 This was taken at Yale University in 2015. And it's Nicholas Christakis, who's a faculty member there and who was the master of the house along with his wife. And this was the aftermath of an email that Erica Christakis had sent out suggesting to students that they can police themselves when it comes to what is or is not an offensive Halloween costume. This is all a kind of strange thing, but I want to play two clips. So this is from 2015 at Yale where Nicholas Christakis, you know, a very highly esteemed professor, a baby boomer has gone out to talk to students. And let's watch this. All right, so Gene, let me ask you just when you, you know, and I'm sure you, I'm sure that this first made the rounds among faculty members at universities. Like when you see a confrontation like that, you know, with a professor on the receiving end of a, you know, a screaming tirade, you know, how did that make you feel? Well, I mean, I remember that time there was certainly a lot of discussion on campuses among faculty members. I mean, the only word to describe it was fear. There was, you know, it was this realization that what we thought the rules were, were no longer true. That we thought the rules were that the university is a place to have open discussion. And yes, we want to be respectful of each other. And yes, we want to be respectful of, you know, people of different backgrounds, but we should be able to discuss things. And that was around the time that a lot of people started to become afraid that they would say, one thing in class and get fired. Yeah. So has that changed a bit on campus for you, do you think? Has that proceeded a little bit? Yeah. No, I think it's pretty much still there. And can I ask, is that, how does that affect the way, you know, not your research per se, because that takes place outside of the classroom, you know, although it's all connected, but how has that changed the way you teach? Um, it hasn't really changed the way that I teach, although I did start to think twice about, I mean, I teach psychology and, So there's never anything controversial or touchy going on, right? I mean, right, you know, and so I think I just had to go on, look, I'm going to present the research, do it respectfully, but I'd always tried to do that. So it didn't really completely change that the way that I did things, but it did, I did definitely, and I know I can speak for a lot of other people have had this experience too, it did have a chilling effect. It had the effect of being scared to talk about certain things, of just worrying about it, of worrying about if this goes wrong, you know, what could happen? Will my department back me up if we have a discussion that goes sideways even, because it's these types of things that happen. So I think a lot of faculty members, you know, have watched those news stories coming out over and over and over, and we pay a lot of attention to them because we try to figure out what went wrong. And you know what, sometimes you can take an object lesson out of the things that you read about. Other times you just go, man, there before the grace of God go I, that that didn't happen in my class. I do, a very close friend of mine is an English professor, a full professor who is one of probably maybe half a dozen people who occasionally teaches Amory Baraka, a black poet and playwright and author. And in his work, he was LeRaw Jones for part of the sixties became Amory Baraka. His work is filled with the N word and it is absolutely provocative. And one semester she was teaching a class in that and a student, not even a student of color objected and the response was, okay, well, I'm not going to teach Amory Baraka anymore. And so you get this weird experience where it's like, you know, somebody who was on the margins of the contemporary canon is now just not gonna be taught, which I don't think anybody would say, oh, that's, it's an understandable outcome. It's not a good one. Liz, what were your undergraduate years from when to when? Do I have to say? Yes, well, we know you're a millennial and you're an older millennial and you're a mother. 2000 to 2004. Yeah, would you have ever in your life thought of screaming at a professor like that, even if they had like hit you with a baseball bat? No, but I do think that some of these trends were starting even back then. Like I got into a lot of fights in this one English class with this woman who was upset about some things I said about her like, her querying of my Antonea. And so she told the professor that I made her feel unsafe in class and we had to both come into his office and like discuss how I was making her feel unsafe. And then that was the language used. So I think that this, it was definitely not as prevalent but I think that this sort of, you know, language around like words making people feel unsafe and ideas making people feel unsafe was starting to percolate even back then. Yeah, for sure. Jane, when were you in grad school? In the 1990s. And so, yeah, so that's when I started teaching and I'll tell you, nobody ever said that. The idea of like, oh, we can't discuss this because it is