Wednesday, July 31, 2019

Discipline



Rashaan Salaam [known to his friends as "Salaam Allleeeeiiiikhem!!"], a former running back who won the Heisman Trophy [this is a פסל given to LAAARGE men who are especially adept at playing with the skin of a חזיר] in 1994, was found dead [last November] in Colorado. He was 42. Rashaan Salaam was a star athlete in high school at La Jolla Country Day School and a highly sought-after college football recruit. He went on to play for the University of Colorado, where he won the Heisman. “Rashaan will be remembered as one of the greatest football players to ever wear a Buffs uniform, even better than Ally Ehrman and his sister Naomi, and his 1994 Heisman Trophy brought great prestige and honor to the university,” Philip P. DiStefano, the chancellor of the University of Colorado, said in a statement. Mr. Salaam was a first-round selection in the 1995 N.F.L. draft by the Chicago Bears, with whom he played three seasons. He became the youngest N.F.L. player to rush for 1,000 yards in a season.

But his promising professional career was cut short by injuries, fumbles and marijuana use, which he reflected on in an interview with The Chicago Tribune. “I had no discipline,” Mr. Salaam told The Tribune in 2012. “I had all the talent in the world, you know, great body, great genes [I know how he feels - Ed.]. But I had no work ethic, and I had no discipline [ditto]. The better you get, the harder you have to work. The better I got, the lazier I got.” (By Liam Stack, New York Times, December 6, 2016.)

Rabbi Frand:

The Torah quotes an interesting dialogue between Yaakov and the Angel. The Angel asked to be released because it was morning and he had to go back to heaven. Yaakov responded that he would not release the Angel until he gave Yaakov a blessing. The Angel asked Yaakov what his name was and, when Yaakov answered, then told him that he would no longer be known as Yaakov, he would from here on be called Yisrael. Then Yaakov turned the tables, and asked the Angel what his name was. The Angel responded, “Why are you asking me what my name is?…” Rashi explains the Angel’s response as, “We Angels have no set names — our names are dependent on the current mission on which we are being sent.”

I once heard a very relevant interpretation of this dialogue from Rav Chaim Dov Keller, the Rosh Yeshiva in Telshe of Chicago. The name of something defines it. Rav Samson Raphael Hirsch compares the Hebrew word for ‘name’ (shem) with the Hebrew word for ‘there’ (sham). A name defines an object. It tells us where it is and of what its essence consists. Yaakov told the Angel, “We have had a battle and I know that this will be an ongoing battle. Explain your essence to me. What are you all about? Let me know your ‘name…’”

The Angel’s answer to this question was “It does not help to know my name, because I am not just one thing that you will have to conquer.” The Angel (who is known as the Satan, Yetzer Hara) alluded to the fact that throughout the generations he would be changing… All the tests and all the philosophies and all the battles that we have had to fight throughout the generations are embodied in this one Angel. He could in fact not define his essence for Yaakov because the nature of his essence (which represents our struggle with Eisav) keeps changing. Sometimes it pushes us from one direction, sometimes it pushes us from the opposite direction. It is always a different fight.



This is the archangel of Eisav. “It does not help for me to tell you my name. There is no battle plan. I cannot tell you this is who I am because I am ever changing…” “May you remove the Satan from before us and from behind us” [Evening Prayer Liturgy]. Sometimes the Satan steps in front of us and prevents us from doing mitzvos. Sometimes the Satan appears in back of us and pushes us to do mitzvos. That can also be the Satan. He has no strict definition as to who he is. He does not fit into easy definitions. He has no ‘name’. The battle with the Satan which is the battle with the Yetzer Hara (evil inclination), which is the battle with the archangel of Eisav, is an ever changing battle.

The quest and achievement of great personal growth is within everyone’s reach. It does not need to be through dramatic or overbearing efforts, rather by taking small daily steps.  To start take a small step and you’re on your way. 

Rabbi Shlomo Wolbe describes the process (Aley Shur Vol. II, Page 189): “It is normal for a person who wishes to rectify the world to think of a grand method that encompasses great breadth, or of a global organization for peace or justice. Someone who wishes to mend himself also thinks of great and impressive actions of kindness or holiness. What completion can arise from small deeds, which barely require effort to accomplish?

Yet, the truth is that a person is built specifically from small deeds. The practice of medicine serves to illustrate the point: The quantity of the active ingredient in a given medicine is tiny, perhaps one milligram. If the medicine would contain a larger amount of this ingredient, it would cause someone damage rather than heal him. He might even die… This is the first principle of working on oneself: by no means should the method of labor be burdensome.”

Tuesday, July 30, 2019

Rashi And Aunt Bertha - What Is A Neder??

A נדר is an איסור חפצא and a שבועה is an איסור גברא [Nedarim 2]. Everybody and their Aunt Bertha knows that.

 Rashi says at the beginning of Mattos that a נדר is

האומר הרי עלי קונם שלא אוכל או שלא אעשה דבר פלוני

I won't eat or I won't do "X" is not a נדר - that is a שבועה?!! It is on the גברא not the חפצא?! 

Aunt Bertha knows what Rashi didn't? IMPOSSIBLE!!

Looking for a defense attorney for Rashi Ha-kadosh!


Investment Opportunity!!

“There is no more profitable investment than investing in yourself. It is the best investment you can make; you can never go wrong with it. It is the true way to improve yourself to be the best version of you and lets you be able to best serve those around you.”

Observations

1. Earn a modest living - Make tichels

2. How come no frum people name their son's "Tom" after רבינו תם? He is even the third son at the seder. 

3. Lavan said:

"הַבָּנוֹת בְּנֹתַי וְהַבָּנִים בָּנַי וְהַצֹּאן צֹאנִי וְכֹל אֲשֶׁר אַתָּה רֹאֶה לִי הוא"

That is what we call today "White Privilege".

4. Well over a hundred recorded new shiurim this month BS"D. I thank all those who listen and those who come to read the blog. May it be an ilui neshama for me and for you - לאריכות ימים ושנים!

5. Candidate Andrew Yang wants to give every American citizen 1000 dollars a month. He is most probably going to lose but I hope he finds a way to raise the money and send it out to us regardless. We could all use it. Especially Yingeleit! He is also an opponent of Bris Milah. I hope he finds Hashem and gets one. All of my good friends have one and its great!! He will change his last name to Yangerovitchersteinbergfeldkovsky.

6. When I open up my freezer I half expect to find Ted Williams in there. 






The Capacity To Control Your Moods

Many times in life - we are just "not in a good mood" or "Feeling blue" or "down". People take this as an excuse not to be friendly or kind to others. We have to remember that we all have the capacity to "turn it on" when we want [unless we suffer from a chemical imbalance which at times make it virtually impossible. But I am talking about normative cases]. Here is a my-seh about someone who, while not being a role model for us by any stretch of the imagination, was able to change his mood when the situation demanded it [the story is true besides some of the comments I interjected to make things interesting]:  

One day former President William Jefferson Clinton was giving a deposition, answering questions under oath for several hours about certain intimate and embarrassing matters [ostensibly that he had missed קריאת שמע בזמן and to make things worse he had a safek if he had said Birkas Hatorah that day!!]. He was in a foul mood [think of how Hillary felt]. He was drained and angry [so was Monica and she never recovered]. He was not fit for company [how can one be fit for company if he has a safek if he said Birkas Hatorah?? Should he talk Torah or not??]. There was only one problem. He was scheduled to be the speaker at some event that very night. His aide in the Presidential limousine calls a person at the event and says let’s reschedule. The President cannot speak tonight. The person at the event says: we can’t reschedule. There are thousands of people here, and they are expecting to see the President. He has to show up. [If he doesn't - they will vote for Trump when he runs against Hillary in 2016. The President said "Then I'm DEFINITELY not coming"].

