she'd been raped and after going into counseling she received a note from the Dean of Students or from the Disciplinary office saying oh we see that you use the counseling services by the way if you mentioned thoughts of self harm to your friends you will be disciplined under the Student Code crazy and what's amazing about it is that you know the student actually hadn't said anything about so far but she did suddenly know that the Dean of Students was aware of the fact that she'd gone to the Counseling Center and if you think about the advice they're giving students they're saying so if you're anxious and depressed you should isolate yourself and by the way you're a burden on your friends that's just just incredibly cruel and at best we can tell it comes from a weird combination of concern about lawsuits related to suicide a misunderstanding of the fact that you do when you have you can have suicide clusters that if someone kills themselves and then that sometimes these happened in pairs but there's no evidence at all that talking about it actually creates a suicide cluster so it was just a total misunderstanding of what the law said exercised in a very cruel way now this gives all sorts of mixed messages to students we we care about your mental health but we don't care about it because your friends are can be easily led to kill themselves and we don't want you to talk to them it's it's a very strange case and we talked about it in the chapter of coddling of the America mind where we talk about the role of bureaucracy and how much makes things worse now the other factor that that um makes things worse is unclear guidance from the Department of Education there have been improvements in this in the past couple of years but you know I'm gonna cover this fairly quickly because it's not as we covered put in some detail in the book this is Laura Kipnis actually raise your hand if you if you know that name so a good portion of you Laura Kipnis is a feminist writer she wrote something for Chronicle higher education basically saying the way title 9 is currently interpreted is actually insulting and paternal izing too modern to the feminist for her generation at 4 and she you know she even came down saying that rules saying that students can't ever date professors worse that was per turn holistic it was basically saying who's to tell me that I can't and this seems like the kind of things that are fighting against back when she was in school and she talked about title 9 going too far and that and this is at Northwestern University and she mentioned a lawsuit didn't mention anything about the names of students involved and for writing an article saying that title 9 was being interpreted too strongly and curtailing freedom of speech on campus and a very popular and probably the most popular magazine News Journal read by administrators across the country she suddenly found herself the target of a title 9 investigation for writing this article she wasn't allowed to know who was charging her she wasn't allowed to know what she'd done she wasn't allowed to have an attorney present she so for about 72 days she went through this awful process where she was being warned about talking to anybody about it but then desperately trying to figure out what what what what was going on and I can tell you that having worked on campuses and talk to professor's this is not uncommon for a professor's come do with this with stuff like this quite often what makes Laura Kipnis very very different though from those other professors is she wasn't having it she decided after 72 days of this nonsense that she would write an article called my my title 9 Inquisition about how for the previous article she had written she'd been subjected to an investigation of her or of her free speech unsurprisingly northwestern dropped the investigation I think either that night or the next day not surprising there one of Fires main weapons is to actually get get the word out about these things the story unfortunately doesn't end there it just gets more recursive like a weird kind of perverse assure painting she wrote a book about her experiences about being investigated for what she wrote for being critical of title 9 and was once again brought up on charges of violating title 9 at Northwestern University for the book she wrote about being investigated for title 9 at her university so we've been helping her a lot as of right now we think that everything but a defamation lawsuit by a student is all that remains there and I think that's very unlikely to be successful this is a Louisiana State University professor Terry Buchanan who was fired from Louisiana State University allegedly for swearing in class when she was trying to explain how if you're working with kids from different backgrounds sometimes their parents will come in and ask you questions like and say things like so you're saying my son is a that's the actual quote and I used to work with inner-city high school kids in DC in the 90s that I'm like what that is that's nothing you know that's that's a light treatment and what the university is claiming is that the Department of Education guidance that's so vague and broad was why they had to fire her so we currently have this in court we had a pretty bad draw for our district court judge she is actually one of the leaders of the Boosters for Louisiana State University Alumni Association so we lost the district court I'm really confident though that that word that we're gonna win going forward this is a very clear case as far as at least First Amendment doctrine is concerned so then we come to the professor now in sort of the and when I say trends when it comes to free speech the professors are always involved in some ways in some ways it's positive but it's mostly the case that professors end up running afoul of Norm's are currently on campus and this is a case where a professor decided that she didn't like a pro-life display at Northern Kentucky University so she said that she wanted to exercise her free speech rights and and leader students to destroy that the students tiny white crosses that were a protest of roe v wade approved by the university you know legit and their property and she this is pictures of her actually destroying the christian students display she and what's amazing about this is after the interview and she ended up getting fired for it because he don't have