The Anxious Generation Goes to College with Jonathan Haidt

I wanted to write a chapter in the book you know the last part of the book is what governments can do what tech companies can do what parents can do what Educators can do and and I was going to have a separate chapter on what universities can do because that's very different from high school this situation is very very different may I say when I when I first got your book and I went through the table of contents I looked for the chapter on what universities can do so I was like thinking myself John I me to talk about this in the podcast that's right no it's the missing it's the missing chapter it's the chapter that I if I'd had the time would have written it now Greg and I have a good chapter in the coddling on what universities can be what's a wiser University so but I didn't have a lot to add at the time as we were writing the book I didn't have a lot to add to that and we I was totally out of time I was so far behind publication deadline so I said all right I'll deal with this later well later's today we're here okay let's deal with it [Music] welcome to heterodox out loud I'm John tamasi the president of heterodox Academy on every episode we'll be taking you on an intellectual Adventure a journey across the complex and challenging terrain of open inquiry in higher education you'll be meeting some leading College professors some heterodox College presidents and some entrepreneurial students too our aim is to give you an insiders view of the complex terrain of open inquiry in higher ed The Perils and the possibilities too so let's get ready for another adventure into heterodoxy today on hetero out loud we'll be talking with John height about his new book The anxious generation Our Focus will be on the question what does John's new book tell us about campus policies and culture what happens when the anxious generation goes to college let's see what John has to say John height welcome to header dos out loud thank you so much John what a thrill it is to be here in this really nice new office I just once before but I'm just really appreciating it like we have really arrived I love it we we are arrived and we're still going I you know you know what this is a special pleasure to have you hxa you're the co-founder of hxa I sometimes think of you as the founder who stayed because you're stayed on with us and have been so incredibly supportive and um we're just really delighted to have you in our new Studio doing having this conversation let's go right into it so your new book The anxious generation came out about two weeks ago two and a half weeks ago you've been busy yes can you say us something about what you've been doing since yeah sure so you know it said if you build a better mouse trap the world will be the path to your door but that's not true unless the world is completely overrun with mice and what's going on here is almost every family is fighting over this this this issue of Technology creeping to the kids' lives pulling them away kids on screens all day long not going outside not running around everyone has felt like something's wrong here uh but it was hard it was hard to prove it people didn't know what to do and all of a sudden you my book comes along and sort of really lays out not just like phones are bad but let's step back and look at child what is human childhood why do we have this super long childhood what are the things you have to do in order to turn into a a healthy adult once you see it that way you see that we used to have a play based childhood because we're mammals all mammals play that's part of Evolution's design for our large brains and our high sociability and we had a play based childhood which began to fade out in the 1980s and 1990s as we freaked out about threats to our children and we started locking them up inside and this is all the Lenor ski let grow free range stuff um so we began losing that gradually in the 90s and 2000s but actually the mental health of Millennials didn't decline it was actually a little better and those of Gen X it's not until 2010 that everything changes about childhood because that's when teens trade in their flip phones for smartphones the flip phone and your when when did the iPhone first come out comes out 2007 but it's expensive and it's not that it's exciting but it doesn't have all the bells and whistles and gizmos there's no app store there no apps other than the ones that Apple gives you uh but in 2009 the App Store 2008 the App Store comes out in 2009 the the retweet like and share buttons come out so everything gets much more explosively viral on social media the camera 201 that's 2010 right so my point is it the iPhone comes out in 2007 totally non-toxic I bought one in 2008 it was an amazing digital Swiss army knife you could use it when you needed a tool by 2010 you now have the very Beginnings you got the front faing camera Instagram is founded um you you more people are getting highspeed internet although most don't have it yet by so so in 2010 teens had flip phones and they could not spend six hours a day on their flip phone you just can't do it if you have to you know press the seven key three times to make right make one letter right and they're all just little shorthands people were using that of became culture right but they used it then in order to meet up so it's a tool so that's all fine if you're talking to your friends you're meetting that's great by 2015 everything is different um the great majority have a smartphone with a front-facing camera the girls mostly have an Instagram account everyone has highspeed internet and so now it becomes the new lifestyle is you actually are online and many kids more recent data is half of young half of American teens say that they are online almost constantly which means that even when they're in class and you think that you're teaching them half unless you have a really strict policy half of them have their phone in their lap or in a book because they they can't they have to be on there's so much going on online so my argument is that the phone based childhood replaced the play based childhood between 2010 and 2015 that's the great rewiring of childhood and so it's exactly in this period it's really right around 2012 2013 that when that when you plot out the rates of especially anxiety depression and self harm you see hockey sticks in the graphs like everything was going sort of along flat straight no change then all of a sudden 2013 everything skyrockets for girls boys go up too but it's not quite as sharp so whatever it is it it is especially affected girls right around 2012 2013 maybe it's a coincidence but that's when Instagram is founded that's when the well I'm sorry it's founded 2010 2012 is when Facebook buys it so it now becomes much more popular it's when everybody's moving on to it I remember when that was happen yeah so so so that's my claim is that we have overprotected our children in the real world when we freaked out and don't let them out to play which they need to do we've um so this podcast i' I've been doing some of your talks around New York I went to one a couple nights ago at the re the Reigns that I've seen you'd exhibit in terms of audiences who are interested in this topic it's just really impressive I saw you give a talk at um the reason Speak Easy with Nick kesie three nights ago where there were a lot of statisticians in the room pushing you on the technical questions I saw you give a talk uh two nights ago a private for a private group uh many many parents young parents interested in what would happen if they had phone free kids and there's a school shooter kinds of questions like that so I've seen the incredible range of um questions you're getting what I want to do in this podcast for this particular audience at hxa hxa listeners is talk about the impact of your findings if we accept the the main story from you which I do so we're g to Grant all that and ask what does this mean for college education and so when the anxious generation starts arriving on College 2015 2014 2014 now they're they're coming on that's what we're going to talk about let's begin by going back a little bit to the codling of the American so you and Greg lukano published this fabulous book 2018 at the time you report that Greg was noticing that something new is happening on campuses you were noticing it too and I was too as a professor but Greg sort of crystallized it he said that we're noticing that students now are it's the students who are calling for for speaker dis invitations