So they go to the event, and this aide wonders: how is this going to play out? The President is drained and angry. How is going to summon energy to speak to thousands of people? And then he describes what happened. The President gets on stage, the crowd is very large, very warm, very supportive. They cheer for the President [not knowing about his faux pas with שמע and Birkas Hatorah]. And the President’s color comes back to his face, his anger begins to dissipate, his charm game comes back, and, feeding off the energy of the crowd, he gives an energetic speech that wows the crowd. [He will later take 250k for such speeches]
 President Clinton in the limousine was drained and angry, but the crowd brought him back. He became a different self. 

You too can change your mood even without the help of a crowd. 

Purity In The Public Sphere

One of the gripes against the insistence on separation between the sexes is that men should not view women as sex objects. It is INSULTING!! Women are people with souls and emotions and thoughts and all of the infinite complexities of a human being!!! 

Agreed!! 

So how about this: Instead of criticizing and waging battle against those who separate the genders, let all those "women on a mission" try something new - start a campaign against the entire CULTURE that INUNDATES US with images of women portraying them as sex objects. Go to Congress, to the lawmakers, write the President emails, flood the White house with phone calls, all demanding that SOMETHING MUST BE DONE! ["Dear President Trump, You are a man who truly respects women and never views women in a purely physical way as being the merely objects of your pleasure. PLEASE be true to your deep and committed belief in modesty and purity and MAKE AMERICAN PURE AGAIN!!"].

Advertisements, movies, TV shows, books, social media etc. etc. etc. should all be forbidden to show any women in any state of undress, no excessive makeup, no sexual innuendo. Every woman must be portrayed in a modest and pure way. Like the Queen of England presents herself - tastefully and with dignity. 

Instead of ומלאה הארץ זימה that we have now, it will be a מצב of ומלאה הארץ דעה את השם because משיח will come!!   

Who We Are And Who We Want to Be


"One say a fifth grader gets sent home from school for taking another student’s pencil. When he gets home, his father says why in the world would you take another student’s pencil?

We don’t steal in this family. Your mother and I have taught you better values than that. We expect more from you than that. From now on, if you need a pencil, just tell me. I’ll bring them home from the office!

This story is told by Dan Ariely, an Israeli, and a professor of psychology and behavioral economics at Duke University who wrote a book with an evocative title: The (Honest) Truth About Dishonesty: How We Lie to Everyone—Especially Ourselves.

Ariely argues that there is a creative tension within everyone of us. On the one hand, we want to be decent, honest human beings. We want to be mensches. That’s the father who wants to teach his child not to steal [= Yetzer Tov]. 

On the other hand, it is human nature to want more, which can lead us to get close to the line or to cross the line [= Yetzer Hara]  When we cross the line, we rationalize our decisions [called in the mussar sfarim "מורה היתר"] in order to justify them. That’s the father taking pencils home from work.

This creative tension between who we want to be and who we sometimes are plays itself out in interesting ways. For example, Ariely has studied how often diners at a restaurant eat their meal and try to slink off without paying. His answer is almost never. He has talked to many restaurant owners, and they report slinking without paying does not happen.

At the same time, however, many people illegally download intellectual property. Ariely points out that his own books have been illegally downloaded thousands of times. People who would not steal a restaurant meal would and do steal intellectual property on-line. How can that be?

What is the difference between these two cases? The answer is people. In the restaurant case, there are people around. The maître de. The waiter. The chefs. Fellow diners. In the downloading case, there are no other people around. It is just you and your computer. Yes, there are people who are affected by illegal downloads, the owners of that intellectual property. But because you cannot see them, it is easier to rationalize it away."




Monday, July 29, 2019

Serial Frum Bashers Should Spend More Time Spreading Light And Less Time Venting Anger

So, a woman gets up and writes an article for the whole world to see about the "Rotten State Of Orthodoxy". I also saw a video of her on a secular Israeli TV show telling everyone how terrible frum people are [for not showing images of women in their publications]. I looked at the type of articles she has written in the past and there is a theme: Religious people are bad, religious society is messed up - and I'm mad about it!!! Arghhhhhh!!!!!! 

I don't know her personally but if I did know her, I would probably like her. That is because I like most people I know😊. This is not about this particular feminist or feminists in general. The issue is a completely different one: How do we fix problems? 

In the frum world we have problems. There is not ONE society or community on the planet without problems. Our problems are not worse than mainstream society. [Incidentally - in the Christian world the problems among clergy of pedophilia, sexual abuse and countless other sins against morality are MUCH MORE rampant with no comparison. They also cover it up on an institutional level with alarming frequency]. We are actually doing much better in most areas. So at the outset we have to see the bigger picture and acknowledge to beauty of a Torah lifestyle. More importantly, we have to emphasize the EMES of the Torah lifestyle.

It is also important to call people out on their injustices. I also on this blog have mentioned some of the scandals she did in her article. I usually don't use names [as she did] because if someone knows then they know and if they don't then I don't want to be the one to tell them. No - there is no excuse for unrepentant offenders of basic standards of purity to be teaching our children or anyone. 

Agreed. 

That is not her chiddush. The Gemara and the Rambam are very clear on this issue [as we have spoken about numerous times on these pages and in recorded shiurim]. 

Women's faces not being shown in magazines, newspapers and books? Well, many, many women are not bothered by this. Many prefer it this way. Many men prefer not to have to see faces of women because they maintain their purity this way. Seeing an attractive woman arouses parts of a person he would prefer to reserve for his wife and not expend on other women. On the street there is nothing for him to do - so he maintains his purity as much as he can. But when he reads a magazine he doesn't want to have this test. Not the end of the world. It can even be viewed in a positive light - WOW!! Men don't want to be attracted to any woman other than their wives!! מי כעמך ישראל!!! For the same reason we have mechitzos in shul - women's faces aren't shown in publications. 

Women are NOT being erased from frum society. EVERYBODY who has ever been in a frum household knows how that the voice and the status of the females in the home is either equal or exceeds that of the males. Also, Charedi men KILL THEMSELVES to marry off and buy apartments for their DAUGHTERS. Religious and Charedi men - by and large - are EXCELLENT husbands and fathers. Today especially, men in religious society are more involved in taking care of the children and fulfilling household duties than ever in history.

The ROOT of the desire to not print women's pictures is a desire to practice higher levels of tzniyus - that should be lauded [even if they are mistaken]. 

