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

The Office of LGBTQ Student Life at the University of Chicago offers a Safe Space program fosters an inclusive environment that challenges oppression and provides support for LGBT students. “Safe Space creates welcoming physical spaces on campus where LGBTQ students can have a conversation with students, staff and faculty knowing that they have a basic understanding of the challenges these students face in developing their identities.”

The university launched its Center for Identity + Inclusion as the home of the Office of Multicultural Student Affairs (OMSA), LGBTQ Student Life and now Student Support Services, a new office focused on supporting first generation, low-income and undocumented students. The Center’s mission is to create intentionally diverse and inclusive communities to bring together students and members of the campus community of call backgrounds.

ugh that all sounds so horrible, imagine gay kids getting together to have a CONVERSATION with someone who has UNDERSTANDING, i'm gonna fucking puke

lol whiney

mostly because even restricted to their original context, that of PTSD sufferers, there are no good studies that suggest they are valuable

maybe i'm misunderstanding you, but this seems like kind of a weird standard to which to hold an instructor. like, you're trying to find what seems like the right way to run your classroom, the one that produces the most helpful and healthy educational environment... pretty sure most of the things you're gonna do aren't backed by 'studies' but that doesn't mean you get no results with them or that going "well, hell, i'm just going to try and trigger PTSD in everybody in sight" is going to be a good idea either. are there studies showing that it's valuable to go around on the first day and ask everybody what name they prefer to go by, or their favorite food from back home as an icebreaker? i dunno? but i've been trying it?

If I had to guess, I'd put the University of Chicago low on the list of schools who have problems with trigger warnings, safe spaces, and the rest of that kind of thing.

they have a deep strain of conservatism, or multiple strains, on the campus tho. i haven't read much about this but it seems the opposition could stem from that in any number of ways.

Yes, that's what I was getting at--that its conservatism probably doesn't attract a large enough, vocal opposition to warrant a pre-emptive strike against Triggers and Thought Police or whatever it is they are imagining.

I haven't seen any sourcing of this letter past this initial tweet or any communication from U Chicago referencing it. John (Jay) Ellison is the dean for sure - he's from Harvard and has been at U Chicago for two years. Not wanting to get all jet fuel can't melt steel beams on this but I wouldn't be surprised to learn that this was a hoax/prank/shop, the bit about "canceling invited speakers" is so r00sh-y that it feels like a giveaway.

https://www.insidehighered.com/news/2016/08/25/u-chicago-warns-incoming-students-not-expect-safe-spaces-or-trigger-warnings

i try to not be too bitter about the u of c on the internet, but let me just say that the tone of that letter reeks of that institution to me

xp I know, but the image is the initial tweet. I don't think anybody's reported receiving such a letter - on twitter or elsewhere - besides the Maroon, the U Chicago publication that tweeted the picture used in that article. Not saying "it couldn't be" -- it could! -- but it's weird that there's just the one source, not a number of students/people saying "I got this letter." The people who got it would be 18/19-year-olds - not exactly too green to be putting up "I got it, too" on Twitter/Tumblr/etc. NB I did not go to U of C and defer to horseshoe's gut feeling here.

i don't know; bitterness can distort one's perception of reality

not saying journalists are incapable of being hoaxed, but jaschik is an experienced, professional journalist, so

http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/local/breaking/ct-university-of-chicago-safe-spaces-letter-met-20160825-story.html

i think it may be in the u of c bylaws that all missives must contain the word "rigor" or "rigorous"

on the other hand this guy seems like just the dude to do it

https://storify.com/WormMD/my-lunch-with-john-jay

also, this has nothing to do with the thread (or maybe it does?) but can we just looooool at the university of chicago:

https://news.uchicago.edu/article/2016/06/07/new-research-center-becomes-first-focus-wisdom?utm_source=facebook&utm_medium=social&utm_campaign=aug2016

wtf

that's not really a thing, it's just research-funding driven innovation ('nobody has really studied…') in standard stuff on practical rationality and moral psychology that is bolstered by up to date social scientific findings. boring af

it's just the name that makes me laugh

has any rapper used "trigger warning" for a mixtape title yet?

i think Lil Poopy has.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KPLE92mBOjc

i'm lying. i just like typing the name Lil Poopy.

https://twitter.com/tylerbkissinger/status/768938663120109570

V good storm

I have to assume the Lambdas and the African-American Greek squads at UT Knoxville got pretty fucking good at making safe spaces on that fucking territory. I saw them pull it off. Us weirdoes with mood disorders and such did ok with turning WUTK 90.3 FM's basement offices into our living room after hours, and there was always Melrose Hall.