calling for protection and crucially now the reasons they were bringing forward to call for these speaker desinations and other trigger warnings and so on they were medicalized reasons right and in that book of course famously uh you talk about the three great untruths that students are being taught on campuses and other places too that that that which doesn't kill you makes you weaker um that always trust your feelings and that life isn't a battle between life is a battle between a battle between good bad people that's right and you you know fragility um emotional reasoning and Us Versus Them wonder if you just say a little bit more about how you see that book now in relation to the new one oh yeah yeah I you know I've been it was such a crush and a rush to try to write this book in a this is the fastest book I've I've written was about a year and a half it was really hard you you do well at speed that's a great book it's a great um but you but like I should have you know I wish I'd gone back or had you know even since we finished the draft come back and looked at the codling because it it definitely picks up from the codling in fact I'm sorry to interrupt me I just say that as I was prepping prepping for this interview after I read the anxious generation I went back and read the reread all the coddles and I was amazed there was so many sprinkles in there we'll talk about some of the things I saw but there's so many sprinklings in there of the concern for mental health phones are mentioned throughout too but the whole picture is not there the picture seems to changed exactly can you just say more about what to do it chronologically from when Greg first came to me um we met through a mutual friend in in New York through Jerry orstrom and Greg invited me out to lunch because he had this psychological idea he wanted to test out he' read the happiness hypothesis and like that wanted to meet so Greg lays out this idea that you know there's that that as you said that for the first time students are asking for trigger warnings ban this speaker cancel this talk not because the person's a fascist or a racist but because people will die people be traumatizing it's going to hurt us and the rest of us were like what do you mean like and of course the Quint the first big case was at Brown I was there and like I was there right you actually hosted it you hosted it I didn't host it but I was there I was in the room you know but the idea that a talk going on on campus is traumatizing even if you don't have to go to it that was new that was totally NE we' never seen anything like that and so Greg had this interesting hypothesis that he wanted to run by me which was you know since he had learned CBT when he had a suicidal depression and he saw students giving exactly the opposite uh uh of what CBT recommends so you're not supposed to catastrophize learn to recognize that no catastrophize if this person comes to speak people will die um and black and white thinking and and emotional reasoning so anyway so that was the hypothesis and Greg thought somehow you know this new culture on campus like students are learning this on college campus as you thought so we wrote up I I volunteered I thought this was a great idea so I just volunteered I said Greg I think it's a great idea you know if you want a co-author like I'd be glad you know I was supposed to write a book on capitalism morality I was saying no to everything you talking that's right yes that's right that was an original conversation but I thought that Greg was idea was so good I said you know what if you if you want a co-author I'll join you on this I've heard some hxa members say people who love the calling of the American mind and now reading your new book They're wondering what's changed and one person said to me and I'm going to paraphrase a member wait in codling John advocated tough love but now an anxious generation is all about protect the kids has John height become a coddler no I that's one of the most common that's one of the most common questions I get and you know if you just have a superficial acquaintance with thesis you'd say oh isn't that contradictory and the answer is not at all um kids are antifragile they need a lot of experience out in the real world the world for which we involved and as soon as you give them a phone they're going to sit down outside and be on the phone they're not going to have that experience so a phone is an experience blocker a phone prevents you from living from growing up you're talking about younger people now ESP especially right now kids are getting I mean kids are getting their devices I just a British study a quarter of them get smartphones between five and seven years old in Britain we're a little behind them um but by fifth grade by sixth grade they've been they've had devices for a long time um and so uh so we're not going to get antifragile kids having real world experiences as long as they're spending all their time on the phone we've got to delay that conversely the virtual world is not the world that we evolved in it's a world in which anyone can reach anyone and so every platform starts out nice everything Twitter was lovely Tik Tock was you know just fun line dances everything starts out nice but as is the way in the biological world you get parasites you get diseases you get viruses and they all turn incredibly nasty and exploitative and so we put our children on these things we didn't know any better in 2012 we thought that the tech is amazing you know this is the way the future but pretty quickly you know our kids are being exposed to sextortion rings in Nigeria that you know they pretend to be a beautiful woman they get a boy to send a nude picture of himself and then they've got him they blackmail him and eventually he kills himself in some cases right so you know the dangers online are not the sort of things you grow from being publicly humiliated in a way that goes viral throughout your whole school it's not that that toughens you that that really that really changes you do you ever get tired of listening to people complain about higher education perhaps even on this podcast if so join me in Chicago this summer to meet some people who are actually doing something to make higher education a better place mark your calendars for June 6 to 8th for hxa 2024 conference there'll be over 30 sessions and 100 speakers speakers like Jonathan height hakeim alesayi Nadine straon and many others hetero Academy conference 2024 let's not just talk about a better future for our universities let's build it together go to heterodox academy.org 2024 conference register today it's going to be enlightening engaging and yes a lot of fun too let me let me ask you if this sounds like a reasonable way to think about the growth of your thinking from coddling to the anxious generation uh we can say under in coddling gener gen Z arrives and they're more or less healthy there are some problems with them you saw through about the codings some they brought some mental health issues with them but they were then taught unhealthy ideas there's this theme in the codling that in some sense campus culture was a sense was a was a cause of these health challenges of students and that now with anxious generation we're now saying that the anxious generation these genz students this wave that begun and it's now moving through the university system that they're arriving very unhealthy right and they're arriving perhaps in need of some medicalized treatment and I just I'll say one more thing just think thinking about the original title of your article that became the Epic article in in Atlantic the original title I believe was arguing towards misery how campuses teach um cognitive distortions so there's a sense in in coddling that I'm really focusing on the University space now what we should think about your what are the implications of the generation for this for hxa and for universities you're you seem to think that you and Greg seem to them that it was campuses were teaching these distortions right what do what do you think is that a change in thinking how do you see that it definitely is because that was ex like that title that was exactly what Greg presented to me in an Indian restaurant on University Place in May of 2014 it was you know the lunch that changed both of our Lives lovely that's what we thought uh and we put out the Atlantic article saying that and we were wrong a couple years later we when we started working on the book going much deeper we discovered now there was a lot more data now we