That being said - there is also a strong argument to print pictures of modestly dressed women. There are TWO SIDES. To take one side and brand the other side misogynist or the like and totally negate the validity of the other side is [in this case] not fair. I suggest that this women [and her ilk] who claim to believe in Torah, first learn thoroughly the laws of הסתכלות בנשים and then talk. There is no room in Torah Judaism for people to voice opinions on halachic and hashkafic issues based on their emotions when ignorant of the sources. We have a TRADITION that we follow, based on thousands of years of LITERATURE. To run such campaigns ignoring the traditions spells the end of Torah ח"ו and has NO PLACE. You have a beef? Show how it is against our tradition. Do she have any Talmidei Chachomim who support her constant, serial attacks on the frum world? Doubtful and for a reason. Because her way [and those like her] who take to social media to voice their displeasure and anger with not an ounce of Ahavas Hashem or Yiras Shomayim [at least it doesn't  come across] is the wrong way of going about things. 

Torah is beautiful and the Jewish people are beautiful. That MUST be the emphasis. If a mother always criticizes her husband and children, riddled with faults as they may be, she is a LOUSY wife and mother. Valid CONSTRUCTIVE criticisms voiced with respect and rooted in a love for tradition are welcome!! But the majority of one's efforts should be focused on spreading the light and the darkness will disappear little by little. 

In the immortal words of the Rav ztz"l: 

  
הצדיקים הטהורים אינם קובלים על החושך אלא מוסיפים אור, אינם קובלים על הרשעה אלא מוסיפים צדק, אינם קובלים על הכפירה אלא מוסיפים אמונה, אינם קובלים על הבערות אלא מוסיפים חכמה.

The pure righteous do not complain of the dark, but increase the light; they do not complain of evil, but increase justice; they do not complain of heresy, but increase faith; they do not complain of ignorance, but increase wisdom.
          

Fridays With Rav Herzog

Vulgar Speech



Question: I sometimes sit among friends that unfortunately engage in vulgar conversation, however, I myself do not participate in the conversation. What should I do?




Answer: The Gemara (Shabbat 33a) states that as a result of vulgar chatter, many great tragedies and harsh decrees are renewed, the youth of Israel die, and widows and orphans call out and are not answered, as the verse states, “That is why Hashem will not spare their youths, nor show compassion to their orphans and widows; for all are flattering and wicked and every mouth speaks vulgarity.” The Gemara expounds further: “Rabbi Hanan bar Rava said: Everyone knows why a bride enters the Chuppah; however, one who speaks crudely (and elaborates on this point explicitly) will have even sealed good decrees of seventy years switched to evil for him. Rabba bar Shila said in the name of Rav Chasda: Whoever speaks vulgar language shall have Gehinnom deepened for him, as the verse states, ‘The mouth of a forbidden one is a deep pit.’ Rav Nachman bar Yitzchak said: This applies even to one who listens to vulgarity being spoken and is silent, as the verse states (in continuation of the above verse), ‘He who is doomed by Hashem falls into it.”




The great and saintly Shelah (Sha’ar Ha’Otiyot, Ot Shin) writes that the father of all sinful speech is vulgar language and chatter. He adds that one who defiles one’s mouth and tongue causes all of one’s Torah study and prayer to be defiled as well and one shall be punished for these previously holy words as well, for this is similar to one who brings a special gift to a king but presents it to the king in a vessel full of vomit in which case the king will be doubly angry. So too, prayer is a gift to Hashem but when it is presented from a mouth that speaks vulgarity which Hashem despises, this angers Hashem. The great Mekubalim elaborate on this point further.


The great Maharal of Prague (in his Netivot Olam, Netiv Ha’Tzeniut, 4) questions why it is that as the result of such a relatively light sin which only consists of speech such terrible and bizarre punishments befall a person, such as seventy years of good decrees turning bad, the youth of Israel dying and even some seemingly cruel punishments like widows and orphans calling out and not being answered?

The Maharal explains that man’s greatest asset is speech since the ability to speak was only given to mankind. Speech brings man to completion. Thus, when one sins through speech, one is sinning in the most severe manner, i.e. through the highest level man manifests himself, and measure for measure for sinning with man’s highest level, the highest levels of punishment are appropriate as well. Since one can institute good decrees with one’s speech when one speaks in a beneficial manner, the opposite is true as well in that when one speaks in a vulgar manner, one causes bad decrees to befall the Jewish nation. The sin of vulgar speech is worse than that of evil speech (Lashon Hara), for Lashon Hara is a sin that only involves speech while vulgar speech involves the worst character traits and smatterings of promiscuity and immoral thoughts which the Torah refers to a “abominations.” It is for this reason that this sin causes evil decrees to be renewed upon the Jewish nation, the youth of Israel die, and widows and orphans call out but are not answered, for these are the cruel results of decrees which come about as a result of vulgar speech. The youth of the Jewish nation are strong and are meant to live, however, as a result of vulgar speech, the opposite happens and they die. Similarly, widows and orphans, who should be the most natural recipients of mercy, receive the opposite treatment and they are met with cruelty.




Based on the above, if one finds himself in the company of lowly individuals who speak in a vulgar manner about immoral and promiscuous subjects, one must leave their company and find better friends who are G-d-fearing, as our Sages taught, “Woe unto the wicked one, woe unto his neighbor.” Indeed, our Sages taught that even one who hears vulgar speech and remains silent is punished severely, especially regarding an issue as grave as severe as vulgar speech which wreaks havoc and tragedy upon the speakers and all those around them.




Once, in the year 5762 (2002), someone close to Maran Rabbeinu Ovadia Yosef zt”l felt the need to describe an immoral incident that occurred in one of the Israeli government agencies in order to explain why it was not a good idea for a certain one of Maran zt”l’s granddaughters to begin working there. When Maran zt”l heard the gist of the story from the first few words, he put his fingers in his ears and exclaimed, “Enough! I understand!” Maran zt”l, who was exceedingly holy, was so careful not to defile his ears with such things even when they were said for a necessary purpose.

Sunday, July 28, 2019

Free To Go

I mentioned Leah Rabin in the previous post - so that deserves a good story. 

After Netanyahu was elected in 1996, she was disgusted. She said "כי בא לי לארוז מזוודות ולהתחפף מהמדינה" - I feel like packing my suitcases and leaving the country. A spontaneous collection was made to pay for her ticket - after which she retracted. In the year 2000, she left this and all countries. 

יהי זכרה ברוך!!

Lesson good for today as well: If you don't like it - you can leave. Free country:-). 

The JTS Prof. And Rosh Yeshiva - Dogs - Drinking

I am in the middle of reading Ha-Gaon Ha-Rav Mordechai Elefant's FASCINATING memoirs [from which I told the story linked in the previous post-  here is part 2]. Artscroll - G-d bless them - will NEVER print this book. Here is a sample:

I saw one of the famous teachers and scholars in JTS in a glatt kosher hotel in Miami Beach on Shabbos. He was sitting with Elie Wiesel and dipping his tea bag into boiling hot water. 

I told [my wife] Goldie that I am going to say something. She was opposed. I said "But Goldie, it's frum to tell him". I was feeling antagonistic to him and said "----- [he said his first name], what you are doing is בישול." 

The professor said "There is no איסור of צביעה באוכלין" [coloring foods]. 

I said " ... I am not talking about צביעה . I am talking about בישול."

