Jonathan Haidt: The Three Terrible Ideas Weakening Gen Z and Damaging Universities and Democracies

I'm Michael Berkman director of the McCourt knee Institute for democracy and it's my pleasure today to welcome all of you and to welcome to Penn State we're glad to see them we weren't sure he was gonna get here yesterday and welcome as well to those of you watching on the social 119 YouTube page we appreciate the efforts of Sam Richards and his colleagues at the world in conversation for setting up today's multi-camera video feed Jonathan's visit today and tomorrow is co-sponsored by the Smeal College of Business and tomorrow at 11:00 you can see Jonathan's second lecture what capitalism does to us and for us that talk will be in the business school auditorium and the Smeal webpage has information on how to pre-register that's a smaller space and this is let me mention also a few upcoming Institute events and then I'll introduce our speaker on Tuesday March 19th at the Katz law school building the Washington Post columnist NPR contributor and author EJ Dione will be speaking on quote protecting free expression by making America empathetic again then on March 29th I will have a conversation in this intimate room with Sarah Koenig the voice in genius behind the serial podcast some of you may know her as well from this American Life on PBS on public radio our conversation will focus on serials current season which is a richly told story of a year inside the Cleveland courthouse and on what sara has learned about the American justice system more broadly and then we'll round out our academic year with the center for democratic deliberations Burke lecture by Patricia Roberts Roberts and Miller of the University of Texas who will speak on the rhetoric of Hitler's battle and Hitler's rhetoric in battle and that's on April 16th all these talks are open to the public and none of them require any kind of pre-registration and to keep up with all of our activities for example our mood of the nation poll our undergraduate Nevins Fellows program our democracy works podcast please check out our webpage at democracy dot psu.edu you'll also find information there on how to follow us on social media and to sign up for our email listserv and we also have clipboards in the back as you're leaving so you can sign up for that finally after Jonathan's talk today we'll have time for some questions just find your way to one of the microphones let's try to limit this to questions not speeches so we can hear from as many people as possible following that we'll have copies of coddling the American coddling of the American mind that will be available for purchase and for Jonathan to sign and that will be just outside the lobby at the top of the stairs and now I'm pleased to introduce our speaker Jonathan Hite is the Thomas Cooley professor of ethical leadership at the NYU Stern School of Business the author of three books including two New York Times bestsellers and the co-founder of the heterodox Academy which is committed to viewpoint diversity in higher education may also have read one of his many articles or op-eds heard among Joe Rogan's podcast or seen him along with stormy Daniels on HBO's real time for Bill Maher Jonathan Hite has been sounding the alarm in a wide range of venues about what he sees as troubling trends in higher education and American democracy he's taken note of how the very nature of liberal democracies that many of us a most celebrate its skepticism of Authority and celebration of diversity and freedom may have as he writes exceeded many people's capacity to tolerate it and he recognized this as he wrote in the New York Times that quote democracy is hard it demands teamwork compromise respect for rules and a willingness to gauge with other opinionated and vociferous individuals it also demands practice over the past few years he had instance Judas had many gifts has had many guests in person and on our podcast who have spoken about the hard work required for democracy along with its challenges for example the inadequacy of modern civics education the dangers and potential of social media the reality of deep and growing partisan polarization and the difficulties of working through so many problems of working through problems when so many Americans distrust expertise cannot agree on basic facts and are increasingly uh netic and intolerant of those on the other side but we've not spoken with anyone who brings all these together as well as Jonathan has managed to do in his rigorous yet very accessible work for times like these Jonathan's scholarship and commentary has been indispensable at its core Jonathan's work is prescriptive and hopeful we're all stuck here for a while he writes in the righteous mind so let's at least do what we can to understand why we are so easily divided into hostile groups each one certain of its righteousness indeed even as he identifies disturbing trends in American society he offers much that we can do to nurture Democratic citizens and enhance our democratic culture Jonathan welcome to Penn State I actually have a long history with with Penn State because my first job interview my first academic job interview was here in 1994 and I didn't get the job but eight years later I married a local girl and and sort of married into Penn State so my wife Jane Rou grew up here because her father John rue has been teaching in the Economics Department since 1963 the year that I was born and while he's retired from teaching he still goes to the office he still serves Penn State every year on recruiting trips for the Economics Department and I see from his loyalty to the University from the love that the family has for Penn State from the insane fandom of this university the loyalty that it breeds that this is an amazing place and I had a great conversation with some of your you're top students this afternoon it looks as though this speech climate a lot of the problems that I'm talking about here today are not nearly as bad here as they are in many of your peer institutions and many of our toppings universities in the country but it's a pleasure to be here at Penn State talking to you about these things actually can we just so at which if you would stand up for a moment and have the community recognize you for your 55 years of service so okay so we Americans have strong feelings about our universities because our universities are different from anyone elses in the in the world ours are our top ones are modeled on Oxford and Cambridge and we have this idea of an idyllic time on the quad now in in British universities you can't actually go on the grass they never actually let you touch the grass but in American universities we know we have these beautiful campuses and a lot of our memories are about times on the campus we're much more sociable and intense than most European universities I just found this online the other day I think it was just in the last week or something I don't know what it is but I'm sure it brings back memories for some of you so we have these really strong feelings we love our universities but what's happening now is that we're all trying to kind of do university while two mega trends are making it much harder they're interfering with what we do on campus they're interfering with many institutions in American society and so I'd like to begin by talking about these two mega trends one is the mental health crisis and the other is polarization so here is what is happening that's what I'm find it who do we have here in the audience raise your hand if you are a current Penn State student how many Penn State students okay great the majority raise your hand if you are a professor at Penn State okay a lot great and raise your hand if you're an administrator of any sort okay administrators I'm so sorry about your jobs your job you have the toughest work on the university it and I'll tell try to explain why your job has gotten harder in recent years this is one of the reasons everywhere I go all across the country anybody working with teenagers or young adults says the same thing that there's been a surge in the rate of anxiety and depression every campus mental health center is overwhelmed they can't hire therapists fast enough something is going on it's not just anecdotes there's lots of reportage around it but as you dig into the statistics what you see is something truly scary first we have to understand that college students today are not Millennials they are Gen so most of us until two years ago we all thought that the Millennials were people born from 1982 to around 2000 maybe 1998 but now it's clear that kids born in 1995 or six or seven depending how you count it but I'll go with ninety five kids born in 95 had a different childhood and have turned out different than the Millennials so here's what we see about them so this is from jean twangy z' work but I'll show other work there's a lot that through that validates it so the this is a this shows the rates at which teenage Americans hit certain milestones or engaged in certain kinds of behaviors and so one is that this is the percentage of 12th graders who have a driver's license now those of you who are older than 40 you're thinking like what do you mean like you know if the DMV is closed on your birthday when you're 16 you have to wait till Monday but why would you ever wait till Tuesday to get your license but nowadays a lot of kids don't even bother to get one they don't care they don't need one they're not going out very much because for one thing many of them have never even drunk alcohol or Xperia got out on a date or had a job for pay and so if you're not doing any of these things you don't really need a car and if you're not doing any of these