THE CODDLING OF THE AMERICAN MIND

GREG LUKIANOFF AND JONATHAN HAIDT Allen Lane, 338pp, £20, Oldie price £15.97

The Coddling of the American Mind, a book co-written by the psychologist Jonathan Haidt and the free speech campaigner Greg Lukianoff as an expansion of a widely read Atlantic piece on the subject of student censorship and mental health in American college campuses, has been received along predictably divided lines. At the Guardian Moira Weigel sternly identified ‘a new right-liberal dispensation’, comparing the authors to one of their bugbears, President Trump. Weigel summarised Haidt and Lukianoff’s methodology as ‘Seize the data! But not all kinds of data,’ and concluded that ‘The minds they coddle just may be their own.’

Niall Ferguson, by contrast, hailed in the Times ‘this important if disturbing book’, flawed, he feared, only in its optimism: ‘history suggests that such cultural revolutions are quite slow to subside unless, as in China, they are forcibly suppressed. Belief in witchcraft took at least a century to die out after the 17thcentury witch craze…i see little if any sign of impending improvement.’ Michael S Roth in the Washington

Post implored that some sense of proportion should prevail: ‘Millions of people were murdered in the Cultural Revolution. Lukianoff and Haidt describe employees who suffered career disruption, sometimes softened with severance payments.’