But none of that was formal, not in the same way the white greeks got to have houses, or claim whole floors of dormitories, and put up signs and have parties and shit dedicated to their own amazing privileged herdness. When I was there a few folks tried to start a mix frat - yes of course this was a necessary thing in the late 90s in the great state of Tennessee, a frat that explicitly included brown people - and it was met with doom, because reasons.

What I can surmise from those experiences is that "safe spaces" are what you have to establish and formalize after the Lambdas and the black greek and mixed greek groups try to get "too big for their britches" according to the establish campus societies, who then start to feel threatened and lash out. So yeah, if the UC is against safe spaces, then it should start out by eliminating the privileges accorded the dominant all-white societies, greek or otherwise, or in other words, pick on somebody your own size.

BLUF if you don't have the sack to tell your existing white kid clubs to stop holding exclusive parties then fuck the fuck off about "Safe Spaces" for everybody else

mostly because even restricted to their original context, that of PTSD sufferers, there are no good studies that suggest they are valuable

maybe i'm misunderstanding you, but this seems like kind of a weird standard to which to hold an instructor. like, you're trying to find what seems like the right way to run your classroom, the one that produces the most helpful and healthy educational environment... pretty sure most of the things you're gonna do aren't backed by 'studies' but that doesn't mean you get no results with them or that going "well, hell, i'm just going to try and trigger PTSD in everybody in sight" is going to be a good idea either. are there studies showing that it's valuable to go around on the first day and ask everybody what name they prefer to go by, or their favorite food from back home as an icebreaker? i dunno? but i've been trying it?

― Silence, followed by unintelligible stammering. (Doctor Casino), Thursday, August 25, 2016 12:27 PM (yesterday) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

i think you might be conflating the therapeutic concept of 'triggering,' which was developed by psychologists working with people with PTSD, with the common-sense concept of giving students a heads-up if there is to be something potentially disturbing in a book or screening. the original concept of 'triggers' as i understand it is that particularly sensory events (like a certain quality of light, a certain noise, a certain smell) could 'trigger' a flashback to a traumatic episode and/or a panic reaction among people suffering from PTSD. the therapeutic idea was to inventory those 'triggers' and seek to avoid or manage them. people who come in contact with the PTSD sufferer--like a boss, or a family member, or an instructor--would be made aware of the range of triggering events and might be asked to be on the lookout for them.

there's been a kind of drift, both in the application of the concept of the 'trigger warnings' by faculty and students who claim to be both for and against them, and in the media discourse about contemporary american universities, were this therapeutic model of trigger warnings -- which applies specifically to people suffering from PTSD, and involves not necessarily /representations/ of disturbing or controversial things but rather fairly idiosyncratic/personal sensory experiences -- is kind of collapsed with the commonsense (i think) idea that barring some very solid pedagogical reason, you should kind of let students know what they are getting into.

i get the sense that the chicago dean isn't really responding to the reality of either 'trigger warnings' on the U of C campus or the aforementioned commonsense pedagogy, but rather reacting to a sensationalized discourse about 'coddled' college students etc. his letter seems unbecoming of an academic dean to me -- sounds more like he wanted to write a thinkpiece for a blog or something.

oh, and to clarify, my (admittedly limited!) understanding is that there haven't been many proper studies of the clinical concept of 'triggers' among PTSD sufferers and the value of trigger warnings -- but i'm speaking about the more narrowly-defined version of TW here. maybe that was the confusion.

i should say the CLINICAL (not "therapeutic") concept of 'triggers' for PTSD sufferers.

this is a quick but fairminded (i think) piece about trigger warnings on campus. it notes how both advocates and foes of 'trigger warnings' are often talking at cross-purposes and in the absence of good info/data

http://nymag.com/scienceofus/2015/12/are-trigger-warnings-actually-widespread-at-all.html

I guess to me both 'kinds' of trigger warnings as outlined above are totally appropriate for the classroom (though when this debate comes up I'm normally thinking about the "clinical" one), and I'm not sure either one needs extensive quantitative research supporting it (or whatever) for it to be a reasonable thing for a professor to think about and incorporate into teaching. Agreed totally about the dean and his thinkpiece.

more like a 'stinkpiece'

http://freethoughtblogs.com/pharyngula/2016/08/26/university-of-chicago-dean-declares-war-on-student-autonomy/

amen.

a few friends who are grads of U of C pointed out that their LGBT center has a "safe space" program, which the dean basically just (inadvertently?) spit on. what a doofus.