things what are you doing young people call it out what our teenagers doing more of that wasn't done before what the video games that's right so for the boys video games for the girls social media is what fills up a lot of the time so basically devices gen Z got these really intense amazing wonderful devices in middle school or earlier whereas the Millennials didn't get them until college or later so that we think is one of the main reasons for the generational difference here's what has been the results so if we look at rates of major depression these are teenagers who said yes to five out of nine symptoms on a symptom checklist what we see is that from 2004 to 2010 the rates were fairly constant girls have higher rates of depression and anxiety boys have higher rates of alcoholism violence things that make other people miserable and what we see is that when Gen Z enters the picture the rate for boys does go up as a percentage that actually is a substantial increase but clearly it's affected girls more the rates of depression and anxiety have gone way up for girls and more moderately up for boys when we look just on college campuses just college students representative survey what we see is that in 2012 when everybody on campus was a millennial the percentage of students who said yes they have a psychological disorder and it was up to them to label it but the percentage who self-identify as having a psychological disorder was very low for boy for women and men but once the Millennials leave and now college is all gnz other than veterans or older people coming back but the the ones who are coming out of high school they have much much higher rates of believing that they have a mental disorder and it's mostly depression and anxiety some great work done here at Penn State you have an institute that collects information from all the counseling centers around the country why are so many students going into the Counseling Center what is the reason that they report when they come in through the front door and the reason as you can see going back to 2013 2014 to the present the only things that are going up are anxiety and depression nothing else is rising so it's not that young people today are just so comfortable talking about it oh I'm you know I've schizophrenia bipolar disorder no it's only depression and anxiety it's not even stress Gen Z does not claim to be more stressed than a previous generation they just never got the chance to learn how to deal with normal ordinary everyday stress I'll explain why later so as I mentioned there is some skepticism this is with the New York Times a few months ago Richard Friedman saying relax there is no epidemic and and it's nothing there's no harm caused by devices your kids playing video games your kids spending hours and hours a day on devices relax its it the only the only evidence that it's harming them is self-report these surveys that show that they say that they're more depressed but you know they're just more comfortable talking about it that's his argument in the New York Times but I believe that he is wrong and here's why this is data on the percentage of boys now for boys no change but this is data on the percentage of boys or the nub sorry the number of boys out of a hundred thousand in the population who are admitted to a hospital each year for cutting themselves or otherwise harming themselves so severely that they required hospitalization and so as you see the youngest boys aged 10 to 14 almost never do that the so the rates are fairly are low for boys compared to the girls which you'll see in a moment and for boys there's been no change as we go from 2001 to 2015 but look at the rates for girls much much higher now here I've cut it off a 2009 much much higher this is an Amana fest a ssin of an anxiety disorder self-harm is a is a is a product of anxiety and anxiety disorders much higher rates for girls and young women as you see but look what happens after 2009 what you see is that for the older teenage girls the rate has increased 62 percent this is not self-report this is not just changing diagnostic criteria these are hospital admissions now interestingly the old the oldest group here who are Millennials in this data set the Millennials were not affected because as I said they got social media when they were in college and later and there's not much evidence that it was harmful in college I believe I can't I'm working on a lit review now there's debate about this but my understanding from going through the data is that the problem is getting social media in middle school and that's a problem especially for girls look what happens to the youngest girls aged 10 to 14 girls they didn't use to cut themselves but their rate has gone up a hundred and eighty-nine percent since they got social media in middle school again I can't prove causality but I have a lit review online which I'm working on which is available if you go to the coddling com I'll post it there tomorrow I think the evidence does point to social media as being the reason for the huge sex difference in what has happened to teenagers it also shows up in suicide so the suicide rate was relative in the 80s and 90s when there was a huge crime wave and a lot of violence but it's been stable in the 2000s until recently so for males it's up 25% now it turns out most age groups in America are going up suicide is going down around the world but it's going up in America for almost all age groups both sexes so the rise for boys is actually not not much more than what's happening to older men but the rise for women while it's higher than for men overall for teen 4 for 15 to 19 year old girls it's up 70% which is much higher and for 10 to 14 year old girls who have a very low base rate but for them again the increase is gigantic a hundred fifty one percent increase in preteen girl suicides in this country so something is going wrong especially for girls 2015 hit a peak higher than ever recorded before since we've been collecting data and the two years after that are right about the same level so it was not a one-year spike so that's the first mega trend this affects a lot of things on campus this is affecting companies corporations who are beginning to hire Gen Z and are noticing now that they have a lot more anxiety in their young employees so HR departments have to staff up the second trend I want to talk about is political polarization so about ten or fifteen years ago there was a debate as to whether America was becoming more polarized everybody agreed that we had elite polarization so if you look at Congress if you look at the media if you look at the the intellectual leaders those were in the fray everyone agreed that that in the 80s and 90s we had elite polarization what you see here is the degree to which the US Congress is polarized going back to 1880 a calculation to what extent can you predict everything about major votes if all you know is where a particular legislature is on the left-right spectrum if that allows you to predict you know and then the - you can print the two parties are far apart then Congress is very polarized just like straight party voting on a left-right dimension and so in the wake of the Civil War it was horribly polarized as you know and then for a variety of reasons it plummets in the mid 20th century and we have this period of very low polarization where there's a lot of bipartisan partisanship so there's a lot of reasons for that but what I want to point out is that that was the an anomaly it was a temporary period and what's happened since the 1980s is this so the US Congress is more polarized than it has ever been or at least it's at the level that it was right after the Civil War it's dysfunctional it's very hard to reform it's it's it is ineffective as a legislature so that's elite polarization it's also now clear I think the argument is settled that we also have mass polarization if you keep your eye on especially what we think about each other how much we hate each other but even if you look at what we think about the issues where it's harder to see pew has been studying American attitudes on a whole bunch of items they were able to go back to 1994 and look at to what extent are different demographic groups different on their attitudes to these issues and here's what they find so the way to read this is let's look at gender if you take this basket of ten items and you take the absolute value of the difference between male and female back in 1994 on this basket of items by gender it was eight or nine eight or nine points apart and now it's seven points apart so on gender there's been no change men and women are not further apart on this basket of issues but if you look at religious attendance it's 11 percent 11 points apart now it used to be only 5 points apart so Americans are now twice as far apart we are coming apart by religious attendance if you know whether someone goes to church regularly you can predict something about their attitudes but that increase is nothing compared to what has happened to our polarization by party I forgot to click before to get you through there let's see wait yeah we here we go this is what has happened to us by party and most of this as you see is just since around 2004 so polarization has been rising since the 1980s but it is really rising in the last 10 or 15 years something is happening that is very very bad for our democracy for our ability to work together trust each other compromise so why is this happening I wrote an article with a political scientist Sam Abrams I won't go into these reasons my point is there are a lot of historical trends the late 20th century was an anomaly in a sense we had a lot of things going for us we took it for granted