Still, it should come with a trigger warning for middle Americans of all nations. Evincing concern for student welfare, it might more aptly be called, The Kids Are Not Alright. Instead, they ground their critique of recent campus developments in cognitive behavioural therapy and ancient wisdom. There's no fulminating against political correctness (they largely approve of it).
But whereas Bloom trafficked in slashing polemic, authors Greg Lukianoff, chief executive of the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (FIRE) which is a kind of civil liberties advocacy group for professors and students, and New York University psychologist Jonathan Haidt are reluctant culture warriors. And not a few dancing bears stalk its pages. It didn't hurt that author Allan Bloom – egged on by University of Chicago colleague Saul Bellow who contributed the foreword – could turn a phrase, minting one of the more memorable descriptions of college leaders caving to bolshie student activists: "A few students discovered that pompous teachers who catechized them about academic freedom could, with a little shove, be made into dancing bears."īy design of its title and subject, The Coddling of the American Mind invites comparison with this near-namesake.
Published in 1987, The Closing of the American Mind was a recondite jeremiad against cultural relativism and declining academic standards – not the material of your average blockbuster. There's a running thread –"campus craziness" – devoted to them on conservative TV channel Fox News and they were the subject of a cantankerous bestseller credited with fomenting the US culture wars. Affronting popular sensibilities at taxpayers' expense, Leftist excesses on campus reliably inflame middle America.
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