Students Seem Determined to Illustrate That ‘The Coddling of the American Mind’ Is Still Relevant

On June 14, Free Speech Advocate Greg Lukianoff, President of the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE) and co-author of “The Coddling of the American Mind” will be awarded an honorary degree by Dartmouth College.for his outsized impact on his field.

Lukianoff may have had a particularly positive impact on Dartmouth, itself. At number 35 in FIRE’s current rankings, Dartmouth College is the only school in the Ivy League to have earned FIRE’s “green light” rating — an impressive achievement after landing near the bottom (224 out of 257) in 2024. The school has now formally adopted institutional neutrality, eliminated anonymous “bias incident reporting” and performed particularly well on political tolerance.

Dartmouth still has work to do in improving its free speech culture. Matching the national average, seven out of 10 students refuse to endorse the idea that it is never acceptable to shout down a speaker, and five in 10 say there are instances when it is acceptable to block other students from attending a speech. Twenty percent of Dartmouth students even believe there are times when violence is acceptable to prevent a speaker from speaking. Remarkably this is better than the national average of 30%.

And representatives of Dartmouth’s LGBTQIA+ Alumni Association aren’t pleased that Lukianoff will receive the honor. In an article in the student newspaper, they took issue with his appearance on Megyn Kelly’s video podcast, during which he explained that people cannot legally be required to use preferred names or pronouns and described compelled speech as “totalitarian.” Demonstrating their failure to grasp the fundamentals of free speech, the students accused him of “threatening the free speech he claims to defend.”

They also objected to a tweet in which he noted that he had never seen anything “become as immediately radioactive as views that ran counter to the narrative on trans issues. Papers were retracted, compelled speech was treated as normal, and people were canceled for saying things that would have sounded like common sense just a few years earlier. It seemed to become a kind of secular blasphemy overnight. And usually, that is a sign that the true believers know, at some level, that they are on shaky ground.”

The article’s authors helpfully proved his points. “We believe Dartmouth should have disqualified Lukianoff from consideration for an honorary degree,” they wrote. They encourage attendees to turn their backs in protest as Lukianoff receives his honorary degree.

On X, Lukianoff wrote: “If students at Dartmouth want to engage in peaceful, nondisruptive protest during commencement, including symbolic acts like turning their backs, @theFIREorg and I would of course defend that right as we’ve done for thousands of students over our 25+ year existence.”

Meanwhile, in New York City, Jonathan Haidt, Lukianoff’s co-author of “The Coddling of the American Mind,” experienced his own cancelation attempt. In a Statement on All-University Commencement, The NYU Executive Committee of the Student Government Assembly expressed “profound disappointment” about his choice as Commencement speaker and asked the administration to “reconsider.”

“The pivot from figures of universal inspiration,” the students complained, “to an individual who has been accused of making homophobic remarks in a class and public misconceptions about transgender identity and has promoted disturbing rhetoric around antiracism, social justice and diversity, equity and inclusion, claiming that the abolition of DEI may be the only way out of the leftist ideological capture of American campuses, is deeply unsettling and clearly undermines the University’s stated values.”

As I wrote for RealClear Education:

Those accusations are deeply mistaken and profoundly misleading. The one accurate claim is that he did acknowledge that the abolition of DEI might be the only way for academia to correct course. So Haidt is clearly not an inspiring choice for students who are attached to that destructive paradigm.

But Haidt is nothing if not a figure of inspiration for parents, writers and budding social scientists. He has produced four bestsellers, of which three, including “The Coddling of the American Mind,” are global blockbusters. His latest, “The Anxious Generation,” has spent over a year on international bestseller lists, leading to not only parental and community efforts, but real policy changes to protect the mental health of children and adolescents.