we thought democracy was easy we thought now the fasabi Union is collapsed clearly this is the end of history all societies as they develop will become like the United States or like Sweden or some sort of Western democracy we thought it was easy we took it for granted we were wrong most of these were trends cannot be reversed it doesn't mean that things are hopeless it just means it's gonna be really really hard to turn this thing around thing passions really rose especially in 2016 2017 and this is now when we come back to campus there was a huge rise in in shout downs and diss invitations all sorts of things happening in the 2016-2017 academic year and the inauguration of the president was actually a spurt that that too raised the temperature on campus especially and so while there's been thank God very little violence on campus most of the real violence occurred in the few months after the inauguration when passions were very high so the bloodiest event was at UC Berkeley a lot of people were injured it's incredible no one was killed and we tell the story in the book and the coddling the American mind I mean it's amazing how many people were injured without being killed so that was Berkeley at Middlebury was another of this spectacular cases where Professor was assaulted he was accompanying Charles Murray they Charles Murray on the front they wouldn't let him speak and when they he and the other professor tried to leave the building they were attacked she has a concussion and possibly permanent neck damage as well there's been a wave of activism of students who especially the last couple years think that they can go into classes and and shout in protest to shut things down if they object to what is happening so there was a lot of that in 2015 to 2017 it declined quite a lot in 2018 so the least of those shout downs and the violence's is way down thankfully in the last year but it's left in its wake a new moral and political culture on many campuses and that's what our book is about that's what I mostly want to talk to you about so what has happened is just since 2014 we've seen the emergence on many campuses it's not very much here but it's at most liberal arts schools in the Northeast and the west coast it's a it's scattered around the whole country but what is a new culture that we call a culture of safety ISM it's an idea that students the idea is that students think of themselves and they think of people as very very fragile and they see the world is and the campus is very very dangerous and therefore they need protection from words or violence and they need protection from certain kinds of words books speakers and ideas so if you see on many campuses in America you do see these if you see a bunch of these terms to get they was travel together if people are talking about safe spaces trigger warnings microaggressions bias Response Teams America is a matrix of oppression you get a call out culture and it's often focused on single words there's a real reactivity to a single word this is these are the features of this new moral culture so what I'd like to do is analyze that for you that's what our book is about with great lukianov why it happened suddenly why it came out of nowhere in 2017 again I won't go through all the reasons I guess I'd like to make lists of reasons I'm a social scientist everything's complicated everything has multiple causal threads so political polarization and rising anxiety those are the two that I'm talking to you about but a lot is because of the way we changed our child-rearing in the 1990s and I'll come back to that in a moment so in the rest of my talk now I hope that this talk will be useful to Penn State students I hope that this will help you navigate these meta trends both here on campus and when you graduate and go out into the working world and I hope that this talk will be useful to Penn State professors and administrators the student body is changing times are changing all sorts of things are changing and a lot of us don't know what to do and so we end up being caught like deer in the headlights and implementing policies that are not based on research I hope that the things here and the things in the book will help ground in empirically grounded reforms and policies so the book is based on analyzing three terrible terrible ideas so in addition to these social trends what we see happening on campus is there are three really bad ideas ideas so bad that if we can get students to believe them we can almost guarantee that they will be failures in life so here are the three ideas so I'll just go through them one at a time that's will be the rest of the talk so bad idea number one is that what doesn't kill you makes you weaker now I wrote a book my first book is called the happiness hypothesis I gathered I read the wisdom literature of East and West and everywhere I could find I pulled out the psychological claims and then I analyzed them are they true and so every society that leaves us a wisdom literature has some insights about adversity and it is often stated like this what doesn't kill me makes me stronger so that's the wisdom principle it's the opposite of the great untruth and here's why it's true the most important word I can give you tonight is anti fragile if you understand this word you'll understand everything else about the talk and you'll understand that why the common things we do on campus in the last few years are mostly backfiring why they're often very badly considered so the word comes from Nassim Taleb he's the guy who wrote the Black Swan and he observed that there are certain systems that need to be tested and challenged so he he's one of the few people who correctly predicted the financial collapse in 2008 because he could see that the financial system was fragile it had never been properly tested and so if anything goes wrong it's all going down and he was right so afterwards he's thinking about this property of systems that gets stronger when you test them and challenge them and he says there's no word in English for this he says we have the word fragile so if something is fragile then you have to protect it so if you have a wineglass and you drop it it will break and nothing good happens from that so we give our kids plastic cups like sippy cups because if they throw them on the ground they don't break plastic is resilient but does the sippy cup get better from being thrown on the ground does it age well no it doesn't do anything it just doesn't deform and so Talib says we need more than that it's not just resilience we need a word for things that get better when you throw them on the floor and so he coined this term and hi fragile and here are the great examples our bones are anti fragile if you take it easy on them if you lie in bed for months they will get thinner and weaker if you bang them around they get stronger because that's the way bones are they get stronger and proportion to the need and the immune system is the best examples let me go into that peanut allergies have tripled they tripled between the 90s and about 2010 why they only went up in countries that tell pregnant women to avoid peanuts so some immunologists got together do a study in which they tested the hypothesis that if you expose infants to peanuts it allows the immune system to actually develop you have to shock it expose it challenge it and then it gets stronger so they recruited they recruited are they so there's an Israeli snack food called bomba which is a corn it's a puffed corn with peanut dust on it and kids love it so they recruited 640 women who had recently given birth and whose infants were at high risk of peanut allergy because there was some other immune issue and here's what they did they said okay half of you standard advice avoid mom don't have any peanut products while you're lactating you don't want to pass the peanut proteins into your child standard advice keep your kid free of peanuts and then at the age of five they tested everybody with a full immunological assay to see did their doesn't amuse and respond to peanut proteins to peanuts and 17% of these kids had a peanut allergy that followed the standard advice they'll have to carry an EpiPen with them for life and they have to always worry about food because it could kill them the other half were given bomba and told here give your kid this this snack food and I mean I should read the article carefully I'm sure they monitored and they didn't just say go home and tell us if he survives but you know so I mean they you know they watch for signs and but what happened when they tested at age five here's what they found three percent only three percent so we could essentially eliminate peanut allergy in this country if we gave kids peanuts rather than running away from peanuts so as this as the authors say our findings suggest that the standard advice was incorrect and may have contributed to the rise in peanut allergies this is an example of our subtitle how good intentions and bad ideas are setting up a generation for failure okay let's run the experiment again only this time we'll use the whole kid alright kids are fragile protect your children you don't want them getting hurt nothing good can happen if your kid gets hurt right so you got to be there for them you've always got to be there for them because you don't ever want to let them go and what if they get hit by a car you can't let the kid out you have to be there for the kid and if you do that you have to always be there for the kid I work in a business school and only recently are we hearing from business people who say I didn't hire this person and his mother called me so it never stops it never stops when you get on the helicopter parent whatever escalator whatever