Dive Brief:
- Greg Lukianoff and Jonathan Haidt, a constitutional lawyer and social psychologist team, argue in a sprawling piece for The Atlantic that colleges in the U.S. are coddling students and failing to foster in them the emotional coping skills they’ll need for the world.
- They write that a preoccupation with avoiding discomfort has become a top-down mandate based on the U.S. Department of Education’s shift in 2013 from defining speech as harassment only when it is “objectively offensive” to “unwelcome.”
- Avoiding class discussions that could trigger feelings of discomfort, they argue, takes away an opportunity for students with real trauma to develop new associations that could minimize future triggers.
Dive Insight:
The idea that academic institutions are failing today’s generation by allowing them to maintain a sense of entitlement to always be comfortable will hit a chord in anyone who has feared legal retaliation or a social media firestorm for a comment, a tweet, or a post.
Students who don’t go on to college but instead join the workforce or the military are not often afforded the opportunity to feel offended or act on such a feeling in their day-to-day lives. But if this generation of coddled children is remaking the culture of higher education, if only at the extremes, it stands to reason they could have the power in numbers to shift the culture of their workplaces one day, too.