This includes an initiative at NYU called “IRL” (In Real Life). As a result of Haidt’s work, designated spaces on campus are device-free to encourage face-to-face interaction and time away from the distractions of social media. The student statement, however, unironically asks whether the choice of Haidt was “yet another effort to push the IRL narrative.” At elite universities, where everything is “narrative,” even efforts to encourage friendships and immersive real life experiences can only be interpreted as an effort to push a narrative.

“Many students have reported feelings of disappointment, disgust, unenthusiasm, defeat and embarrassment” as well as “being misunderstood,” the statement reads. Awkward phrasing aside, at least these students didn’t insist that Haidt’s selection was “harmful.” When I worked with Greg Lukianoff and Haidt on “The Coddling of the American Mind,” attempts to disinvite and deplatform speakers were often framed as efforts to protect vulnerable students from the “harm” of speakers’ words — or even the speaker’s mere presence.

Psychologists at UCLA, Harvard and Ohio State have found that believing words can harm is associated with worse mental health: more anxiety and depression, less resilience and worse emotion regulation. And when students see words as violence, they can become willing to endorse actual violence in response to speech — or even to prevent it.

According to FIRE, Gen Z is roughly 10 times more accepting of using violence to prevent speech than Baby Boomers, and more than 25 times more than the Silent Generation. Roughly 43% of Gen Z survey participants refused to endorse the view that violence against speakers is never acceptable.

As of May 7, campus deplatforming attempts had surpassed 100 for the year, according to FIRE’s publicly accessible Campus Deplatforming Database. In the first quarter of 2026, reports FIRE’s Chief Research Advisor, Sean Stevens, 65 of 70 attempts succeeded.

While failed deplatforming attempts are bad enough, at least they “show that institutional safeguards are holding,” Stevens says. “A successful attempt signals that those safeguards are eroding. If nearly all deplatforming efforts are now succeeding, then the problem is not simply that controversial events are being challenged. The problem is that universities appear increasingly willing to fold under pressure.”

Protesting commencement speakers is hardly new. When I graduated from Barnard College in 1990, students at Wellesley College were “outraged” by the choice of their commencement speaker, Barbara Bush, because she wasn’t a career woman.

But when students of past generations tried to school their elders, their elders schooled them right back. Psychiatrist and author Jean Baker Miller called those students’ objections “simplistic.” Wellesley alumnae quipped that the class of 1990 had apparently not learned the school’s Latin motto: “non ministrari, sed ministrare,” not to be served, but to serve.

And the pushback wasn’t partisan. Feminist Pat Schroeder offered, “I have nothing but respect for Barbara Bush. … Being a wife and mother is not a protestable offense. After all, if it weren’t for mothers, there would be no students at Wellesley.” Mrs. Bush, always the soul of discretion, said simply, “They’re 21 years old and they’re looking at life from that perspective.”

Gen Z has been less fortunate. Instead of university administrators and other leaders asserting their authority, they have increasingly appeased and indulged students’ emotional instability, arrogance and even rule-breaking — including with respect to disruptions, harassment, threats, mobbings reminiscent of Maoist struggle-sessions and even violence. This is not beneficial for anyone, including those students who violate the boundaries of protected free expression.

Both Jonathan Haidt and Barbara Bush delivered their keynote addresses. Mrs. Bush’s is now included in NPR’s list of best commencement speeches of all time:

“As important as your obligations as a doctor, lawyer or business leader will be,” she said, “you are a human being first. And those human connections — with spouses, with children, with friends — are the most important investments you will ever make.”

That advice has never been more true or more necessary. And it’s not so different from the message NYU graduates heard from Haidt on Thursday. “Call someone you love just to say hi,” he told them, “Invite someone to dinner. Say yes when someone invites you. Be the one who makes things happen in the real world.” Hopefully, the graduating class learned something from him.

A social psychologist with a clinical background, Pamela Paresky, Ph.D. serves as an Associate at Harvard University in the Psychology Department, Senior Advisor to the Open Therapy Institute, Advisor to the Mindful Education Lab at NYU, and Senior Fellow at the Network Contagion Research Institute.