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

oh I think he's criticized a lot actually! not my field though so someone could better say how that text is received these days. was just speculating on the intellectual roots of a certain idea of cultural appropriation.

oh! fair enough. i remember when he died Critical Inquiry did an entire issue on him that bordered of the hagiographic which led me to believe that the academy was pretty infatuated. if there's more critical pushback that's wonderful.

yeah i think there's a distinction (not necc even a subtle one) between cultural exchange, sharing, borrowing, and what's called "appropriation" -- but also agreed that not everyone using the latter term has probably thought that thru v. fully.

i actually also think that the criticism of said is nearly all (with some notable exceptions like aijaz ahmad) within a generally hagiographic narrative -- i.e. he made important contributions _but_.

Btw the jewish prohabition that i didn't know existed/was respected until very recently is Shatnez. especially impressed by the fact that there seem to be conflicting theories on why this came about, and there's no clear correct answer.

FWIW I have been exposed to the various weird Jewish identity denial stuff (including via Nation of Islam, Black Hebrews, afrocentrism and various random people on social media, often, I think, posting from Arab countries where there is a political interest in denying that Ashkenazi Jews are "real" Jews).

I don't think it has much to do with appropriation though, in the sense that we're discussing it.

I was once randomly stopped on the street by a Nation of Islam guy handing out Daily Caller newspapers. He goes "Jewish John!" And I'm like, "Uh, what? Do I know you? My name isn't John." (was not wearing a yarmulke or jewish star or anything like that, fwiw). And he goes "I called you Jewish John, because you're a Johnny-come-lately Jew."

xp when i was in yeshiva there used to be a tailor with expertise in shatnez who would visit all the yeshivas and check the student's suits for shatnez (and remove it if necessary). he also ran a side business in giving people the opportunity to do shiluach ha-ken (chasing away the mother bird). he was like a maven in exotic mitzvot.

yeah i learned about it because my friend went to a tailor who advertised shatnez compliance and was baffled.

it's related to the prohibition against cross-breeding, both of which are considered chokim in jewish law aka laws that are suprarational and we don't know the reason for (by contrast w/ eidot or symbolic laws like Passover, or mishpatim - laws that are rational like no murder).

Superstitious belief in "purity" maybe? That's found in a lot of religions.

the quintessential chok is actually directly related to the laws of purity - it's the ritual sacrifice of the red heiffer to use its ashes to remove impurity from people. the actual verse says "these are the chokim (laws) of the torah" and then goes into the red heifer. i once asked my rosh yeshiva why it says "of the torah" when we're reading the torah and surely we realize these aren't the laws of the new testament of the qur'an and he quoted his father who said that when it says "of the torah" it means that this law teaches us a general rule about the essential nature of the torah. in this case it's that the person who sprinkles the ashes of the red heifer becomes impure, while the person being sprinkled on becomes pure. which teaches us that the holiest thing a person can do is to make themselves impure in order to purify their fellow. i always thought that was a lovely explanation.

that sounds similar to some hindu customs, where the cow is sacred but people butchering cows are tainted by their approximation to death

er.... not butchering, but dealing w dead cows by the side of the road and such

feel like we shd be more careful conflating the way black & jewish ppl occupy different roles in structure of american society when making these pronouncements

striking to me how religion just isn't the hateful divider it used to be in the states. netflix is our lord now:

The EEOC released fiscal year 2014 private sector data tables providing detailed breakdowns for the 88,778 charges of workplace discrimination the agency received. The fiscal year ran from Oct. 1, 2013, to Sept. 30, 2014.