a First Amendment right to destroy someone else's art it shouldn't ever occur to you that he did you don't have a First Amendment not to be offended that that that's impossible that that wouldn't work but nonetheless what after she was interviewed about it it really did seem like she actually completely misunderstood what the First Amendment actually said but that's a rare case more often than not what we see our professor is getting in trouble for what they say and there's a pretty typical case this is Chicago State University another case that I have to somewhat limit what I say about it because it's still in litigation but just very simply several years ago students two professors were running a blog saying that Chicago State University was corrupt and poorly managed it was a blog complaining about the mismanagement of Chicago State University and they were first accused of violating copyright by talking about Chicago State University which was not a very good argument the next one was that they're accused of bullying the president of Chicago State University which is like congratulations of your you're protecting the the helpless president of Chicago State University from the mean professor bullies the most serious accusation was that they then approached two female a professor at one professor in one administrator asking them to file for false harassment claims against the two professors in question and to their credit one professor actually was willing to step down and the other professor unfortunately was fired so this is this is a real scandalous case and this is this has been going on for years close by and what's interesting is one of the things that held up this litigation here was the fact that CSU was looking like it might run into bankruptcy which just leads me to say so maybe you should have been listening to the people who were saying that there might be some attachment rather than trying to silence them maybe they might have had a point and then there are cases that look exactly like well actually not quite exactly like what people's stereotypes of campus look like this is a professor John McAdams at Marquette University he wrote a blog where he was where he generally complained about the fact that Marquette University which is nominally Catholic was not was actually hostile is it his premise was that it was hostile to Catholic ideas a student brought to him a recording of a class with a junior not full professor a junior professor in training that was a debate class and he asked if they could debate gay marriage and he was told that they know they couldn't that would be homophobic and offensive and the student brought this recording to Professor John McAdams who wrote a column really just saying like this is this is what I want about like we're a Catholic school nominally we actually don't believe in gay marriage and we're not even allowed to debate it because to debate it at a Catholic school would be considered offensive now what happened when this got out was it led to a lot of reaction from Fox News and from people on Twitter sending hate mail to Marquette University and it was nasty but it was nonetheless not John Adams fault that that had that happened he was just reported what actually happened and he was fired for for making this original blog post which you know under the First Amendment absolutely protected the good news here is that after a initial loss the circuit court decided that John McAdams that Marquette's promises a free speech were real and they were serious and John McAdams has been reinstated he was required to start teaching again this fall probably was a little bit awkward returning to the school that fought so hard to keep him from from being a professor there so and that brings us to number five student sensors and this is the one that that leads us most into what the book is to what led to the book like I said for all of my career the best constituency for campus for freedom of speech were have always been the students until right around 2013-2014 working at fire it was like someone flipped to switch and suddenly students who were usually on our side were demanding that speakers be disinvited they were shouting down speakers they didn't like they were demanding new microaggression policies suddenly trigger warnings something we hadn't actually heard of before you had some schools like Oberlin where students were demanding that these become essentially mandatory a lot of bad cases starting in 2013-2014 that we didn't you know we'd really don't understand where they're coming from now this is a picture of student of liberalism that predates that this is another attempt for someone to protest roe v wade another Christian group on campus and these are little American flags at Dartmouth College the reason why some of them are mad at on the ground is because one student decided that he didn't like this display so he decided to run it over with his car wildly dangerous terrible idea and made all the more ironic by the fact that he had a coexist bumper sticker on the back of his car you can't make this stuff up so okay well this is where I feel like a lot of people know know the story because it's been kind of hard to avoid the scariest thing that I've seen in terms of trends we started seeing attitudes for students with regarding free speech go on a worrisome direction in 2013-2014 the scariest thing we saw was outbreaks of violence and the scariest one was at UC Berkeley I don't care if you like my innopolis the if you sit down and watch the videos of what happened in response to a speaker and in a violent demand that the speaker not speak on campus they're really lucky that nobody was killed during this actually this is a good time for me to mention Pamela Pratt's key is in the audience she is she was the chief researcher on the book she did amazing research on this part of the book really convinced us that the situation at Berkeley was much worse than we thought like I said they're very lucky that nobody was killed during this and that you know of course terrifies me because well it's kind of funny because you'll sometimes have people have such profound misunderstandings of speech that they'll make arguments like well you know it's that they're just really expressing themselves in in this way and I have to explain no freedom of speech is a system by which we try to resolve disputes