Mentally Pampering Students Analysis

As American universities and colleges grow their demographics, diversity and ideas there is a continued and an accelerated debate regarding freedom of speech within these higher education institutions. College campuses are struggling to simultaneously provide a learning environment that is inclusive to traditionally unrepresented students while also providing an environment that allows for ideas to be challenged and debated no matter how offensive or controversial.

It is made clear that college students are quick to form an opinion which doesn’t expand knowledge and can show unintelligence. Many people, more specifically protesters, believe one side and won’t open up and listen to the other side. Frank Bruni, an Op-Ed Columnist for the New York Times and the author of 3 New York Times best sellers in 2015, 2009, and 2002, tells us that the college protesters are wrong. His argument states that the college students need to be educated more on the whole subject because lacking education can essentially lead to being biased or sticking with the one side you believe in. The students were protesting a guest speaker, Charles Murray, who is identified as anti-gay, racist, and sexist. Although the guest speaker’s beliefs are terrible, the students should hear what he has to say. Frank Bruni’s “The Dangerous Saftey of College” presents an effective logical appeal; however, it lacks clear and concise evidence along with not presenting an emotional appeal to connect with the audience.

Colleges and universities are places of higher education and learning. Part of this learning comes from listening and understanding opposite views from your own. Positively, these zones have allowed students to avoid any ideas they may not want to hear; however, avoidance is not the way around life. Another positive outcome of free speech on campuses is that students are able to bind together

In the article “Trigger Warnings, Safe Spaces and Free Speech, too” published in the New York Times by Sophie Downes, Downes argues in response to a letter sent out by the dean of the University of Chicago. The letter states that safe spaces and trigger warnings were an issue deterring students from having free speech and therefore would not be supported on the Chicago campus anymore. Downes argues that the letter was just a poor attempt to advert attention away from the real issues on the campus—ones that the dean will not meet with student council about and will not talk about at all. Sophie Downes argues that safe spaces and trigger warnings actually encourage free space and enhance support and community—two values that the dean said were deterred by the existence of them.

It is always important to think back to the Buddhist and Stoic beliefs about thinking clearly and working through emotions (Lukianoff and Haidt 6). The college students mentioned in “The Coddling of the American Mind,” need to learn these crucial principles in order to live a life where they can positively overcome discomfort and offendedness. People need not be punished for causing minor emotional inconveniences. Once cognitive

“A movement is arising, undirected and driven largely by students, to scrub campuses clean of words, ideas, and subjects that might cause discomfort or give offense” (Lukianoff and Haidt 44). Colleges are sheltering their students from words and ideas that students do not like or are found to be offensive. Affecting their education and cognitive skills, scientists are warning colleges to refrain from coddling the students and allowing other viewpoints to be spoken. People are speaking their minds, saying their own views; however, some people are over sensitive and take these viewpoints offensively. In the article “The Coddling of the American Mind,” Greg Lukianoff and Jonathan Haidt successfully argues using rhetorical questions, specific examples, and affective visuals that protecting college students from words and ideas deteriorates their education and mental health.

“Over the years, courts have ruled that college officials may set up reasonable rules to regulate the ‘time, place and manner” that the free speech can occur, as long as the rules are “content neutral,’ meaning they apply equally to all sides of issues” (Fisher, 2008). Speech codes and free speech zones on campus do exist for many reasons: many of the causes or topics that students or others looking to interact with students take up are controversial and can frequently take on less of an academic or social justice overtone and more of a hateful one. Hate speech is the greatest threat to freedom of speech on college campuses, and the limitations colleges and universities put on student’s verbal freedoms are largely in place as efforts to avoid it. Religion, in particular, is a hot topic on campuses and it has an unfortunate tendency to become more aggressive and argumentative than universities would like. However, under the First Amendment, individuals do have a right to speech that the listener disagrees with and to speech that is offensive and hateful. It’s always easier to defend someone’s right to say something with which you agree. But in a free society, you also have a duty to defend speech to which you may strongly object.

Trigger words are common-throughout anyone’s daily life. Imagine this, an elderly women loses her husband of fifty years. The man kept a four leaf clover in his pocket at all times for good luck. Did the world completely eliminate four leaf clovers from the world to accommodate her loss? No, not at all— the elderly women had to mentally prepare herself to handle the mental distress that could come. Greg Lukianoff and Jonathan Haidt in wrote an article in September of 2015 titled, “The Coddling of the American Mind.” This article covers overall mental health mostly in American college students. The students demand security from words and ideas that are uncomfortable in the learning environment. Lukianoff and Haidt cover every aspect concerning the views through the students, therapist, professors, and even the general public. There is a serious epidemic of micro-aggressions, trigger words, and an over-use of vindictive protectiveness. The two author’s ideals stated within are realistic, however, getting to the conclusion is a bit hectic and spastically placed throughout.

