On “The Coddling of the American Mind”

So I think I’m ready to write about why I disagree with the Sept. 2015 Atlantic cover story, “The Coddling of the American Mind.”

The authors, both university professors, claim that requests for “trigger warnings”–that is, warnings about content that may link to students’ own traumatic experiences, such as sexual violence or racism–on university course material is infantilizing and intellectually stifling. They suggest that a key part of post-secondary education is facing ideas one doesn’t like, and, furthermore, that protecting students from reminders of trauma is actually bad for them–they need exposure to upsetting stimuli to break free of their psychological power. The authors link higher rates of mental health issues to what they see as a desire to shield students from anything that might offend or bother them.

A companion article also expresses the authors’ feeling of being arbitrarily punished: they complain that students’ teaching evaluations, over which they have no power, unduly influence their careers. They describe situations in which students complain in the evaluations rather than bring up the issue with the instructor–such as one student who criticized one of the authors for using classic paintings featuring naked female bodies to illustrate an unrelated point.

As a university instructor myself*, I couldn’t disagree more.

Well, I guess I could: I don’t disagree about everything. Yes, teaching evaluations are a poor tool for assessing instructors. Yes, it can be a scary and deeply upsetting experience when a student expresses discomfort at biases in your teaching. Yes, people sometimes need to face ideas they don’t like, and learning to do so is an important part of intellectual life.

But the rest of it? A familiar refrain: the old system was designed assuming that everyone was pretty much like me. Since I am pretty much like me, I was a fish in the water–I never noticed that the environment might unfairly punish others, because, to me, it’s as natural as breathing. And for that reason, it’s easy to conflate the merits of current practice with keeping everything in favour of people like me.

It’s an open secret that the academic environment is more white, more middle/upper-class, more male than the population as a whole. Thankfully, at least at the university where I work, our students often are not.

Likewise, although the world is slowly changing to accept that mental health is as important as physical health and just as much out of individuals’ control, the dominant model in academia–the model anyone who is currently a professor studied with–is that students should suck it up and deal with their issues on their own.

Look, being uncomfortable is sometimes a valuable learning or aesthetic experience. But let me put it plainly: there is a difference between being uncomfortable because you disagree with an opinion (like me reading this article) and being uncomfortable because you fear for your safety, mental or physical.

To use the same analogy as Teller in his discussion of education: great magic and great teaching both make you uncomfortable. But there’s a difference between being uncomfortable the way he describes, because the performers push the edge of what’s possible or what’s beautiful or what’s intriguing–or because you don’t know what’s going to happen next–and feeling uncomfortable because you are the only woman at this meeting of male magicians, and one of them feels entitled to your attention, and none of the others stops him.

Or because you’re a racialized person, and the white magician onstage is twisting your culture, the life you live each day, as a theme to make this act feel strange and mysterious for other white people, who, surprise, make up most of the audience.

Or because the person doing card manipulations makes an off-hand joke about being “crazy,” drawing on stereotypes of anxiety or OCD that stifle your career and relationships, unfair judgements you face every single moment you are alive and in public, but if you don’t find it funny, everyone else will get mad at you.

Magic is great–I wrote my doctoral dissertation on it. A lot of traditional academic subjects, like Shakespeare’s The Merchant of Venice and the female nude in art and psychological theories are also great.

But just because they have value doesn’t mean we can teach them without questioning where they came from and who got to decide they were great.

For example, I teach business communication. I’m very aware that the grammar and rhetorical styles I teach come from a set of specific cultural norms–those enforced by Anglo-Saxon, white Westerners, the demographic with the most power in North America.

Some of what I teach students to do is extremely rude in other cultures. Some of it is the exact opposite of the writing styles some students have learned their entire lives. Some of it discourages marginalized groups’ ways of using language in order to help them successfully communicate with the privileged groups in power. I have to be mindful that I’m not teaching what’s objectively right; I’m teaching a particular writing style that may be useful to my students in their professional lives under specific circumstances.

Likewise, sure, it’s important to study works like Uncle Tom’s Cabin or medical theories that focus on doctor-perspective pathologies without integrating patients’ experiences. But there is a difference between something being important because one group of people have identified how great it is and something being important because one group of people, implicitly better than everyone else, is the only group qualified to decide what’s objectively the best.

So I definitely disagree with the idea that all types of discomfort are pedagogically acceptable. But what about the worry that instructors may be unfairly penalized for causing this discomfort without intention? What about students’ criticisms on course surveys or complaints to the administrator?

Well, let me be clear: as the instructor, I have the power in the classroom.

Yes, negative evaluations affect me, but you know what? I am a contract employee–my job gets renewed each semester, or not. According to the terms of my employment, I don’t have job security. And although it’s possible I may be out of the loop, I still don’t know of anybody in my department, where at least a dozen faculty are contract workers like me, who’s been fired or demoted for negative student evaluations.**

However, I’m pretty sure that, if I wanted to, given my position, I could hurt a student’s life in a dozen tangible ways. Based on the grades I give, students can maintain or lose scholarships, fail out of the (mandatory) course or pass, have to pay thousands of dollars to take another term of school or not. A student who does poorly might get kicked out of their program of study, barring them from the career they’ve chosen.

More immediately, the way I behave in class tells all my students what behaviour and attitudes the university will tolerate: through the words I choose, I can tell a student that they are worthless, that they are less than a person, and that other people should treat them as a joke. And unlike the actions of their peers, mine have the full implied weight of the academic apparatus behind them.

Basically, as in all cases of privilege, having power may be tough, but not having power is way, way tougher. Part of my job as a professor is to remember that, and to do my best to use the authority I have for good: to teach students what they need to help them succeed and to make sure nobody in my classroom fears for their wellbeing, mental or physical, because I decided that my own intellectual comfort was more important.

So, bluntly, no, most students are not asking for professors not to teach certain subjects so it doesn’t hurt their feelings. They are asking for professors not to be assholes who assume that they know what’s best for human beings whose lives may be completely different from their own.

* As always, I write on behalf of myself only, not my colleagues, employer, or institution. Any opinions expressed are mine and mine alone.

** I don’t mean to imply that my department ignores student complaints; it definitely doesn’t. Obviously, if there were a pattern of student complaints or the complaint were about something inexcusable, job loss might be an appropriate consequence. But my department’s response is constructive, not destructive. When it can, it fixes the problem rather than abandoning its investment in either students or faculty.