The Coddling Of The American Mind (Trigger Warning Article In The Atlantic...)

posting this here instead of that pitchfork thread where people were talking about social justice warriors and then we started talking about college kids and i wanted to know what you think, america. also, is this happening everywhere? meaning outside america. my wife has been dealing with college kids at the college radio station she vounteers at and those kids all use this language and they really do feel attacked in a pretty visceral way if people question them or are critical of them. my wife has a theory that college-age kids were traumatized by 9/11! which i never would have thought of. but the helicoptering parents and emphasis on safe spaces....well, it kinda makes sense! but i'm no shrink.

http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2015/09/the-coddling-of-the-american-mind/399356/

good article

http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2015/09/thats-not-funny/399335/

related article about how some comedians won't play college campuses anymore.

I've been skeptical of these articles -- I read this one last week -- because I work at a public university in a major metropolitan center and have seen little evidence of these phenomena, which doesn't mean it doesn't exist.

However, I DO see the use of the politics of offense in smaller communities within the university, like the college radio deejays whom scott alludes to and to a lesser extent student newspaper employees. But these are students who already feel besieged, and when we include sexual experimentation, a muddled absorption of classroom concepts, hours on the internet not knowing the difference between a blog post and a scholarly article but responding as if they were the same, I can understand. Students are fun.

lots of discussion in the "free speech and creepy liberalism" thread iirc

and Alfred otm, I work a university too and I think the article is overblowing the issue, I've seen some really good responses to the article and I'll try to post a few

Childhood itself has changed greatly during the past generation. Many Baby Boomers and Gen Xers can remember riding their bicycles around their hometowns, unchaperoned by adults, by the time they were 8 or 9 years old.

so close

riding their bicycles watching TV

"lots of discussion in the "free speech and creepy liberalism" thread iirc"

ah, okay. i never go there.

Students are fun to be avoided

contemporary college students are awesome (i teach them) and seem exactly the same as college students did when I was in college

article's kind of a weak entry in this extremely competitive field imo. over half of it is earnest recap, like a rocky and bullwinkle episode.

i'm also increasingly suspicious, maybe unfairly, of "cognitive behavioral therapy"? really seems to be reaching critical mass right now as something people who are not therapists recommend to people who are not their patients. it's got this nice sellable new-age connection to buddhist right-thought stuff but in practice it seems over and over again to come down to an expert way of saying "your perspective is invalid, use mine." that this article positions it as the clinical antidote to those nasty Feelings rings a little alarm bell that harmonizes with other little alarm bells, like the one at the part where the authors muse on the horror of "a culture where everyone must think twice"; or the one at the part where they say that instead of changing the world, you should change your desires, because of buddhism, not the maintenance of hegemony at all; or the one at the part where one of them describes his qualifications as ceo of something called "the foundation for individual rights in education". idk. i think i left college just before this started, if it started.

xp iirc article was linked by on fs & cl thread but there wasn't much discussion of it
(lol maybe thread participants felt a little exhausted of topic by then)

fairly good article overall. not sure about suggested prescriptions (eg introducing cbt training); agree shd be reform of federal standards language
anyway largely agree with diagnosis (tho nb i currently do not inhabit a campus)

ya dlh, share yr ? re cbt (particularly, idea of institutionalizing training of it on campus)
prima facie seems harmless but

well, it's good to have some anecdotal evidence from people here that this isn't as big a deal as you might think based on articles like this.

it's funny that i don't ever really remember hearing people talk about "mindfulness" until i moved to western mass. though i don't know if it's a long-time western mass thing or just a recent faddish term. i've been here 6 years. i hear it all the time. speaking of cognitive therapy.

not dismissing cock/ball torture in itself because obviously lots of people (lots and lots of people) are extremely anxious all the time and living in a whole assortment of horrible moments that aren't this one, and cbt as practical diy tool to solve this is probably plenty useful. (it's probably so useful that people use it all the time without knowing it; "teaching" it seems more like a matter of highlighting+formalizing one of your basic cognitive defenses.) however because its fundamental premise is your perceptions are distorted and its fundamental mechanism is replace them with this, it imo really and unfortunately lends itself to the culture wars, where there hadn't been a breakthrough in ages in the r&d of how to talk about certain people's insanity and irrationality and how to get them to see that the hegemonic perspective isn't really a "perspective" at all but in fact the realm of pure form. so recommending it be imposed en masse by a corporate bureaucracy for the good of its customers, as a way of fixing their alarming, inexplicable political dissatisfaction, doesn't seem to me like a road to compassion and mental health.

so are we just going redo that whole other thread in this thread

seems to work for the atlantic

you don't have to do anything!

it's a free country! or is it....

never saw this as a college prof in the USA and haven't seen it yet in frogland though over here kids get yelled at a lot more, by parents, by teachers, than in the USA so I don't expect it to cross over here, if indeed it is a thing aux États-Unis

xp :)
(btw sorry for omission of 'j' in 'linked by j')

links by j

I think this culture exists (mostly) among politically active left-wing kids in relatively-elite universities. so a subset of a subset of college kids. that doesn't mean it's 'not a thing' but it's also not something you want to associate w/ a whole generation. I would guess the majority of American college students have never heard the term 'trigger warning'.

a related atlantic article
http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2015/09/will-black-lives-matter-be-a-movement-that-persuades/407017/

On the left, I constantly see activists and cultural critics trying to police public discourse by calling out people who run afoul of their preferred social norms, even when the vast majority of the public does not share a given social norm. What if Americans all started hashing out our disagreements again instead? The social-justice movement in particular relies heavily on shaming and norm-policing, tactics responsible for a large part of its unpopularity and, I’d argue, its ineffectiveness. The left should start recognizing that its focus on policing social norms in enclaves where it wields unusual influence undermines its effectiveness everywhere else.

codling warning

http://cs4304.vk.me/u1753898/87471552/x_cbabc6e4.jpg

i just wanna know why their voices go up at the end of a sentence, and they all have the Valley Girl accent

you mean, the young?

Obama's fault

uptalk is just a sign of a generation willing to question everything and anything

disruptors, is their appellation

codling warning
http://www.worldseafishing.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/05/mt_cobh_cod.jpg

disruptors are throwing figurative bang snaps at the feet of startled normies everywhere.

please, it's neurotypicals

i wonder if what is really at issue here is something like the "political" in carl schmitt's sense: the political as the space of legitimate conflict. or if schmitt's critique of liberalism as obscuring the political could be useful here.

oh boy, a whole other thread for this shit

shit, now we've bummed out qualx too. good ol' qualx.

I don't work in academia, but I find it hard to believe that kids today are more "sensitive" or demand more coddling than they did a decade ago when I was in college. I feel like the trend pieces have been popular due to:

-The insane insecurity of the academic job market, and how easy it is lose work if you're not tenured. This is not necessarily the students' fault, but I get the impression reading these things that some academics feel besieged on all sides, and students are an easier scapegoat because students are more likely to be obnoxious and self-righteous than the administrators who are actually the ones with the power.
-The fact that young people now have a "published" platform in the form of social media, particularly in the post-twitter age. So suddenly things that professors wouldn't have even heard about a decade ago may be more likely to develop publicly, and that has people nervous and scared. Even if there's a certain boogeyman quality to the whole thing.

Add this to editors knowing that bashing millennials will get you clicks, and you get a slew of stories like this.

Also one thing that bothers me about a lot of these pieces is that they imply that trigger warnings let students opt out of course readings without providing any evidence that professors are actually allowing that. It's in the Atlantic article repeatedly.

What are we doing to our students if we encourage them to develop extra-thin skin just before they leave the cocoon of adult protection?

Hopefully they will find the unmitigated courage to get a job writing for the Atlantic about how college kids are wimps.

I read the thread title as The Coddling Of the American Mind (Trigger Warning -- Article in the Atlantic)

that was exactly how i read it too, a warning against articles in the atlantic, which is the sort of warning i'm cool with tbqh

one of my typed-and-deleted posts this morning was "thread title needs a colon"

yeah I was thinking like trigger for IA at nu-Atlantic terribleness

intheblanks otm

there is also a totally lame element of "political correctness gone mad!!!!" bullshit imo

shit, now we've bummed out qualx too. good ol' qualx.

― scott seward, Saturday, 3 October 2015 20:01 (Yesterday) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

lol <3

contemporary college students are awesome (i teach them) and seem exactly the same as college students did when I was in college

― Guayaquil (eephus!), Saturday, October 3, 2015 1:28 PM (Yesterday) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

i would say "yes" except for one thing, i think they've largely lost the ability to read more than a few paragraphs at a time. all but the very the best students seem constitutionally unable to process an entire chapter (let alone an entire book) and follow an argument. i can even feel this happening to myself, gradually, as a result of spending too much time on the web.

Also one thing that bothers me about a lot of these pieces is that they imply that trigger warnings let students opt out of course readings without providing any evidence that professors are actually allowing that. It's in the Atlantic article repeatedly.

― intheblanks, Saturday, October 3, 2015 4:15 PM (Yesterday) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

this sort of thing absolutely happens... sometimes... not often. basically these articles take a very real but marginal phenomenon and make it sound as if it's a majority practice at american universities. which it isn't.

that said, some of the things that always come up in these articles (like the "safe space" with stuffed animals and candy brown university set up when a pro-life speaker was on campus...or something like that) are so absurd that you really have to wonder what sort of echo chamber the people involved exist in that they don't recognize their own ridiculousness.

the brown thing was hilarious in that it basically wrote one of thee articles about the infantilizing of undergraduates all by itself....

*these articles

-The insane insecurity of the academic job market, and how easy it is lose work if you're not tenured. This is not necessarily the students' fault, but I get the impression reading these things that some academics feel besieged on all sides, and students are an easier scapegoat because students are more likely to be obnoxious and self-righteous than the administrators who are actually the ones with the power.

this seems v otm, teens using the college space to begin to define themselves personally and politically in often quite unrefined ways is obviously not a new phenomenon, what's more new is university admin who are looking for any opportunity to cut staff* and making lecturers feel like they're walking on a tightrope at all times.

*though have there actually been many / any instances of people losing their jobs over this kind of thing?

there is only one thing that bothers me about the trigger warning clique, who seem to me to be basically saying "hey, don't be an asshole" and all the assholes (well, not all the assholes, because i am definitely an asshole) get all up in arms about it. and that's the "mansplaining" thing. i get where that comes from. these days everybody wants to talk, nobody wants to listen, and i am a chatty fucking cathy when it comes to explaining stuff. that said, i will always be shit at validating other people's emotions, and calling me out on that is not going to do anything to improve the situation. fuck meta-confrontation.

dlh, intheblanks otm itt

i knew i'd read this article but i can't remember which of the dozen articles on this topic i've read in pre-caffeine somnolent facebook-based auto-browsing mode it is. it has the best title of all the articles both pro and anti!.

Jerry Seinfeld and Bill Maher have publicly condemned the oversensitivity of college students.

good to know, good work guys

xxpost The other new thing is Twitter etc. amplifying these petty things into national issues we all have to take sides on. Like back in the day the dickbag who was offended that he was steered toward a graphic novel with icky lesbians would have just been writing in his student paper not starting a national debate.

there is only one thing that bothers me about the trigger warning clique, who seem to me to be basically saying "hey, don't be an asshole" and all the assholes

sadly, this is not at all what "trigger warnings" are about, as much as i might wish it so.

trigger warnings are often just about /broaching/ a topic, not even taking an assholish perspective on it.

http://i.imgur.com/yNDKxYv.gif

i kept reading for the clever twist, the angle that would make this article not just another "oh brother, these sensitive students" piece and it never came. so stewart lee's take on PC perfectly applies, it's the best thing i've ever heard on the subject:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1IYx4Bc6_eE

(^ trigger warning)

Yeah, Lee's spot-on there.

the thing that gets me about trigger warnings is that somehow we've managed to politicize the principles of effective communication. in america, communications is a first-semester college requirement, and if you go that class they say, for instance, that when you speak in public you should tell your audience what you're going to say, say it, and then tell your audience what you just said. so it seems to me that if you're going to talk about, for instance, rape, it's effective communication to point that out.

one of the other things they say in comm 101 is that effective communicators pay attention to their audience. so many people these days get caught up in the fantasy of speaking truth to powerless and wholly ignore this aspect of communication. if your bread and butter comes from scoring meaningless rhetorical points while inflaming pointless arguments, that's at least understandable, but i can tell you from experience those sorts of "victories" tend to ring hollow after a little while. attempting to pummel people into submission with rhetoric simply doesn't work very well.

i wonder if what is really at issue here is something like the "political" in carl schmitt's sense: the political as the space of legitimate conflict. or if schmitt's critique of liberalism as obscuring the political could be useful here.

― ryan, Saturday, 3 October 2015 20:51 (2 days ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

I am not sure that BLM, for example, would characterise the current atmosphere as being void of legitimate conflict, so much as "It'd be nice to have a discussion using shared terms without it turning into Reddit every 5 minutes"

these days everybody wants to talk, nobody wants to listen, and i am a chatty fucking cathy when it comes to explaining stuff. that said, i will always be shit at validating other people's emotions, and calling me out on that is not going to do anything to improve the situation.

Mansplaining, in my understanding, is less "validate my emotion" and more "be aware that 'genially tell me to STFU, I already know this' is a response that's selected for in certain environments and selected sharply against in others"

so many people these days get caught up in the fantasy of speaking truth to powerless

Actually that's a better definition :)

I sometimes wonder if it isn't the internet that has made everything so raw. The college experience seems like a good place to learn to grow thicker skin in the new digital age. I wonder how many freshman are concerned about trigger warnings compared to seniors. I didn't really have to read all the articles and threads, just my two cents.

really have TIME to read

i love the last paragraph of this:

"In 1990, when I was eight years old, radical student activists at Wesleyan firebombed the president’s office. This was not, I hasten to say, a constructive way to go about getting what they wanted. And yet I’m struck by how fundamentally different the thinking of campus activists was then, not just at Wesleyan, but writ large. Back then, students wouldn’t have been caught dead making appeals through official channels. They were more likely to occupy administrative offices than to go to them, hat in hand, seeking to get what they want. Somewhere along the line, sit-ins and underground newspapers were replaced with committees and formal complaints. The question for the passionate, committed young activists at Wesleyan and elsewhere is whether they can ever shake up the system by asking it nicely to change."

http://www.newrepublic.com/article/122938/college-students-have-forgotten-how-fight-system

more firebombings plz ty...

I just googled Wesleyan. Who the fuck is going to firebomb a place they're paying $48,704 a year to go to.

It's funny how it doesn't matter how many examples of this behaviour come up, the response of some people on the left is simply to deny it exists. This allows the right to pretend that the left doesn't give a shit about free speech. It doesn't strike me as a great strategy.

my wife is getting a masters at cal state northridge and one of her undergrad classmates likened a pop quiz she took to 'getting raped'. People kinda throw that word around too easily these days imo.

my wife is getting a masters at cal state northridge and one of her undergrad classmates likened a pop quiz she took to 'getting raped'.

And the next person over didn't immediately start screaming "microaggression!!!"?

I just googled Wesleyan. Who the fuck is going to firebomb a place they're paying $48,704 a year to go to.

Odd thing about the recent articles posted is they don't mention tuition at all. Which seems like it should be a huge factor in student/admin relations.

Like I can buy the idea that these colleges are bastions of free speech where students should be compelled to challenge everything if tuition didn't saddle most of them w lifelong debt. These power dynamics don't exist in a financial vacuum.

one of her undergrad classmates likened a pop quiz she took to 'getting raped'. People kinda throw that word around too easily these days imo.

On the contrary, this is the kind of thing I both heard and said routinely when I was in college 20 years ago. But as I grew up I started to understand that was actually kind of a gross thing to say, and I stopped saying it, and it seems to me that I hear it less too. And my increased understanding of this is largely thanks to the kind of efforts the Atlantic likes to shit on. My rights are not in danger from people encouraging me to talk and write mindfully instead of mindlessly.

xp i suppose one instance of this kind of thing that i've noticed in british universities does come down to that, students insisting on getting their money's worth. and tbh that's completely understandable, fuck getting into a dizzying amount of debt and not getting what you perceive that you've paid for, though it is obviously a terrible way to approach university

eephus emphatically otm

It's funny how it doesn't matter how many examples of this behaviour come up, the response of some people on the left is simply to deny it exists. This allows the right to pretend that the left doesn't give a shit about free speech. It doesn't strike me as a great strategy.

― impossible raver (Re-Make/Re-Model), Monday, October 5, 2015 10:33 AM (29 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

I don't know, I think there is plenty of policing of speech and social norms on both sides of the political divide. TBH we're not that that far removed from the "how dare you question america, don't you support our troops"-era among conservatives, and that's still very much a part of that discourse.

Anyway, I don't deny that there are examples of college students going to unnecessary extremes that contradict traditional American ideas of free speech. I do, however, deny that it is a very important social trend that deserves cover stories in major magazines, or frankly much of my attention at all. Like, I wouldn't even put this in the top 100 problems with American's higher education system.

yeah - beautifully put eephus xpost

xp like trigger warnings are stifling our freedom of speech? jesus christ, wait until you find out there are rating systems for movies and video games that tells you how much sex and violence they contain!

eephus otm

tbh how our ratings systems of movies works in practice is actually a bigger threat to free speech than trigger warnings on college campuses.

I do, however, deny that it is a very important social trend that deserves cover stories in major magazines, or frankly much of my attention at all.

two things:

i basically agree, this isn't a huge societal problem or really even a major problem on campuses (maybe there are some exceptions). it is however of particular interest to a few of this on this board since we're "in" academia. it's also likely fodder for a lot of articles because a lot of journalists are not-so-distantly connected to that milieu.

er wait was that two things? it was originally. oh well.

More than anything cases like Seinfeld etc seem more about connecting money w speech in a post citizens united world.

Seinfeld not admitting the culpability for his sins of the 90s. If I ever hear anyone my age or older using the phrase "not that there's anything _wrong_ with that!" again I'm going to walk out of the room.

like let's get real these middle-aged white comedians are horrible

@amateurist

Yeah, totally, I'm not saying that we shouldn't discuss this or other articles, or that they're of interest to no one! I was responding specifically to RM/RM's claims that the left is shooting itself in the foot by not publicly distancing itself from this "trend," because the right can now accuse the left of not supporting free speech. I think actors on the left have no obligation to respond to this because it seems pretty clear that there's less to this trend than meets the eye. Also "the conservatives will call us fascists" isn't really that scary, it's been an ineffective strategy for like 15 years now.

I think that you're absolutely right that journalists' connections to that milieu is one reason why editors are happy to run these articles. I think it's interesting to think about why there is a recent spate of articles, and I've posted about that upthread!

the left is shooting itself in the foot by not publicly distancing itself from this "trend,"

As if the world doesn't have enough articles about this "trend".

Feel like Free Speech these days is more akin to saying "Not it!" while playing tag.

I guess in the same way that what you do as a rebellious young person can come back to you via scandalous FB photos, what you do as a young person in the social sphere can come back to you via an article from the establishment shaming your way of protest.

Unless the article starts with "We should raise minimum wage for teachers nationally and make drastic cuts to tuition." there is no reason for any school-going folks to listen to these clowns. If student protests are supposed to be held to some national standard then let's make public tuition free. If teachers are expected to add more micromanaging to their already overflowing schedules then let's give them some of that plutocrat dough.

Some anti-free speech bollocks from the opposite direction:

http://www.newstatesman.com/politics/feminism/2015/10/goldsmiths-diversity-officer-bahar-mustafa-receives-court-summons-wake

I did wonder if anyone on ILX was going to bring up that specific case and the background to it.

It seems like understanding the context of a joke meme like "#KillAllWhiteMen" requires a kind of nuance with regards to understanding the context of what it's like to be a woman living in a world of constant male harassment, and what it's like to be a PoC living in a world of constant racist harassment. This is nuance that gets lost, but it's harder to get people who have never experienced any of it to recognise, let alone care about that kind of nuance.

I've been going back and forth about even reading this thread, let alone contributing to it... to be honest, I can't even begin to explain the kind of cringe I experience on contemplating getting involved. Like, even down to the titles, and how they already slant the discussion in certain ways: the specific choice of phrases like "creepy liberalism" and "coddling" just indicate to me that a certain opinion and mindset has already been formed about them (a negative one) and as someone who is not just in favour of trigger warnings and content warnings but (gasp... even worse!) is the kind of person who needs them is starting, not with a level playing field of "what's this about" but already facing an uphill battle of having to justify one's own existence.

