Free Speech and Creepy Liberalism

if you had any idea how much trouble that situation is causing me (like, as you post)

like I'm happy that you're happy for your team I guess, but for me this isn't some abstract thing, because the boycott fucks so much up

i'm sorry it's giving you personal trouble. academic boycotts stink.

so much time. & it's not like anything, one way or the other, is going to change anything. if the hire is reinstated, will this guy lead to the downfall of Israel? right. if he's not hired, will the university get better? the university has already suffered permanent damage from the chancellor and board of trustee's decision. like this is a game for a small group of very rich people, getting "their way" with an institution they care nothing about, except perhaps as a way to get tax exemptions (for the donors who threatened to withdraw funding) or as a point to brag about (for the board of trustees). for the people dealing with this everyday, it is not a game.

& I say all that as someone who will happily visit Israel for an academic visit whenever (if flights weren't so expensive I'd go this month, I was asked but there's basically no money in their university system to support).

http://www.thebaffler.com/salvos/able-bodied-kills-us

http://www.vulture.com/2014/11/when-did-the-art-world-get-so-conservative.html

One of art's great weapons is its bad taste — how something can seem ugly, wrong, or off but still help extend art. Art is for anyone; it just isn't for everyone. And we have to stop acting as if it is something to be domesticated, proper, good. Oscar Wilde thought that art is amoral, something first for itself; sometimes, it’s something you cross the street to avoid. Sometimes art is Muddy Waters' "Mannish Boy" blatantly howling a barbaric yelp. Come what may. Operating within rules isn't art. It's about acceptance. Being good. Moreover, if we're this bunkered in, what are we retreating from? What are we so afraid of? And why?

lol is that jerry saltz whining about people criticizing him for fawning over richard prince's gross, sexist, and incredibly boring new work?

what is the work and why is it gross, sexist AND boring?

http://news.artnet.com/art-world/richard-prince-sucks-136358
this review by paddy johnson is what saltz is responding to (also i guess where i got "fawning over"). imo it would be bad and embarrassing work even if it wasn't also gross and sexist

I'm a little torn on this one, I think Saltz is onto something but I'm not sure this is the art I'd be planting my flag in the sand over since it does actually sound like kind of obvious and bad art.

It just feels a little like the male gaze has become such a discussed and analyzed and almost taboo topic that once you identify it in contemporary art the conversation stops there.

i think what saltz is complaining about is just a basic feature of the current moment--the internet is giving a voice and a platform to millions of people who never had them before; artists, critics, and writers are no longer shielded from direct criticism from those people (either by the institutions they work for, or just by the traditional hurdles of pre-internet communication); and people and institutions haven't developed tools or responses to gauge "social media outrage" or whatever. lately it's felt exhausting (e.g. when it turns from mass justified outcry to buckets of mind-numbing coverage chum http://www.theawl.com/2014/06/story-covered) but we're all still negotiating it. the next five years of discourse will probably be really shitty and irritating. oh well.

probably not more so than preceding five thousand years of discourse though

nope, just in new and different ways!

i don't know if that's true at all. one review he's responding to is on artnet. i do think there's something about the tumblrization of the outrage cycle more generally, but also there seems to be something narrowly specific about how that then transforms certain aspects of discourse more generally?

he seems to be mostly complaining about twitter and facebook. artnet is not exactly longtime critical institution.

http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2014/nov/17/hashtag-hate-trap-censorship-freedom-expression-dapper-laughs-julien-blanc

I'm still not sure why Julien Blanc gets lumped in with this. Surely a Visa application is precisely a request for what you're doing to be assessed in terms of whether it's wanted/needed in the country you're applying to? In which case it's a legit channel for saying 'no'. If I applied for a Visa to go to the US to get paid for idk, doing 'street art' or something, I'd hardly moan about being 'banned' for not being granted one.

He'd only need the type of temporary visa bands get when they come over to play shows. Unless there's seen to be a risk that they'll abscond, they're normally granted to Americans without a second thought. The justification suggested for keeping him out is that his act is not conducive to the public good. That said, given that he has been filmed assaulting women and encouraging men to do the same, 'free speech' isn't much of a justification here. His views aren't offensive, they present an active danger to women.

As does he, obviously.

In law, an individual can be refused entry to the UK if “admitting the person may lead to a breach of UK law or public order” or “admitting the person may lead to an offence being committed by someone else”. Given the instructional content of his seminars, and the existence of footage showing Blanc assaulting women in Japan, the legal case for turning Blanc back at the border is clear.

http://www.newstatesman.com/politics/2014/11/free-speech-must-be-defended-not-julien-blanc-s-incitement-violence-against-women

http://coreyrobin.com/2014/12/05/more-news-on-the-salaita-case/

actual effects being felt on uiuc, broader faculty pushback

if I could only tell...

the broader faculty pushback is administrative, though; they're from unit heads and chairs agreeing that the way the university handled this was fucked. some units that didn't get involved before floated no confidence votes but vocal opposition to Salaita himself squelched those. but the real issue on campus is how the administration got involved in a faculty search, and how they've claimed that civility is as important as scholarship at the U. so faculty are only now starting to unify on procedural grounds against the administration.

as is expected (minimally)

have you guys been hearing any of the state chatter about shuttering programs, shrinking offerings on the basis of enrollments/majors/graduates alone? i would expect it to touch you the least of any in the ui system, but then i've heard reorg talk ('let's just put those departments together in one big one') about my big R alma mater too, so.

there's always re-org talk; it's something deans can do to fill out their admin experience so that they can get a promotion

& aren't course offerings arranged on the basis of enrollments/majors/grads already? that's been normal at all my institutions.

