A mind is a terrible thing to challenge

Bemoaning the rise of college ‘safe spaces’

Greg Lukianoff and Jonathan Haidt’s “The Coddling of the American Mind: How Good Intentions and Bad Ideas are Setting Up a Generation for Failure” immediately evokes Alan Bloom’s incendiary “The Closing of the American Mind,” a best-seller more than three decades ago.

Mr. Bloom’s book offered a revisionist history of 1960s campus protests and a bleak assessment of their deleterious effect on academic rigor. Mr. Lukianoff and Mr. Haidt’s “Coddling of the American Mind” seeks to offer a similar but friendlier critique of leftist good intentions gone awry, but without Mr. Bloom’s neoconservative blaming and shaming. It is a difficult needle to thread.

“Coddling of the American Mind” draws together several currents shaping our contemporary American culture, including increased political polarization, the tendency to self-segregate into tribal pockets, helicopter parenting and the campus culture of safetyism, and above all the oversharing and over-comparing smartphone, that destabilizes young psyches. The book paints a picture of a college-age generation less prepared and less resilient than ever to take on a complex, rough and tumble adult world.

Sometimes technical and intricate, “Coddling” lays out an exhaustive argument that may tax some but will persuade many. Beginning with Martin Luther King Jr.’s successful inclusionary appeal on behalf of civil rights, the book charts a shift on the left to exclusionary (specifically antistraight, white male) identity politics, the adoption of illiberal tactics such as shouting down controversial speakers (the “heckler’s veto”) over reasoned, articulate debate, and “concept creep” that conflates physical with emotional safety.

The cumulative effect of these and many other trends since 2014 has been to prolong childhood, rendering the inevitable day of reckoning — growing up — more traumatic. This coddling, the authors maintain, has set up a generation for failure, although they stop short of considering what that failure will look like, the clear implication being that failure is not an option.

The authors, a First Amendment lawyer (Mr. Lukianoff) and an academic (Mr. Haidt), respectively, argue that college campuses should not be “safe spaces” where administrators, fearful of litigation, shelter students from harsh, even ugly speech, but rather noholds-barred laboratories that allow young minds to “dose risk” and offer tools and experience to counter-argue for themselves. The igen (internet generation) is not, or should not be, treated as fragile, the authors insist, although they recognize it may take much effort to counter the overprotection under which igen has emerged in this already-long 21st-century.

The social media echo chamber the authors describe, in which the most extreme voices in our culture thrive and feed off one another, recalls Beat writer William S. Burroughs’ formula for discord: “Always create as many insoluble conflicts as possible and always aggravate existing conflicts.” In the novel “Nova Express,” the result is a world going Super-Nova. In “The Coddling of the American Mind,” the authors seek to pull back, so that the Nuclear Option is not always our first and only recourse.

The individual social factors the book identifies as culprits in our current dysfunction will not be unfamiliar. But the holistic interconnectedness the book perceives between rising suicide rates, violent protest, and the absence of a more constructive framework for controversy and debate will be new. Given short shrift, perhaps, are the various economic and political interests that, like Burroughs’ Nova Mob, strive to maintain this self-destructive status quo of civility.

The remedies the book outlines should be considered on college campuses, among parents of current and future students, and by anyone longing for a more sane society. Among them are “free-range parenting” (allowing children to take risks in these low-crime times), encouraging youngsters to learn to settle their own minor disputes and discomforts through reason rather than blocking, limiting social media device time, and teaching the emerging generation not to call out every micro-aggression nor to rely on force or authority to avenge every perceived slight.

In short, in conflicts large and small, we should always remind ourselves to recognize the humanity in our adversary, rather than seeing only Satan.