I've been operating for over a decade (maybe more? the idea of content warnings were discussions I was having in the 90s, though we didn't call it that, then, because we lacked the terminology) in communities that now use them by default. It's never been a big deal. But I've given up on reading news articles about them because the blatant lack of understanding or misrepresentation of What They Are For and How They Work just bears absolutely no resemblance to how I've seen them function in communities I'm in that use them. I honestly sometimes feel like, if Trigger Warning were a doom-metal band from Siberia releasing lathe vinyl on some trendy label, you can bet that every dude on ILX would have found more relevant an accurate information about what they were than simply taking the word of scaremongering Atlantic thinkpieces making them the scapegoat for the ills of the American educational system. But "it's a Social Justice thing" just seems to make some people kick in an automated defensiveness where they do not want to investigate further than reacting to what is presented in some kneejerk thinkpiece. If you find yourself missing "nuance" in the discussion of things, maybe that's a gap in your own knowledge and understanding, that you could remedy?

I have a lot of experience (on both sides) of What Trigger Warnings Are For, Who They Are For, How They Work, that in a perfect world, I'd be happy to share. But it's obvious from just skimming this thread that there's a vast disparity in terms of knowledge, and I don't want to over-explain to people who already know all about the subject and are tired of it, or under-explain to people whose literal only exposure is to Atlantic articles or "college kids today are kinda weird and I don't understand their lingo." And I can't shake the nagging suspicion that a lot of the hostility directed towards "Trigger Warnings" is actually veiled hostility directed towards "The Kind Of People Who Need Trigger Warnings" - that is, ~college kids~ as cipher for feminists; rape survivors; abuse survivors; refugees; veterans; people who have been on the receiving end of hate crimes for race, gender, sexuality etc; people with mental health conditions (and how scary and needy and yet oddly... "Coddled" we are?) This list is starting to look, kinda... hmmmmm?

Talking about this stuff is hard. It often makes people uncomfortable. But I often feel like people who experience discomfort at these conversations (because they are not part of the groups likely to need these things) project this idea of "this is awkward and discomforting for me to hear" into their mental picture of what People Who Want Trigger Warnings are talking about when they say "Triggered". It really isn't; it's people who are dealing with the kinds of trauma that may be totally outside of your experience. I get nervous when I see "I want a nuanced conversation" becoming a kind of code for "I don't want to feel awkward or uncomfortable by difficult conversations that implicate people like me." So it becomes this kind of handwaving ~why can't we all be more reasonable~ which is again, not a level playing field, when for one side of the debate, it's an academic discussion involving "something they read on the internet" and for the other side of the debate, it's a highly charged emotional discussion asking people to defend and justify their experiences of some of the most harrowing events of their lives.

I understand this may have contributed absolutely 0 to the thread or the debate or whatever. But this thread has been eating away at me for days now so there it is. I'm not going to be in for the rest of the day to discuss it any further though.

If you need a place to vomit, the toilet is that way.

Wow. I have literally no idea what you mean by that statement.

Here's another piece on Bahar Musafa and power dynamics and the idea of "safe spaces" and the reaction to them

http://mediadiversified.org/2015/10/07/from-safe-spaces-to-court-summons-how-did-we-get-here/

― Three Word Username, Wednesday, October 7, 2015 6:31 AM Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

wtf -- flagging post

Aw come on - it's a lot of words, but some of them are quite short!

"I am not contributing to this thread, but it bothered me. I will not be back to read it." So you are just releasing bile and running. Nothing wrong with that, just no need to do it here.

It seems like the social context for these issues is significantly different in America and Britain. I'm fully willing to admit that the American veneration of free speech above practically all else can go to far (and maybe even more so in internet forums dominated by Americans). But when I see the text of the British Communications Act of 2003 outlawing "sending by public communication network an offensive/ indecent/ obsecene/ menacing message/ matter", it just seems wide open to authoritarian abuse. Maybe again my view is colored by the American lens of distrust of authority.

Maybe "I feel uncomfortable contributing to a thread because of reasons that I detail in my post; but I really think it's necessary because I seem to have experience and perspective that does not appear to be represented so far. P.S. I'm on an overground train going in and out of signal for most of this afternoon so I can't respond at length" is a more nuanced interpretation of my post if you could get past that bile of your own that you clearly feel towards me!

Now why might I feel weird about participating in threads like this, facing posts land attitudes like that? Why? I have no idea!

Oh, come on - I've can't remember seeing you join any thread, on any subject, where something almost exactly like that wasn't your opening gambit. "I'm a trauma victim/Most of you are horrible/I don't know why I'm even here since most of you are going to be horrible/Here's what I think anyway/I don't really want to discuss it further." You do this every time. Eventually you post something productive, but there's always this ridiculous poor-me throat-clearing first.

X-post because it took 4 stations to get enough signal to post that...

See I just do not understand the framing of trigger warnings as a "Free Speach" issue. Every community I've been in that employed them, it lead to a larger conversation, with a wider audience than I ever encountered in communities that didn't use them. They have always *functioned* in practice, with self imposition, as a way of producing more and freer speach.

But, like this Communications Act was probably introduced with propaganda about protecting "women from threats" and "minorities from hate speach" yet gets used by a racist and sexist institution as a blunt instrument of power against ... you guessed it. Not a surprise. I don't know the answer either.

Sorry for phone typing!

You say "more nuanced interpretation", I say "less bothersome second draft", let's call the whole thing off.

Dude. I get criticised if I post without a thousand apologies and clarifications and couching terms first. I get criticised even more if I do. There is literally no position I can take that pleases people who have already decided to see me (and people like me) in certain ways.

I do think it the tendency of nuanced concepts designed to make more and better conversations happen to eventually be pick up and used by dummies as magical silencing spells. That's where we are the phrase "trigger warning", although I suspect powerful people screaming in terror at the very concept are the bigger problem. This phrase does have a curious mix of political and pseudo-psychotheraputic about it that I think makes people want to pay attention to it one way or the other.

x-post

See I just do not understand the framing of trigger warnings as a "Free Speach" issue.

i dont think they are a "free speech" issue either. it's an education issue. i think the majority of the legitimate concern about trigger warnings comes from a sense that it is not a concept that can be effectively, fairly, or coherently deployed without negative consequences in the education system. the whole idea immediately cascades into a infinite regress of individualism and special dispensation that is an intensely difficult thing for the current education system in the US to cope with. so what's at stake--as far as i can see--is a shift in what we think it means to "get an education" or "be educated."

some people seem ok with the idea of education being entirely "overcoded" with political (or moral) values, but perhaps they only think that way because many campuses tend to be guided by political values they already agree with. when the other guys get in power they may feel differently.

(also worth pointing out that the entire reason college campuses in the US can be such bastions of liberalism is paradoxically because the education system has this measure of autonomy from the political, so maybe that's the sense in which this issue intersects with "free speech.")

I think warning people about content, as a signal of mutual respect and understanding, is an action that can help build trust and frame conversation.

The vocal minority of people who are getting highlighted (scott's link, etc) are college students, which, as always, is a convenient tip of the iceberg for people to write about, even if they're not necessarily representative of groups that use content warnings constructively.

I don't think "college kids" is being used as a cipher here, just a convenient target for analysis considering it's a visible, identifiable group that always has more than enough members that latch on terminology/concepts and use them as a bludgeon with no grace or tact. Trigger/content warnings are, at heart, about helping to claim mutual safe space, but there's a better lede for a story in concentrating on the individuals who, wittingly or unwittingly, use the same tools to _take_ space.

The word sophomore was not coined by accident; college students are very often wise idiots. To the extent that identity politics are loudest among young people without fully formed identities and a psychological tool is being self-prescribed by immature souls, it makes sense that people are freaking out and hollering. I just haven't seen any real evidence of real harm coming from a mass trigger warning movement.

That is to say, the majority of time it's about finding common ground and shared space, but for someone who's skeptical, it's easy to see insistence on warnings as a power play, and the more insistent of critics will find a myriad of microaggressions to be tallied in any response from, say, a professor or teacher who feels criticized. A college class doesn't need to be a "safe space," but it does need to be a space based on mutual respect.

I'm not overly familiar with Bahar Mustafa’s case, but as far as I can tell I'm completely in favor of what she was doing. White people (especially white dudes) need to stop feeling disrespected when other people just want breathing room.

I think there's a pretty broad variation in life experience and maturity among college students, let alone the population at large. No need to tar them all

There is no need, and I didn't do it. Most undergrads are under 21, and I am talking about many of those most, which is a long way from all.

I know we're all olds here but tbh if a college kid was in the room telling them they're a wise fool isn't exactly going to endear them to your point of view

nice rhetorical flourish, though

It's kind of not about endearment, which is something I learned in college.

Nice post Branwell. Good stuff.

Mostly I'm confused about what exactly these types of articles want. It's not as if we can really stamp out Trigger Warnings etc by now. And if the point is to make sure students don't grow up shielded and ignorant of the world, well that now includes a world full of Trigger Warnings and PC culture, particularly in digital/new media spaces. By testing and experimenting with that new social world the students are learning how to function in it. So again, what exactly is to be done? It seems like a 'problem' with no offered solutions.

Beyond cutting the budgets to these schools. That is a fake solution.

if a college kid was in the room telling them they're a wise fool isn't exactly going to endear them to your point of view

Again with the coddling! Jeez...

I think they want readers and clicks on their ads, tbh xp

bbl, have to do my daily work of being a foolish fool

In my experience common ground and shared space don't always make for the best educational environment. This probably depends on what is being taught, and who is doing the teaching.

I've been operating for over a decade (maybe more? the idea of content warnings were discussions I was having in the 90s, though we didn't call it that, then, because we lacked the terminology) in communities that now use them by default. It's never been a big deal. But I've given up on reading news articles about them because the blatant lack of understanding or misrepresentation of What They Are For and How They Work just bears absolutely no resemblance to how I've seen them function in communities I'm in that use them.

otm

ffs trigger warnings are not about "coddling" anybody, they are about (among other things) working with people dealing with PTSD and dealing with them as human beings about whom you care, and for whom you would like your classroom to be a maximally educational, useful space. from what i know you don't learn a lot when you're experiencing a panic attack.

my perspective here is as an educator struggling (and often failing) to be a good educator, which i think is not mutually exclusive with being an ally and being a good human being. i also have a lot of problems with the idea that the only kind of learning possible is the one where students are "challenged" at every minute, and that anything that isn't "challenging" them is "coddling." but i teach in a field (architecture) that has really internalized a lot of fucked-up practices with regard to students and their well-being and their intellectual development so maybe i'm particularly keyed-up about this. i'm not saying i have found a perfect feminist mode of practice; i have a ton of really bad ingrained habits that i would like to root out one by one. but this is where my head's at.

it's also just weird like, ILX has a whole thread, maybe multiple ones, mocking the "political correctness GONE MAD!" trope in right-wing discourse. but when it's "trigger warnings GONE CODDLEY!" we pretend it's a serious expose of a major issue of our times or something. it's all bullshit and it all comes down to (a) "in my day we learned better when the teacher told us to shut up and had the switch at the ready" and (b) "these kids in these colleges, it's just a big liberal feel-good fest, they don't learn anything!" which also includes (c) "the liberal arts are bullshit." fuck that.

branwell & casino otmmmmmmmmmmmmmm

it's also just weird like, ILX has a whole thread, maybe multiple ones, mocking the "political correctness GONE MAD!" trope in right-wing discourse. but when it's "trigger warnings GONE CODDLEY!" we pretend it's a serious expose of a major issue of our times or something.

wonder if this isn't also a symptom of aging ILX

i haven't really contributed to this thread much apart from calling out some posts as very truthful and otm. i'm so annoyed by these kinds of articles and i feel a little exhausted by the attention they are getting. i work at an research university that was once almost entirely white men and is now one of the most diverse elite schools around right now thanks to enormous amounts of work done by people who were sick of sexist and racist bullshit. this is a far better school than it was before thanks to this work. people say far less racist and sexist things than they used to. that shit is not tolerated anymore and as a result so many different types of people other than white dudes are able to succeed here. the global impact this school has is far more immense now that we have all types of people enrolled here. i run a "diversity/inclusion/social justice" committee in the dept i work in and it is astonishing how much more of an effective, caring, and open department we are now than before when people weren't having these types of conversations. people are waaaaaay happier than they used to be. the cluelessness and yes definitely "political correctness gone mad!!!!" bullshit spoken about social justice movements on campuses is so fucking exasperating.

branwell, casino, marcos otm, great posts.

yeah, bravo.

yeah but can Seinfeld visit your campus

Can Kramer?

You know I didn't even see this yesterday because of train/bus posting, but I'm just going to put this out here. Because when I say something like... "I find it difficult to participate in some threads because of baseline hostility, ad-hominem BS, deliberate misrepresentation of the intent behind my words and behaviour" for someone then to reply like this, and pretty much confirm everything I've just said:

Oh, come on - I've can't remember seeing you join any thread, on any subject, where something almost exactly like that wasn't your opening gambit. "I'm a trauma victim/Most of you are horrible/I don't know why I'm even here since most of you are going to be horrible/Here's what I think anyway/I don't really want to discuss it further." You do this every time. Eventually you post something productive, but there's always this ridiculous poor-me throat-clearing first.

― the top man in the language department (誤訳侮辱), Wednesday, 7 October 2015 12:23 (Yesterday) Permalink

Dude, how dare you speak to me like this. This post is unkind, uncharitable, totally un-empathetic, and indicates some fundamental-level failing of basic humanity.

Yes, sure, I am sometimes defensive or less than 100% enthusiastic or less than 100% super-chirpy-polite on threads about topics that are highly emotive. But when routinely faced with this kind of just nasty, malicious, *mean* little comments, do you *wonder* why I might feel defensive, or might reply to stuff like this, not with apologetic politeness, but with a plain and blunt "Wow, that was a shitty thing to say."

I do wonder if a lot of the specifically academic resistance to the idea of trigger warnings comes from the fact that it's such a grass-roots, bottom-up concept.

It's seen as something that comes from "the youth" and something that comes from "the internet" because those are the spaces where this stuff was hashed out. And because it's internet-y and youth-y that's going to provoke a kind of "ugh, it's awful" which has little to do with the actual content of the stuff but with defensive kneejerk fear of who's coming up with it. There's not an old white European philosopher dude spreading a Grand Paradigm Theory of Why This Should Exist at the top, it's a set of conventions and protocols and ways of proceeding that were hashed out in small groups and slowly coalesced from the bottom up.

Is this argument about free speech, about education, about... I dunno. I always saw it as being about consent. (Education comes into this, in terms of... does a student have the right to consent or withdraw consent to an education which they may find damaging?)

This is one personal perspective on using them, which people may find useful context as one example (or not!) followed by more general comments.

The first place I encountered it was not actually in feminist spaces, but way back in the mid 90s, in ~internet fandom~ spaces which were full of a mixture of women who were feminist, either through study or just experience. The first discussion I ever had about content warnings was in the editorial committee of a site I hosted that published amateur fiction, fan fiction, short stories. There was a warning of a "naughty zone" for materials of an adult nature (usually sexual) with an age limit on it. But some of the writers were getting into some quite... dark territory. Editors, and readers, and writers discussed the need for something beyond just "rated adult" in terms of expressing what it was getting into (was it just sex, or was there violence, non-con, drug use, etc.) I knew (I was!) some of the writers who were writing the "dark" stuff were people who were using writing as a form of therapy to cope with and come to terms with some pretty horrific and brutal stuff. But at the same time, there were groups of readers who were "wow, this is not OK with me. I came in here to read some fun smut and I just smacked in the face with some brutal flashbacks" and readers who were "wow, reading this really helps me to come to terms with / understanding stuff."

These conversations went on for years. Decades. It was sometimes people bringing arguments from feminist spaces to fandom spaces and sometimes it flowed the other way around. They intensified in the mid-00s as ~fandom~ as a whole moved over to platforms like LiveJournal, with its mixture of ~fandom communities~ and personal journalling and blurring of boundaries. Conventions varied from community to community, with stuff getting hashed out in discussion and debate. There was master links lists of "discussions people have had about warnings" which would accrue and get revised, but it was a hugely collaborative project of people finding out together what worked for them.

It was always an *alternative* to outright censorship. Instead of saying "there will be absolutely no rape or non-con stories on this site, verboten" the admins would say "you can write whatever you need to, under the condition that you give advance warning so people have a choice whether to go there or not." It produced more, varied writing, rather than pre-emptively excluding something ~problematic~. And once you'd established those ground rules, in the comments threads, in people's personal journals, people would open up and start sharing their own experiences. Amazingly, "You have the choice whether to participate in the Bad Stuff or not" lead to lots and lots of individual and group discussion of The Bad Stuff. "Why do you warn for this?" often functioned as a conversation starter: "This is A Thing" followed by "Oh, I didn't know that, and now I do" or "Wow, me too, I had no idea other people had experienced this, too, can we talk about it?"

Back to more general comments:

I think if you were part of the process of hashing this stuff out, it makes a much more instinctive gut-level kind of sense. If you are someone who grew up within those communities (my experience of kids is: I don't think they're idiots - or wise fools. They are people who are actively in the process of figuring stuff out, and can often be hugely helpful in terms of *teaching* you, when you are making up a collaborative process as you go along) then you've already seen it in action. If you are encountering this for the first time as a older college professor or a confused middle aged dude on the internet, it's like... WHERE DID THIS COME FROM?!? Everywhere. But mostly crazy kids and their internets. WHERE IS THE BOOK ON IT, WHERE ARE THE FOOTNOTES??!? There are none. It was built as a collaborative process. (Even what you are able to find out about it will be the result of your particular filter bubble.) I suspect that to Academics with a specific view of how learning advances, and who advances it, the idea of THE THING WITH NO CITATIONS is terrifying!

And again, I suspect also, a lot of the defensiveness about it comes from... some people are just resistant to the idea of accepting that certain kinds of trauma are *real*. It's one thing to accept that a shellshocked veteran coming home from a war with PTSD and flashbacks has been in a traumatic situation with long term mental and physical effects. But, very obviously, to some people, the idea that other forms of trauma - rape, sexual assault, racially motivated violence, being on the receiving end of sustained systematic bigotry-influenced abuse - can have long-lasting psychological effects? People who have never experienced these things have a hard time even seeing them, let alone understanding the effects of them, and this is when you get the "coddled" comments and the "poor-me, always playing the victim" bollocks from shitheads like our friend in the comment above, when someone asks for this stuff, or tries to talk about it.

This gets even more nebulous when you start talking about the other kinds of trigger warnings which don't get so much press. The trigger warnings for mental health stuff around issues involving impulsivity and control: many of the communities I was involved in recognised that things like Eating Disorders, self-harm (especially cutting), addictions, even suicide attempts have a trigger-like element to them. For someone who is at-risk for those behaviours, exposure to depictions or even discussion of those behaviours can provoke a trigger-like urge or compulsion in engage in them. So some spaces will ask people to warn for those things, too. But trying to ask for empathy and understanding and support for (these are horrible terms, but these are the stereotypes I often see these people *described* as) "attention-seeking teenage girls who cut themselves" or "coked-up anorexic model types" ... that is, for many people, an ask too far. Asking for protection and sensitivity for vulnerable people who are often dismissed or demonised - that is the *opposite* of coddling. Yet the resistance comes because of who's doing the asking.

This is an essay now, apologies for the length, and thanks for reading if you made it to the end.

Hi Dröhn Rock,

Just wanted to comment that I appreciate your post. Anything I've read about trigger warnings previously has left me vaguely suspicious of the idea and I am glad to get another perspective, I'll have to think about it more but at the very least its good to get some context about the history the idea. I haven't read any other posts by you but certainly it seems to me that the hostility that you've been met with here is completely uncalled for and as someone on the "other side" of the argument to you I still found it quite shocking, not to mention a little ironic given that many concerns about trigger warnings are based on an assumption that people should be exposed to different viewpoints in an unmediated way!

I'm not academically trained so apologies if I'm off on the terms I'm using, and I'm sure these are points you've heard raised before but I'd be interested to hear your thoughts on what I presume are common objections to trigger warnings, IE concerns about how wide the net should be cast, given how many possible traumas there are and how many situations might act as a reminder of these it seems like there is almost no cultural artifact which wouldn't be potentially problematic for at least one person's specific set of circumstances. I would be worried that the act of engaging with a book or film requires a certain amount of allowing an argument or nuanced portrait of a set of circumstances or whatever to unfold on its own terms. I feel like a lot would have been lost if every book I had ever read had been mediated in advance with information about its content. Perhaps this is a price worth paying, I don't know, but it also seems to me unrealistic, which brings me to my next concern.