through words not violence so in a very real sense violence is the antithesis of freedom of speech more and much much more recently sam sam abrams you might have read this in the new york times a an article by a professor at Sarah Lawrence University he wrote it making the pretty unremarkable claim in most circles that I know that administrators actually just like professors leaned decidedly to the left and not really a particularly controversial thing even in administrative circles as best I could tell but well after publishing this it was an empirical study which you published in the New York Times the students began demanding that he be fired for for publishing this and including vandalizing his door apparently trying to break into his office and allegedly we've even told by the university president that maybe you should start looking for another job at another school so thankfully the president of the university has at Sarah Lawrence has changed their tune the most interesting change that we've seen and that we talk about in the book is how Twitter and how social media is playing into all this and suddenly we have the phenomenon of a conservative outraged mobs making everything that much worse so now we have professors who have to be worried they always had to be worried about the what the press what the public relations department of the university would think if they said anything interesting or offensive they always have to worry about what the general counsel's office would think if they said something that someone's even slightly claimed might be a to the point of discrimination or harassment and believe me those definitions can be very vague and broad but now I mean but as of 2013 they have to worry about what the least charitable most easily offended student or class would think and then they have to start worrying about what FoxNews what the conservative Twittersphere would think this is a professor lisa Durden she went on tucker carlson possibly not the best idea to defend a party that she didn't go to at her New Jersey College that was a black lives matter party in which only black students were invited she defended it again she didn't attend it wasn't at her college but she was nonetheless fired from her job because the university was afraid of sort of nasty backlash from it they did get she got death threats they got some nasty emails but when we finally did a Freedom of Information request for how many emails was this avalanche of hate mail that they got after Lisa Durden was fired they actually could only produce one so it wasn't as bad as I thought but the reason why I just feel morally compelled to point this case now is because this is unlike a lot of professors that we talked about this is a professor who got fired and this gotten very little national attention and she still is out of a job to this day and it doesn't get covered for some reason I don't really get that more recently since the book came out Jim Livingston he posted a pretty angry rant on Facebook but it was a very typical I lived in New York for ten years and he was complaining about gentrification of heart of Harlem he was mad he was mad at some particular white kids that he saw he thought were acting like jackasses so he wrote a rant saying I want to him the right white race you know and again you know for those of you who've lived in New York it's not it's a rant that you'll hear people make sometimes sometimes and any made it on Facebook he was found guilty of racial harassment of white students at Rutgers University you might notice something about Professor Livingston which makes it less likely that he actually hate all white people maybe he does but we eventually we eventually got the Rutgers to back down in this case um but here's the important point all of this stuff is happening at the same time it's not as if these trends that I'm talking about one ended and then the next one started you have to worry about all these forces at once like I said I don't envy professors right now because there are a lot of forces it can be really easy to say the wrong thing and get yourself in trouble now how does this relate oh yeah and if you want to see an example of all of these things happening all at the same time everything from the angry students to the administration losing its mind to relatively tame speech being treated as if it's some horrible diatribe and then the some backlash from conservative Twitter all of its in the in the Brett Weinstein case at Evergreen State University which we cover in some detail in the book which is really kind of horrifying so one of the things that really made the 2013-2014 movement different was it was the first time I saw students really relying on strong claims of medicalization for the justification for censorship and what do I mean by medicalization I mean that they were saying not I don't want this person here because they're bigoted I don't want this person here because it's hate speech I don't want this person here because I just think they're wrong they're saying I don't want this person here because usually it wasn't the advocate themselves these people over here will be psychologically harmed if that person is even on our campus and that was an argument that we weren't used to seeing and I'm kind of a hobbyist when it comes to psychology and I know and you know a little bit of a personal note when I talk about this in the book you know cognitive behavioral therapy really saved my life in 2007 I slipped into a very dangerous depression and what helped me was cognitive behavioral therapy and cognitive therapy isn't about saying you have to wall the world off from yourself it's about actually learning to intermediate your own thoughts you know there's a wonderful stoic tradition saying you know Hamlet quotes it well and I'm gonna butcher Hamlet now but saying that nothing can harm you as much as your own thoughts unmonitored that essentially and that's part of stoic tradition it's part of Buddhist tradition that essentially there's a there's a moment when you have to decide and you have to learn the discipline of whether or not you're going to let someone harm you with their words or actions and that's the wisdom in cognitive behavioral therapy and so I was looking at this seeing these justifications for censorship on campus and saying not only of these bad for free speech these seem like these would be