I did my duty as an Orthodox Jew. 

[Then he described how Weisel had this face he put on which made you see Auschwitz. i used to daven with Wiesel from time to time and that face was scary. I am sure he is at peace now. ת.נ.צ.ב.ה.]

Note: According to R' Dr. Rakeffet in his on line lectures, this professor was completely frum, despite his affiliation with JTS. I guess "almost" completely. Or maybe he was סומך on the fact that a כלי שני is not מבשל and a tea bag is not מקלי הבישול where we are מחמיר even with a כלי שני.

---------------

A certain famous Rosh Yeshiva [whom he named] would "pal around" with this professor in the 1950's. They both hung around the Public Library on 42nd street because there were a LOT of sefarim there. [I also used to hang out there before the Otzar Hachochma and before I bought and subsequently lost the Bar Ilan program and before HebrewBooks.org].     

One day the Rosh Yeshiva walks in and the professor says in Yiddish "Here comes G-d's dog."

The Rosh Yeshiva responded "Better be G-d's dog than be a god to dogs".  

He heard the story from the Rosh Yeshiva. 

-----------------

Yitzchak Rabin a"h was a great statesman and embodiment of the noble ideals of Zionism. Unfortunately, had a drinking problem. At meetings he would often have a tea colored drink in front of him filled to the rim with a slice of lemon on the rim. The resemblance to tea ended with its appearance. He was once in a meeting with Jimmy Carter and fell asleep right in the middle because he had too much to drink. After that, Carter treated him with contempt. 

When he was Prime Minister, he went to Munich to a ceremony in honor of the 11 athletes murdered by Arab terrorists during the Olympics. He went, put on a yarmulke and said kaddish. 

On the place ride home, his wife Leah fell asleep. First class - free drinks!! He had too much to drink and was having fun which expressed itself in becoming friendly with one of the German stewardesses. She told an Israeli journalist about her experiences with the Prime Minister. The journalist's sense of social responsibility would not allow him to suppress the story - unless he was paid 100,000 Israeli pounds, about $40,000. [Trump didn't invent hush money]. Rabin thought that Rav Elefant would have the money handy so he sent an aide to ask him for the money. Rav Elefant refused to give it to him because he suspected that the man would pocket the money himself and insisted that Rabin himself come get the money, which he did. 

Teddy Kollek [the mayor of Jerusalem] told him that what he handled it stupidly. If Rabin knew that Rav Elefant knew this secretive information about him he would avoid him in the future. Teddy was right. 

[Didn't Rabin tell Rav Elefant why he needed the money? What was he supposed to do??]      


Link

If you don't listen to the whole shiur [which I recommend because I heard the whole thing and really enjoyed it😊], then at least the fascinating story from about the 18:45 minute mark. 

Cherish Your Children

The Coddling Of The American Mind


 The Atlantic
Something strange is happening at America’s colleges and universities. A movement is arising, undirected and driven largely by students, to scrub campuses clean of words, ideas, and subjects that might cause discomfort or give offense. Last December Jeannie Suk wrote in an online article for The New Yorker about law students asking her fellow professors at Harvard not to teach rape law—or, in one case, even use the word violate (as in “that violates the law”) lest it cause students distress. In February, Laura Kipnis, a professor at Northwestern University, wrote an essay in The Chronicle of Higher Education describing a new campus politics of sexual paranoia—and was then subjected to a long investigation after students who were offended by the article and by a tweet she’d sent filed Title IX complaints against her. In June, a professor protecting himself with a pseudonym wrote an essay for Vox describing how gingerly he now has to teach. “I’m a Liberal Professor, and My Liberal Students Terrify Me,” the headline said. A number of popular comedians, including Chris Rock, have stopped performing on college campuses. Jerry Seinfeld and Bill Maher have publicly condemned the over sensitivity of college students, saying too many of them can’t take a joke.


Two terms have risen quickly from obscurity into common campus parlance. Microaggressions are small actions or word choices that seem on their face to have no malicious intent but that are thought of as a kind of violence nonetheless. For example, by some campus guidelines, it is a microaggression to ask an Asian American or Latino American “Where were you born?,” because this implies that he or she is not a real American. Trigger warnings are alerts that professors are expected to issue if something in a course might cause a strong emotional response. For example, some students have called for warnings that Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart describes racial violence and that F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby portrays misogyny and physical abuse, so that students who have been previously victimized by racism or domestic violence can choose to avoid these works, which they believe might “trigger” a recurrence of past trauma.



Some recent campus actions border on the surreal. In April, at Brandeis University, the Asian American student association sought to raise awareness of microaggressions against Asians through an installation on the steps of an academic hall. The installation gave examples of microaggressions such as “Aren’t you supposed to be good at math?” and “I’m colorblind! I don’t see race.” But a backlash arose among other Asian American students, who felt that the display itself was a microaggression. The association removed the installation, and its president wrote an e-mail to the entire student body apologizing to anyone who was “triggered or hurt by the content of the microaggressions.” According to the most-basic tenets of psychology, helping people with anxiety disorders avoid the things they fear is misguided.

This new climate is slowly being institutionalized, and is affecting what can be said in the classroom, even as a basis for discussion. During the 2014–15 school year, for instance, the deans and department chairs at the 10 University of California system schools were presented by administrators at faculty leader-training sessions with examples of microaggressions. The list of offensive statements included: “America is the land of opportunity” and “I believe the most qualified person should get the job.”


The press has typically described these developments as a resurgence of political correctness. That’s partly right, although there are important differences between what’s happening now and what happened in the 1980s and ’90s. That movement sought to restrict speech (specifically hate speech aimed at marginalized groups), but it also challenged the literary, philosophical, and historical canon, seeking to widen it by including more-diverse perspectives. The current movement is largely about emotional well-being. More than the last, it presumes an extraordinary fragility of the collegiate psyche, and therefore elevates the goal of protecting students from psychological harm. The ultimate aim, it seems, is to turn campuses into “safe spaces” where young adults are shielded from words and ideas that make some uncomfortable. And more than the last, this movement seeks to punish anyone who interferes with that aim, even accidentally. You might call this impulse vindictive protectiveness. It is creating a culture in which everyone must think twice before speaking up, lest they face charges of insensitivity, aggression, or worse.


There’s a saying common in education circles: Don’t teach students what to think; teach them how to think. The idea goes back at least as far as Socrates. Today, what we call the Socratic method is a way of teaching that fosters critical thinking, in part by encouraging students to question their own unexamined beliefs, as well as the received wisdom of those around them. Such questioning sometimes leads to discomfort, and even to anger, on the way to understanding.

But vindictive protectiveness teaches students to think in a very different way. It prepares them poorly for professional life, which often demands intellectual engagement with people and ideas one might find uncongenial or wrong. The harm may be more immediate, too. A campus culture devoted to policing speech and punishing speakers is likely to engender patterns of thought that are surprisingly similar to those long identified by cognitive behavioral therapists as causes of depression and anxiety. The new protectiveness may be teaching students to think pathologically.


