Kate Manne: ‘There’s something valuable in being a little bit oversensitive’

Sean Brenner | April 6, 2026

You’ve heard the complaint: College students today overreact to anything that feels even slightly out of their comfort zone. They’re oversensitive. But what if the people making that claim are, in actuality, the oversensitive ones?

That proposition will underpin an April 30 talk at UCLA by Kate Manne, a professor at the Sage School of Philosophy at Cornell University and the author of three acclaimed books on misogyny, male privilege and fatphobia. Her speech, entitled “Sensitivity and Survival,” will inaugurate the Dean’s Lecture in Humanistic Inquiry, a new biennial series created by the UCLA College Division of Humanities.

The talk will be held in Royce Hall 314 beginning at 4 p.m., followed by a Q&A and a reception. (Admission is free; advance registration is strongly recommended.)

“This is a lecture that I hope will be thought-provoking for someone who has worried that they are oversensitive and has, like me, been haunted by the thought that they’re prone to having their sense of social justice activated by the world,” Manne said. “I’ll be offering an argument that, actually, there’s something valuable even in being a little bit oversensitive in a world where many other people are reliably undersensitive.”

In a phone interview, Manne spoke about whether the “oversensitive” label is being applied fairly, shared suggestions for having productive disagreements and explained why writing for the general public is a logical extension of her work.

On university campuses, discussion abounds about the need for people to learn how to have productive, respectful conversations even when they disagree. How can the humanities play a role?

There is a venerated tradition in the humanities of disagreeing as a discipline, which philosophy is all about, and that you can go into a disagreement wanting to maintain your side of it but without wanting to dominate the opposition.

And what is so wonderful about philosophy is that it is really the art of having disagreements that you don’t necessarily want to win. It’s not that you have a convincing, knockdown argument where you’re going to, as YouTube might have it, “destroy your opposition” or humiliate someone. Rather, you’re having rational disagreements for the sake of representing both ways in which reasonable minds will naturally diverge.

Do you think there’s a way that even non-philosophers among us can feel more comfortable when they encounter disagreement?

We all need to work on our natural instinct, when faced with moral confrontation and disagreement that questions our own behavior, to say to ourselves, “What I’m doing is entirely benign, and someone else must be misunderstanding or be incorrect morally.” We can recognize that maybe it’s another reasonable mind having a reaction that they’re allowed to have.

One thing that would really help is a little lesson that I teach my six-year-old called “take the note.” By that I mean, when people disagree with us or with what we’re doing, rather than viewing it as a fundamental attack and assault on our character, we can just sit with it a little bit and think, “Do I agree with that? Is it reasonable, even if I disagree with it? Is it something I can understand as a concern?” And when you can do that, you can begin to have productive dialogue.

Your lecture will, in part, explore the complaint from some observers that students today are overly sensitive. Are we living through a “scourge of snowflakes,” as you put it?

I am on the side of those who think that there isn’t a scourge of snowflakes, and what’s actually going on is that, a lot of the time, that discourse is being perpetuated by dominantly positioned group members — people like Jonathan Haidt, who co-wrote “The Coddling of the American Mind.”

He was motivated to write that piece because students were coming to him and asking him, for example, to be a bit more sensitive to the fact that he used an image of a topless woman to illustrate a lecture on Odysseus and the idea of tying yourself to the mast in order to avoid the sirens. Whether or not you agree with a student’s request to not show a topless woman in a psych 101 lecture, it is a totally fair request to bring up, and a professor should be able to take it on the chin and not be overly sensitive to a student’s point of view.

You’re saying that the person who called students oversensitive was actually being oversensitive himself?

There’s a natural way to take Haidt’s idea that students are becoming oversensitive, and turn that on its head: Isn’t it that people in positions of power are becoming oversensitive to the fact that students feel more comfortable bringing up their concerns? Whether or not a professor thinks they should do things differently as a result, I think we should welcome students having views about pedagogy in this way. I think we should take the note rather than overreacting to a slight change in social norms.

So, there is a sense of “The students are the problem,” but I’m of the mind that there’s actually a lot of underdiagnosed oversensitivity on the part of those who are complaining about other people’s oversensitivity.

Finally, changing gears a bit: It’s clear from your books, your Substack and your regular contributions to mainstream publications that writing for the general public is important to you. Why is that, and what advice do you have for other humanists writing for non-academic audiences?

I’ve been privy to debates about whether we should have more so-called public philosophy, which I just think of as philosophy simpliciter. I think a good response to that is that it really depends on the subject matter. And the topics that have most gripped me have been misogyny, fatphobia and other intersecting systems of oppression, as well as longstanding themes of feminist scholarship — like how to live our lives in a genuinely equitable way, given our entrenched history of inequitable gender relations. I think those particular topics are of too broad an interest to confine to purely academic research.

One thing I often hear from other scholars is that they’re worried about enormous backlash if they ever venture to say something in public. And I worry that I’ve contributed to that, because some of the things I’ve written have been controversial and I’ve gotten a fair bit of especially misogynistic blowback.

But here’s the thing: Most op-eds don’t get a massive reaction. It’s totally possible that yours will, and of course, you should be prepared for a reaction. But I think there’s more reward and less risk if you’re not aiming to make a giant splash overnight, which honestly is very unlikely. The internet is a big place, and the most common fate for any piece of scholarship that’s intended for a more general audience is to inspire a few people to be a bit more thoughtful and engage a bit more deeply with important questions.