Tuesday, August 18, 2015

"...desires for emotional protection from ideas that might offend them— trigger warnings, microaggressions, and the like—mimic certain cognitive disorders."

How Trigger Warnings Make College Students Helpless, Humorless, and Stupid - Hit & Run : Reason.com: "A similarly excellent, just-published companion article written by Foundation for Individual Rights in Education President Greg Lukianoff and psychologist Jonathan Haidt explores the trends that have normalized such a repressive intellectual environment for campus comedy. Students’ desires for emotional protection from ideas that might offend them—institutionalized as trigger warnings, microaggressions, and the like—mimic certain cognitive disorders, Lukianoff and Haidt claim. Vindictive protectiveness—their name for the new regime of speech-curtailing measures on campuses—leaves students unprepared for the real world and may actually worsen their social anxieties...

...vindictive protectiveness teaches students to think in a very different way. It prepares them poorly for professional life, which often demands intellectual engagement with people and ideas one might find uncongenial or wrong. The harm may be more immediate, too. A campus culture devoted to policing speech and punishing speakers is likely to engender patterns of thought that are surprisingly similar to those long identified by cognitive behavioral therapists as causes of depression and anxiety. The new protectiveness may be teaching students to think pathologically. Vindictive protectiveness hurts all students by depriving them of the considerable intellectual benefits of a campus that tolerates controversial speakers—from offensive comedians like Chris Rock to political extremists like Bill Ayers. It also hurts the faculty, who increasingly feel compelled to self-censor if they want to keep their jobs. But ultimately, vindictive protectiveness even harms the very people it is intended to protect—emotionally-fragile students—by teaching them unhealthy avoidance tactics."


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