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

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

I have no idea what I was getting at there, sorry.

http://bookforum.com/blog/15501

link dump on recent campus activism and other higher ed issues, several at least 1-2 months old

highlight of that link dump for me the rightwing stuff i typically wouldn't follow seeing marcuse and althusser under every bed

would love response articles "i tried to infect my students with althusser and they didn't read it just like they don't do any other readings" "i gave my students a quiz on lukacs and they dropped the class."

"okay fine i got one student who actually enjoys reading adorno and he even creeps me out with how seriously he takes this shit"

can you really be infected by something you don't understand

well wait

Call me crazy (you guys always will) for this, but I happen to believe that the demographics of who are asking for a thing are just as important as the demographics of who is avoiding doing the thing / giving reasons why it's a bad or dangerous or undesirable thing to do in the first place.

Because my memory of the demographics of university professors when i was at school, is that they were 2/3 to 3/4 male, and almost overwhelmingly white.

My experience of administering and using multiple sites that use trigger warnings every day is that the people who ask for trigger warnings on things like rape, sexual violence, eating disorders, self harm, suicide tend to be overwhelmingly female or non-binary. And the people who ask for trigger warnings on things like racism, police violence tend to be overwhelmingly Poc and especially WoC.

So I need to know the demographics of both groups, before I judge the effectiveness of that study. Because if you have a group of people who are mostly women and non-binary saying "we need a thing" and the group refusing them is overwhelmingly male, you have a problem. If you have a group of people who are mostly black or brown saying "we need a thing" and the group refusing them is overwhelmingly white, you REALLY have a problem.

I see this play out again and again, in the tech industry where I work, of women asking for really basic "we need a privacy function" or "we need a block function" or "we need a stop harassment function" and male tech workers saying "why on earth would you need a thing like that; I have never in my life encountered the need for anything like that, my god I can't even conceive of needing one, in fact I can imagine that would be dangerous because it would impede my FREEEE SPEEEECH!" Do I really need to go further and draw the comparison between how many of my white friends "never have problems with the cops" compared to how many of my black or asian friends get routinely hassled? Yet, if you were going to study "police action" would you accept a study which asked only the police, and never ever asked the public what their interactions with the police were like?

This is a flawed study. It tells only one side of the story. (And funnily enough, yes, it tells the side of the story that has access to the press and Atlantic thinkpieces!) Look for whose voices are missing. Look for whose side is excluded.

"the demographics of who is avoiding doing the thing / giving reasons why it's a bad or dangerous or undesirable thing to do in the first place."

but like if you read the study you'll find that it reflects a much broader range of opinion among the professorate.

The point isn't "we asked these people and they think its bad so lolno".

It tells you their experiences in who requests things, whether they've even heard of these things, and it tells you how many are already providing different sorts of warnings, and the choices they make as to why.

so its not just another bunch of people being shouty over made up stories about what campuses are like in terms of how big a deal these things are or aren't, but it helps paint a picture of, at least in one concrete area, what is actually happening.

like for one you make a claim about the people who ask for warnings and why, but then this survey reveals that in certain campuses the warnings are asked for to defer to religious sensibilities. ("but that's not the point of them"! well not originally clearly, but also that's what's happening, and the survey helps reveal that).

this is just a segment of empirical data. it tells you there are certain concerns about mandated policies, but it doesn't make any sort of yes/no argument about the things themselves in the survey body.

like maybe you think these people are all rong assholes, idk. but its a survey of them, which is informative, not an endorsement of their views individually or en masse. if it didn't include a segment "the case for trigger warnings" that gave substantial treatment to the views of professors who saw them positively, i think you could make the argument, but... nah, it reports their views too.

so you're left just with complaining that anybody asked the academics what they think at all (and mostly, i suspect, they don't get asked -- being an adjunct or even a junior faculty member on some campus is a _long_ way from having access to be a thinkfluencer).

this is one of the problematic issues here i think -- we have an ongoing destruction of the conditions of teachers on campuses, who are largely junior and largely can't imagine a life with tenure and prestige, and they're getting painted like this ossified layer of out-of-touch oxford dons tut-tutting the activist kids. that's not the dynamic at all.

like i bet if you surveyed college students (someone really should) you'd find fewer than the 17% of teachers in terms of who supported use of tws, in no small part because you'd be lucky to find 17% of students who were informed enough to be aware of it or have thought about it either way.

Conservative Law Students at Georgetown Were ‘Traumatized’ by an Anti-Scalia Email

I like that when the right tries this, it's the professors who pulls out the move: 'Although this email was upsetting to us, we could only imagine what it was like for these students.' Or, y'know, you could ask?

wow david auerbach is a moron https://twitter.com/AuerbachKeller/status/723234848010285058

David Auerbach
‏@AuerbachKeller
Whether it's women's bodies or whiteness or Islam or the patriarchy, marking something as toxic and filthy produces VERY powerful reactions.
http://img.waggish.org/wp-content/uploads/2010/05/davidheadshot.jpg

CONCEPT CREEP is your new band name by the way.

http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2016/04/concept-creep/477939/

kinda the best sentence i've read all year:

"So many residents of Santa Monica, California, claim to need emotional support animals that the local farmer’s market warns against service dog fraud."

These articles are idiotic (much like Friedersdorf). A shadow of interesting idea completely obscured by epic concern trolling and hyper-generalization.

Concept Creep would make a great band name.

concept creep
concept weirdo

^^^ Radiohead b-side

what % of the atlantic's traffic is driven by campus concern trolling? surely someone here writes for them

i don't dislike it or anything. tbh i prefer overwrought, tendentious opinion pieces more than reasonable ones.

what's Andrew Sullivan's username?

Treeship

what is andrew sullivan up to these days anyway?

Trees

i just read the concept creep article. i agree that people like that girl who complained about her teacher on facebook should just get away with doing that stuff. i'm down with people being as sensitive as they want, to demand as much conscientiousness as they want, but i get off the bus when it comes to using institutional power to discipline people for doing things that aren't nice but that absolutely do not rise to the level of abuse

let the kids talk shit