I'm also unsure about how trigger warnings in colleges are supposed to interact with the "wider world". So while I can certainly see the value of trigger warnings in specific situations such as the online forums in which they developed, where you have a self selecting group who are likely to have suffered a particular trauma or experience, and may have different levels of readiness to deal with material which may act as a reminder of the trauma, but it seems to me that if trigger warnings are attached to generic college courses, it is merely kicking the can down the road for when people who might want or need these warnings are no longer in a campus environment, and that this might be counter productive in the long run. (this is how I would interpret the word "coddling" in the atlantic article.)

one thing i'm confused by is the lack of a trigger warning wiki

Branwell forever otm

although i wonder if maybe that's best explained by the fact that anyone who was a point of contact for one would find themselves the recipient of for-the-lols threats of violence

sorry xpost. yeah, branwell otm itt, also difficult listening hour upthread

couple other posters way out of line

its the ilx way

an assumption that people should be exposed to different viewpoints in an unmediated way!

IANAB, but there is overlapping layers of both "I don't have the same problem as someone who would be triggered, so I get to ignore their desires" (which is pretty clearly a dick move) and "I have the same problem, but I don't feel that I need a trigger warning (due to access to various resources of various types, which I have this long list of reasons why they don't mitigate), so I don't think anyone should"

What does the "B" stand for?

Berliner.

Branwell - no wish to speak over them, just adding what I've seen in similar discussions.

ok, long aimless ramble ahead.

i'm a middle aged white guy, and i do find myself involuntarily rolling my eyes at the youth, dismissing them as callow or whatever. at the same time i know this is an unfair cultural bias on my part. it's kind of sobering because i like to think of myself as having gotten wiser over the years, but when i run across something i wrote in college, you know, i wasn't some naif who didn't know what he was talking about, and accordingly there's no reason i should demean the young by assuming that about them. there are certainly things i know now that i didn't then. you know, you think procuring gainful employment as a 22 year old with a college degree is hard, try doing it as a 40 year old without one.

but they come up with all these new words for all the old concepts, like they invented them, and now i am middle-aged and am suspicious of anything that appears new, even if it isn't, and confused by such things. like, whenever someone tells me to check my privilege. do they mean like i should check my coat, at a restaurant? or should i check it like my watch, just to make sure it's still there? this jargon is insular and doesn't transfer over well to the middle-aged white dude wilco fan set.

the main thing that fatigues me is the stridency. youths demand things and anybody with eyes to see can tell that they don't have the power to demand anything, and i react negatively even though the stuff they're demanding (mainly tolerance and respect) is quite reasonable, and the only reason they don't ask nicely is because nobody listens to you when you ask nicely.

like, branwell, i like you and all, but when you go all j'accuse, i find myself overwhelmed with ennui. i've been on the internet for more than twenty years, and i've lost my capacity to react to outrage. i'm not saying that to de-legitimize your outrage. it's totally legit, you're gonna feel the way you feel, but i question as to what practical social purpose it serves. it's hard to have a sincere and meaningful discussion with a land mine.

Ahem 'aimless ramble'...

which reminded me of an extract from a book I read recently on stoicism...

But, over time, the demand for specific rights degraded into a generalized sense of entitlement, the demand for specific recognitions into a generalized demand for attention and the anger at specific injustice into a generalized feeling of grievance and resentment. The result is a culture of entitlement, attention-seeking and complaint....

i react negatively even though the stuff they're demanding (mainly tolerance and respect) is quite reasonable

how on earth is this anyone's problem but yours though? maybe you're not saying it is, but don't you see why people would be impatient with that kind of attitude? why do old people always feel so entitled to a "get off my lawn" attitude?

It's been very interesting watching a baby grow up and learn to do things over the last 10 and a half months, and it's made me think about the way we expect the battles we fought as adolescents not to need fighting again by the people who come up after us. And sure enough, some battles don't - they become entrenched in law or cultural responses or social mores, and that's great - but an awful lot of other battles, it seems to me, are way more microcosmic than that, and need fighting by each passing generation as much as babies need to learn to use spoons and not to roll off beds in case they hurt themselves. Every baby needs to experience these things, not just watch older kids and somehow know.

Which is to say, that old people need to appreciate that young people need to step on someone else's lawn sometimes, even if you've already learnt not to.

in my experience the young people who are most involved in cultures where trigger warnings etc are prominent are also the young people who are most involved in selfless activism for social housing, against police violence, and plenty of other things that often have no direct impact on them. i suppose viewing things from the outside and not bothering to engage could give a different impression

Addressing the issue of choice Branwell raises: it makes sense framed in that way, but (and this is not based on personal experience - I only took a few college courses, and never graduated, am certainly not an academic or an educator myself) I feel like the professorial POV may be some combination of "How are you going to learn anything if you're unwilling to be exposed to unpleasantness? Into every life a little rain must fall," etc., and...pride in their work? Like, they've gone to all this trouble to assemble a syllabus that they think will bring something of meaning and value to a large number of people, and then some kid comes in and says nope, they're not gonna listen because there's a single element of it that hurts their feelings? It's entirely possible that that could come off as extremely insulting to the professor. Granted, that may be seen as a reactionary POV, but if the student's feelings are being granted validity, the professor's must as well, yes?

Also, tangentially, I think what bugs people a lot about the term "microaggressions" is the "micro" part. Because it says right in the name that this is a very small thing, so the instantaneous response is, "That's nothing! What are you complaining about?" Perhaps a better term is needed. Which is something that I notice in a lot of "radical" discourse - the use of terminology is in-group focused, with seemingly little thought given to how it will be heard/received by the people under discussion.

isn't all jargon insular?

youths demand things and anybody with eyes to see can tell that they don't have the power to demand anything, and i react negatively even though the stuff they're demanding (mainly tolerance and respect) is quite reasonable, and the only reason they don't ask nicely is because nobody listens to you when you ask nicely.

how is this any different than when you were twenty?

like, whenever someone tells me to check my privilege. do they mean like i should check my coat, at a restaurant? or should i check it like my watch, just to make sure it's still there?

Hey, Seinfeld made it after all!

this jargon is insular and doesn't transfer over well to the middle-aged white dude wilco fan set.

I was going to say hey, jargon generally is, new ideas need new words, but actually that's not even true, the first Google result for "check your privilege" is knowyourmeme.com, which gives a history and a link to the original Peggy McIntosh article*.

youths demand things and anybody with eyes to see can tell that they don't have the power to demand anything

Dude, if they had power...

*okay, the link it provides doesn't actually work, you have to Google the title, but such is life.

ha, i was just thinking how good a term "microaggressions" is because the point is that it's the cumulative effect of the same ones over and over again, that in and of themselves are too small to take offence to in person, or if they didn't happen all the time wouldn't have much effect

i mean, it's toned-down language - instead of treating a minor rudeness with (eg) possibly unintentional, possibly racial undertones as A Racist Incident, it's people pointing out that if it happens repeatedly it feels weightier and more racist than any single incident would

Also as a counter: I've been on the internet going on 30 years, and I'm going further left on this over time, and further delighted by younger generations. I am wondering that maybe this is shifting to the internet because it's one of the places that you can (CAN) get useful friction, we disagree and we have the time to do it and neither of us are going anywhere - previously an environment that you'd see at, well, college.

xp Ah that does make sense - I never understood that about the term util now, always seemed to be doing more harm than good.

some kid comes in and says nope, they're not gonna listen because there's a single element of it that hurts their feelings

"hurts their feelings" - again this language designed to minimise what's happening. i'm lucky enough not to have needed a trigger warning but it's not so hard to imagine that reading or seeing certain things could seriously affect someone's mental or even physical health. this already happens in society, post-watershed programmes come with sex/violence warnings, as do films, the news comes with "some viewers may find these images distressing" warnings.

ime people who want trigger warnings aren't refusing to consume or engage with certain types of culture at all (although if they do it's totally their prerogative), more that they would rather engage them when they're in a good head space or when they're mentally/physically prepared rather than being blindsided

seemingly little thought given to how it will be heard/received by the people under discussion.

psst - the discussion is regularly about the people who were the subject of the microaggression and how they're doing.

youths demand things and anybody with eyes to see can tell that they don't have the power to demand anything, and i react negatively even though the stuff they're demanding (mainly tolerance and respect) is quite reasonable, and the only reason they don't ask nicely is because nobody listens to you when you ask nicely.

Think I must have gone blind for this sentence. wtf?!

It feels like discussions on trigger warnings pretty quickly devolve into discussions about which side is being a bigger asshole. but if we assume good intentions all around I still don't see much discussion about how trigger warnings might or might not be a workable idea in terms of education in general, academic freedom in particular, and then even in terms of the legal system.

how does this idea work out in practice when it's exported from the communities in which it was developed?

it's not so hard to imagine

Actually, it can be hard for a lot of people to imagine that words on a page, or images on a screen, could seriously affect someone's mental or even (especially) physical health. I mean, when I was a kid, movies that were rated G could have nudity and rather surprising (for today) levels of violence in them. Think, too, of the driver's education films that used to be shown in schools, with graphic footage of real-life traffic fatalities intended to scare kids into driving safely. If you grew up as/when I did, seeing stuff like that, it can be difficult to imagine that people could possibly be upset by things that are on their face seemingly much less shocking/horrifying. Never mind the idea of being triggered by race-, gender- or sexuality-based language when, from the perspective of someone my age (born 1971, graduated high school 1990), things are quite clearly better for racial, ethnic, and sexual minorities than they've ever been.

Trust me, for people who remember how much worse things used to be, it's quite hard indeed at times to understand what young people think they've got to complain about.

We seem to return to misrepresentations of trigger warnings. The way I've seen them, they're no different than advisories for movies we watch: strong, graphic material is coming, etc. As I've said, I teach and advise at a major public university and, after initial balking Phil describes, I see them now as courtesies. Twelve years ago I used to show Blue Velvet in a lit class. It's inconceivable that I'd show it now without warning student about the violent rape that occurs in the middle (and I used to show it at 8 a.m. – another indignity).

Actually, it can be hard for a lot of people to imagine that words on a page, or images on a screen, could seriously affect someone's mental or even (especially) physical health. I mean, when I was a kid, movies that were rated G could have nudity and rather surprising (for today) levels of violence in them

but if you love literature and film, then the sense of empathy created by deep reading should help you imagine how a Blue Velvet or Native Son might shake someone.

I'm actually more affected by violence than I was when I was twenty-four.

Things can always get better.

My understanding of trigger warnings is as Alfred just surmised: not a ban on discussion, but a flag that potentially difficult / upsetting discussion is coming (or even necessary) so people can be ready for it. I can't understand why anyone would have a problem with that.

I'm going to try to hit a couple of direct questions here, but I'm at work and time is limited.

robin:

concerns about how wide the net should be cast, given how many possible traumas there are and how many situations might act as a reminder of these it seems like there is almost no cultural artifact which wouldn't be potentially problematic for at least one person's specific set of circumstances.

You're right. You cannot warn for every potential trauma. You can take this reducto ad absurbum and claim "but what about the one child who watched his parents pecked to death by penguins, do we have to put a trigger warning on everything containing Arctic seabirds?!?!?!?" Except, when you actually start to listen to people about what they want warnings on, they tend to fall into pretty recognisable patterns, many of which I've hit on above. Yes, it's true that trigger warnings would ideally reflect the specific concerns of the community they serve. Finding out what those specific needs are and how best to meet them, would be something I would assume would fall under the job of a Community Diversity Officer (like Bahar Mustafa, who has been targeted for removal) or the "diversity/inclusion/social justice" committee that Marcos mentions. Yes, it's impossible to come up with a *complete* list, but it's not hard to come up with guidelines that cover the basics at least.

it seems to me that if trigger warnings are attached to generic college courses, it is merely kicking the can down the road for when people who might want or need these warnings are no longer in a campus environment, and that this might be counter productive in the long run. (this is how I would interpret the word "coddling" in the atlantic article.

I am guessing that the desire to have them attached to college courses reflects, as I mentioned before, the idea (maybe college has changed substantially in the 20 years since I was around one!) that courses have required reading or watching material. Like I said, this is about consent. Triggering is a complex process, sometimes one has more tolerance for triggers, sometimes less, depending on stress levels, setting, and most critically... FOREWARNING. I am speaking only for myself here, but it's a common thing I've heard. "This contains triggers" does not mean "OMG I will never be able to read/watch this" - it usually means, I'm gonna take care of myself, make sure I am in a good place, psychologically prepared, forewarned, and have control over this situation, then I can engage with the triggery thing in a relaxed, calm environment. The absolute worst thing is having it sprung on you unprepared, blindsided, by surprise, in a noisy, tense environment, when I'm already feeling stressed. Putting a warning on something gives someone the ability to make that call.

As to "kicking the can down the road" - would it REALLY be such a terrible thing if it were? You keep talking as if Trigger Warnings are some exclusionary forcefield to hold someone in a bubble, rather than being a ~way of interacting with the world~ which values forewarning and choice and control. What if the can *did* get kicked down the road? What if people who grew up in an environment of understanding triggers went on to work in publishing, in television, in films? What if film ratings were useful things that, rather than saying "contains some adult themes" (what? people do their taxes and argue over whose turn it is the load the dishwasher?) they contained specific "contains consensual sex" or "contains scenes of non-consenting sex" or "contains racially abusive violence"? Would that really be an absolutely awful, terrible world? I know; "Life" does not come with trigger warnings, but I don't understand how a world where people can make informed choices about the media they consume and how that might affect their mental health and wellbeing is supposed to be a bad thing. How does this affect you, as a person that doesn't need them? How?

Rushomancy, I don't know what to say to you. I don't understand what you think you mean when you say "when you go all j'accuse" - you are going to have to be clearer and more specific than that - but really... you know, don't. Because I have reached my limit for this week.

Because the answer is mostly, I don't get some ~kick~ out of talking about this shit. I don't *enjoy* dragging up my personal trauma over and over and explaining it to people, in order to get people to treat me and people like me with a modicum of decency and humanity. (In truth, I find it *interesting* because it is relevant to my life and the issues I face.) But if having this conversation makes one or two people turn around and say "Actually, those Atlantic articles are kinda misrepresenting this; I have a more positive view towards this than I did before" then it is worth continuing to have them.

Man, I would *prefer* to just float in a happy zone where I never talk about anything but Florian Schneider and records I love. But when people keep metaphorically hitting you in the face over and over and over, the choice to act or not is like... you can learn how to duck and how to swallow your anger and eventually ignore being hit. Or you can keep standing up and shouting "STOP FUCKING HITTING ME IN THE FACE" until people stop hitting. But I don't get the choice to sit back and be jaded and do nothing because it isn't some vague sense of "outrage", it's not wanting to be hit repeatedly in the fucking face.

Congratulations on living a life where very few of these issues affect you. Congratulations that "ennui" is an option that is open to you. This is what "Privilege" means when people talk about it - it means you get the *option* to not care, and caring or not caring affects your life in no way.

Now I see that there are a million replies after Rushomancy but I have work to do.

Some things affect me WAY more now than they did when I was 24 or 14 or whatever.

Also, can I please repeat, that "Being Triggered" is not the same thing as "Being upset by something".

Seriously, do you get flashbacks, panic attacks, do you end up in scary repetitive thoughtworms that can last for hours or even days that make any kind of concentration impossible?

If you feel upset, if you feel disturbed, or even "outraged" or angered by something, please. stop. conflating. that. with what PTSD reactions involve. OK? Thanks.

I'm surprised that Trigger Warnings have become such a hot topic when there's no evidence that they're being imposed or forcing texts off the curriculum. I was bothered by the breadth of the Oberlin draft guidelines a few months ago but they were dropped and most colleges seem to be using them voluntarily as a courtesy without any ill effects. It feels like a paper tiger.

re: microaggressions, I like the word because I just think it's a pretty word, and it's imo also a pretty useful framework for describing the experiences of people who experience them all day every day, but just tactically I think people generally hate being called "rude" and thinking of themselves as rude, and the word oughta get more play. if I'm right, that people don't like being called rude, it's a little weird, because esp. Americans have really embraced this "did I offend you? WELL I'M JUST SPEAKING MY MIND" thing that's so horrible and gross, but I think "rude" in the US anyway still carries some stigma (probably rooted in garbage classism but stick with me here) that could be exploited for a little while

I think that's a pretty important part of understanding the vocabulary and nuance of this whole sphere -- many people just lack the cognizance or emotional experience to recognize the difference between disagreement and lingering emotional trauma.

I might just have some occasionally lousy coworkers, though.

JCLC otm about "rude" though, I'm definitely in favor of bringing it back

And I just wanted to add:

On a personal level, I dropped out of high school due to mental health issues. I got an equivalency diploma, and made several attempts at going to University, but ended up dropping out every time, again due to mental health issues.

I have no idea if trigger warnings in classes would have enabled me to stay in school and complete that education. But if I seem really passionate about *anything* that enables people, especially women, with mental health issues to stay at school, and finish their education - an option which was denied me - I am going to be really personally passionate about defending that thing.

Americans have really embraced this "did I offend you? WELL I'M JUST SPEAKING MY MIND" thing that's so horrible and gross, but I think "rude" in the US anyway still carries some stigma (probably rooted in garbage classism but stick with me here) that could be exploited for a little while

yeah but a bold canadian band tried to empower us with this word & ILX just laughed... shameful

as cheesy as it is, that web browser extension that replaces the phrase "political correctness" with "treating people with respect" is kind of eye-opening when it comes to framing what should be a simple idea in a heterogeneous society

Re: calling people out on rudeness (or anything), again, I refer to child-rearing (and I think basic psychology); you get much better responses by saying "you did a rude thing / that action was rude" than by saying "you are rude". Actions and reactions can be tempered and changed easily. Intrinsic sense of self much less so, and being told your intrinsic self is bad just isn't good at all.

Thanks for the reply Dröhn Rock. I definitely see what you are saying and it has made me reconsider my opinion somewhat, however you seem to be assuming a homogeneity of both traumatic events and individual responses to them that I am not entirely comfortable with. Its a fraught discussion because neither people, events nor people's reaction to those events are predictable, and what might be good for one person might not be good for another. I appreciate the response though and its definitely food for thought.

however you seem to be assuming a homogeneity of both traumatic events and individual responses to them that I am not entirely comfortable with

No, really, I'm not. I've been pretty specific over and over again, "this is my, specific, individual experience" (do I really need to qualify every time that other people's experiences may vary, *every* time?)

So I think the assumption is actually yours, rather than implicit in what I've been saying.

But this is the problem, when you have a thread of dozens of people ~discussing an issue~ and only one person who has experienced that issue talking about it from the inside. Other people start assuming that one person speaking their experience on that issue is somehow speaking for all. Wow, oh boy, do I ever not want that responsibility. I am just trying to provide one perspective which had been missing from this debate here.

as cheesy as it is, that web browser extension that replaces the phrase "political correctness" with "treating people with respect" is kind of eye-opening when it comes to framing what should be a simple idea in a heterogeneous society

― μpright mammal (mh), Thursday, October 8, 2015 3:10 PM (11 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

I agree with the sentiment behind this (and the Stewart Lee video), however I think the problem is that in practice a heterogeneous society is going to include lots of people whose speech or behaviour doesn't meet the highest standards of treating people with respect/political correctness, for reasons ranging from lack of access to education or lack of cultural context to general social awkwardness and anxiety or differences in cognitive functioning, and if statements or attitudes which don't meet those standards are treated as deliberate acts of aggression then people who may just not know any better and who themselves may be marginalized in one way or another may struggle to deal with the situations that arise.

Which is not to say that a high standard of respect isn't a worthwhile goal, I just feel like the question of tone in these things is hugely important and I suspect often misjudged.

Also, tangentially, I think what bugs people a lot about the term "microaggressions" is the "micro" part. Because it says right in the name that this is a very small thing, so the instantaneous response is, "That's nothing! What are you complaining about?" Perhaps a better term is needed.

― the top man in the language department (誤訳侮辱), Thursday, October 8, 2015 8:56 AM (55 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

ha, i was just thinking how good a term "microaggressions" is because the point is that it's the cumulative effect of the same ones over and over again, that in and of themselves are too small to take offence to in person, or if they didn't happen all the time wouldn't have much effect

i mean, it's toned-down language - instead of treating a minor rudeness with (eg) possibly unintentional, possibly racial undertones as A Racist Incident, it's people pointing out that if it happens repeatedly it feels weightier and more racist than any single incident would

― lex pretend, Thursday, October 8, 2015 9:05 AM (46 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

re: microaggressions, I like the word because I just think it's a pretty word, and it's imo also a pretty useful framework for describing the experiences of people who experience them all day every day

― tremendous crime wave and killing wave (Joan Crawford Loves Chachi), Thursday, October 8, 2015 9:57 AM (13 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

yea i actually really like the term "microaggressions." lex very otm here about the cumulative effect of these very "small" things over a lifetime. i heard the term for the first time a few years ago and it totally resonated with me. i had a lot of white friends growing up -- very close friends, even -- say minor shit to me all the time that was "in jest" but grossly racist (calling my dad "chief" bc he has brown skin, saying my curly black hair was like "public hair", joking around calling me a "dirty peruvian" or a "mexican" even though i am not mexican) that didn't constitute "oppression" in the strong sense of say, police brutality or housing discrimination or whatever but over and over the cumulative effect of this minor things said jokingly by friends of mine over my childhood sent very clear messages to me about what white folks think about brown people and about how i really fit in (or not) into the very white community i grew up in. (aside, i had a lot of shit that i hadn't yet figured out as basically the only hispanic kid in my community and at this point in my life i can say that i wouldn't tolerate that bullshit anymore and wouldn't continue being friends with people who said that shit to me, but at the time it was a little more complicated, i truly wanted to be accepted by these people even though i never really could be).

