Recommended by David French essay "Men are from mercury, women are from Neptune". NYT 29 Feb 2024

The point is a fair one and well articulated: that in general universities as apex of societal knowledge should remain open to healthy discourse across many views.

The problem is that the solutions are naive and do not take into account what we might mean by “healthy discourse”.

While the examples drawn appear to be mainly academically sound poiints to the author, at least in some cases I would find the ideas hogwash that only exists because of fetishistic interest in controversy.

For example; as I see the IQ test, and discussion: not only is the test useless, its goal a sort of post-colonial vision, its analisys by Murray statistically flawed.. any university that admits discussion about garbage should not be surprised to get garbage thrown at it. I do not think you can reason around certain levela of idiocy, and so am not surprised idiots attract attract idiots.

Could it also be that the expectations and level of academics is not as high as Universities pursue funding relentlessly.

Nevertheless a good book to read, and very difficult to write, so I appreciate the author’s effort.

( )

The themes of this book — including the effects of safetyism, tribal conflict, the distortions of emotions — all ring true to me.

I have seen close friends “cancelled,” I myself heavily censor my opinions online and in public for fear of being outed or my business crushed by reflexive or reactionary forces in the public realm. ( )

I have watched the politicizing of speech with a sense of bafflement but this book went a long way towards helping me understand this trend. It also gave me some insights into the wave of anxiety that seems to affect every young person I know. A great book for anyone raising kids to read. ( )

Struggling with a 3 star or a 4-star rating. I think the topics here are worth 4-stars, I think parts of the discussion are worth 4 or even 5-stars... but the whole book ends up being disjointed and a bit repetitive. I would have liked more discussion/details of "safetyism" on campus: maybe more details of polling on attitudes, any stats or details on events and/or activity less dramatic than disinvite/deplatforming (like reporting of professors/TA's/other students for bias incidents, etc.) Some stats about campus life (diversity, student graduation rates, involvement in campus activities, etc.) to put it all in context would be useful, as well. There are tiny bits and pieces of that in there, but not enough.

The book itself seemed like two somewhat incomplete halves, the first about campus issues and the second about child-rearing and social attitudes about parenting and children. Altogether it came off as disjointed. The connecting thread throughout is "safetyism," but it wasn't written that way. The book suffers because of that.

That said, some of this is because the authors set a tall order for themselves. They want to talk about safetyism and its medium-term consequences, but there don't seem to be the complete statistics they would want to do that: a couple or 4 years worth of stats on college campuses, a few more than that on teen depression, etc. I'm guessing a lot of the stats about campus life, bias reports, etc. are also not readily available in any kind of usable format.

Which leaves mostly 2-star reviews from people arguing that the book is terrible because it doesn't talk enough about Nazis, or because it doesn't acknowledge the depth of racism, or because this is just old people complaining about young people, or because the authors don't like social justice (all comments that make me wonder if folks even read the book...) and 5-star reviews from people who seem to have missed all the hesitations and qualifications and the fact that the authors actually don't think that activists are coming for your kids (actually, that's probably a good chunk of the 2-star folks, too.)

I'd really love to split that difference: this really is a 3.5 book, not a 3 or a 4. I'll unhappily settle on the lower end:

3-stars. ( )