Free Speech and Creepy Liberalism

College is also a good time to make friends, have sex with different kinds of people, and experiment with drugs.

― Treeship, Friday, May 23, 2014 9:49 PM Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

i understand there are other ways to do this

getting married?

What I mean to say by all this is boorish people have always been "triggers" for me in a way no piece of literature ever could.

― just like the one wing dove (Crabbits), Friday, May 23, 2014 2:47 PM (6 hours ago)

my work in disability services makes me VERY skeptical about remarks like "if you're too fragile to handle it, maybe college isn't for you" or "the real world won't coddle you, so toughen up." they play into the pervasive idea that environments are immutable, when it's entirely reasonable to make changes to an environment that is not serving the lived reality of the community.

― funny unconscious rocks creating your consciousness with free choice (reddening), Friday, May 23, 2014 7:32 PM (1 hour ago)

The kind of people I was thinking about when I said 'creepy liberals' are, at this very minute, putting links to this story on facebook and talking about the rise of politically correct censorship and et cetera ... and yet one feels that they don't really care very much about literature or trauma victims. For them, Literature Under Threat is just useful as a rhetorical image, and unlike me, they have no interest in exploring the real psychology of triggering and flashbacks.

― cardamon, Friday, May 23, 2014 1:46 PM (8 hours ago)

i don't think most itt are treating the issue in so aggressively black & white a fashion...the question, as i see it, is more like "what changes, and under what circumstances, and on whose authority?" the details.

one interesting thing i've learned from working in disability services is the distinction between the "medical model" of disability and the "social model." the medical model is the traditional way: student goes to a doctor, comes to us with a note of diagnosis, and we provide accommodations. the "social model," which my department promotes, is an attempt to make certain accommodations a normal professional expectation among all instructors: captioned videos, powerpoint slides made available online, that sort of thing. that way students who struggle with undiagnosed disabilities or students who don't want to disclose their disabilities are able to benefit as well. it's a way of saying "students with disabilities are normal, expected participants in the college community, and everyone's work practices should reflect that."

this argument over trigger warnings feels really similar. in the social model, you'd make up a list of triggers and say "let's accommodate everyone's sensitivities generally." not a lot of people are going for that idea, so i'd think the next proposal would be the medical model, where trigger-related accommodations are reserved for people who have doctor-diagnosed issues with trauma/ptsd. but (and here's where my bit of stridency upthread comes in) a non-trivial number of instructors are just not cool with the idea that they need to change anything about their work practices, period. it's like pulling fuckin' teeth just to get some of them to accommodate bone-obvious disabilities like hearing or vision loss. so i tend to be suspicious of appeals to tradition or "principled stands" in this kind of argument, as i think it's often just another way of saying "i find it a hassle to change." but this probably has less to do with the discussion itt than it does with my experience "on the ground" or w/e.

anyway my presence in the classroom already has a chilling effect on the instructor's free speech, namely their desire to spend half an hour of class watching uncaptioned YouTube videos.

In the old culture war, we were supposed to read Ovid. We were supposed to read the "classics". I suppose I should dig up citations, but part of the original conservative beef was that "modern" lit with its bad language was preferred to the classics. Now we're supposed to have shocking, offensive lit with lots of violence.

my work in disability services makes me VERY skeptical about remarks like "if you're too fragile to handle it, maybe college isn't for you" or "the real world won't coddle you, so toughen up." they play into the pervasive idea that environments are immutable, when it's entirely reasonable to make changes to an environment that is not serving the lived reality of the community.

And they also assume that accommodating people is the same as 'coddling' them, that there is no legitimate sensitivity, only 'over-sensitivity', etc ...

x-post the Classics probably need TWs as well, what with all that child murder and incest leading to eye-gouging.

http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/books/2014/05/trigger-warnings-and-the-novelists-mind.html

i didn't find this post particularly interesting ("trigger warnings are dumb. but maybe they're useful! alas, i am a writer"), but for the sake of completism, here's jay caspian kang's take

curious how it's possible to even think yr engaging w lolita if you're not keeping in mind it describes the systematic rape of a young girl

My professor’s pronouncement felt too didactic, too political, and, although I tried to put it out of my mind and enjoy “Lolita” ’s cunning, surprising games with language, I could no longer pick up the book without feeling the weight of his judgment.

like this sentiment is so bonkers-dumb as to actually be evil

maybe the weight you were feeling was THE BOOK

years of staring rapt at the alliteration in "to tap at three on the teeth" and here comes this political asshole with his personal-experience-polluting claptrap about the "plot"

no i think what he's saying is that to be an artiste is to slip the bonds of mooing humanity

