Radio 4 Start the Week 'Safe spaces and snowflakes' interesting nuanced discussion Jonathan Haidt, Olivia Sudjic, Yasmin Alibhai-Brown and Mark Ravenhill with Amol Rajan

[R0wantrees]

On now.

Only caught part of it at the beginning but thought it was very interesting. It made a lot of sense to me. I’m on my way out now so couldn’t listen to it all - did they come up with any ideas as to how to overcome the difficulties with people who can’t cope with anyone disagreeing with them?

Policy Exchange has some excellent events in London this week but a couple of the interesting ones (one of which features Haidt) will be live streamed on FB and later available on YouTube.

policyexchange.org.uk/pxevents/is-there-an-ideological-monoculture-at-british-universities-and-does-it-matter/

Yasmin Alibhai-Brown said she wouldn't talk about transgender issues because she was frightened. Doesn't seem to be mentioning that in this programme.

I shall listen to it on IPlayer or whatever it's called now.

Saw an explanation for "snowflake" behaviour in an article which blamed the "sticker" and "star of the week" culture: current 20-somethings are the product of being over praised and told they were great at everything, could achieve anything they wanted and that everything they said was valid.

Of course you shouldn't ever stamp on someone's dreams, but I've seen with my own dcs this school culture of "Great point!" "Fantastic idea!" "Super drawing!" for every single thing no matter how bad or worse, however little effort has been applied.

As for Safe Spaces, who dreamed this up? Trigger warnings about works of literature, indeed.

Text for above Policy Exchange event.

Jonathan Haidt, one of the western world’s most important social psychologists and public intellectuals, will be launching his book The Coddling of the American Mind (co-written with Greg Lukianoff) at Policy Exchange on Thursday evening November 22nd.
The book is an investigation into the new safety culture in US universities and the dangers it poses to free speech, mental health, education and ultimately democracy itself. The book challenges three great “untruths” that characterise the safety culture: What doesn’t kill you makes you weaker; always trust your feelings; life is a battle between good people and evil people.
The Policy Exchange event will consider the extent to which these American trends have crossed the Atlantic and if so, whether they should be combatted. Does Britain need a local version of the Heterodox Academy, the organisation founded by Haidt to monitor and lobby against the intellectual monoculture in the humanities and social sciences?
Joining Haidt on the panel will be Eric Kaufmann, Professor of Political Science at Birkbkeck, whose latest book Whiteshift on the decline of white majorities has been the subject of heated debate; Joanna Williams, Head of Education at Policy Exchange and the author of Academic Freedom in an Age of Conformity; and Ken Macdonald the Liberal Democrat peer who has been at the centre of free speech debates at Oxford University where he is Warden of Wadham College

did they come up with any ideas as to how to overcome the difficulties with people who can’t cope with anyone disagreeing with them?

The first person interviewed (north american academic?) mentioned both critical thinking and building reslience and I cheered as I got out of the car!

What on earth is the decline of white majorities?

I just posted on another thread about this. I too only heard the beginning, but it was an all too familiar story from Haidt about micro-aggressions and students demanding that the entire university experience be a ‘safe space’ in which nothing whatsoever would make them feel uncomfortable in any way. Their feelings were to be prioritised above everything else.

He said that in every toilet on his campus there were posters giving a number to ring in case anyone felt threatened by a challenging idea. Basically urging students to report their professors for ‘wrongthink’. And now he deliberately doesn’t deliver lectures that might provoke such a response