Re: "did I offend you? WELL I'M JUST SPEAKING MY MIND." Sweet merciful jeebus do I hate that attitude of "obviously you just can't handle my raw REALness."

Whether it's used as cover for mild challops about a piece of pop culture, or for incontrovertibly hateful spew, it's manipulative in the extreme. It instantly positions any objection, however reasonable, as wussiness.

I was in college twenty-mumble years ago. Everything I thought and did was so cringe-inducingly immature that I am not going to hold today's youth to a higher standard than I would have wanted myself held to.

At the same time, I encountered a lot of ideas that made me uncomfortable. Interestingly, one of those ideas was to take other peoples' perspectives seriously, even those who were not well-off white dudes! This required a generous helping of "shut up and listen." Another idea was thoughtfully craft my tone and messages with the intended audience in mind so as to communicate with that audience more effectively. Including people with different life experiences than my own. Further including voices that have been historically underrepresented and/or silenced (perhaps especially those voices).

Thus, for me, learning to empathize with people and learning to think/speak/write effectively were inextricably linked. Neglecting the first would have sabotaged the second. As a result I'm grateful for posts like branwell's here.

But this is the problem, when you have a thread of dozens of people ~discussing an issue~ and only one person who has experienced that issue talking about it from the inside. Other people start assuming that one person speaking their experience on that issue is somehow speaking for all. Wow, oh boy, do I ever not want that responsibility. I am just trying to provide one perspective which had been missing from this debate here.

― Dröhn Rock (Branwell with an N), Thursday, October 8, 2015 3:30 PM (2 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

What I was trying to suggest is that while you might be the only person in this thread who has experienced your specific set of circumstances, there might be others who have experienced traumatic events and who have a different perspective on whether trigger warnings would have been helpful in how they dealt with it. Which is not an attempt to diminsh the value of your own perspective at all.

THANK YOU CAPTAIN OBVIOUS! That idea had literally ~never~ crossed my mind! So glad you pointed it out to me.

Branwell over and out.

I have definitely dealt with a person or two who most definitely had some strong traumatic events in their past who was not aware they were triggering post-traumatic stress in others by talking about certain people and events.

But, you know, family is often difficult

The way Alfred, Lord Sotosyn described trigger warnings, in the context of a classroom, seemed pretty reasonable.

I will say that the name could be a little less violent...for people who don't like to evoke the imagery of guns.

Trigger warning:

http://www.horsenation.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/03/trigger-alive2.jpg

i actually think the use of the term trigger warning in that atlantic piece is kind of a red herring. but it's a buzzword and i guess that's why its there. really my interest was in the psychology of safeness and well-being and *kids today - are they more sensitive than in the past?*. but the more i think about it the more i think that they are probably not all that different than i was at that age. though my own defense mechanism way back when was to hide alone in my room and curl up with music in the dark and want to die in a hole. i have no idea what i would have been like with the internet.

in retrospect, i should have put this on the baby making board. don't know if people still go there though. just for a general discussion of kid/teen psych. since i am raising two future firebombing warriors.

for the record i am all for calling people out on their shit and people feeling safe and not feeling uncomfortable and i think it's probably really easy to give someone a top-notch rigorous education and even challenge their assumptions without ever upsetting them. maybe bore them a little. but a little boredom is good for kids.

Yes, it's good training for the soul-crushing boredom they will experience in post-collegiate life.

exactly!

tbf some of us find a way to be upset (although not traumatized! hopefully!) about just about anything

could use a little bit of that laid back firebombing warrior nature of the seward boys

oh man that was not meant as any sort of passive dig! I meant me. I've got my issues w/anxiety under control, though. all life was anxiety-causing when I was in college.

What is it about modern life that requires a hardened outer shell? Sitting in front of a computer all day answering emails? Obeying traffic laws on the way to/from work? Shopping for groceries? Going to the bank? Is there any instance here where a heightened sensitivity would not result in a better and safer experience for all?

the lurking horror of mortality?

it's not so much about having a hardened shell - though that really depends on where you live - and i think everyone is all for heightened sensitivity - i just like the idea of kids being open and engaged with people who are not like them or who have differing views/opinions. even the wrong views/opinions. i am all for curiosity. (where i live there is a lot of shielding...)

the multiple ways I can communicate with other humans, all within grasp in my office, each with different expectations and capabilities when it comes to nuance, tone, and communication style

there are a lot of parents where i live who don't want to let their kids walk around the main street here. in greenfield, massachusetts. not exactly the mean streets. and, thus, some kids around here become scared of the street. which is a shame. and why i like having a store on main street that my kids have grown up in kinda. it's not exactly the united nations around here, but the street attracts a varied populace. or varied for around here.

was talking to a friend of my father-in-law. very new age. very holistic and all that. lives somewhere in the hills around here. i mentioned greenfield and she said: oh, i HATE greenfield. and i was like why? and she paused and said...there are no GOOD people there!

and i tried not to scream, so i just laughed. this is who i don't want my kids to be when they grow up. this person - outwardly earth mother-y and beaming - is a major parenting fail. and i don't think they will be like that. they see me talking to a lot of different people who are not like them. or who don't appear to be. and new york city is their favorite place to be. just like it was for me when i was a kid. just say no to cloistering!

sure but idk what this has to do with trigger warnings?

scott started the thread and if he wants to talk about his kids I am game

trigger warning: skot rambles, deal with it.

Can't speak for scott (or anybody) but I see a clear line from a proposition like:

"Being an educated person includes includes being exposed to different ideas, which you may find challenging and upsetting"

(some form of which is sometimes forwarded in the anti-trigger warning, "CODDLING GONE MAD" articles) to a proposition like:

"Being an educated person includes includes being exposed to different ideas, INCLUDING the idea that it's just plain decent to be considerate toward people who may need/want a trigger warning (or whatever other form of respectful consideration they may need/want)."

Neurodiversity and diversity-of-experience being among the kinds of diversity that help make the world interesting and are worth communicating about to kids.

(okay, i rambled, but the kid thing IS tangential to the atlantic thing. you could run the same article in psychology today with the headline: Are we raising our kids to be TOO sensitive? if there still is a psychology today magazine. haven't seen one in years.)

It's an app now. "Are we raising our kids to be TOO sensitive? Point your phone at your kid, and we'll tell you!"

Maybe the parent asking that question are too sensitive to the sensitivity of their kids.

there are a lot of parents where i live who don't want to let their kids walk around the main street here.

these people are so annoying

but let's take it to the judging other people's parenting thread if necessary...

There's a fine line imo between "are we raising our kids to be TOO sensitive?" and "suck it up, buttercup." In my day we were beaten regularly with barbed wire then sent off to work in the mill at age six, etc. etc.

Messages that valorize perseverance and suck-it-upitude, when twisted just a few notches further, can easily sound like victim-blaming. Parents often have to work both sides of that street: you want to foster resilience, but you also want to acknowledge and appreciate sensitivity.

http://www.globaltimes.cn/Portals/0/attachment/2011/481f8458-269b-4fbe-8bef-629261ebc681.jpeg

AND WE LIKED IT

in our house we slept ten to a bed!

you had a bed!?

(a joke i think i originally heard on All In The Family when i was a kid...)

ftr the "creepy liberalism" of that other thread's title is the kind of liberalism that's disdainful of trigger warnings

Yes, it's good training for the soul-crushing boredom they will experience in post-collegiate life.

― forbidden fruitarian (Ye Mad Puffin), Thursday, October 8, 2015 11:18 AM (1 hour ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

this is how i excuse myself whenever i give a boring lecture.

fwiw i think a big problem is that the "conversation" around trigger warnings is often framed in reference to the most obviously egregious misuses of that concept -- and people mistakenly assume those are representative. the key word is "warning"--ideally, the concept doesn't expressly forbid the broaching of certain topics or themes but merely suggests that people should be given some kind of notification in advance.

i think that, in a lot of ways, this is good common-sense practice. without ever having heard the phrase "trigger warning," when i started teaching and was about to raise a sensitive subject or show a film clip that was unusually violent or upsetting in some way, i'd let people know.

however it gives me pause when this sort of thing becomes institutionalized, not least because the nature of many higher-ed administrations is to aggressively expand the scope of any and every thing that they worry might upset students (and by extension, their parents). that /does/ have a lot to do with some phenomena that seem to me to growing and which might be encompassed by the word "coddling." students at my (big state) university are offered an ever-increasing number of amenities that would have been rare when i was in school... and would have been unthinkable when my mom was in school. these include a lot of reasonable accomodations and services, and a lot of stuff that is... a little less so. there's actually kind of an "arms race" among colleges in terms of offering services and amenities to students, which necessarily inflates tuition rates. it's in that context that the concept and practice of "trigger warnings" can suffer institutional abuse. but at heart it's not a bad idea at all, so long as it isn't construed to exclude discussion of certain subjects.

The only decent piece I've seen Freddie deBoer write in recent months warns college students not to seek redress with administrators; this empowers the people who already have too much power.

http://www.nytimes.com/2015/09/13/magazine/why-we-should-fear-university-inc.html

I'll reiterate that I went to two Scottish Universities (one very conservative) in the 90s, for English and then Philosophy, and we absolutely got heads up before certain content. For example, we were told that Beloved involved a whole lot of unpleasant stuff, and we were told that we would be discussing abortion. It had no effect on my freedom of speech.

ok, short-ish inadequate responses here because i can't keep up with rolling clusterfucks like i could when i was a kid, and i'll try to tone down the hostility as much as i can (macro-aggression is way more my scene; micro-aggression sounds like something you do on your cell phone):

if we're going to have the discussion on which side is the bigger asshole, i claim victory and retreat. i own my asshole nature.

"i react negatively even though the stuff they're demanding (mainly tolerance and respect) is quite reasonable

how on earth is this anyone's problem but yours though? maybe you're not saying it is, but don't you see why people would be impatient with that kind of attitude? why do old people always feel so entitled to a "get off my lawn" attitude?

― lex pretend, Thursday, October 8, 2015 8:51 AM (5 hours ago)"

it's a problem because old white male assholes more or less like me (though not, necessarily, me personally, hell, i don't even have a lawn) run this world. look, my capacity for personal insight is somewhat limited. i don't know why people like me are how we are. i can work to overcome my instinctive reactions, but i'm always going to have those instinctive reactions, humans are always going to make gut decisions based on instinct rather than on logic and reason. i'd love it if we lived in a just world, despite the fact that the world's blatant injustice redounds to my benefit most of the time, but fuck if i know how to get from here to there.

actually if i had a lawn i think i would probably let kids step on it. because my grandfather did have a lawn, and he would let the kids on it and none of the other people on the block did, and as a result he had nothing but dirt for most of his life. on the other hand maybe i'm not as good a person as my grandfather was. not really sure.

andrew, i'm sorry i am not current on the latest memes, but reading about memes gives me sciatica. i know i can google anything i want and get a distorted and inaccurate view of what the internet thinks it is along with some pictures of the dos equis guy.

as for if the youth had power, yes, people with power can demand stuff of me, and then i will pretend to comply to their face and then spend the rest of my time trying to sabotage whatever it was they demanded i do. because that's apparently what it means to be a professional adult. i just don't think demands are an effective form of communication.

branwell, i will do my best to take your congratulations as a compliment. i'm honored that you have concluded that i am the not-crazy sort of asshole. i'm not sure i agree with your conclusion, mind you, either the assumption that nobody and nothing is repeatedly hitting me in the face or the assumption that i am somehow capable of ignoring it and blissfully soaring over it all with zen aplomb.

i don't get to choose how i feel, but i do have some very small level of control over what i do about it. after spending some years yelling at people to quit hitting me in the face and getting, largely, a reaction of "wtf are you talking about, i wasn't hitting you in the face", i gave up on doing that.

sorry for going all hippie and shit, but i just want us to be able to talk to each other, even though i'm an asshole and you have ptsd or whatever. and what i see on the internet these days is a pretty profound lack of serious communication. if you want me to apologize for being an asshole, i'll gladly do it, but you know, i'm still going to be an asshole afterwards.

it's not about you, dude, go read the bottle opener thread or something

look, my capacity for personal insight is somewhat limited

then stfu or see a therapist who can help you with this

it's a problem because old white male assholes more or less like me (though not, necessarily, me personally, hell, i don't even have a lawn) run this world. look, my capacity for personal insight is somewhat limited. i don't know why people like me are how we are. i can work to overcome my instinctive reactions, but i'm always going to have those instinctive reactions

this is why ppl say things like #killallwhitemen

at the very least, their gut instinct and their supposed inability to change it can go fuck itself

btw you can change gut reactions, it just takes a while

"it's a problem because old white male assholes more or less like me (though not, necessarily, me personally, hell, i don't even have a lawn) run this world."

http://www.dementia13.net/film/features/bios/images/Wilford%20Brimley.jpg

mushorancy

btw you can change gut reactions, it just takes a while

just have to improve your microflora! (these are plants on your cell phone.)

k, thx for the death threats guys, lates

a grad level philosophy seminar i took screened the film "antichrist" and during the genital mutilation scene one of my classmates had a seizure

i think we were trigger warned too but it wasnt called that then

afaik stress doesn't really trigger seizures but I am not a neurologist

im going to go ahead and guess, not being a neurologist either, that stress can contribute to seizures in some people

Maybe it was a coincidence then. Afterward she told me she had had epilepsy as a child but this was the first recurrence in many years

high-blood pressure/dehydration/sleep deprivation can trigger seizures but again these are pretty different extenuating factors - it's not like people see something that shocks them and have a seizure, that isn't really how they work afaik (full disclosure I am only speaking from personal experience and having dealt with family members w seizure disorders for 20+ years)

http://www.epilepsysociety.org.uk/non-epileptic-seizures#.VhbzeFL3bCQ

Maybe she had this. Anyway, i dont think ppl should be made to watch shit like antichrist. Less visceral stuff like ovid (which has been trigger warned iirc) is harder for me to wrap my head around.

The notion that ppl have the right to live in their own bubble free of emotional distress from the social environment seems very idealistic and american and I like it for this reason. Look at most highly demanding people and you'll find an idealistic, even progressive core to their ridiculous demands - an expectation that life should be better

not that trigger warnings are ridiculous in principle or even in practice, really. but the ridiculous examples are worth looking at too bc they give us some insight into the ideology behind the trend imo

christ, i think a trigger warning would be warranted for a book in which the stuff that happens in antichrist happens, let alone a movie where you see it happening in close-up

weird thing to me about "trigger warnings" as a supposed new thing is that growing up in britain you'd always get a little voiceover to the effect of "some viewers might find this programme upsetting" prior to any tv programme with violence/sexual violence in it, and that just seems common sense/common courtesy and not like a big deal or threat to free speech to me?

oh theyd also say why you might find it disturbing ie "this programme contains scenes of x or y"

American tv has a ratings system for that

viewer discretion advised

the following lecture is approved for appropriate audiences

the thing that amazes me about ppl saying things like "how can kids learn if they're not exposed to difficult subjects" w/r/t trigger/content warnings in academia is that those warnings are designed for students who have actual firsthand experiences of the "difficult subjects" in question like... they've been exposed

x-post now but...

The one Urgent and Key thing that came out of years of debates about warnings is that "this program may have content that some viewers find upsetting" does not cover it. Be more specific about *types* of content because people are different and triggers/concerns are different!

This is something which came up a lot in my childhood, in that I was raised by people who were a) European not American and b) hippies and when I was in single digits they had no problem with me being taken to films that were full of naked people or people having sex, but did not want their kids exposed to massive episodes of violence, especially gun violence. And when we moved to America, the rating system was completely different, and they would take me to a PG film which would feature one guy blowing another guy's head off, OK, just fine; but one picture of a guy's dangling dick and there was an X slapped on the film.

the thing that amazes me about ppl saying things like "how can kids learn if they're not exposed to difficult subjects" w/r/t trigger/content warnings in academia is that those warnings are designed for students who have actual firsthand experiences of the "difficult subjects" in question like... they've been exposed

― 1staethyr, Friday, October 9, 2015 7:16 AM (1 minute ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

THIS THIS THIS THIS THIS.

coming from a slightly different headspace than the atlantic article, for anyone who still has the energy. Most of the shares on facebook quote the final paragraph, but it really is the punchline and it's maybe best when read in context

http://raneutill.com/how-trigger-warnings-broke-my-back/

There is a recent article titled, The Coddling of the American Mind, that looks in depth at this phenomenon, the call for safe spaces and trigger warnings. The article’s tone could be read as pretty condescending to people who are survivors of trauma, but I do think it raises a number of super important points. Similarly, the work of Laura Lipnis on trigger warnings is illuminating, but in an unfortunate and often typical academic fashion, it can be snobbish and sometimes downright mean (Jack Halberstam is also in this camp). And here lies the problem. Taking a tone like that just pisses students off even more. I’m not saying that if we said these things nicely, students would suddenly get it, they won’t. I am living proof of that. Im just pointing out the fact that putting on an academic face of elite speak isn’t helping either. Maybe pointing out the horrifying political stance these students are making will help?

hey that's actually an article critical of this phenomenon that doesn't make me roll my eyes and makes me sympathetic to the author

I feel like a goddamn college professor should be a better writer than high-school graduate me, but her point is solid.

that's kind of what I assumed was going on behind a lot of this, "What's the big deal? It's just about respect" stuff

I think TWs are necessary if you're teaching an intro class required by students from all kinds of majors, but at some point, when you've decided to go into the humanities, you're going to have to deal with art/ideas that doesn't comfort you/reflect your ideals.

Right, and no-one is saying you shouldn't.

I feel like a goddamn college professor should be a better writer than high-school graduate me,

I should introduce you to recently published academic writing

x-post students in that class kind of were

I think TWs are necessary if you're teaching an intro class required by students from all kinds of majors, but at some point, when you've decided to go into the humanities, you're going to have to deal with art/ideas that doesn't comfort you/reflect your ideals.

― Why because she True and Interesting (President Keyes), Wednesday, October 21, 2015 2:52 PM (5 hours ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

but... no... this is really the main roadblock for me, everyone conflating the trigger warning issue with all this other shit -- censorship, protesting against certain public speakers, the mythical coddling epidemic that prevents young people from being 'exposed' to art/ideas -- when it has nothing to do with any of it? they're just being grouped together because i guess people assume the same exact students are arguing for all of these things for the same exact reason? trigger warnings are about accessibility for disabled students. they exist for people with ptsd. just like 1staethyr posted like... ten posts up, trigger warnings are for people who have in all likelihood been exposed to the content at hand far more than the person teaching it. they exist to allow disabled students access to content on terms that they have some degree of control over. if you're going to file that under "not dealing with art/ideas that don't comfort [them]/reflect [their] ideals" then idk

honestly as far as i can tell people who are against TWs in academia, in any capacity, either:

a. don't really understand what trigger warnings are or how ptsd works
b. don't believe ptsd is a disability
c. don't believe accommodations should be made for students with disabilities
d. don't believe students when they (or their doctors) say they have ptsd

or a fun mix of all all of them

the students in the article who were doing a fairly good job of conflating a bunch of different things--objecting to showing negative portrayals of black people (in films by black directors) because the non-AAS majors would be turned into racists by them, demanding detailed TWs in a course whose name was a TW in itself.

but thnx for the self-righteousness. It's the first time I've encountered it on ILE

Trigger warnings are definitely advocated by ppl looking to push a certain ideology. They also have a legit function as a reasonable accommodation for students with ptsd. Both things are true. Schools should be judicious about when and why they use TWs, they shouldn't discard the concept altogether of, alternately, use them whenever ppl demand them

There was that case at wellesley where the statue of a sleepwalker was declared triggering bc some students felt he looked like a rapist. That was dumb

keep on bringing up those extreme examples that represent nothing relevant

They represent the fact that the concept has the potential to be abused. I'm pro trigger warnings when the goal is to protect trauma victims from unnecessary distress. I'm against the language of ptsd being used irresponsibly

the students in the article who were doing a fairly good job of conflating a bunch of different things--objecting to showing negative portrayals of black people (in films by black directors) because the non-AAS majors would be turned into racists by them, demanding detailed TWs in a course whose name was a TW in itself.