'every word matters'

"tried to put it out of my mind"!!!

curious how it's possible to even think yr engaging w lolita if you're not keeping in mind it describes the systematic rape of a young girl

Yeah, I find I'm always almost getting drawn into Humbert's self-pitying schtick and then something doesn't feel right and then I remember - argh fuck this narrator is a lying rapist

I thought that's what Nabokov was trying to do with the novel, really?

humbert trying to seduce you, the conspiratorial way you laugh at charlotte together, the coy self-identifications as a "murderer" (meaning quilty, but, really, especially since you read the prologue first, meaning lolita), the way the part of the first paragraph people leave out explicitly frames the entire book (except the prologue) as a defense in a celestial trial--a defense of what? what is tangling the thorns? what are the rotting monsters behind the slow boyish smile? forget politically correct, none of this stuff is even aesthetically pleasurable, nor (when it comes to all the beautiful odes to humbert's covetous kind of love) provocative, if you forget you're being smoothtalked by a rapist. that's the book.

i mean "as" aesthetically pleasurable. obv the prose is very nice.

well, horror stories provide their own aesthetic pleasures. and yeah, it's easy enough to get caught up in the language and wit for their own sake.

but it's not a horror story if you don't wanna think abt the rape

in the social model, you'd make up a list of triggers and say "let's accommodate everyone's sensitivities generally." not a lot of people are going for that idea, so i'd think the next proposal would be the medical model, where trigger-related accommodations are reserved for people who have doctor-diagnosed issues with trauma/ptsd. but (and here's where my bit of stridency upthread comes in) a non-trivial number of instructors are just not cool with the idea that they need to change anything about their work practices, period. ... so i tend to be suspicious of appeals to tradition or "principled stands" in this kind of argument, as i think it's often just another way of saying "i find it a hassle to change."

― funny unconscious rocks creating your consciousness with free choice (reddening), Saturday, May 24, 2014 5:36 AM (12 hours ago)

xp, gotcha

http://bullybloggers.wordpress.com/2014/07/05/you-are-triggering-me-the-neo-liberal-rhetoric-of-harm-danger-and-trauma/

Fifteen to twenty years ago, books like Wendy Brown’s States of Injury (1995) and Anna Cheng’s The Melancholy of Race: Psychoanalysis, Assimilation and Hidden Grief (2001) asked readers to think about how grievances become grief, how politics comes to demand injury and how a neoliberal rhetoric of individual pain obscures the violent sources of social inequity. But, newer generations of queers seem only to have heard part of this story and instead of recognizing that neoliberalism precisely goes to work by psychologizing political difference, individualizing structural exclusions and mystifying political change, some recent activists seem to have equated social activism with descriptive statements about individual harm and psychic pain. Let me be clear – saying that you feel harmed by another queer person’s use of a reclaimed word like tranny and organizing against the use of that word is NOT social activism. It is censorship.

Let’s call an end to the finger snapping moralism, let’s question contemporary desires for immediately consumable messages of progress, development and access; let’s all take a hard long look at the privileges that often prop up public performances of grief and outrage; let’s acknowledge that being queer no longer automatically means being brutalized and let’s argue for much more situated claims to marginalization, trauma and violence.

there should be a [...] in between those 2 paragraphs

What does it mean when younger people who are benefitting from several generations now of queer social activism by people in their 40s and 50s (who in their childhoods had no recourse to anti-bullying campaigns or social services or multiple representations of other queer people building lives) feel abused, traumatized, abandoned, misrecognized, beaten, bashed and damaged? These younger folks, with their gay-straight alliances, their supportive parents and their new right to marry regularly issue calls for “safe space.” However, as Christina
Hanhardt’s Lambda Literary award winning book, Safe Space: Neighborhood History and the Politics of Violence, shows, the safe space agenda has worked in tandem with urban initiatives to increase the policing of poor neighborhoods and the gentrification of others. Safe Space: Gay Neighborhood History and the Politics of Violence traces the development of LGBT politics in the US from 1965-2005 and explains how LGBT activism was transformed from a multi-racial coalitional grassroots movement with strong ties to anti-poverty groups and anti-racism organizations to a mainstream, anti-violence movement with aspirations for state recognition.

And, as LGBT communities make “safety” into a top priority (and that during an era of militaristic investment in security regimes) and ground their quest for safety in competitive narratives about trauma, the fight against aggressive new forms of exploitation, global capitalism and corrupt political systems falls by the way side.

