Analysis Of Greg Lukianoff And Haidt's The Coddling Of The American Mind

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Recommended: Trigger warnings, safe spaces and free speech

Throughout America, people place a high value in their freedom of speech. This right is protected by the first Amendment and practiced in communities throughout the country. However, a movement has recently gained momentum on college campuses calling for protection from words and ideas that may cause emotional discomfort. This movement is driven mainly by students who demand that speech be strictly monitored and punishments inflicted on individuals who cause even accidental offense. Greg Lukianoff and Johnathan Haidt discuss how this new trend affects the students mentally and socially in their article The Coddling of the American Mind published in The Atlantic Monthly. Lukianoff and Haidt mostly use logical reasoning and references to …show more content…

First, they explain cognitive behavior therapy and use the “mental distortions” identified by it to describe what’s happening in colleges. Then, they claim that emotional reasoning, allowing your emotions to color how you perceive reality, is prevalent in many campuses and is viewed as legitimate reasoning. They support this claim be providing examples, one of which is about a student who was found guilty of racial harassment for reading a book whose cover offended at least one other student. Then, they mention how a Hump Day event, which had camel petting motivated by a popular TV commercial, was cancelled for supposedly being offensive to people from the Middle East …show more content…

First they explain how students have recently started expecting that their professors publish trigger warnings, alerts that students expect with anything that may cause distress, in the name of protecting students who may be reminded of trauma by being exposed to certain topics. While proving the fallacies in the concept of trigger warnings, Lukianoff and Haidt quote Harvard professor, Jeannie Suk 's essay about teaching rape law when students are determined to have protection from unpleasant ideas and demand trigger warnings. She says it is like trying to teach “a medical student who is training to be a surgeon but who fears that he 'll become distressed at the sight of blood (48).” This shows how the students’ desire for protection cause difficulties in teaching for

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