First rule: don’t catastrophize
Very enlightening piece by Jonathan Haidt about the rise in depression among girls and how catastrophizing is involved.
In May 2014, Greg Lukianoff invited me to lunch to talk about something he was seeing on college campuses that disturbed him. Greg is the president of FIRE (the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression), and he has worked tirelessly since 2001 to defend the free speech rights of college students. That almost always meant pushing back against administrators who didn’t want students to cause trouble, and who justified their suppression of speech with appeals to the emotional “safety” of students—appeals that the students themselves didn’t buy. But in late 2013, Greg began to encounter new cases in which students were pushing to ban speakers, punish people for ordinary speech, or implement policies that would chill free speech. These students arrived on campus in the fall of 2013 already accepting the idea that books, words, and ideas could hurt them. Why did so many students in 2013 believe this, when there was little sign of such beliefs in 2011?
Greg is prone to depression, and after hospitalization for a serious episode in 2007, he learned CBT (Cognitive Behavioral Therapy). In CBT you learn to recognize when your ruminations and automatic thinking patterns exemplify one or more of about a dozen “cognitive distortions,” such as catastrophizing, black-and-white thinking, fortune telling, or emotional reasoning. Thinking in these ways causes depression as well as being a symptom of depression. Breaking out of these painful distortions is a cure for depression.
What Greg saw in 2013 were students justifying the suppression of speech and the punishment of dissent using the exact distortions that Greg had learned to free himself from.
Ahhhhhh. That’s very interesting, and would explain a lot.
Students were saying that an unorthodox speaker on campus would cause severe harm to vulnerable students (catastrophizing); they were using their emotions as proof that a text should be removed from a syllabus (emotional reasoning). Greg hypothesized that if colleges supported the use of these cognitive distortions rather than teaching students skills of critical thinking (which is basically what CBT is), then this could cause students to become depressed. Greg feared that colleges were performing reverse CBT.
Do catastrophize. Do use your emotions as a guide to reality.
They wrote an essay about it.
After our essay came out, things on campus got much worse. The fall of 2015 marked the beginning of a period of protests and high-profile conflicts on campus that led many or most universities to implement policies that embedded this new way of thinking into campus culture with administrative expansions such as “bias response teams” to investigate reports of “microaggressions.” Surveys began to show that most students and professors felt that they had to self-censor. The phrase “walking on eggshells” became common. Trust in higher ed plummeted, along with the joy of intellectual discovery and sense of goodwill that had marked university life throughout my career.
2015 eh? The summer of 2015 is when all those loonies at Freethought Blogs got to work catastrophizing about me. I was supposed to walk on eggshells, but I told them to fuck off instead.
Greg and I decided to expand our original essay into a book in which we delved into the many causes of the sudden change in campus culture. Our book focused on three “great untruths” that seemed to be widely believed by the students who were trying to shut down speech and prosecute dissent:
1. What doesn’t kill you makes you weaker.
2. Always trust your feelings.
3. Life is a battle between good people and evil people.
All those people screaming at “terfs” – that’s where their heads are. No wonder it’s all such a clusterfuck.
There’s more. I’ll get to it later, because there’s a lot to think about. I like to take small bites.
This is partly the subject of their book, The Coddling of the American Mind, which I recommend. As someone who’s done CBT, I found their account rather compelling.
That’s quite an article. Particularly this >>
“The evidence is abundant that social media is a major cause of the epidemic, and perhaps the major cause. It’s time we started treating social media and other apps designed for “engagement” (i.e., addiction) like alcohol, tobacco, and gambling, or, because they can harm society as well as their users, perhaps like automobiles and firearms.”
I completely agree that social media is harmful to mental health. There are probably people who are resilient enough to withstand it’s negative effects, but not young people with limited life experience to draw upon. Combined with the suppression of critical thought in favor of emotional coersion and virtual superiority contests, it makes for a poisonous environment. It’s easy to fall into the trap of thinking phony online personas are accurate reflections. Living up to the idealized fantasies that masquerade as people’s actual lives is daunting, and playing that game requires you become one of the fantasy creators. Hell yes it’s depressing, unless a person can put it in perspective, and healthy perspectives can’t be had if one is immersed in artificiality.
David Horowitz was instrumental in fostering this attittude that students were to be sheltered from wrongthink, long before the issue of trans ideology became the issue of no debate on campus. He was one of those who claimed to be raised commie and then moved to the opposite extreme. In the 1990’s he wrote books, columns, and web articles about how the leftist professors were targeing conservative students. With blacklists from the right and no-platforming from the left, it’s important to understand that this is not a leftist nor rightist feature, Hell, even centrists can be authoritarian.