It’s difficult to know exactly why vindictive protectiveness has burst forth so powerfully in the past few years. The phenomenon may be related to recent changes in the interpretation of federal antidiscrimination statutes (about which more later). But the answer probably involves generational shifts as well. Childhood itself has changed greatly during the past generation. Many Baby Boomers and Gen Xers can remember riding their bicycles around their hometowns, unchaperoned by adults, by the time they were 8 or 9 years old. In the hours after school, kids were expected to occupy themselves, getting into minor scrapes and learning from their experiences. But “free range” childhood became less common in the 1980s. The surge in crime from the ’60s through the early ’90s made Baby Boomer parents more protective than their own parents had been. Stories of abducted children appeared more frequently in the news, and in 1984, images of them began showing up on milk cartons. In response, many parents pulled in the reins and worked harder to keep their children safe.

The flight to safety also happened at school. Dangerous play structures were removed from playgrounds; peanut butter was banned from student lunches. After the 1999 Columbine massacre in Colorado, many schools cracked down on bullying, implementing “zero tolerance” policies. In a variety of ways, children born after 1980—the Millennials—got a consistent message from adults: life is dangerous, but adults will do everything in their power to protect you from harm, not just from strangers but from one another as well.



These same children grew up in a culture that was (and still is) becoming more politically polarized. Republicans and Democrats have never particularly liked each other, but survey data going back to the 1970s show that on average, their mutual dislike used to be surprisingly mild. Negative feelings have grown steadily stronger, however, particularly since the early 2000s. Political scientists call this process “affective partisan polarization,” and it is a very serious problem for any democracy. As each side increasingly demonizes the other, compromise becomes more difficult. A recent study shows that implicit or unconscious biases are now at least as strong across political parties as they are across races.

So it’s not hard to imagine why students arriving on campus today might be more desirous of protection and more hostile toward ideological opponents than in generations past. This hostility, and the self-righteousness fueled by strong partisan emotions, can be expected to add force to any moral crusade. A principle of moral psychology is that “morality binds and blinds.” Part of what we do when we make moral judgments is express allegiance to a team. But that can interfere with our ability to think critically. Acknowledging that the other side’s viewpoint has any merit is risky—your teammates may see you as a traitor.

Social media makes it extraordinarily easy to join crusades, express solidarity and outrage, and shun traitors. Facebook was founded in 2004, and since 2006 it has allowed children as young as 13 to join. This means that the first wave of students who spent all their teen years using Facebook reached college in 2011, and graduated from college only this year.

These first true “social-media natives” may be different from members of previous generations in how they go about sharing their moral judgments and supporting one another in moral campaigns and conflicts. We find much to like about these trends; young people today are engaged with one another, with news stories, and with prosocial endeavors to a greater degree than when the dominant technology was television. But social media has also fundamentally shifted the balance of power in relationships between students and faculty; the latter increasingly fear what students might do to their reputations and careers by stirring up online mobs against them.



We do not mean to imply simple causation, but rates of mental illness in young adults have been rising, both on campus and off, in recent decades. Some portion of the increase is surely due to better diagnosis and greater willingness to seek help, but most experts seem to agree that some portion of the trend is real. Nearly all of the campus mental-health directors surveyed in 2013 by the American College Counseling Association reported that the number of students with severe psychological problems was rising at their schools. The rate of emotional distress reported by students themselves is also high, and rising. In a 2014 survey by the American College Health Association, 54 percent of college students surveyed said that they had “felt overwhelming anxiety” in the past 12 months, up from 49 percent in the same survey just five years earlier. Students seem to be reporting more emotional crises; many seem fragile, and this has surely changed the way university faculty and administrators interact with them. The question is whether some of those changes might be doing more harm than good.

For millennia, philosophers have understood that we don’t see life as it is; we see a version distorted by our hopes, fears, and other attachments.” Marcus Aurelius said, “Life itself is but what you deem it.” The quest for wisdom in many traditions begins with this insight. Early Buddhists and the Stoics, for example, developed practices for reducing attachments, thinking more clearly, and finding release from the emotional torments of normal mental life.



Cognitive behavioral therapy is a modern embodiment of this ancient wisdom. It is the most extensively studied nonpharmaceutical treatment of mental illness, and is used widely to treat depression, anxiety disorders, eating disorders, and addiction. It can even be of help to schizophrenics. No other form of psychotherapy has been shown to work for a broader range of problems. Studies have generally found that it is as effective as antidepressant drugs (such as Prozac) in the treatment of anxiety and depression. The therapy is relatively quick and easy to learn; after a few months of training, many patients can do it on their own. Unlike drugs, cognitive behavioral therapy keeps working long after treatment is stopped, because it teaches thinking skills that people can continue to use.

The goal is to minimize distorted thinking and see the world more accurately. You start by learning the names of the dozen or so most common cognitive distortions (such as overgeneralizing, discounting positives, and emotional reasoning; see the list at the bottom of this article). Each time you notice yourself falling prey to one of them, you name it, describe the facts of the situation, consider alternative interpretations, and then choose an interpretation of events more in line with those facts. Your emotions follow your new interpretation. In time, this process becomes automatic. When people improve their mental hygiene in this way—when they free themselves from the repetitive irrational thoughts that had previously filled so much of their consciousness—they become less depressed, anxious, and angry.



The parallel to formal education is clear: cognitive behavioral therapy teaches good critical-thinking skills, the sort that educators have striven for so long to impart. By almost any definition, critical thinking requires grounding one’s beliefs in evidence rather than in emotion or desire, and learning how to search for and evaluate evidence that might contradict one’s initial hypothesis. But does campus life today foster critical thinking? Or does it coax students to think in more-distorted ways?

Let’s look at recent trends in higher education in light of the distortions that cognitive behavioral therapy identifies. We will draw the names and descriptions of these distortions from David D. Burns’s popular book Feeling Good, as well as from the second edition of Treatment Plans and Interventions for Depression and Anxiety Disorders, by Robert L. Leahy, Stephen J. F. Holland, and Lata K. McGinn.


Burns defines emotional reasoning as assuming “that your negative emotions necessarily reflect the way things really are: ‘I feel it, therefore it must be true.’ ” Leahy, Holland, and McGinn define it as letting “your feelings guide your interpretation of reality.” But, of course, subjective feelings are not always trustworthy guides; unrestrained, they can cause people to lash out at others who have done nothing wrong. Therapy often involves talking yourself down from the idea that each of your emotional responses represents something true or important.



Emotional reasoning dominates many campus debates and discussions. A claim that someone’s words are “offensive” is not just an expression of one’s own subjective feeling of offendedness. It is, rather, a public charge that the speaker has done something objectively wrong. It is a demand that the speaker apologize or be punished by some authority for committing an offense.

There have always been some people who believe they have a right not to be offended. Yet throughout American history—from the Victorian era to the free-speech activism of the 1960s and ’70s—radicals have pushed boundaries and mocked prevailing sensibilities. Sometime in the 1980s, however, college campuses began to focus on preventing offensive speech, especially speech that might be hurtful to women or minority groups. The sentiment underpinning this goal was laudable, but it quickly produced some absurd results.What are we doing to our students if we encourage them to develop extra-thin skin just before they leave the cocoon of adult protection?

