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

so the combined presidents of the thirtysome universities and colleges in my state system just sent around a joint letter, evidently unsolicited, extolling the recipients - maybe as inclusive as all students, faculty, and staff throughout the entire system, which would be thousands - to combat racism by listening better and acting with urgency.

tryin to get out in front of this thing i guess

my (public) university's chancellor sent out a similar email, only she unfortunately also wrote that nobody on campus was "entitled" to make remarks that belittled or demeaned others. which is like... uh... depends on what you mean by "entitled."

fuckin bureaucrats.

lol if my school called me untitled i would be like gtfo give me back my tuition then jerks

entitled lol

it's true that we're not untitled, either.

this entire things seems like speech policing of speech policing of speech policing. a never ending void of critical thinking. just reactions going off in a chain.

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/7/71/Serpiente_alquimica.jpg

in the middle is "respect". outside the circle is "cannibalism"

We got our letter from our vp of student affairs on Friday.

the weird thing is, it's really not that heard to pen a letter that

1) recommends civility and dialogue

2) upholds the principle of free speech

and yet somehow administrators seem to have trouble with this over and over again.

The American non-profit professional class is pretty much a wasteland these days.

That's an interesting statement. Why?

Largely a function of boards composed primarily of rich conservative philanthropists making the hiring decisions. In the arts, education, and charity, there's a growing non-profit management class that is aimed primarily at keeping those boards happy, and those boards know for-profit business methods and communication and like to see donations and grants rolling in. And those skills aren't generally the same skills you would want to keep a community of learning thriving, you know?

cf unc

https://twitter.com/hidden_dores/status/666372394198671361

vanderbilt list of student demands to admin

http://www.thedemands.org/

From Amherst's list:

5. President Martin must issue a statement to the Amherst College community at large that states we do not tolerate the actions of student(s) who posted the “All Lives Matter” posters, and the “Free Speech” postersthat stated that “in memoriam of the true victim of the Missouri Protests: Free Speech.” Also let the student body know that it was racially insensitive to the students of color on our college campus and beyond who are victim to racial harassment and death threats; alert them that Student Affairs may require them to go through the Disciplinary Process if a formal complaint is filed, and that they will be required to attend extensive training for racial and cultural competency.

Love those last 13 words.

http://web.ics.purdue.edu/~felluga/foucault.jpeg

^^ much cooler, though perhaps less representative, than the ruler gracing the current cover.

http://jezebel.com/we-need-yale-to-choose-us-inside-the-racial-tensions-o-1742070334

In the room, students openly grieved, sobbed, and shared stories with faculty, hoping for answers about their school’s apparent failure to provide a safe environment for minority students. At the head of the table were Holloway, Salovey and his Chief of Staff Joy McGrath, and Yale Secretary and Vice President for Student Life Kimberly M. Goff-Crews. According to Barlowe, emotions were one-sided. And this, she says, was the precise problem—that after multiple accusations, complaints and petitions about racist incidents, it took a sit-down meeting for administrators to listen, and that even the students’ discernible pain in the room sparked no visceral empathy.

“People were having breakdowns in this room. People were out of control of their bodies,” says Barlowe. “There were accounts of really deep trauma and pain, everything from outright racism to micro-aggressions to discrimination and also feelings of invisibility. And the administrators were not emotional at all, which was part of what was strange and difficult for us. They were calling on people as if we were having a regular meeting.”

they should all do mushrooms together

Grown-ups are scawwy.

jeez it's like a church revival. did any of the kids start speaking latin?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y7rFYbMhcG8

http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2015/11/the-new-intolerance-of-student-activism-at-yale/414810/

Shaming college students is turning out to be quite the career opportunity for several Atlantic writers! Thanks for making the world a better place, guys.

And yes in case you were wondering quotes the titular article. A human centipede of tsk tsk

The crap at the Atlantic is maddening to me, because it's so hysterical and sloppy and reactionary. There is a whole lot that I find threatening and difficult and worthy of criticism in the language and methods used by the protesters, particularly at Yale -- the "you aren't crying, WHY AREN'T YOU CRYING; YOU MUST UNDERSTAND AND YOU MUST APOLOGIZE AND CRY OR YOU MUST GO" shit -- but the backlash has been so much in the nature of "this is what THEY do, look at 'em, ingrates, can you believe we let THEM go to college" that there's not much change that nuanced (there's that word again) criticism of language and style could ever be taken seriously.

The future sucks and we are all gonna die, one way or the other.

Thinking how "kum-bye-ya" turned into a punchline to mock peace activism and its principles and its more faddish aspects, and how we're seeing something similar with "safe space" et al.

in case you wanted to read more articles that do little to try to comprehend the perspective of protesters:

http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2015/11/16/brown-students-poisonous-uprising-against-their-president.html

that url makes it all the more unfortunate

yes, it does

there is a lot of hooha in the air. young peoples are an easy target. it'll go away. occupy went away. remember all the hooha about that? remember something something seattle world bank imf something something? i think it would be great if students made some positive changes on campus while they are there though. they should try at least. before they go work for google.

i looked it up and over 25% of college undergraduates have children of their own. something tells me a lot of those students aren't coddled. or have time for a lot of this. but if the people who have time to fight make some positive changes, maybe it can help everyone.

