Michael? Peter. Have you read the Coddling of the American Mind? I have not because I'm a millennial and I can't handle challenging ideas.

Today we're talking about the Coddling of the American Mind, a book about campus culture by Jonathan Height and Greg Lukyanov.

Finally, a couple middle-aged men complaining about what the kids are doing. The bravery.

When I was doing background research for this book, I ended up becoming kind of fascinated with the origins of our modern campus culture discourse.

If you go through all the op-eds and think pieces, you can actually sort of see that at some point during the first half of 2015, there was a wave of writers suddenly talking about the hypersensitivity of college students.

There is a March 2015 New York Times article about safe spaces at Brown University that gets a ton of attention and we'll talk about it a bit later.

Vox publishes a piece titled, I'm a liberal professor and my liberal students terrify me. National Review publishes a piece comparing modern campus culture to both McCarthyism and the Salem Witch Trials.

Now we're talking. I love a good, the college students are snowflakes and that's why they're just like Hitler.

Hitler and the kids exaggerate. And you had Jonathan Shate writing a piece about the new political correctness for New York magazine.

I don't know that this was caused by anything as much as it's just sort of the momentum of the discourse, but it's probably worth noting that in January of 2015, the Charlie Hebdo shootings happen.

I don't want to get too aggressive with my causal diagnosis here, but I do wonder whether a discussion of free expression migrated into the realm of American campuses.

And that's sort of what made really made this take off or Peter, the college students are just terrible and we noticed.

So to give you a little taste of what this discourse was like at the time, I'm going to send you a bit from that Vox piece.

The piece is by a professor writing under the pseudonym Edward Schlosser. He is purportedly hiding his identity due to his fear of retaliation from students.

He writes about an incident where a student complained about a lecture of his in 2009.

And the student called him like a communist just based on some pretty bland liberal takes about the recession.

And he tells the story of how administrations sort of quickly realized that the complaint was bullshit.

They rolled their eyes a little bit and they disposed of it and that was that.

So now you can read this.

Okay, he says in 2015 such a complaint would not be delivered in such a fashion instead of focusing on the rightness or wrongness or even acceptability of the materials we reviewed in class.

The complaint would center solely on how my teaching affected the students emotional state.

And if I responded in any way other than apologizing and changing the materials we reviewed in class, professional consequences would likely follow.

...