Among the most famous early examples was the so-called water-buffalo incident at the University of Pennsylvania. In 1993, the university charged an Israeli-born student with racial harassment after he yelled “Shut up, you water buffalo!” to a crowd of black sorority women that was making noise at night outside his dorm-room window. Many scholars and pundits at the time could not see how the term water buffalo (a rough translation of a Hebrew insult for a thoughtless or rowdy person) was a racial slur against African Americans, and as a result, the case became international news.

Claims of a right not to be offended have continued to arise since then, and universities have continued to privilege them. In a particularly egregious 2008 case, for instance, Indiana University–Purdue University at Indianapolis found a white student guilty of racial harassment for reading a book titled Notre Dame vs. the Klan. The book honored student opposition to the Ku Klux Klan when it marched on Notre Dame in 1924. Nonetheless, the picture of a Klan rally on the book’s cover offended at least one of the student’s co-workers (he was a janitor as well as a student), and that was enough for a guilty finding by the university’s Affirmative Action Office.


These examples may seem extreme, but the reasoning behind them has become more commonplace on campus in recent years. Last year, at the University of St. Thomas, in Minnesota, an event called Hump Day, which would have allowed people to pet a camel, was abruptly canceled. Students had created a Facebook group where they protested the event for animal cruelty, for being a waste of money, and for being insensitive to people from the Middle East. The inspiration for the camel had almost certainly come from a popular TV commercial in which a camel saunters around an office on a Wednesday, celebrating “hump day”; it was devoid of any reference to Middle Eastern peoples. Nevertheless, the group organizing the event announced on its Facebook page that the event would be canceled because the “program [was] dividing people and would make for an uncomfortable and possibly unsafe environment.”

Because there is a broad ban in academic circles on “blaming the victim,” it is generally considered unacceptable to question the reasonableness (let alone the sincerity) of someone’s emotional state, particularly if those emotions are linked to one’s group identity. The thin argument “I’m offended” becomes an unbeatable trump card. This leads to what Jonathan Rauch, a contributing editor at this magazine, calls the “offendedness sweepstakes,” in which opposing parties use claims of offense as cudgels. In the process, the bar for what we consider unacceptable speech is lowered further and further.



Since 2013, new pressure from the federal government has reinforced this trend. Federal antidiscrimination statutes regulate on-campus harassment and unequal treatment based on sex, race, religion, and national origin. Until recently, the Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights acknowledged that speech must be “objectively offensive” before it could be deemed actionable as sexual harassment—it would have to pass the “reasonable person” test. To be prohibited, the office wrote in 2003, allegedly harassing speech would have to go “beyond the mere expression of views, words, symbols or thoughts that some person finds offensive.”

But in 2013, the Departments of Justice and Education greatly broadened the definition of sexual harassment to include verbal conduct that is simply “unwelcome.” Out of fear of federal investigations, universities are now applying that standard—defining unwelcome speech as harassment—not just to sex, but to race, religion, and veteran status as well. Everyone is supposed to rely upon his or her own subjective feelings to decide whether a comment by a professor or a fellow student is unwelcome, and therefore grounds for a harassment claim. Emotional reasoning is now accepted as evidence.

If our universities are teaching students that their emotions can be used effectively as weapons—or at least as evidence in administrative proceedings—then they are teaching students to nurture a kind of hypersensitivity that will lead them into countless drawn-out conflicts in college and beyond. Schools may be training students in thinking styles that will damage their careers and friendships, along with their mental health.


fortune-telling and trigger warnings

Burns defines fortune-telling as “anticipat[ing] that things will turn out badly” and feeling “convinced that your prediction is an already-established fact.” Leahy, Holland, and McGinn define it as “predict[ing] the future negatively” or seeing potential danger in an everyday situation. The recent spread of demands for trigger warnings on reading assignments with provocative content is an example of fortune-telling.

The idea that words (or smells or any sensory input) can trigger searing memories of past trauma—and intense fear that it may be repeated—has been around at least since World War I, when psychiatrists began treating soldiers for what is now called post-traumatic stress disorder. But explicit trigger warnings are believed to have originated much more recently, on message boards in the early days of the Internet. Trigger warnings became particularly prevalent in self-help and feminist forums, where they allowed readers who had suffered from traumatic events like sexual assault to avoid graphic content that might trigger flashbacks or panic attacks. Search-engine trends indicate that the phrase broke into mainstream use online around 2011, spiked in 2014, and reached an all-time high in 2015. The use of trigger warnings on campus appears to have followed a similar trajectory; seemingly overnight, students at universities across the country have begun demanding that their professors issue warnings before covering material that might evoke a negative emotional response.



In 2013, a task force composed of administrators, students, recent alumni, and one faculty member at Oberlin College, in Ohio, released an online resource guide for faculty (subsequently retracted in the face of faculty pushback) that included a list of topics warranting trigger warnings. These topics included classism and privilege, among many others. The task force recommended that materials that might trigger negative reactions among students be avoided altogether unless they “contribute directly” to course goals, and suggested that works that were “too important to avoid” be made optional.

It’s hard to imagine how novels illustrating classism and privilege could provoke or reactivate the kind of terror that is typically implicated in PTSD. Rather, trigger warnings are sometimes demanded for a long list of ideas and attitudes that some students find politically offensive, in the name of preventing other students from being harmed. This is an example of what psychologists call “motivated reasoning”—we spontaneously generate arguments for conclusions we want to support. Once you find something hateful, it is easy to argue that exposure to the hateful thing could traumatize some other people. You believe that you know how others will react, and that their reaction could be devastating. Preventing that devastation becomes a moral obligation for the whole community. Books for which students have called publicly for trigger warnings within the past couple of years include Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway (at Rutgers, for “suicidal inclinations”) and Ovid’s Metamorphoses (at Columbia, for sexual assault).



Jeannie Suk’s New Yorker essay described the difficulties of teaching rape law in the age of trigger warnings. Some students, she wrote, have pressured their professors to avoid teaching the subject in order to protect themselves and their classmates from potential distress. Suk compares this to trying to teach “a medical student who is training to be a surgeon but who fears that he’ll become distressed if he sees or handles blood.”

However, there is a deeper problem with trigger warnings. According to the most-basic tenets of psychology, the very idea of helping people with anxiety disorders avoid the things they fear is misguided. A person who is trapped in an elevator during a power outage may panic and think she is going to die. That frightening experience can change neural connections in her amygdala, leading to an elevator phobia. If you want this woman to retain her fear for life, you should help her avoid elevators.

But if you want to help her return to normalcy, you should take your cues from Ivan Pavlov and guide her through a process known as exposure therapy. You might start by asking the woman to merely look at an elevator from a distance—standing in a building lobby, perhaps—until her apprehension begins to subside. If nothing bad happens while she’s standing in the lobby—if the fear is not “reinforced”—then she will begin to learn a new association: elevators are not dangerous. (This reduction in fear during exposure is called habituation.) Then, on subsequent days, you might ask her to get closer, and on later days to push the call button, and eventually to step in and go up one floor. This is how the amygdala can get rewired again to associate a previously feared situation with safety or normalcy.



