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

It'd be good to hear a little more detail on the substance of the objections. The syllabus looks really crusty, boring and never-been-revised to my eyes; maybe the lectures are a really dynamic operation that deconstructs the operation of encountering the rest of the world through the eyes of Greeks like Herodotus (as delightful as he obviously is). Not putting words in the protestors' mouths but I could imagine that that's where a critique of epistemic violence might start, around the question of who gets to tell whose stories and who we accept as great and important (etc etc).

I mean the whole premise of these "Western Civ" type required courses for first-years is sort of what's at stake, right? One could argue convincingly that a course trying to introduce you to civilization, broadly speaking, might just as easily begin with six weeks in China or India or etc. The expansion of this course to "the Mediterranean" (which seems to just involve week after week of reading Gilgamesh?) might be a really awesome move that opens up tons of space in the lectures and discussions to challenge that implicitly Hegelian world-historical framework. Or it might just be lazy programming that someone got out of a high school textbook twenty years ago. (We had to read chunks of Gilgamesh in 11th grade but I assure you that the syllabus and content were overwhelmingly Eurocentric in all the classic ways.) Again, I have no idea, and I don't know the (very few) secondary texts on that syllabus - maybe they also do really important work, but we don't know because we're not in the classroom.

I completely agree, if it wasn't clear, Tombot. This does seem like a bizarre way to raise questions about the curriculum of a bog-standard intro humanities course. I did include more music by women and non-white composers and more recent music in this semester's music since 1945 course; this was motivated in part by student demand but they expressed that demand by, um, writing it on the course evaluations that they get to fill out in every class every semester.

i think that two/three constraints of this type of course - as humanities, not really scientific, gotta include more or less the purviews of academic disciplines in english, history, philosophy, art - and gotta do a big dose of greco-possibly-romanism (rome is in the second semester) - pretty much makes most of their choices for them. the first semester syllabus seems like it does about as well as you could do within that framework. more on greek predecessors, some time on non-greek rivals, shared frame for the introduction of biblical bridging material, smattering of contemporary questioning-the-tradition scholarship.

xxp reminds me that i've been meaning to look more closely at http://www.sunypress.edu/p-5655-africa-asia-and-the-history-of-.aspx this book having heard a few things about it and skimmed through it. seems a fine and important addition to any generic western civ class that wants to engage in a bit of autocritique

http://www.theolympian.com/news/local/article173710596.html

The Evergreen State College professor at the center of campus protests this spring will receive $500,000 in a settlement that was announced Friday.

Bret Weinstein and his wife, Heather Heying, resigned from their faculty positions effective Friday. The couple filed a $3.85 million tort claim in July alleging the college failed to “protect its employees from repeated provocative and corrosive verbal and written hostility based on race, as well as threats of physical violence,” according to the claim.

Weinstein had criticized changes to the school’s annual Day of Absence after white students who chose to participate were asked to go off campus to talk about race issues. He called the event “an act of oppression,” according to emails obtained by The Olympian. Weinstein later appeared on Fox News and wrote an op-ed in the Wall Street Journal.

The incident led to protests and threats over allegations of racism and intolerance, pulling Evergreen into a national debate over free speech on college campuses. The campus was closed for three days in June and graduation was moved to Cheney Stadium in Tacoma.

New (embargo on remarks lifted): Sessions says the DOJ will file a statement of interest in a campus free speech case this week

— Betsy Woodruff (@woodruffbets) September 26, 2017

https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2017/09/it-takes-a-nation-of-snowflakes/541050/

serwer serwering

that was excellent

good fodder for rolling explaining conservatism

https://www.theatlantic.com/education/archive/2017/11/the-surprising-revolt-at-reed/544682/

If Facebook is no place to debate Hum 110, what about the printed page? Not so much: During the entire 2016-17 school year, not a single op-ed or even a quote critical of RAR’s methods—let alone goals—was published in the student newspaper, according to a review of archived issues. The only thing that comes close? A clarification regarding a school dance:

[ RAR] requested that students, specifically white students, give a suggested amount of five dollars to RAR if they planned on consuming black and brown culture at the ball. This money, explicitly regarded as reparations, was collected at the door by student activists…. [ the ball organizer responded], “we are in support of Reedies Against Racism but want to make it clear that their event is unaffiliated with ours.”

lol

On the one hand I'm sick of the tone of coverage like this but on the other hand you couldn't pay me enough money to be 19 again

it's a pretty small school iirc

https://news.artnet.com/art-world/thomas-hart-benton-mural-indiana-1133765

A Thomas Hart Benton painting is at the heart of a controversy at Indiana University, where a student petition is calling for a mural depicting hooded members of the Ku Klux Klan to be removed from a classroom. In response, the school has stopped holding classes in the room, the largest lecture hall on campus.

