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.”