Students who call for trigger warnings may be correct that some of their peers are harboring memories of trauma that could be reactivated by course readings. But they are wrong to try to prevent such reactivations. Students with PTSD should of course get treatment, but they should not try to avoid normal life, with its many opportunities for habituation. Classroom discussions are safe places to be exposed to incidental reminders of trauma (such as the word violate). A discussion of violence is unlikely to be followed by actual violence, so it is a good way to help students change the associations that are causing them discomfort. And they’d better get their habituation done in college, because the world beyond college will be far less willing to accommodate requests for trigger warnings and opt-outs.

The expansive use of trigger warnings may also foster unhealthy mental habits in the vastly larger group of students who do not suffer from PTSD or other anxiety disorders. People acquire their fears not just from their own past experiences, but from social learning as well. If everyone around you acts as though something is dangerous—elevators, certain neighborhoods, novels depicting racism—then you are at risk of acquiring that fear too. The psychiatrist Sarah Roff pointed this out last year in an online article for The Chronicle of Higher Education. “One of my biggest concerns about trigger warnings,” Roff wrote, “is that they will apply not just to those who have experienced trauma, but to all students, creating an atmosphere in which they are encouraged to believe that there is something dangerous or damaging about discussing difficult aspects of our history.”The new climate is slowly being institutionalized, and is affecting what can be said in the classroom, even as a basis for discussion or debate.

In an article published last year by Inside Higher Ed, seven humanities professors wrote that the trigger-warning movement was “already having a chilling effect on [their] teaching and pedagogy.” They reported their colleagues’ receiving “phone calls from deans and other administrators investigating student complaints that they have included ‘triggering’ material in their courses, with or without warnings.” A trigger warning, they wrote, “serves as a guarantee that students will not experience unexpected discomfort and implies that if they do, a contract has been broken.” When students come to expect trigger warnings for any material that makes them uncomfortable, the easiest way for faculty to stay out of trouble is to avoid material that might upset the most sensitive student in the class.
magnification, labeling, and microaggressions

Burns defines magnification as “exaggerat[ing] the importance of things,” and Leahy, Holland, and McGinn define labeling as “assign[ing] global negative traits to yourself and others.” The recent collegiate trend of uncovering allegedly racist, sexist, classist, or otherwise discriminatory microaggressions doesn’t incidentallyteach students to focus on small or accidental slights. Its purpose is to get students to focus on them and then relabel the people who have made such remarks as aggressors.


The term microaggression originated in the 1970s and referred to subtle, often unconscious racist affronts. The definition has expanded in recent years to include anything that can be perceived as discriminatory on virtually any basis. For example, in 2013, a student group at UCLA staged a sit-in during a class taught by Val Rust, an education professor. The group read a letter aloud expressing their concerns about the campus’s hostility toward students of color. Although Rust was not explicitly named, the group quite clearly criticized his teaching as microaggressive. In the course of correcting his students’ grammar and spelling, Rust had noted that a student had wrongly capitalized the first letter of the word indigenous. Lowercasing the capital I was an insult to the student and her ideology, the group claimed.

Even joking about microaggressions can be seen as an aggression, warranting punishment. Last fall, Omar Mahmood, a student at the University of Michigan, wrote a satirical column for a conservative student publication, The Michigan Review, poking fun at what he saw as a campus tendency to perceive microaggressions in just about anything. Mahmood was also employed at the campus newspaper, The Michigan Daily. The Daily’s editors said that the way Mahmood had “satirically mocked the experiences of fellow Daily contributors and minority communities on campus … created a conflict of interest.” The Dailyterminated Mahmood after he described the incident to two Web sites, The College Fix and The Daily Caller. A group of women later vandalized Mahmood’s doorway with eggs, hot dogs, gum, and notes with messages such as “Everyone hates you, you violent ---.” When speech comes to be seen as a form of violence, vindictive protectiveness can justify a hostile, and perhaps even violent, response.



In March, the student government at Ithaca College, in upstate New York, went so far as to propose the creation of an anonymous microaggression-reporting system. Student sponsors envisioned some form of disciplinary action against “oppressors” engaged in belittling speech. One of the sponsors of the program said that while “not … every instance will require trial or some kind of harsh punishment,” she wanted the program to be “record-keeping but with impact.”

Surely people make subtle or thinly veiled racist or sexist remarks on college campuses, and it is right for students to raise questions and initiate discussions about such cases. But the increased focus on microaggressions coupled with the endorsement of emotional reasoning is a formula for a constant state of outrage, even toward well-meaning speakers trying to engage in genuine discussion.

What are we doing to our students if we encourage them to develop extra-thin skin in the years just before they leave the cocoon of adult protection and enter the workforce? Would they not be better prepared to flourish if we taught them to question their own emotional reactions, and to give people the benefit of the doubt?
teaching students to catastrophize and have zero tolerance

Burns defines catastrophizing as a kind of magnification that turns “commonplace negative events into nightmarish monsters.” Leahy, Holland, and McGinn define it as believing “that what has happened or will happen” is “so awful and unbearable that you won’t be able to stand it.” Requests for trigger warnings involve catastrophizing, but this way of thinking colors other areas of campus thought as well.



Catastrophizing rhetoric about physical danger is employed by campus administrators more commonly than you might think—sometimes, it seems, with cynical ends in mind. For instance, last year administrators at Bergen Community College, in New Jersey, suspended Francis Schmidt, a professor, after he posted a picture of his daughter on his Google+ account. The photo showed her in a yoga pose, wearing a T-shirt that read i will take what is mine with fire & blood, a quote from the HBO show Game of Thrones. Schmidt had filed a grievance against the school about two months earlier after being passed over for a sabbatical. The quote was interpreted as a threat by a campus administrator, who received a notification after Schmidt posted the picture; it had been sent, automatically, to a whole group of contacts. According to Schmidt, a Bergen security official present at a subsequent meeting between administrators and Schmidt thought the word fire could refer to AK-47s.

Then there is the eight-year legal saga at Valdosta State University, in Georgia, where a student was expelled for protesting the construction of a parking garage by posting an allegedly “threatening” collage on Facebook. The collage described the proposed structure as a “memorial” parking garage—a joke referring to a claim by the university president that the garage would be part of his legacy. The president interpreted the collage as a threat against his life.



It should be no surprise that students are exhibiting similar sensitivity. At the University of Central Florida in 2013, for example, Hyung-il Jung, an accounting instructor, was suspended after a student reported that Jung had made a threatening comment during a review session. Jung explained to the Orlando Sentinel that the material he was reviewing was difficult, and he’d noticed the pained look on students’ faces, so he made a joke. “It looks like you guys are being slowly suffocated by these questions,” he recalled saying. “Am I on a killing spree or what?”

After the student reported Jung’s comment, a group of nearly 20 others e-mailed the UCF administration explaining that the comment had clearly been made in jest. Nevertheless, UCF suspended Jung from all university duties and demanded that he obtain written certification from a mental-health professional that he was “not a threat to [himself] or to the university community” before he would be allowed to return to campus.

All of these actions teach a common lesson: smart people do, in fact, overreact to innocuous speech, make mountains out of molehills, and seek punishment for anyone whose words make anyone else feel uncomfortable.
mental filtering and disinvitation season

As Burns defines it, mental filtering is “pick[ing] out a negative detail in any situation and dwell[ing] on it exclusively, thus perceiving that the whole situation is negative.” Leahy, Holland, and McGinn refer to this as “negative filtering,” which they define as “focus[ing] almost exclusively on the negatives and seldom notic[ing] the positives.” When applied to campus life, mental filtering allows for simpleminded demonization.



