How Will Students React to “The Coddling of the American Mind” Movie?
How Will Students React to “The Coddling of the American Mind” Movie?
Tonight we’ll find out
A university president recently addressed his campus community about an incident that had shaken his Wisconsin school.
“The last few days have been painful ones for many members of our community, as they have also been for me,” wrote Lawrence University’s Mark Burstein.
“The event and its aftermath have left many students wondering whether the University cares about their safety.”
Again and again, Burstein returned to the issue of safety: “We are working closely with the Appleton Police Department to investigate all instances where physical safety is threatened. If there is anyone who has an immediate safety concern, please contact Campus Safety...”
Television news crews captured the aftermath of an event so disturbing that Burstein never identifies it specifically. So what was it? A spate of muggings? A murder?
No. The disturbing event was a campus screening of my documentary, Can We Take a Joke?
That’s how I described the episode in 2017.
I’ve been thinking about that today as I prepare for the first college screening of The Coddling of the American Mind, a not-yet-released documentary my wife and I made based on the bestselling book by Greg Lukianoff and Jonathan Haidt.
The Lawrence University episode seems like a long time ago, and it also seems like just yesterday.
In between Can We Take a Joke? and The Coddling of the American Mind, my wife and I produced and released another film, Little Pink House starring Catherine Keener and Jeanne Tripplehorn. Little Pink House is controversial, but it doesn’t address campus life like Joke and Coddling do.
The culture on campus and beyond has changed a great deal since Can We Take a Joke? was released in 2016. The film examines the clash between comedy and outrage culture. Back then nobody used the term “cancel culture.” Nobody used the term “DEI” either.
Back then The Coddling of the American Mind (the book) hadn’t been published. The precursor Atlantic cover story ran just before Joke’s film festival premiere in November 2015 at DOC NYC.
Can We Take a Joke? precedes infamous campus eruptions at Berkeley, Middlebury, and Evergreen State College. The film precedes the election of Donald Trump, the murder of George Floyd, COVID, and countless other events and controversies that fuel the fires of the culture war.
Tonight’s special event screening of The Coddling of the American Mind will take place at CU Boulder. My wife and I will participate in the event, and it’ll mark the first time we screen the completed film for college students.
Young people are our target audience. They are the ones facing the brunt of a mental health crisis—the sudden and unprecedented explosion of anxiety and depression—that is the centerpiece of our film.
Although our film reveals how Lukianoff and Haidt connected the dots to make sense of a mental health mystery, most of the film is told through the eyes of a diverse and global group of 20-somethings.
These current and former college students explain what pulled them into darkness and how they pulled themselves back into the light. The film is fundamentally about happiness—how to lose it and how to find it again.
Tonight will be the first time we screen the completed film for college students, but we did hold a test screening of a nearly-completed version for about 40 undergrads (mostly between 18 and 22 years-old). We were encouraged by the response.
After the screening, the attendees filled out anonymous questionnaires.
One question asked, “On a scale of 1 to 5 (where 5 = “very likely”), how likely are you to recommend this film?” The average response was 4.5.
We asked respondents to write down words they’d use to describe the film. The top responses clustered around “stimulating” and “truthful.”
Many students acknowledged the film’s controversial nature, calling it “a wakeup call,” “profound,” “important,” and a “must-see.” Another summed it up like this: “Risky, but needs to be shared.”
Others deemed the film too risky to share. That’s what we learned from some students who told us they probably wouldn’t share the film because they feared how their peers would react.
We also asked respondents to write down their takeaways in their own words, and I’ve included some below.
Can We Take a Joke? has screened on more than 250 college campuses.
There have been a few eruptions of intolerance, ranging from the tearing down of promotional posters to the pulling of a fire alarm, which effectively shut down a screening and discussion in which I was scheduled to participate (and at my alma mater no less!).
But far more common have been examples of students with little in common coming together to have a laugh and talk frankly about free speech.
Take the screening at Ohio’s Capital University.
It was co-sponsored by College Democrats, College Republicans, and Young Americans for Liberty. According to Jason Fugate, treasurer of Campus Democrats, “The film did a good job of sparking discussion between students with different philosophies, and gave them an opportunity to better understand each other.”
Some of my fondest memories come from a post-screening discussion I attended at Mount Saint Mary’s University, a “majority minority” campus and Los Angeles’s only women’s university.
I entered the auditorium right as the screening concluded, and the environment was tense. But I heard the students out, and they heard me out.
The Q&A session went on longer than scheduled, and all of us found plenty of common ground. Afterward, the professor who invited me to attend sent me some takeaways the students offered, including: “It is important to discuss controversial issues rather than push them under the rug,” and “Free speech, even though it may be offensive to you, should still be respected.”
So what sort of response awaits us tonight as we screen The Coddling of the American Mind at CU Boulder? We’ll soon find out.
I don’t think the event will end in screaming, but if it does I hope I remember two points:
Most students don’t support shout-downs. (That’s what students say in surveys, and that’s what they’ve said to me in person.)
Adults taught students to be intolerant.
College students had long been the biggest supporters of free speech on campus, but then an army of administrators intervened. They taught students to fear words.
Lawrence University’s president refers cryptically to “the event and its aftermath.”
He was apparently too shaken by our film screening to mention the title of the film or to note that the event in question was nothing but a film screening.
More recently at Stanford, an associate dean of diversity, equity and inclusion delivered a similarly overwrought reaction to a speech by a federal judge.
Again and again, administrators teach students that they’re fragile, that they can be permanently harmed by the words uttered by others.
I try to imagine what my life would be like if I truly believed that. After all, if I truly believed that, I might engage in shout-downs too.
Ted Balaker is a filmmaker, and former network newser and think tanker. His recent work includes “Little Pink House”starring Catherine Keener and Jeanne Tripplehorn, “Can We Take a Joke?” featuring Gilbert Gottfried and Penn Jillette, and a forthcoming feature documentary based on the bestselling book, “The Coddling of the American Mind,” by Greg Lukianoff and Jonathan Haidt.
Undergrad Takeaways fromThe Coddling of the American Mind Test Screening
“I am not a victim. I am stronger than what I was told.”
“As someone on the inside (GenZ), after seeing the destruction of lives around me — including very close friends — this film gives me hope and further inspires me to share this message.”
“Stand up for what’s right even if the majority is against you.”
“Courage, fortitude, charity.”
“Gen Zers are not the fragile beans we’re taught we are.”
“Gen Z is taught to be weak.”
“We forgot, ‘What doesn’t kill us makes us stronger.’”
“The world has labeled us as fragile and overprotected us from what we need to be exposed to.”
“Don’t take freedom of speech for granted. Defend it.”
“I won’t coddle my kids.”
“Helped me find words for a lot of my feelings”
“Many times I caught myself thinking, ‘Oh, I’ve done that,’ or ‘I’ve had thoughts like that.’”
“I’m not the only one who struggled with this kind of stuff.”
“Too much sensitivity can lead to negative mindsets.”
“Dialogue and debate about touchy subjects has to be possible.”
“Discussion and conversation need to keep happening.”
“Irrational thought processes contribute to the tense climate of the world because it causes people to lose touch with reality and lash out.”
“Don’t be afraid to stand up for the truth publicly.”
“Wokeism is directly related to a culture of fear.”
“Woke culture negatively affects everyone.”
“I don’t want my younger siblings to get social accounts.”
“Young people don’t know that they’re being taught lies, but they need to know. Knowing why they’re so miserable can save them.”
“Don’t let toxic ideas rule your life.”
“We need to tell kids more stuff like this.”