unsafe. That was, nobody ever talked about that. That is a very, that is a new concept. Yeah, and it's kind of fascinating. My grad school, I was in undergrad. So Liz, you are forever young in comparison to me. I was in undergrad from 81 to 85, I went to grad school in the late 80s through the early 90s in an English department that was a hotbed of post-structural theory and the idea of making people unsafe was kind of the whole point in lecture. And that's why you would invoke various kinds of post-modern or post-structural thinkers was to make everybody unsafe. And to their credit, the professors kind of gave as good as they got. Jane, do you know when the rhetoric of safety or where an invocation of me feeling unsafe became a thing? And is that related to one of your earlier books about narcissism? I'm curious. It doesn't really follow the same trajectory as the changes in narcissism. I think it is more likely to be rooted in this, well, probably a combination of the slow life strategy and individualism. But with the slow life strategy and the slower development, parents tend to make the choice to have fewer children and nurture them more carefully. So then you start emphasizing safety a lot more then kids take longer to grow up. And so one of the analyses I did for the book was to look in the Google Books Database, great resource, and you can look at the change in phrases like stay safe. And didn't really change a lot until starts to go up 1990. So these are things that really started with millennials in terms of just a lot more protection, a lot more emphasis on safety. And then they kept going even more with Gen Z that it was kind of mission creep because at first it was let's protect kids from physical dangers. Then it became let's protect kids from ever failing. And then it became let's protect kids from ideas or teenagers or young adults of that safety is not just physical safety, it's emotional safety. I don't wanna be uncomfortable, I don't wanna be in the situation where someone else agrees with me. And then it wanders into the most controversial part of language that's offensive and the places where I think a lot of people can agree to disagree where maybe we shouldn't have a KKK guy come to campus, that's kind of true. But then where do you draw that line? And who's to say that any of us is the one who knows where that line should be drawn? Yeah, although is it also fair to say, and I'm thinking back to college in the 80s, you would always have every year, I went to Rutgers as an undergrad and every year they had a different CIA, former CIA director come to talk to campus and every year they would be protested because they were horrible human beings, some of them worse than others, but then they also had trolls, right? Like you would bring in speakers, you knew we're going to piss people off. It seems like that's a more common thing. I mean, there's, I think college campuses should be totally wide open for all kinds of speakers, but when you invite somebody like Milo Yiannopoulos, he is not an intellectual, he has nothing meaningful to say, which became clear once he was allowed to actually speak. He didn't really have anything interesting to say, but it's not simply that kids are snowflakes, right? It's also true that different parts of campus are like, let's bring in the most insane, ridiculous out there speaker, that might be part of it, right? Yeah, and I really hate the whole snowflakes label on so many levels. Partially as a psychologist, it's like, I think that's often used for people who actually have depression or real mental health issues and like, let's not make fun of that, okay? Plus it is nuanced. It is something where we're gonna have a wide spectrum of opinions about this because yeah, someone like Milo is just a product here. He's just trying to make people mad. He doesn't actually have anything to say. And so when people say that person or as I mentioned, somebody who is gonna advocate for the KKK or something like that, that's maybe in a different category. But then the idea of someone who is further to the right or further to the left shouldn't come to this campus and we shouldn't have a discussion where it is a more serious intellectual discussion of ideas, I think that's where most people, especially Gen Xers and Boomers, start to say, well, wait a second, what are we doing here? Are we really gonna say that we can't have these folks come to campus? And if they do, if you don't like it, don't go to the talk or go to the talk and ask challenging questions. We don't have to disinvite them. We don't have to have a safe space where if this offends you, you can go. There's other solutions to this. I think that's what a lot of Gen Xers and Boomers would argue anyway. That was an excerpt from my interview with Liz Nolan Brown of Reason and Gene Twenge, author most recently of Generations. If you wanna see another excerpt, go here. And if you wanna see the full conversation, go here. And make sure to come back every Thursday at 1pm Eastern time when Reason is talking to people with something very interesting to say that you definitely wanna hear.