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

What's excruciating about it?

there are just scenes that are painful to watch.

there is one scene toward the end that i actually had to hide my eyes for. and yet it is not a horror movie.

https://www.theatlantic.com/education/archive/2016/10/the-most-popular-office-on-campus/504701/

As student enrollment increases and stigma subsides, the demand for counseling will presumably continue to rise. Blaming this crop of students for being less resilient will be a popular diatribe, but it shouldn’t be, Locke emphasized. In fact, it undermines a decade’s worth of work by counselors, psychologists, and student advocates who have strived to not only bring mental health to the forefront of public debate, but to reassure students that there is no shame in struggling—that experiencing mental distress is not a sign of weakness. “If anything,” Nguyen said, “this is what makes us stronger and makes us more resilient: the fact that I’m fighting for these resources.” The result of validating mental health in the culture of schools is that faculty, bystanders, and friends have intentionally led sufferers to the centers that promise to help them. “We need,” Locke said, “to follow through on that promise.”

http://www.thecollegefix.com/post/29616/

https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/my-halloween-email-led-to-a-campus-firestorm--and-a-troubling-lesson-about-self-censorship/2016/10/28/70e55732-9b97-11e6-a0ed-ab0774c1eaa5_story.html?postshare=4841477870473408&tid=ss_fb&utm_term=.19967b799d04

let's argue about this again

My feeling is that if some idiots want to dress up in racist costumes, feel free to ridicule them, criticize them, take their picture and shame them. It's the appeals for rule making and punishments by authorities that rub me the wrong way.

i think the kids were probably right to see in christakis' email a reactionary mindset hiding behind her liberal arguments -- cf. her mention of "absent fathers" in the wapo article -- but i still think their response to the email was over the top and even frightening. some professors are a bit conservative and don't "get it" -- doesn't mean they are demons

like, they should have been criticized -- i am pro arguing, even loudly and self-righteously -- but the whole looking for institutional redress for something that was worded in such an abstract way was really odd. it's interesting to me how quickly things changed: the activists i knew when i went to college in the late 00s would never think that someone should be punished formally for objecting to cultural appropriation theory. actually i remember some of them wearing appropriative costumes now that i think about it.

I can't be bothered to read the latest Here's a shot as being an old asshat about whatever it is:

Kids need to have their ass handed to them on an semi-arbitrary basis or they won't feel like their politics make a difference, and they won't have stories for how a fight went south for no reason that one time. A campus is a campus. Sloppy, lazy, stupid application of authority is half the point of a college administration's job.

Rub some dirt on it! Walk it off! When it matters, you'll remember how to fight. Grumble harrumph cough cough

A reminder, because it's nowhere in that self-rigteous article, that Erika Christakis held the position of Associate Master at Stillman College. It was really her job to create a good community for the students, and she failed at that miserably. Like, objectively failed. That's the job the students were protesting, not her as a professor (everything I've read about her academic writings sound absolutely horrid, though, lol)

When you use the word "objectively" in this context it loses all meaning. Objectively failing at that job would mean that students were physically harmed under her watch (which, AFAICT, didn't happen?). The fact that some (many?) students were unhappy with her is the very definition of subjectivity.

let's argue about this again

no

No, schwantz, she was also meant to foster a good community, and she caused such an uproar that she's still writing about it a year later. Do you think that's subjectively bad?

Yes Fred, any objective observer would agree with your fucking opinion

Fostering a good community doesn't (necessarily) mean "going along with whatever the mob demands." The fact that anyone disagrees with you means it's subjective.

That someone whose job it is to foster a good community shouldn't cause the biggest fight in years?

So communities shouldn't have arguments? You are ridiculous.

fred, vehement uproar and disagreement would be objective evidence of her failure to create a good community only if the success or failure of the entire community were solely and exclusively in her power to control, which, given the innate limitations of individuals to control the thoughts and actions of anyone other than themselves, is objectively impossible.

yep, no way to predict that acting like a giant tool would cause a mess. three dimensional chess man

somehow I am not convinced that your saying she "acting like a giant tool" should be considered as "objective evidence" of anything. it sounds suspiciously like an opinion.

i only read playboy for the objectivity

shockingly enough, all playboy has in it nowadays are the articles. it couldn't compete with the internet amateurs.

