‘Kids need conflict,
insult, exclusion – they need to experience these things thousands of times
when they’re young in order to develop into psychologically mature adult’
Worrying things have been
happening on US campuses of late. While most of us are now familiar with the
campus censors’ vocabulary of ‘trigger warnings’ and ‘microaggressions’,
authoritarian student behaviour has recently taken an even more sinister turn.
At Middlebury College, Vermont, protesting students assaulted an academic who
tried to protect speaker Charles Murray, because they considered Murray racist.
In video clips Yale students were shown screaming at a professor who dared to
suggest that Halloween costumes should not be policed for offensiveness. And at
Evergreen College, Washington, when a professor refused to participate in a day
of absence in which white students and staff were asked to leave campus for a
day to raise awareness about race and equity, a student mob occupied the
college president’s office and the campus ended up on lockdown.
Jonathan Haidt, social
psychologist and professor of ethical leadership at New York University Stern
School of Business, has been studying this new wave of campus culture for
years, and has written several essays on the rise in demand from
university students for the protection of their emotional wellbeing from words
or ideas they dislike. He talked to me about the crisis of fragility on US
campuses.
‘I’m very concerned about a
phenomenon called “concept creep” – which has been happening to a lot of
psychological terms since the 1990s’, he says. ‘When a word like “violence” is
allowed to creep so that it includes a lot of things that are not violence,
then this causes a cascade of bad effects. It’s bad for the students themselves
because they now perceive an idea that they dislike, or a speaker that they
dislike, as having committed a much graver offence against themselves – which
means that they will perceive more victimisation of themselves. And it’s also really
bad for society because, as we are seeing in a spectacular way in the United
States this year, when each side can point to rampant occurrences of what they
see as violence by the other side, this then justifies acts of actual physical
violence on their side. And there’s no obvious end to this mutual escalation
process.’
He adds: ‘Everybody involved in
education needs to be dampening down violence and the acceptance of violence.
Telling students that words are violence is counterproductive to that effort.’
‘When a word like “violence” is
allowed to creep so that it includes a lot of things that are not violence then
this causes a cascade of bad effects’
While incidents of protests
getting out of hand and the censorious policies of student bodies get a lot of
press, Haidt points out that these problems do not involve the vast majority of
students. ‘The political problems are mostly confined to elite schools where
people live together for four years. The problems don’t seem to be arising very
much at community colleges or places where people leave the college community
to go to work or to go home to their families. So the problems are localised,
especially in intense communities that co-create a particular moral order’, he
says.
‘I don’t know if most college
students, even at those elite schools, are more fragile. What we do know is
that rates of depression and anxiety [have been] sky-rocketing since around
2011.’
Haidt says these issues are not
related to the millennial generation, but to those born after 1995, who grew up
with social media as the norm. He calls them the i-gen (the internet
generation). This tendency towards vulnerability has a number of causes, he
says, but there are three main ones: social media, rising national
polarisation, and the decline in unsupervised (adult-free) time during
childhood.
‘The widespread introduction of
social media on a potentially hourly basis occurs after around 2009 or 2010.
The iPhone is introduced in 2007, Facebook opens itself to teenagers in 2006.
So it takes a couple of years before most teenagers are on social media, but by
2008, 2009, a lot are… The problem seems mostly to involve social-media sites,
where a teenager puts out something and then waits to sees what dozens or
hundreds of people say about it. That seems to be the most damaging thing – it
leads to more anxiety and insecurity.’
On polarisation, Haidt says that
cross-partisan hatred has been increasing in the US since the early 1980s, ‘but
it’s much more intense now… There is a much fiercer battle going on, and there
is more motive to charge the other side with crimes and to claim victimhood for
your side. I think this is part of the “speech is violence” movement. It is
part of a rhetorical move to convict the other side of more serious crimes.’
The third major cause has been
the ‘general decline in unsupervised time and the rise of adult protection’,
says Haidt. In the US in the 1980s, there were two high-profile abductions and
murders of two young boys, and parents panicked, he says. ‘Now there never was
much of a risk of abduction from strangers… But America freaked out and
overreacted and stopped letting kids out of their sight.’ By the 1990s there
were pictures of missing children everywhere – ‘as if it was an epidemic, but
it never was an epidemic’, he adds. At the same time, there was more of an
emphasis on anti-bullying, as well as a decline in unsupervised play. ‘Studies
of how kids spend their time show that up until the early 1980s kids spent a
lot of time outside playing without adult supervision, but by the early 2000s
that has almost disappeared, especially for younger kids’, he says.
Ironically, this over-protection
of children may have done more harm than good. ‘The key psychological idea in
understanding the rise in fragility is the idea of anti-fragility’, says Haidt.
