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

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?

When students approach me with a problem, I try to be as sober as possible. I think they want someone willing to listen. I don't try to match their anger or depondency – they want the stability. I think that's why they want to talk to an adviser in the first place.

out of control of their bodies gives me a positively baffling google image search result.

My thinking is, "Let's determine if there's a problem. If so, let's solve it."

It's a pretty big leap from "not emotional at all...calling on people as if we were having a regular meeting" to "be[ing] unresponsive and act[ing] like they didn't say anything." These are academic professionals dealing with students in their charge; it's their fucking job to handle the situation, not break down alongside the students. Now, would a cookie, a tissue, and a "there, there" have helped? Maybe. But I can't understand wanting faculty and administration to go much further than that.

yeah exactly - it must be difficult for someone in a position of responsibility to know how to react - but maybe they consider it their job to try and formally deal with problems. plus who's to say a mirroring reaction wouldn't be derided for some other reason, misplaced empathy or false solidarity.

I deal with a lot of student trauma (and drama if it's unfounded) monthly as instructor and adviser. Offering the students I advise a chair or walking out for coffee goes a long way.

i don't think the students at yale were asking administrators to rend their garments. all of us have been through any number of personal interactions where we realized the other person/people were just trying to get the interaction out of the way and didn't actually care about whatever concerns we were bringing up. That's frustrating even when it's minor stuff, which it very obviously is not in the Yale situation!

you can show basic human empathy without simply mirroring the students' emotions/actions, and at least some student left feeling that it didn't happen.

you can show basic human empathy without simply mirroring the students' emotions/actions,

otm

it's pretty hard to speculate without being there. and "feeling that didn't happen" says it all really - how people feel is important but impossible to assess. it could have seemed massively obvious to anyone in the room that someone didn't gaf or it could have been that some students would have left thinking someone didn't gaf regardless of what was said. or it could be somewhere in the middle of that.

maybe the students get the benefit of the doubt - but i'm not sure how much empathy you can expect from a formal process - or how much should be demanded. action would be better surely? and solving a problem might depend on having a formal process.

seems kind of...unhelpful for anyone here to be guessing what the administrators were or weren't saying or doing in response to the students' stories. people who tell other people about their problems at the very least want their problems validated, to have some empathy be shown. it doesn't sound like the kids were upset that they weren't agreeing with their demands -- though that could be part of it surely -- from the sounds of it, they simply felt that they weren't being heard

xp intheblanks otm

people who tell other people about their problems at the very least want their problems validated, to have some empathy be shown

this is a p broad statement. if i told my best friend about something, maybe. if i made a formal complaint about something maybe i'd want to know what's going to happen. we do have a multitude of phrases that place solutions above apologies or empathy.

but i mainly agree that without being there it's impossible to say. i dunno how you also build empathy into a formal complaints procedure, or how you'd decide what form it takes. it's not quite as easy as saying "you must show empathy if people tell you about a problem" - what is empathy? what is enough and what's not enough?

Re-reading the jezebel article, the stuff we're talking about now regarding the meeting is all coming from one student activist. Feel like that's worth noting.

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?

io serious question, since i don't recall, when if ever have you been in 'authority positions' over / taking non-personal-relationship care of people?

i would surmise that the role itself seems to people who occupy it to demand/create a certain reserve / distance

x-post: Yeah, it's one person, and she might have chosen her words poorly. The words she did choose -- "were not emotional at all" -- at least conflate listening with reacting (which isn't great because different people listen in different ways and express emotion in different ways, and that needs to be understood and tolerated) and at worse demand a display of emotion to make understanding possible, which is something I think a lot of people in a lot of cultures wouldn't be particular comfortable with.

http://www.baltimoresun.com/news/maryland/bs-md-towson-protest-20151119-story.html

The document listed the demands and ended with a pledge for Chandler: "I am acknowledging that in the event that I do not keep my promise and begin to address these concerns, I will resign as president of this University for failing to effectively represent black students."

Chandler, who signed it about 12:40 a.m., said the discussion was "long and quite difficult" but "very fruitful."

I am incredibly conflicted about removing the names of people complicit in racism from the history of our older, storied institutions of higher learning.

I absolutely understand not wanting the institution where you are learning and to where your reputation going forward will be tied to not celebrate people in its history who, if you co-existed with them, would be entirely inimical to your being.