It's very far from being just the internet competition. It's difficult to imagine many people getting excited by most of what they've been doing for the last few decades.

feel like it doesn't really live up to its name anymore (for playboys)

i feel like a lot of these matters can be somewhat fairly described with the cliché "takes two to tango"--meaning someone does something dumb, people react in dumb ways, and the dumbness continues to increase exponentially until it swallows the sun (or at least inspires another hack article in the atlantic).

Well, yeah, but it was only one of the parties whose job it was to prevent people from tangoing at the college.

well sure Americans appropriating the Tango is nagl name and shame

If it's your job to make sure there's no tangoing in your community, you might not be able to prevent all tango. But if you yourself starts tangoing, even though it takes someone else to tango with, you're objectively bad at your job.

And no, that people disagrees with me doesn't prove that my point is subjective. Could just as easily mean somebody doesn't know what they're talking about.

way to go all Footloose town on us FB

And no, that people disagrees with me doesn't prove that my point is subjective. Could just as easily mean somebody doesn't know what they're talking about.

Didn't want to be a jerk about it...

had a friend tonight cite that one article about this issue from the New Yorker from earlier this year and extrapolate all of the wrong conclusions from it - trigger warnings and 'safe spaces' are "closing dialogue when dialogue should be open". humorously of course, said friend says this in the same post where she compares trigger warnings to the PMRC of the 80s and says she didn't need explicit lyric labels on her kids' albums, ergo nobody should need trigger warnings. (she's in her 40s and has recently gone back to school to acquire another degree, but has not suggested she has experienced any of these things firsthand)

many left-leaning folk seem to have adopted "trigger warnings/safe spaces are bad" as the du jour position and I will admit, being long removed from academia, to not having any first-hand knowledge of how these things work in most universities, largely relying on articles/interviews/this thread etc. But has seemed to be that even the term "trigger warning" doesn't necessarily carry the same set of expectations for each student, and even when they do, students don't even use them the same way (one might wish to actively avoid said topics, others might just want a warning of what is to come so they can mentally prepare, but still engage with the topic), and safe spaces don't have to feel like they are coming at the expense of other communities.

obv think there's a problem with drifting into solipsism and "avoidance" if practiced can have a deleterious effect, but on the other hand (as said upthread), if something is a trigger, that often means said person has experience in the matter so they are not 'avoiding' anything as they've already been exposed to it.

why is it that so many lefties have been so quick to distance themselves from trigger warnings/safe spaces as acceptable when they've often embraced similar ideals outside of academia? is it, like was posited by one of the interviewed in The New Yorker, that some feel like these students are "doing the Right's work for them"? Is it less to do with political alignment and more to do with generational divide ("these kids today..." etc)? Is it a fundamental misunderstanding of what, exactly, these terms mean, due to faulty received second-hand knowledge? is any of it regional at all (ie do schools in different regions interpret the concepts differently, do they happen more frequently in one versus another, etc)?

https://www.insidehighered.com/news/2016/12/12/reed-college-engages-soul-searching-after-posters-and-shouts-insult-director-boys

I think there is a tremendous generational divide at play as far as expectations go. The rules of discourse on campus are obviously undergoing a major overhaul.

To me, the whole thing seems about as moot as it could possibly be, given that the loudest and shrillest voices for "safe spaces online" are bully boy white supremacists with hides thinner than tracing paper (i.e. https://www.insidehighered.com/news/2016/12/26/drexel-condemns-professors-tweet-about-white-genocide) and we just gave Trump 103 judicial vacancies plus the nuclear codes to play with, but I'm not going to college again any time soon.

i definitely saw, in grad school, people say they felt "unsafe" during discussions where people made mildly conservative or heteronormative (evopsych) comments in class. i heard someone say that another student had "said a lot of hurtful things," when said student mostly just pushed back on the idea that they, personally, had benefitted from "white privilege." (this was someone not from the US).

the language of harm is definitely being used, by college students, as a passive aggressive way to make people who disagree with them seem like bullies. this is an abuse of the original idea of trigger warnings, which of course i support.

i vote "fundamental misunderstanding of what, exactly, these terms mean, due to faulty received second-hand knowledge" - - - combined IMO with some misplaced application of PMRC-era hangups, where i think a lot of people who identify as "left" are primarily attached to fights for freedom against "censorship." which isn't a bad fight to fight! but i think there are a lot of well-meaning folks, and a lot of outlets/publications, that really put their chips on "freedom" and aren't really equipped to talk up "being considerate." turns out to align really well with what your average conservative would say, since the emphasis on "freedom" exclusively leads us pretty fast to individualism and fuck-you-ism.