‘It’s a word coined by Nassim Taleb and it describes systems that are the
opposite of fragile. If something is fragile then you need to protect it,
because if it breaks then it’s broken and it won’t get better. But there are
some things that if you protect them, they won’t get better; the immune system
is the classic example. If you protect your kids from germs and bacteria then
the immune system can’t develop and your kids will be immunologically fragile…
So protection can sometimes be harmful if there is an anti-fragile system at
work.’ He continues:
‘Kids need conflict, insult,
exclusion – they need to experience these things thousands of times when
they’re young in order to develop into psychologically mature adults. Every
adult has to learn to handle these things and not get upset, especially by
minor instances. But in the name of protecting our children we have deprived
them of the unsupervised time they need to learn how to navigate conflict among
themselves. That is one of the main reasons why kids and even college students
today find words, ideas and social situations more intolerable than those same
words, ideas and situations would have been for previous generations of
students.’
‘Kids need conflict, insult,
exclusion – they need to experience these things thousands of times when
they’re young in order to develop into psychologically mature adult’
The heightened vulnerability of
college students has had a chilling effect on discussion in the academic world,
and Haidt sees this in his day-to-day experience on campus. ‘There is a rapidly
spreading feeling that we are all walking on eggshells, both students and faculty.
That we are now accountable, not for what we say, but for how anyone who hears
it might take it. And if you have to speak, thinking about the worst reading
that anyone could put on your words, that means you cannot be provocative, you
cannot take risks, that means you will play it safe when you speak… This is
what I’m seeing in my classes when topics related to race or gender come up –
which we used to be able to talk about 10 years ago, but now it’s painful and
there’s a lot of silence.’
This is disastrous for academic
life, as Haidt points out: ‘A university cannot function if people will not put
their ideas forth, will not contest ideas that they think are wrong, will not
stand up for ideas that they think are right.’
He is keen to emphasise that this
is not a right-left issue. ‘Several people on the left are noticing that
college students are less effective politically as activists, as progressives,
when they have this morality and this ethos with such heavy concept creep.’
Haidt believes there is a
mental-health crisis on campus: ‘I have never seen such rapid increase in
indicators of anxiety and depression as we have seen in the past few years’, he
says. But his suggested approach is unlikely to find favour with student
communities fond of Safe Spaces and therapeutic puppy-petting. ‘If you think
about it as a mental-health crisis’, he explains, ‘then you might be tempted to
say: we need more help, more counselling, more protection for those who are
suffering from mental illness. But if you look at it that way you will miss the
broader pattern, which is that for 20 to 30 years now, Americans have been
systematically undermining the development of resilience or toughness of their
children.’ Referencing the work of Lenore Skenazy, author of Free-range
Kids, he concludes: ‘We have made our children too safe to succeed.’
‘A university cannot function
if people will not put their ideas forth, will not contest ideas that they
think are wrong, will not stand up for ideas that they think are right’
In his forthcoming book Misguided
Minds: How Three Bad Ideas Are Leading Young People, Universities, and
Democracies Toward Failure, Haidt claims that certain ideas are impairing
students’ chances of success. Those ideas being: your feelings are always
right; what doesn’t kill you makes you weaker; and the world is divided into
good people and bad people. ‘If we can teach those three ideas to college
students’, he says, ‘we cannot guarantee they will fail, but we will minimise
their odds at success’.
So how can we resolve the problem
of vulnerability among young Americans? Haidt says part of the solution must
begin in childhood and will require parents to give their children daily
periods of ‘unsupervised time’. ‘We have to accept the fact that in that
unsupervised time there will be name-calling, conflict and exclusion. And while
it’s painful for parents to accept this, in the long-run it will give them
children that are not suffering from such high rates of anxiety and
depression.’
As for university students, Haidt
references a recent quote from CNN commentator Van Jones. Jones said: ‘I don’t
want you to be safe, ideologically.’ Building on this, he says universities
should help students develop their ‘anti-fragility’.
‘We need to focus on preparing
students to encounter intellectual and ideological diversity. We need to
prepare them for civil disagreements. We need to be very mindful of mental
illness, but otherwise need to minimise the role of adult supervision in their
lives. College is a major opportunity, once they have left home, for them to
develop anti-fragility and we must not deprive them of that learning
opportunity.’
Jonathan Haidt is
professor of ethical leadership at New York University and author of The
Righteous Mind: Why Good People are Divided by Politics and Religion. His
forthcoming book, Misguided Minds: How Three Bad Ideas Are Leading
Young People, Universities, and Democracies Toward Failure, will be
published by Penguin Press in July 2018.