Sydney, Tuesday 23 July 2019: 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?
These are just some of the many issues explored in the New York Times best-seller The Coddling of the American Mind: how good intentions and bad ideas are setting up a generation for failure.
To deliver more insight into how over-protection may cause future generations harm, as well as how we can remedy bad-practices to create ‘wiser kids’, ‘wiser universities’ and ‘wiser societies’, co-author of The Coddling of the American Mind Jonathan Haidt will deliver the fifth Ramsay lecture for 2019.
Professor Haidt is Professor of Ethical Leadership at New York University’s Stern School of Business. Named one of the “top global thinkers” by Foreign Policy magazine and one of the “world’s top thinkers” by Prospect magazine, he was inducted into the American Academy of Arts and Sciences this year. His research examines the intuitive foundations of morality, and how morality varies across cultures, with the aim of helping people understand and learn from each other. He has co-founded a variety of organizations that apply moral and social psychology to that end, including HeterodoxAcademy.org, OpenMindPlatform.org, and CivilPolitics.org.
Ramsay Centre for Western Civilisation CEO Professor Simon Haines said Professor Haidt’s lecture was timely, following the report on free speech at Australian universities by former High Court chief justice Robert French. He praised Haidt’s emphasis on students seeking truth through critical thinking and engagement, rather than seeking refuge in comfortable majority positions.
“We should be careful not to stray into territory where students feel safer to adopt ‘group-think’, rather than be challenged to develop conclusions based on meaningful and respectful challenge from their peers and from people with different views,” Professor Haines said.
Professor Haines commended Professor Haidt’s establishment of the Heterodox Academy, a non-partisan global collaborative of more than 2,500 professors, administrators and graduate students committed to “promoting open inquiry, viewpoint diversity, and constructive disagreement in institutions of higher learning.”
Professor 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 (co-authored with Greg Lukianoff). His next book is tentatively titled Three Stories about Capitalism: The Moral Psychology of Economic Life.
Media contact: Sarah Switzer 0407 816 098