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

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?