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

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

lol

it's true. there's just some thing you can't get across to people by telling them over and over.

for people who just want a generic BA on their resume, I'm not sure partying less and doing all the reading is actually the best decision

i should have partied more and not got sucked into going to grad school, that's for sure.

for people who just want a generic BA on their resume, I'm not sure partying less and doing all the reading is actually the best decision

― iatee, Tuesday, November 10, 2015 7:34 PM (1 minute ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

this, unfortunately.

the self-motivated people will be self-motivated, the others will be cynical and opportunistic to differing extents governed by personal code and social pressure.

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.

― ryan, Tuesday, November 10, 2015

haha I experience this phenomenon every day: students won't enter an empty classroom until I walk in; or, today, for example, a student needed to leave early and she took the trouble to tell me. I said, "Thanks for telling me, but you can leave this room whenever you want" and she said, "I'm just being courteous."

i always had this silent [palm up] [apologetic face] gesture i would make while leaving to indicate i wasn't leaving in rage over something the professor had said about lenin.

that tablet piece is really good.

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.

Yeah if they go into activist work they can say oh you are the famous person who got wrote up in the Atlantic.

Not to mention the opportunity to see how their ideas are received by the community at large and the establishment in particular. Activists growing up in this turbulent period have a much broader scope and who knows maybe in the future all this awkward stuff will be finely tuned from decades of mass market research.

i'm so glad i don't have to go to workshops. jesus. you should see how hard i try to look engaged at school events for my kids. it's sad. it's not my natural habitat. i read all the teacher posts on here though. interesting. i like work bitching. cheers, teachers.

Yeah if they go into activist work they can say oh you are the famous person who got wrote up in the Atlantic.

Not to mention the opportunity to see how their ideas are received by the community at large and the establishment in particular. Activists growing up in this turbulent period have a much broader scope and who knows maybe in the future all this awkward stuff will be finely tuned from decades of mass market research.

i honestly don't know which of this is sarcastic and which isn't, and i'm not sure who the sarcasm is directed at. :(

and this is what i mean by the troubling consequences of channeling outrage into bureaucratic remedies

http://www.mediaite.com/online/university-of-missouri-police-ask-students-to-report-hurtful-speech/

I'm going to tip-toe in, leave this on the table, and then tip-toe out again.

https://medium.com/@juliaserano/how-to-write-a-political-correctness-run-amok-article-9b828d443018

This one just happens to be about "trans ppl" but you can easily just substitute in "oversensitive college students" or "those kids protesting racial violence in ways I don't condone or agree with" or a lot of other subjects where cranky old people think things have "gone too far", quite easily.

i'm not sure that being able to point out the rhetorical strategies of a particular argument is the same thing as dismantling that argument.

and it doesn't take much these days for something to become cliché. sure, the "outrage against political correctness" article is a horrible cliché, as the atlantic magazine seems bent on proving every 36 hours. but there are all manner of journalistic clichés, from all political perspectives, simply because the internet seems to generate about 23,000 thinkpieces per minute.

also that piece seems built upon bad-faith straw man arguments, or not even arguments so much as snark, e.g.:

But then you will pan back and show that this is but one instance among many in a much larger and disturbing trend sweeping the nation — aka, “political correctness running amok.” (I am not sure why political correctness is always “running amok” as opposed to other synonymous phrases, but just roll with it.)

i'm not sure, either, since the author doesn't actually cite a single instance of this cliché being used in the type of article she's mocking. (in fact, i'd bet at this point the "...run amok" cliché is used much more often in an ironic fashion than a sincere one.) but it allows her to mock the (as yet unnamed) object of her scorn. so why not? who cares?

also, wtf is "medium.com."

also i suspect her aim is bad in implying that internet liberals are up in arms about transgender activists. but i wouldn't really know since she doesn't provide a single actual example.

i think my default position concerning pretty much every tempest-in-a-teapot controversy around campus life and "political correctness," in re. all sides, is mutating into "fuck all y'all."

but i wouldn't really know since she doesn't provide a single actual example.

It's not linked in the article, but "Feminism Needs More Thinkers Who Aren't Right 100 Percent of the Time" can be found in most popular search engines

i think my default position concerning pretty much every tempest-in-a-teapot controversy around campus life and "political correctness," in re. all sides, is mutating into "fuck all y'all."