could see wait this is happen happening to high school kids this is happening to people who don't go to college there is a mental health catastrophe unfolding Across America and we also had data on the UK we knew it was the UK as well in Canada um so now it was clear well this can't be caused by college because it shows up in high school in Middle School even um so we changed our thinking we expanded it and in the codling we focused on the overprotection half and the overprotection of childhood and we had a section you know I wrote the psychology sections we had a section I reviewed all the available evidence we said you know in the timing maybe social media it could be a contributing factor but correlation isn't causation we don't know right so you know like parents you know don't freak out like you know but you just be you know careful about this because we didn't know and it was 2017 well now we know a lot more information has come in the trends have gotten catastrophically worse they keep going up and up covid didn't really change the trend line at all um it's happening across northern Europe it's happening across the all the English speaking countries and now there are also a lot of experiments so this's the other big thing I get is oh you know correlation is not quotation yeah I know that you know read anything I've written I'm very careful about this um and uh oh and actually you know what a thing I'll bring in because I think it is a sort of an hxa thing is a strategy that I took from the beginning when I we wrote the coddling and put it out there and some people criticized it and said it's your moral panic and it's not the screens it's not the phones and the kids are all right and I said oh oh my god did I get this wrong because you know this is not my field like in these people who are in media Fields I was saying I got it wrong so I collected all the research I could find because we're all citing different studies it was totally confusing I just collected them all in a Google doc and I invited Jee twanky to join me we just put it up and said here here's everything we can find tell us where us what're wrong and and I've done that open and query John a model of open and query well okay that's right it's a very hxa thing because what happened was then we did this for mental health stats whole document document for the research on on causation is it social media we have documents for the research on video games on dating apps on everything and uh and then an amazing thing happens when you put your work online and you invite people to criticize you they will do you the favor and criticize you and that's how you get things right that's how you grow so you know it's so sad I like on social media people are playing the game not of how can I learn the truth how can I grow how can I become smarter they're playing the game but how can I win this argument and the goal shouldn't be to win the immediate argument it should be as a scholar it should be to win the long-term argument because you're right good and we'll talk about that last formulation in a few minutes and we talk about what haa might contribute to the Health crisis on campus there's something about let's go there there's something about the way you think about learning and about research was going be really relevant I think to addressing this health issue but I still want to say for just a minute more on this idea that in the coddling there seems to there was this idea that universities were promoting these great truth these untruths unth yeah that in their policies and in their programs and in their assumptions the culture on campus was drifting towards an encouragement of these three great absolutely I just wonder if you see that differently now because when I read that initially I thought to myself well reformers should change that reformers should change these cultural norms on campus yeah because they're they're hurting kids they're making kids more anxious and more depressed and less res but now we're saying a little bit Things Are a little bit different now on the story now we're seeing that those medicalized claims that students were making would you say that they're more Justified than we thought five or six years ago well are universities contri are universities causing it are they just amplifying it right okay good so let's go into so you know so as as you and as the audience knows universities are these giant complicated places with lots of schools lots of departments different cultures in different places so the three great un truths you know let's be frank about this the three great and truths are primarily taught in Humanities and studies departments that are teaching the oppressor victim mindset and Greg and I have a whole chapter chapter three because it's the it's the great un truth life is a battle between good people and evil people and we go into intersectionality which is a good idea originally I mean intersections of identity there you know it's not just main effects there are intersections and interactions we all know that in statistical terms so intersectionality begins as a good idea good Insight from Kimberly khaw but as it's applied right it's basically applied to teach kids the three great un truths to teach them that the world is divided into people with power those are the bad people and the people that they oppress those are the good people everything's binary um and so this was you know this has been around since the 90s and in some way since the 70s um but it used to be confined to small the small departments and unless you were majoring in one of the studies departments if you're majoring in chemistry or history or uh um you know a psychology you wouldn't you wouldn't really be taught these terrible ideas uh but in the activist departments I mean the departments that aren't primarily about scholarship in my opinion I you know I think they're they're focused on on causing social change um and you know I'm not sure that there's a place for that on a University campus that is U if of course we want our students to be competent at at bringing about change that's great um but departments that emphasize it um instead of the search for truth you end up with activists who push programs that often backfire uh and that's what I think we see a lot happening and so the the culmination of this was really um December 5th that that incredible day uh last December when those three University presidents were before Congress right right last fall we really saw the catastrophic collapse of the brand of higher ed higher ed used to have the best brand in the world like better than Apple you know everyone in the world wanted to come to American universities uh here I'm I'm I'm showing off my my new business school credentials since I moved to stern in 2011 um but you know by all the way through 2015 American highered had argu the best brand in the world we were loved by people on the left and we were reasonably liked by conservatives and moderates they there was some distrust but we still they still had a positive view overall if I may just add during the 20th century was this great accomplishment the American Research University combining the Collegiate idea from England with a research idea from German building something wholly American and his novelty and his combination and and fundamentally committed committed to undergraduate open inquiry Viewpoint diversity these were you know we were developing that that was the engine that was powering for's greatness exactly but please continue this story so I'm just really interested to hear about how you see this stronger finding now about the the way this anxious generation has is struggling with these mental health issues now when they're on campus when the anxious generation comes to campus what do you think about hxa values I have on the wall here across from you see the hxa way and read them out loud for our read from our for our listeners these are norms that hxa is encouraging on campuses make your case with evidence be intellectually charitable be intellectually humble be constructive be yourself and I'll add that these values you well know John are all derived from an idea of yours that the teos of the university is something like truth or knowledge seeking or self- awareness growing and these virtues making your case with evidence being charitable being humble being constructive these are all meant to be epistemic values values aimed at knowledge but now now with your new book we're thinking well say we're all talking about this are there