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

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?"

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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?