They even include practical advice for conveying those lessons in child-rearing. How significant are the ills that they identify relative to all the others that confront higher education or young people generally? I don’t know. But their prescriptions seem sensible, low-cost, likely to help some, and unlikely to prevent other reformers from addressing other problems.

Some critics have praised their work. Thomas Chatterton Williams reviewed the book favorably in The New York Times. Wesleyan University President Michael Roth’s Washington Post review seemed to endorse the book’s advice in its last paragraph.

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Lots of folks who responded to the book more critically argued that it gave short shrift to the thing they regarded as the most pressing problem in society or on campus. Few challenged its core arguments, whatever they were worth.

But I wanted to hear from critics of their central thesis. That’s how I found myself reading Moira Weigel’s review in The Guardian, having seen folks on social media flagging it as a devastating takedown. “Moira Weigel eviscerates with ease ‘The Coddling of the American Mind,’” the biologist Stephen Curry wrote. The sociologist Kate Cairns asserted that the review “systematically demolishes” the book, while another observer characterized the review as “an excellent shredding.”

Imagine my surprise when even that review contained a passage that appeared to grant the potential value of the advice at the book’s very core. Weigel wrote:

Despite the title, which suggests cultural or civilisational diagnosis, the checklists and worksheets distributed throughout this book make clear that its genre is self-help. The tips it contains may benefit upper middle class parents. They may benefit students from minority or working class backgrounds who arrive on elite campuses to find that, despite good intentions, those campuses have not fully prepared for them.

It’s the sort of passage that would usually appear in a positive review. It is no small thing to identify a problem that harms families from different economic classes and to offer tips that may help folks in each to help themselves.

But as it turns out, that passage is a brief aside, anomalous for its substantive assessment of the book’s thesis. The review’s first paragraph complains that the book doesn’t discuss financial hardship among college students (though the authors trace the mental-health trends that worry them back to high school and to the wealthiest families, not the ones struggling to pay tuition). An entire section complains that the book’s style “wants above all to be reasonable. Lukianoff and Haidt include adverb after adverb to telegraph how well they have thought things through.” Is it bad to want to be reasonable? Have they thought things through? The merits of such substantive questions are rarely Weigel’s focus, though. Many critiques are implied rather than stated, rendering them unfalsifiable.