Sally attended Joliet Junior College and took a general psychology class. One day when she attended her psychology class, her professor warned students of a topic that there were going to talk about in class which was how abuse can damage an individual’s mental state. Sally has been through abuse in her past and is uncomfortable with that certain topic, so she left class because she was alerted to the topic. Ultimately, she didn’t want to revisit her past of abuse. This is considered a trigger warning, in which professors give a warning about topics that they will discuss that can lead to some sort of discomfort for students. Trigger warnings are used on campuses that are considered a safe space. The term safe space is defined as an environment where students can feel like themselves and are not exposed to any harm physically or mentally (Google). Various of colleges/universities have safe spaces so that their students don’t have to go through discrimination of sorts or any harm. Safe spaces are good for students, but there are negative outcomes from it, such as it doesn’t let individuals who suffer and have trauma cope with what happened to them. Even though are negative outcomes from safe spaces, there are positive results that impact Millennials such as a decrease in anxiety and prevention of hate speech.

Cognitive distortions are said to be the ways in which our brain convinces us of something that is not true. College students experience cognitive distortions more often than none. The cognitive distortions in which college students experience would include the feeling of being a failure per not doing as well as you thought you did on a test, the rules we mentally make for ourselves, or negative global labeling. Cognitive distortions are believed to make us believe that information presented to us is rational and accurate when its goal is to make us continue to feel bad about ourselves. In the article, “The coddling of the American mind”, the authors, Greg Lukianoff and Jonathan Haidt examines what they believe in the fact that professors are protecting students’ minds through warnings of offensive materials, which they believe encourages students to believe that it is damaging and dangerous to discuss certain aspects of our history (2015). College students endure these and many other cognitive distortions, but we are often made to believe that these distortions are acceptable simply because students’ minds are allowed to become more open to new ideas and new people due to the toning down of the perceptual state of mind to outrage and discomfort (Lukianoff & Haidt, 2015).

Throughout the past few years people have started to become more cautious of what they say and do in public because everyone reacts differently to all kinds of things and it is not hard to offend someone. In the essay “Coddling of the American Mind” by Greg Lukianoff and Jonathan Haidt, they discuss the rise of microaggression, which fosters a culture where young adults are sheltered from concepts that give offense. They focus on the idea of removing offensive words, ideas, and subjects from college campuses because they believe it is disastrous to protect the words and ideas that may cause “microaggression” from college students. In order to persuade the readers that colleges are distorting and coddling the minds of their students, Lukianoff and Haidt use modes of persuasion, examples, and definitions.

In the article “Universities are Right to Crack Down on Speech and Behavior,” Eric Posner uses science, logic, reason, and morality to challenge the idea that college students are mature young adults who deserve the right to control their own behavior and to exercise unfettered free speech on campus. Furthermore, Posner contends that speech and sex codes have not always been lax but they changed drastically in the 1960s in response to the circumstances of the era. Consequently, the changes have brought about unwelcome freedoms that students themselves are currently rejecting. According to Posner, both parents and students agree that it’s time to for college administrators to resume a more conventional role in managing the speech and behavior

In his editorial, “The Year of the Imaginary College Student,” Hua Hsu asserts that “alarm about offense-seeking college students say[s] more about critics than the actual state of affairs.” Hsu begins his article by discussing James O’Keefe’s attempt at Vassar College to depict that college students are as politically sensitive as they appear. He goes on to demonstrate that college students are getting increasingly more “hypersensitive.” Hsu then questions the “surge of interest in campus life,” wondering why people who are not in college are questioning the behavior of those in college. Next, Hsu states that this panic about “offense-seeking college students” says more about the people criticizing rather than the system. Elucidating, he

After the authors debunked Barrett’s claims, they touch on one of their previous essays they wrote where they touched on schools needing safeguards or safe spaces from micro-aggression and triggering situations. These situations have been linked with anxiety, depression and this has been supported by the multiple protests that have taken place at many universities arguing this topic. Students were protesting to having these

Over the course of this semester, I have had the opportunity to learn about educational psychology. I have always enjoyed psychology and was especially interested in how it applied to teaching in the classroom. There were five specific concepts we discussed over the semester that especially interested me. I found that homogenous and heterogeneous grouping, extrinsic and intrinsic motivation, operant conditioning, cooperative learning, and divergent versus convergent thinking are five psychological concepts that every teacher should learn about in preparation for teaching.