therapeutic Dimensions Absol yes can you can you tell us something about that see that okay good now thank you this is a great thing to for us to talk about I wanted to write a chapter in the book you know the last part of the book is what governments can do what tech companies can do what parents can do what Educators can do and and I was going to have a separate chapter on what universities can do because that's very different from high school this situation is very very different may I say when I when I first got your book and I went through the table of contents I looked for the chapter on what universities can do so I was like thinking myself John I me to talk about this in the podcast that's right no it's the missing it's the missing chapter it's the chapter that if I'd had the time I would have written it now Greg and I have a good chapter in the coddling on what universities can do what's wiser universities so but I didn't have a lot to add at the time as we were writing the book I didn't have a lot to add to that and we I was totally out of time I was so far behind the publication deadline so I said all right I'll deal with this later well later's today we're here okay let's deal with it um so here I want to just put a couple facts out on the table um one is that levels of anxiety are extraordinarily High among our undergraduates and this is true across the board around the country they're extraordinarily High yet even still students really want to learn they really want to grow and and the dynamic that's happened is that the students and there's a lot of research from hxa and others the students are mostly afraid of other students not of their professors that's and the professors are afraid of again of a small group of students not of their other professors the administrators are afraid of a small group of students it's those who who believe that their activism gives them the right to shout people down to shame them to attack them right so you know I felt as though I'm teaching on eggshells since 2015 many students feel they're learning on eggshells Deb mashik the the previous executive director of hxa she would tell the story about a student at Harvey mud College where she had taught who said my motto is silence is safer so this is so sad yeah I just add that i i two days ago I Cote I um guest h a class at NYU a freshman seminar top Mutual someone we know an hxa member Alicia Russ fishbane we were on an email chain with him together a while ago um and Alicia had me come to his class a freshman class called the the UN univers what it is what it was what it could be and there are 20 students in this class and as Alicia warned me before I walked in that it was gonna be hard to get them to talk that's what everyone says and I was really Struck from having taught my last class around two year two and a half years ago there's a maybe it's just tic to the class but these students wouldn't speak and they eventually did by the end when I asked them you self-censor they all raised their hand yeah and one little statistic I thought you'll find interesting listeners maybe too we have a new the new campus expression survey this big survey H it's about to come out you know we were finding again as we found in the past that students report self-censoring at these very high levels we're now asking the question in a little set more nuanced way and a little twist I think you'll enjoy so they do say as they've said before that they're wary they don't speak because they're wary about their peers posting on they're posting on social media but they also say that 40% of students who self sensors say that they fear some that others will disagree with them will debate with them and not think that they're right yeah that's right it's kind of that's right sounds like an anxiety well exactly it is that's right so so I I spent a lot of time in the book on the difference between being in Discover Mode versus def mode I want to ask you about that please talk about that yeah so so let's put a couple things on the table and then I'll answer your question about the therapeutic applications to universities go for it um so we've already established that that the students have high levels of anxiety but they actually really do want to learn they want to be exposed to different ideas this comes through in a lot of the surveys um and and they want to grow another fact genz is not in denial you will NE I have never yet had a member of gen Z say you're wrong you you've got her Generation all wrong they say yeah you're right we're anxious we're we're hooked on social media why is that significant that they don't deny because in all previous you know moral panics um it's like the adults are freaking out because the kids are on television the kids are like no I like my TV like like you know don't take it away from me um or comic books or the early video games um so this is very different because Jen Z actually agrees that this is messing them up if you went through puberty on social media it changes you it makes you more defensive you're walking on eggshells you're living on eggshells you're growing up on camera you're put posting photos of your life you're always being judged beautifully described an anxious generation yeah now WR that's right it's so sad it's so sad but it makes you you're in defend mode you're like the world is threatening and any anything could go wrong and online anything can blow up at any moment right um right so whereas what you want is you want students to be in Discover Mode when you're in Discover Mode um and those are circuits that are especially a little bit more in the front left cortex and front right cortex they're specialized for approach um and when you see opportunities you're like wow like I could do that I could do that and I always remember you know my first I went to Y undergrad and at Yale at the time 1981 they send you over the summer I think it is this really thick Blue Book you know paper bound book The Blue I would just like flip to a random page and say you know Chinese art from The 14th Century I could take a course in that if I want remember that experience it's a feeling you couldn't believe it you could believe it the abundance the possibility a kid in a candy shop and I kind add to that I think many people felt this I I still remember it too walking on campus walking past these buildings with these names on it like plant biology or Classics I'm thinking to myself who am I gonna be yeah I wasn't Fant biology but you know but I was walking around the campus and like possibil possib right so so you're in so we expect students to be in Discover Mode and that's was those are our stereotypes about students they want to go out and party they take risks that's not true for genen Z j z doesn't want to go out and drink they don't want to go out and party as much as previous generations they um they're anxious and they have so much time on their phones they don't have time for anything else anyway so to bring this back to what we're talking about so imagine you now have a a freshman coming in 2015 2014 2015 all the way through now all your students are in this way now let's return to the hxa values right so imagine that you grw up online imagine that you grw up always you know posting and getting little arguments with people in the comments or or being afraid of getting arguments in the comments um so if we read these values again I think what we'll see is that they are exactly the opposite of the culture of most online fora certainly for Twitter or X um uh so let's go through them and let's see you know what what growing up online does and then let's see whether this is an antidote that we could promote on campus and I'll just say that here hxa and the center for academic pluralism the seagull Center we're just having this discussion a lot now we're looking at these values and asking are there therapeutic ti so let's let's See's see how you do it so make your case with evidence well you know on Twitter I mean you only have a very limited number of characters you're more likely to make it with an ad hominum you link somebody to someone you say you know you're a fascist because or you know you liked this post by some fascist or whatever right so make your case with evidence it's tough to do on that platform that's right not reward but you can especially now that Twitter allows you to have much longer posts especially I mean I'm willing to pay the $8 a month and it actually makes a huge difference that you can actually have longer post be intellectually charitable