Psychologist Carol Dweck, creator of the terms fixed mindset and growth mindset, suggests that people need to push themselves and challenge themselves mentally in order to grow. When something is difficult and requires hard work, many people will give up. Although, forcing yourself to think outside of your comfort zone, especially when it feels like a lot of work, can help make new connections and strengthen thinking. (Dweck) Dweck’s theory of becoming more resilient with a growth mindset is very useful because it spells out an easy solution for changing the thinking of college students.

Lukianoff and Haidt argue that overprotecting students and policing their speech is negatively impacting their chances at future success. Students need to be able to hear other people’s viewpoints and learn how to deal with them. Being protected from realities “prepares them poorly for professional life, which often demands intellectual engagement with people and ideas one might find uncongenial or wrong” (Lukianoff, Haidt 6). Lukianoff and Haidt are completely right that over protecting students and policing speech on campus are negatively impacting their chances at future success.

Lukianoff and Haidt insist that intellectuals must be treated like adults, and if they are over protected then they are losing on their potential for learning. Stating that  “The presumption that students need to be protected rather than challenged in a classroom is at once infantilizing and anti-intellectual” (26). Although I agree with Lukianoff and Haidt up to a point I cannot accept his overriding assumption that any form of protection is bad for the student. Students should have some form of protection and help from professors and other university resources, but students should be taught to be completely self sufficient and resilient to different opinions.

Michael S. Roth president of Wesleyan University reasons that classrooms need to “promote intellectual diversity” so people can feel comfortable enough to challenge each other’s ideas. He argues that “classrooms should never be so comfortable that intellectual confrontation becomes taboo or assumption goes unchallenged because everyone’s emotional wellbeing is overprotected” (Roth). I agree that college students should not stop replying or asking questions for fear they offend someone, and/or get in trouble. This is a point that needs emphasizing since more people nowadays seem hellbent on never offending anyone, and shaming anyone who does.