Jon Haidt on The Coddling of the American Mind and How We Should Address It

The suppression of free speech on college campuses isn’t a new thing, says Jon Haidt, social psychologist at New York University Stern School of Business. In the past, however, it seems to have been guided mostly by the professoriate and administrations rather than the students.


Subscribe to our YouTube channel: http://youtube.com/reasontv
Like us on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/Reason.Magazine/
Follow us on Twitter: https://twitter.com/reason
Subscribe to our podcast at iTunes: https://goo.gl/az3a7a


Haidt says student-driven speech suppression is a relatively new phenomenon. “It was after the Yale protests that everything really spread,” Haidt says, “and that was only thirteen or fourteen months ago.”

According to Haidt, one of the root causes of the shift toward a leftist academia was the Baby Boomers who rushed to avoid the Vietnam war. However, the ideas behind PC and microaggressions didn’t catch on for several decades. “The thing people were not expecting, was that the students are the ones who are demanding political correctness now,” Haidt says. “Before, it was typically the students who were demanding more freedom.”

This can have a chilling effect on discourse at universities, Haidt says. “At some schools, the men feel they can’t speak and then they go and vote for Trump.”

Reason TV's Nick Gillespie sat down with Haidt at the International Students for Liberty Conference to discuss the rise of political correctness and the cultural implications it brings with it.

Produced by Mark McDaniel. Cameras by McDaniel, Joshua Swain, and Todd Krainin. Graphics by Meredith Bragg.