Is this the way the world ends? When groups that share common cause, utopian dreams and a joined mission find fault with each other instead of tearing down the banks and the bankers, the politicians and the parliaments, the university presidents and the CEOs? Instead of realizing, as Moten and Hearny put it in The Undercommons, that “we owe each other everything,” we enact punishments on one another and stalk away from projects that should unite us, and huddle in small groups feeling erotically bonded through our self-righteousness.

“Neoliberal rhetoric, with its foundational emphasis upon individual freedoms, has the power to split off libertarianism, identity politics, multi-culturalism, and eventually narcissistic consumerism from the social forces ranged in pursuit of social justice through the conquest of state power. It has long proved extremely difficult within the US left, for example, to forge the collective discipline required for political action to achieve social justice without offending the desire of political actors for individual freedom and for full recognition and expression of particular identities. Neoliberalism did not create these distinctions, but it could easily exploit, if not foment, them.” David Harvey's Brief History of Neoliberalism

http://nataliacecire.blogspot.com/2014/07/on-neoliberal-rhetoric-of-harm.html

There's another strain to Halberstam's polemic that pits professors against students on generational terms. Here is one generation who fought hard for queer rights; who never had a Gay/Straight Alliance in high school or a way to grow up both queer and normal. Who made careers out of queer studies while they watched their administrations professionalize and their faculties casualize, who teach at universities that cost $44,000 a year to attend.

A representative of this generation calls another a bunch of babies. (So they are: their infantilization has been enforced by the privatization of public goods, by debt, and by the destruction of good jobs. Reaching puberty earlier and earlier, likely due to environmental factors, they achieve financial independence later and later, if ever. All their own fault, no doubt.)

Halberstam kind of makes a big deal of this generational gap, pointing to the "friendly adults" who erroneously install "narratives of damage that they [the youth] themselves may or may not have actually experienced." It's as if young people are stealing an earlier generation's trauma, claiming it as their own when really they have it so good. In this bizarrely counterfactual linear temporality, the past is not only past but also dead, and you do not have the right to be traumatized by historical memory, only by things that have literally happened to you—even if you are eighteen and it's all—all—news to you. We (the older generation) were there, and are over it, and so you (the younger generation) should root yourselves entirely in the ameliorated present* and get over it, because it is over.

The result is an odd polemic against coddled millenials and their too-sensitive feelings, as if it were somehow ridiculous to be young and too sensitive, or for that matter, old and too sensitive. This cross-generational call to "get over it" is an example of what Sara Ahmed has called "overing": "In assuming that we are over certain kinds of critique, they create the impression that we are over what is being critiqued." It's particularly perverse to demand that young people be "over it," when they have perhaps only just left their parents' homes, and have perhaps only recently come to any political consciousness at all. There's a very good reason college students aren't "over it"; they just got there. Have you met a college student? It's all, all new.

It is its own kind of shock to learn about how you have been historically, rather than personally, hated. It is not about "trauma" but about developing a political consciousness that is also historical, a fundamentally utopian impulse to exist in solidarity with the dead. There is, to be sure, a fine line between identifying with the past and appropriating it, but I think we can allow our students some leeway in figuring out where this line is, and not getting it right every time. Certainly grown-ups need the same leeway.

halberstam thing was so snide and shakily written but i guess i'm not surprised it made waves nor that it would turn up here

look, para 3, a primer on what humor is using monty python as an example, yeah

Couldn't get to grips with the halberstam thing beyond - 'The effect this text has on you, triggering you, is important but is still fixed on you, what about the wider community - if we fix things so that you always get a trigger warning, we could do that and still live in a world of gross inequality and suffering' - am I right, was that what he was saying?

caught some of this on the radio this morning:

“Freedom from Speech”: Speech Issues on College Campus
August 19, 2014

Hour One

Guests: Tim Burke and Greg Lukianoff

Over the past year, students at several colleges have called for “trigger warnings” to be added to syllabi to warn of potentially traumatic material. Also, there have been calls for higher scrutiny of “microaggressions” – subtle prejudices – that are used in everyday language. Additionally, several commencement speakers have had their invitations revoked because of protests from students and faculty members. In this hour of Radio Times, we’ll examine topics related to speech on college campuses with TIM BURKE, professor of history at Swarthmore College and author of the “Easily Distracted” blog, and GREG LUKIANOFF, president of the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (FIRE).

