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

i still say it's mostly a question for academics, as they are probably the one's who will ultimately be deciding the course

LOL - http://www.usatoday.com/story/opinion/2015/11/11/raise-voting-age-25-yale-missouri-protests-political-debate-column/75577468/

conservatives are flipping out about that cobb quote for the wrong reason. he's trying to say that enlightenment values don't countenance bigotry, which, lol

free speeeeech

http://america.aljazeera.com/articles/2015/11/11/missouri-senator-aims-to-block-students-dissertation-on-abortion.html

As a reminder, this started because Yale administrators merely ADVISED students not to wear offensive costumes -- no ban or censorship was at issue. In response, it was a white adviser who complained "American universities were once a safe space not only for maturation but also for a certain regressive, or even transgressive, experience; increasingly, it seems, they have become places of censure and prohibition." IMO it sounds like it's the white kids who are coddled.

this started because after the white adviser wrote her response email (which contains afaict zero bigotry) some students accused her and her husband of making them feel unsafe

maybe upper class whites are just more tuned into passive aggression. like, "we ask that you please consider..." basically means "FUCKING DON'T" in a lot of contexts, institutions, families...

accused

isn't this a form of speech? speech that must be free to be expressed?

i mean free speech gives the political right the ability to organize a broad anti-educational campaign that stretches from presidential debates to the article you read in the airplane on the way to said debate

yes - has anyone here said that they shouldn't be allowed to express themselves? by contrast, the students who complained have said that she should be fired for expressing herself. i defend people's right to illiberal opinions but we also get to say that they are wrong about how we want to organize our society.

school: please don't be racist this halloween, we don't need this shit
house master, responsible for student life: ohhh can't we be? just a little? for fun, like in the old days?

just in case it's not clear - i am not calling for any consequences of any sort for the students who yelled in that video and the advisor's husband or who called for them to be fired. i just think they're morons.

goole, do u think that you are accurately representing her email or maybe not so much?

this is all people objecting to things other people are saying about things that may or may not be true. its meaningless idle bullshit. as an American i support the right of them to print it but i can call it out and support the right of others to call it out. thats what free speech is.

should the woman be fired for writing her email? i come down on 'no.' it's meaningless to me but probably not to her.

if anyone is being coddled it is writers who spend their days pontificating maybe indulging in some sad nostalgia for their youth but now they are wise and have read theory so thats the knife they use for their self pain pleasure

i dont know its not our place to say who should be fired and not. its not a bloggers or an articles place either. its up to the people they work with.

i think you can give a judgement of personal opinion - do you think she should be fired due to her email or not?

sorry dont mean to derail but i was feeling El Tomboto earlier

personal opinion i dont really care. i dont know enough about the situation. i am not involved in their school. i dont live in Missouri or Massachusetts. i haven't been to a university in 7 years.

exactly who are you refering to being fired? there are a bunch of these stories flying around now hard to keep track

the woman who wrote the email regarding the halloween costume.

i dont think people should be fired for what they say in private. but at work anything kinda goes. hasnt that always been the case?

i am not in favor of firing by pressure from groups outside the workforce. but this happens as well. its not a new phenomenon, it goes hand in hand w nepotism, which is ages old.

i think there's a very simple question you could answer about whether she should lose her job based on sending that email and possibly you wouldn't actually want to answer that question bc if you conclude that she shouldn't, you might also have to conclude that the students demanding she lose her job are being unreasonable, which is ultimately what these stories keep coming down to - are these students making legitimate claims or not.

freedom of speech also means not having to have an opinion on this matter.

has the actual original email been published? i cant seem to find it. only something about somebody who was upset about the email.

i need to see the email to make an informed opinion. otherwise i am going off heresay and he said she said.

https://www.thefire.org/email-from-erika-christakis-dressing-yourselves-email-to-silliman-college-yale-students-on-halloween-costumes/

demanding an apology for an email sounds ridiculous but whatever. maybe they miss the PTA

would it have been too much trouble to crumple it up and throw it in the bin? would that make one less a hero for free speech?

I don’t wish to trivialize genuine concerns about cultural and personal representation, and other challenges to our lived experience in a plural community. I know that many decent people have proposed guidelines on Halloween costumes from a spirit of avoiding hurt and offense. I laud those goals, in theory, as most of us do. But in practice, I wonder if we should reflect more transparently, as a community, on the consequences of an institutional (which is to say: bureaucratic and administrative) exercise of implied control over college students.

she sounds like a monster

how is she not entitled to her opinion there? isnt that what free speech is all about?

she isnt writing legislation here. shes a policy writer. her job is to have an opinion on this stuff.

what a monster, asking us to reflect

well i mean i'm obv defending her right to her opinion there. i don't think she should lose her job for writing that email and i think the people who are demanding that she does lose her job are wrong.

yeah they need to get over themselves. she doesnt have the power to fire them. why should they have the power to fire here. that isnt speech.

but i dont know there could be local politics involved. certainly there are school politics nobody will know outside of Yale impacting this.

sounds messy.