but my own unit has shuffled off re-org talk & our numbers are fine so there's no present pressure to change anything, except to hire (on which re. yr revive though)

i guess yeah, i shoulda said, more that that criterion would be magnified so as to be everything. research, nil, quality, nil, distinctive service to the community, nil, requirement for a serious university to have a program in X, nil.

i had read someone at a lower-tier school in your system saying much more explicit things they'd heard from some state-ed board drone; fully online curriculum (do it or die), etc.

that drop in applications mentioned in the link is pretty unbelievable, tho. even at that level it's not like people can be turning their noses up at jobs.

ah. no, nothing like that. "flagship" & all that. it's a place with Nobel laureates & its aspirations are maximal. that affects everything. even the online stuff is extremely optional.

the drop in apps is a senior thing though (hence why I'm in this tab rather than the other, ugh)

http://www.thecrimson.com/article/2014/12/17/huds-soda-stream-suspend-purchase/

Last fall, some members of the College Palestine Solidarity Committee and the Harvard Islamic Society noticed that the filtered water machines in certain dining halls had Sodastream labels on them. Citing discomfort with the machines and the potential of the machines to offend those affected by the Israel-Palestine conflict, the students emailed House masters and tutors to arrange a meeting with University officials to have the machines removed.

Rachel J. Sandalow-Ash ’15, a member of the Harvard College Progressive Jewish Alliance who attended some of the subsequent meetings, said that she believed that regardless of the University’s position, the machines and their association with the disputed territory could be offensive to Palestinian students.

“I think it is neither anti-Israel nor anti-Semite to take stand against the occupation,” she said. “These machines can be seen as a microaggression to Palestinian students and their families and like the University doesn’t care about Palestinian human rights.” She added that her views should not be construed as the official club stance on the issue.

microaggression

Rachel J. Sandalow-Ash ’15, a member of the Harvard College Progressive Jewish Alliance

the fuck you trying to do to me

good to have u back deems

Sodastream-machines obviously has nothing to do anywhere on a campus. Hopefully we can all agree on that, right? I mean, boycutting stuff made in illegal settlements is not the same as boycutting all of Israel.

dont tell me how to feel

israel already boycuts itself amirite

what does this have to do with free speech

Take it to ILAFL

Who speaks for the fizzy water making thing, who

Boycotts, hmm.

Compared with boycotting McDonalds, how much does the suggested boycott of sodastream machines help people?

I mean I'm thinking both of them, and boycotts in general, probably don't do much?

And also doomed gestures and the narcissism of small differences

tonight in a coffeeshop i heard a bro talking up the awesome benefits of sodastream all bro-like so apparently they've got some market penetration

Because just the very casualness of a consumer appliance like a sodastream machine kind of makes the boycott attempt seem ridiculous all by itself, regardless of the politics - but then, depending on what you're used to, anything can seem trivial and given, and protests about it ridiculous

The Sodastream boycott has been effective afaict. They have stopped production in the occupied territories and moved it back to Israel.

lol

http://www.theatlantic.com/education/archive/2014/12/at-law-school-is-insensitivity-grounds-for-an-objection/383882/

Law Professor Eugene Volokh recently wrote about a controversial exam question at UCLA, where he teaches. The question noted a protest in Ferguson, Missouri, where the stepfather of Michael Brown, the unarmed man killed by police, reacted to news that Officer Darren Wilson would not be charged in the killing. Overcome with anger, he shouted to a crowd of protestors, "Burn this bitch down!” Students were asked to write a memo analyzing how the First Amendment applies to such speech. Several complained. Said one UCLA student: "These kinds of questions create a hostile learning environment for students of color, especially black students who are already disadvantaged by the institution." The professor who gave the test agreed to adjust grades of test-takers who did worse on that question than the rest of their First Amendment exam.

On the other side of the country, Harvard law professor Jeannie Suk has taken to the New Yorker to express concern over her perception that students are increasingly likely to object when classroom discussion turns to rape. "Individual students often ask teachers not to include the law of rape on exams for fear that the material would cause them to perform less well," she writes. "One teacher I know was recently asked by a student not to use the word 'violate' in class—as in 'Does this conduct violate the law?'—because the word was triggering."

"We now use the vocabulary of post-traumatic stress disorder—trauma, triggers, etc.—to refer to virtually any bad feelings occasioned by controversial events or expression."

I often worry about what this means for individuals who are both survivors of individual trauma and members of communities that have suffered collective trauma. I've been mugged 3 times in this city, on all occasions having been grabbed from behind on the sidewalk at night--now my heart rate spikes when I hear footsteps behind me on the sidewalk at night. That fits my (granted pretty layman's) understanding of a trigger in the traditional sense. While I can't speak to the interior of anyone else's experience and wouldn't ever try to invalidate anyone else's feelings, *I feel* a little :| when I see "being triggered" being used as a synonym for "this made me upset."

I'm in with the notion of collective trauma, but I think maybe individual survivors of trauma might be better served by unhooking these common languages from one another.

I am wary of the term "triggers" being so public. It is an Internet term, and if you use it, you feel weak, and I don't think that's a healthy persona to have on the 'net.

I'm not sure I follow you?

i'm with you on displeasure with seeing "triggered" used synonymously with "i am temporarily upset". i had a similar experience with a violent mugging (also a crazy violent dog attack) and so to me a trigger is something that instantly morphs your brain and body into a tense helpless defensive mode. i have similar thoughts whenever i overhear someone on the phone say "ugh, the bank closed early today just as i was about to walk in, ohmigod i am SO DEPRESSED NOW." not a huge deal, just annoying and it devalues the original meaning of the word, bit by bit.

It's a term from recovery groups, where gamergaters and net creeps etc. don't belong - I'm not sure it's something to be used in a more open forum - whether it's online or in a classroom. It just feels like it's giving predatory and abusive people ammunition.