Lukianoff has a book out called 'Freedom from Speech': "Lukianoff analyzes numerous examples of the growing desire for "intellectual comfort," such as the rise of speech restrictions around the globe and the increasing media obsession of punishing "offensive" utterances, jokes, or opinions inside the United States. To provide a preview of where we may be headed, Lukianoff points to American college campuses where speakers are routinely disinvited for their opinions, where students increasingly demand "trigger warnings" for even classics like The Great Gatsby, and where students are told they cannot hand out even copies of the Constitution outside of "free speech zones." Lukianoff explains how increasingly global populations are arguing not for freedom of speech, but, rather, freedom from speech."

Long-term, and I know this sounds facetious but, I wonder if 'people who don't like having to negotiate systems of trigger warnings and sensitivities' are going to become one of those groups whose sensitivities are catered for in a system of trigger warnings and accommodations?

Will gladly defer to people who know more, but for example, wouldn't people who have autistic spectrum disorders really struggle in a system that penalised you for not providing trigger warnings?

I think it makes sense that people want freedom from speech now, and that this wasn't an issue in the past. With screens everywhere you turn, we are bombarded with so. much. information. and lots of people fantasize about dropping out altogether. I think it is in this environment that people have come to view information as assault. Even I, with my frenetic, hummingbirdlike mind want to slow stuff down from time to time, and take more active control over my information environment by cutting stuff out.

I know trigger warnings don't directly address this problem, but I think they speak to an anxiety that comes from living in the modern information environment.

xxxp you mean like "Trigger warning: Trigger warnings"?

good point, treeship. information overload has to be a factor here. also proximity.

one of the big questions for the 21st century, imo = how do non-homogeneous societies manage themselves, given ever-increasing population density, travel & communication opportunities, and access to a tidal wave of unfiltered information? one obvious answer = redefine social permissions so as to restrict things that might exacerbate tensions between groups. there's no nice, simple, ideologically "pure" defense for such an approach, at least none comparable to "all people should be free to say whatever they want," but it does make a certain kind of pragmatic sense.

for the record, i'm not advocating legislative speech restriction in the name of peace 'n' harmony, but i can easily see why less formally codified social rules might shift in that direction, things being what they are.

I think consent is important here ^

An agreement between people not to cross each other's lines just feels so different to an order coming down from above that you and they must not cross each other's lines

yeah, absolutely. but any shift even in loose social permissions will generate the sense among some that they're being unfairly restricted, even oppressed (e.g. conservative grousing about "political correctness").

also, the two things - social and legislative permissions - aren't so clearly distinct. when a society collectively demands something, it will rarely limits itself to non-legislative means of obtaining it. today's common agreements will likely form the foundation for tomorrow's laws.

"...it will rarely limits itself..."

i haven't been following this case too closely, of the newly hired uiuc prof whose job was retracted (against custom, and against the hiring department, by the higher-ups) because of his pro-palestine/anti-israel tweeting. consensus seems to have been pretty strongly with him and against the school, since the retraction seems to provide good grounds for an academic-freedom suit, and although the prof's employment hadn't been formally approved yet (so technically ok to retract?), no prof's employment customarily IS before they start their new jobs and move to new cities and begin teaching, so a retraction of this scale has a 'chilling effect'.

but ppl have been waiting for the school to justify themselves. here's the chancellor:

http://illinois.edu/blog/view/1109/115906

A pre-eminent university must always be a home for difficult discussions and for the teaching of diverse ideas. One of our core missions is to welcome and encourage differing perspectives. Robust – and even intense and provocative – debate and disagreement are deeply valued and critical to the success of our university.

As a university community, we also are committed to creating a welcoming environment for faculty and students alike to explore the most difficult, contentious and complex issues facing our society today. Our Inclusive Illinois initiative is based on the premise that education is a process that starts with our collective willingness to search for answers together – learning from each other in a respectful way that supports a diversity of worldviews, histories and cultural knowledge.

The decision regarding Prof. Salaita was not influenced in any way by his positions on the conflict in the Middle East nor his criticism of Israel. Our university is home to a wide diversity of opinions on issues of politics and foreign policy. Some of our faculty are critical of Israel, while others are strong supporters. These debates make us stronger as an institution and force advocates of all viewpoints to confront the arguments and perspectives offered by others. We are a university built on precisely this type of dialogue, discourse and debate.

What we cannot and will not tolerate at the University of Illinois are personal and disrespectful words or actions that demean and abuse either viewpoints themselves or those who express them. We have a particular duty to our students to ensure that they live in a community of scholarship that challenges their assumptions about the world but that also respects their rights as individuals.

