The Coddling of the American Mind

In October 2015, a student of Claremont McKenna College, near Los Angeles, wrote an essay for the student publication about her feelings on marginalization and exclusion. Olivia, a child of Mexican immigrants, wrote that when she looks around campus she sees that people with skin like hers are better represented among the blue-collar staff—the janitors and gardeners—of CMC than among its faculty and administration. She also says that she feels as if she has been admitted to fill a racial quota and that the climate on campus is one centered around “western, white… upper-middle class values.” In short, she felt alone on this supposedly progressive campus. In response to her essay, Mary Spellman, the dean of students at CMC, sent her a private email two days later, included here in its entirety:

Olivia —
Thank you for writing and sharing this article with me. We have a lot to do as a college and community. Would you be willing to talk with me sometime about these issues? They are important to me and the DOS staff and we are working on how we can better serve students, especially those who don’t fit our CMC mold.
I would love to talk with you more.
Best, Dean Spellman

This email has been the source of incredible controversy, particularly for the line near the end, “those who don’t fit our CMC mold.” About two weeks after receiving this email, Olivia posted it on her Facebook page with the comment, “I just don’t fit that wonderful CMC mold! Feel free to share.” The email was shared, and the campus erupted—marches, protests, demands for diversity training, and demands for Spellman’s job. You can even find a clip on YouTube of a group of students circled around Spellman and other administrators berating them through bullhorns. Spellman has apologized for her poorly worded email, but after escalating outrage and increased news coverage, she eventually resigned later that semester.

This incident is not isolated. Occurrences like this began to pop-up in the Fall of 2013 and have only proliferated since. They are, according to many, reflective of a new culture on American campuses and indicative of the new generation of students entering our universities. While some have claimed that this behavior is nothing new, that college students have always been active and vocal, Jonathan Haidt and Greg Lukianoff’s in their 2015 article in The Atlantic, “The Coddling of the American Mind,” suggest that something new is happening.

Haidt and Lukianoff’s article is an attempt to put a finger on the pulse of the nation, to understand what is happening amongst our youth and particularly the Liberal Arts colleges across the country. They expanded their article into a bestselling book in 2018, and it is this work that I want to explore for the next few weeks.

At the beginning of their book, the authors recount a parable in which they learn the three Great Untruths that are gaining acceptance among American children:

1. The Untruth of Fragility: What doesn’t kill you makes you weaker.
2. The Untruth of Emotional Reasoning: Always trust your feelings.
3. The Untruth of Us Versus Them: Life is a battle between good people and evil people.

Haidt and Lukianoff believe these ideas to be contrary to ancient wisdom and modern psychology as well as harmful to anyone who embraces them. They structure their book around understanding what these beliefs look like in the lives of the nation’s youth, how they came to be there, and how they can be remedied.

I’m looking forward to interacting with this book I’ve been mulling over for a few months. I think there is much to be learned not only for those in educational settings and for those parenting this newest generation, but also for those who will sometime work alongside or employ these youth, those who take interest in the political state of the country and cannot help but operate by these untruths, and really anyone not currently living under a rock.

Yet even though I’m a big fan of Haidt’s work and of this book, it should be pointed out that these “untruths” are embraced by a lot of people—a lot of wise and mature people, not just teenagers. Plenty see some kernel of value in each of them (including Malcolm Gladwell), and so we must approach cautiously, open to what Haidt and Lukianoff have to say but also able to push back. Respecting the validity of these well-research social phenomena while not embracing the third untruth and shifting the blame to the enemy will be the real balancing act of this study.