it is it never stops and so here's the way to see how quickly this changed I have a question for all of you in the audience at what age were you let out at what age could you walk out the front door no adult with you bye mom I'm going to Billy's house are you walk six blocks you and Billy go down to the store buy some candy or whatever maybe maybe you don't want to that's too dangerous you know but the point is at what age could you go out without any adult supervision and so if it was first grade you should say six if it wasn't until eleventh grade you should say sixteen so please everybody think to yourself what's your number when were you let out without adult supervision not just walking to school more than walking to school okay now what I'm going to do is I'm going to ask you to call out your answer but first I only want people born before 1982 raise your hand if you are born before 1982 okay so you're all Gen X and baby boomers and a couple of Greatest Generation so okay so so just to you what up only if you just raised your hand I'm going to sweep my finger around the room and when I point to your section just yell it out loud okay what's your number okay so that's what I always find it's six as always the mode this is what we always did always did kindergarteners are a little young but first grade that's when kids go out you go out and play come back at dinner there's other kids out there that's what we always did first grade okay some kids said some of you many of you said eight so between first to third grade by third grade everyone's out okay now I'm gonna skip the Millennials I'm sorry but you're not interesting because you're just transitional okay now just gens e that is and that's most of you students here so only so yeah so right so this is what I always find is that for the older people that's what it is now only if you were born in 1995 or later raise your hand high okay only you people as I wait and only if you were raised in United States other countries aren't as crazy as us so only if you were born in 1995 or later and raised in the United States should you answer okay what's your number [Music] okay where's your where's your mom is she okay so this is what I always find alright so the norm changed in the 90s beginning of ladies the norm changed in the 90s just as the crime rate was ending we had a huge crime wave from the 1960s to the 1990s just as crime was plummeting and it became safe to let kids out again we changed our minds and said oh if I ever take my eyes off you you will be abducted therefore you cannot go out you can go to soccer practice because I will drop you off and then another adults responsible for you until I pick you up but we will not let you out of adult sight until you are 12 that's the new norm that we developed in this country in the 1990s so many of us have idyllic memories of childhood or at least we see stories about it and in the 90s we said no more of this no more of this and what's the result so Peter Gray is an amazing psychologist at Boston College who has done research on the effects of play we learned so much in play all mammals play there is a biological imperative for mammals to play in play we learn how to coordinate how to be empathetic how to make up rules how to enforce rules how to be flexible with rules what do you do when you don't get your way we learn almost all of our social skills in play it's the richest source of learning for children we learn how to climb trees by climbing trees not by taking a class on tree climbing where they show you powerpoints and so what's the effect if we suddenly take play away from children and we say no more on supervised play everything is done by adults what's the effect the effect is a big rise in psychopathology one of the main things we learn in play is how to handle risk for ourselves if you've noticed what kids do is when they play with something like ice if they get a skateboard or anything they play with it once they master it they ramp it up they make it harder once you can skateboard you then skateboard down staircases right there kids are seeking out the level of risk of their brain needs to unfold we have to learn to face risk in order to become self-governing adults and in the 90s we said no more no more that you just sit there on your well not on your device in the 90s but you just sit there and don't go out where I can't see you and so as Alison Gopnik a developmental psychologist put it I'm trying to eliminate all such risks from children's lives might be dangerous there may be a psychological analogue to the hygiene hypothesis which is like what I was telling you about with peanut allergies in the same way by shielding children from every possible risk we may lead them to react with exaggerated fear to situations that aren't risky at all such as a speaker coming to campus who's saying things that you hate and we may isolate them from the adult skills that they will one day have to master in other words there is good reason to think that by protecting our children we damage them we harmed them we interfered with their development so I'm not saying we need to go back to this okay this is too too much because kids could actually die and and there's research on this death does not make you stronger so that's too much but this is just right because on this playground you can get hurt and that's very important because if you let kids face situations where they can get hurt that's the only way they can learn how to not get hurt conversely if you said no let's give kids playground like this this is what my kids were raised on this is what most of you right raise your hand if this is we've recognized this from your childhood right this is boring you it's very hard to get hurt here and therefore there's not much you can learn it's fine for three-year-olds but not for eight-year-olds the basic dictum the basic insight that every culture knows and it's common sense once you see it is prepare the child for the road not the road for the child because you can't fix every road that they will ever be on they have to learn how to go off road or to run rough roads in Britain they're ahead of us on this they have all the same problems not quite as severely but they're they're heads of schools are beginning to understand the psychology here kids need risk and so they're beginning to put construction materials out in a playground and few know physics professors here look what this kid is gonna learn he's created a lever right he's going to basically discover Archimedes for himself and if the bricks go up like that it's a lesson he will never forget unless he has amnesia okay what are we do in America the opposite in America we say if anyone gets hurt we will ban it for everyone everywhere for all time and before we know it everything is banned I just found this meme floating around we are all balloons filled with feelings in a world full of pins okay this would be a terrible thing to teach teenagers or children of any sort this I think is that one of the reasons we end up with this so Talib has this wonderful wonderful insight in his book he says he notes that a candle flame a candle is easily blown out a candle flame is fragile if you have a candle flame you have to protect it with a glass sleeve because any puff of wind will extinguish it but once it reaches the stage of a roaring fire the more wind the better the more wind is stronger it gets and so what Talib says is you want to be the fire and wish for the wind if you get that you understand antifragility all right bad idea number two I'll go through this one more quickly always trust your feelings in the happiness hypothesis there was a whole chapter on changing your mind this is the number one truth of pop psychology this is the number one truth you find in every culture that leaves us any psychological wisdom literature so the Stoics the Buddhists the Hindus were all fantastic on this they all said the same roughly the same thing it is not things that disturb us but our interpretation of their significance Buddha put it this way your worst enemy cannot harm you as much as your own thoughts unguarded but once mastered once you master your thoughts then no one can help you as much not even your father or your mother you learn to interpret the world in ways that are helpful for you and then you can face just about anything this is also the core inside of cognitive behavioral therapy one of the most powerful and easy to learn techniques in all of psychology Aaron Beck discovered that if he could get depressed people to question their thinking patterns they would be released from their temporarily it would come back but once they got practiced at it they could actually keep it away forever and so that's what CBT is all about in CBT you learn to recognize a bunch of common thought patterns cognitive distortions such as negative filtering you only notice the bad stuff over generalizing dichotomous thinking breaking things into good and good and bad black and white right or wrong everything's binary and emotional reasoning all of these distortions are encouraged on some campuses when we teach students when we encourage emotional reasoning when we teach them about microaggressions let me explain so the microaggression concept is a very widespread concept it gets two things right I think but it gets two things wrong very wrong so this is from an article it goes back to what's the name that goes back to in the 1970s but it was popularized by Derald wing sue in a 2007 article American psychologist and so it is useful to have a word for small acts of aggression a micro aggression and these are in the context of racial insensitivity originally and so you it would be useful to have a word for