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

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

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 last famous person you were surprised to discover was actually (man alive), Thursday, September 1, 2016 1:57 PM (nine hours ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

i think the idea was that they worried that simply showing a film about israeli settlers in the west bank would have been anathema to campus BDS activists and their supporters

which isn't crazy considering that pro-palestinian and BDS activists have protested/interrupted israeli speakers who simply discussed (even a critical fashion!) the IDF

the idea that there is a diversity of voices in israel, even some that are acutely critical of israeli gov't policy, seems to be hard to grasp by /some/ (not all) in the BDS movement.

maybe it's just that college kids often have a poor grasp of nuance in general, whatever their political orientation.

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

for this to be true you'd have to assume the justification/rationalization in hammer's email was entirely bogus. which is possible! seems a little unlikely to me, though.

If not entirely bogus, you have to acknowledge that it is pretty damn vague.

I mean, I find it believable that another instructor might have said "ooh, better watch out for those BDS types" in the lunch room.

Which is the weird feedback of anti-PC rhetoric. People in the 80s said you couldn't sing 'baa baa black sheep' in schools based on nothing (maybe evolved from a joke? Next we won't be able to sing...) and a couple of teachers eventually believed this and told their kids not to sing it, which was them held up as proof of PC-gone-wild or whatever.

I will say this, Gail Hamner does not exactly seem like somebody terrified of movement leftism and identity politics

http://rsn.aarweb.org/columns/work-and-life-balance

https://medium.com/@cincity2404/i-think-you-have-completely-missed-the-crux-of-the-problem-with-trigger-warnings-a3f0f0bb8411?source=responses---------10-#--responses

Comments from that article upthread.

I think it's interesting that some people who like trigger warnings and safe spaces are saying they are being used in an increasingly negative way. It must be really tough sometimes to decide what is an unreasonable student request.

People are hungry for crazy stories* about college and university and they're able to find them in a way you couldn't decades ago (that time may have been equally crazy for all I know, but probably in a different way). But after hearing so many stories (many of which are probably false or reported wrong), regular lefties talking about the horrors of "dark tumblr" and a lot of seemingly unlikely people being refused a speaking platform, I'm a bit worried that some of the people saying "don't worry, it's not that bad" are allowing things to get worse.

* Most recent story I heard was a woman being accused of destroying a safe space by shaking her head in disagreement.

The fuck is dark tumblr

A place where Branwell would be considered a triggering bigot.

No comment hey

The director of Jewish Studies at Syracuse weighs in

https://jewishphilosophyplace.wordpress.com/2016/09/04/statement-re-shimon-dotan-syracuse-university-and-the-atlantic-magazine/

There was just this stupid Freddie DeBoer piece about the armed protesters outside Brock Turner's home and about how it's all the result of the new terrible darkness on the left and we've "unleashed" some terrible things although I'm not really sure how and I couldn't help but feel he had showed his cards with his civilizational concern trolling.

And I guess I thought of that because I kind of don't really buy Robert Adam's claim that we're allowing things to get worse by not taking it seriously, this just feels like the exact same shit that existed on college campuses in the 90s with different jargon.

I'm with man alive, in that those of us who were in college in 1991 are being asked to believe "no this time it's different" and I just don't see the difference. I do have a sense that, in the 90s, when students protested a speaking invitation, the speaker tended to show up rather than turning tail.

internet amplifies that shit and makes it stick to you forever

The movie PCU is basically exactly what the chicken littles of western intellectual discourse are describing now, except the movie wasn't humorless about it.

do college kids ever play at the anti-war thing anymore? probably not. 26,000 civilian deaths in afghanistan probably not that sexy.

i mean it used to be a rite of passage to pretend to make a difference during one's college years, but maybe modern kids are more savvy now.

idk but i'm glad at least that grownups are still playing at the wisdom thing

I said I was worried it was worse, even though it may be no different. Not trying to make solid claims.

Wasn't Freddie de Boer going to stop writing? He promised! But the last piece I saw by him was about us being nicer to rapists as well, this time Nate Turner (who was never convicted, I know, I know, the piece was about rapists in general, though)

what's funny is that of course i have no way of being sure it's not worse, it's just that i feel like i read a new friederschait article EVERY WEEK saying "it's obviously much worse than ever and a near-crisis" and i find it so obvious that that's not obvious that i just get an ingrown hair about it

friederschait

winner

i dunno i'm sorta thinking now i should have gone with chaitersdorf

deboer is a little different in that he constantly cites his own experience on an Actual College Campus as evidence that political correctness has run amok. and some of his points are valid, but he doesn't seem to grasp that even his supposed ground-level observations still don't rise above the level of anecdote.

He is good sometimes when not writing about that sort of thing, but his Last Reasonable White Man schtick is really tedious.

But the last piece I saw by him was about us being nicer to rapists as well, this time Nate Turner (who was never convicted, I know, I know, the piece was about rapists in general, though)

― Frederik B, Monday, September 5, 2016 5:28 AM (seventeen hours ago)

i am not even a deboer fan but this is an obscene mischaracterization of that piece, which was about coming to terms with the fact that ending mass incarceration will involve more than just releasing nonviolent drug offenders:

I want to argue that this situation demonstrates an absolute fissure in contemporary progressive politics, that there is a direct and unambiguous conflict between our efforts to address mass incarceration and the insistence that people accused of crimes such as sexual assault should be presumed to be guilty and that those who are guilty are permanently and existentially unclean. I want to argue that there’s nothing particularly hidden about this conflict, that acknowledging it is as simple as noting the direct contradiction of two progressive attitudes: the belief that certain crimes, particularly sex crimes and domestic violence, should be treated not only with harsh criminal punishments but with permanent moral judgment for those guilty of them; and the idea that we need to dismantle our vast criminal justice industrial complex, to oppose the carceral state, and to replace them with a new system of restoration and forgiveness. I further want to argue that progressives are not doing any of the moral and legal reasoning necessary to resolve these tensions, and that if we don’t, eventually they’ll explode.

i thought it was a good essay. it describes a real tension on the american left.