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

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

but you don't have to, you can decide you don't need to, and it actually, amazingly works out. or you can stick all the defensive stuff in footnotes or the end. it isn't what people normally do, so it feels weird, but from what i've seen, people can do this, and they're generally well-received?

the problem is if there isn't much left when you take all the trappings away, like that fdb piece.

after all the nonsense, he has about a tweet's worth of a point left.

http://www.theatlantic.com/education/archive/2015/11/are-hbcus-necessary-racial-sanctuaries/416694/

Who Gets to Organize a Protest?

http://wesleying.org/2015/11/18/students-of-color-publish-a-list-of-demands-on-isthiswhy-com/

reading this you'd think that wesleyan university was no better than alabama in the 1920s, but the only specific bad behavior referenced hear is that the university president failed to send a concerned email about the beirut attack before he did so concerning the paris attacks (not that wesleyan has a study-abroad program in paris but not beirut)

also, the last demand, which insists on an anonymous way to report "microaggressions" by professors, is chilling. i'm sure there's no way that could be abused, no sir!

UNC students have demanded that the food in the cafeteria be free to all residents of North Carolina. Also the gym.

Demand from UNC lol

the unc list is really radical! i notice a lot of pet causes of some friends of mine who are in the research triangle area, it looks like ppl in their circles are really having a hand in the local activity

the food/gym demand above is actually

We DEMAND that University cafeterias, gym memberships, libraries, and class registration be free to all residents of North Carolina regardless of admittance into the institution.

which makes it seem more like a low-access-public-service thing

the school for my second teaching job finally got its concerned adminstrative message out today, we're gonna have listening sessions that address local protests (none on campus, but against police, in town) and world terrorism all in one!

the amount of coordinated nationwide motion at this point is really something, i wonder when the last time was that colleges got so anxious about managing on-campus political change

hard to imagine more extreme differences than those between UNC students and NC government

maybe moral mondays can get some traction

which makes it seem more like a low-access-public-service thing

don't get what you mean by this, unpack it for me, because i'm authentically curious about the origin of this one

i have no knowledge, it's just, if a school is publicly funded, there are many people who could benefit from its services who might not be able to get access to them via full matriculation as students? it's an outreach thing.

I get that, but it just seems like the mechanism by which the state provides food benefits to the hungry is already in place and isn't (and shouldn't be) everybody eats on campus.

but i guess, i dunno, the UNC demands at any rate don't even feel to me like things written with the intent that they be enacted, but more of a statement of principle -- "now that you're paying attention, take a second to ask yourself whether the radically different campus we're describing would have some advantages over the campus we have now"

http://chronicle.com/article/How-Missouri-s-Deans-Plotted/234283/?key=zJxi9MdiNfFUydjqU9KC4FHyHeWFsNRt0p28gV8XgCFsaFkzUEV6VklNeXlmNzREaHl2Ykt0MkZ1RWNMS2dOS2J0Z243SjVhRHE4

How Missouri’s Deans Plotted to Get Rid of Their Chancellor

such a tantalizing title! but paywalled

ganked a copy from google cache: http://pastebin.com/wr3Jjz0U

the way we operate in the Midwest

death blow

this is the midwest, we do what we want

^ that is exactly backwards

http://chronicle.com/blogs/ticker/smith-college-protesters-bar-journalists-from-covering-sit-in-unless-they-support-the-cause/106834

Reporters planning to cover the sit-in arrived at the Massachusetts college’s student center on Wednesday only to find that the protesters intended to keep them out. Alyssa Mata-Flores, a Smith senior and a sit-in organizer, elaborated on the decision to The Republican: “We are asking that any journalists or press that cover our story participate and articulate their solidarity with black students and students of color. By taking a neutral stance, journalists and media are being complacent in our fight.”

http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/university-yoga-class-suspended-over-cultural-appropriation-dispute-a6744426.html

This one is interesting. Hopefully a solution that is agreeable (a form of induction that would talk about where the practice comes from and how it has evolved in the last 50 years in the West) can be found and ultimately the class can return - it was both free and for all so v much in the spirit of the best yoga practice I see.