Few public intellectuals have done more to warn Americans about how the coddling of children produces intolerant adults than Jonathan Haidt and Greg Lukianoff. Their 2018 book, The Coddling of the American Mind, argued that helicopter parenting, the decline of unsupervised play, and the rise of campus safetyism had set up a generation for failure. They warned that universities were teaching students three Great Untruths: that hardship makes you weaker, that you should always trust your feelings, and that life is a battle between good people and evil people. Haidt, a social psychologist and professor at the Stern School of Business at NYU, has spent more than a decade documenting the link between fragility and authoritarianism. Lukianoff, the president of the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression, took over the group in 2006 and has spent two decades documenting censorship on American campuses. FIRE today operates with an annual budget above $32 million and a staff of 120, including roughly 20 lawyers.
For exactly that reason, it was dispiriting to watch students at Haidt’s own university enact the behavior he and Lukianoff have spent a decade trying to combat. Graduates booed Haidt as NYU President Linda Mills welcomed him to the stage at Yankee Stadium on May 14, 2026. About three dozen students walked out of the venue while he spoke. The booing followed a May 5 open letter from the Executive Committee of the NYU Student Government Assembly, which called Haidt’s selection “deeply unsettling” and demanded that the administration reconsider. Most revealingly, the committee complained that “many students have reported feelings of disappointment, disgust, unenthusiasm, defeat, and embarrassment,” language that mirrors the therapeutic vocabulary Haidt and Lukianoff diagnosed as the central pathology in Coddling. The students treated emotional discomfort with a speaker’s ideas as the equivalent of a physical threat. “Was he the safest option,” asked the students, without any apparent irony, “considering the current political climate and his critiques of liberal ideology?”
