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

I heard about that Baltimore letter on NPR tonight. Simultaneously overreaching AND ineffectual. Everbody's gonna love that.

this is from a right-wing college news website but i read through the minutes that they're discussing and there is some truly fascinating discussion about 'wellness' and geopolitical student body initiatives: http://www.thecollegefix.com/post/25500/

The new bylaw restricts the current Undergraduate Students Association Council to only weighing and voting on “matters directly and substantially pertaining to student welfare issues,” defined as “issues pertaining to student (health), resources, education, safety.”

[...]

The vice president of Students for Justice in Palestine at UCLA, called the resolution “petty bullshit.” His sister, also of SJP, defended the 2014 boycott measure as related to student-health: “You are in a place of privilege and we don’t have the power and this resolution is just really frustrating that we have to constantly reaffirm and what student wellness affects us. If we tell you something is our student wellness you have to believe us you cant pick and choose [sic].”

I was really irritated by a fb comment on a friend's post a couple weeks ago when someone attempted to use "what's going on with college campuses" as a balance to complaints about regressive shit being said by republican politicians in the US. That's not even wrong. Not even in the same realm!

college campuses are, at least for those that have large undergraduate populations, populated by young people who are still figuring out who they are. which is kind of a complete headfuck because thousands of them are all crammed into one area, with interactions with people not their own age being mostly limited to instructors and the administration, especially in towns where every store and resource is staffed by their peers

so many weird behaviors, attitudes brought from home, new ideas they pick up and cling to as identity-defining. i met a woman who lived in the same residence hall i did my freshman year of college who just had to get out, to go back home and maybe go to a community college or smaller school because there were more people living in our building than there were in her entire hometown and she couldn't deal. i wasn't really dealing well with anything, myself.

on one hand you have people who notice the inherent fucked-up pieces of the system in play who are looking for safe spaces, for places where they can concentrate on parts of their identity that are important that the student body (and administration) might not even care about. on the other hand, you have the administration, the obvious other party, who wants to keep things going and struggles to react, and overreacts, with impunity because absent student trust (which they are ridiculously bad at cultivating) they flail around.

what does an environment that treats you with respect, regardless of your sexuality, gender, race, or health look like? what about all the things you'd never really questioned before encountering all these people who have had much different experiences from your own but now live feet away from you? how do you deal with that without having any real tools to do so, and when you find the tools you don't know how to use them?

the more i think about this the more it seems like it all boils down to saying "what's with kids these days?" college is largely a time of identity politics, whether you join a movement or are just figuring out who you are. college kids caring about identity politics is not new. what IS new is the 24 hour news cycle + internet-enabled instant communication. now instead of grandma bitching about her liberal arts grandson at lunch at the country club she can register her complains in the comments of an Atlantic article.

yup

Or by writing an atlantic article

social media has also kind of standardized the language and tactics of the protests

the students got what they wanted. they can now have the CMJ station of their dreams. 65 years of community involvement....maria is completely out of it too. at least there is an ending. they are "re-branding" now.

in a way, it makes sense. it's easier to deal with any university entity if outsiders are not an issue. but the station charter as originally written was all about community involvement. (plus, the old timers had the best and most professional shows by far. and played awesome stuff. i'll miss that for sure...)

http://www.masslive.com/news/index.ssf/2015/12/umass_radio_statio_to_refocus.html

http://www.umass.edu/newsoffice/article/umass-amherst-announces-restructuring-wmua

that's a shame. is there a way to relaunch the now lost shows as podcasts in someone's garage?

there is Valley Free Radio in Northampton. low power fm station. some people might move over there if they can.

the students got what they wanted. they can now have the CMJ station of their dreams. 65 years of community involvement....maria is completely out of it too. at least there is an ending. they are "re-branding" now.

in a way, it makes sense. it's easier to deal with any university entity if outsiders are not an issue. but the station charter as originally written was all about community involvement. (plus, the old timers had the best and most professional shows by far. and played awesome stuff. i'll miss that for sure...)

http://www.masslive.com/news/index.ssf/2015/12/umass_radio_statio_to_refocus.html

http://www.umass.edu/newsoffice/article/umass-amherst-announces-restructuring-wmua

― scott seward,

sounds a little like the changes to our bylaws that kept out students who'd graduated or had no interest in graduating.

the general manager is on the air now:

04:26pm Vampire Weekend Step Modern Vampires Of The City
04:26pm The Vegan Leather This House This House
04:25pm Sufjan Stevens Chicago Illinois
04:25pm Spoon The Underdog Ga Ga Ga Ga Ga
04:24pm Passion Pit Where The Sky Hangs Where The Sky Hangs
04:00pm Mangus Haengsle Northern Lights Land
03:59pm In The Valley Below Peaches The Belt
03:59pm Future Islands Seasons (Waiting On You) Singles
03:58pm Ghosty Joy In My Sorrow Ghosty
03:58pm Diamond Mind Ngc7293 Split Tape

like a fiery vision of hell!

in a way, it makes sense. it's easier to deal with any university entity if outsiders are not an issue. but the station charter as originally written was all about community involvement. (plus, the old timers had the best and most professional shows by far. and played awesome stuff. i'll miss that for sure…)

This feels otm with my college radio experience. Our faculty adviser pushed really hard on it being a students-first station, and even when that meant community members got fired as part of petty or trumped-up disputes. In addition to being "officially" part of the university, most students generally only stuck around for four years and would just join some other club if they something didn't go their way at the station. They rarely became troublemakers or instigators, whereas the community members were viewed as hangers-on or liabilities by the faculty members I had to work with. We probably had a 2-to-1 students-to-community members ratio fwiw.