terrible for mental health and so I'll give you some examples of what cognitive distortions are they include things like mind-reading fortune-telling catastrophizing I'm not defining most of these because they really do sound exactly they are what they sound like discounting positives negative filtering labeling overgeneralizing emotional reasoning emotional reasoning means the idea that your emotions tell you exactly what you must do and that if you feel dark one day that must mean something really terrible is happening and something is really wrong and that's I think that's most closely related to sort of Buddhism where you get in the habit of seeing your emotions as whether that sometimes you're sometimes you're down for no good reason sometimes you're down because you didn't eat enough sugar sometimes you are down for a real reason but you shouldn't always assume uncritically that it's something that someone else has to change in the world is to blame and then of course blaming dichotomous thinking I'm very guilty of this my wife makes fun of me all the time for the fact that it's like it's all gonna be great or it's all gonna be horrible and I don't really mean to think that way but it's definitely you know a pattern that an awful lot of us fall into and I work on myself over generalizing if you think about some of the way we conduct debates on campus today and off campus there's a hell of a lot of overgeneralizing there's a hell of a lot of labeling there's a hell of a lot of discounting positive fortune telling mine reading all this stuff and one of the reasons why I'm such an advocate of CBT is that I want people to get over the T part of it I want people to get over the therapy part of it because what's amazing if you get in the habit of not of seeing these cognitive distortions in yourself it is actually a very effective path to getting over anxiety and depression mood disorders that's amazing applied stoic thought has such a great track record it's as effective as Prozac for many people but the other thing that I get very excited about is what if we actually started applying these rules to the way we argue with each other what if our political discourse was full of people who actually took a moment before they decided to make their statement and said maybe I'm over generalizing maybe I'm blaming maybe I'm engaged in emotional reasoning maybe I'm engaged in binary thinking discounting positives I think that there's some keys in here to the way we can argue safe we can argue effectively with ourselves and argue effectively with each other and they are very much one on the same of good tact ways of having responsible productive argument for society as well some of the reasons why I'm such a big advocate of the wisdom of CBT because I think it's wisdom goes well beyond the therapeutic so we wrote the original article in 2015 it was well-received and we thought we were all done it was in August of 20 2015 we thought we'd done our job and then unfortunately things got a lot worse on campus so we decided to write a book the original article I I have fought against it being called coddling the American mind because I didn't like that title as I mentioned before I wanted to be called the incredibly dull arguing towards misery which probably is a good thing I lost on that one but I went into the second book being like but one thing it's not gonna be called as coddling of the American mind and I even got height on my side on this one but we never came up with a particularly good title but to really get a better sense of what coddling the American mind is about you should understand what my preferred title was was the also frankly quite boring disempowered is I think that we're taking some of these exceptionally because I don't really think when people hear coddling they think of people who are pampered they think of people who are spoiled we make the case that we're just saying that uh that we're over protecting but in a lot of cases I think these students are very hardworking very diligent students who have been you know I did to forgive me if I said this already I think I said in a discussion with Lonnie they're like you know finally perfectly designed pieces of high-technology perfect Rockets designed to get themselves into University of Chicago and Princeton but in the course of doing that we've left out all of these life skills that give people a sense of autonomy a sense of locus of control a sense of competence in in their own lives and if you take away someone's locus of control if you may if you're implicitly telling them that that you have to be scheduled from 6:00 a.m. to 10:00 o'clock at night and by the way ask my advice on everything you do you're really telling them that they can't handle this on their own and that's why we shouldn't be surprised although we should be distressed by how much anxiety and depression has gone up now when John and I were writing the original article we heard plenty of stories of overwhelmed campus counseling centers with really high rates of anxiety and depression seemingly overnight things bumping up really badly but you know I know enough about social science John is a social scientist and that you know you expect curves to be kind of slight that increases so we thought there might be a modest increase in depression and anxiety on campus and then we found that it was actually not so modest depression rates this is a chart of depression rates for students for girls and boys boys hasn't gone up that much the depression rate and this is this is clinical depression in a year for those of you who've actually experienced clinical depression it's not the blues it is something depending on how bad it is life threatening and that's a market increase right around the time that we were that we were seeing this problem on campus and it all starts in 2012-2013 we also do the same can same trends on campus just a straight line straight up from this Penn State study and of course people will bring they'll say it's absolutely valid to say fine in every study you see an increase in self-harm you see an increase in ports of depression une increase in reports of anxiety you see we're you know data about increased diagnosis of anxiety and and and other mood disorders and but you know people have a lot of you know potential kind of like well maybe that's just because we've widened the definition or maybe