idk though; early in this thread i noted some kinship here to tired old "political correctness GONE MAD" stuff and i'm pretty sure that in the 90s there were plenty of mainstream liberals, Dems, etc., who would have co-signed that "political correctness" had "gone mad," insofar as identity politics and taking the experiences and demands of non-privileged groups seriously were seen as "going too far" and for all i know probably "coddling" also.

i think a lot of the no platformer-type activists, or the people at reed who recently called a lesbian filmmaker a "cis white bitch" for daring to try to tell the story of someone less privileged than them, are fundamentally illiberal in outlook. maybe they are just young. but it doesn't do any good to pretend that there isn't an issue where people are saying they feel "unsafe" or whatever in order to bully people out of not having a platform. this is happening to people who are not even conservatives, like the aforementioned filmmaker. or that yale dean who stepped down after the halloween email.

i am not in favor of slurs, personal attacks, anything else like that being tolerated in the space of civil discussion -- the space of a classroom or reading series. but it is for this reason -- in the name of civility or whatever, not of anarchic "free speech" -- that i dislike some of these tactics i am seeing.

i also have seen identity politics-oriented lessons make people from marginalized groups -- people with disabilities, religious minorities -- feel singled out. specifically i was in a class (in grad school!) where we needed to fill out a checklist of how privileged we were and then line up from most privileged to least. no one felt good about where they ended up in that line. it was also incredibly objectifying -- each of the students was literally assigned to a place in the pecking order. the activity literally reasserted the toxic social hierarchies that are supposed to be suspended within a classroom -- which everyone should, in all ways, work to dismantle. i know the argument is that the exercise just "revealed" what was in plain sight all along but...idk. it did it in this way that singled people out and reduced them to their ascriptive traits.

i know i am in the minority on ilx when it comes to this stuff.

ok officially holy shit at whichever clueless, careless, stupid instructor came up with that exercise

xxpost I too am not a fan of thought-terminating discourse or several of the examples you shared upthread Treezy, which I think nicely illustrates the issue that there is definitely on-campus behavior that isn't productive that is getting aligned with 'trigger warnings' (and it's hard to dismiss objections without getting into "No True Scotsman" territory in those cases).....

Most of us don't object to some kind of rating system or 'warning' in other walks of life which also makes me wonder how much of the issue is the term itself - "trigger warnings" probably comes across as the syntax of "hippie weenie sissies".

I was sexually assaulted twice in my life, on two separate occasions, by the same man, and I had a dream about him last night that, despite me having forgiven him years ago and not having seen him in years, still disturbed me and left me feeling queasy when I woke up because of the ugly memories it dredged up. so it makes sense to me that someone that y'know, some kind of warning might suffice in the syllabus. but I also understand how it could be problematic to educators if students were attempting to use the trigger warning as a means of being excused from the assignment while still getting credit rather than merely just using it to mentally prepare for a troubling topic (though does that actually happen or is that the "quota queen" narrative detractors are spreading? I'm seriously asking as I don't know!).

xxpost always a good exercise to weaponize the concept of privilege in a classroom of young adults.

sorry to hear about your experiences. i absolutely support trigger warnings to let people know what kind of content is coming so they can protect themselves. 100%.

i don't even mind kids cutting corners academically using this as an excuse. a good instructor will create an alternate assignment but either way "people getting away with laziness" has never been something that got me riled up. the issues i have are different.

the language of harm is definitely being used, by college students, as a passive aggressive way to make people who disagree with them seem like bullies.

there were some examples of this in the New Yorker article and that, as well as shaming-culture* or making demands of the university that involve firing several individuals are definitely things I'm not down with.

(*there are definitely times where shaming is warranted, but I find it being used in more troubling contexts lately and as a discursive tool, it tends to poison the well for would-be sympathetic ears)

yeah. people need to learn how to evaluate individual cases on their own merits.

this is a general issues, across the culture. people look at a thing and they think "this is an example of _________!" immediately. they bend the facts to fit their own crude schema.

