Snowflake College Students May be Partly True, But Mainly It's a Red Herring Fallacy

Reasonable people can concede with authors Greg Lukianoff and Jonathan Hadit, authors of The Coddling of the American Mind, that middle-class helicopter parents and indulging professors have turned students into snowflakes to the students' detriment, but as Moira Weigel, writing in her Guardian book review correctly points out that the snowflake problem is tiny compared to structural inequality that is so glaring that since 2008 student debt has tripled in the face of shrinking job prospects. Weigel correctly points out that emphasizing the snowflaking of American college students is a "bait and switch," or what I would call a red herring.

For my critical thinking class, I am not inclined to teach The Coddling of the American Mind. Rather, I would rather teach a bigger problem: lost jobs, which are analyzed in Louis Hyman's new book: Temp: How American Work, American Business, and the American Dream Became Temporary. 

I heard Hyman on the most recent On the Media, and he gave a fascinating talk on the way Sears helped fight Jim Crow by providing products to African Americans who were not allowed to shop in "white" stores.