Milk, Cookies, and Therapy Dogs: Trump Wins and Universities Ramp Up the Coddling
Milk, Cookies, and Therapy Dogs: Trump Wins and Universities Ramp Up the Coddling
When will colleges learn that overprotecting students fuels their anxiety?
Imagine you came across a schedule that devoted blocks of time to activities such as “milk and cookies” and “legos and coloring.” You might assume you’d found a mother’s plan for her toddler’s birthday party, but in this case the reality isn’t so cute. Yes, those activities were cooked up by a mother figure, but Jaclyn Clevenger designed the schedule, not for diapered tots looking to party, but for young adults struggling with post-election anxiety.
Clevenger is the director of student engagement at Georgetown University’s McCourt School of Public Policy. It’s an elite institution that’s expected to prepare future leaders for careers as diplomats, senators, and policymakers. But instead of training students for the rough and tumble world of geopolitics, Clevenger coddles them with her “Self Care Suite.” And she’s not alone.
Across the nation, schools such as the University of Oregon and the University of Michigan offer friendship bracelets, calm jars, and therapy dogs for students mourning Donald Trump’s election victory. Professors at universities such as Harvard, Columbia, and Penn cancelled classes so students could engage in “self care.”
We’ll see if SNL lampoons the infantalizing (don’t bet on it), but in any event universities have showered countless social media wisecrackers with comedy gold. And yes, let’s have a laugh at these professors and administrators, but then we need to get serious.
That’s because colleges that coddle students aren’t reducing their stress. They’re teaching them to be anxious and depressed. They’re fueling the Gen Z mental health crisis, and they should know better.
A Great Untruth
One of the worst things you could tell young people is that they’re fragile.
Fragile people don’t embrace life like an explorer embarking on a grand journey. They recoil from it, like a turtle hiding from a predator. Fragile people are anxious people, but unfortunately universities often teach students to be fragile.
Of course, administrators don’t just walk up to students and tell them they’re fragile. As we show in The Coddling of the American Mind movie, university staff communicate the idea indirectly. Administrators crack down on all kinds of speech crimes including “inappropriately directed laughter” and “harsh texts or emails.”
They provide students with phone numbers and websites where they can report classmates or professors who have offended them. They disinvite speakers, including Peter Thiel, Hillary Clinton, and Charles Murray, in order to shield students from opinions that might make them uncomfortable. The message universities communicate to students is unspoken, but powerful: You are too fragile to handle certain words and opinions.
Universities turn students into human veal, and when election season rolls around they ramp up the coddling with safe spaces packed with milk, cookies, and therapy dogs. No wonder some students exploded with anxiety after Trump’s electoral vote count struck 270.
They were taught to react that way. Check out how some campus “role models” responded to the election:
Michigan State University Professor Shlagha Borah said in a Wednesday memo to students: ”I am cancelling class today to grieve the presidential election results. As a queer, immigrant woman of colour, I cannot, in good conscience, go on about my day like everything is alright.”
”This is a major historical event that we are witnessing. I hope you take this time to take care of yourself.” [...]
At Ohio University, Professor Amy Chadwick canceled her communications class “to give space to those who are devastated by the election results.”
“I have already interacted with students who are hurting badly, who are scared, who are tired, and who are unsure how to go on,” stated Chadwick’s memo, a copy of which was posted on X by Old Row.
“For those of you who are scared, traumatized, angry, etc., please know that you are not alone. There are resources available to help support you and there are pathways forward.”
Quick, direct students to the nearest pack of snuggle-ready labradoodles!
And don’t assume the other side of campus was free from catastrophizing. At the University of Pennsylvania, neuroscience professor Michael Kaplan cancelled his Wednesday classes “for his own well-being and due to his strict policy against ‘politicking from the podium.’”
What if the future neurosurgeons in his class are one day expected to perform surgery after an upsetting election? Here’s hoping they’ll still be able to carve into their patients' skulls with confidence.
“Excellent” … “Terrific” … “Great. Important. Eye-opening”
(Steven Pinker, Harvard psychologist … Michael Smerconish, CNN … Chris Gore, Film Threat)
Help spread The Coddling movie’s message of antifragility, free speech, and hope:
Watch the movie on Prime Video, Apple TV, Google Play or Substack.
Rate and review it on those platforms and at Rotten Tomatoes and IMDB (where the film currently enjoys a 9.2 rating).
Ask your friends to do the same.
Deja Vu All Over Again
We saw the same sad story after Trump won his first bid for president in 2016. What’s extra sad for those of us on the coddling beat is that it seemed like safe spaces were one part of the bubble-wrapped modern campus that was going extinct. Then Trump wins again, and they come roaring back.
Universities should have known better in 2016. As
and Jonathan Haidt note in The Coddling of the American Mind book, ancient wisdom and modern psychology have long established that not only are human beings not fragile, they become better and stronger when faced with some amount of adversity.As Nassim Taleb puts it, we humans aren’t just resilient—we’re antifragile. Stress makes us stronger. Anyone who’s ever entered a squat rack knows how, if you keep at it, that heavy weight on your back eventually feels light. Likewise, when we face our fears, we grow stronger.
That doesn’t mean arachnophobes should jump into a pit of spiders. Exposure therapy teaches us how to face our fears gradually. But it does mean that universities should finally stop teaching students that they’re fragile.
It should be a national scandal that, in 2024, universities continue to coddle students. Today the Gen Z mental health crisis is widely acknowledged, and university staff witness it up close every day. Moreover, The Coddling of the American Mind project sparked a global conversation about campus speech and antifragility that’s been going on for about a decade.
The Atlantic released Greg and Jon’s cover story in 2015. President Obama referenced it favorably in a speech to students, and it soon became the second-most read piece in the publication's 161-year history. The Coddling book came out in 2018 and landed on The New York Times bestseller list for nine weeks. The Coddling movie, which I directed, was just released onto Prime Video, Apple TV, Google Play and Substack, and has already been embraced by audiences at dozens of campuses including Harvard, Cornell, Princeton, Pepperdine, UCLA, Duke, USC, the University of Virginia, the University of Toronto—even Penn (too bad Prof. Kaplan couldn’t make it to the screening!).
Universities should donate their milk, cookies, and coloring books to the nearest preschool and finally tell students the truth. They can handle uncomfortable words. They can handle uncomfortable opinions. They can handle a Trump victory.
It might even make them stronger.
Ted Balaker is a filmmaker, and former network newser and think tanker. His written work has appeared in many publications including The New York Times, The Los Angeles Times, USA Today, Reason, and The Washington Post.
His recent film work includes Little Pink House starring Catherine Keener and Jeanne Tripplehorn, Can We Take a Joke? featuring Gilbert Gottfried and Penn Jillette, and the new feature documentary based on the bestselling book, The Coddling of the American Mind, by Greg Lukianoff and Jonathan Haidt. Stream the very first “Substack Presents” feature documentary here on Substack or on Amazon Prime, Apple TV, and Google Play.
Ted and his wife and producing partner Courtney Moorehead Balaker are now making a narrative feature film based on Rob Henderson’s bestselling book Troubled: A Memoir of Foster Care, Family, and Social Class.
I was at a corporate HR leadership retreat in 2016 during the first after-Trump victory crying game.
The tears and the whiskey were both flowing—the whiskey thru the disbelief and denial; the tears came when the resistance to reality became futile.
I am having a hard time with it this time around. I cannot buy into the narrative of doom. It makes me a bit angry at influential actors for perpetrating such disempowering destractions.
Worse yet, what happens when these future neurosurgeons notice many of their own patients hold political affiliations & personal beliefs they find abhorrent???