Nearly 1,600 signatories are asking the school to take down or cover the offending panel from A Social History of Indiana (1933), also known as the Indiana murals. But others are speaking up in support of the artwork, contending that Benton was looking to draw attention to the evils of the Klan.

https://news.artnet.com/app/news-upload/2017/10/15667217698_fd4fc33e3f_b.jpg

i do wish these kids were .... smarter

i think it's clear that coddling isn't the issue. these kids aren't weak snowflakes. they feel emboldened and are expressing what they see is their political power to dictate terms to their institutions and professors.

What they hell kinda school has paintings in classrooms. We don’t even have windows!

The Reed stuff is kind of interesting to me since it really points to the dilemma of the humanities once the idea of a common cultural context or historical frame of reference is lost. If you don’t buy, or are excluded from, the cultural traditions of “the West,” then how do you justify the teaching of a broad humanities style class of any sort?

Like, I’d be curious to see what kind of syllabus the RAR contingent would approve. The ultimate problem, I think, behind all this is that the formation of any kind of solidarity will by necessity create exclusions, blind spots, etc. In my opinion you can and should try hard to be “inclusive” but this is by definition impossible so long as you are working from an approved (and growing) list of cultural/racial identities. Simply redressing exclusions is not and will never end this dilemma—someone always gets left out. And since the driving thrust of much critical theory is to simply occupy this excluded space as a fortified position from which to do criticism, it’s not really something many humanities professors are equipped to deal with, given their current set of assumptions and methodologies. We just go on observing the observers, and being observed in turn.

I’d also add that this excluded position of observation is routinely imbued with moral authority as well.

relevant: http://ringmar.net/index.php/2017/10/29/fascists-and-gender-at-lund-university/

Put more clearly, I don’t think it’s totally unfair to say that the RAR students have taken many of the implicit and explicit assumptions of critical theory to their logical conclusions. Which gives the lie to the idea that critical theory was ever resisting or “criticizing” a socially entropic modernity—it was just merely extending it.

xpost

at this stage it seems like things are only going to get worse in this regard (abolishing thanksgiving, or taking down statues of the founding fathers seem like obvious next steps) so you've gotta hope that either college students grow out of the bonfire of the vanities mindset after they graduate, or that these are a small amount of activists making a lot of noise w/ little real impact on the country. otherwise we're looking at - imo - escalating claims of exclusion/white supremacism/patriarchy and subsequent reactionary backlashes. neither of those groups (totalitarian leftists or right-wingers) are particularly attractive to me.

Reactionaries trawl the internet looking for things to backlash against. I don't think it matters much. Starbucks was targeted for not having a bleeding christ on its coffee cups.

this creates more reactionaries. we didn't elect trump twenty years ago, we did it last year.

in the future colleges will be place kids go to build statues of bad people and then bang on them with hammers

start broadcasting how respecting george washington and thomas jefferson is supporting white supremacism i promise you'll generate more reaction.

i think it's clear that coddling isn't the issue. these kids aren't weak snowflakes. they feel emboldened and are expressing what they see is their political power to dictate terms to their institutions and professors.

― Mordy, Friday, November 3, 2017 12:54 PM (twenty-six minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

yea i agree

I don't really know what to make of any side of this (except that Khan should have never faced potential disciplinary action over a FB post) but I feel like it might relate to Mordy's point: https://globalnews.ca/news/3833413/dalhousie-student-slams-anti-canadian-motion/

Afaict, it seems to be pretty much taken as a given with many on the Canadian activist left at this point that any celebration of Canada or its founders is more or less a celebration of genocide.

I am legitimately offended by the comment at the beginning of that article about Reed College where a student claims that a saxophone player painted gold is performing blackface.

OTOH it's Reed so odds are all of these students are so high that they don't know what they're saying.

