This is the Cato Daily Podcast for Thursday, August 13, 2015.

I'm Caleb Brown.

What does a vigorous policing of speech on campus get us?

One argument is that it allows people to fully experience who they are in a world without so-called micro-aggressions.

Reglukienoff, with the Foundation for Individual Rights and Education, argues that policing speech leaves young people less able and often less willing to handle

the challenges of adult life.

How did we get to the point at which we have so many ridiculous cases of censorship and speech policing on college campuses.

Now I talk a lot about this in my book on learning liberty and I talk about bureaucracy, I talk

about fear of litigation, but political correctness is of course a huge part of it as well.

And in the big feature article that social psychologist John Hight and I just wrote in the Atlantic,

we talk about a kind of novel theory where we take cognitive behavioral therapy

theory and apply it to campuses to make the argument that universities have

been modeling what are called cognitive distortions for students for decades now.

All right, so what is a cognitive distortion and how does that work in the college setting?

So the first thing I should say is like people should really read the whole article.

It's thousands of words and we honestly could have written tens of thousands more on this topic because

we just find it fascinating.

But cognitive distortions is a relatively simple idea.

To put it really plainly, it's more or less a mental exaggeration.

It's an irrational mental exaggeration of a problem.

So for example, a lot of people and everybody engages in these, everyone

engages in these pretty much, maybe Spock doesn't engage in these or something like that. But one of them is

...