― Why because she True and Interesting (President Keyes), Wednesday, October 21, 2015 10:01 PM (27 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

thing is, that article is doing a boatload of conflating itself. barely any of her examples had anything to do with trigger warnings. even the part where she explicitly points them out, the end result is... the class having disagreements? it's one thing if you don't agree with certain students or enjoy how they communicate, but almost every example she gives is just... students having a discussion in a discussion class. she basically says "i used SO many trigger warnings, and they responded by calmly discussing the material in a way i didn't want"

the AAS student wasn't demanding trigger warnings, she was -- and this is being extremely ungenerous to a person who's already being presented in the worst possible light -- demanding a change in the way the class is directed. again, agree all you want with the writer, but TWs played no part in that, and there's no reason to assume they were without saying "crying students demanding things are all basically demanding the same thing at all times". it's a similar line of thinking as her "conservative students also refuse to engage in content for completely different reasons... you don't want to be a conservative, do you now?"

what you're left with is an instance of two students responding viscerally to content (in a way that i guess is assumed to be performative?) and one individual student who got emotional raising a stink, like that has never been a thing that happens in college. and an entire paragraph whining about the tremendous effort it takes to write an email before class (in response to a completely legitimate and common request).

it isn't any different than the other panic-inducing articles, it just includes a paragraph about being kind in between the usual examples of modern students being horrible little monsters and several paragraphs reaching for the same bs reasons to say that trauma survivors are wrong for not wanting to be triggered in class. and i'd bet if she were being paid by the click that paragraph about being nice would be the first one cut

and jesus i don't even wanna touch that last bizarre attempt at a point

I mean I imagine teaching SSBAS has always been really hard.

So as an article asking "how the hell do I teach this stuff" it is interesting.

And I think the question: "Is it harder to teach this stuff than in the past" is also interesting.

But also "my students are frustrating and lazy and full of lazy ideas" is sort of... the point of teaching in the humanities? Like if they weren't like that they could go and read all sorts of stuff and figure it out on their own.

i was totally frustrating and lazy and full of lazy ideas when i was that age. which is why i dropped out of college and spent decades figuring it out on my own.

I think that really hits on something important, in that for many the "humanities" broadly construed is about fostering some sort of enlightened consciousness (currently going by the name "critical thinking") which also ironically supposes some sort of passive or receptive role for the student to allow their mind to be more or less developed through encountering the canon (however it is construed). the student has to allow themselves to be acted upon, or at the very least has to enter into some sort of arrangement where they agree to be receptive. (this is the ideal case obviously)

in the absence of this framework you have to really rebuild the case for teaching the humanities from the ground up. I don't think it's hard to see why some thing like trigger warnings will trigger a defensive response from those invested in teaching the humanities. trigger warnings effectively reverse the arrangement: the student is given a measure of control over how and what they will encounter.

keep on bringing up those extreme examples that represent nothing relevant

― qualx, Thursday, October 22, 2015 2:28 AM (13 hours ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

new board description ):

well i think someone mentioned something interesting upthread about the student/teacher relationship now. more of a client relationship. which makes it less about trust on the part of the student and more about tailoring the experience to the student's needs.

x-post

or maybe that was somewhere else and not upthread...

if a student sees their education as more of a service they have bought then they are gonna want that service to meet their needs. in other words.

yeah and there's a really a problem for the humanities in that idea, particularly those that want to be about some idea of the aesthetic as an autonomous (i.e., non-consumerist) realm of experience or communication.

for myself I wonder if trigger warnings are based on an idea that some ways of being upset are ok and some not-ok (and that we can therapeutically define the difference), or if any way of being upset is not-ok. if we assume some *possibility* of being upset by a work of art needs to be part of art, some way for the artwork to "reach" you or have an effect on you, all of a sudden this coercive effect of art becomes inherently threatening if it's not previously consented to. hence even a statue on campus can be a site of protest.

add to the idea that the aesthetic is in some sense a way of acceptably communicating ideas that are not otherwise acceptably communicable and you can see why Plato banished the poets from the republic.

and I think the extreme examples are to the point for now until we can create a clearly delineated procedure for TWs in education. that we can't draw a clear line right now between reasonable and unreasonable accommodation is exactly the problem that needs to be worked out to the satisfaction of both individuals who need protection and the goals of education.

yes and the reason all these issues (supposedly 'conflated') link together in the context of education is that there's a risk of THIS

http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2015/10/ben-carson-calls-for-a-right-wing-fairness-doctrine-on-college-campuses/411865/

if a too readily abused concept/tool isn't clarified enough to enable it to perform a valid function in the context of education

ha, saying this idea "discredits" ben carson is to presume he has credits to take away

wish there were more work-work being done on this q instead of ppl just ~sharing their opinions, click like if you agree~. I personally think trigger warnings are very nice and considerate, and do no harm to the person being asked to provide them - I don't think it's really a hardship for a course description to conclude This course contains potentially triggering material encompassing themes of (here insert potentially triggering matters), and enrollment constitutes acceptance that the student may be experience distress around these issues -- which, honestly, would probably boost enrollment in some classes -- but I also think, you know, what's the overall suggestion about the nature of the game pre-TW? that, for hundreds of years, students have been living with a genuinely traumatizing level of discomfort, which they're just now becoming able/free to articulate? there's some philosophical in the actual "hard philosophy" sense of the word claims being made about ~~~the Past~~~ vs. the present and what that past was like for the people who lived in it, etc., it seems to me: unless we want to claim that being triggered is somehow new, which, if that's the claim, then there's more in play, etc

I'm not the guy to parse all this shit but some framing of how people managed in the absence of these warnings and what harms they suffered seems...merited, right?

'college students are too sensitive these days' is like the idiot folk-psychological/sociological version of a perception that may actually hold some accuracy: that 'being triggered' and the possibility of regarding oneself as being triggered (rather than having some other attitude toward one's own experiences) actually is a new thing, or at least a significant change in social mentalities over time.

given the uncertainty over how some things like mood disorders, anxiety disoerders, adhd, etc. can be overdiagnosed, whether overdiagnosis can be driven by extrinsic factors rather than accurate assessments of medical facts, whether concrete historical circumstances actually contribute to increased prevalence of some disorders (e.g. maybe modern life MAKES people depressed and anxious etc), etc., doesn't it seem like there are good reasons for not just uncritically acceding to the spread of triggering-related practices and discourse?

and the same way in the other direction: 'i feel like i finally have a way to talk about my experience' doesn't entail that before this there were all kinds of people having the experiences without the tools. it's a historical question what their experience was like, how their times prepared them or impaired them from dealing with it. different times have different tools, as well.

I feel like there's another issue here:
In the past, it seems like we all agreed that the best way to deal with trauma was to talk through it, whether in therapy, or in some kind of support group. If you didn't want to talk about it, you weren't "dealing with your issues." It turns out that maybe that's not always the best way to control PTSD. For those of us old people, I think this thing where people avoid triggers smacks of weakness (even there is growing evidence to suggest that NOT rehashing bad experiences might actually be more effective for some people).

I know I certainly have a knee-jerk bias against trigger warnings, etc., and I think this might be where it's coming from.

that, for hundreds of years, students have been living with a genuinely traumatizing level of discomfort, which they're just now becoming able/free to articulate?

I'm not the guy to parse all this shit but some framing of how people managed in the absence of these warnings and what harms they suffered seems...merited, right?

we don't need to look into the deep past to find out how people managed before trigger warnings or what harm they experienced... there are plenty of people around right now who have had to and continue to have to deal without them, and some of them are arguing for the existence of trigger warnings using their own personal experiences. saying "for hundreds of years" also seems misguided b/c if we're talking specifically about higher education, the people who are most likely to have suffered trauma from racism, misogyny, homophobia, transphobia, etc were mostly excluded from higher education up until fairly recently, and perhaps coincidentally they actually also weren't free to articulate that trauma until fairly recently

the people who are most likely to have suffered trauma from racism, misogyny, homophobia, transphobia,

why do you mention these things and not the innumerable other forms of trauma that people can and do suffer? (to provide one example: i've had a lot of veterans in my classes over the years?).

also i'm not really sure that being subjected to "transphobia" or any kind of "-phobia" is, in itself, traumatizing on the level where you'd want to set aside an entire policy for helping not to re-trigger it. to imply that they are seems to risk trivializing the concept of PTSD. certainly there are people who have been victims of violence and abuse motivated by racism, homophobia, transphobia, etc., who might desire trigger warnings. but there are also people who have been victims of violence, abuse, and acutely traumatic experiences that had little or nothing to do with those things (victims of childhood sexual abuse, war veterans, law enforcement officers, etc.).

sorry, i don't know how that second question mark got into my first of those last two posts.

i mean i don't want to diminish the ambient stress that comes from being a member of an abused/despised/discriminated-against minority--that's very real. but i'm not sure that, outside of a particular incident or incident of violent, abuse, etc., that really adds up to the sort of "trauma" that demands a trigger warning.

apologies if i am completely misreading you.

i mentioned those specifically b/c afaict most of these anti-tw articles seem to be specifically about e.g. victims of rape, racialized violence, homophobic violence, and transphobic violence asking for trigger warnings for these subjects. i said "racism, misogyny, homophobia, transphobia, etc" b/c it seemed more sensitive than saying "lynching, rape, and murder"

and ppl who suffer from ptsd due to racism are actually much more numerous in the u.s. than soldiers suffering from ptsd

"triggers" as a concept are also not confined to ptsd; mental health professionals also talk about triggers in relation to anxiety, addiction, self-harm, eating disorders, etc.

anyway i typed this before your x-posts and it's been said before on this or the other thread but i think it's important so: trigger warnings are not about avoiding talking about a person's issues, they're about allowing a person to control their exposure to material that might harm them. being randomly bombarded with triggering material will make you more sensitive to it and also make you constantly hypervigilant and anxious; being able to engage with triggering material only when you choose, when you know that you can handle it, will let you gradually become desensitized to the trigger

also god many people's experience of ambient "any kind of '-phobia'" is constantly being aware of the threat of actual physical violence against them and yes that can be harmful to a person's mental health

"triggers" as a concept are also not confined to ptsd; mental health professionals also talk about triggers in relation to anxiety, addiction, self-harm, eating disorders, etc.

― 1staethyr, Thursday, October 22, 2015 10:55 PM (14 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

but i guess this is where folks start to have problems with the application of the TW concept. anxiety is pervasive; its arguably a basic condition of contemporary life. surely some experience greater anxiety than others, due to all manner of factors, but where do we draw the line between "normal" levels of anxiety and those that might demand some kind of special handling? i'm not asking that question in a leading fashion -- i'm not saying the line can't or shouldn't be drawn. but i feel like your description of conditions that might demand a TW is troublingly expansive...

xpost

i mean it almost seems as though you are advocating TW for material that might be "triggering" or troubling to:

- any women
- any member of racial or ethnic minorities
- anyone who identifies as LGBT
- etc.

generalized anxiety disorder is in fact a medical diagnosis

One of the few places outside the academy I've regularly seen trigger warnings is in books about self-harm, and suicide. And when you're not well with regards to that stuff there's nothing worse than a TV show unexpectedly depicting it - it's like getting punched in the stomach; sickening, dizzying.

There seems to be an element to this that is about language. The Right seems to have a disgust with certain kinds of 'jargon', which manifests in it's 'anti-PC' stance. When people react to 'triggered', 'BLM', 'man-splaining', 'privilege', 'LBQT' etc. etc. (to pick a bunch of recentish bugbears for the Right, for better or worse) it sometimes seems that it's the fact that these things have been named that is offensive, rather than the idea themselves. The reaction is something like being 'outside' a fashion (because, of course, the Right has plenty of their own magic words)

Lots of psycologists on this thread, which is great because it eliminates the need for any support for the assertions about treatment and diagnosis.

(Less snarky version: using the language of pathology and psychology to score easy political wins is kinda fucked up. There is a difference between asking for proof of a general assertion and denying someone's particular self-identity, and denying that difference is a common tactic in these sorts of debates.)

also common

'you are for this so you are bad'
'you are against this so you are bad'

Lit teachers are also not trained psychologists, so asking them to locate every potential trigger trigger in a text (beyond the obvious) is going to be thorny. Also cases like in the article, where there was disagreement between prof and students about whether a sex scene was consensual, where the instructor may not think something is triggering while a student thinks it is.

Probably the answer is a website that lists the potential triggers for the most widely taught texts that profs can direct students to on syllabus

Perhaps something crowd sourced people with PTSD could make themselves?

when you write a syllabus at most schools you include a little section on disabilities and usually that section informs the student that it is their responsibility to inform the professor of their disability and how reasonable accommodation might be achieved.

I think this is the way forward for trigger warnings because it doesn't leave it up to the professor to figure out ahead of time what *may* be triggering to some generalized and anonymous victim of trauma out there. it allows a particular student to begin a dialogue with a particular professor and, in the best scenario, allows them to work together to find a way through that meets the objectives of the class. there's also common sense, in that a war veteran suffering from ptsd cannot sensibly expect to take a class on war literature if they are liable to be triggered by it.

yes it places onus on the student but from my point of view it's the professor's class and the student is the one who needs to make concessions to enter it (hence my talk about receptivity above).

required classes make this a tougher problem but then I've advocated for getting rid of those.

apropos to chachi/1staethyr

http://www.wired.com/2015/10/how-black-lives-matter-uses-social-media-to-fight-the-power/

(Less snarky version: using the language of pathology and psychology to score easy political wins is kinda fucked up. There is a difference between asking for proof of a general assertion and denying someone's particular self-identity, and denying that difference is a common tactic in these sorts of debates.)

i can't quite figure out who this is aimed it, or which arguments it's opposed to.

I think this is the way forward for trigger warnings because it doesn't leave it up to the professor to figure out ahead of time what *may* be triggering to some generalized and anonymous victim of trauma out there. it allows a particular student to begin a dialogue with a particular professor

students may not be super-excited about having to tell all their professors about their past personal traumas but idk

and I don't want to hear about a student's trauma unless I can help it. Usually our disability services intervenes.

yeah there are FERPA laws about what we can and can't demand that students tell us

all disability accommodations are cleared through a disability center. we get to know what accommodations they need, but typically don't know the specific nature of the disability unless the student volunteers that info (which they often do).

it's not ideal but it's also not a situation where they have to go into great detail other than "X is triggering to me, do you think any material on your syllabus may be a problem for me?" I dont see how disability services can determine this better than the prof teaching the class.

This is better than allowing the professor to determine what may or may not be triggering--and thus making the professor liable in some sense for failing to account for certain triggers that they may or may not be aware of! Again, im starting from the assumption that the classroom is the teacher/professor's space and the student is the one who is--in a manner of speaking--the guest of the teacher/professor, which im sure not all would agree with.

having ready-made trigger warnings, or even a universal trigger database, strikes me as eliding the very personal/singular nature of trauma. it's not as if we can identify triggering materials across lines race/gender/class/history or whatever contextual matrix you want to use. applying TWs in the manner of a kind of universal liberal functionalism is, as they say, ~problematic~ because it's imposing ahead of time what kinds of trauma are admissible and which aren't. and if that sort of thing really what is at issue then what we are discussing isn't necessarily personal trauma and psychological distress so much as a kind of community defining exercise in which certain kinds of speech or representations of certain things are not allowed. then we're back to students dictating to professors what the content of their education should be.

it's imposing ahead of time what kinds of trauma are admissible and which aren't.

right... that was my concern about the posts above, which seemed to create what seems to be a privileged category of (sorry for using this term) politically-correct trauma having to do with minority status, when in reality traumas come in a lot of different forms.

posts above by 1staethyr

to put a finer point on: if the desire is for a pre-set mold of trigger warnings to applied to texts then the whole notion of trigger warnings becomes by definition something that has to be wrangled over politically and determined by a community. which may or may not serve particular victims of trauma.

i think ryan is onto something.

Salon picks up that blog post that Milton linked to a week ago and they add the word CODDLED to the headline.

http://www.salon.com/2015/10/28/i_wanted_to_be_a_supporter_of_survivors_on_campus_and_a_good_teacher_i_didnt_realize_just_how_impossible_this_would_be/

I can't be the only person who enjoys misreading this threadline as "TRIGGER WARNING: Article In The Atlantic"

Shit is blowing up at Yale because of a faculty member's email about Halloween costumes

her original email does sound pretty dumm

from the students et al's open letter

After receiving responses from students and alumni through both social media and email, you responded to critics of your email with a link to the Atlantic Magazine article, “The Coddling of the American Mind.”

haha that's terrible.

i was less sympathetic to the students until i realized these people are being protested for and were acting as master and associate master of a house -- so they're not being protested for any sort of academic capacity where they can say it is all about challenging minds and ideas or whatever, but because they are supposed to have an additional job of actually looking out for students and representing them, and they are clearly being terrible at it.

I was reading quickly but I didn't see anything in the Post article or the open letter that called for a resignation.

Or in the Youtube clips that I watched. All I saw was people exercising free speech and expressing offence.

Oh, OK, a student yells "you should step down" (as house master, not professor) in the third video clip.

LOL college. Attacking someone for standing up for freedom of expression rather than attacking those (if there were any?) who wore offensive costumes is NAGL. These kids have no idea how safe a space they are living in.

"Being protested for"

Wtf

the christakis email ticks every concern-troll box that it's possible to tick, she is obviously a horrible person

"in my vast experience working with children" etc is completely irrelevant but she can't help rattling on about it, why because just can't help talking about herself in this post-midnight email

Why does the guy have to apologize for an email his wife sent?

c'mon that's mansplaining 101

Ha, was wondering that myself, Treeship.

They're asking b/c apparently he endorsed and defended it, and he's master of the house and she's assistant master or something.

I don't think the students are right to want these people to lose their jobs. Also, they aren't right in thinking the "residential" part of the residential college experience has nothing to do with fostering a sometimes uncomfortable community of diverse perspectives where rigorous debate is encouraged. Imo, this atmosphere is something that, in college, is meant to exist beyond the classroom.

This woman wasn't saying racist costumes were good, but that it wasn't the college's place to proscribe expression that seems taboo or shocking. Taboo-breaking offensive speech is often ignorant and worse than worthless -- harmful even -- but occassionaly it can be valuable. As a baby boomer and (i'm assuming) a progressive of the old mold, she seems to want to err on the side of more controversy, more debate, more discomfort, rather than more safety. This is a generational divide, honestly, and I think students and administrators need to fight it out more to come to some sort of understanding or consensus. Calling for people to step down is such a bullshit power move.

As is demanding apologies. That administrator is probably sincerely concerned about what it would mean for the college to police people's expression outside the classroom in the way these activists want. She shouldn't apologize for thinking this, or for having concerns that are different from the protesters. She is a person, and they are people, and they have different ideas about how the institution should be run and they should argue about it in good faith.

"he's master of the house and she's assistant master or something

Proper system, that

I agree with a lot of what you're saying, Treeship, but does "students wanting these people to lose their jobs" actually amount to one or two people yelling "you should step down" in a heated moment? I don't see a call for a resignation or even a demand for an apology here. I also don't see proscription or censure in the Dean's original email: "we encourage Yale students to take the time to consider their costumes and the impact they might have" is not forbidding anything.

*amount to more than

"As a baby boomer and (i'm assuming) a progressive of the old mold, she seems to want to err on the side of more controversy, more debate, more discomfort, rather than more safety. "

Going to go out on a limb here and suggest not a lot of people dress in a way that Erika identifies as for Halloween.

"Imo, this atmosphere is something that, in college, is meant to exist beyond the classroom."

Going to go out on another limb and suggest the same about yourself.

"but associate master, being a thoughtless dickhead IS my halloween costume!"

*strokes chin* "you're onto something there"

I hope he's referred to as "associate master."

reading the original email email that the prof was responding to clarifies things too -- it just sort of said "hey, if you don't mind, maybe try not to be offensive or anything with your halloween costumes, 'kay?" there was never free speech imperiled or anything.

and the actual jobs these people have are as professors. the acting as a master of a house thing is a separate position from their direct academic post, and it comes with another set of responsibilities and expectations. #1 being, i would hope, that you encourage students not to be dicks to one another.

wish someone named CHRISTAKIS would play the hellenic-american-offended-by-american-universities'-GREEK-system card and stir shit up. greeks are a minority too you know and seeing their letters appropriated all over fraternity and sorority events and structures could create a hostile environment for them

Treeship OTM. I also like the idea of dressing up as Associate Master (oh Yale) for Halloween.