somebody who tells a joke that that seems insulting but the guy says I'm just it's just a joke come on it's just a joke so plausible deniability so it would be useful to have a term for small acts of aggression and as we've made progress from big overt blatant acts of racism which are much lower as we've made such progress maybe things are in a small veil deniable way so we great to have a term for that micro aggression that would be great but what about fits clumsy apps that make others uncomfortable but there's no aggression whatsoever in fact maybe the person was even trying to be helpful what should we call those well we don't really have a word in the English language for that but it would be great to have one so great that we actually went and borrowed the French word a faux pas a false step a clumsy act it would be great especially as we try to increase diversity and inclusion it be great to have fewer faux pas to teach people especially if you have a lot of international students and students from across social class they can't know all the niceties of our language around diversity issues so there's a lot of faux pas so if we were to distinguish micro aggressions from faux pas that would be very helpful that would be great to talk to freshmen about to help them get along with each other and not give unneeded offense okay that would be great the problem is that the things we're talking about here most of them are not clearly acts of aggression so it's things like asking someone where are you from so if you look again or if you look in some way not clearly white or black people will often ask you where are you from and then you say as my as my wife says I'm from state college and then they say no I mean like where are you really from or where you know or where were you born where's your family from okay now is that an act of aggression it's often motivate motivated by curiosity people want to know I've been to Korea I thought it was one of your Korean or Chinese so it's generally not motivated by any sort of hostility or aggression but if you're asked this every day yeah that can be tiresome so this is what the micro aggression concept gets right that we need to term for that but when we call it aggression what happens what happens what does it do to people what does it do to members of historically marginalized groups when so many daily interactions are now labeled for them interpreted for them as acts of aggression against you so saying you speak English very well or if someone mispronounces your name repeatedly or if someone says there's only one race the human race or if someone says America is a melting pot do we want students to interpret these as acts of aggression directed against them do we want them to see a world full of pins that's what happens when we call it micro aggression if we call them faux pas it would be great but it gets worse because the micro aggression concept is presented always hands hand with the idea that intentions don't matter I don't care that you weren't badly in tension that doesn't matter all that matters is what someone felt in the end what does the intent of our action really matter if our actions have the impact of furthering the marginalization or oppression of those around us and so one of the most basic aspects of morality as we judge people by their intent if someone bumps into me it makes a world of difference if it was intentional or accidental it's it it's it's madness to ignore intent but this is what we tell students ignore intent all that matters has how you feel and you should be offended so think about the challenge we face every school I go to every institution every business is trying to increase diversity and how so if you increase diversity that guarantees more faux pas more misunderstandings it has to happen there's no way around that so as long as you're increasing diversity of more misunderstandings there are two ways to handle it one let's talk about these issues diversity is hard it has many benefits but if we don't handle it right it has many costs so it's hard let's all try to be more polite but let's also give each other the benefit of the depth this is hard stuff there misunderstandings we're all flawed we all have bad days we have to be forgiven we have to give each other the benefit of the doubt that's one way to handle it imagine that that's the way it was done at Penn State I don't know how it's done but imagine that's the way it's done at Penn State conversely imagine that instead of that we teach students to focus only on the emotional impact ignore the intent only focus on how you feel and we are training you to detect more and more acts of aggression against you so that you will feel more and more marginalized and then also along the way we're going to give you a reporting system this is what we have at NYU you have one here at Penn State - if you feel offended by something there's a number you can call in every bathroom at NYU there's a number telling students how to report if I say something that they don't like I can be reported so I don't say things they don't like I can be much more offensive here at Penn State because you can't report me okay so that's the second bad bad idea well-intentioned but if you make this the norm of your group before you know it you have increased tensions hostilities and feelings of marginalization third bad idea life is a battle between good people and evil people so it's a whole chapter in the happiness hypothesis on the faults of others because we're all self-righteous hypocrites we all are prone to dichotomous thinking and tribalism as Solzhenitsyn says in the Gulag Archipelago the line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being the ancients know this the ancients knew this every culture advises us I don't know of anyone where we were advised judge more and more harshly lest you beat or before someone judges you like that's not the way it works it's always something more like why do you see the speck in your neighbor's eye but do not notice the log in your own eye you hypocrite we're hypocrites by design I cover that in the righteous mind why we were designed for hypocrisy now throw in tribalism the Bedouin proverb me against my brother me and my brother against our cousin me my brother and cousin against the stranger this is tribalism this is sports this is politics this is religion at times where tribal species and we bond with whatever group is needed to confront whatever the threat is and it's great fun as you know at Penn State every Sunday in the fall but here's if you put these together here's what you get here's the here's a really bad mix of it you get a call out culture so let me just give you a quote on that and then I'll ask all the students whether you have it here so this is at Smith so n at elite schools in the Northeast it is it's really intense it's everywhere that I go at the elite schools and then in the New England especially and also in California so well I will see what people say here so a student at Smith wrote during my first days at Smith I witnessed countless conversations that consisted of one person telling the other that their opinion was wrong the word offensive was almost always included people could soon detect a politically incorrect view and called a person out on their mistake I began to voice my opinion less often to avoid being aided and judged by a community that claims to represent the free expression of ideas I learned along with every other student to walk on eggshells for fear that I may say something offensive that is the social norm here so this is what a Smith student said at many schools I go to I asked and and 100% of the students will say yes I was just at a fancy prep school in Connecticut and a hundred percent said yes they have it but I don't know let's find out so just current Penn State undergraduates will only do undergraduates would you say yes now I know it's not pervasive here it's not in most of your classes for sure my question is are you have any classes where this is the case where you are afraid to speak up because that will happen to you so just Penn State students raise your hand if your answer is yes you've seen that here raise your hand high okay a lot of you and raise your hand if you say no you have not seen that here okay so actually about three or four to one yes so you have it here Penn State students raise your hand if you'd say it's present in most of your classes raise your hand high okay only a few and raise your hand if no it's not present most of your classes okay so that's my sense here at Penn State it's much better than at most top schools in the Northeast but you still have it it's in some classes it varies a lot by department there are certain departments that tend to foster this it's not just you who are self-censoring we professors are self-censoring like mad I don't teach nearly as provocatively as I used to five years ago and so we're all in a sense walking on eggshells now a big part of the reason I believe is the prevalence of the idea of intersectionality let me just explain this very carefully because they're in the middle of a big culture war and a lot of people from the right who want to say oh identity politics and intersectionality and cultural Marxism this is destroying the university I'm not one of those I'm not on the right I used to be on the left now I'm a non partisan and it's been incredibly freeing to be a social scientist studying this stuff without feeling like you're on a team that has to win so let me be very clear the core idea of intersectionality is absolutely right kimberlé crenshaw developed the term and the basic idea is that identities don't just add they interact so to be a black woman in