Ramsay Lecture
Series 2019
The Coddling of the American Mind:
How Good Intentions and Bad Ideas Are Setting Up a Generation for Failure
Are we coddling our youth presuming they are fragile rather than robust people who can benefit from challenging experiences? Are we continuing to over-protect students at university, leaving them unprepared for life’s rough and tumble? Should we be disturbed by the growing trend on US campuses of controversial speakers being de-platformed and classic texts being banished on the grounds that they are too confronting?
Jonathan Haidt
Jonathan Haidt (pronounced “height”) is a social psychologist at New York University’s Stern School of Business. He received his Ph.D. from the University of Pennsylvania in 1992 and taught for 16 years in the department of psychology at the University of Virginia.
Haidt’s research examines the intuitive foundations of morality, and how morality varies across cultures––including the cultures of progressive, conservatives, and libertarians. His goal is to help people understand each other, live and work near each other, and even learn from each other despite their moral differences. Haidt has co-founded a variety of organizations and collaborations that apply moral and social psychology toward that end, including HeterodoxAcademy.org, OpenMindPlatform.org, and CivilPolitics.org.
Haidt is the author of The Happiness Hypothesis: Finding Modern Truth in Ancient Wisdom, and of The New York Times bestsellers The Righteous Mind: Why Good People are Divided by Politics and Religion, and The Coddling of the American Mind: How Good Intentions and Bad Ideas are Setting Up a Generation for Failure (co-authored with Greg Lukianoff). His next book is tentatively titled Three Stories about Capitalism: The Moral Psychology of Economic Life.