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

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

Lol dowd, rong thread

Where's the alt right thread

No, I think that folks arguing against trigger warnings are arguing against something that doesn't exist. Some kind of rule that if you mention racism you get kicked out of college, or something.

why did i click on that chait thing, i knew it was gonna piss me off

The right is all about challenging attempts to curtail the right to do things that no one really does. There was a good interview with a U of C prof yesterday who explained that critics (including the U of C dean) have a fundamental misunderstanding of what it even means to have trigger warnings or safe spaces or the like. She said that she starts each class basically saying that no subject is off the table, and they will be dealing frankly with potentially challenging subjects, and that's it, pretty much the extent of her "trigger warning." I think like "affirmative action" or "political correctness" or other terms, it just makes people in certain conservative circles antsy. Perhaps they'd be assuaged if most college policy was presented simply as "try not to be an asshole."

"people criticize me and say i'm wrong about what the underlying issue is, but note that they don't address THE UNDERLYING ISSUE"

I'll restate my theory that it's giving something a certain term that they hate. A dislike of jargon they don't understand.

I actually like Jonathan Chait much of the time, or at least I /agree/ with him; I'm not sure his style of commentary is all that penetrating or useful even when I do agree with him. It's really just classier clickbait.

In this he seems to be parsing the discourse so finely it's a little absurd. He acts like somehow the U of C letter was a gauntlet to which everyone on "the left" must have some kind of serious, measured reaction, as opposed to it being what it is, a coarse publicity stunt.

Just to repeat myself though, I do think the term "trigger warning" is often misused, because the vast majority of students (who might be well-served by a warning about particular content in a course) are not going to have PTSD that might be "triggered." It's a hyperbolic phrase for all but a very select set of circumstances. And I think it kind of muddies the debate as a result.

But maybe this expanded idea of "trigger warnings" is just what "trigger warnings" means now. If so I think that's a little regrettable because it collapses actual PTSD with a more routine sorts of unsettledness.

I haven't thought through this, but might it also be that we can recognize a broader spectrum of "trauma"? That is, there's the level which might trigger PTSD, but there are lots of other bad reactions and anguish and other not-very-helpful-for-education things, from we can spare people by providing a reasonable heads-up before the conversation suddenly plunges into powerful reminders of really bad stuff? I mean the sad fact is that the odds are reasonably high, if you're a professor, that at some point in your career, you're going to have a student who is a survivor of some form of abuse, assault, war, hunger... Nice to just get into the habit of not treating these as things you shift into suddenly, or with awkward jokes or god knows what else. Giving people some kind of heads up permits them a measure of autonomy in how they want to handle that and I guess I approach the whole thing as "well, it certainly couldn't hurt to try and be more cognizant of these things," and not really any kind of crisis of education or whatever.

Sorry, dowd, I just misread your post this morning. thanks for clarifying everybody.

I would like people to warn me at work meetings before they're going to talk about shit they nothing about that I do literally all the time.

"Just so you know, I'm going to be reciting the guidance passed down to me from somebody else who never travels further than 60 miles for work purposes, which may make some of you feel like you're being subjected to torture."

http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2016/09/what-it-looks-like-when-political-correctness-chills-speech-on-campus/497387/

'I now am embarrassed to share that my SU colleagues, on hearing about my attempt to secure your presentation, have warned me that the BDS faction on campus will make matters very unpleasant for you and for me if you come. In particular my film colleague in English who granted me affiliated faculty in the film and screen studies program and who supported my proposal to the Humanities Council for this conference told me point blank that if I have not myself seen your film and cannot myself vouch for it to the Council, I will lose credibility with a number of film and Women/Gender studies colleagues. Sadly, I have not had the chance to see your film and can only vouch for it through my friend and through published reviews.'

we should prob distinguish btwn "PC" and BDS -the latter of which is an explicit political movement tied to a particular nationalist agenda. idk if it's exactly politically correct (or at least not w/ enough consensus that you'd say that being bullied by pro-BDS ppl is the same as being condemned for making racially insensitive remarks). it's political censorship but i'm not sure politically correct censorship.