(i do think the phrase "trigger warning" is kind of misleading, though, b/c it invokes a whole clinical diagnosis--that of PTSD, which is "triggered" by certain sensations and events--that doesn't apply to 99% of students. the word "warning" should suffice, as it has for decades.)

actually this graf from the piece sterling posted rubs me the wrong way:

Shame on the dean, shame on the University of Chicago, and shame on all those people I see who consider this a good thing. Unsurprisingly, a lot of those fans seem to be people who also detest feminists and Black Lives Matter, a degree of correlation that ought also to cause some soul-searching among the progressive people who don’t see anything wrong with that letter. You’re on the side of Libertarians, the Daily Caller, and Breitbart.

this seems like childish guilt-by-association stuff. it isn't necessary to make his argument and in fact just cheapens it.

anyway.

like yeah sometimes you end up agreeing with people you otherwise don't agree with. it's weird when that happens, but it's not an obscenity or something. in this case the folks cheering the dean are wrong, but they aren't wrong /because/ the daily caller is one of the groups cheering him.

I also really enjoyed that piece, and I think it changed my thinking on some of this stuff. However, this was a little ridic:

rejecting those concepts is literally impossible, without destroying the University of Chicago and turning it into an authoritarian prison.

LITERALLY a prison

A prison of the MIND, maaaaan.

I took a course in sociology at one point where we read Loic Wacquant's great book on the sociology of boxing in impoverished areas. The reason he went boxing is because he studied at University of Chicago, which was placed right in the middle of the poor african-american neighborhood. He described the segregation as really uncanny, between poor rundown neighborhood on one side, and glittering campus just a stones throw away. The only thing I know about University of Chicago is that it's one of the most bubble-like campusses in the US, and that says a lot, I guess. And the dean claims that they're against safe spaces because they want students to be exposed to different people?

it's a little different these days b/c -- thanks in part to the endless expansion of the university -- much of the surrounding area has gentrified considerably. but the contrast is still there, if a little blunted.

FWIW michelle obama in her chicago days worked as a community liaison at U of Chicago, which to folks i know in the neighborhood basically means she had to convince community leaders that whatever the university was doing to the neighborhood was just dandy. it's a job that's sort of inherently ethically compromised. which is why i've always had a somewhat more jaundiced view of the First Lady than most.

SUNY Binghamton offers a course for RAs intended to 'help others take the next step in understanding diversity, privilege, and the society we function within'; the RAs teaching the course decide to call it "StopWhitePeople2k16."

s. clover's link is good. this bit captures something super important that seems to get totally lost in most mainstream versions of this conversation:

What about trigger warnings? Ellison doesn’t understand those, either. A trigger warning is not an announcement that we won’t discuss bad, complex, divisive things. Quite the opposite: a trigger warning is an announcement that we are definitely going to talk about bad, complex, divisive things. A syllabus is a string of trigger warnings — we just tend not to think of it that way because we take for granted that the subjects are innocuous to us and are required to understand the purpose of the course.

http://www.bradford-delong.com/2016/08/what-i-see-as-a-marketing-ploy-by-the-university-of-chicago.html

My favorite type of the week = "sage spaces"

typo. the irony

FWIW michelle obama in her chicago days worked as a community liaison at U of Chicago, which to folks i know in the neighborhood basically means she had to convince community leaders that whatever the university was doing to the neighborhood was just dandy.

She did a lot more than that, because she also had to convince my buddy to hang up posters around campus for her!

That letter, like anything U of C, seems very U of C. But when I was there no one gave a fuck about anything. Well, I had some far- lefty friends (that everyone sort of ignored or mocked) and some conservative friends (that everyone definitely mocked), but most people were way too busy studying to get super political, as well as I can remember. I think that's my apathetic generation.

I was there with a friend over the summer, checking out the state of things, and it blew our minds how much more active the campus was, in terms of student groups, diversity of student groups, what the school was doing for students, etc. No doubt to justify the jaw dropping current tuition.

But anyway:

The only thing I know about University of Chicago is that it's one of the most bubble-like campusses in the US

This is categorically not accurate (or at least only in the most generic sense, in that colleges are almost by definition bubble-like). Most college campuses across the US are not even in cities, let alone diverse cities (however myriad Chicago's problems). U of C, like most schools, isn't exceptionally diverse, but it's not overwhelmingly white; 30% Asian, 15% Latino, a little under 10% black; more or less 50/50 men and women. And Hyde Park itself is plenty diverse. You want bubbles? Go to UC Santa Barbara, or Princeton, or Notre Dame, or virtually any elite college or college otherwise either in the sticks or some seat of affluence.

thay was a good post, Josh In Chicago

https://medium.com/@erikadprice/hey-university-of-chicago-i-am-an-academic-1beda06d692e#.8r80p7cu8

*mic drop*

Really, though. It's odd that when I listen to these alt-right folks they seem to be talking about something else entirely. Some phantasm. There's a similar thing going on in my country about care workers, where the right seems to be arguing against this apocalyptic nightmare that has nothing to do with the legislation.

Fuck Chait, seriously.

http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/2016/08/chicago-and-the-anti-anti-p-c-left.html

This is so dumb. He and Kilgore are useless, I'm about to just self-ban DI at this point