Why link to the story on FIRE's website, instead of the Post? FIRE are Koch-funded and assholes, imo. And that article is typical hypocritical bullshit. First it praises Yale for once being 'transgressive' and radically pro-free speech, then it shames all the students for yelling and shouting their demands.

Honestly, this might be one of the clearest examples of this debate as just a clover-leaf for old racist assholes to attack the youth for being young.

I've found FIRE's rating system relatively fair ime

Business-insider with another take on the story: http://uk.businessinsider.com/yale-university-racism-on-campus-2015-11?r=US&IR=T

'Shit is blowing up' at Yale because minority students are speaking up about the discrimination they encounter on campus, and the assistant master of a house decided then was the time to send out an email saying 'isn't there room to be racist anymore?'

But that is not the story that the Koch's are paying FIRE to write.

the problem w/ what she said isn't so much that people don't understand that kids often do things that are inappropriate that they later forget, but that an adult who knows better basically said "can't we just let kids act ignorant and be hurtful as they are wont to do?".

I def don't agree with the cries for their jobs (kinda feel like this is becoming a default reaction which makes me uncomfortable) but I get why people are pissed about it.

later *REGRET

also getting tired of people immediately responding to something that is merely a behavioral suggestion (and a good one at that) with "OMG U ARE TRAMPLING ON FREE SPEECH, next they come for our kidneys!"

this quote is out of an Onion story:

"Christakis is not hostile to any minorities," Cole Aronson wrote in the YDN. "To the contrary, by advocating a campus where feather-dress costumes are met not with tar, but with dialogue, Christakis treats all students as equals. Her opponents ought to emulate her."

"met not with tar, but with dialogue"

'hey do you like my blackface costume?'
"FUCK YOU!!!"

is about all the dialogue it deserves

i mean we've dialogued about these type of things for years. at this point everybody's position is relatively understood. and nobody dressing in such costumes is interested in dialogue, they're interested in people looking at them

bleh. I thought you wrote "this quote is NOT out of an Onion story".

i am too hung over to be online right now.

Onion-worthy.

come over -- I got tomato juice.

i mean we've dialogued about these type of things for years. at this point everybody's position is relatively understood. and nobody dressing in such costumes is interested in dialogue, they're interested in people looking at them

this is the beauty of the college freshman, they keep making more of them and none of them have ever had a day of dialoguing in their whole damn lives

I want to find the bureaucrat/administrator who came up with 'dialoguing' as a word, cover him in honey, and hurl him at a wasp hive.

kind of a tough Double Dare physical challenge but if you want that grand prize....

I think everyone should resign

i love how thoroughly unfun christakis' idea of halloween is

"everyone shut up, stop drinking, turn the music off -- we need to have a serious talk about my costume"

i think she just wants students to define for themselves what they deem unacceptable instead of having the administration dictate it. some people are allergic to anything that seems like paternalism. this might be the attitude ilx defines as "creepy liberalism" but that's where she seems to be coming from.

Ironically, many students seem pretty certain that they find her unacceptable. But that doesn't seem to worry her.

Or, y'know, she might just be racist?

please exit this world where "gentle suggestion with no threat of consequences" means "dictation"

if anything the email strikes me as the dean trying to remove any potential blame from the school in case controversy hits

I feel sad for people who don't see anything odd about a college sending out Halloween costume guidelines

xp removing potential blame was definitely part of the reasoning behind the email. another part though, i feel, was that the suggestion of paternalism sets of alarm bells for some people. "safe spaces" is a newly popular concept. it wasn't too long ago that young people pretty much always argued for less adults meddling in their affairs/telling them how to run their social lives

"hey mom, there's a girl at my school looks like this!" *pulls eyes back into squints* "chinky chinky chink!"

"son you need to understand something. i know you don't mean it but laughing at how someone looks and calling them names is hurtful"

"stop meddling in my affairs!!"

i.e. qualx majorly otm. trees you are really on the wrong road here.

Or, y'know, she might just be racist?

― Frederik B, Sunday, November 8, 2015

occam's razor slices again

wow, tracer workin a little blue today

"hey mom, there's a girl at my school looks like this!" *pulls eyes back into squints* "chinky chinky chink!"

"son you need to understand something. i know you don't mean it but laughing at how someone looks and calling them names is hurtful"

"stop meddling in my affairs!!"

― illegal economic migration (Tracer Hand), Sunday, November 8, 2015 9:45 PM (6 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

university students aren't schoolchildren though, and treating them as schoolchildren is what these ppl who ascribe to the 'coddling of the american mind' viewpoint are complaining about right? I should say that the university email seems completely innocuous to me and that I think the associate master's response was wrongheaded and clumsy

xp removing potential blame was definitely part of the reasoning behind the email. another part though, i feel, was that the suggestion of paternalism sets of alarm bells for some people. "safe spaces" is a newly popular concept. it wasn't too long ago that young people pretty much always argued for less adults meddling in their affairs/telling them how to run their social lives

― Treeship, Sunday, November 8, 2015 4:32 PM (29 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

please exit this world where "gentle suggestion with no threat of consequences" means "meddling in their affairs/telling them how to run their social lives"

I'm not even agreeing with her. I'm just saying that she should be allowed to have that perspective and the demands for her to apologize for it are ott

Like, she has a different line for where meddling begins than you do and the students do and also than i do. (I support the friendly reminder email ftr.) She should be able to have her own line and not be called a racist.

Occam's razor here would dictate you read her actual words instead of ascribing motives to her.

If we're pro free speech, then clearly I'm allowed to call her a racist?

Am I demanding you apologize or else step down from your job?

Am I saying you're Swedish guy named Johan? Are you drunk?

I have no idea what you're talking about right now?

If we're pro free speech, then clearly I'm allowed to call her a racist?

allowed ~by whom~?

office of speech allowances

i’m radically in favor of free speech in all circumstances including hate speech but i make a special allowance for curtailing the right of people to call other people racist which i think is over the line and particularly heinous

university students aren't schoolchildren though, and treating them as schoolchildren is what these ppl who ascribe to the 'coddling of the american mind' viewpoint are complaining about right?

it was an analogy yes so for clarity's sake we could do a reworking of that with an example from an office, with an HR email to staff. the usual suspects would roll their eyes and moan about how lame it was, what is this, the nanny state? and that's coincidentally a good way to smoke out who the dickheads are!

I should say that the university email seems completely innocuous to me and that I think the associate master's response was wrongheaded and clumsy

yes!

wow, tracer workin a little blue today

sorry, that was literally something a child i know did around their parents, who were horrified obv. all of this comes back to the thing of like, if this associate-master-just-thinkin-'baout-things-in-a-public-email-to-everyone is made slightly uncomfortable by having to take to heart the very gentle and soberly reasoned nudging about being thoughtful, that is a tiny price to pay for living on a campus where people aren't confronted by blackface and other unproblematized caricatures of themselves and their families.

I'm against most speech. This thread helped.

it's like the underlying assumption is that the intercultural affairs committee or whoever just ENJOYS sending out emails like this, regardless of actual student behavior. there's a reason these emails get sent dog!!!

xpost

If we're pro free speech, then clearly I'm allowed to call her a racist?

Unless you're slandering her, which in fact I think you are

horrible person's alright though i think

Yeah that's just garden variety ignorance not libel, so congratulations

The addling of the Danish mind

Guys mutiny wasn't good for the bounty

it's like the underlying assumption is that the intercultural affairs committee or whoever just ENJOYS sending out emails like this, regardless of actual student behavior.

actually

curious if Yale explicitly promises a "safe space" and what the legal or quasi-legal definition of it might be.

also wondering if it's really in the interest of an impersonal and heterogenous institution like a university to make such promises beyond a motive of "this'll look good in a brochure."

the very angry student in the last video did seem pretty emphatic on that point, 'home', like it was part of the local sales pitch

iirc nobody was thinking of our college dorms as that kind of home but they were fairly standard janky dorms

yeah maybe what we're seeing here in the increasing tendency for schools to provide not so much an education as a lifestyle conflicting with older vestigial models of education.

They probably don't use the term 'safe space' exactly, but universities have a duty of care, right? Never been that clear on what that means, though...

surely, and it would be interesting to trace out how and why what's expected has evolved--my intuition is that it has as much more to do with how universities market themselves and compete for students than it does with college freshman being especially sensitive these days (or maybe better put that the sensitivity in question can be as much a product of expectations as anything else).

Not that freshmen are especially sensitive more that that sensitivity is now a popular internet fetish

ryan otm. this is a debate about changing norms and expectations in higher ed.

yes and residential universities in particular have long histories of duties of care, but the impression i had in mind, having gone to a big state school in the late 90s, was that the overall… aspect… of the delivery of that care was, i dunno, institutional, in the way that food-service food is institutional. serviceable but indifferent to individual comforts.

this is story is pretty interesting. a hunger strike! not really totally connected to this thread but i'm putting it here anyway.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/morning-mix/wp/2015/11/06/black-grad-student-on-hunger-strike-in-mo-after-swastika-drawn-with-human-feces/

yeah that's… the opposite of this thread

man you really gotta learn some thread discipline scott

yes and residential universities in particular have long histories of duties of care, but the impression i had in mind, having gone to a big state school in the late 90s, was that the overall… aspect… of the delivery of that care was, i dunno, institutional, in the way that food-service food is institutional. serviceable but indifferent to individual comforts.

― j., Sunday, November 8, 2015 8:43 PM Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

i think tho in the case of yale, that this is really _not_ a new thing? like they actually have masters of houses, etc. -- and this tradition of a camradre of faculty and students including regarding residential organization, etc. that's not a new thing, that's waaaay old-school.

and that position as i understand it is about building a good environment for students to live and learn in, and that's what its always been. so if as part of that position you oppose totally rational "try not to be hurtful to others" emails, then maybe that's not the right position for u?

(to be clear, the above starts as a reply to tracer then obv veers into a reply to others very quickly)

that would be consistent with the relative frequency of safe-space-style protests on elite slac campuses - bigger history of loko parentis, stronger commitment communicated to students that their feeling secure matters

#BLM twitter is all over that mo-story and connecting it to yale, so saying it's the 'opposite' of this thread...

The minority students at Yale are actually really explicit of what they want from their university. Not to be turned away at parties because only white girls are allowed, no harassment on squares, not feeling devalued by the authorities. And yeah, that's probably a 'new' thing at the place, but I wouldn't call it 'sensitivity'.

And are we saying that we're pro-free speech, hate speech even, but libel and slander is too much?

I know there's no 'we' here, that we're all individuals, we're all different, but above could seem like a consensus view. Which is weird, imo!

Yes, it's clear that people in this thread are pro-hate speech

Well, that was a joke from mordy, I'm aware of that, but I get the feeling a lot of people here think that hate speech should be legal? While others think that slander should not. So I'm saying, clearly nobody believes both of those things, right?

Slander has a pretty high legal bar in the US
It rarely applies to public figures and the slandered party has to prove harm, usually financial
The slander laws in UK seem crazy to me

Or I guess libel is the correct word

Frederik, are you implying that it's a bridge too far to support free speech and libel laws?

I just always wonder why all the free speech activism only revolves around racism and hate speech, and never slander and libel. It's weird. You know, Flemming Rose, the guy from Jyllands-posten, with the Muhammed cartoons, that guy is traveling all over the world and talking about the importance of absolute free speech. And back in 2008 he was suing people for libel, in connection with their reactions to the drawings.

It's just weird to me?

And of course, there is a really logical reason for why a bunch of right-wingers are defending racist speech but doesn't care about libel-laws, but apparently it would be libelous for me to talk about that logic...

US libel laws are much easier to reconcile with a strong belief in free speech than UK libel laws. That's not chauvinism -- the question of who has to prove what is central and makes a big difference.

It's definitely possible, and I've seen people try and do it. Some of them don't manage to do it to my liking (a couple of Danish philosophers defined the difference as libel being directly harmful while hate speech isn't, which seems somewhat questionable to me, when you look at what people get away with saying about races, vs individuals, in a place like Denmark).

But it's just one of those weird contradictions that pop up. Which Mordy phrased quite funnily upthread.

Hate speech isn't legal, it's just decriminalized

That was flip but as best I can imagine, "hate speech" would first have to pass a judge or jury's Potter Stewart test ("I know it when I see it") and then the plaintiff would have to be able to prove harm somehow. Otherwise criminalizing hate speech would most likely have a profound chilling effect.

A lot of countries have much stricter laws on hate speech than the US, fwiw, so Mordy's comment didn't seem like a joke to me, even if that's how it was intended. (Inciting hatred against an identifiable group is a criminal offence in Canada.)

And I generally agree with him, btw.

Frederik is certainly 'allowed' to call people racists and other people are allowed to say he's being unfair.

Mordy's comment didn't seem like a joke to me

(except for the 'special allowance' part)

Re: that Stewart Lee clip from a month ago upthread.

I got told that Lee said there was an increasing amount of political correctness he wanted to criticize but was scared of being accused of becoming the sort of bigot he usually makes fun of.

Anyone know where he said this?

x-post, it was also that part that I found funny :) And if we just take the first part of his sentence, I def respect that attitude as well.

i think i missed this part in the whole yale thing:

"The lengthy email—replete with suggestions for inoffensive costumes and links to information on various stereotypes—angered some Silliman students, who felt straightjacketed and condescended to and protested to both Nicholas Christakis and his wife Erika. Erika Christakis, a child development researcher, sent out a response shortly after midnight on Friday, Oct. 30."

http://www.slate.com/blogs/the_slatest/2015/11/07/yale_students_protest_over_racial_insensitivity_and_free_speech.html

that she was responding to students who didn't like the original e-mail.

like, she didn't read the original e-mail and then just send an e-mail to everyone. she was prompted by people who lived in the house.

what were the suggestions for inoffensive costumes?

have we mentioned that the Christakis email has its own genius page complete with passive aggressive annotations?

http://genius.com/8083073

what were the suggestions for inoffensive costumes?

the university email links to this pinterest page for good and bad costumes: https://www.pinterest.com/yalecces/

chilling

what exactly is offensive about the ball pit costume?

amy winehouse and steve jobs!

I don't think all of the costumes on the 'costumes to avoid' board are supposed to be 'offensive' exactly? just ill-advised for various reasons? the note for this one says 'try to avoid costumes that prevent you from breathing'

https://s-media-cache-ak0.pinimg.com/736x/4c/dd/4b/4cdd4b113cab9a4d50363bcd21279375.jpg

my sister-in-law visited one year and we went to a costume party at our friend's restaurant and she had done the pocahontas thing - like FANCY pocahontas her costume must have cost some money - and she totally got verbally knocked around by a grape at the party. someone dressed as a grape. she ran outside crying. my sister-in-law. and then i think she went back to our house. it gave me pause when i saw her dressed like that but what was i gonna tell her? western mass people will call you on that shit.

is there a distinction between dressing as "Pocahontas" vs as just a generic Native American? both perhaps racist but somehow going as an actual historical figure doesn't seem as racist.

Next year's costume idea: sexy racist.

Or, conversely, racy sexist.

xpost Nico?

number of punchlines you could have gone for there, good choice

that picture is making me hyperventilate

it also didn't help that my sister-in-law looks like the queen of sweden.

https://www.google.com/search?q=disney+pocahontas+costume&safe=off&biw=1242&bih=606&tbm=shop&source=lnms&sa=X&ved=0CAcQ_AUoAWoVChMIqdGnlf6DyQIVCTg-Ch0_9Qls&dpr=1.1

hers looked better than these. it wasn't a "sexy" pocahontas costume. i dunno, that whole night was really weird.

that grape was practically spitting she was so pissed.

Was she a lone grape or a bunch?

she was just one big purple grape.

pinot ok

http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2015/11/the-new-intolerance-of-student-activism-at-yale/414810

The part in Christakis's letter where she basically asks "How come none of you are concerned about the conservative students offended by slutty cop costumes, HMMMMMMMM?" and this in the Atlantic piece really bug me:

Those who purport to speak for marginalized students at elite colleges sometimes expose serious shortcomings in the way that their black, brown, or Asian classmates are treated, and would expose flaws in the way that religious students and ideological conservatives are treated too if they cared to speak up for those groups.

I'm part of the problem. I dressed up as Bob Dole on a HAlloween when my arm was messed up

They’re behaving more like Reddit parodies of “social-justice warriors” than coherent activists

lol conor man up

mordy posted this article in the other thread that's the same as this thread and it responds well to that "but what about safe spaces for republicans" line (while otherwise kinda chasing itself to a yes-but-yes standstill)

yale newspaper:

Letter from the editor:

I'm posting this letter here, because the Herald's server is down. We're working hard to resolve this issue.

On Fri., Nov. 6, the Yale Herald published an opinion piece titled “Hurt at home,” which articulated an individual’s feelings of discomfort in the aftermath of an email from Silliman College’s associate master. On Sat., Nov. 7, we removed that article from our website at the author’s request.

I recognize that we published the article with only a Yale audience in mind and that many readers outside of Yale took issue with the article’s perspective. In the following paragraphs, I hope to provide context helpful in understanding the events of the past week and “Hurt at home.”

Many readers interpreted “Hurt at home” as a direct and unreasonable response to Associate Master Erika Christakis’ email to students in the college. In considering this issue, it’s also important to acknowledge that Associate Master Christakis’ email was itself a response. It rebutted an email from Yale’s Intercultural Affairs Committee, which is made up of many of Yale’s religious and cultural group leaders. That email urged students to be culturally sensitive in choosing Halloween costumes.

Associate Master Christakis’ email articulates her faith in the Yale students’ ability to dress themselves without administrative mandates. The IAC, however, threatened no disciplinary measures for cultural insensitivity. In rebutting an email urging simple mindfulness, Associate Master Christakis’ message, intentionally or not, was “don’t be mindful.” It is this aspect of her email that has proven most troubling, especially in light of a master’s unique role at Yale.

The role of master is distinct from that of professor. While each residential college has a dean, who functions as the college’s chief academic advisor, the master’s role is one of community leader. The Yale College website reads, “[ The master] is responsible for the physical well being and safety of students in the residential college, as well as for fostering and shaping the social, cultural, and educational life and character of the college.” The University touts the communal environment enabled by masters as a major draw for prospective students.

Students in Silliman expressed their discomfort and pain at Associate Master Christakis’ decision to write her email. Instead of first trying to understand students' concerns, both Associate Master Christakis and her husband, Silliman Master Nicholas Christakis, took to Twitter, posting articles that they felt justified Associate Master Christakis’ point of view. Master Christakis even went so far as to retweet an article he had posted on his personal account from Silliman College’s own Twitter account, falsely representing it as the position of the college.

Masters are individuals, and as such have a right to voice their opinions. But Associate Master Christakis’ message is tainted by her decision to email it directly to all Silliman students—an email list to which she has access through her administrative role in the college. She could have published these thoughts on a personal blog or in a publication. She chose not to.

This incident has become an issue of free speech. The term was introduced into this conversation when Master and Associate Master Christakis asserted that in opposing the recommendations of the IAC, they were defending a right to free speech. Readers unfamiliar with the nuances of this situation believe that students have censored Master and Associate Master Christakis; they haven’t made that argument themselves.

Nicholas and Erika Christakis have an undisputed right to free speech. No one has argued that they, as individuals, should not. But students have exercised their own free speech in speaking against the way Master and Associate Master Christakis have treated their office. This incident is not analogous to a professor offering an unpopular view, or a controversial speaker coming to campus. “Hurt at home” addresses a failure to perform the duties of a defined role: nurturing the Silliman community.

David Rossler
Editor-in-chief

In rebutting an email urging simple mindfulness, Associate Master Christakis’ message, intentionally or not, was “don’t be mindful.”

ha ha way to define an argument. It could just as easily be said that her email was about free thought and imagination and how institutions can, intentionally or not, stifle such things with their official calls for mindfulness

also this "hurt at home" thing. It's not like her email contained descriptions of rape or violence. Was anyone actually hurt by reading an opinion they didn't agree with?

u could also say her email was about chocolate cake or equatorial guinea but u would be rong tho

well she wrote about that stuff not cake so whatevs cuz

what was wrong w/ the original email that she was responding to exactly?

well she wrote about that stuff not cake so whatevs cuz

― Why because she True and Interesting (President Keyes), Monday, November 9, 2015 4:18 PM Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

that's like an opinion

i cant imagine someone actually getting b-hurt about a letter asking students to be mindful on halloween of not wearing racist costumes. ...

You don't have to imagine.