― wizzz! (amateurist), Wednesday, 11 November 2015 11:05 (20 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

glad 2 have u on board, now we need a mod

also, wtf is "medium.com."

it's a blog publishing platform that hosts mainly long-read pieces - it's pretty widely known and not, like, some obscure thing

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Medium_(publishing_platform)

It's not linked in the article, but "Feminism Needs More Thinkers Who Aren't Right 100 Percent of the Time" can be found in most popular search engines

why would i know to search for that?

all these thinkpiece sites seem indistinguishable to me; a discover a new one every day.

yeah, but this one also facilitates discourse between the living and spirits from beyond the grave, which is a pretty distinguishing feature.

lol

There were safe spaces at my late-1980s liberal arts college, but no content warnings. Many of my black classmates were 2nd generation activists - one girl's parents harboured Angela Davis, another was the daughter of a very prominent Black Panther - and their main action during my time was an occupation to get more black studies on the curriculum, taught by black profs. The only troubling thing for me, at the time, was finding a way to be supportive without muscling in, accepting that they were in charge of the occupation and just listening to learn. Many white students were pissy about 'reverse segregation' and there were people like me from scholarship/financial aid backgrounds who were angry that their classmates did not respect their experience of relative poverty (not me, I hasten to add - I understood that there was a spectrum of poverty and a spectrum of racial situation pretty much implicitly). None of these wite kids interrogated their LGBT classmates in quite the same way as they did classmates of colour, which I always found a bit telling.

Amateurist - she mentions the name of the article in the article, if that makes sense.

i'm not sure that being able to point out the rhetorical strategies of a particular argument is the same thing as dismantling that argument.

reminds me of this post:
http://squid314.livejournal.com/329561.html

internet seems to generate about 23,000 thinkpieces per minute.

That's sort of the point. When there are 23,000 thinkpieces, all about the same small set of instances, and when I don't see anything like this as a part of life on my own campus, I have to wonder whether there's an actual trend or whether it's just thinkpiece gonna thinkpiece.

This was definitely a trend in the small graduate program I attended last year. one of my professors posted a poem on her tumblr a few days ago about a white colleague wearing a hat with fake dreadlocks for Halloween and she called it something like "the face of white supremacy."

the hat and attached dreadlocks of white supremacy

My experience with this kind of discourse -- and it really is it's own discourse, which in many ways feels different from how people spoke out against various forms or oppression when I was an undergrad -- has generally been hearing white "allies" talk about checking their privilege, or feeling "unsafe" when a classmate had a patriotic American flag cover on her macbook. In that capacity it's often felt condescending, like white people telling minorities what they should need to feel "safe" and constantly patting themselves on the back for "checking their privilege" and "complicity" in the system, which sometimes even felt to me like they were bragging about how advantaged and educated they are. If my grad program had more racial minorities of a political bent -- most of them tended to steer clear of these conversations last year -- I'd probably have a very different, more favorable view of modern day campus activism. What I saw was very performative and weirdly solemn and annoying.

https://cdn-img-3.wanelo.com/p/b27/16d/78e/d7d2291583b9b74d0c13584/x354-q80.jpg

This was definitely a trend in the small graduate program I attended last year. one of my professors posted a poem on her tumblr a few days ago about a white colleague wearing a hat with fake dreadlocks for Halloween and she called it something like "the face of white supremacy."

― Treeship, Wednesday, November 11, 2015 8:30 AM (1 minute ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

i mean...

i think my default position concerning pretty much every tempest-in-a-teapot controversy around campus life and "political correctness," in re. all sides, is mutating into "fuck all y'all."

as a disaffected and probably soon to former academic there's a tiny bit of glee in the back of my mind at the carnage.

on the other hand i think the logical outcome of all this is the further quarantine and fragmentation of the humanities, or some even worse fate.

"in the system, which sometimes even felt to me like they were bragging about how advantaged and educated they are."

the dead kennedys talked about this on their first album.

this also goes waaaaaaay back to that blog post by the professor and her white student who was so upset by the melvin van peebles movie.

"What I saw was very performative and weirdly solemn and annoying."

in other words, the work of teenagers. or people who were recently teenagers. i do give up the grain of salt in a lot of cases to the youngness. i remember how completely wrong i was a lot at that age.

xposts
but on a positive note, maybe im misreading the situation and what we're seeing is the embryonic development of a greater (if conflicted) pluralism in American society and culture, a pluralism not of an ever-expanding whole but the proliferation of ever-more-specific subgroups. maybe this is a more realistic idea of what democracy is or will be than the one we've been working with.

They weren't undergrads though. The worst offender was this professor who was in her fifties. Other activists who rubbed me the wrong way were in their twenties, like between 22 and 27.

Sorry xpost to scott.