that doesn't happen very much online you get points for knocking someone down and Char means listen to the good and what someone says that's right recognize we're as students now on campus we're a community of imperfect Learners I'm not perfect with my knowledge you're not perfect either we're going to work together in that way we're going to show charity to you and you to me that's right whereas life on Instagram especially for the girls is all about perfection this is one of the reasons why social media is so much rougher on girls girls are more prone to uh socially desired perfectionism that is um trying to live up to the impossible standards of society more girls have have anxiety issues related to that than boys and life on Instagram especially really uh heightens that and so this fear of making a mistake know everything has to be perfect I mean it's really painful for the students and it means they're not in Discover Mode they're in defend mode um so yeah be intellectually charitable be intellectually humble again online life does not uh promote that um be constructive again you get more points for tearing down for being destructive and be yourself something all the kids say is you know you put forward your fake persona imagine everyone living life as a fake and thinking about that all day long um so anyway we have to be sympathetic and realize gen Z coming in we deprive them of a normal childhood we deprive them of normal Social Development we allow them to be raised in a place that has exactly the opposite values as hxa now how do we undo it what do we do once they get onto campus and here I will here I'll draw on the course that I teach at in my Us St called flourishing um it's a full semester course uh you know 13 weeks 14 weeks um and it the course is organized around how do you become smarter stronger and more sociable and um smarter stronger and more that's right nice um so if you can do those three things then you will be more successful in love and in work and as Sigman Freud said you know Le love and work that's like the formula for a successful life um and if you can be more successful in in love and work then you will be happier that's the promise I make to the students uh and their task is to make themselves smarter stronger and more sociable more socially skilled during the course of the semester so let's talk about the smart part because that's the hxa part so uh the first thing you do to make yourself smarter um is you turn off almost all your notifications you regain control of your attention nobody can think when they're giving away all their attention to interruptions on their phones um but then the second part of it is I have them read uh so you know HX they produced this volume I you know I worked on it with um Richard Reeves and Dave cicerelli um all minus one it's it's beautiful little volume it's an it's an a bridged version of chapter two of John Stewart Mills on Liberty I I urge everyone if you haven't read it or if you teach courses try to assign it it's free on the hxa website or you can buy it on Kindle on Amazon on but I have them read just a part of that and then we talk about what game are you playing when you're talking with someone what game are you playing are you playing the game of I want to I want to prove you wrong are you playing the game of I want to win this fight are you playing the game of I want to impress them are you playing the game of I want to preserve my reputation or are you playing the game of I want to grow and learn and you're giving me an opportunity to grow and learn and John stmill was all about that you know he who knows only his own side of the case knows little of that and he said and it's not enough to hear someone just tell you what the other side believes you have to hear it from people who actually believe it you have to be exposed to Viewpoint diversity and and then I show them the Daryl Davis that amazing Daryl Davis video where that you know Daryl Davis a black mus Blues musician who has talked hundreds of Klux clan members out of their road because he listens he gains their trust that he's going to listen to them and hear their story then they talk now they have a human connection and he's then able to persuade them so I say don't R you know because people say oh you know somebody said something racist therefore I can't talk to him well really Daryl Davis thought he could and look what he did because Daryl was not playing the game of showing off right he had a game of I want to take this kook's slam member bring him out of the clan so if you always approach things with what can I learn there's a line in Dale carneg we this is one of the assigned books uh in how to win Prince and influence people um he quotes somebody from you know the 1920s I forget who it was who said every man is in some way my better and in that I learned from him if you take that as your motto you're going to grow you're going to get smarter and if that's a social if that motto becomes a social Norm that is now socially acceptable in this space in this community on campus to approach the world that way it seems that it's I feel strange still talking about these hxa values therapeutic they weren't designed for therapy that's right but they were but they were designed to set people on a certain course of life so when you think about people walking onto a camp as being this very special thing they now part of their iiz metaphor that it's like a hot house right C it's only going to last for four years with these very specialized conditions for growth and changing and during those four years you're gonna be transplanted outside very soon four years plants brought outside but in these four years the special place if we think about the anxious generation coming now into this hot house yeah more damage perhaps from previous generations and yet in many ways I'm going to just try this and let see what you have to say also be more needy since they're self aware of their defects more needy about these values more perhaps if it's PCH the right way receptive to being old you're joining a special Community where we support each other in the purpose of learning yes not some other purpose not some Warfare not this good evil stuff we're seeing but rather this higher ideal that has again I'm going use the word therapeutic but something like the community of Learners of imperfect MERS learning together what do you what do you make that that is okay that is beautiful I think it's right and it sparked an idea in me how we can get an integration of of of what I just said about my course and what a university should do please so as I said the course is how do you get smarter stronger and more sociable good the smarter is obvious of course University should make you smarter and you should be open to ideas Etc but it just occurs to me from what you said that actually a university should make you stronger in a way that I'll say in a moment and a university should make you more sociable in this way of a community of Learners let's go through them good for stronger and this I should have started with this one the stronger how do you get stronger the main reading we read parts of Marcus Aurelius and then we read this wonderful book The stoic challenge by William Irvine and once the students understand antifragility they all want to grow and and after we talked about it I always put it to the Mis way you know a lot of your professors are afraid of you a lot of your professors are afraid to give you they're afraid to give you harsh feedback they're afraid to criticize because they think you know you'll break or you'll get angry or you'll report them and so but I want to ask you which of two professors would you rather have one Professor does is the sort of standard and everything that they as positive as can be and they don't tell you what they really think take it easy on you you're not going to hurt your feelings the other Professor starts on day one and says you know what um uh you know you need to grow um you're here in a business school this is it turn you're here in a business school um you're going to go out into a Work World which is going to be tough and I want to know how you want me to talk to you um one way is I'm going to really look for what's wrong in your writing and I'm going to say what's wrong not going to sugarcoat it not going to focus on the positive and then a little crit know my job is to make you better and so I'm G to criticize you um what do you think do you want that and every time all hands go up yes they all want it so