Have American College Campuses Finally Gone Bonkers?

As a mental health professional, people sometimes will ask me, “Am I crazy?”

My reply usually goes like this: “If you were truly crazy, you wouldn’t possess the objectivity and rationality required to ask the question.”

It’s the truth.

But what happens when a person, or a group of people in society, begin to say and do almost self-evidently irrational things — and not only believe they’re sane, but think they’re enlightened and beyond reproach?

That’s a whole different scenario.

Consider academia, 2015.

Example: In April, at Brandeis University, the Asian American student association sought to raise awareness of microaggressions against Asians through an installation on the steps of an academic hall. The installation gave examples of microaggressions such as “Aren’t you supposed to be good at math?” and “I’m colorblind! I don’t see race.” But a backlash arose among other Asian American students, who felt that the display itself was a microaggression. The association removed the installation, and its president wrote an e-mail to the entire student body apologizing to anyone who was “triggered or hurt by the content of the microaggressions.”

During the 2014–15 school year, for instance, the deans and department chairs at the 10 University of California system schools were presented by administrators at faculty leader-training sessions with examples of microaggressions. The list of offensive statements included: “America is the land of opportunity” and “I believe the most qualified person should get the job.”

Trigger warnings are alerts that professors are expected to issue if something in a course might cause a strong emotional response. For example, some students have called for warnings that Chinua Achebe’s “Things Fall Apart” describes racial violence and that F. Scott Fitzgerald’s “The Great Gatsby” portrays misogyny and physical abuse, so that students who have been previously victimized by racism or domestic violence can choose to avoid these works, which they believe might “trigger” a recurrence of past trauma.

If these trends do not represent madness and insanity, then there’s no such thing as madness and insanity.

Typically, insanity refers to the presence of sensory hallucinations and/or cognitive delusions. Delusions are false ideas — false, not due to honest ignorance or lack of facts or honest errors in reasoning, but false beliefs grounded in arbitrary feelings incapable of being supported by facts or reason. A delusional person, in fact, either is unconcerned with objective reality, or outright rejects its existence.

As the article astutely points out:

There’s a saying common in education circles: Don’t teach students what to think; teach them how to think. The idea goes back at least as far as Socrates. Today, what we call the Socratic method is a way of teaching that fosters critical thinking, in part by encouraging students to question their own unexamined beliefs, as well as the received wisdom of those around them. Such questioning sometimes leads to discomfort, and even to anger, on the way to understanding.  [Source: The Atlantic, September 2015, “The Coddling of the American Mind” Greg Lukianoff and Jonathan Haidt]

If these professors and university administrators attended the equivalent of sessions with a cognitive-behavioral psychotherapist or psychologist, the therapist would say things like: “You’re trying to anticipate and control the emotional reactions of others. That’s a mistake. You’re overfunctioning. You cannot control or be responsible for the feelings of others. Their feelings are the result of their own assumptions, beliefs and thinking. You’re only responsible for, and capable of controlling, your own thinking and actions. Of course, do not say anything deliberately hurtful or harmful or nasty to your students. Why would you want to do so, if they’re important to you? But you cannot, at the same time, possibly anticipate every small thing that might offend any one of them.”

Something is deeply wrong in any atmosphere — academic, business, marital, family, or anywhere else — where people expect themselves or others never to offend. While in most cases such concerns indicate dysfunction, in these university settings what we’re finding is outright delusional.

We’re not talking about “hypersensitivity” here, or even political correctness. It has gone way beyond that. The dominant ideological attitude on most college campuses today might be termed postmodernism. Essentially, postmodernism is a form of subjectivism where truth is considered to reside not in objective reality, but in feelings and consensus as identified by groups. Some call this social subjectivism, and it arises (ultimately) from the teachings of influential philosopher Immanuel Kant.

According to the Kantian/postmodern psychology of social subjectivism, it’s crucially important to care about what others think, because consensus and group identity/reality (by postmodern philosophy) determine what’s true and what’s right. As a result of this insane and inaccurate philosophy, you find all these psychopathological tendencies to obsess on not harming the feelings of others, such as “microaggression”, “microracism” and “trigger warnings,” as well as not being seen as harming the feelings of others. Why? Because the group consensus (and perceived group disapproval) would be the kiss of death, not just psychologically, but financially and to one’s professional standing. If you commit these indefinable yet socially constructed offenses against individuals deemed members of victim groups by the group consensus, then you’re out.

It’s truly madness.

You might think that abstract ideas in philosophy (or even psychology) have little relevance to daily life, or the wider society. But if you agree that our social and cultural/political institutions appear to be going mad, then look at where most of these trends start: American campuses. Keep in mind that most of our high level political and government officials (including the current president) are the ones who have succeeded in such crazy environments. What does this say about them?

Not all students or teachers are insane. In fact, most of them are not. But the proliferation of irrational ideas in philosophy, and related fields, have a way of working themselves into campus policies and practices, as well as the mindset of the students.

Campuses are going bonkers, because the idea of objective reasoning — the only means of figuring out objective reality, both in the biological sciences and the humanities such as philosophy, psychology and so forth — are going out the window.

How to reform? A start would be to immediately defund all colleges, and make them compete on their own in a free, unencumbered marketplace. Imagine how long such toxic folly as “microaggression” would sell if colleges could not rely on government grants, funds or indirect subsidies such as student loans guaranteed by the government. The end of higher education as we know it could mean the beginning of real education.

Psychologically and morally, an individual deteriorates from the mind down. Toxic ideas ultimately lead to unhealthy emotions and irrational behaviors. Only by identifying the erroneous, absurd or untenable ideas and beliefs can the irrational or problematic feelings and behaviors change.

The same is true for a society. The “head” of the society is academia. Look at what’s happening in that head, and ask yourself how much longer we can expect all of this to continue.