The following are the top 10 categories of charges filed with the EEOC:

Retaliation under all statutes: 37,955 (42.8 percent of all charges filed)
Race (including racial harassment): 31,073 (35 percent)
Sex (including pregnancy and sexual harassment): 26,027 (29.3 percent)
Disability: 25,369 (28.6 percent)
Age: 20,588 (23.2 percent)
National Origin: 9,579 (10.8 percent)
Religion: 3,549 (4.0 percent)
Color: 2,756 (3.1 percent)
Equal Pay Act: 938 (1.1 percent) but note that sex-based wage discrimination can also be charged under Title VII’s sex discrimination provision
Genetic Information Non-Discrimination Act: 333 (0.4 percent)

https://newrepublic.com/article/124303/think-campus-pc-control-look-military?utm_medium=social&utm_source=nfrb&utm_campaign=2050

so the community members at the college radio station asked maria to be the new community rep at the station and the students scrambled to find someone else to nominate but maria was voted in and tonight another student told maria that the student's plan was to get up and walk out of the meeting if maria won. because they hate her and don't feel safe around her because she is old and questions their actions. but maria gave a good speech and they chickened out. she is like the norma rae for the olds.

the students have antagonized all the fogeys. even the polka people. they had fundraising recently and raised about 35 thousand for the station. over 30 grand of that came from the polka listeners. why you would want to upset those people - who are amazing and have the most popular shows by far - is beyond me.

Good for Maria! She'll be awesome.

"students' plan" that should read. not the student who told her that. ALL the student management was going to walk out. which i thought would actually be kinda cool because i love drama...

i love the idea that the station is totally reliant for fundraising on an hour-long polka show! that is comedy gold.

(kind of like how the local public TV station here plays 'lawrence welk' during sweeps week! make fun of it if you will, but people watch that shit.)

http://heterodoxacademy.org/2015/11/24/the-yale-problem-begins-in-high-school/

basically dying at the idea of this guy arguing about the power of adversity and speaking freely and mocking "safe spaces" and "play-doh" etc having a freakout at snapping

"I had never heard the snapping before. When it happens in a large auditorium it is disconcerting. It makes you feel that you are facing an angry and unified mob — a feeling I have never had in 25 years of teaching and public speaking."

like he actually encounters disagreement and just panics

did we follow the whole 48-hour cycle wherein everyone decided that millenials hate free speech and then oops actually no they don't, not any more than anyone else?

also its interesting how he traces all this stuff back (in the link to his talk) to marcuse. wow he harbors a grudge.

also it's notable how often college teachers blame one thing or other about their students on their high school educations, but so many of us have only the dimmest idea of what high school education is like these days.

these complaints definitely have that eternal "kids these days..." quality, where you can impute almost anything to "the trouble with education these days" when you're actually just projecting your own confusions and resentments etc.

( sterling btw i'm sorry that i've insulted you a bunch of times in the past few months. i've been real stressed out IRL and sometimes my posts have a nasty edge that i regret. )

also high school educations is so wildly diverse! there are all kinds of schools and students have all kinds of experiences there. that's not to say there aren't national trends in education -- there are. but i've found that generalizations about students' backgrounds/experiences in high school don't usually withstand a ton of scrutiny. even the usual carping about a generation raised on too many standardized exams...

i think ppl learn a lot on tumblr

i realize this is totally obvious almost to the point of satire but its true

That's the fear alright

Good protest

https://youtu.be/HKVTE9Vj5uA

This thread has wandered into my wheelhouse. I'm a HS civics teacher and I sponsor an after school LGBT+ student group. A lot of the students in the group are definitely using Twitter and tumblr to learn about social justice issues more broadly which I think is pretty important to be able to connect with other people like themselves about their experiences.

The handwringing in the article linked above...like I get that academic cultures in these rarefied private school environments skew a particular way, but the idea that this is part of some wider trend which threatens free speech and social justice warriors are running amok, it's a bit precious to me. The vast majority of K-12 spaces are still very traditional, and students are tacitly expected to endure racism, sexist, homophobia, transportation, etc as part of the background of their day to day lives.

Ugh, should say transphobia but autocorrect

I was reading Far from the Tree by Andrew Solomon again and this seems to fit here:

http://s18.postimg.org/vn8t5u761/far_from_the_tree.jpg

Meaning if schools, colleges, whatever, are undergoing this conflict between speech and identity and the status quo, it's because our society at large undergoing that struggle.

Destroy someone's self-esteem enough, and every punch feels like punching up.

He punched up at me; it felt like a kiss

'punch up' most #1 confusing term of our era imo

i say as one who has read way too many interviews with people hired to 'punch up' screenplays

(btw amateurist your apology is much appreciated. despite the friction our conversations usually turn out interesting and ultimately enjoyable.)

