Tellingly, the cohort that most exhibits these symptoms are not millennials but “iGen”—people born from the late 1990s, who grew up with Facebook and Twitter and began to matriculate in 2013. They also reached adulthood in an atmosphere of political rancour, in which partisan allegiance was increasingly determined by shared enmities rather than values…

The Coddling of the American Mind: How Good Intentions and Bad Ideas are Setting Up a Generation for Failure. By Greg Lukianoff and Jonathan Haidt. Penguin Press; 352 pages; $28. Allen Lane

After John McCain died, a clip from his run for the presidency in 2008 resurfaced on social media. “No, ma’am,” he tells a woman at a rally who describes Barack Obama as “an Arab” who can’t be trusted; “he’s a decent family man, a citizen.” To many observers, the incident epitomised McCain’s integrity. A few heard something different—an implication, in that “No, ma’am”, that Arabs and good family men were mutually exclusive categories. Rather than exhibiting a now-antiquated bipartisan civility, McCain had betrayed his unconscious prejudice.

That response encapsulates some of the disturbing intellectual trends chronicled in “The Coddling of the American Mind”: a willingness, even eagerness, to take offence; a determination to interpret other people’s words as bleakly as possible, regardless of intent; and a Manichean world view in which a political opponent must always be wrong. On the contrary, plead Jonathan Haidt and Greg Lukianoff, “A faux pas does not make someone an evil person.” Along with other shibboleths that have taken root in American universities—and spread beyond them, and beyond America—this kind of hypersensitivity closes down debate, the authors say. It also leaves young people ill-equipped for life’s inevitable frictions.

Their book grew out of an article in the Atlantic in 2015. As they point out, the sort of shenanigans that concerned them then, such as the rise of “trigger warnings” and “micro-aggressions” and the hounding of teachers for imaginary thought-crimes, have multiplied and worsened. In “The Coddling” they narrate a few of these rumpuses, such as the riot over a visiting speaker at the University of California at Berkeley in 2017, and what, in effect, was a student coup at Evergreen State College in Washington in the same year. Staff who should have known better have sometimes been complicit in the mayhem.

For all these lurid episodes, though, the big problem on many campuses is less vigilantism than self-censorship. As the authors note, “students at many colleges today are walking on eggshells”. The main victims, they emphasise, are not disinvited speakers but the agitators themselves, whom they see as worryingly fragile and confused. Just as many Americans describe commercial wants as needs (“I need a Coke”), so too many students mix up the concepts of safety (which it is the authorities’ job to ensure) with emotional comfort (which is nobody’s look-out). They construe objectionable opinions as invalid, even as a form of violence. They are prone to “catastrophising”, or interpreting as disastrous what is merely undesirable.

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