Noah Berlatsky tore apart Haidt's book as it's basically regurgitating the usual old and already debunked talking points about free speech and college students:
Also the book includes more Charles Murray white-washing:
The Coddling of the American Mind: How Good Intentions and Bad Ideas Are Setting Up a Generation for Failure is, as you might expect from the title, a warning against coddling. It is also, somewhat contradictorily, a brief against direct action, and an argument for quietism. Greg Lukianoff, president of the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education, and Jonathan Haidt, a professor at New York University's Stern School of Business, claim that they want young people to be less constrained by political correctness and more committed to free speech. From the book, though, it seems clear that the authors want students not to speak up, but to sit down and shut up—or, if they must speak, to speak decorously, in ways that won't actually challenge or change institutions.
The authors' central thesis is, as they acknowledge, a familiar generational complaint: They worry that kids today lack gumption and spine. Young people no longer walk uphill both ways to school; they just sit in their rooms staring at their iPhones and occasionally virtue-signaling. Today's generation is swaddled in a cult of "safetyism." Young people, Haidt and Lukianoff assert, believe that "what doesn't kill you makes you weaker. So avoid pain, avoid discomfort, avoid all potentially bad experiences." Kids fear adversity, when they should embrace it.
The Coddling of the American Mind may claim to stand for bold new ideas, but it does not challenge the standard media narratives around free speech on campus. Much of Lukianoff and Haidt's narrative is a revisiting of the campus free speech debates that have long been popular fodder for writers at venues like the New York Times, Reason, and The Atlantic (where the essay that became Coddling first appeared). The University of California–Berkeley protests against Milo Yiannopoulos; the Middlebury College protests against Charles Murray; the backlash to Yale University lecturer Erika Christakis' Halloween letter; the ordeal of Laura Kipnis—each narrative has been immortalized in a hundred op-eds, so the book almost starts to feel like a party game. Bret Weinstein—drink!
Also the book includes more Charles Murray white-washing:
There's certainly a good case that student protesters have overreached and done harm in some instances. In the melee as student protesters demonstrated against Murray, one student pulled the hair of the professor who was supposed to interview Murray, giving the professor a concussion. Whether that incident is an example of student excessive fearfulness is perhaps an open question. But it's certainly ugly.
Haidt and Lukianoff forthrightly and reasonably condemn this violent attack. But they are less forthright in describing Murray's views. The authors say that students protested against Murray because he proposed "that differences in average IQ scores found across racial groups may not be caused entirely by environmental factors; genetic differences may play a role too." That's a deliberately euphemistic way of saying that Murray has made extremely tendentious arguments that black people are less intelligent than white people using evidence that has been widely discredited.
By soft-pedaling Murray's views, Lukianoff and Haidt avoid some uncomfortable questions. They present Murray as a reasonable scholar, rather than as a man peddling discredited race science. We can agree that protesters should not have assaulted a professor. But is protest itself wrong in this case? Are the university, the community, and the country really enriched by yet another "debate" about whether black people are fully human? Vocal protest, short of violence, is supposed to be protected in the constitution too. How can the authors assess whether protest is justified if they don't accurately explain what's at stake?
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