Dear Members of the Harvard Law School Community,

I write to update you about the community meeting to be held next Monday, November 30, from noon until 1:00, in Milstein East. Last week, as you know, in these halls where we learn and work and live our lives together, some person or persons defaced the portraits of our African-American faculty members -- cherished colleagues and beloved teachers, pillars of this Law School. I am saddened and outraged by this act. The Harvard University Police Department is investigating this act of vandalism as a hate crime, and today you received an email from the HUPD asking for all of us to assist in its investigation. I thank you all for your cooperation.

This event again reminds us that Harvard Law School is not immune from problems of racism that all institutions must confront. As an institution of higher learning, we have special obligations to provide and protect a fair and inclusive educational community. As a law school, we must strive, and help our students strive, for justice. Harvard Law School is a place to pursue our highest ideals of justice; to seek truth by subjecting ideas and assumptions to rigorous scrutiny, debate, and disagreement; to send into the world lawyers who are better and more effective because they have encountered diverse perspectives, approaches, and ideas -- and have dared to think differently. For us to achieve these aspirations, all members of our community must feel safe and included. We must be able to disagree, sometimes vigorously, but always with mutual respect. We must feel able to have difficult conversations. We must, as last week's moderators so beautifully said, encounter our differences with compassion and curiosity.

On Monday, together with senior members of the staff and faculty, I will discuss with the Harvard Law School community concrete efforts that we have been making, and will pursue, to help Harvard Law School realize these aspirations. We will discuss ways in which students, staff, and faculty can participate in helping to make Harvard Law School ever better in the pursuit of our shared ideals:
Under the leadership of our new Dean of Students Marcia Sells, we will continue work begun last summer to use Orientation and our 1L Sections as places where we learn better how to have difficult conversations and tackle sensitive issues openly but with mutual respect. I have also asked some faculty members to intensify discussions about how to foster such conversations in an environment of curiosity, compassion, and mutual respect. We have consulted -- and invite further consultation -- with students and student organizations about this process. In addition, under Dean Sells' leadership, we will develop a more formal institutional framework for diversity and inclusion, with new resources.

Through the work of the appointments committees chaired by Professors Ken Mack, Dan Nagin, and Ben Sachs, we will continue to work hard and consciously to improve the diversity of this faculty on all dimensions. This has long been a priority of this Law School and of my deanship, and we intend to continue to make it a priority to have a diverse faculty and a rich program of offerings that enable all of our students to pursue what they feel passionate about and what has inspired them to enter our profession. In the past five years, we have been honored and delighted to have many new colleagues who reflect our commitment to excellence and diversities of all kinds. But our work is far from done. We have, in the past, received excellent input from individual students and student organizations, and we invite and look forward to further collaboration on these matters.

A key element of our community is our staff. I have appointed a new Assistant Dean and Chief Human Resources Officer, Kevin Moody. Dean Moody and I are committed to finding ways to ensure that every member of the staff feels included and valued in our shared enterprise.

I have appointed Professor Bruce Mann to chair a committee that will lead research into, and a community discussion, of whether to continue using the HLS shield. This committee will be composed of faculty, staff, and students and it will begin its work immediately. Please share your thoughts with the committee at roy✧✧✧@l✧✧.harv✧✧✧.e✧✧.
Any great institution is always a work in progress. Ours certainly is. In the almost 35 years I have been here, the institution has improved along many dimensions -- the breadth, range, and collegiality of intellectual inquiry; the diversity of the students, staff, and faculty; the commitment to pro bono service through an exponential growth in clinics, student practice organizations, and every student's commitment to pro bono work; and, frankly, a more conscious focus upon the happiness and well-being of our students and our community as a whole. But there is room for improvement, and we certainly feel that urgency today. On Monday, we will continue the work of improving Harvard Law School and making it a place where all feel included and can thrive in the important work that lies ahead, not just here but in all the worlds this school opens up to members of our community.

