David Michael Miller
Every September, more than 40,000 students arrive at the UW-Madison campus to begin a new school year. They’re almost certainly excited and hopeful about what the next year will bring, but these are strange times at many American universities, including the UW.
This subject is explored in depth in the current cover story of The Atlantic magazine, “The Coddling of the American Mind,” by Greg Lukianoff and Jonathan Heidt. Every incoming UW freshman should print this article out and keep it in a convenient place for the next four years. It provides a road map for detecting, and overcoming, the most pernicious intellectual influences currently afflicting American colleges.
The authors argue that current efforts to “scrub campuses clean of words, ideas and subjects that might cause discomfort or give offense” are not only incompatible with the core mission of the university, they’re actually “likely to engender patterns of thought that are surprisingly similar to those long identified...as causes of depression and anxiety.” Excessive attention to “micro-aggressions” and “trigger warnings” of potentially controversial material "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.”
Among the worst of these cognitive pathologies is emotional reasoning, or letting “your feelings guide your interpretation of reality.” Emotional reasoning is essentially the opposite of critical thinking, or learning to reason clearly, critically and dispassionately about objective reality. By putting the individual’s subjective reaction front and center, emotional reasoning encourages feeling at the expense of thinking. A primary and exaggerated emphasis on feeling leads naturally to the “hypersensitivity” described by Lukianoff and Heidt. It can also lead people generally astray since “subjective feelings are not always trustworthy guides” to what is real.
No one should be coming to the UW to learn how to feel rather than think, and in my opinion nothing develops critical thinking skills better than directly engaging with what Matthew Arnold called “the best which has been thought and said” in human history. Unfortunately, this is another area where the UW falls short. Based on my experience attending and teaching at the UW, and subsequently employing dozens of UW students in intern positions, it’s clear that an overwhelming majority of students never have to study Plato, Augustine, Aquinas, Locke, Rousseau, de Tocqueville or Marx (directly, not filtered through the Frankfurt School) while earning their undergraduate degree. This is a travesty, since no one is truly educated until he or she has read these and other seminal figures in Western civilization. Examining superior minds as they grapple with eternal human questions is an exercise in and demonstration of advanced critical thinking. It’s also necessary for understanding the world we live in, since these individuals’ thoughts have shaped this world for good (Locke) or ill (Marx).
Of course, attending college is not a purely abstract intellectual activity. People come to the UW for more practical reasons as well, like developing employable skills that lead to a satisfying and (for many) remunerative career. But critical thinking is essential to success in almost any career, and developing the ability to think and communicate clearly will pay enormous dividends down the road.
Focusing the university’s mission on thought rather than feelings also doesn’t diminish the emotional richness of the college experience. There are still enormous opportunities to make lifelong friendships, be active in the university and broader community, see Big Ten football and basketball, drink too much on occasion, and possibly fall in love. All of this makes the college years a once-in-a-lifetime and sometimes life-changing experience that nearly everyone remembers fondly.
But college also provides students a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to develop their mental faculties and be exposed to the best in thought and literature. Ideally this will ignite a lifelong passion for learning, but, realistically, most people get only one shot to tackle the really heavy stuff. If you don’t read The Nicomachean Ethics in college, the odds are very slim you’ll suddenly decide to do so 20 years later after a hard day at the office.
So kudos to Lukianoff and Heidt, who have provided a valuable service to the 40,000 plus UW students just beginning classes. Their article provides a compact but powerful explanation of how the academy is losing its way and may even be teaching unhealthy mental habits. There’s still much potential value in a UW education, but students have to be careful and discerning. My advice: Avoid trendy sophistry (including anything with even a whiff of postmodernism), and seek out a wide variety of diverse authors whose work has stood the test of time.
Larry Kaufmann is a Madison-based economic consultant.
