College students today didn’t play enough as kids, and therefore they fall apart — or become furious — when confronted with challenging ideas. Administrators are too weak to stand up to these fragile students. That combination has led to a crisis on campuses that threatens free speech, unfettered inquiry, and perhaps the very soul of the academy.
Or at least that’s the dire takeaway from the first Open Mind Conference, put on last week by Heterodox Academy, an organization founded in 2015 with a mission to increase “viewpoint diversity” on campuses. Held at TheTimesCenter, in New York, Open Mind was a slick, briskly paced event featuring academic leaders like Robert Zimmer, president of the University of Chicago, along with with professors who have risen to prominence after drawing the ire of student activists.
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College students today didn’t play enough as kids, and therefore they fall apart — or become furious — when confronted with challenging ideas. Administrators are too weak to stand up to these fragile students. That combination has led to a crisis on campuses that threatens free speech, unfettered inquiry, and perhaps the very soul of the academy.
Or at least that’s the dire takeaway from the first Open Mind Conference, put on last week by Heterodox Academy, an organization founded in 2015 with a mission to increase “viewpoint diversity” on campuses. Held at TheTimesCenter, in New York, Open Mind was a slick, briskly paced event featuring academic leaders like Robert Zimmer, president of the University of Chicago, along with with professors who have risen to prominence after drawing the ire of student activists.
Among them was Lucía Martínez Valdivia, an assistant professor of English and humanities at Reed College, whose humanities course was disrupted last year by some students for, among other things, focusing on figures of the Western canon like Plato and Sappho. Valdivia says she tells her students at the beginning of the semester that she’s not doing her job if they’re not uncomfortable. “You should at some point completely change your worldview, and you should have an existential crisis,” she tells them. “That’s fine.”
The theory that the supposed fragility of college students can be traced to overly protective parenting is central to the thesis of The Coddling of the American Mind: How Good Intentions and Bad Ideas Are Setting Up a Generation for Failure, which is set to be published in September. The authors are Jonathan Haidt, a founder of Heterodox, and Greg Lukianoff, president of the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education, who was trumpeting the issue of free speech on campuses long before it became cable-news fodder.
Lukianoff and Haidt believe they have located the source of the trouble. Their argument goes like this: Once upon a time, kids were allowed to roam the neighborhood, ride their bikes to school, climb trees, and so on. That unstructured exploration made them resilient. But the parents of millennials hovered over them during their formative years, and, consequently, they can’t take it when someone like Christina Hoff Sommers shows up on campus to give a speech.
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Among Heterodox panelists and attendees, most of whom are professors themselves, the belief that there is a free-speech crisis on college campuses seemed close to universal. Zimmer, the Chicago president, demurred a bit, saying he thought the word “crisis” was too inflammatory. Still, he said, he fears that “this is quite a serious situation on most campuses because, I think, to the extent to which it takes root and has sway, it degrades the quality of the education.”
What’s the solution to the crisis, assuming there is one? There was talk of the need for administrators to crack down on disruptive activists, just as they discipline students for plagiarism. Also to educate them on the importance and history of free speech. To that end, a pamphlet summarizing John Stuart Mill’s ideas was included in the conference swag bag. It’s a lavishly illustrated document with curiously horrific images, including a skull and a figure being dragged into an abyss.
There were a few voices of dissent. Jason Stanley, a professor of philosophy at Yale University, argued that generalizing about college students and campus social environments is a mistake — that what’s going on at Reed isn’t the same as what’s happening at the University of Missouri. He also cautioned against the embrace of terms like “free-speech crisis” and “social-justice warrior.”
“When we traffic in such vocabulary,” he said, “we prepare ourselves to see the world in a certain way.”
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At the final session, Haidt made the case that Heterodox is no longer mostly an organization that appeals to conservative academics who feel like outcasts, but that it now attracts liberals and moderates who believe in creating room for a wider array of opinions. And he made a more-or-less inspiring call for unity among academics.
“We’re on a ship, the ship is kind of going down, and rather than fighting with each other, we actually can work together and patch it up,” Haidt said. “It’s a pretty good ship, other than it’s sinking.”
Tom Bartlett is a senior writer who covers science and other things. Follow him on Twitter @tebartl.