if it's an individual thing and they don't understand the point of it then it's like he's criticizing me the professor doesn't like me but once you frame it as growth this what I'm saying they understand that they've deprived of growth and if you offer them the opportunity to grow they grab it they love it let me let me let me share with you something get your thoughts about something I've also heard from a lot of students I've heard this from students of brown but I heard it again just two days ago at myu people I asked them what what their what their orientation experience arrived on what were they told what were the signals and the general impression that that I got from these students but not I don't I'm not picking out myu but myu I think is a representative of a lot of places y it is they said that in some sense they were being told that it was high school part two so they were told you're going to have you're going to have have fun in these various ways interesting places to go you're in the city all safe but you're in the city um you're gonna meet friend you're gonna make friends they're gonna last a lifetime which is thing you're g at the end you're G to get some job what the NYU students told me this last week was that they felt they didn't see the purpose of that it's good to have fun it's nice to have friends and have some job but they didn't have this sense that they're being told or signal that this is about you becoming the person you might be you mentioned the three in your class let me just add three others that I sometimes think about from Joel Peterson um former CEO of Jeet blue and someone has been very helpful to me and hxa Joel says that each of us has to find three things to get a good life his version is a person to be a work to do and someone to love H if you think about the university and the search for truth and know we want to know more about the world around us we also want to know more about ourselves there a sense much figuring out finding the person to be who you are what your values are what your interests are that's going to make you stronger when you choose the work to do and perhaps the person love do hxa values help with these kind of things again I'm thinking it's not just knowledge about the World Knowledge about the world is crucial but it's also a question of like lifelong learner setting ourselves in a certain course of being yeah that's open that's charitable that's humble but also princi and demanding with high standards yeah you do anything yeah so I think that's very inspiring lot to throw at you it is no it's very inspiring although to me it it feels more resonant for my MBA students for my students in their 20s the undergrads when they come out to campus they're they're 18 uh 18 or you know roughly um I'm not sure that we want to task them with this individual task of you have figure who do you want to be that can be very inspiring it might work for a lot of lot of them but what I want to do because you started with this with let's go back to orientation let me tell you what my orientation was and then I want to be sure that I touch on the issue of community because that's that's the other big part of the story sens of community good so my orientation so I I show up at Yale in in September of 1981 I'm 17 years old I know I'll turn 18 in a month or two time the young John height enter walking on campus for the first time and you know and so yeah you're in a residential College I was in Davenport College and I like day two there's you know um a reception at at your Residential College in the Master's house it was called the you know the master of the college yes and no more but anyway yeah that's right that's right and you know there was lovely food in a lovely setting and they served alcoholic drinks like welcome to college you're you know because in Connecticut it was still 18 New York had just raised it to 21 so every September I would I could drink in Connecticut or but not in New York anyway the point is like you were treated as an adult it was incred you know we put on our sport code and it was just an incredibly adult defying sort of thing um you you there was all kinds of orientations but it was mostly about actually there weren't all kinds of orientations I take that back um there was shopping period on campus you figure out what courses you want to take but the my most vivid memory is they brought us all together in woy Hall which is the most beautiful Auditorium on campus where there's a gigantic pipe organ and uh the president was Bart Giamatti um uh and I actually you know I can't remember that he gave the spee whether he was sick that year in any case there was a really inspiring speech about the mission of the university and truth and what we're here for and then there were the pipe organ were playing I remember my chest shaking fabulous and uh fabulous and it was it was it and what I now what I realize now now that I wrote the anxious generation chapter four is on puberty I cover initiation rights good and what we don't think about is that when you take kids from one place to another you don't just want to give them the tools you want to change identity good and they don't do it themselves this is why I'm a little wary of the individualistic thing identity historically is not something you choose your identity is your position in the larger social Fabric and then when you change identities you have to the older people have to guide you through that who are you now it's not up to you you know now you it's not your parents typically most it's other people other adults that's right that's right College again exact that's right because kids have to leave their parents you know as we say in the modeling uh the job of a parent is to work him or herself out of a job right and you better do that before you send your kid off to college and parents used to do that they don't anymore so now we have to do it um the parenting um so anyway what I'm saying is if we think more about that transition to college not as we're going to give you drug and alcohol training we're going to give you sexual harassment training we're going to give you all your microaggression training we're gonna give you all these trainings about how you know threat sensitive and all the ways you can screw up but rather but rather a noble Vision expressed in beautiful words in a beautiful setting in the has to be in the first week they arrive on campus because that's when they're very plastic very flexible about who are we it's not just who am I it's who are we and if the rhetoric is a lot about we are a community of Learners we descend directly from Plato and Aristotle that's why we call it the academy because we are model on the idea that people sitting around in a circle maybe drinking wine talking about ideas being provocative laughing with each other sometimes there's some tension like that is the origin of Western thought as we see fine you know there are exceptions but this is our story that we tell stories are important we are their descendants and now we welcome you into this Guild you are now a college student and so if you the more you frame not just what are you doing here what are we doing here who are we and then you go right into the hxa values we are a community of Learners because you know what people are really stupid as individuals we don't think well as individuals because we want to be right we want to impress people you have to have other people who will criticize you who will challenge your confirmation bias so once you if you lay that all out for them and you say your mission is not just to you know live by all these rules we're giving you your mission is to grow and you grow as part of a community and you have an obligation and a duty to that Community you have to give your honest criticism of the other students now I know that many of you are afraid to speak up in class this is what all the professors say well I understand that but you know what if we all agree that we're going to do it you're gonna find you're gonna find it's thrilling and they do they do they really do I love the way you just did that let me just let me a little twist to see up so you described your own experience walking on the the campus hearing that inspiring speech having your heart and I think we we talk about hxa why those why these initiatives these these orientation are so important that they be communal that they not be broken up rather bringing people together but now let's say that the people walking on campus are are deeply anxious and many of