The Coddling of the American Mind

The book is a long and sometimes tedious explanation of what we all know to be true - that undergraduates are slightly unhinged and that colleges treat them as a market, not as adults. A 10-30% minority of students who are willing to advocate for violent action against offensive speech have upset rationality on the American campus. iGen girls are committing suicide at an alarming rate due to the outsized influence of social media. Threats to liberty come from alt-right and Antifa activism and that college campuses overreact by creating speech codes, safe spaces and taking 'microaggression' seriously. The lack of political diversity in the professoriate threatens the capacity for institutional bias disconfirmation. The distortions of social justice premises of equality generate profound dislocations and moral hazard in Title IX implementation. 

In the end, Haight seems to be directing his primary admonishments to a generation of helicopter prone parents in the top (half) of socioeconomic class in hopes that the next crops of undergraduates have their heads screwed on straighter and so do not corrupt the reality of the mission of academia, which is the search for truth. He does so with care, rigor and the best intentions.

His description of 'safetyism' is fair but does not encompass the larger political narrative of what the Right has been calling the 'nanny state'. So he has limited the applicability of this term to academe, but it is part and parcel of a larger infantilization of Americans and the major political movements that seek to disable the individual. I am talking of course about abortion and gun control, two perennial issues in which partisans aim to remove responsible choice by legal fiat 'for their own good'. It seems to me that Haight has sacrificed the greater argument for greater specificity and so it goes under 'whats wrong with these kids today'. But the enemy is us, and Haight leaves most of us off the hook.

I am fond of the book for its consistency in demonstrating the effects of acceptance of the 'three great untruths'. The truths they contradict are part of enduring human wisdom. We are thus simply left with using them to clean up the mess in American higher education and everywhere else foolishness reigns.