The exercise Treesh describes sounds godawful and totally ill-conceived - what happened to the good old "invisible knapsack" privilege lesson we got back in the early 2000s? But it's not really anything to do with trigger warnings - just a really wrong-headed instructor. At that point the question isn't really "are our campuses coddling people?" as "are some academics proving really clumsy and inept in their attempts to grapple with privilege as an operative concept?" which probably doesn't get headlines, though it might be much more useful to be talking about those things, since surely there are lots of instructors casting around for good ways to get conversations to happen about privilege, and at this point decades of experience from those who have tried. Plus, yes, there could be a useful conversation among instructors looking for ways to handle students who do take the wrong lessons from all this. Students are still figuring out how to talk, how to interact with others, how to have mutually respectful grown-up conversations. But it's not like they come from high school as model citizens of the intellectual commons, and then it all goes horribly wrong when college instructors offer them the language of privilege, respect and trigger warnings and suddenly nobody can "handle controversy" and they're all abusing the system.

The Yale Halloween-letter situation is different too: her email was antagonistic and condescending in its attempt to suggest that a "don't wear racist costumes" policy (or maybe just a flyer or helpful reminder email, I don't remember) amounted to some troubling infringement on free speech. It was either just flagrant obnoxious trolling or a sign that she was utterly out of touch with (and insensitive to the concerns of) her students - which was a problem since her actual job was to be the head of house (I forget the official term) for a residential college. (Sorry, I forget the exact details and her exactly title - they're upthread though for sure when all this was hashed out the first time - and tellingly if you Google her you mostly find articles with axes to grind against Today's Coddled Students.) I'm not saying that there were no douchebags and out-of-control strident young people among those calling for her resignation, but calling for her resignation was not in itself an out-of-control douchebag thing to do, or a sign that one hates free speech or something.

Putting content warnings on the syllabus seems particularly sensible to me - like if I taught literature, I'd want my students to know if this novel they're reading has a rape scene in it, in advance. So then they can choose to tackle reading it when they're in a good place, when they're well-rested, or whatever else is necessary for them to be able to get the most out of reading and dealing with that book, so they can get as much out of it as any of the other books on the syllabus. Which might not happen if they don't know ahead of time and they're trying to whisk through the thing on a bus ride after a long shitty day and it triggers a post-traumatic reaction.

Neanderthal, your experience sounds awful; I'm sorry to hear it. For what it's worth, I don't think I've heard of any cases where trigger warnings in a classroom translate into someone not having to do an assignment. If some instructor did go that route it'd be a different thing. A trigger warning is, precisely, a warning: we will be talking about this, there will be an assignment about it. The idea is to give people some measure of agency or time in bracing themselves. I personally believe you're on to something with identifying a "quota queen" narrative.

thanks DC - I didn't actually think that legitimately did happen but yet that seems to be the prevailing theory amongst those I know who are so dead-set against these warnings (fittingly enough, the friend of mine who is going back to school isn't going to any kind of institution that has this type of controversy anyway, so it turned out to be a kinda shitty appeal to authority).

thanks Treesh/DC for the comments on my experience. fortunately it's not something that actively bothers me anymore (though at the time I was positively freaked as the guy was a co-worker, and I was too afraid to tell anybody). but it was kind of eye-opening for me as far as triggers go, because I've mostly had a privileged life so didn't really understand what it felt like to be 'triggered' by a memory or a thought.

if something I've mostly put aside briefly resurfaced due to a mere dream, so it stands to reason that someone who experienced significantly worse trauma could easily be distressed if sideswiped with the topic in a classroom setting without warning.

Idk if this is off topic or not, but when I was a freshman in college I bailed on a final exam because it involved speaking in front of the whole class, and the idea terrified me to the point that I just... didn't even show. (Although I had prepared, and written the speech.)

It wrecked my grade in the class, and my overall GPA. I remember being so angry. My petrifying anxiety was not my fault. I should have talked to my instructor before the final, but it wasn't until that day that I knew I wasn't going to be able to make the speech.

If the college experience is more tolerant and sensitive these days, I hope that tolerance extends to people with social anxiety disorders.

i think a lot of the no platformer-type activists

I consider myself pro-NP, and I find it strange these days that some people take it as an obvious wrong.

it feels that with both anti-NP and anti-safe space there's a real absolutism that won't countenance the slightest bit of nuance. Just refusing to recognise that there's maybe a difference between a blanket shutdown of opinions you don't like and wanting to have some basic control over the kinds of things you're discussing. I'm coming to think that 'safe space' maybe isn't a great term in a lot of cases, though I'm not sure what a good replacement would be - it does seem to have an implication of something cosy and coddled, while ime it's usually much more about having some basic shared principles from which you can then argue and disagree and hammer things out and try to get things done.