The safety culture burgeoning in US universities is a danger both for ‘coddled’ students and the future of society, warns Niall Ferguson
Niall Ferguson "Trigger warnings. Safe spaces. Preferred pronouns. Checked privileges. If you work at an American university these days, you have to tread as if on eggshells, if not land mines. One ill-judged microaggression is all it takes to be accused of racism or sexism, transphobia or Islamophobia, harassment or full-blown rape. Often, such accusations lead to investigations that are the antithesis of due process, with the transgressor deemed guilty until proved innocent. "I remember when it was not like this. Sixteen years ago, what lured me away from Oxford to New York University (NYU) and Harvard was the sense that the real intellectual action in my field (economic history) was on the western side of the Atlantic. The US economists, in particular, were impressively free in their speech. To present a paper at one of their seminars was to run a gauntlet of caustic criticism. “There are idiots,” Larry Summers famously began one of his papers. “Look around.” He was right. Unfortunately, idiotic ideas were in the process of taking over large swathes of academic life.
"The speed with which campus life has changed for the worse is one of the most important points made by Greg Lukianoff and Jonathan Haidt in this important if disturbing book. Lukianoff is a lawyer and head of the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (Fire), which works to protect academic freedom. Haidt is a professor of social psychology at NYU’s Stern School of Business and the founder of Heterodox Academy, which promotes intellectual diversity in academic life — the one type of diversity that universities appear not to care about." . . .
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