"u could also say her email was about chocolate cake"

Careful now

the pinterest was not just about avoiding racist costumes fyi it also includes advice to avoid katniss costumes, costumes of some mom who got sun tanned, bane from batman costumes, costume of shirtless guy wearing a ball pit, costumes of food items?, costumes that don't give the wearer enough air to breath, etc. ie very nannyish.

costumes of the recently dead - steve jobs, amy winehouse, also honey boo, iphone 5, game of thrones costumes

that's solid advice, though. You don't want to offend eunuchs.

i, defiantly, wore the same filthy (literally, i store it with my spare tire in the trunk of my car) banana costume that has been my go-to for the last several years of halloweens chiefly due to apathy.

take that, yale.

the pinterest was not just about avoiding racist costumes fyi it also includes advice to avoid katniss costumes, costumes of some mom who got sun tanned, bane from batman costumes, costume of shirtless guy wearing a ball pit, costumes of food items?, costumes that don't give the wearer enough air to breath, etc. ie very nannyish.

― Mordy, Monday, November 9, 2015 3:32 PM (20 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

they werent just mixing in jokes?

the original email didn't really seem very NANNYISH to me

3 of the 8 links in the collage are about appropriating religious/ethnic/racial outfits for costumes, the other 5 seem to be about other transgressions of taste, safety, or personal aesthetics.

so this is all over a pinterest page ? cool

as long as we're airing out all the atlantic stuff we might as well do this:

http://www.theamericanconservative.com/dreher/the-tyranny-of-social-justice-warriors/

1. Thank you. My journey away from the radical Left actually began almost 3 years ago, when I found myself 30 years old living in a tent in a friend’s back yard. I’ve realized that it’s around that age where true Leftists have only two options available: They become full time criminals or they become college professors. (I suppose “journalist” is also an option but I roll that in under number two.) Neither appealed to me, so I began withdrawing myself from my former comrades.

she's serious: she capitalized "left"

fuckin' bullshit, not all of us can find full-time work in crime

does that have benefits???

I hear it doesn't pay.

exposure tho!!!

http://www.ew.com/sites/default/files/i/imgs/090417//public-enemies_l.jpg

http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2015/11/the-new-intolerance-of-student-activism-at-yale/414810/

http://www.mediaite.com/online/university-of-missouri-protesters-clash-with-reporters-declare-no-media-safe-space/

i kinda feel like the most [only?] interesting part of the halloween story is that it's taking place at yale which i always assumed was sorta old-money insulated by this kind of activism thing but that's probably just rooted in stereotypes about the kind of student who goes to yale (and the kind of background their families have)

http://i50.photobucket.com/albums/f308/sotoalf/Untitled_zpspi8mpwwf.jpg

SMH x10,000 re. this whole "public space safe from media" thing

http://fredrikdeboer.com/2015/11/07/its-my-job-to-take-college-students-seriously/

As I’ve said before, there’s a confusing and frustrating divide on these issues for me. One part of my life, the part that engages with the broader political conversation, is filled with well-meaning liberal and left people who say “oh, there’s no illiberal attitudes among college students — that’s all a conspiracy by the conservative media.” These people, generally, are not on campus. Meanwhile, my extensive connections in the academy, and my continuing friendships with many people who are involved in the world of campus organizing, report that this tendency is true — and often justify it, arguing that this illiberalism is in fact a necessary aspect of achieving social justice. It’s disorienting and frustrating to get arguments of denial in one part of my life and arguments of justification in another.

seasoned journalists on my timeline shaking their heads at this, all saying "yeah, i've covered protestors for years and they've always asked media to occasionally keep cameras out of people's faces and typically it hasn't been a problem and as a journalist its basically your job to work around this and figure out a way to interact that makes people not hate you, otherwise you won't get a good story."

like https://twitter.com/soledadobrien/status/663924143738462208

that's not the issue and (i hope) you know it.

i don't know what issue we're talking about.

the issue i was talking about was the protestors blocking off the area with the tents (where i presume people are camping) from the media.

bear in mind that if yr in a tent camping out then that's just like where you are living, and they were asking the media to not stick their cameras into the middle of people's tents where they were sleeping and living the past week while they were camped out protesting.

if you were camped out in the middle of some lawn protesting for a week maybe you would want some space like say the tent where you slept, where people weren't going to be going up and taking constant photos of you, idk?

in my experience this is actually a really typical thing with people camped out in protests, and the tweets i mentioned sort of validate that.

it seems like a non-story that people are latching onto because they don't know how to cover the story of "the students actually got their demand" because that never happens.

I think the issue is lol

What is the issue, amateurist?

Dod they tell them not to dress up as journalists?

Around 5:45 p.m., as attendees began to leave the conference, students chanted the phrase “Genocide is not a joke” and held up written signs of the same words. Taking Howard’s reminder into account, protesters formed a clear path through which attendants could leave.

A large group of students eventually gathered outside of the building on High Street, where several attendees were spat on, according to Buckley fellows who were present during the conference. One Buckley Fellow added that he was spat on and called a racist. Another, who identifies as a minority himself, said he has been labeled a “traitor” by several.

It's a person's right to refuse to speak to the media; the media have an obligation to get the story in a respectful manner. It's possible to hold both positions.

I feel like there's something missing from this story...? It took cutting the revenue stream to fire the president, but from what I've read he'd lost the confidence of his governing board months ago.

It's laughable that people shaking their heads at the students expect the students to have hired media consultants over the weekend or something

The attempts by conservative blogs to expose and shame the yale student in the video have been disgusting. I really dislike the rhetoric she used, but she is a college student and she didn't think she was speaking to a national audience. Fuck defining people by their worst moments.

In general at this political moment there is too much slippage between 1.) disagreeing with someone and 2.) thinking someone is a garbage human/metaphor for everything wrong with everything

More context: http://chronicle.com/article/Thrust-Into-a-National-Debate/234131?cid=at&utm_source=at&utm_medium=en&elq=0fd415c0de1d4c8690bc7d7ef0af5ccd&elqCampaignId=1797&elqaid=6828&elqat=1&elqTrackId=a2c66509e54f4a98a8f670bb1c084c8e

Ew. Better.

bear in mind that if yr in a tent camping out then that's just like where you are living, and they were asking the media to not stick their cameras into the middle of people's tents where they were sleeping and living the past week while they were camped out protesting.

"sterling," did you watch the video? the photographer is merely on the quad--a public space--not hovering over their tents. there's also the matter of a media-studies professor calling for the reporter to be forcibly ejected from that public space and the various iterations of "you can't be here"/"you don't have a right to be here" from the students.

in any event, #thereisnoperfectjournalist

Treeship's last two posts OTM

Also worth mentioning that it was a student photographer, not someone from an outside media organization.

1) I really hope it becomes a regular thing for conscientious college sports players to exercise their implicit but rarely exercised power.

2) Not entirely sure what the chancellor did that justified removal, but just looking at the dude (on the right) I can tell he's trouble:
https://chronicle-assets.s3.amazonaws.com/5/img/photos/biz/photo_73970_landscape_650x433.jpg

from the Chronicle story:

Concerns about Mr. Loftin’s leadership expanded beyond his handling of race-related issues. Citing changes in federal health-care laws, the Columbia campus announced in August that it would cut health-care subsidies for graduate students. Amid protest, that move was delayed. Throughout the chancellor’s tenure, he was criticized as slow to act and for insufficiently consulting students and faculty members.

"There were definitely some complaints that the administration sometimes shot from the hip, and therefore they occasionally had to backtrack," said Ben Trachtenberg, chairman of the Missouri Faculty Council on University Policy.

Even as students turned their attention to Mr. Wolfe, who had become the designated lightning rod for racial unrest, administrators on the Columbia campus were working to have Mr. Loftin removed. On Monday the campus’s nine sitting deans wrote to the system’s Board of Curators, the governing board, calling for the "immediate dismissal" of the chancellor.

They cited "failed leadership" regarding graduate student health insurance, along with the "dismissal" of the dean of the medical school, whose resignation was announced in September after less than a year on the job. The deans accused Mr. Loftin of "creating a toxic environment through threat, fear, and intimidation."

xpost

yeah, I don't understand people in the media who lament that it took the involvement of the football team to make things happen at Mizzou. It should be obvious that there's a huge amount of inherent racism when schools profit to the tune of millions off the free labor of mostly black athletes. I think their involvement makes total sense.

One part of my life, the part that engages with the broader political conversation, is filled with well-meaning liberal and left people who say “oh, there’s no illiberal attitudes among college students — that’s all a conspiracy by the conservative media.” These people, generally, are not on campus. Meanwhile, my extensive connections in the academy, and my continuing friendships with many people who are involved in the world of campus organizing, report that this tendency is true

The thing is, I teach college students, I'm on campus most of every day, and I do see this whole "PC run amok" thing as wildly overstated. But I know empirically that there are people who have similar jobs to mine, in similar campuses to mine, who nod their heads vigorously and share these Atlantic articles every time they come out and truly see their students as more, I dunno, thin-skinned/uptight/eager to be offended than they should be. And I just can't see what they see. I mean, maybe if I hung out in "the world of campus organizing" -- but I don't, and most students don't, and most students are barely aware that world exists.

BTW it's a nice piece of rhetorical scale-thumbing by FDB there to describe the people who disagree with him as "saying", and more than that, "saying" something which starts with "oh" to indicate they're just now thinking about it for the first time, while the people who agree with him are "reporting."

yeah, I don't understand people in the media who lament that it took the involvement of the football team to make things happen at Mizzou. It should be obvious that there's a huge amount of inherent racism when schools profit to the tune of millions off the free labor of mostly black athletes. I think their involvement makes total sense.

people are lamenting the involvement of the football team because:

a) few if any of the people complaining want to believe college football teams are made up of anything besides mindless, hulking thugs who subsist on violence
b) most if not all of the people complaining want to see football programs abolished entirely so seeing players use their (outsized) power to affect political change frightens them

(x-post) I think people sometimes conflate the obnoxiousness of some types of student activist culture and rhetoric with its actual real world power. It's odd to me that people who support big dudes using badges, guns, and clubs to communicate that somebody isn't free to speak or act in a specific place act like a small number of students to do the same thing are an unstoppable threat to freedom.

Pierce:

A couple of things: first, Ms. Click demonstrates quite vividly the difference between an assistant professor of mass communication and an assistant professor of journalism. Yoicks; also, the First Amendment argument here is a bit murky. (There seem to be university regulations regarding free space on campus that are dispositive, however, and they seem to support Tai.) It has been rendered murky over a decade and a half through policies such as those that established "free speech zones" at political conventions. If anyone wants to argue this point, they're free to take it up with all those people busted in and around Zuccotti Park in Manhattan a couple of years ago. I don't recall many bold conservatarians standing up for them.

Tim Tai was doing a job of work. He should have been allowed to do so without interference. He also should have been allowed to do so without being turned into a cudgel to be used against the people whose protest he was trying to cover. Welcome to the world, Tim. Hang in there.

The attempts by conservative blogs to expose and shame the yale student in the video have been disgusting. I really dislike the rhetoric she used, but she is a college student and she didn't think she was speaking to a national audience. Fuck defining people by their worst moments.

― Treeship, Tuesday, November 10, 2015 6:39 AM (3 hours ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

fredrik deboer has a good blog on this -- the way that the internet has raised the stakes of all this stuff in a way that's not good for students. something that in the past would be a kind of training or learning experience (among other things) will now follow you forever. i can't seem to find it at the moment, though....

and yeah i feel like the football players' actions in this mizzou stuff is the best thing to come out of college football in a long time.

i'm sure that college football players are like anyone else-- people capable of different things. some /are/ probably doofuses, a lot of them certainly are not. i've had football players in my classes and the only generalization i feel comfortable making is that they are exploited by a system that expects them to be students but puts enormous pressure on them to succeed at something that doesn't allow much time/energy for being a student. i mostly teach 'em when they're freshman and they typically are still so caught up in the excitement of being a campus star to recognize this exploitation. but i think a lot of them come around to realizing it, and it seems that at least some of the mizzou players are consciously using the particular (and peculiar, sure) authority they have for good.

sorry for typos and crappy grammar.

I blame the schools

It's odd to me that people who support big dudes using badges, guns, and clubs to communicate that somebody isn't free to speak or act in a specific place act like a small number of students to do the same thing are an unstoppable threat to freedom.

And lots of people support neither.

yeah... that's a false dichotomy/straw man if ever there was one

the relentless Atlantic:

http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2015/11/how-campus-activists-are-weaponizing-the-safe-space/415080/?utm_source=SFFB

yeah i think they have a quota of two articles about this stuff each week.

i actually think friedersdorf is right a lot of the time, but at the rate and volume he publishes this stuff you'd think we were witnessing the rise of adolph hitler or something.

and yeah that article is basically OTM, so i shouldn't complain.

reminds me of why i started this thread in the first place. maria's problem with students at the college radio station she volunteers at. the student management kicked out a long-time DJ there and one of the complaints they made about him was that he had a "weaponized" razor blade in the studio. which he used to open CDs...

Every time I come to this thread I wonder what it will take for certain posters to accept that there is something awry - maybe not to the extent the Atlantic thinks, certainly not what the National Review wants to portray, but something. These incidents keep happening (not Missouri, that's very different imo) and academics keep pointing it out and people like Frederik keep saying "No there's nothing wrong and only racists think there is." It's silo thinking.

this is the part that was just nuts, and that made me wince:

Around the 20-second mark, a woman shouts that the photographer needs to respect the space of students, just as they start to forcibly push him backwards.
Just after the one-minute mark, having been pushed back by students who are deliberately crowding him to obstruct his view, things grow more surreal as the photographer is told, “Please give them space! You cannot be this close to them.”

she's pretty clearly thrusting herself into his personal space, but then she--and those around her--accuse him of invading /her/ personal space.

TBH what a lot of this seems to illustrate is mob mentality. i suspect a lot of the individuals in that group--including the media professor who threatens the photographer at the end of the video--would probably recognize, as well as one of us, the insanity of what they're doing, if it were presented to them as the actions of other folks... but there's a kind of spontaneous groupthink that pushes them toward this misguided sense of power and greivance.

and this

Around 1:42, after several rounds of students chanting and yelling loudly at him in unison, he raises his voice to politely insist that he has a First Amendment right to be there. And a student interjects that he must not yell at a protestor.

remind me of the two women who interrupted the rally where bernie sanders was going to speak. they were screaming at the top of their lungs, getting right up in people's faces, very nearly assaulting the organizers... all the while accusing folks of treating them with disrespect and invading their personal space.

friedersdorf sure is proud of his my lai zinger

she's pretty clearly thrusting herself into his personal space, but then she--and those around her--accuse him of invading /her/ personal space.

This reminds me of a cop video: "Stop resisting arrest. Why are you resisting?"

Bookmark Removed

amazed how riled up people can get about a stupid non-story as opposed to the impressive story of students organizing against a racist thing and getting results.

but yeah that doesn't matter because somebody didn't want some photographer to take some photos at one point, so that's the issue not racism but these students hate free speech i guess.

4real?

There's no way for us to be sure their speech is free if it isn't on the Drudge Report by 6. Why do you hate free speech, Sterl?

amazed how riled up people can get about a stupid non-story as opposed to the impressive story of students organizing against a racist thing and getting results.

xp i just made this exact post. i personally think the anti-media stuff they're doing is pretty stupid but let's not lose sight of the real story here

I'm less "amazed" and more "completely unsurprised"

"And lots of people support neither." Sure, I count myself as one of them in many cases, but I'm not defining this debate.

Seeing as how the students are PAYING to go to school whereas the media (in these cases) is PAID to talk crap about them I'm down to give the students a much bigger benefit of the doubt.

i mean to be clear there is for sure a certain amount of characteristic denialism/minimization that the usual suspects like sterling/andrew farrell are employing here in the course of keeping the narrative focused -- it's a classic activist tactic, even if it requires a bit of intellectual dishonesty -- but in this instance it seems like it's not really worth arguing the point. what these kids have been doing is awesome, let them make a few mistakes imo.

The word 'coddling' just kind of sets me off, I imagine a room full of stuffy aristocrats with monocles, idly pontificating between drinks of brandy.

i prefer "mollycoddling"

xp Are you for real Adam? Do you actually decide things based on who's paying?

fwiw, I don't think the friction with the media at Missouri takes anything away from a successful protest in the face of aggressively racist behaviour and complacent leadership. My comments above were w/r/t other colleges.

xp Are you for real Adam? Do you actually decide things based on who's paying?

― impossible raver (Re-Make/Re-Model), Tuesday, November 10, 2015 12:41 PM (4 minutes ago)

i'm sure he'd say the same thing about media coverage of a $10k-a-plate republican fundraiser

there is a HUGE difference between an elected official fundraising for his own party and a student who typically gets saddled with $20k+ a year of debt

esp when articles like these are used as examples to cut further school funding/scholarships/etc cos OMG SCHOOLZ LIBRUL BAD NO MONEY FOR YOU

i understand that, I was responding to the dumb thing you said by taking it to its absurd extreme. we don't need to debate whether the media has the right to cover students -- it's obvious they do

yeah i never said they didn't. only that i would err on the side of students.

wasn't the "media" in this case also a student? or did i misread something?

amazed how riled up people can get about a stupid non-story as opposed to the impressive story of students organizing against a racist thing and getting results.

the 'getting results' here seems kinda fuzzy. it honestly seems like this chancellor was basically a run of the mill bureaucrat who broadly sympathized w/ the students but could have gone about interacting w/ them better. I really don't get why poop swastikas are his fault or what exactly he is supposed to do to prevent future poop swastikas. not sure what kind of a 'result' having his head on a pole is and I'm guessing he just didn't want to deal w/ this anymore.

I am shocked to hear that I'm reframing things in terms that cause me to agree with myself, and will take the next week on retreat to figure out whether I agree with my views because of my persistent bias, or because of my animal magnetism.

what exactly he is supposed to do to prevent future poop swastikas.

That's his job. You can't say "Oh poop swastikas. Kids will be kids. What are you gonna do?" It's a straight-up hate crime as far as I can tell from the available reporting.

i don't know that getting this guy to resign was a huge victory for anyone or anything but whatever i mean in neoliberalism u take ur victories where u can get them i guess

well maybe they should install anti-poop swastika cameras across the school, or create walls that have poop-swastika sensors built into them

sterling wrote:

but yeah that doesn't matter because somebody didn't want some photographer to take some photos at one point, so that's the issue not racism but these students hate free speech i guess.

that's a weird gloss: 'somebody didn't want some photographer to take some photos at some point'. i wouldn't say that's precisely what happened. and yes, it is a single incident. it's symptomatic of some larger trends in campus activism, but yes, even that is not exactly a world-historical problem, as i noted above.

that said it's not a zero-sum game. talking about this stuff doesn't preclude talking about the events at missouri in general. as i also have done, above, in discussing the role of football players.

i think you know that, though. in fact, i'm sure of it. you just can't resist your usual pedantic urge to police the speech of others.

and yeah i think the big 'victory' at mizzou is overstated. presumably they will hire a new college president who will be better at PR; the question of whether he or she will actually do anything, or whether there's really much of substance he or she can do, is another thing.

i don't want to condescend to the student and professor activists, though, and assume they don't realize that getting this guy out of the picture isn't just one step.

but yeah that doesn't matter because somebody didn't want some photographer to take some photos at one point, so that's the issue not racism but these students hate free speech i guess.

btw NOBODY in this thread is saying this

you write "the issue" --- but can there be, you know, more than one thing happening at one time? can things have layers to them?

or do you not trust us (or trust anyone but your own sublime intellect) to carry two thoughts--perhaps ones that carry some contradictions and complications--in our mind at once?

xp

in terms of what Wolfe could/should have done- this is a list of demands issued by the students on 21 October, students met with Wolfe later that week and said that they did not feel he was taking the demands seriously or making any moves towards putting them into effect, though the second demand is that Wolfe resign, so I guess maybe things were already past the point of no return by then? the catalyst for the demand for his resignation seems to be him refusing to engage with the protesters who had blocked his car at the homecoming parade?

I. We demand that the University of Missouri System President, Tim Wolfe, writes a handwritten 
apology to the Concerned Student 1­9­5­0 demonstrators and holds a press conference in the 
Mizzou Student Center reading the letter. In the letter and at the press conference, Tim Wolfe 
must acknowledge his white male privilege, recognize that systems of oppression exist, and 
provide a verbal commitment to fulfilling Concerned Student 1­9­5­0 demands. We want Tim 
Wolfe to admit to his gross negligence, allowing his driver to hit one of the demonstrators, 
consenting to the physical violence of bystanders, and lastly refusing to intervene when 
Columbia Police Department used excessive force with demonstrators.  
  
II. We demand the immediate removal of Tim Wolfe as UM system president. After his removal 
a new amendment to UM system policies must be established to have all future UM system 
president and Chancellor positions be selected by a collective of students, staff, and faculty of 
diverse backgrounds.
III. We demand that the University of Missouri meets the Legion of Black Collegians' demands 
that were presented in 1969 for the betterment of the black community. 
  