people are more comfortable talking about mental health issues and that's all stuff that you have to consider but we're skeptical that it isn't representing a very real and serious phenomena one though when the curves for all the other problems we've seen are reflected in something that you really can't fake which uses suicide the suicide rate for men have gone up since the first decade of this of this millennia by 25% that's bad 25% increase is very bad that's that brings it to levels we haven't seen since the early 1980s it's you know 20% is a big increase for women it's gone up 70% if you count from 2008 to today it's gone up it's doubled and these curves look exactly like the same anxiety and depression ones that we saw I think that a part of this is disempowering them the whole book really more or less is trying to figure out why we why this all happened in 2013 2014 we believe that it's a generation that had some idiosyncratic misfortunes including being the first generation to be guinea pigs to social media and smartphones but we talked about six other phenomena but the backbone of our book is oh interesting okay is this we called them the three great untruths just like the premise of our article i john and i believe that it's as if we are giving a generation a terrible advice like about the worst advice you could imagine including by the way what doesn't kill you makes you weaker always trust your feelings that one sounds nice but ultimately as I said emotional reasoning is something that generally mature people have to learn to talk back to and overcome that people it sounds nice because people here follow your heart to go to your one true love and that sounds swell but you probably shouldn't punch everybody who makes you a very for example and the untruth of us versus them life is a battle between good people and bad people and evil people sorry now we don't think we're directly giving a generation of student this advice but we do think we're giving it by example or do we do think we're giving this advice and implicitly and and in short what we're saying is we shouldn't be surprised that we have a generation of students that are increasingly anxious increasingly depressed and increasingly polarised because we've essentially been telling them the mental habits of anxious depressed and polarized people so what can we do what can high schools do you know very I want to start with really simple things but I start with simple things for a reason there's a lot of fatalism around the issues we talked about in the book I don't want people to be fatalistic until we start doing some really basic things you know teach civics host debates better yet assign debates you know if I could wave a magic wand every student in their junior year of high school would have to do an Oxford style debate in which part of the rule is you have to take the opposite position from what you actually believed in the current environment it would be insanely controversial but it shouldn't be you should get in the habits of being able to take things from other people's perspective it's part of critical thinking and it's one of the parts of critical thinking that has been when you do the social science on how good students are today at perspective-taking that's been in in kind of freefall at a very bad decline by some of the studies they've done of it I teach the philosophy of freedom of speech and it's important to civil civil and human rights fire has materials already we're at WWE for I want to do a lot more of this and I'm definitely happy to talk more with people from New Trier about how now you can help out with this so what can students do I was actually aspecting there to be some more students in the audience in there but research the college you want to attend and see it's a greenlight school from fire educate yourself about the law and philosophy of freedom of speech for example fires free speech guide written for students I wrote it along with a bunch of other fire attorneys including Harvey silverglade David David French contributed to it will crea we we think it's quite accessible read anything by Jonathan Roush for goodness sakes especially kindly inquisitors it's one of the best philosophical explanations of freedom of speech written in the last thirty years and be prepared to fight for your for your own freedom and for the free speech more importantly but more importantly fight for the free speech of others and this is the piece of advice that I always leave students with and I decide to make my own slide of it make it a lifelong habit to seek out smart people with whom you disagree this is this could solve an awful lot of the isolation this could definitely help with great untruth us-versus-them a lot I think it could actually help a lot with them even the other great untruth and the anxiety around I just assume you as evil person to have nothing to say to me and then you find out actually talking to you is not nearly as horrible as you thought you may may man it may even end up dating who knows make it a lifelong habit to seek out smart people who whom you disagree I did have a somewhat depressing point when I gave this talk out in New Mexico and someone came up to me it's like I don't know I don't know if those people exist that's like okay you you probably need some work and what alumni parents and grandparents can do don't give unrestricted gifts to colleges ask some questions I don't care if you give $100 to them ask do you have a speech code do you teach about orient do you teach about free speech at orientation have you passed the Chicago statement do you pledge to protect controversial speakers and do you pledge to prompt to punish students who actually engage in violence that's been one of the outrageous things that's happened with some of these incidents of violence is that the people who did it weren't held accountable and that's not good that can lead very quickly to a very bad downward spiral and I'm gonna leave you with a final quote from Alan Charles Coors what about what's at stake and here is my contact information so I love to get feedback we're gonna take some questions for the next half an hour but in case you want to talk to me more directly this is how I find me thank you so much rather [Applause] you

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Length: 55min 6sec (3306 seconds)

Published: Tue Dec 04 2018