As chancellor, it is my responsibility to ensure that all perspectives are welcome and that our discourse, regardless of subject matter or viewpoint, allows new concepts and differing points of view to be discussed in and outside the classroom in a scholarly, civil and productive manner.

A Jewish student, a Palestinian student, or any student of any faith or background must feel confident that personal views can be expressed and that philosophical disagreements with a faculty member can be debated in a civil, thoughtful and mutually respectful manner. Most important, every student must know that every instructor recognizes and values that student as a human being. If we have lost that, we have lost much more than our standing as a world-class institution of higher education.

good response from t burke

http://blogs.swarthmore.edu/burke/blog/2014/08/22/on-the-salaita-decision/

yes this is...relevant to my...interests

uggggggh

I am not troubled by the idea that an acceptance of all students as they come to you is an important professional standard. I would go even further than you do in your statement and suggest that persistent inability to accept and respectfully work with students and colleagues with many diverse views is not just a legitimate weight on hiring but should govern whether someone retains tenure. But you must not measure adherence to this standard by reading what scholars or intellectuals say or write in the public sphere, whether in formal publication or in social media.

Hmm, but if you can't use that to gauge what somebody's going to be like as a teacher, what can you use? Which question is sort of answered by this:

The proof is in the pudding: in how a professor teaches, in how they participate in the professional evaluation of other scholars, in how they execute their administrative duties. There are innumerable examples of faculty in the last fifty years whose intensely expressed public views had no impact on the professionalism of their work with students and colleagues.

Sort of answered.

But basing it on how they behave in class with students requires you to hire them first

FIRE are really creepy even tho they occasionally seem to come down on the right side of some things. on the whole they feel like some astroturfed koch/reason operation

http://jewishphilosophyplace.wordpress.com/2014/08/26/steven-salaita-uncivil-speech-obnoxious-speech-abusive-speech/

If anyone wrote this way about or addressed Muslims, Arabs, or Palestinians, vilifying broad sectors of an entire community for its political commitments, he would have found his head on a platter, and rightly so.

Worth quoting this recent LGM blog post in nearly its entirety, as it bears directly on this little bit of sophistry:

You will be unsurprised that Glenn Reynolds has no problem with academics being fired for the political content of their Twitter feeds:

A FACULTY CANDIDATE WHO TALKED ABOUT BLACK PEOPLE THIS WAY WOULD BE UNEMPLOYABLE ANYWHERE. SAY IT ABOUT JEWS, THOUGH, AND IT’S CONTROVERSIAL. “Yet ad hominem attacks are also a BDS strategy that serves to silence opponents. Many faculty who believe the university made the right decision about Salaita are now unwilling to say so publicly.” BDS people have made clear by their actions that they are nasty antisemites who deserve no respect.

First of all, let us once again dispense with the silly idea that Salaitia was a mere “candidate,” despite having agreed to an offer and been scheduled to teach classes. By this logic, he could have been teaching for a month and not been hired. The trustee approval is pro forma; he was treated by the university as an employee, which he was. The idea that he wasn’t fired is such vacuous formalism it would embarrass proponents of the Hilbig litigation. He was fired.

So let’s consider another hypothetical. What if someone said “something like that” about, say, Palestinians? I happen to have a test case handy:

Dean Obeidallah @Deanofcomedy
.@instapundit I applaud ur honesty in cheering the death of Palestinian children.

Instapundit.com @instapundit
Follow
@Deanofcomedy If Palestinians acted civilized, no one would die. You are a mouthpiece for bloodthirsty savages.

Note here that Reynolds isn’t talking about Hamas, or Palestinian terrorists; he’s talking about Palestinans as a group. The evidence alleging anti-Semitism in Salaita’s tweets is far more ambiguous. (Indeed, I don’t think they constitute evidence that Salaita is anti-Semitic at all, although some of the tweets are hateful and indefensible even if they are not anti-Semitic.) It is being asserted that Salaita retweeting a tweet saying that a reporter’s story — not the reporter, the story — should have ended at the “point of a shiv” is a firable offense. Reynolds has called for the literal, not metaphorical, murder of Iranian nuclear scientists.

My position at the time of the latter incident is that Reynolds could not be fired for his statements based on the principles of academic freedom, and that applies to his new disgusting tweets as well. Reynolds himself, however, is happy to benefit from these protections but does not want them extended to people he disagrees with, which is a disgrace.

That does not really bear on the link I posted at all.