“Feeling safe” and “Feeling attacked” or needing safe spaces (who doesn’t need to get away for a few minutes to regroup? That’s part of the reason I smoked as long as I did, it gave me an excuse to get away from social situations) are now exaggerated to be the primary need for students when, actually, being challenged to rethink or understand their own views from varying perspectives, and being willing to reshape them based on critical thinking, is one of the functions of college education.
I’d be intereted in learning whether the change in college corporate structure to focus on career-based core curricula and away from liberal arts/humanities is in part responsible for this shielding from imaginary catastrophe.
I think that’s an excellent point. Also, the idea that students are “customers” and that a business has a vested interest in not pissing them off. If universities see themselves as businesses selling a product rather than institutions of learning, then this viewpoint is going to colour their relationship with their “client base.” This hands the
studentsclients a great deal of leverage over what can and can’t happen in the classroom. If the university administrators decide to cater to these prickly, disgruntled customers at the expense of teaching staff, then I think that gets you a long way towards the current situation.That epithet “teaching staff” probably has a lot to do with it too. The corporate-style workforce downsizing universities went through in the last few decades involved replacing permanent, full-time staff (professors) with temporary, part-time hires, to the extent that most classes taken by undergraduates are taught by adjuncts with no job security. They are under much more pressure than are tenured faculty to please their customers.
It’s convenient for the business, but it must result in a retreat from challenging students, debate, and critical thinking. Toe the line, give to Caesar what is Caesar’s, and save serious discussion for private spaces.
No job security and no benefits. It’s a very exploitative arrangement.
You’re not wrong, Ophelia. I saw the writing on the wall when I was in grad school in the 90s and made a quick lateral. I liked the academia of my youth, but not the academia I saw developing. My advisor told me to remember that it is Parsifal, the fool, who finally gets the grail. I was unsuited for playing the fool. I miss it, but more the academia of my memory and imagination than the academia of today. I don’t know if it will ever come back.
And if you haven’t read The Coddling… I do recommend it. My son and I both read it, and it is fundamentally correct.
Papito, I experienced the same thing, returning to college in the 90s. Several things were different, but the transformation wasn’t yet complete, at least not where I did my masters. They were still teaching the content they needed to teach, but I was seeing some signs of creeping coddling, such as “I’m not saying evolution is TRUE, but I do have to teach it to you.” Huh? I got better than that in my non-majors Bio in the 1970s.
By the time I was teaching, it was full on coddling, and has continued to get worse. I was asked about a student by my Associate Dean. “He dropped the class”, says I. “Why did he drop the class?” says AD. “I don’t know” says I. “You must have failed to engage him”, says AD. “I couldn’t engage him”, says I. “He never showed up for class once.” I thought…checkmate. “You needed to give him a reason to want to come to class”, says AD.
We are now being told that students know not only themselves better than anyone else, but they know the best way to teach them (both statements are probably BS; the second one definitively is).
When I was in college the first time, there was no such thing as student evaluations. When I went back, I was told to rate my professor. These are used on our evaluations, though studies have suggested they are not a good measure of quality of teaching, and they are both racist and sexist. I have refused for the past three years to summarize my student evaluations on those grounds; no one has said a thing about it, that I have to (even though it is required), but my AD does summarize it himself. And the tendency I have noticed is that if there is even ONE negative comment, it will become prominent in your evaluation, even if it can be demonstrated not to be true.
We are also being told that we need to be available to our students 24/7. Sleeping? Why would we need sleep? If our students are up at 2:00 in the morning, and need our help, we need to be there for them RIGHT AWAY. I have not taken that drastic step; I tell my students if they email me after 11:00 p.m. (I am very giving here; they shouldn’t be able to expect anything that late), don’t expect an answer until the next day. Since going to a multifactorial authorization system, I rarely even check my email at home any more. It’s too big a hassle.
I have ordered the book. Haidt’s article is excellent. I do not understand the desire to avoid the rough and tumble of ordinary life, or the desire not to hear ideas you dislike or simply disagree with. I have learned a lot from reading thinkers with whom I disagree, or whose ideas I profoundly dislike, and working out why I disagree with them, as well as the points on which I agree with them.
I get a newsletter from the Chronicle of Higher Education, and the newsletter sometimes talks about changes in the mission of college. They have a new report out, Building Tomorrow’s Workforce, which sounds of interest but costs more than I’m willing to spend. It is intended to help colleges further transform into job education institutions.
While I was looking for that report, I found this article (requires signing up): The Day the Purpose of College Changed. The date was Febuary 28, 1967, and after that date the purpose of going to college was to get a job. That date was when newly-elected California Governor Ronald Reagan issued directives regarding the state university system, including that taxpayers shouldn’t be “subsidizing intellectual curiosity”.