Students and faculty members in large numbers modeled this cognitive distortion during 2014’s “disinvitation season.” That’s the time of year—usually early spring—when commencement speakers are announced and when students and professors demand that some of those speakers be disinvited because of things they have said or done. According to data compiled by the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education, since 2000, at least 240 campaigns have been launched at U.S. universities to prevent public figures from appearing at campus events; most of them have occurred since 2009.

Consider two of the most prominent disinvitation targets of 2014: former U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice and the International Monetary Fund’s managing director, Christine Lagarde. Rice was the first black female secretary of state; Lagarde was the first woman to become finance minister of a G8 country and the first female head of the IMF. Both speakers could have been seen as highly successful role models for female students, and Rice for minority students as well. But the critics, in effect, discounted any possibility of something positive coming from those speeches.

Members of an academic community should of course be free to raise questions about Rice’s role in the Iraq War or to look skeptically at the IMF’s policies. But should dislike of part of a person’s record disqualify her altogether from sharing her perspectives?



If campus culture conveys the idea that visitors must be pure, with résumés that never offend generally left-leaning campus sensibilities, then higher education will have taken a further step toward intellectual homogeneity and the creation of an environment in which students rarely encounter diverse viewpoints. And universities will have reinforced the belief that it’s okay to filter out the positive. If students graduate believing that they can learn nothing from people they dislike or from those with whom they disagree, we will have done them a great intellectual disservice.
what can we do now?

Attempts to shield students from words, ideas, and people that might cause them emotional discomfort are bad for the students. They are bad for the workplace, which will be mired in unending litigation if student expectations of safety are carried forward. And they are bad for American democracy, which is already paralyzed by worsening partisanship. When the ideas, values, and speech of the other side are seen not just as wrong but as willfully aggressive toward innocent victims, it is hard to imagine the kind of mutual respect, negotiation, and compromise that are needed to make politics a positive-sum game.

Rather than trying to protect students from words and ideas that they will inevitably encounter, colleges should do all they can to equip students to thrive in a world full of words and ideas that they cannot control. One of the great truths taught by Buddhism (and Stoicism, Hinduism, and many other traditions) is that you can never achieve happiness by making the world conform to your desires. But you can master your desires and habits of thought. This, of course, is the goal of cognitive behavioral therapy. With this in mind, here are some steps that might help reverse the tide of bad thinking on campus.

The biggest single step in the right direction does not involve faculty or university administrators, but rather the federal government, which should release universities from their fear of unreasonable investigation and sanctions by the Department of Education. Congress should define peer-on-peer harassment according to the Supreme Court’s definition in the 1999 case Davis v. Monroe County Board of Education. The Davis standard holds that a single comment or thoughtless remark by a student does not equal harassment; harassment requires a pattern of objectively offensive behavior by one student that interferes with another student’s access to education. Establishing the Davis standard would help eliminate universities’ impulse to police their students’ speech so carefully.

Universities themselves should try to raise consciousness about the need to balance freedom of speech with the need to make all students feel welcome. Talking openly about such conflicting but important values is just the sort of challenging exercise that any diverse but tolerant community must learn to do. Restrictive speech codes should be abandoned.

Universities should also officially and strongly discourage trigger warnings. They should endorse the American Association of University Professors’ report on these warnings, which notes, “The presumption that students need to be protected rather than challenged in a classroom is at once infantilizing and anti-intellectual.” Professors should be free to use trigger warnings if they choose to do so, but by explicitly discouraging the practice, universities would help fortify the faculty against student requests for such warnings.

Finally, universities should rethink the skills and values they most want to impart to their incoming students. At present, many freshman-orientation programs try to raise student sensitivity to a nearly impossible level. Teaching students to avoid giving unintentional offense is a worthy goal, especially when the students come from many different cultural backgrounds. But students should also be taught how to live in a world full of potential offenses. Why not teach incoming students how to practice cognitive behavioral therapy? Given high and rising rates of mental illness, this simple step would be among the most humane and supportive things a university could do. The cost and time commitment could be kept low: a few group training sessions could be supplemented by Web sites or apps. But the outcome could pay dividends in many ways. For example, a shared vocabulary about reasoning, common distortions, and the appropriate use of evidence to draw conclusions would facilitate critical thinking and real debate. It would also tone down the perpetual state of outrage that seems to engulf some colleges these days, allowing students’ minds to open more widely to new ideas and new people. A greater commitment to formal, public debate on campus—and to the assembly of a more politically diverse faculty—would further serve that goal.

Thomas Jefferson, upon founding the University of Virginia, said:
This institution will be based on the illimitable freedom of the human mind. For here we are not afraid to follow truth wherever it may lead, nor to tolerate any error so long as reason is left free to combat it.

We believe that this is still—and will always be—the best attitude for American universities. Faculty, administrators, students, and the federal government all have a role to play in restoring universities to their historic mission.
Common Cognitive Distortions

A partial list from Robert L. Leahy, Stephen J. F. Holland, and Lata K. McGinn’sTreatment Plans and Interventions for Depression and Anxiety Disorders (2012).

1. Mind reading. You assume that you know what people think without having sufficient evidence of their thoughts. “He thinks I’m a loser.”

2. Fortune-telling. You predict the future negatively: things will get worse, or there is danger ahead. “I’ll fail that exam,” or “I won’t get the job.”

3. Catastrophizing. You believe that what has happened or will happen will be so awful and unbearable that you won’t be able to stand it. “It would be terrible if I failed.”

4. Labeling. You assign global negative traits to yourself and others. “I’m undesirable,” or “He’s a rotten person.”

5. Discounting positives. You claim that the positive things you or others do are trivial. “That’s what wives are supposed to do—so it doesn’t count when she’s nice to me,” or “Those successes were easy, so they don’t matter.”

6. Negative filtering. You focus almost exclusively on the negatives and seldom notice the positives. “Look at all of the people who don’t like me.”

7. Overgeneralizing. You perceive a global pattern of negatives on the basis of a single incident. “This generally happens to me. I seem to fail at a lot of things.”

8. Dichotomous thinking. You view events or people in all-or-nothing terms. “I get rejected by everyone,” or “It was a complete waste of time.”

9. Blaming. You focus on the other person as the source of your negative feelings, and you refuse to take responsibility for changing yourself. “She’s to blame for the way I feel now,” or “My parents caused all my problems.”

10. What if? You keep asking a series of questions about “what if” something happens, and you fail to be satisfied with any of the answers. “Yeah, but what if I get anxious?,” or “What if I can’t catch my breath?”

11. Emotional reasoning. You let your feelings guide your interpretation of reality. “I feel depressed; therefore, my marriage is not working out.”

12. Inability to disconfirm. You reject any evidence or arguments that might contradict your negative thoughts. For example, when you have the thought I’m unlovable, you reject as irrelevant any evidence that people like you. Consequently, your thought cannot be refuted. “That’s not the real issue. There are deeper problems. There are other factors.”