"dont be offended about stuff"
"dont tell me what to do, that offends me"

i haven't kept up with developments but do they want her to get fired from her job as a lecturer or step down as "associate house master"? different standards of transgression here imo. different types of transgression, even, which is what the girl yelling about "making a home" vs an intellectual environment was saying. complicates things of course that the associate house master position apparently always comes w a marriage to the house master, but not my job to help ivies work through their hogwarts bullshit.

the phrase "free speech" has been abused by both the right and the left in this debate. The first amendment only prevents the government from infringing your speech. It doesn't say Yale can't have a code of conduct, or that you can't complain to your dean about being bullied, or that someone can't discourage you from wearing Halloween costumes designed to humiliate and mock others, and it ALSO doesn't differentiate between the rights of different groups based on power. I agree with the sentiment that the freedom to challenge power is more important than the freedom to mock, but this has little to do with the first amendment.

― on entre O.K. on sort K.O. (man alive), Thursday, November 12, 2015 11:44 AM (1 hour ago)

this is a great post, and illuminates how silly the objections to that initial yale email were

lol @ dlh "hogwarts"

Mordy maybe I'm misremembering, but weren't you perfectly OK when UIUC tried to fire Steven Salaita?

iirc i said here that i think on the merits of the case he should not have been fired but that i think he's a dick and i can't help but feel some joy at his misfortune

Ah, OK, I stand corrected.

fwiw i thought the contractual arguments for hiring salaita were strong enough that they should've reinstated him, but i'm still pretty pumped about the news that they voted him down

http://legalinsurrection.com/2014/09/u-illinois-board-of-trustees-votes-down-steven-salaita/

― Mordy, Thursday, September 11, 2014 2:43 PM (1 year ago)

funny u brought him up tho since the settlement just came in:

Steven Salaita and the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign have reached a settlement. According to a press release from the Center for Constitutional Rights, which helped represent Steven, Salaita will receive $875,000 from UIUC. According to this press report, $275,000 of that amount is for legal fees. The UIUC has already spent $1.3 million in its own defense.

he isn't being reinstated

Thankfully football has gotten involved so people will start to take things seriously now. /s

― AdamVania (Adam Bruneau), Thursday, November 12, 2015 9:38 AM (2 hours ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

does the involvement of football teams devalue these protests?

― too young for seapunk (Moodles), Thursday, November 12, 2015 9:50 AM (2 hours ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

i would say the opposite

― AdamVania (Adam Bruneau), Thursday, November 12, 2015 9:53 AM (2 hours ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

i think that the football players (well, some of them, anyway) taking a lead in mizzou is pretty inspirational, actually. or at least admirable, even if their stated demands could have used a few rewrites.

that said, the larger fact about university life this points to--the incredibly out$ized influence of college football--is pretty depressing. if there was one reason that the mizzou president resigned (and honestly there were a host of reasons), it's because of the football issue... Mizzou would have had to pay a fine of $1 million if they had forfeited a game.

i mentioned this above, but i feel strongly that college athletes (well, the ones in revenue-producing sports: football, basketball, hockey...) are greivously exploited, so i'm very happy to see them turn the tables on the university.

but ultimately it'd be better for everyone if this whole NCAA charade of "non-profit, amateur" college sports came tumbling down.

frankly though i think the clock is ticking on college football, because football will be un-insurable in a few decades if not sooner.

xpost

the yale thing is such a clusterfuck. the email sent by the house master's wife was dumb and passive-aggressive in some ways that one could very reasonably object to, but the response to it was often (not always) outsized. and the one valuable kernel of that email--that students stand to lose something if their first recourse is always to appeal to bureaucracy--proved regrettably prophetic. at the very same time, i'm sympathetic to all parties in this whole affair, but i'm also inclined to reiterate my earlier point, to wit: "fuck all y'all."

as for tombot's point that we are fiddling while the world drowns: yes, that is true. but my despairing feeling is that the basic cognitive and social architecture of humanity doesn't really allow us to address massive problems whose major impacts seem far in the future. so we're probably doomed.

happy thursday!

this is a great post, and illuminates how silly the objections to that initial yale email were

― k3vin k., Thursday, November 12, 2015 1:09 PM (7 minutes ago)

"initial email" meaning the perfectly reasonable "please don't be racist" email from the administration

the email the associate house master wrote, which i'm sure very few people outside the school have actually read in its entirety and instead are going by the cliff notes of the variety goole provided, was quite thoughtful if ultimately misguided and wrong-headed. it was not bigoted though and there's no reason for her to lose her job

anyway what's the latest with the missouri (non-free speech) situation? seems all i'm hearing about is this media blockade nonsense

The other thing is, the Mizzou comm professor as an employee of a public university is a government employee, therefore could be the subject of a First Amendment lawsuit if the newspaper were feeling sinister.

that said, the larger fact about university life this points to--the incredibly out$ized influence of college football--is pretty depressing.

i guess i agree but also i am kind of relieved, honestly, that the gargantuan corporate edifice that is the 21c american university has managed to place itself so totally+directly at the mercy of an exploited and largely black proletariat

They went off and saw a minister.

xp

i guess i agree but also i am kind of relieved, honestly, that the gargantuan corporate edifice that is the 21c american university has managed to place itself so totally+directly at the mercy of an exploited and largely black proletariat

well the bitter irony is that if anything helps to topple the edifice of semi-professional "amateur" college sports, it will be this proletariat exerting its power politically.

(well, that and the fact that football fucks up people's brains something awful.)