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....

That gawker article didn't "debunk" anything. All it did was raise a bunch of questions. My wife teaches in SFUSD, and has heard, first-hand, about how out-of-control it got at SOTA. Kids were not even able to be seen with "canceled" students without they themselves being shunned. Random people ended up on lists by accident. Children calling any pushback to their demands "violence."

Is shunning someone who committed a crime worse than committing a crime? Also, I don’t know why you felt the need to connect a real life identity to this story but that’s your lookout.

are you pretending not to see the revenge porn thing or do you think

fuck it

cancel everyone who thinks cancel culture is the issue in any of this bs

Kids were not even able to be seen with "canceled" students without they themselves being shunned.

Children ostracise each other the world over. Bullying is a serious problem in schools everywhere. Overdramatised reactions to events are, in fact, extremely teenage. The abnormal part of this story is, again and I will keep repeating myself until you acknowledge it, that you are supposed to sympathise with someone who committed a crime. Seriously!

Random people ended up on lists by accident.

The nature of a whisper network as per the initial reply I pasted from the article is that it arises where normal procedures have failed. Did you go to a girls school? I did. We raised behaviour of a teacher towards us at the age of 12 with staff we trusted and our parents did too and nothing was done about it. I have heard similar stories from friends of mine and it’s been reported on, though, again, nobody seems really inclined to care about what happens to teenage girls in school. Now a whisper network flags up the wrong person because of the inadequacies of adults who are supposed to be safeguarding these children and children trying to protect themselves is the problem? Fuck off. You don’t get this happening if the issue had been acknowledged and addressed by the school.

Children calling any pushback to their demands "violence."
Their demands were that a peer who committed an act of assault, whether you bother to acknowledge it as such or not, faces some sort of consequence for his actions! It is classified as a sexual offence where I live, I imagine California has legislation covering similarly. This isn’t a case of the boy being misconstrued or outright lied about- he shared nudes of his underage girlfriend with classmates and not once in that article does the author bother to ask why!

Fuck this place, honestly.

That gawker article didn't "debunk" anything. All it did was raise a bunch of questions. My wife teaches in SFUSD, and has heard, first-hand, about how out-of-control it got at SOTA. Kids were not even able to be seen with "canceled" students without they themselves being shunned. Random people ended up on lists by accident. Children calling any pushback to their demands "violence."

You're a real peach. From "you know, Matt Taibbi makes some good points" to wondering if it's really bad for Donald Trump to keep Top Secret paperwork in an unlocked room at his golf resort to "cancellation is really real, you guys!" What color is the sky in your world?

https://www.thewrap.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/04/simpsons-memes-no-its-the-children-who-are-wrong.jpg

Many xps. Because he was a drunk teenage boy! And I don’t think he committed a crime, technically (he didn’t publish or share anything electronically). In any case, what he did was super-shitty (which he seems to understand).

I just don’t like when kids are permanently written off as bad people and given no chance to become uncanceled. All that achieves is further dehumanization and limits the opportunities for growth.

But I think a bunch of you disagree with me.

fuck you

Is that just in general, or

Many xps. Because he was a drunk teenage boy! And I don’t think he committed a crime, technically (he didn’t publish or share anything electronically). In any case, what he did was super-shitty (which he seems to understand).

I just don’t like when kids are permanently written off as bad people and given no chance to become uncanceled. All that achieves is further dehumanization and limits the opportunities for growth.

But I think a bunch of you disagree with me.

In my entire time on ilx I have never attacked anyone the way you jerks are piling on. Questioning my parenting? Yuck.

maybe grow a thicker skin and stop playing the victim

Oh no, we're "canceling" DJI!

It's undeniably shitty behavior and not the girl's fault, but is it ok to say that I'm glad that kids didn't have an easy way to send nude photos to each other when I was in high school, with the attendant weight of confidential & responsible behavior? I don't even understand why adults do it tbh.

Politics "discussions" on ilx are so toxic. A bunch of twitter addicts shouting down and insulting anyone who isn't already completely on-board with whatever they feel is the right way to think about everything. Pretty rich that you think canceling isn't real, when you guys seem to be trying to do it right now! Have any of you ever convinced anyone of anything, or are you just happy yelling at them and writing them off? I don't want to grow a thicker skin. I want to talk to non-assholes. I don't like talking to people like this. I'll leave you to it.

Like, of course it's horrible that people shared nude photos of a teenage girl! Sorry I didn't mention that. I assumed that was a given.

uh. grow a thicker skin? you really think that's the right answer? sheesh.

xp it wasn't considering how thoroughly you misapprehened what the relevant issue was

I'm sorry for being abusive not for your sake but because it gave you the excuse to do pretend everyone is just being mean to you for no reason

Like, of course it's horrible that people shared nude photos of a teenage girl! Sorry I didn't mention that. I assumed that was a given.

Hot take: maybe it's good for high school boys to be shunned for doing genuinely shitty things to other people. They will eventually graduate, it's not going to ruin their entire life, and it will give them a chance to reflect on what they did and how it has consequences.

I think DJI means well and maybe the reaction is a little unfair to him, but I otherwise agree with gyac. Sharing nude pictures of someone is a kind of cancelation too, and in that case the victim did nothing to bring it on themself.

