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

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

djp you're in luck

[NSFW EDIT]

Would you mind linkifying the NSFW image, if you please, or asking a mod to do so? (I am aware of the irony of asking that, in this thread, about that particular image, but please. Some of us do work in offices.)

Feel like the survey on trigger warning in academia was an interesting premise, but a missed opportunity. It tells only half the story: that of the educators. I think a more balanced approach would have actually involved surveying students about what, specifically, they wanted warnings on, and warnings for. Because when you are relying on educators (professors? teachers?) to report second hand about students' concerns, that introduces a layer of hearsay and interpretation that would not hold up as scientifically rigorous.

no its rigorous it just tells you something different.

like it tells you who actually uses them or has gotten requests, and how they feel about those requests. i don't think that's unbalanced. it just tells you a particular thing instead of another thing.

also surveying instructors you can get a representative sample with a smaller study. surveying students nationwide in sufficiently significant numbers (especially with qualitative responses) would be a freaking nightmare

Well, it tells you about instructors. It doesn't tell you much about trigger warnings.

I've been trying to think of an analogy, like, imagine someone setting out to survey ... some aspect of healthcare? And they go round hospitals and interview doctors and nurses and healthcare providers. But never actually think to interview or study the patients receiving that care. Would you consider that a rounded survey?

Or imagine you're studying "rail commuting" and you interview train drivers and station staff, but never interview a single passenger. Is that a rounded view of rail commuting? Even if you asked what train drivers and station staff reported hearing from passengers, would you think that was a representative view of how the majority of passengers felt? (Or only representative of a subset of passengers who 1) had problems which required intervention from staff and 2) felt comfortable approaching station staff?)

Guys on ILX who participate in these kind of topics are always demanding more "nuance" in these discussions. But part of discovering "nuance" in any conversation is looking for whose voices are missing. (Or, in a more complicated and nuance-y approach, those whose views are only ever represented for them by people in positions of power over them.)

You may think this is quibbling, but imagine someone setting out to do a study on "incarceration" which interviews only prison guards, parole officers and police, and never interviews a single prisoner. Do you think that is a representative or indicative study? Yes, that is a purposely loaded question. (Students are not prisoners.)

So I think, in terms of telling you anything about trigger warnings and their use, that study is missing a really important viewpoint. Yes, it's *easier* to survey only instructors. But easier is not more representative or more accurate.

it shouldn't be, but you'd be surprised (or maybe you wouldn't) by how radical the concept of talking to the people who use a thing about what they need or want is, for big institutions. probably both public and private. like they just don't do it and are blind to why it would help. i suppose because they're institutionalised.

speaking from a uk perspective, but i worked in a government department (i now work more centrally for government - so it's a little less myopic) and basically my job was to make webpages or tools that work for the people who need to use them - or even before that to identify whether people actually need this page or this information or this tool/app at all.

you go to meetings where people are like "i know you're thinking about the user, but..." and go on with some random concern that comes from within the institution. these are people who are colloquially known as "public servants"... it's astonishing how obvious it should be and how blind they are.

this ground up way of looking at how something works and how to improve it - talk to the people who use it (and pay for it, your customers) - it's a huge thing to swallow for institutions who are used to deciding things slowly amongst themselves based on keeping each other happy and representing their own foibles. i can only assume academia is very much like this.

slight tangent but the post above made me think of this.

Well, funnily enough, I work for a semi-governement body that talks to the people who use a thing, all day long. We are an agency that sits between an industry that doesn't think it should be regulated, and the government department that is supposed to regulate it. And we talk to actual users all day long, and wow, is their perspective different from both, in ways that neither considered. So that's exactly where I'm coming from.

multiple associations of educators polled their own educators about a thing involved in their work which impacts them and the people for whose sake they work

there's no missed opportunity there, it was a took opportunity

your critique is irrelevant to the limited purpose of the poll

How about for how the poll is being used? That is, to show that trigger warnings are bad?

by whom?

By the Right, by the kind of people who complain about political correctness, about 'coddled' students etc. Wasn't it entirely predictable that this study would reinforce their beliefs? After all, it's in response to their concerns, no? If you were actually interested in the (non)issue of trigger warnings why would you just ask educators? What does it tell us that we don't know? (I'm not objecting to the study, I'm just interested in why people care about it)

'wasn't it'? how do we know it has? and how do you imagine that a survey of members of professional educators' groups conducted by what looks to be a fairly ecumenical left-wing (if that) organization -

http://ncac.org/about-us/coalition/

- could or could not 'reinforce' the beliefs of someone else? should they have… not reported on their findings? determined that in the interests of not conceding anything to hostile opponents, they ought not to have done the survey in the first place?

one thing it might tell us that we don't know is that what we might believe actually has more solid support for being something we 'know'. in other words, just the point of doing such a survey.

Whenever the govt need the perspective regarding nurses pay and conditions, etc, they always ask a panel of Doctors.

Funny, that.

yet if patients were suddenly clamoring for a new technique (or, say, for not using an old one) and everyone and their mother had an opinion about whether or not the use or non-use of the technique was or was not an affront to core health care values, and doctors were increasingly being expected to employ it, they'd probably ask the doctors what they thought about that