America is not the sum of being a black person and being a female person there are unique indignities insults oversights problems that a black woman faces in America and that others especially that say white men wouldn't even notice and until you have terms for it you don't notice it so she has a great TED talk I urge you to watch her TED talk there's nothing I object to in a TED talk it's a very good talk and it's an important idea okay the problem I believe is that as it's taught on campus as it's taught in certain departments that emphasize intersectionality it's taught with this basic intellectual structure let's look at identities and they're all binary you're on one side or the other and so you're either white or you're non-white and these are not just random dimensions these are valence t' they are morally valence t' the ones above the horizontal line are a privileged and powerful therefore they are oppressors therefore they are morally bad those are the bad people whereas the people below the identities below are the less are the unprivileged they are the oppressed and therefore they are the good people and you it's they're not just individual people they're intersectional addresses and the main intersectional address is the heterosexual white male that is the person that is the group that is the cause of most of the problems they are they're really bad people they are the oppressors now of course there is such a thing as privilege of course people have different experiences I'm not saying we shouldn't be talking about these things but what I see coming out of people who take more than one course in these topics is a kind of a an idea that the world is divided into good people and bad people and so you can see it just in the last few years we're seeing a lot of this a lot of stuff that is really it's sort of violent in a sense or at least advocating violence in ways that would have been unthinkable 10 or 20 years ago so a student at Texas State University ontological speaking white death will mean liberation for all so it goes on round about white genocide now he doesn't literally mean that white people should biologically kill he means culturally killed we white people should be wiped out in terms of their cultural cultural presence but to use this language of genocide in a student editorial this is just not very helpful if you're trying to create a tolerant multicultural environment and it's not just students on campus well this is another one so it this is at the new school a few blocks north of where I live it's an incredibly progressive anti-racist school but some students there have learned that the new school is a bastion of white supremacy and so they need special spaces for everyone who is not a straight white person it's not just students it's now in the media it's now adults it's now people journalists well this is a gender studies professor of course Harvey Weinstein is a criminal he's a horrible man who deserves to go to jail and we now know many women have been harassed and molest and even raped that we didn't know before so the me2 movement is very very important how should we react to this well one way would be to say the world is divided into good people the women and bad people the men we women have every right to hate you men as a sex as a gender you have done us wrong the New York Times recently hired someone who writes this way so Sarah Jang hasn't had a number of tweets about how much she hates white people and the New York Times hired her interestingly the feminists named Jessica Valenti defended her with an exact paraphrase of great untruth number three as she put it Sarah John is good her haters are bad it's not difficult it's that simple good bad that's all there is to it and then recently we saw a really horrible one so the many people again people who are in this intersectional culture that judges by race and gender saw this photo and as reza aslan put it honest question have you ever seen a more punchable face than this kids because violence against the bad people is a good thing they're the cause of our problems we should round them up and punch them or kill them okay again not the best way to think if you're trying to create a tolerant open diverse multicultural society or university here's a much better way to think it's the way that the great civil rights leaders thought it's the way that works it's called common humanity identity politics so identity politics is not a bad thing you need politics in fact the motto of the McCourt Institute is what partisans for for democracy okay but politics is a good thing groups need to organize to to address it grievances and in justices you have to have identity politics you know if corn growers can organize and comic book readers can organize then black people can organize and Jewish people and gay people so identity politics is not bad but if it's organized by common hatred of the enemy it gets ugly quick and it never works on a university but if you follow some of the great civil rights leaders like Pauli Murray was gay when we would now say transgender black episcopal priest got a law degree at Yale she said I intend to destroy segregation by positive and embracing methods when my brother's try to draw a circle to exclude me I shall draw a larger circle to include them this is really good social psychology draw a circle around us all and then within this circle we can talk about difficult things so the Dalai Lama also fantastic as Buddhists tend to be on this I'm Tibetan I'm Buddhist and I'm the Dalai Lama but if I emphasize these differences it sets me apart and raises barriers what we need to do is pay more attention to the ways in which we are the same as other people so imagine a university that was structured on the three unwisdom principles imagine what it would be like to be a student there imagine a business choosing where to hire from what business in its right mind would hire someone who came out believing these three things conversely imagine a university that rejected them and that was based on the basic psychological principles that I've explained today so what can we do what can Penn State do to set Gen Z up for success briefly point number one you need viewpoint diversity you have to expose people to a variety of viewpoints as Ruth Simmons said learning is the antithesis of come the collision of views and ideologies is in the DNA of the academic enterprise you have to expose students to ideas that they dislike and reject point number two I found at co-founded this organisation heterodox Academy because I was alarmed as a social psychologist that everyone in my field was on one side politically and that made it hard for us to actually think clearly about problems please raise your hand if you're a professor or an administrator at Penn State anyone who just raised their hand I invite you to join heterodox Academy just go to heterodox Academy org click on about us click on join and I welcome you we are the only politically balanced organization in the Academy equal numbers of people on the left and the right we have 2500 professors and and now we're at we have hundreds of administrators third use the open mind program we designed it to be used in freshman orientation but it works great in all kinds of classes political science classes it walk students through why it's good to talk to people who differ from you how to cultivate intellectual humility helps you break free from your moral matrix I won't go through this we have data that it actually works it does what it's supposed to do the good stuff goes up the bad stuff goes down a fourth point teach all incoming students cognitive behavioral therapy you could hire another therapist $430,000 or you could buy the entire incoming class his book for ten dollars a piece it's a lot cheaper and then students themselves could actually do therapy on themselves and it just teaches critical thinking skills and last I'm going to end with a three-minute video this basically sums it all up Van Jones a democratic activist he was in the Obama White House Van Jones gave a talk at the University of Chicago and they had just had an event on campus at Chicago where somebody from the Trump administration was going to speak and the student some students protested they want him disinvited and so David Axelrod democratic strategist interviews Van Jones and says van what do you think what do you think about this and so just listen to the way this is the most brilliant exposition of antifragility I have ever heard you know I mean have a different view but because I'm interested in yours look I I don't like bigots and bull I just want to just point that I'm against biggest I'm against bullies so just leave that as it is those who like bigots and bullies raise your butt I'm gonna say I'm I got tough talk for my liberal colleagues on these campuses and they don't tend to like it but I tend to like me so I get away with it so I'm gonna keep trying but that's the property exactly I did I did I want to I want to push this there are two ideas about safe spaces one is a very good idea and one is a terrible idea the idea of being physically safe on a campus not being subjected to sexual harassment and physical abuse or something like that or being targeted specifically personally for some kind of hate speech you are an n-word or whatever that I hate perfectly fine with that perfectly fine with that but there's another view that is now I think ascendant which i think is just a horrible view which is that I need to be safe ideologically I need to be safe emotionally I just need to feel good all the time and if someone says something that I don't like that's a problem for everybody else including the administration and I think