However, removing these people from the institution's history not only gives you an incomplete story, but also allows the institution to ignore that portion of its history. If that person is removed, the institution never has to answer questions about its actions underneath that person's guidance, or what it did with all of the money/support that person gave it, or make any type of redress/action plan to respond to the negative things that person may have brought to and embedded within the culture of the institution. It feels like letting the school off the hook in the worst, most self-sabotaging way, where they get to do something that is virtually meaningless without having to make any substantive changes to how it is supporting the students upset by these historical patrons in the first place.

I don't have an answer for this beyond thinking these figures need to be talked about and used to drive changes going forward and you can't do that if you sweep all of them under the rug.

Also hopefully those conversations can help stop things like this from happening:

http://blavity.com/this-morning-at-harvard-law-school-we-woke-up-to-a-hate-crime/

you would get upset, angry, and despondent too?

No, the opposite, I would try to treat it like an ordinary meeting; I mean, I would be compassionate, I would offer a Kleenex, but I would very much try to be a neutral figure, not reflecting back the emotion of the student. I mean that I would act the way the students in that quote complain about the administrators acting.

But what people above are saying is basically otm -- there is "I'm gonna to maintain my composure and make a neutral quiet space where you can be heard" is what I'm imagining I would do, but there is also "I'm gonna visibly not gaf and look at my watch until I can reasonably exit" and I have no idea which was actually taking place in that room.

C-post to DJP: Fucking hell. I hate the WCC Complex anyway -- it feels like a monument to white supremacy on the best of days -- the wall of faculty photos is one of the few humanizing elements of that building. I am dismayed, not surprised.

yeah i can see the problems administrators are facing here. i can also feel the students pain vis-a-vis a lack of empathy when faced w bureaucracy but come on their job is not to be your mommy.

but also i just highly object to anyone using the word entitled. especially when the political right has already decided that is their mantra for shaming the underclass.

Did some reading on the larger context of the black tape bullshit at HLS -- it's pretty clearly a direct response to student protesters putting black tape over the part of the HLS seal that quotes the Royall family coat of arms (the Royall's having been slave owners). So it's pretty clearly white supremacist pricks responding to a protest they don't agree with with racial invective (WE'LL take YOUR symbol, how you like that?) and I'm still not surprised. Assholes. I am not down with changing the seal and the politicization of PTSD crap involved in the language of the protests, but the tape on the faculty thing is infinitely more destructive and dangerous and why is so fucking hard for some people to understand????

i shouldn't really write anything of substance on this thread b/c it just seems to muster abuse, but i figured that some might value this guy's perspective so i'll leave this link here:

http://fredrikdeboer.com/2015/11/19/you-cant-administer-your-way-to-justice/

I'm against changing the seal for the reasons I outlined above but I absolutely understand why students would ask for it and further understand why existence on that campus would be talked about in terms of PTSD.

deBoer often has insights (have you read his NYT Mag piece about students relying too much on administrative redress?), but he's verbose and given to self-pity when he's not bragging ("Or are you an ally if you tell them the uncomfortable truth?").

yeah all the hand-wringing (or whining) at the beginning is annoying, like he has to clear his throat of all his greivances and perceived slights before he can say what he wants to say. but what he has to say is worth hearing, i think.

like he has to clear his throat of all his greivances and perceived slights before he can say what he wants to say

He's an academic; he's grown up believing you must always maintain a ratio of 1/3 throat-clearing to 2/3 substantive content in everything you write.

ha! i'd say for lots of academics the ratio is more like 9:1

there are so many articles where i get to page 12 and i'm like, "ah, now he explains his thesis."

i've refereed some articles where the actual "news" (the substantive content) is buried on the last two pages of a 15- or 20-page article.

oy vey.

and then they say journalists are unemployable

i've also heard conference papers or invited talks where the guy (or gal) barely gets through the "lit review" portion of the talk before the time is up.

to sum up: many academics are incompetent.

i work editing civil servants' writing and it's the same thing, mind-boggling failures to provide basic and necessary information. there's a task-based piece of work i was doing recently about how someone in a gov department can get central permission to spend money on something digital - the existing content was mainly built around an application form and 4/5 diff info dumps - at no point anywhere did it say "you need to complete this form and send it to xyz" - at no point was there a link to the form that said "application form". after a week or so of working on this content i found the form on a page in a list of 25 pdfs and it was called "digital template".

i guess with politics i always assume it was a case where everybody was arguing so much about one thing or another that basic competence goes by the wayside. maybe the academic is more a case of someone arguing with themselves.

It always seems to me that the writer is trying to preempt criticism of the "you didn't think about this/read that" variety by showing that yes they did

otm a lot of academic obfuscation is defensive, not just for fun