TOW #3: The Coddling of the American Mind

The Coddling of the American Mind is an article written for the magazine The Atlantic by Greg Lukianoff and Jonathan Haidt. The article comprehensively describes and analyzes what the authors believe is a growing problem within the United State's collegiate academia: overwhelming hypersensitivity to "microagressions". The authors define microagressions as "anything that can be perceived as discriminatory on virtually any basis" and use common psychological theories to describe how the overzealous condemnation of people for committing microagressions has created a toxic environment within America's universities. The author's establish their credibility early on, describing themselves as "a constitutional lawyer and the president and CEO of the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education, which defends free speech and academic freedom on campus, and has advocated for students and faculty involved in many of the incidents this article describes; [and] a social psychologist who studies the American culture wars". The authors wrote this essay, the cover story for the September 2015 issue of The Atlantic, in response to growing polarization on college campuses as college students accuse fellow students and faculty of minuscule microagressions, such as one case at UCLA where students staged a protest against a professor after he told a student to uncapitalize the word "indigenous" (the student said it offended their ideology). Throughout the text, the authors appeal to logos within the audience (the American public and more specifically college communities) through expertly applying the rhetorical modes of cause and effect and definition. They start each section by defining a term such as trigger warnings, microagression, labeling, and magnification, and then exploring how each term factors into the culture of offense within college circles. This helps appeal to logos as the reader follows a cohesive and reasonable breakdown of the psychological and mental causes for the new trend. For example, the authors define "trigger warnings" by characterizing them as "The idea that words (or smells or any sensory input) can trigger searing memories of past trauma—and intense fear that it may be repeated" and then describing how this has affected the recent college culture by saying "explicit trigger warnings are believed to have originated much more recently, on message boards in the early days of the Internet [...] Search-engine trends indicate that the phrase broke into mainstream use online around 2011, spiked in 2014, and reached an all-time high in 2015. The use of trigger warnings on campus appears to have followed a similar trajectory; seemingly overnight, students at universities across the country have begun demanding that their professors issue warnings before covering material that might evoke a negative emotional response". Through this use of definition and cause-and-effect, the authors effectively appeal to the reader's sense of logos, thus achieiving their purpose of showing the reader how excessive coddling and hypersensitivity in universities is detrimentally affecting the academic freedoms and mental health of students.