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

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

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

― goole, Thursday, November 12, 2015

do you wanna get married or are a hater of marriage

is anyone calling for the associate master to be fired? Legitimately asking--early on there was no evidence of this except for one confrontational student in the video. The initial statement by Yale students/faculty did not ask for her to step down iirc, though the initial FIRE article jumped to that conclusion without evidence.

it takes a lot of growing up i think to not be trolled by an effectively passive-aggressive email.

but at this point that means essentially blaming the yale students for failing to have assimilated the internet hardman rules

the big heated debate on youtube was important in that what it shows is the yale students were trying to argue with the dude and he kept blowing them off and telling them that he knew things and they didn't, and repeatedly doubling down, at which point they again were effectively trolled.

experienced academics are great at being total dicks without just losing it and screaming at you -- its a storied tradition

we need to send tombot to yale to straighten all this out. he can hold a workshop.

experienced academics are great at being total dicks without just losing it and screaming at you -- its a storied tradition

― big WHOIS aka the nameserver (s.clover), Thursday, November 12, 2015 1:36 PM (5 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

hmm

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".

lol i tried a gambit like this on my first day of ethics class: 'do you think that your parents are good people?'

not surprisingly, very little traction to be had there

hmm

― wizzz! (amateurist), Thursday, November 12, 2015 2:44 PM Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

;-)

¯\_(ツ)_/¯

UPDATE 11/8/15 – FIRE has heard secondhand reports that one or more people in these videos have received threats of violence or death. We do not know whether these reports are valid or whether the alleged threats are credible. Regardless, FIRE condemns any such threats in the strongest terms, and reminds viewers that true threats of violence are not protected speech and that credible threats of violence against any person can and should be investigated by law enforcement.

https://www.thefire.org/yale-students-demand-resignations-from-faculty-members-over-halloween-email/

https://pbs.twimg.com/media/CTdk4GWUcAEOYi9.png

https://www.thefire.org/mizzou-professor-demands-muscle-to-remove-student-journalists-police-claim-hurtful-speech-can-be-punished/

I don't think the writer of the email should be fired, no. Maybe she should step down from her residential thingy position which doesn't sound like all that big a deal anyway.

What she expressed is, unfortunately, a very typical white American sentiment, and of course it has white supremacist implications although I can't say whether the writer fully appreciates that based on the text. The "freedom to offend (minorities)" is such a cretinous concept -- it might be defensible in the most abstract sense of testing the outer limits of free speech or whatever, but anyone who actually strongly cares about it is a disgusting savage.

is a disgusting savage.

hate speech IIRC

"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

― rap is dad (it's a boy!)

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

― Mordy

it just seemed hella dogmatic is all. there's clearly other things at stake here than just Mitch Daniel's call for moral absolutes

I don't think the writer of the email should be fired, no. Maybe she should step down from her residential thingy position which doesn't sound like all that big a deal anyway.

The residential thingy position is tied directly to her residence, which is also tied to her husband; it will be difficult/impossible for her to "step down" without taking him with her and they'll definitely have to move out of the housing they're currently in.

OIC. No, I don't think she should step down then, but I have a real problem with the email and the attitudes behind it.

I'm not sure if anyone has gone into how the housing system works but "colleges" at Yale are upperclass dorms; you get into one starting your sophomore year and you live there for the next three years of school, with the intent being that you are part of a community of students all living under the broad care of a faculty member living in the residence with you. That faculty member and his/her spouse (as they are usually married people) are the masters. The reason this is a big deal is because the faculty members responsible for building community and making the students who live in their residence feel welcomed and like the belong, as part of their baseline job description, are othering the kids underneath their care.

This article is a good perspective on this, from a Yale alum: http://time.com/4108632/yale-controversy-belonging/

ok that's helpful, I had no idea about this stuff, went to a state school and moved off campus after first year

Yeah, it's not like this is an RA or someone responsible for a floor; this is someone responsible for the well-being of the entire dorm hamfistedly communicating with the students she's supposed to be looking out for. Now, bear in mind that "look out for" does not mean "agree with" and shouldn't, BUT given that this started because one group of students felt that they were being condescended towards by suggestions in a campuswide email, the solution probably shouldn't involve being condescending to another group of students.

http://m.richmond.com/news/local/city-of-richmond/article_4a05d70e-99fe-539f-9097-8415205caafd.html?mode=jqm

Black students take over VCU's president's office to demand changes

BY LOUIS LLOVIO Richmond Times-Dispatch | Posted 3 hours ago

About 30 Virginia Commonwealth University student activists took over the school president’s office Thursday morning demanding, among other things, an increase in the number of black professors and more cultural competency training on campus.

The students took over first floor of the office on Franklin Street about 10 a.m.

They read a prepared letter expressing their solidarity with students at the main campus of the University of Missouri and a list of changes they are demanding from VCU officials.

What followed was not a 1960s-style protest rife with tension but an open and frank conversation about the issues black students confront at VCU.

The students talked about feeling like outsiders on campus and alienated at a place to which they turned to improve their future. Several said they were angry and felt abandoned by the university.

Participating in that conversation was Michael Rao, VCU’s president, who came downstairs when he heard the students and sat on an end table listening to them for more than two hours.

Their main concern is a lack of black professors at VCU. They say it’s often difficult for them to deal with educators who don’t understand their cultural concerns or the experience driving their thoughts and world view.

A lack of black professors also means that other students are missing out on a valuable educational point of view.

VCU says 5 percent of its professors are black. Fifteen percent of the student body is black.

Coupled with their classroom concerns is a feeling of being an outsider on campus because there is no effort being made to foster a community for black students, they said.

“You can go a whole four years talking to white people, being taught by white people and not having anything to do with black people,” sophomore Reyna Smith said.

Among the demands are to double the number of black faculty members to 10 percent of the total number of professors by 2017, to have at least one of every three candidates interviewing for a faculty position be black, and to create a position to make sure the policies are being implemented.

The students also demand the creation of a cultural competency course for all students and the hiring of an ombudsman so students have someone who will understand their experiences and concerns.

The students also want to see an increase in funding for cultural organizations and events on campus.

For his part, Rao sympathized with the students and encouraged them to talk about their concerns.

He told them that their concerns are not a complete surprise and that VCU is taking steps to bring more black professors into the university.

Still, he said, it must be acknowledged that black students have a unique perspective and that the university needs to work to bring about fundamental change.

“Students of color can’t take on the burden themselves,” Rao said, adding, “I very much have the same vision for VCU. I think there’s greater capacity to do what we know we need to do for all fellow human beings, and it needs to be a model for the rest of the nation.”

ilxor with the logical conclusion. LOCK THREAD!

http://gawker.com/maybe-the-college-kids-should-destroy-college-1741946658

I agree with the second part

we need to send tombot to yale to straighten all this out. he can hold a workshop.

yes he can

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T3PvcpWbUIg