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

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.

ok that's just fucking stupid

appropriate, but for gods sake be mindful about it.

never thought id say this but these kids need a healthy dose of postmodernism

or just irony, more fundamentally

those motherfuckers better not be serving any bagels at their meetings

amazing

We experienced genocide, and now they are appropriating our breakfast foods