The student proceeded to criticize Paxson’s proposal for change, though he admitted he hadn’t actually read it. “I haven’t seen it, but I’m going to make the not very far logical leap it doesn’t address the issues at all,” he said.

i think a good thing about the very urgent, measured, and specific demands being made of all these institutions is that they anticipate this cynical response in the right way and step around it by giving the institutions explicit, specific ways in which to fail. they can already expect that responses are not going to address their issues, but they're forcing the institutions to either fail in specific ways for which they can be held accountable, or to respond quickly rather than via glacial institutional processes to be determined by their logic and priorities.

My wife and I were discussing the dismissal of the students mounting these protests as "entitled" and we were both annoyed that no one seems to think that having students of color who feel entitled to recognition and redress for situations that they find intolerable is actually a positive advancement for how students of color view themselves in America.

college kids can be powerful. they don't have soul-crushing jobs yet and they are young and strong. that's why i loved seeing that football team get in on the action.

djp, didn't you go to harvard? i can't remember if you've ever talked about what it was like for you there when you went. my brother-in-law quit the harvard baskeball team because of racism. he was one of the only black players at that time. early 80's. he had a miserable experience on the team.

A good chunk of my misery at Harvard was self-inflicted because I was REALLY burnt out on school by the time I got there and really just wanted to sing 24/7 and/or take a year off and recharge. My parents interpreted "taking a year off" as "dropping out" and refused to support that decision, so I countered by joining as many singing groups as I could, skipping a bunch of my classes, binge drinking and staying in bed until it was time to go to a rehearsal. In retrospect... I might have been depressed.

While I was there, something like 90% of the black students lived in the Quad, which is where my rooming group ended up (me, a white dude from Long Island and a Taiwanese-American dude from northern NJ). That alone gave me a life experience unlike any I'd had up to that point or since; my high school graduating class had two black students in it out of approximately 340 kids and my high school overall had... 4? black students out of 1400, two of which were siblings. This was the largest number of black people I'd ever gone to school with up to that point, so living in a dorm where most of the other black students were was a wildly different experience for me. Of course, the institution responded to this by deciding that rising sophomores could no longer choose where they wanted to live because "students weren't being exposed to new experiences" even though most of the black kids I went to college with were coming from situations where they were only one of a handful in their situation/social circle, either through where their parents lived or through the academic program they tested into that got them onto the track that led to Harvard. The diversity experience of the black students was completely discounted in favor of the diversity experience of the white students.

http://www.slate.com/articles/double_x/doublex/2015/11/free_speech_on_campus_will_it_become_the_new_all_lives_matter.html

This is what worries me as well:

"Those who are now willing to weaken free speech protections in the name of sensitivity seem awfully sure that their version of sensitivity will prevail. I don’t share their confidence."

thanks for that, dan. it's very interesting. and in some ways mirrors maria's brother's experience.

https://messages.yale.edu/messages/University/univmsgs/detail/129760

yale prez

https://www.washingtonpost.com/national/how-black-lives-matter-born-on-the-streets-is-rising-to-power-on-campus/2015/11/17/3c113e96-8959-11e5-be8b-1ae2e4f50f76_story.html

there is a lot of hooha in the air.

http://checkhookboxing.com/customavatars/avatar2431_1.gif

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/grade-point/wp/2015/11/18/princeton-protesters-occupy-presidents-office-demand-racist-woodrow-wilsons-name-be-removed/

weirdly, that article alludes to but doesn't specifically mention the fact that woodrow wilson was president of princeton from 1902-10.

The diversity experience of the black students was completely discounted in favor of the diversity experience of the white students.

Talk about a BLUF opportunity. This is so key. This is why mix greek society stuff and mix dorms aren't the simple answer we (fucking white people) think they are. God dammit. I'm an idiot.

“People were having breakdowns in this room. People were out of control of their bodies,” says Barlowe. “There were accounts of really deep trauma and pain, everything from outright racism to micro-aggressions to discrimination and also feelings of invisibility. And the administrators were not emotional at all, which was part of what was strange and difficult for us. They were calling on people as if we were having a regular meeting.”

This breaks my heart. Denial of someone's suffering is just another violence.

So college administrators are now expected not only to hear students out, but also to match their emotional pitch? That seems entirely unreasonable to me.

i don't see how anything in the paragraph quoted indicates a denial of someone's suffering.

That's how I would react -- how I DO react -- when in the presence of a student who's visibly upset, or angry, or despondent.

you would get upset, angry, and despondent too?

Idk what to say, I guess. When ppl show you that they're in pain, you think it's normal to be unresponsive and act like they didn't say anything? Would you do this to anyone you cared about, or do you just reserve cold rationality for students?