that is a terrible idea for the following reason 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 I'm not gonna take all the weights out of the gym that's the whole point of the gym this is the gym you can't live on a campus where people say stuff you don't like and these people can't fire you they can't arrest you they can't beat you up they can just say stuff you don't like and you get to say stuff back and this you cannot bear okay so you get the point so basically so there are two models of adolescents two models of young people that we can have that we can encourage that we can encourage our students to think of they can either think of themselves as being balloons full of feelings in a world full of pins or they can think of themselves as fires and too close I would just like to say that every student here you are the fire now go find some wind thank you so if you have questions I invite you to come up to the microphones and we have a little while for some questions somebody up here okay you want to thank you sure okay okay let me especially ask any critics anybody who has something critical to say so-so okay any members of Gen Z who are still here first let me just ask what does it say that they're all No so anyone any any current Penn State student would you say that I have misunderstood your generation would you say that this portrait makes sense you think it's mostly right raise your hand if you think I've misunderstood I've gotten it wrong okay I'm amazed even if you think it was basically right that this is okay thanks all right so please go ahead in the back hi great talk I'm very excited to see you talk I've used a few of your theories so I'm millennial just to be cool I feel like I need to say that to distance yourself yeah so I'm a bit confused by one of your messages which is you talked about how we need to expose kids to more risks like it playgrounds that metaphor but you also said about part of the problem with the new generation was this exposure to social media and all the negatives and the vulnerability they have from out social media those seem to clash to me so I guess first can you speak to that and second how do we decide how much of emotional vulnerability we should allow so not just playgrounds but bullying for example okay no two great questions so in theory it could be that kids don't need physical risks it's okay for them to just take social risks or you know whatever it is that you do did you know that could in theory work it doesn't seem to so okay so it's an empirical question in part the results are disastrous especially for girls secondly we are a biological species we are mammals and so to physically develop our physical abilities to be able to actually play with fire we evolved for fire you watch kids roasted marshmallow now the marshmallow catches on flames and a lot of them never handled fire so they freaked out there are basic physical competence skills that we all need and it turns out having an app that lets you roast marshmallows or bake cakes doesn't do it so and then the another aspect of that is these devices were engineered to keep you on them all day long and just as we don't let kids try heroin or cigarettes I don't think we should be letting 11-year olds try things that are there to hook them when they're 18 they're ready so that's the first thing an amazing thing happens when Mike so my kids so I'm up here with my kids at my in-laws house and you know here they're in the country there's snow what do they do all day long they're on their devices and then when I only when I take them away do they actually go outside and play and there's no substitute for going outside and playing it turns out your second question was about bullying yes that's that that is one of the fine lines that needs to be drawn so the original definition of bullying and the psychological literature had three features to it it was power differential threat of actual violence or something close and over many days so that's bullying is terrible kids are not stronger from being bullied some will say they are but some are permanently damaged bullying is terrible but we have concept creeps so that now any confrontation is seen as bullying so my advice is we have to give kids a lot more unsupervised time we have to tell them about bullying of course and so if there's any case where one kid is picking another kid on multiple days it's more than an hour it goes on the next day that's the line then adults can get involved but normal conflicts kids need to get in fights and then settle it and go back to playing it's only if they're responsible for the game that they figure out how to resolve the dispute so you don't want to stop disputes you just want to stop multi-day tormenting thank you okay there okay so everyone's on that microphone was that go ahead okay okay will do okay we'll do it you put go to you then yeah so two-part question the first part is what changed in parenting between the generation that I'm from Gen Z and the generation before and then their generation and secondly why is there a parent like why is there this I guess paradox where parents are so protective over their kids that they won't let them do anything that could physically hurt them but they're really lenient in terms of their online presence and allowing them to you said get hooked at the age of eleven on things are leading to physical harm like cutting themselves yeah so what why is there that paradox but first of all why did parentage yeah so parenting changed in the 90s for a couple of reasons mostly related the original ones are related to the media so the there were two famous cases of kids six-year-old boys being abducted one is Etan Patz the others Adam Walsh 1979 1980 or 81 those got some press in the 80s when as cable TV was coming in and then cable TV TV develops this art form of any kids but I should say any white kid if any white kid is missing there's round-the-clock coverage for weeks and so if people get the impression that there's all these abductors out there my kid is in danger and so that bit so Adam Walsh's father starts America's Most Wanted he starts the milk cartons so he himself as well I mean a horrible tragedy I don't want to blame him but with the best of intentions he freaked us all out so that by the 90s we stopped letting our kids out that's one of the biggest pieces the other piece is as as inequality rises and as competition to get into college increases the sort of the middle third or the middle this or the upper half the whole upper half of the income distribution gets more and more focused on what's called concerted cultivation parenting I have to give my kids this experience this experience listen to Mozart when you're in the womb go to this camp you know I got to get my kid into a top school so as that pressure increases we take away more and more free play substitute adult supervised activities so that really ramps up in the 80s in the 90s and so once it is no longer the case that kids are seen outdoors unaccompanied it begins to look weird we don't hear of parents being arrested in the 90s for kids playing outside that starts in the early 2000s because it had been ten years since anyone had spotted the child outside yeah that's those are the main changes that happened in the paradox what are we so lenient with technology but not with one reason so one reason is laziness parents are very busy and it's and you know babysitters are expensive and if your kid wants to watch another video I mean it seems to work out so well so in part we're lazy we're and other thing is that we don't know for sure that it's harmful until just now now I think we're coming the data's becoming clearer it's not crystal clear it really is not but there was enough ambiguity that I think we didn't know and now that it's clear it's really hurting girls it's not hurting boys so much heavy use deprives them of other things so when I say it's not hurting what I mean is it's not showing up in mental health stats okay I got to share something with you so Mike Michael said that I was on I was on the Bill Maher show with stormy Daniels she she was the first guest I was the second guest but afterwards okay so afterwards there's a you know a party and all the guests are there and she has a she has a an 8 year old daughter and she took her took the daughter out of school when although all the stuff was coming down it was homeschooling her and she was really interested in what I was saying about the effects of our protection and she says and you know I see it in the young men because she says you know I've been working in clubs since about 1998 since when she was 17 or 18 years old she starts being a stripper and so she's been working with men of all ages from you know 18 to 65 or 70 for decades and she says only in the last few years the young men won't look me in the face and it's not because they're looking elsewhere it's because they're looking down at their phones or their they they don't have the skills and this is what a lot of people say Gen Z has a much harder time looking people in the face they're just much more avoidant because you have to have millions of experiences of the back-and-forth of conversation to get your brain wired up and Gen Z has you know a quarter as many have who knows Hamlin but a fraction of what it used to be through all of human history and so if you deny the basic human back and forth through a device doesn't do it okay yes so often it's very difficult to determine the intention of somebody and you talked about a lot in the second problem that's like the most important thing is we should recognize the intention the other speaker yeah but it's very interesting that in February of 2017 at Berkeley Maya