Q: How does the creation of safe spaces and microaggressions detract from the focus on education in elite universities?
A: They detract from all education, not just at elite universities. Also, these speech restriction zones are not limited to elite universities
They detract in the exact same way that PG movies detract from any viewers ability to understand the actual depth and breadth of human activity. Imagine a university that is regulated only to cover PG material. It would then be, by definition, a middle school. It could only present Disney documentaries.
How about this: If you had the ability to change a university according to safe spaces and microaggressions, you could give an MPAA style rating to the degree program. Who would you hire to run your coffee shop? Sure, a PG-13 business degree, and you only give them PG-13 work. But they can’t handle more than $100 cash. Then they have to call the R rated manager, if a customer starts cursing.
The term we use is called ‘infantilization’. You treat adults like babies, then you’ll only get goo goo results.
Here’s your reference book.
The Coddling of the American Mind
Greg Lukianoff and Jonathan Haidt show how the new problems on campus have their origins in three terrible ideas that have become increasingly woven into American childhood and education.
Here’s my review from 2018.
The book is a long and sometimes tedious explanation of what we all know to be true - that undergraduates are slightly unhinged and that colleges treat them as a market, not as adults. A 10-30% minority of students who are willing to advocate for violent action against offensive speech have upset rationality on the American campus. iGen girls are committing suicide at an alarming rate due to the outsized influence of social media. Threats to liberty come from alt-right and Antifa activism and that college campuses overreact by creating speech codes, safe spaces and taking 'microaggression' seriously. The lack of political diversity in the professoriate threatens the capacity for institutional bias disconfirmation. The distortions of social justice premises of equality generate profound dislocations and moral hazard in Title IX implementation.
In the end, Haidt seems to be directing his primary admonishments to a generation of helicopter prone parents in the top (half) of socioeconomic class in hopes that the next crops of undergraduates have their heads screwed on straighter and so do not corrupt the reality of the mission of academia, which is the search for truth. He does so with care, rigor and the best intentions.
His description of 'safetyism' is fair but does not encompass the larger political narrative of what the Right has been calling the 'nanny state'. So he has limited the applicability of this term to academe, but it is part and parcel of a larger infantilization of Americans and the major political movements that seek to disable the individual. I am talking of course about abortion and gun control, two perennial issues in which partisans aim to remove responsible choice by legal fiat 'for their own good'. It seems to me that Haidt has sacrificed the greater argument for greater specificity and so it goes under 'whats wrong with these kids today'. But the enemy is us, and Haight leaves most of us off the hook.
I am fond of the book for its consistency in demonstrating the effects of acceptance of the 'three great untruths'. The truths they contradict are part of enduring human wisdom. We are thus simply left with using them to clean up the mess in American higher education and everywhere else foolishness reigns.
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Update April 2024
Things have gotten worse and haven’t quite turned the corner yet. My position has been mute for the most part but I’m settling on the following.
DEI is the institutionalization of infantilization and corporations and universities have overstepped their bounds by social engineering Progressive politics. It will destroy the Democrat party.
Inclusion is what we’ve always been about since the the passage of the Civil Rights Acts. Inclusion is non-discrimination. Nothing more and nothing less.
Diversity is intellectual confusion at best. Otherwise it is overdone marketing. Nobody actually desires diverse compliance with proven protocols. Furthermore unless you are a cabalist, you cannot actually predict where truly valuable new ideas are going to come from. In other words, there is nothing stopping any university or corporation from the discovery of every diverse idea in American society. Is it ideas, or ‘kinds’ of participants?
Equity is a socialist premise. I oppose it, not only for traditional anti-communist reasons, but for its Orwellian inversion of the public understanding and respect for equal opportunity and merit.
Pile on Equity
I’ve put up with Diversity since Hopwood. I don’t lose sleep over it. I think all of the boring, mediocre companies and colleges are up to their ears in it and know exactly how competitive they are. From my perspective they are exactly as competitive as UCLA with regard to a ridiculous amount of demand for the same level of supply. If class size ever mattered, then so does the number of undergraduate degrees. In other words good public universities are not competitive because they have improved their services, but because far more applicants are in their pools. It’s the exact same inflationary dynamic as real estate in Southern California. The competition for housing is fierce, not because the houses are better than they were 50 years ago; it’s just that everybody wants to be here in the same houses at the same beaches. California is hip deep in its historical laurels. We keep saying everybody is welcome, and they are. But something is broken.
The concept of Equity in the context of DEI of course does damage to merit. I say it presumes the succinct following axioms.
The weaker person is always the good guy.
Equality of opportunity is insufficient.
Equality of results is required.
A system that delivers equality but not equity is corrupt and must be questioned.
The decision to maintain any DEI program accepts those premises and will step away from them in due time if they intend to maintain standards of excellence. It is excellence itself which cannot abide such representational equity.
Yet I am concerned, I repeat, with the Orwellian effect on the social concept of equity even though I know no business will redefine what it means to their accounting operations and consequently to their balance sheets. There is no free lunch and no free equity.
It should go without saying but I’ll say it anyway. Equity is destructive of the presumption of previous excellence, which I say is not predictable in retrospect. That’s its historicist component. I clearly align with Popper.
Conclusion
So on the whole, I have absolutely no problem with inclusion. I’m all for it, always have been, always will be. This is civil liberty 101.
I expect the mediocre, the sloppy, and the cabalist cronies to do as much diversity as they possibly can to their own shameless and mendacious hearts content. Sucks to be them or dependent on them.
I detest the premises of ‘equity’ and pity the fools who fall for it. It is evil. Thus I find DEI to be essentially incoherent, sentimental and borderline subversive as it tries to co-opt the non-descrimination principles of 1964.
Love the image of the baby in the crib.