Anyway, without knowing all the details, I'm really sorry about this. I feel like community radio can be a really great thing that all universities, and especially public universities, should offer.

hahaha I listen to KALX quite a bit and end up playing the "is the dj an undergrad student or community member?" game ... and it's saddeningly easy. I guess Berkeley has a lot of grad students, so it's more nuanced, but still

jesus, that playlist is shockingly boring even for a bad college radio station, i hope that guy goes on to a great career picking overused songs for movie trailers and romcoms.

We don't allow outsiders. The problem was, like I said, the students who'd hog slots years after graduating. One guy held a Friday nite electronic set for 12 years! And it was his spot -- no one could take it away. We thought this unfair.

yeah, that can be tough. On the other hand, my station had a lot of community members who were incredibly knowledgable, great DJs, and had lots of listeners; everyone knew that they made our station better overall. Some of these were alumni, some were from totally outside the university.

that's what WMUA was like for years.

but we get to listen to Beach House a lot now...

dude I sympathize. And Beach House realized two albums to snooze to this year.

man, scott, that is depressing news.

i was getting bored with beach house's shtick after their 1st or 2nd album (it's a decent shtick)--kind of amazing that they've really made a career of it.

do they sound like tame impala?

they sound like slowly dying in a beach house with the sun warming your legs

another story. the catalyst was getting rid of max this past summer. i really do think the students had a divide and conquer strategy from day one. and it worked. kinda like when employers heap work/misery on employees in the hopes that the employees will quit/give up.

http://www.gazettenet.com/home/20058086-95/roles-of-students-community-members-to-shift-at-wmua-as-university-announces-station-restructuring

the university was supposed to meet with maria and her crew for weeks and weeks and kept cancelling and they finally met today just to be told that the community members were done. surprise!

obviously this is something that Umass wanted to happen. for whatever reason. they probably just didn't want to hear about it anymore. and it is their radio station. but it was a nice thing for people in the area. and it connected people in the area to the school.

okay, i'll shut up about this now! there must be juicier college hijinx out there in the world.

at least "Woodrow Wilson" was nowhere near your station name.

the station here is all-student, but that includes grad students, and it's completely free-form... which means that it's fairly awful 75% of the time and pretty interesting the rest of the time.

obviously this is something that Umass wanted to happen.

seems like it. as far as i can tell, university administrators do not care in the slightest about college radio stations. If you're admin and the radio station means basically nothing to you, the most efficient route is to just get rid of potential irritants.

well, all they do is cost money

It's an easy deal for the University -- community support disappears, students fail to staff or raise money, University sells the frequency for big money, and nobody who doesn't give a fuck about radio is upset! The mid-Atlantic model moves north at last. Sorry!

yes, but not before the students leave a Sufjan Stevens-shaped dent in the armor of the Oppressor

So as expected Conor Friedersdorff wrote nothing about the Missouri state legislation trying - and failing, it seems - to take scholarships away from students if they use their first amendment rights. But to be fair to him, he had a much more important task in front of him: Defending Antonin Scalia!!!

http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2015/12/the-needlessly-polarized-mismatch-theory-debate/420321/

http://www.foxnews.com/us/2015/12/16/yale-fail-ivy-leaguers-caught-on-video-clamoring-to-kill-first-amendment/

posting this just for the lols

Scalia’s error was to talk carelessly and imprecisely about a predictably fraught subject.

no he never does this

Yeah, that one was bad. I think the worst part is where he mentions 'one of the most even-handed articles on the controversy, the National Review’s Reihan Salam, an agnostic on racial preferences'. Yeah, right...

http://www.npr.org/sections/codeswitch/2015/12/17/459211924/the-long-necessary-history-of-whiny-black-protestors-at-college

v. interesting actual survey http://ncac.org/resource/ncac-report-whats-all-this-about-trigger-warnings/

Good read: http://www.newyorker.com/culture/cultural-comment/the-year-of-the-imaginary-college-student

http://qz.com/593489/if-you-want-to-be-a-bestselling-author-make-an-adult-coloring-book/

“We thought people would stop caring by now, but it has longevity,” Gabrieli Coeli tells Quartz. Coeli is chief creative officer of Blue Star Coloring, a collective of illustrators established in 2015 which produced some of the year’s run-away hits.

“The appeal for coloring books extends past traditional publishing products,” he says. “They’re self-care products.”

Universities, libraries, and senior citizen centers are catching wind and holding coloring book parties. In November, Barnes and Noble locations across the US held coloring activities for “stressed out America.” And book stores are adding new sections for adult coloring.

there was a sandwich board sign outside the office supply store across the street from me saying that they got a new shipment of adult coloring books in. "STRESSED".

I think the adult coloring book idea is pretty dope. No idea what this is doing in this thread.

don't you see man we're becoming a nation of etc

People should color in coloring books instead of getting all jerked up about traumatic imperialism in literature.

i got an adult coloring book for christmas.

given the normal usage of "adult _______" I just assume an adult coloring book is full of black and white genitalia drawings

yeah i assumed they were x-rated when i first saw them advertised somewhere.

i'm pretty sure kids could handle this lion...

http://d20eq91zdmkqd.cloudfront.net/assets/images/book/large/9781/7824/9781782433255.jpg