innopolis was a speaker there it was very clear that his intention was to provoke yep that's loose so what does some advice you could give to university administrators who you said have the most difficult job when dealing with speakers who come with the intention of offending and come with the intention of no well first let me give some advice to liberals if a speaker comes with the direct intention of provoking you to make a fool of yourself and commit violence on caught on TV to be broadcast all around the world to humiliate you don't take the bait okay so he was only able to do that because he knew and he said this he wrote this up a year or two before he said here's how to beat me and nobody read it and he did executive so they fell right into the trap first of all second of all while I think they're I don't talk about free speech on campus very much because that's not really the governing principle we're here to do research and education so discourse and dialogue that that so having charles murray come to talk about a book on social class which is why Trump won that's really relevant and even if you hate him for a previous book either don't go or go and argue with him but you don't punch him okay the innopolis is a different matter not saying you should punch him I'm just saying he doesn't provide the educational value so the so intention does matter and you should have policies that block the campus to provocateurs but that welcome scholars whose work challenge is the dominant view you need that do more of that so as a follow-up is there a way that we can value speech that creates a productive dialogue because like yes I don't think very many people would argue that the innopolis is providing a very productive dialogue yet there's a lot of conservative commentaries yeah first of all first of all so when I was at Yale in the 80s we had a lot of provocative speakers we had a lot of performance artists and radicals and people whose job was to provoke but because they were provoking in favor of our aside we welcomed them so I would say that if you're going to have a consistent rule then you're going to lose all the provocative people I actually think if people had gone to his talk they would have actually learned something is actually quite smart and yes he's his goal is to provoke so I don't think he should be invited but once he's there you'd learn a lot again that's wind you want to get stronger go to the talk thank you okay yes oh I'm sorry go ahead and also what's our time what time do we need to stop five minutes great okay go ahead please in the book the coddling of American mind that make us low speak loudly into it yeah in your book the coddling you show a graph of disinvited speakers as a function of year yeah and you can see the 2013 to 2017 I was wondering if there's any updates because you don't show any anything for me I'm not sure if I have it here there are updates I don't have in this presentation so it dropped way off the the spectacular shout downs dropped way off in 2018 there was some in the early part but they're much less frequent the passions of the election year are part of the big reason for the spike also much better policies originally administrators had no idea what to do and so it got out of hand and now they all like at NYU I mean they're on it it's a huge operation they're able to get the speaker in and out so the administrators all over are much better at it and there's also less provocation as well yeah but the but the callout culture does not seem to have diminished that's what I'm mostly concerned about the speech planet thanks okay yes great so clearly we've discussed that childhood experience has drastically changed in the mid 90s and later but when we think about experience of like expression and having voices heard and things like that there's a history being known that marginalized groups have clearly not been listened to so ryr to then that's right so what proof do you have that by changing the way we're we're raising children is actually gonna change the way we communicate oh so raising the way we change children will make people a lot tougher and stronger and if we do that then people won't be so hurt by somebody wearing a piece of jewelry by somebody saying a word people have thicker skin and so there'll be fewer conflicts school is an organization that go in for the microaggressions type training it's not like they make it to someplace where now things are good never get there the more you do this the more people are upset everyone is angry so I do I prove I strongly prove the term historically marginalized that is absolutely true but I object to saying marginalized groups on campus I teach at NYU one of the most gay friendly progressive schools in the country and for gay students at NYU for LGBTQ students at NYU to say I'm a marginalized student historically Marlys absolutely but I am a marginalized student what I mean what you know at NYU I mean I'm not saying that no student ever said something you don't like but to say that this place is institutionally against me and I am in hostile territory and I'm gonna approach my education with fear this is a great way to damage the education of members of historically marginalized groups it's just counterproductive it's ideological but it hurts the very people it's trying to help and that's the point of the book what do you think when I push back on that I'm mostly just thinking of that's theory that has grown from history changing and people changing but I'm trying to figure out is that has a theory been seen to succeed my god look at the progress I mean if you imagine you know if you so I teach the business school and I you know what was it like for a woman in the 70s to join the financial world it was constant harassment what is it like now I pull my students they're mostly working in corporate America the answer is how often does anything happen that in any way makes you feel that your dignity has been violated you've been insulted or treated differently and the modal answer is are there once every couple years or a couple times a year you talk to women who so women today going into the work world it's amazing how much better things are imagine being a gay student showing up now at Penn State compared to 20 years ago the progress has been amazing fantastic we should be celebrating it but the people who push this way of thinking are committed to saying everything is always was and always will be systemic ly and structurally racist transphobic homophobic Islamophobic etc again if what do you care about do you care about maximizing your victimhood to convict your enemies do you care about actually helping the students that's my question I think we should probably make this our last quail ass last question my questions about the effectiveness you think these suppose policy change might not have you can go closer to the microphone fees given that these students have had this coddling effector in their most formative years can four years of a different policy really change them going into the workforce yes so the frontal cortex begins myelinating or kind of locking down at puberty and it's not done until you're around 30 and if you think about high school kids coming out of high school and let's take a hundred who go into the army and a hundred who go to Williams College or Smith College and now we're gonna test how tough they are four years later I'm gonna hire the veterans every day I would never hire someone who went to Smith or Williams so yes teen the teen years early adult years a definite not too late the problem is the lawyers so administrators want so most administrators agree with what I'm saying when I travel around the administrators love the book they say oh my god our light our jobs are done so hard yes we want to do this but if anything goes wrong we get sued so college is not too late but because of the litigiousness of our society and the expectation that parents and students have that if anything goes wrong there's a number to call there's an adult who's responsible so you hear these stories you know that students who call the campus police because there was a mouse in the door in the room I mean that you know the the administrators tell me things like just in the last few years students are not able to manage the routine aspects of daily life that ten years ago they were able to manage and so if we give in to it and give increased accommodation we're harming them we're making it worse I don't know how you handle that unless we get you know litigation release which is not going to happen Thanks if if you would like to if you would like to buy and buy a copy of John's book their coddling of the American mine and have him sign it step outside buy it from the bookstore you need to have plastic they won't take cash and Jonathan will be in here bring it down and he'll sign it they'll be here for a little while you

Channel: Penn State McCourtney Institute for Democracy

Views: 168,564

Rating: 4.8193316 out of 5

Keywords: Jonathan Haidt, Coddling of the American Mind

Id: B5IGyHNvr7E

Length: 80min 30sec (4830 seconds)

Published: Fri Feb 22 2019

Reddit Comments

[u/JAWVMM]

"It is madness to ignore intent." Also see the Pauli Murray quote at 56:08 - which sounds to me like it came from Unitarian Edwin Markham's poem "Outwitted" which is much beloved and quoted.
The New Yorker this week has a long piece which among other things covers the evolution and complexity of feminism's attitude toward men, especially batterers, which his thoughts about the problems with dividing people into good and evil reminded me of.
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2019/08/19/the-radical-transformations-of-a-battered-womens-shelter