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

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.)

And it gets dumber!!

https://pbs.twimg.com/media/CTkdesPWsAEP4-H.jpg

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

yeah it actually made me sad too cos she is referring to her experience as a teacher so i thought it was pretty obvious it was a personal opinion and not some brow-beating PC Police. people see what they want to see and hear what they want to hear, i guess.

and disregard the rest woo-woo-woo

she referred to her experience as an early-child-development teacher, but oddly didn't really speak to that experience in the email.

it was a pretty odd email, i thought. maybe not worth sending? but coming from a place of concern, i think, no matter how misguided.

free speech olympics 2015

https://pbs.twimg.com/media/CTkdesPWsAEP4-H.jpg

"what a proud contrast..."

yeah! go purdue! forward boilermakers!

FBI: Purdue reports 2nd most campus hate crimes
December 23, 2012

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WEST LAFAYETTE, Ind. (AP) — Purdue University reported the second-highest number of hate crimes among the country's colleges last year, according to statistics compiled by the FBI.

The seven alleged hate crimes reported on the West Lafayette campus in 2011 were the most among Indiana colleges, the Journal & Courier reported Sunday (http://on.jconline.com/UVP9D1 ). So far in 2012, Purdue police have documented 12 hate crimes.

The FBI report said five of the incidents reported at Purdue reflected racial bias and two were related to religion. The offenses involved assault, intimidation and vandalized property.

The largest number of hate crimes last year and this year were reported against blacks, closely followed by Jews. Other alleged victims included Muslims, Asians, whites and a gay man, the newspaper said. The majority were acts of vandalism.

But I'm sure the "We Are Purdue Statement of Values" fixed all of that!

this year has been the biggest thing to hit college policy depts since starbucks

^ unsurprisingly, the dude who was a do-nothing president during the anti-racist protests of my college years went on to become a president of purdue

"hogwarts" definitely these people seem to think they are wizards, as if writing pr statements was a magickal way to transform the world.

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

yeah I mean yale corporation has tons of people and things to boycott and get angry about, it is a key part in the american class system. this email is not one of them. if this email had been an ilx post, some people would w/ agree it, some people would w/ disagree it, nobody would claim the person who wrote it was a racist.

some people would respond w/ an animated gif

i was looking for salt.gif

this whole thing probably coulda been prevented if someone responded to her email w/ an animated 'tldr' gif

MTV needs to do Real World 2015 Ivy League Edition to purge us of our sins

the section people have been objecting to is this:

I wonder, and I am not trying to be provocative: Is there no room anymore for a child or young person to be a little bit obnoxious… a little bit inappropriate or provocative or, yes, offensive? 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. And the censure and prohibition come from above, not from yourselves! Are we all okay with this transfer of power?

this is pretty funny in a way. idk the exact social racial dynamics at yale but i'll assume when controversies like this spring up, they don't come out of nowhere. people who have to deal with this shit are beyond sick of this kind of devil's advocacy.

whether she should lose her job as a teach, no, the letter in itself is anodyne enough. in her role as the house-master of a group of students; if they've come to distrust and dislike her enough, then yes.

her admonition to not trust institutional authority (the only part of this that rings true to me) is pretty funny. it ended up being taken to the nation as a whole. don't complain to the admin, take it up amongst yourselves! well, they did.

American universities were once a safe space... for a certain regressive, or even transgressive, experience

the response is that they are a perfectly "safe space" for all that stuff right now! "become places of censure and prohibition"? is that what telling kids to maybe lay off the blackface amounts to?

what's really interesting is that the email begins "Nicholas and I have heard from a number of students who were frustrated by the mass email sent to the student body about appropriate Halloween-wear." i wonder who these kids were. who is really making a mountain out of a molehill here? at the very least it suggests a much more tense social environment

as you all know i am a hater of halloween so objections that the expressiveness of your costume is being limited are p much lost on me

"Events this week at the University of Missouri and Yale University should remind us all of the importance of absolute fidelity to our shared values." -President of Purdue

so what's a stake here is basically some form of religion

in the sense that a religion is also a collection of shared values, yes

People talk about racial identities all the time when they harp on how terrible identity politics are but very few people point out that the most pernicious, self-serving, harmful identity people latch onto in the face of criticism/discomfort is "nice person".

MTV needs to do Real World 2015 Ivy League Edition to purge us of our sins

executives there obv asleep as they've passed on bidding for the republican debates not once but twice

People talk about racial identities all the time when they harp on how terrible identity politics are but very few people point out that the most pernicious, self-serving, harmful identity people latch onto in the face of criticism/discomfort is "nice person".

― I Am Curious (Dolezal) (DJP), Thursday, November 12, 2015 1:21 PM (40 seconds ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

yeah, that was a thought i had too, given the passive-aggressive and subtly coercive nature of that email

(which still doesn't justify some of the more extreme reactions to it)

and the one valuable kernel of that email--that students stand to lose something if their first recourse is always to appeal to bureaucracy

I just think she totally fails to see the comedy here: she wrote this email in the first place because some students felt bruised by a different email about their Halloween costumes and ran to the master to see what she could do about it

^ precisely