This is a season to give thanks, and although we face challenges, there remain many grounds for gratitude. I am grateful for the strength, good will, and caring of this community, which is bound together by a mission to serve others and advance justice through law. I am thankful that we have the chance to serve others through clinics and student and faculty advocacy, and other work of the School in local, national, and global communities, and I admire and thank all who contribute to these efforts.

I look forward to continuing our work when we come together again next Monday.

I wish you all the blessings of happiness, peace, and renewal during this Thanksgiving holiday. Together, with the energy, vision, skills, and commitments of the students, staff, and faculty of Harvard Law School, we can do so much to make our community and our world better.

Warmest regards,
Martha

(sent to me and, I assume, all alumni after the fact with a very nice "Dear Alum" letter -- no idea how the meeting went.)

I've been hearing about all of this through my wife's contacts at the school; the administrative staff response has been almost a complete 180-degree turn since the turnover in the head of HR (for the better).

I found this article about the continuing unfolding of events at Yale interesting, because it's the first time I've seen the full text of Erika Christakis's email to students.

Myself I kind of align with everything she says in that email even though it's a chatty email/thinkpiece type of writing and is not very rigorous

Even if we could agree on how to avoid offense – and I’ll note that no one around campus seems overly concerned about the offense taken by religiously conservative folks to skin-revealing costumes – 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?

I mean her mistake here was to employ the word 'offensive'.

By 'offensive' she means 'something that offends someone (an individual)'.

A lot of other people take the term 'offensive' to mean 'something that is the final straw (of racism etc against a group of people who are fed up of it) that breaks the donkey's back'.

It's all about miscommunication and it's all very sad

And I think her point about the sexy costumes also holds up, although it looks throwaway on first glance.

If 'white American in sombrero' = this campus is no longer a safe space for Mexicans (or any other minority) because of the awful cultural appropriation going on, then surely 'woman with prosthetic slash across the throat and strategically torn prom dress costume covered in blood' would = this campus is no longer a safe space for anyone who has been sexually assaulted. The 'Mexican costume' links to actual American/Mexican border violence exactly as much as the 'sexy murder victim' costume relates to actual sex crimes.

Even take away the sexy violence angle (maybe this is just a British halloween thing?) and you're still left with (the majority of) people wearing 'sexy' costumes which are definitely not in line with 'sex positivity' or 'body positivity'; you're still left with halloween as a festival wherein those who are comfortable with their sexuality get to strut it, and where those who are less so are 'spotlighted' by contrast. And inevitably those who are less comfortable strutting their sexuality are going to be those who are outside the cultural norms of beauty.

This is before we get on to what the phenomena of lots of people walking around in revealing costumes 'says to' people from more conservative religious backgrounds, whether traditionally American or, for example, Indian. It could be argued that it's basically a massive 'fuck off' to such people.

I'm not aware of anyone militating against it though, in the same way people do against sombreros and chinese fans being carried around by white people

^ Not that any of that is meant to 'end' the discussion about racism (in which at some point yes, we really are going to have to talk abt sombreros and no, I wouldn't black up to go to a party and would also not wear a sombrero if I thought the significance of that was on the same level)

This is what’s so odd about the language of coddling and hypersensitivity. If students are really so fragile, if they’re really hiding from scary ideas in a thoughtless cocoon of political correctness, why are they so often to be found out on the campus, demonstrating, protesting, petitioning and organising? That’s not what hiding looks like. It’s not what coddling looks like. In fact, the people showing greatest signs of coddling are those professors for whom the classroom has been a safe space for way too long. Now they’re apparently afraid that their “small or accidental slights”, as Lukianoff and Haidt put it, are going to get pounced on. They’d much rather students “question their own emotional reactions” than question the assumptions coming from the front of the classroom.

https://www.timeshighereducation.com/features/todays-students-are-anything-but-coddled

I agree. The coddling language is dumb. Censorship is a symptom of a polity that feels strong enough to repress opposing view points, not one that is afraid of being offended.

"question the assumptions coming from the front of the classroom" is not the same thing as demanding someone be silence or fired.

*silenced

http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2015/12/06/brown-university-professor-denounces-mccarthy-witch-hunts.html

yeah i kno daily beast