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

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.

Sometimes think there might be value in keeping around statues of horrible people as some sort of reminder but I'm not committed to it.

I think that the "promissory note" idea is the only thing that allows us to maintain social fabric while progressing ethically. But cutting off that note at the root by disowning the entire independence narrative would be v difficult to recover from.

We're a multicultural country. We don't have the luxury of appealing to other commonalities to create trust and allow society to function. We have this contractual nation idea that this nation was founded for ideals to which we still subscribe. I think you're imagining that some kind of ad hoc new nationality would come to replace the founder mythology. That seems a little optimistic. It seems more likely that we'll just become more fractured without shared historical touch points.

there's a lot of leaps there and i can't really follow them all. but really there are so many ways to engage with the promissory note/perpetual improvement narrative than by venerating these specific guys. for example, you might choose to make another step towards progress by... taking down their statues. depending what values are shared in that community that might feel very affirmative.

enshrining the statues as sacrosanct, as if touching them is a deliberate and negative assault against any possible commonality and community, feels bizarre to me. monuments come and go. figures who were once universally-known national heroes become obscure. we swapped eisenhower for susan b anthony on the dollar coin and we're hopefully about to see tubman replace jackson. the greek revival museum burns down and gets replaced with a neogothic one (or neoclassical or art deco or international-style depending when we're talking), the vietnam memorial becomes a more important site to visit in washington than the jefferson memorial. those things happen sometimes with active pushing for a realignment and sometimes it just happens but in neither case is society atomized and the constitution vaporized.

washington and jefferson are a lot more important to our national mythos than eisenhower or even jackson. more importantly they're metonymic for the documents that enshrine those shared values. they're not so easily extractible imo.

also i think i'm much more pessimistic about the current level of atomization/individualism than you are.

well, in turn, i'm a lot more skeptical than you are about the values attached to these characters! who am i to tell someone who associates jefferson and washington and the constitution mainly with its force as a conservative document designed to retain and standardize injustice (specifically the enslavement from which both men drew all their wealth, as you know of course) that they're wrong and that taking action based on that point of view goes against the promissory note / american-experiment potential of the good bits of the constitution?