maybe i'm splitting hairs

it's interesting that even a tenured prof felt pressure like that. she may be unusually weak, or syracuse (or her department there, or adjacent departments) might be unusually conformist and oppressive. the idea that it should be beyond the pale even to show a film about settlers is bizarre.

xxp yes i think political correctness probably has to do with at least incipiently or hopefully hegemonic norms i.e. over a sufficiently broad or 'public' political/institutional space

probably the perception is that bds is so normalized on the left that it's enjoying the presumptions extended to already established modes of discourse policing etc

am., i think tenure is little protection against the reality of social-institutional relationships

some 40 years ago, my advisor became disenchanted with the favored work in his field and made his dissatisfaction with it known to his colleagues; he says they basically shut him out for decades until he was recognized as a teacher and they started respecting him again

and that wasn't even political shit

This seems like a key sentence:

As an outsider, I don’t know whether that judgment reflects an accurate assessment of BDS protesters and a faction in the film and Women/Gender studies departments, or does them a disservice by underestimating their tolerance.

It's a bit frustrating that the disinvite was speculative. We don't really know if BDS would have made her life hell. Although since it is an Israei filmmaker it would fall under their boycott.

i guess no one is even pretending any more that it's only against institutions and not against individuals

I actually don't really get what happened in that story at all. The people programming the festival said they didn't want to screen something sight unseen, and the professor who invited the filmmaker then told the filmmaker they couldn't come? Why didn't she just get a digital copy and watch it?

I mean is the point that they programmed lots of other films in the festival just based on reviews?

The filmmaker, based on his response, also seemed kind of befuddled that Hamner didn't just ask to see the movie.

Actually I may have misspoke. I can't find anything suggesting that BDS includes all Israei films. It seems more like they have some kind of criteria as to whether a film or film festival serves the purpose of positive branding efforts for Israel. Which it doesn't sound like this film would.

The people programming the festival said they didn't want to screen something sight unseen, and the professor who invited the filmmaker then told the filmmaker they couldn't come? Why didn't she just get a digital copy and watch it?

Yes, the whole story seems bizarre. Basically, what I gather is that it happened the way you describe, except that Hamner also tried to explain her disinvitation with a very shadowy statement that unnamed 'colleagues' (not necessarily involved with BDS themselves) 'warned' her that 'the BDS faction' (no names given again) would 'make matters very unpleasant' (with no expansion on what this might mean: they don't invite her for Euchre? They protest at the event? They will ensure that she never gets published again? They kidnap her kids?).

Fwiw, a couple of minutes on Google turns up the Coordinator of the Film Program at SU: http://vpa.syr.edu/academics/transmedia/graduate/film. Not only was he a guest professor at Tel Aviv University on a Fulbright in the 80s but he gave a talk on Israeli cinema at Wesleyan's Israeli Film Festival in 2012: http://iff.site.wesleyan.edu/past-festivals/spring-2013-festival/.

IMO, the whole thing reads way more like Blizek wrote some checks that weren't his to cash, Hamner is just trying to pretend it's somebody else making the decision to disinvite Dotan, and Freidersdorf is biting at the BDS Chilling Effect!!! angle because he is a lazy doofus and it fits nicely into his brief

I have my own issues with BDS but this story is smelly.

(Better link for Owen Shapiro, Film Coordinator at SU, sorry: http://vpa.syr.edu/faculty-staff/owen-shapiro)

IMO, the whole thing reads way more like Blizek wrote some checks that weren't his to cash, Hamner is just trying to pretend it's somebody else making the decision to disinvite Dotan, and Freidersdorf is biting at the BDS Chilling Effect!!! angle because he is a lazy doofus and it fits nicely into his brief

― Anacostia Aerodrome (El Tomboto), Thursday, September 1, 2016 3:22 PM (thirty-four minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

pretty much yea

hamner's email was some weak ass garbage too