IV. We demand that the University of Missouri creates and enforces comprehensive racial 
awareness and inclusion curriculum throughout all campus departments and units, mandatory 
for all students, faculty, staff, and administration. This curriculum must be vetted, maintained, 
and overseen by a board comprised of students, staff, and faculty of color. 
  
V. We demand that by the academic year 2017­2018, the University of Missouri increases the 
percentage of black faculty and staff campus­wide to 10%. 
  
VI. We demand that the University of Missouri composes a strategic 10 year plan by May 1, 
2016 that will increase retention rates for marginalized students, sustain diversity curriculum and 
training, and promote a more safe and inclusive campus. 
  
VII. We demand that the University of Missouri increases funding and resources for the 
University of Missouri Counseling Center for the purpose of hiring additional mental health 
professionals; particularly those of color, boosting mental health outreach and programming 
across campus, increasing campus­wide awareness and visibility of the counseling center, and 
reducing lengthy wait times for prospective clients. 
VIII. We demand that the University of Missouri increases funding, resources, and personnel for 
the social justices centers on campus for the purpose of hiring additional professionals, 
particularly those of color, boosting outreach and programming across campus, and increasing 
campus­wide awareness and visibility.

I. We demand that the University of Missouri System President, Tim Wolfe, writes a handwritten
apology to the Concerned Student 1­9­5­0 demonstrators and holds a press conference in the
Mizzou Student Center reading the letter. In the letter and at the press conference, Tim Wolfe
must acknowledge his white male privilege, recognize that systems of oppression exist, and
provide a verbal commitment to fulfilling Concerned Student 1­9­5­0 demands. We want Tim
Wolfe to admit to his gross negligence, allowing his driver to hit one of the demonstrators,
consenting to the physical violence of bystanders, and lastly refusing to intervene when
Columbia Police Department used excessive force with demonstrators.

i get the general point, but as an actual request this seems ridiculously specific in a hectoring way. i mean do they also want them to count to sixteen and rub his tummy while chewing gum?

and sterling if you're talking about "isolated incidents," the actual incidents of overt racism on campus, however awful, aren't exactly a tidal wave. so if your logic w/r/t to activists harrassing journalists is "this one thing happened, but it's not important"--that same logic could be used to trivialize the racist incidents on campus.

man i bet friedersdorf popped a boner at this one

This behavior is a kind of safe-baiting: using intimidation or initiating physical aggression to violate someone’s rights, then acting like your target is making you unsafe.

did we already discuss this on this page btw? http://www.nytimes.com/2015/09/13/magazine/why-we-should-fear-university-inc.html

this is the reporter who was shoved, i take it

https://twitter.com/nonorganical

well worth checking out

re: whether or not this is a big victory, is there any chance of this part of the second demand happening now?

After his removal a new amendment to UM system policies must be established to have all future UM system
president and Chancellor positions be selected by a collective of students, staff, and faculty of
diverse backgrounds.

I. We demand that the University of Missouri System President, Tim Wolfe, writes a handwritten
apology to the Concerned Student 1­9­5­0 demonstrators and holds a press conference in the
Mizzou Student Center reading the letter. In the letter and at the press conference, Tim Wolfe
must acknowledge his white male privilege, recognize that systems of oppression exist, and
provide a verbal commitment to fulfilling Concerned Student 1­9­5­0 demands. We want Tim
Wolfe to admit to his gross negligence, allowing his driver to hit one of the demonstrators,
consenting to the physical violence of bystanders, and lastly refusing to intervene when
Columbia Police Department used excessive force with demonstrators.

I admire their commitment to the aesthetics of the show trial. "The letter must be hand-written, because that's how you know he really means what he wrote! And he should have to cry, and rend his garments, as he speaks! And can we shave his head after?"

the football team thing has been really striking to me because of the fact that they joined with the hunger striker.

there was a similar protest at my alma mater in the 90s, over the imminent renaming of a renovated building on campus after an alumna who had made statements in arguments made to southerners that women's suffrage (her cause) would actually bolster white supremacy, not harm it. iirc there might have been a couple other places people were able to dig up where she also voiced a similarly politically-expedient indifference to racial oppression, but before that point and after that point she apparently repudiated racism, so it was a hard charge to make stick very much or amount to anything that moved a lot of people. just the kind of thing easily brushed aside that makes committed administrators say 'in view of her large accomplishments we are very proud of our first woman graduate' etc., so despite complaints - and it's not like this person's past was a big public secret just come to light - the admins went forward.

there was a protest movement on campus in response, that lasted for a couple years, had a name, demands, went on marches around the quad, got faculty to sign on, hooked up with related grievances especially around diversity on campus. after repeated sit-ins and related challenges to get the president to actually even continue dialogue with them - he adopted the this-is-closed-we'-re-done-talking-about-this style of leadership - one of the students, a grad student iirc, went on a hunger strike that lasted for about six days before he had to be hospitalized. during that there was a shorter daylong sympathy hunger strike.

the admins didn't move an inch.

this was in the early days of widespread internet adoption, so you can still go on the campus newspaper site and read idiotic letters to the editor from fellow students. and it had state govt and national attention, got written up in the nyt. but on campus it just had a tendency to look a little pathetic, like posturing: people carrying signs and marching around our quad just utterly lacked a social/political context in the area that would have made it seem like an effectual action to take. they were relying almost entirely on the residual generic campus commitment to action in the service of progressive ideals, inchoate in most students and vaguely recalled by some of the faculty from their lives elsewhere. which was not enough to spark anything.

and it seems like it would have been unthinkable at the time that the football team would have been spurred to take any action at all, much less to do what the mizzou team did.

one of the earliest complaints i've found about the plan to rename the building after the shady alumna used the word 'comfortable'.

aero was actually around at the time, i wonder what he remembers about it.

you write "the issue" --- but can there be, you know, more than one thing happening at one time? can things have layers to them?

or do you not trust us (or trust anyone but your own sublime intellect) to carry two thoughts--perhaps ones that carry some contradictions and complications--in our mind at once?

Well, after reading President Keyes making a direct connection between protesters demanding space and police officers shouting "Why are you resisting arrest?" as they abuse people both physically and with their institutionally-granted authority, it's perfectly reasonable to doubt the mental faculties of some of the people being critical of the protesters.

dude i think he also called you a sublime fan in case you want to dignify that charge with a response

apparently Loftin will remain as "director for research-facility development," probably earning his chancellor's salary.

pushing up against someone and saying "Why are you invading my space" is a disingenuous tactic that makes the person you're accosting seem like the aggressor. Cops use a similarly disingenuous tactic.

things can reflect one another in some ways but not others. sorry i'm dumb enough to know that.

Those missouri protester demands are unreal. Did a lot of people sign that specific petition?

Mostly item 1, with the itemizing of the apology letter. The rest seemed reasonable when i glanced at it

dude i think he also called you a sublime fan in case you want to dignify that charge with a response

― j., Tuesday, November 10, 2015 12:41 PM (49 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

i was responding to sterling, not DJP FWIW

xp I don't think it was a petition, it was from a statement issued by the Concerned Student 1950 group

http://www.columbiatribune.com/list-of-demands-from-concerned-student-group/pdf_345ad844-9f05-5479-9b64-e4b362b4e155.html

not that any such demands would be unrealistic or not specific to their contexts, but i've seen fairly similar ones from campus protesters elsewhere recently, the strategies may just be fairly routine. student representation, equity in faculty/staff representation, mandatory educational component of some kind, etc.

the swarthmore newspaper protests, e.g. even

things can reflect one another in some ways but not others. sorry i'm dumb enough to know that.

And sometimes the circumstances surrounding the ways in which they don't reflect grossly supersede the circumstances around the ways in which they do and render the comparison irrelevant at best. Admittedly, you could be making an equivalency argument between protesters' relationship to journalists and the police's relationship to the general public that would make the comparison you're making have actual weight but that would actually mean you are even dumber than I think you are, so I hope that's not what you're trying to do.

from the Atlantic comment thread. zinnnng:

"One feels for these students. But if an email about Halloween costumes has them skipping class and suffering breakdowns, either they need help from mental-health professionals or they’ve been grievously ill-served by debilitating ideological notions they’ve acquired about what ought to cause them pain."

Must be difficult to be in college these days, organize a protest, and have to consider the feelings of a Atlantic article commenter.

skipping class wow that never happens in college

brilliant call to send these miscreants off to the psych so they can get prescription medication like a normal American

several years ago just as i started working at a slac they held an all-faculty meeting to do a bit of onboarding, old and new faculty together, and they went over a little presentation on unexpected ways young people might be very different than the olds expected. among them, the constant contact with parents, and the increased prevalence of already-diagnosed or yet-to-be-diagnosed mental health problems.

like, they did a quick survey about phones and text messaging frequency and things like that, and of the couple-hundred-ish faculty in the room, i, already past 30, was one of the few people in the room whose answers aligned with the students rather than the faculty. the social/behavioral facts across generations are just different.

it's symptomatic of some larger trends in campus activism

― wizzz! (amateurist), Tuesday, November 10, 2015 1:04 PM Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

no, it isn't part of any trend. that's part of what i was posting about initially. reporters who have covered protests at any point in the past all chimed in and said "yes, this is what happens, what's the story."

i guarantee you if you were at the campus tent cities set up in protest about apartheid in the 1980s you would have found conflicts between reporters wanting to go into the middle of them and protestors seeking to restrict access.

in fact if you are at any event ever, even in a public space, and it is well managed, you will find people directing reporters to where they would and would not like them to be. usually reporters who are more seasoned have figured out ways to navigate that and push their access but also know when they should not escalate, in order to get the best story possible. those reporters have typically learned that yelling "free speech" is not a good way to get people to talk to you, engage with you, and allow you good access to cover them.

a good read on press access and the relationship to protests is, of all things, mailer's armies of the night btw.

I can't tell if these ongoing college incidents are indicative of a tiny minority of students seeking accommodations that they may very well grow out of or if they imply broader cultural shifts among a large and diverse similarly aged demographic. And I feel like it is in the interest of this potentially radical minority and the media seeking controversial narratives and political antagonists alike to make them seem larger and more significant than maybe they are which just distorts the picture more.

i think that's fair

sterling, i'll give your post more thought. i don't think what i saw is as routine as you argue, and i do think that it entails an unreasonable extension or misuse of the concept of "safe spaces" -- which connects it to larger trends in campus life. but i don't want to be too dismissive.

i still think that your assertion that the story is /either/ "x" or "y"--and that talking about "x" is necessarily to discount or obscure "y"--is condescending at best.

missouri school of journalism paper's story on Jonathan Butler

http://www.columbiamissourian.com/news/higher_education/quest-for-justice-drives-mu-hunger-striker-to-grab-things/article_8fbbb75e-873a-11e5-a683-4f42206b7731.html

i do agree that the use of the term "safe space" for this stuff is pretty new. but that bit of jargon aside, i think the underlying dynamic isn't very novel at all, and is pretty easy to understand.

btw good rundown of stuff running up to the resignations here: http://www.themaneater.com/special-sections/mu-fall-2015/

"like, they did a quick survey about phones and text messaging frequency and things like that"

i am definitely an old cuz when rufus was talking about how all the kids in his class have phones i said i thought they shouldn't be allowed in class. at all. and he said but what if they have to call home and i said i don't care they can use the phone in the office. the office! that's how old i am.

"And here's a shiny dime so you can use a payphone if that one's busy!"

i can't believe i told that long halloween story about my sister-in-law and i totally didn't mention that she went to Yale!

my sister-in-law is awesome by the way. i love her. and she is actually taking time off from her job right now to go to yale divinity school.

i walked by a very forlorn-looking payphone in the university library today and wondered how many people use it every week.

i think the last time i used a payphone was in france in 2004.

in those days we called them cabines

Which was the style at the time.

the last time anyone used a payphone was when Adnan called Jay from the Best Buy parking lot

if i ran a school i would totally ban cell phones from the school grounds.

the more i read that list of demands from the missouri football players (et al) the more ridiculous and incoherent much of it seems. they demand "comprehensive racial
awareness and inclusion curriculum throughout all campus departments and units"? what does this mean? that the math dep't should offer "racial awareness and inclusion curriculum"?

This curriculum must be vetted, maintained,
and overseen by a board comprised of students, staff, and faculty of color.

those "overseeing" this curriculum must be "of color"? all of them?

(i'll take a snooty grammar moment to note that "comprised of..." is incorrect. that said, this is an error that pretty much everyone seems to make.)

there's plenty in those demands that's reasonable, pointed, thoughtful. but there's a lot in it--and unfortunately this stuff is front-loaded--that, again, seems hectoring, outrageous, impossible, or incoherent.

that said, this gets to my point about the internet not being good for student activism in a sense. i guess it's OK for a bunch of 20-year-olds to put together a list of demands that doesn't read like they were written by seasoned activists. they're young. but b/c of the internet, social media, etc., there's going to be this huge spotlight on those demands, and the folks who wrote them, and it's going to follow them around forever.

at my second-tier occupy we of course kept the press mostly out of the residential areas of camp and totally out of places like the "communications" tent (originally the "media" tent, which made this difficult). it did not tend to be necessary to interact with them physically (though it was sometimes useful to get someone big to stand somewhere) but then the journalists tended to be professionals.

i share iatee's skepticism of the great achievement of getting the guy at u of m to resign, although i think it is very cool that the grisly exploitees of the football team gave a squeeze to the sport's collective grip on higher education's nuts. hope there will be some progress on some of the other demands but i kind of suspect the modern university is much less amenable to such demands than it is to stuff like the vyshinskian specifications of the first item.

do people still go occupy camping? kinda forgot about that whole thing. probably time for #occupy reunions already.

they've upgraded to yurts

this is a safe space; no yurt feelings.

the more i read that list of demands from the missouri football players (et al) the more ridiculous and incoherent much of it seems. they demand "comprehensive racial
awareness and inclusion curriculum throughout all campus departments and units"? what does this mean? that the math dep't should offer "racial awareness and inclusion curriculum"?

you can read it as a demand for a suitably universal curricular requirement. i don't know if mizzou has one. but given the compartmentalization of programs on campuses, unless there's a gen ed diversity requirement in place, many majors (including some prone to reactionary swastika-drawing hmmmm) can escape college having given minimal thought to anything like what's being asked for.

Yeah I don't get how it's unreasonable to ask anybody that teaches anything for a living to hold court on racial awareness and inclusion.

which majors are most prone to reactionary swastika-drawing? business?

what do you mean by "hold court"?

i don't have a problem with the sort of "diversity" curriculum requirements that many if not most universities have (meaning that at some point students have to take one or more courses substantially about minority cultures/issues). i don't actually think these requirements do much of anything, but i have no problem with them.

asking /all/ parts to add "racial awareness curriculum" to their courses is just not practicable.

if you read this (at a stretch) as asking that all /teachers/ somehow receive diversity training, this is a theoretically laudable goal that, based on everything i know about how these things are implemented in practice, will be a huge waste of time and resources.

and of course one important context for these demands is that we live in a time when state legislatures are less and less interesting in funding state universities.

ahem, i meant asking all departments

You seem pretty certain that any such initiatives are a waste of time, why?

not "any such," but those particular ones, sure. have you ever been at a diversity-training workshop?

i'm profoundly cynical, i suppose, of the efficacy of asking for, effectively, more bureaucracy in a probably vain attempt to purge the university of the racism that is, unfortunately, a fact of our culture--a culture from which the university can't be cut off. does that mean that the president should ignore racist acts when they occur, or should twiddle his thumbs rather than engage with student protestors? no. maybe he needed to go for a host of reasons, that being one of them. but if those demands really are the endgame (which is a big "if," i'll admit) then it seems like mostly wasted motion.

guessing that training on the professional side would amount to a mandatory workshop w/ some kind of binder distribution and powerpoint slides, maybe a little bit of the usual role-playing exercises, a cynical charade all around

or worse, a required webinar designed by HR staff

oh believe me I've attended these diversity training sections, and I work for the division that programs diversity in student activities: they're staff development hours at best.

which majors are most prone to reactionary swastika-drawing? business?

maybe; i'm teaching a bunch of business types for the first time this year and am finding them surprisingly engaged and thoughtful, as a group - should be no surprise i guess that a lot of people who are ambitious and talented would be in business since that's a way to get the $$$

i was thinking over the years of lame letters from people in the engineering fields. or e.g. when my graduate alma mater tried to unionize, the core of resistance to the efforts came from some of the most socioeconomically conservative majors on campus - chemical engineers and the like who were well compensated, highly skilled, and incentivized to side with authority

to be fair "mostly wasted motion" is a good description of life

xxxpostsssss

Xps
Yeah I've seen a fair few and while the feeling I mostly associate with them is despair, they're so much better than nothing. Change in wider culture often foments in controlled closeted institutions, and while I don't think anybody expects the eradication of racism in America, fighting a losing battle is better than playing the odds in a situation where things could easily get worse.

Yeah I mean those demands reflect the fact that uncertainty in the atmosphere leading up to the resignations and i assume/hope they'll reevaluate what's what.

Xps
Yeah I've seen a fair few and while the feeling I mostly associate with them is despair, they're so much better than nothing. Change in wider culture often foments in controlled closeted institutions, and while I don't think anybody expects the eradication of racism in America, fighting a losing battle is better than playing the odds in a situation where things could easily get worse.

Yeah I mean those demands reflect the fact that uncertainty in the atmosphere leading up to the resignations and i assume/hope they'll reevaluate what's what.

the J-school dean; http://journalism.missouri.edu/2015/11/dean-david-kurpius-comments-on-students-coverage-of-protest-on-carnahan-quad/

this blog post from the american assoc. of university profs website echoes some of the stuff sterling said about there being better ways for a journalist to be present without that presence upsetting people, but also comes down on the "side" of the photographer. above all he blames the authority figures present for not exerting a mediating, de-escalating presence: http://academeblog.org/2015/11/10/16583/

I gotta say, the photojourno thing seems like kind of a distracting non-issue -- obviously the footage capturing that mob mentality in action is disturbing & hard to watch, which is why we're even having the conversation, but I don't think it's any more disturbing than the 'whimsical' flash mob I witnessed on my public university campus ~7 years ago, and if I step back and look at the big picture, I know which activity I'd rather see young people getting carried away in service of.

Obviously the two UM employees in the video were... shall we say "overzealous" in their support of the students; but given that they were never trained to act as law enforcement officers, I can forgive them for performing poorly when the role was thrust upon them (and obviously, at this moment in history, there are about a thousand reasons for not wanting to involve the *actual police*).

That being said: a small part of me hopes the off-camera dude who kept repeating "you lost this one, bro!" got splashed by a bus on his way to class the next day, because gloating is really just nagl

This is kinda all-over-the-place, but I agree with the central point of not looking to authority for all of the answers, etc.

http://www.tabletmag.com/jewish-news-and-politics/194874/person-up-yale-students

http://www.newyorker.com/news/news-desk/race-and-the-free-speech-diversion

jelani cobb

Also was Kelefa's article on this subject posted earlier this year? i forget http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2015/08/10/the-hell-you-say

towards the end of that tablet piece:

I have a different vision for my students, one that I am constantly trying to promote in class: Please, think of yourselves as fellow adults, my peers. When I am wrong, say so. Don’t assume I know any better than you—in many cases, you may know more. When upset by fellow students, ask if there is a forceful, creative way to solve the problem without involving the strong fist of administrative authority—which, as you know, is often likely to get things wrong and make matters less, not more, just. Recognize that solidarity with one another will nearly always work better than asking us to be disciplinarians. Consider an analogous situation in the post-college world: Do you want more police presence, or less?

And, above all, take some time to wonder what college life would be like if you comported yourselves as draft-age, marriage-age, voting citizens. Which is what you are. Would you drink more responsibly, party a bit less, be less reckless in relationships? Would do more of your reading? When offended, would you organize more effectively? Would you be more capable of truly radical political action? Think about how an adult, not a partying student, treats people of other genders. If you are white, take stock of what solidarity you owe people who lack white privilege.

this is a theme i stress a lot in my own teaching (usually in regard to taking charge of your education) but it rarely seems to get across. it's quite difficult to get college students to look at college as anything other than an extension of high school adolescence. and i think larger trends within and without the university unfortunately encourage that approach.

you almost uniformly see students with children of their own, or students who have worked prior to school or are still working 'real jobs', take to that message w/ complete alacrity tho

yes absolutely. it's kind of a thing with me to remind my classes early on that "you don't have to be here, this is a choice you are making"--which is both obvious and hopefully a bit of a perspective changer.

haha it just makes you sound like a high school teacher tho