them let I think you can go two different ways with this some people I think say therefore and this is how do we how do people on the University respond to your book The anxious generation some might say they need more protection no and therefore let's double down in these protections others would say what I think you and I would say which is like double down on hxa kind of can you say anything about that because youing you're bringing this attention you're bringing the whole world's attention to this problem on campus now there's GNA be a struggle as to how to respond to it can you this any wisdom so the most important fact here is that the treatment for anxiety in Clinical Psychology is exposure not protection if someone's anxious about elevators you don't say oh we're going to be nice to you and we're going to build staircases that you never have to take an elevator that would be accommodating the anxiety or saying oh you know people might be anxious if we're going to talk about you know kidnapping or violence or War um because somebody went through those experiences we don't want to trigger them no that is building protections for them which prevent them from growing the cure for anxiety is exposure in a in a situation in which the bad thing doesn't happen after the after the queue so um if you're anxious about speaking um we're not going to say therefore you don't have to speak we're going to say act once you frame it the right way like actually you know speaking is the best way to get over it so what I would do you know with my Shire students like when I was at UVA teaching a lot of undergrads I would check because some of the students were very shy about speaking up in class even a seminar class yes and I'd say you know it's you know I really want to help you be part of the class I'll tell you what um uh you know you think before class because some people some introverts especially they don't think like so quick on their feet they they do deeper slower thinking so I'll say you know come up with come up with a a good idea come up with some insight um and at a certain point I'm going to call on you I'll just say you know you know Maria did you have any thoughts about this so it's okay if you prepare but I want I just I want you to speak during class uh and so once you do that then they do it and nobody laughs at them and it goes well and then the next day it's easier so over and over again what we've done is we have accommodated kids fears which prevents them from growing uh we did that when they were younger we did that in high school and then we do it in college and then we pass them off to companies you know I I speak to a lot of people in the corporate world and I always ask them how are your gen Z employees and I've never heard a positive report it's always I they're so anxious they need to be told exactly what to do they're so afraid of messing up um but universities could help with us what you describing about the students not speaking I mean my colleagues and I are BR sort of had this joke we would sometimes announced to our classes on the first day this is not a class for the strong silent type you must be and and You' find ways we have to be thoughtful about how you bring a person into conversation but as you were describing I very familiar to me as well once a student speaks yes and they realize that they're actually is part of an environment that's be supporting each other not holding no punches but putting it in a serious way because we're all imperfect Learners then they realize wow I can actually raise my hand and ask the question yeah I'm not the only one who's wondering that and then they start then they start to go more so college is I'm just really taking with this this this possibility again we're all talking about does hxa we don't think of ourselves as being therapy we think of ourselves as restoring a kind of Wonder and joy to university life removing fears and divisions but now we're really thinking about well what about this anxious generation is there something we can offer them so that when they leave College and enter the workforce we've done some corrective work that's right we think a lot about that at Stern you know we're producing students going into the corporate world largely um how do we produce what you want is you want to produce students who will be a blessing to whoever hires them not those who are going to think it's all about me and my political values I mean those the students who come out as activists are a curse to companies and companies are now seeing them they're trying to fire them as fast as they can a lot of companies um so we want you know there's a a line I quote one of my books from um from Rick Warren it's a Christian book it's the book starts off the opening line is it's not about you it's not all about you um and so uh you know social media teaches it is all about you and you have to manage your brand I'm sorry this is a bit rambling just to get back to it um the more we the more we are in Discover Mode and growth mode and we see our job not just as educating them but as helping them to grow and flourish and we and you know we're academics like we should understand the scientific research we should understand Clinical Psychology we should understand how do you help people gradually expose to things that scare them so that they grow and if you hold out the promise of growth genz is gon to grab it they're really gonna grab it we're coming to the end of the podcast I want to ask you um question about where we are right now at the University so we've been talking about how um this anxious Generations arriving on campus we see that hxa values may be a helpful cure in some way be part of a solution but I want to ask you just a more a little more topical question about the what we've seen in the pasture around univ yeah you've mentioned before the Congressional testimony early in this in this and there's a line from there's a line from codling that that's a corrective to that third great on Truth the idea that the world's divided between good The Good the good ones and the bad ones and the line is um it's this quote there was a the line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every man which is a line of think from suan I read when I was in high school I remember underlining that line so struck but that but can you say a bit about that line so we're we're one of the things we're watching now in the past year the country now has become aware of that we've been tracking you and I and hxa in that for years this oppressor versus oppressed yeah that's right good versus evil how does the anxious gener if you're if the anxious generation generation comes to campus and that Paradigm is still up and running yeah is that going to increase their pathology is there can you address that specifically sure so um an important term I'll put on the table is integrative complexity I don't know tell about yeah I don't know if Phil tlock invented it but Phil tlock uh brilliant social psychologist now at pen at whorton did research on integrative complexity he would look at like Arguments for and against slaver in the 19th century and you can code how much is just like one-sided simple versus like well now there's this complic a and this interaction um so our job as Educators especially at the University level must be to enhance integrative complexity we live in a very complicated World anyone who goes out thinking their easy solutions they tend to actually make things worse rather than better um so we need to Foster integrative complexity if you're afraid you're not curious if you're afraid you want simple answers um so part of our mission I think we want to get our students into Discover Mode we want to inspire them with who show integrative complexity we want to really educate them to beware beware all the H husters and demagogues we're going to hit you with good versus evil simple binaries only I can save it that sort of thing um do those binaries appeal to anxious people of course absolutely absolutely um so that's what we're up against in some sense on the campuses that's right integrative uh uh integrative thinking integrative complexity this is kind of a luxury it's kind of a cognitive luxury um when we have the time and space to think deeply about something and we're when we're immersed in a culture that says you know what things things are often very complicated but if we think carefully over a long period of time together we actually can figure it out that's an Enlightenment view that we can figure things out