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

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

Bullshit trís and you know it

Falling back on the quickly-tiring institutional/imbalance of power as a catch-all isn't a worthy nor correct response to the example in question and the individual teacher involved deserves better than such a reflex

Also that article is toddler-stupid imo

Line the bottom of a saucepan with a kitchen towel. Fill the pan with enough water to come just below the rim of the coddlers. Place over medium-high heat. Bring to a boil.

Butter the insides of each coddler. Pour 1/2 teaspoon heavy cream in each. Add one mind; season with salt and pepper. Screw on lids tightly. Carefully place mind coddlers into boiling water.

Reduce heat to medium, and simmer for 4 minutes. Turn off heat, cover pan, and let stand for 6 to 7 minutes. Remove coddlers from water, unscrew lids, and serve immediately.

https://www.theguardian.com/books/2016/jun/01/yale-english-students-call-for-end-of-focus-on-white-male-writers?CMP=twt_books_b-gdnbooks

http://www.slate.com/blogs/xx_factor/2016/05/24/yale_students_want_to_remake_the_english_major_requirements_but_there_s.html

Comment made me chuckle:

Shakespeare was emphatically NOT transphobic

yeah i'm facebook friends with that guy, under his real name he's an english professor, with a pretty great intro to literature course from the materials i've seen for it.

the students should really be making the argument, 'we shouldn't have to have anything to do with tradition if we don't want to'

Slate responds more or less makes that point:

You’ve written that “it is possible to graduate with a degree in English language & literature by exclusively reading the works of (mostly wealthy) white men.” It is possible to graduate a lot of ways, and every English major is responsible for taking advantage of the bounty of courses the department offers to attain a full and deep education. What is not possible is to reckon with the racist, sexist, colonist poets who comprise the canon—and to transcend their failures—via a “see no evil, hear no evil” policy.

They want the university to abolish the major English poets requirement, and to refocus the course’s pre-1800/1900 requirements “to deliberately include literatures relating to gender, race, sexuality, ableism, and ethnicity”

i made it all the way to a phd without considering gender, race, sexuality, ableism, or ethnicity in my work (but i stand on the shoulders of those who have considered it). i recognize this might be a problem in my own work (and god knows i've paid for it on the job market) but i hate these kinds of statements because they tend to foreclose in advance any number of other things that literature can be "about"--in other words, why stop at gender, race, sexuality, etc? on what non-authoritarian basis can you make those particular concerns the concerns of literature?

this is so dumb

when do the history majors beat them up

xps

(it's also kind of interesting to read those kinds of statements because they lag behind what's going on in "cutting edge" literature departments, which have moved on to the "non-human." so we could argue that that list needs to be extended to include species and the like.)

it's funny cuz i was just reading the paris review interview with james baldwin and he can't stop blabbing about henry james and balzac.

everybody has a race gender sexuality, ryan

not everybody has a whatever dumb thing you care about that's not even a thing

it's about universality man

INTERVIEWER

Do you think that now blacks and whites can write about each other, honestly and convincingly?

BALDWIN

Yes, though I have no overwhelming evidence in hand. But I think of the impact of spokespersons like Toni Morrison and other younger writers. I believe what one has to do as a black American is to take white history, or history as written by whites, and claim it all—including Shakespeare.