‘This Is Something That We’re Doing to a Generation’

If it hadn’t been for his own mental-health scare, Greg Lukianoff might never have written a book about how colleges are, he says, “setting up a generation for failure.”

It took being hospitalized for depression a decade ago, as well as his continuing tenure leading the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education, or FIRE, to inspire him to reflect on how today’s students think about concepts like free speech, safety, and violence — and how, in his view, colleges’ efforts to protect students are in fact harming their mental health.

Lukianoff, who has been president of the free-speech group since 2006, wrote his new book, The Coddling of the American Mind, with Jonathan Haidt, a social psychologist at New York University. The book arose from a widely read piece with that title that the two wrote for The Atlantic in 2015.

The book touches on “three great untruths” that Lukianoff and Haidt say colleges are teaching students: What doesn’t kill you makes you weaker, always trust your feelings, and life is a battle between good and evil. The result, they write, is that students can’t cope.

Lukianoff has also become an evangelist of sorts for cognitive-behavioral therapy, a short-term treatment designed to change people’s patterns of thinking or behavior, and he would love to see colleges adopt elements of that therapy into their curricula. He hopes college administrators will hear him out. But he’s most interested in reaching parents.

Lukianoff spoke with The Chronicle about how his battle with depression informed his book, why he doesn’t like the word “coddling” in the book’s title, and how colleges could change teaching to help make students more resilient.

How has your thinking about the landscape of college students, mental health, and free speech changed over the years?

Not too long after I became president of FIRE — this is where it gets a little personal — I had always had bouts of depression. I had one that was so bad in the winter of 2007-8 that I was hospitalized. I had never said that publicly before the Atlantic article came out. I realized that I wrote stuff in the new book that I’d never even told my wife.

But the thing that helped me the most, long term — I still get bouts of depression, but I’m better equipped to fight them — is cognitive-behavioral therapy. It’s this process of looking at your exaggerated thoughts, writing them down, and practicing over and over again responding to them. You ask yourself, “Is this a cognitive distortion?” That includes things like overgeneralization, labeling, catastrophizing. My big one is “all or nothing” thinking. Either today is going to be great, or it’s going to be horrible, like there’s nothing in between.

So I was doing this training that was incredibly helpful for my own mental health, while working on campus freedom of speech. I started noticing these well-intentioned efforts by administrators, and sometimes professors, who were trying to protect the mental and physical health of their students. But they were oftentimes sending a message that students were in much greater danger than they actually were.

In 2013-14, we at FIRE were feeling pretty good. We were making progress, we were talking to university presidents, speech codes were on the decline. Then we saw a couple of incidents where students shouted down speakers. Activists wanted free speech for themselves but not for people they strongly disliked. We also started seeing more about trigger warnings, microaggressions. I went to go talk to someone I’d become friends with — Jonathan Haidt — and told him my “we’re teaching cognitive distortions” idea. To my surprise and delight, he was like, “Let’s write an article about it.” We finished the article in July 2015, analyzing what was happening on campuses from the point of view of cognitive-behavioral therapy.

Then, rather than things getting better, they seemed to be getting worse. Not too long after we finished the article, the mental-health numbers for the incoming cohort of students for 2016 started coming in, and they were bad. Very serious jumps in anxiety, depression, and suicide attempts. Jon at one point called me up and said, “Well, looks like we were right to be worried about this.” I remember saying to myself, “I really, really wish we were wrong.”

People who are worried about the status quo on campuses love using the word “coddled” to describe students. I know you have mixed feelings about the term. Have people gone too far with the “coddled students” mantra?

When we decided to do the book, I said, it’s not going to be called The Coddling of the American Mind. We signed the contract under the name “Disempowered,” to make the point that a lot of the stuff that we think we’re doing to help young people could actually be putting them in a position that can feel hopeless. I would jokingly refer to the book in my head as “The Great American Psych-Out.” It was only toward the end that the publisher said, Listen, you haven’t come up with a better title than The Coddling of the American Mind. I don’t like “coddling,” because the debate just becomes about how kids are spoiled. The subtitle, How Good Intentions and Bad Ideas Are Setting Up a Generation for Failure, is very important to us. Those good intentions and bad ideas is really what we’re getting at.

Let’s talk about another word in the book: “safety.” You say it’s a problem that the term has evolved to mean emotional as well as physical safety. But words evolve in meaning all the time. What’s so bad about “safety” evolving to mean something different among students today than a decade ago?

The concern with “safety” is that it’s a very powerful word, and we’re letting its meaning progress into something more like an unperturbed state. When someone says “I don’t feel safe,” they might mean that they feel uncomfortable with an idea or a book or an argument that’s presented in class. If you’re a university professor, and one of your students says they don’t feel safe, 15 years ago you’d think, “Oh my God, I have to call the police.” But now, when people say it on campus, it could be a situation where you have to call the police, or it could just mean someone feels uncomfortable. When you create an ambiguity around safety, that’s dangerous.

You also take issue with students who describe speech as “violent.” Say, while walking to class, a Mexican student has to walk over chalked messages on the path trumpeting “Build the wall!” A black student encounters fliers commending white supremacy. They feel that speech is violent because it’s attacking their very identities. Is there another word they should use?

The most effective way for people to attest to the hurt that can be caused by someone — either intentionally or unintentionally — is to explain it in more than a single word, to actually explain why. Changing the meaning of words so there’s a blurry relationship between physical violence and someone saying something really nasty is another thing that will have serious unforeseen negative consequences. Remember, the other side is going to start making that argument, too. And that scares the hell out of me.

As you tell it, students are arriving on college campuses with a lot of the mental- health issues that you outline. Why should colleges be the ones to remedy that?

Colleges should take the mental-health crisis on campus more seriously than they are now. When it comes to free speech, every single university in the country should explain the philosophy behind freedom of speech, free inquiry, and academic freedom during freshman orientation. Until we start teaching these concepts, the fact that students aren’t showing that they understand them is entirely on us. This is something that we’re doing to a generation. This is on us. This is on parents.

Was it interesting for you to explore these concepts as a new parent yourself?

That’s something I’m trying to be aware of, because I want to be careful not to do some of this stuff myself. I don’t think being a free-range parent or trying to raise your kid with a sense of independence is easy. The strong instinct that you have to do everything to protect your child in every possible way, that’s something I completely get. But you have to figure out: Are you dealing with a situation that’s more like stranger kidnapping — which statistically speaking is just not very common — or are you dealing with something like an outdoor pool that doesn’t have a gate around it? People are not always that great at evaluating risks, and that includes me.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.