A few days ago here Jane Shaw discussed Jonathan Haidt’s and Greg Lukianoff’s excellent Atlantic article, “The Coddling of the American Mind.”
Haidt, a social psychologist, has roiled the waters before. See, for example my “Infidels In The Church Of Diversity” and my review of a predictably biased review of Haidt’s book, The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided By Politics And Religion. In his recent article, which I encourage everyone to read in full, Haidt and co-author Lukianoff, president and CEO of the Foundation for individual Rights in Education, argue that no matter how inane “microaggressions” might be — and they provide a number of inane examples — the growing effort to cleanse college campuses of them actually harms students by driving them nuts.
That’s my characterization, not Haidt’s and Lukianoff’s, but I think it fair. They argue, for example, that the harm is both real “immediate”:
A campus culture devoted to policing speech and punishing speakers is likely to engender patterns of thought that are surprisingly similar to those long identified by cognitive behavioral therapists as causes of depression and anxiety. The new protectiveness may be teaching students to think pathologically.
The purpose and effect of the movement to root out “microaggressions,” they write, “is to turn campuses into “safe spaces” where young adults are shielded from words and ideas that make some uncomfortable.”
Writing on Bloomberg News, Megan McArdle expands upon Haidt’s and Lukianoff’s argument that fighting “microagressions” has backfired in a serious way of the students who claim to be injured by them.
During the time when people are supposed to be learning to face an often hard world as adults, and going through the often uncomfortable process of building their intellectual foundations, they are demanding to be sheltered from anything that might challenge their beliefs or recall unpleasant facts to their mind….
Students demanding that campus life be bowdlerized to preserve their peace of mind seem to believe that the best way to deal with trauma is to avoid any mention of it. But Lukianoff and Haidt argue that this is exactly backward; chronic avoidance breeds terror. The current climate on campus is a recipe for producing fearful adults who are going to have difficulty coping in an adult world.
The more administrators try to protect fearful and overly sensitive students from “microagressions,” the more they give the lie to their own arguments for “diversity,” which emphasize the necessity of exposing students to “different” ideas and people who come from “different” cultures with “different” values.
Perhaps “diversity” itself is the ultimate “microaggression.”