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

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.