ourselves U but as long as you bring in the complexity um that we can figure it out but no one of us can figure it out alone that we we're going to just confirm what we already believe that if you put us them the right way and so I'll just bring up one final concept had an Atlantic article two years ago called why the past 10 years of American Life have been uniquely stupid and because I watched you know because universities have been brilliant institutions and of course they have their own institutional stupidity always but you know what really happened in 2015 in many ways it was a cultural revolution um it was a time when everyone was afraid to stand up and say what was obviously true um how did that happen and my analysis in that essay was it was because of the arrival of super viral social media um anyone could uh you know could slander or defame or attack anyone at any time anonymously and they often attack the leaders of anything so the key the key idea in that essay was structural stupidity that when you have that individuals have all these difficulties thinking you put us together in the right way where we we you based on John Stewart Mill's ideas even unconsciously where you say you put forward your argument and my job is to critique it uh and then it's not that I hate you or that I embarrass you it's just like I find flaws in your argument then you make your argument better um if we do that that's structural uh intelligence and that's what a university is that's what the academy has been from the days of Plato now there was some interrup interruptions in between those 3,000 years but um that's what we need to do um whereas when you bring fear and intimidation into it then you get structural stupidity and this is why uh so in 2015 we saw the spectacular collapse of Courage among University leaders they almost never punished any students for shouting down speakers um and this is what I watched from 2015 all the way to through 2022 it just got worse and worse and worse um I co-founded hetero Academy um in 2015 not in response to anything on campus it was a conversation I had with Nick Rosen CR in the spring of 2015 um and um it really just a faculty thing about how we're everyone's on the left we need to have have some balance here in order to do our thinking in in the right way uh but things weren't terribly structurally stupid then it was after the Yale debacle The Yale Halloween debacle that the curtain of fear and activism and attacks and AD homm attacks swept over the university but let's end on a hopeful note because um things really began to turn around in 203 in 2023 and I I wrote my I have an annual letter that I put in the hxa report so I think this was the first one that that from during when you were president but I think yeah so I think I think I titled it something like the fever has broken because there were some signs because for the first time you know I've been in this game since 2015 and I can count on one hand the number of presidents whoever stood up against their students and said no that's not the way we do things here this is not right here's how we here's how we do it but suddenly we started occasionally seeing presidents saying no um you're not allowed to just shout down these speakers and um that began uh you know there was there was the Stanford law Dean there were there were a couple of cases which I had not seen in my nine years of of or eight years of being in this business and then then we get October 7th and we get the spectacle of I it may be controversial but just the spectacle of students blaming Israel right away before they even counterattacked the the spe the Spectre of anti-Semitism on the I the campuses that's weird it's it's it's most intense in the ivys um so all kinds of weird stuff is happening that really is bringing great shame to higher ed and the country is seeing it and then that December 5th uh uh hearing room where the president could not explain they were they were such obvious Hypocrites they didn't and they also they refused they were they proved themselves unable to elevate talk higher Mission they were doing the legal ease which is understandable perhaps and yet they failed to say what they were there for as though they'd forgotten or they didn't even know that's right they've lost the sense they'd lost the sense of mission they certainly did not convey that they were the curators the caretakers the the Guardians of something very precious of one of the most precious institutions in the western tradition in the United States as well um and so um let me just think wait where was I going with this oh yes so when you look at Gallup data and Pew also on what Americans think about higher ed as I said it was very high in 2015 and it plummets not just among the right but among centrists and moderates so higher ed we've destroyed our brand that big Gall came out before October that's right that's right if you did it now there's new being conducted now netive numbers that's right yeah so but my point is I I do think we've hit rock bottom we were publicly humiliated we destroyed our brand and I think this has been very freeing for some people because most this is a principle I I I keep espousing wherever you go most people are reasonable wherever you go on campus most professors want to do their work they don't want to indoctrinate students uh they're Scholars first but what's changed is the dynamic so that a small number of people can intimidate others into silence but that changes once the number of people realize you know what we actually can we can we can we can speak up and we're not going to get slaughtered if if a few of us do it together so that's changing I I do think there's a sense of the fever has broken our house is in tatters I give an example of what you just you just said it if I may so as you know hxa has members all over the world and we've been bringing them together into communities on campuses there are 50 plus now in USA candada now England one of the Striking things direct directly on your point is that we found when you when we create a community of hxa members on a campus we get more members very quickly yeah so it's turned to be a membership exactly the reason you say now you're not you realize there are other people who think like this not crazy and I'm also willing now and we we also see the climate changing a lot since the events of last fall oh good glad to hear that um John I know you're I know you're extremely busy um congratulations on the anxious generation number one on the New York Times best seller list it's a fabulous read I'd like to say to to our listeners um read that book of course it's it's just wonderful if you do read it I think many of you who are interested in h on higher education issues would really enjoy going back to look through the codling again you'll see fascinating traces of this book in that book and uh maybe you join us in the thinking together about if the anxious generation as the anxious generation come goes to college how does hxa play a role to help U amarate the situation and move it to a higher place right we can make them smarter stronger and more sociable stronger and smarter and more sociable sounds like a nice way to end it John height what a pleasure thank you so much John tamasi what a pleasure to see what you've built here and what you're doing here I'm thrilled thank Youk thank you for tuning in to today's episode hetero out loud is a nonprofit production of heterodox Academy we rely solely on suppor of listeners like you if you enjoyed today's episode please follow our podcast leave a rating or a review and share it with your friends and network your support helps us reach more individuals who value diverse perspectives in higher education if you are in higher education visit heterodox academy.org and join the thousands of professors and students from all around the world who are working to support open inquiry until next time I'm John tamasi reminding you that great minds don't always think alike [Music]

Channel: Heterodox Academy

Views: 9,574

Keywords: free speech, heterodoxy, higher education, diversity, viewpoint diversity, enlightenment, free thought, heterodox academy, Jonathan Haidt, steven pinker, rationality, academia, enlightenment thinkers, intellectuals, sensemaking, science, Joe Rogan, Jordan Peterson, Sam Harris, cornel west, douglas murray, critical race theory, crt, intellectual dark web, john stuart mill, epistemics, conservative, progressive

Id: KFGc2I5qpAI

Length: 63min 1sec (3781 seconds)

Published: Thu May 09 2024