Not a very hot take to ask boys to be accountable for their behavior?? Gyac otm throughout this discussion imo.

Absolutely.

thirded

Did you guys really read the whole story?

Yaretzi, the young woman in the story who wanted to work for real change - things like counselors for victims, for example - thought that putting up lists of "known abusers"was counterproductive. "Her intent was to lay blame at the feet of the school district, not specific young men."

The guy's ex-girlfriend seemed to have forgiven him:

The vice-principal told Fiona she could file a police report. She didn’t want to do that. (Diego had not disseminated the photo.) In communication with her family, however, the school made a plan to help Diego and Fiona repair. Fiona’s family, the vice-principal wrote in an email to Diego’s, made two requests:

1. That all pictures are deleted from every possible device, cloud, storage/media platform, etc.

2. That it be made clear to Diego and his family that this was a serious violation that is having an impact on the student’s overall well-being.

Done and done. As individuals, at the beginning, the two had managed this incident okay. Fiona had no interest in getting back together. But a couple of weeks after their breakup, when Diego was still eating only a handful of peanut-butter pretzels a day, they’d met at the beach and talked. “I was like, ‘I don’t appreciate getting treated like an abuser,’ ” Diego said. “And she’s like, ‘I don’t think you’re an abuser at all. I know that.’ ” But this had grown way beyond them.

My problem is certainly not with holding rapists and sexual assaulters accountable! I also don't want innocent people to get swept up in a witch-hunt, or for young people to have their lives ruined over a forgivable mistake - whether criminal or not. This is where the usual restorative justice routines might make sense, if they were moderated by the right person, perhaps? Obviously it wouldn't be ok to force assault victims into a restorative justice session with their abusers, but if the offense falls short of assault, maybe it would be better than just letting a bunch of kids get all Lord of the Flies on each other.

I mean, she's forgiven him based on the testimony of Diego. I don't think the guy is an unforgivable monster, but I thought the story was really weirdly written - it seems desperate to make you sympathize with him, going on about how beautiful his girlfriend was, as if he couldn't help but want to show off her nude photos to people. It only gives you second-hand, glancing accounts of the innocent people who were swept up, while giving you endless detail about the tragedy of the guy who did something fucked up. But his life isn't ruined - I'm sure the rest of his high school experience was indeed stressful and painful, even if he went to four proms (!), but he's graduated and does not have to exist in the drama mill of high school for the rest of his life. Clearly the school handled the entire situation terribly, but the article would have been a lot more effective without "he's really a good kid!" in every other paragraph.

god just fuck off DJI.

Go piss up a rope with Noel emits

^ winning hearts and minds one "fuck off" at a time

well gyac already said everything that needed saying. you're just feeling superior, as usual

you're just feeling superior

and brimstead, ofc, was just feeling, uh, smugly, morally... (looks for a word that means 'superior', while avoiding the blatant irony of it. fails. seeks an alternative, gentler approach)

go piss up a rope, sleeve

and brimstead, ofc, was just feeling, uh, smugly, morally... (looks for a word that means 'superior', while avoiding the blatant irony of it. fails. seeks an alternative, gentler approach)

go piss up a rope, sleeve

― more difficult than I look (Aimless)

i'm sorry, i don't know the social dynamics involved, what are you doing here again?

dick measuring, apparently.

i will say that i am, in fact, grateful to brimstead for telling dji to "fuck off". to me, that's allyship. in a practical sense, telling dji to fuck off isn't something i can really do anymore, so i'm glad that brimstead did.

as far as aimless goes... thank you for getting your dick out on stage. is there a joke you're trying to set up by doing this, or were you just trying to be edgy for the sake of it?

Glad I could provide some catharsis.

fuck off

Glad I could provide some catharsis.

― DJI

fuck off, you didn't provide jack shit in terms of catharsis. you provided a hostile environment, you want to take credit for that, be my fucking guest

gyac otm throughout obviously

Now that the dust settled I'm curious what people now think of that original atlantic article scott posted in 2015?

you know what's funny is a lot of my liberal friends who have full-on embraced safe spaces and are sympathetic to triggers were positively railing against this article back then.

mocking the idea outright. guessing Trump brought them around to seeing their benefit.

there were a lot of things that i had to have very patiently explained to me by people who knew a lot better than i did. i'm grateful that they took the time. it wasn't their responsibility to do so.

Now that the dust settled I'm curious what people now think of that original atlantic article scott posted in 2015?

still very dumb moral panic stuff. just tries to tie a bunch of unrelated anecdotes into the idea that content warnings are bad and coddling students, it's a very weak argument.

Anything that resolves to "kids these days amirite" should be rejected out of hand and anyone pushing it should be ridiculed at every opportunity.

^^^^
Words to live by but damn does it get hard as you get older.

Anything that resolves to "kids these days amirite" should be rejected out of hand and anyone pushing it should be ridiculed at every opportunity.

― papal hotwife (milo z)

kids these days are based af amirite

heh, I was going to say that includes zoomer fetishism to a lesser degree

The excellent If Books Could Kill podcast recently did an episode of the The Coddling Of The American Mind book, no spoiler to say they were not very impressed.

https://pod.link/1651876897

Ooo, I love Michael Hobbes on Maintenance Phase, will check that out.

that pod is great (and so is the ep)