From Pursuing Truth to Managing Stress: The Costs and Consequences of the Therapeutic Turn in American Universities

The desire to simultaneously encourage and contain transformative research and to both nurture and control critical thinking has been a tension since the very creation of the university. In recent years, efforts to manage these conflicting impulses have been assigned to individual psychic expressions of "cognitive dissonance" rather than structural disparities or social contradictions. In a diversionary fusing of the individualism of neoliberalism and the collectivities of identity politics, university leaders tried to reconcile the contradictory mandates by attributing failures to resolve the paradox to psychological distress. In the aftermath of the Hamas attack on Israel on October 7, 2023, they issued declarations of personal "devastation" and recommendations that individual anguish be taken up by "mental health resources"—exemplifying a therapeutic turn designed to evade the deeply political role and responsibility of universities in their societies, as well as the purposes of academic freedom.