I wondered if that was the case, yeah.

http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-k_3ruV9munQ/UaufkFv3QRI/AAAAAAAACpw/BbFX8Q02Q7s/s1600/reedlogo.jpg

My main memory of my one visit to Reed is some engineering students showing off the bong they made out of a shop-vac.

lol that is perfect

xpost
trivializing the tools of the domestic worker
nagl

it was the 90s; it was trivialize the tools of the domestic worker or go home

at this stage it seems like things are only going to get worse in this regard (abolishing thanksgiving, or taking down statues of the founding fathers seem like obvious next steps)

I doubt it -- I mean, I don't doubt there will be a handful of examples of this (there are already!) but I doubt it will be, as people say, "a thing"

or that these are a small amount of activists making a lot of noise w/ little real impact on the country.

This is what I think, my evidence being that I work on an extremely liberal college campus where all of this stuff is completely invisible/irrelevant to 95% of our students. You'll notice that the same incidents (Charles Murray at Middlebury, the biology guy at Evergreen, and now lately this stuff at Reed) are trotted out again and again and again and it's not because those are the most important and representative college campuses that are fair stand-ins for higher ed as a whole (ha!) it's because there are just not that many examples but scoldy op-eds must be written. If you want to know what lefty activists on campus are spending their time doing, by and large it's registering people to vote, making sure college students have required ID in states that have recently imposed requirements, trying to get campuses to divest from oil/gun/tobacco companies, etc., not putting a KKK hood on the statue of Lincoln on the quad or trying to get the Shakespeare class canceled.

student who said 'emotional theater' otm

lol "taking down statues of the founding fathers" I heaven forfend, what a nightmarish picture you paint of our dystopian future

Been wondering why the masochistic Midwich Cuckoos fantasy is so popular. I know people from different viewpoints want to believe the worst, but why?

I say this as someone who often suspects people are downplaying liberal/left problems.

i think conservatives have observed that fads in the academy often become policy a few decades (or less) down the line - or at least they've observed this with social issues, economic ones a little trickier?

college students grow out of the bonfire of the vanities mindset

They probably do, they get jobs and stuff, but there's always more college students to grow into it. Why shouldn't they?

heaven forfend, what a nightmarish picture you paint of our dystopian future

fwiw tho i think doing so would be a mistake (eroding shared constitutive culture) i don't feel particularly strongly about it. i do think it'll cause a major reaction. v likely that removing the statues is value neutral but the response is dystopian.

xp weak sub-institutional-level memory

It's the reluctance to find out what's really going on that puzzles me. In a lot of these articles they don't interview the students to find out what they want. It's like they really really want there to be kids who will destroy everything they believe in.

i've spent my whole life hearing about crazed leftists warring on christmas, secretly weaving the homosexual agenda into school curricula etc. and as with things like gay rights, there have usually been ostensible liberals ready to assert that things are moving too fast (or "it's not the right time, there's an election coming in three years" ) and that the backlash will be so bad it means that the thing is not worth it. imo the probability of right-wing exploitation of these things as wedge issues is not in and of itself an argument against pursuing them. especially in a world where the right wing is going to exploit literally anything that you do as a wedge issue. or things that haven't even taken place (e.g. pizzagate).

of course you can, separately, argue that you think the changes/ideas themselves are bad and not what you would like to see happen! but personally i think it is best to table the "the other side will use this against you" angle since it obscures your own position and would be true of anything.

you're right that it's a cheap argument. i gave a more serious one in the first half of that post.

aka civic culture is what is holding this country together and intentionally damaging it further will not lead to results that are good for anyone

isn't that what steve bannon is saying?

i think steve bannon wants to destroy the government and start a civil war

ok, well, the specific hypothetical which i found laughable was the implication that communities deciding to take down founding-father statues would be a turn for the worse. you can conflate that with "intentionally damaging civic culture" but i don't buy that at all, it seems like a tendentious elision. one pictures young hothead radicals, eager to find a way to damage civic culture, picking up a broken brick of society from the gutter and hurling it at a statue of thomas jefferson.

if that's not what you're going for, please feel free to correct me but it just sounds like you're buying into or inadvertently propagating the right-wing stereotype/fantasy you claim to want to shield us against. i for one can think of lots of reasons to get rid of statues that in my view are about an *affirmation* of civic culture. certainly the removal of confederate monuments reflects that, no? not much "civic" about devoting ostensibly shared resources to erecting and maintaining those, since their purpose is to let certain populations know who's boss. taking them down can be a real corner-turning or eye-opening moment - "yknow it never occurred to me what that would look like to somebody descended from slaves" etc. if a community came to the conclusion that jefferson is in the same boat, sounds like a healthy civic discussion to me.