Free Speech and Creepy Liberalism

TBH though - and here I'm thinking about things like the recent protests over the 'Are You Beach Body Ready' adverts for weightlifting supplements on the London underground - I think a lot of these, on one level obvious over-reactions from the left are to do with the omnipresence of thumping idiot ideology on all channels

I.E. I'm a bit of an idiot to sit here scratching my head saying 'Whhyyy can't they just rrread and crrrriticise the rapey ancient poemmmmmsss?' when what's really going on is people looking for some way, any way, to carve out a space that isn't just boom boom we're big men in suits fuck you lose weight guns guns money money

^ This is not my clearest ILX post ever but dunno, what do you lot think

invigorating use of vernacular idioms

it's empowering for students to learn to articulate their points of disagreement with the canon, and to do this in the context of a classroom environment that lets them know that their voices are just as legitimate as the voices of the authors they study. if students come away from a literature class feeling dominated by the texts that is a failure of the teacher.

their voices are just as legitimate as the voices of the authors they study.

lol what earth are you from?

?

maybe columbia is mad backwards, but when i studied english and art history students were literally never encouraged to examine texts from a totally uncritical standpoint. in fact, when it came to the classics, postcolonial and feminist critiques were de rigeur assigned supplemental readings.

Achebe's Heart of Darkness essay is a perennial favorite.

And Edward Said on Conrad generally.

The only way I know of to read anything with pleasure and profit is to read in the light of my personal experience and my borrowed knowledge of the world. You could call this "reading critically" or just reading mindfully, but it shouldn't be something one needs to be reminded or encouraged to do. It should just be how one lives one's life. The alternative is just too depressing to contemplate.

if students come away from a literature class feeling dominated by the texts that is a failure of the teacher.

Depends. There's a great deal of context one needs to supply in order to interpret that statement fully.

I would agree that a student must feel adequate to the task of engaging an author and finding the source of their authority in the text, rather than in their reputation, if they are going to derive any lasting good from it. But most undergraduate students are still too impoverished in life experience to justify anything beyond a tentative judgment on most classic texts. The purpose of introducing them to such classic texts isn't to 'teach' them the texts, so much as to introduce them to the authors and begin the possibility of an enduring conversation with a few of them.

most undergraduate students are still too impoverished in life experience to justify anything beyond a tentative judgment on most classic texts.

i don't think this is true. their judgment is going to be different than what it will be later on, it will come from a narrower perspective, but i don't think this means it's worse. it's like the de man essay, "blindness and insight." sometimes you can see more by not seeing everything, and young people are really good at that if they are bold enough. i even find this with the high school students i teach.

but like, you're right: their views need to have basis in the text. they shouldn't feel dominated by the text but they also shouldn't feel empowered to make dictatorial judgments about stuff they haven't really thought about much. I saw more of the latter than the former when I was an undergrad

their judgment is going to be different than what it will be later on

that sounds like a tentative judgment to me

idk. i think it's authentic for who they are at that point. who they are later will be different.

it's not like they are moving closer or further away from some sort of unassailable truth. the truth of a text lies, at least in part, in the polyvocality of the discourse it generates. imo.

sending a prayer of thanks that I was an undergrad no later than the 80s

Visiting the past is like visiting another country, and you know who I really don't want to go visit another country with? Tourists whose first response to every cultural difference is "YOU PEOPLE ARE DOING IT WRONG."

i think it's authentic for who they are at that point.

authenticity is not exactly in question here. an opinion, whatever it is, is an 100%authentic personal opinion. nor is whether any later judgment on a text could achieve some unassailable truth my point.

I think it is worth noting that one's appreciation of a work will change in light one's changing experience only if one revisits that work. if one believes one's initial judgment is unassailable as an undergrad, the chances one will revisit a work later in life are very slender.

http://www.cbc.ca/m/news/politics/ottawa-considering-hate-charges-against-those-who-boycott-israel-1.3067497

hate speech laws: what could go wrong?

i think this whole discussion is missing the point, reading ovid is probably fine for the great majority of people.

Ovid’s “Metamorphoses” is a fixture of Lit Hum, but like so many texts in the Western canon, it contains triggering and offensive material that marginalizes student identities ~*~*~in the classroom~*~*~. These texts, wrought with histories and narratives of exclusion and oppression, can be difficult to read ~*~*~and discuss~*~*~ as a survivor, a person of color, or a student from a low-income background.

the problem instructors are trying to solve with warnings like these is NOT the hypothetical student who can't bear to make her eye continue down the page. it's the very real, observed phenomenon of students who can't talk about... well, anything, but especially rape and other kinds of trauma w/o dominating the discussion with bullshit hypotheticals and justifications. it's not about the homework, it's about the class discussion the next day.

frankly instead of trigger warnings they should issue a direct admonition to the #actually brigade that these issues are not imaginary for people sitting in the room with them. but that would get the academy in more trouble, wouldn't it.

http://www.10news.com/news/mom-outraged-her-daughter-is-asked-to-perform-naked-for-ucsd-art-class-final-050915

TRIGGER WARNING!!!!

http://www.theonion.com/article/college-encourages-lively-exchange-of-idea-38496

nice

frankly instead of trigger warnings they should issue a direct admonition to the #actually brigade that these issues are not imaginary for people sitting in the room with them. but that would get the academy in more trouble, wouldn't it.

― goole, Monday, May 11, 2015 10:48 AM Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

i'm pretty cool with this

goole, you redescribed the quote to isolate its most reasonable strand & mitigate what was most objectionable (imo). if the issue isn’t ovid so much but problematic classroom discussion of certain topics, why bring ovid into it? nb problematic discussion of certain topics is just as likely to occur when dealing with texts which do not “marginalize” but focus on historically excluded/ oppressed identities

fair enough though (always better to deal with most reasonable articulation of the problem)

don’t know what “#actually brigade” is (think i can guess though). i’m sympathetic to what you’re saying, but wonder what such an admonition would look like in practice. take care not to be insensitive assholes?

problem imo is it’s too easy for problem (which trigger warnings are meant to address) to slip from “speech which may cause post-traumatic (di)stress in some students” to “speech which some students may find ideologically obnoxious”

not same thing and imo that conflation is harmful to education

at the end of the day, such classroom issues have to be handled with instructor’s discretion on case-by-case basis, i guess

inevitable right wing exploitation waits in the wings....so many things to be traumatized about in higher ed.

http://www.racialmicroaggressions.illinois.edu/files/2015/03/RMA-Classroom-Report.pdf

students v. racist of course, but hella clueless professors in this thing too

possibly a personal bugbear, but i think a lot of lit professors are so needy of "classroom discussion" that they aren't really able to tell the difference between a productive one and non-productive one. students "expressing" themselves becomes a value in itself. ruthlessly confining discussion to textual and literary matters in no way avoids these problems but it does help contain it. if a student is soapboxing in a way that doesn't explicitly refer to the qualities of the text under discussion then my inclination is to shut it down. my other feeling is that explicitly engaging hot-button ideological questions is a reductive and even harmful way to read literature in an academic environment (you can read however you want elsewhere). literature can inform and influence politics and community making (poor words for how this actually works) but it's also something else, worthy of analysis and study in its own right. if you don't believe this then there's a political science class down the hall.

there's no possibly of productively having any kind of classroom in any subject if some voices are not excluded. every single discussion will exclude someone and be partial, limited, even "biased." the solution isn't to avoid exclusion--there is no solution. you have to define the parameters of what you're doing as best you can and move forward. the best way to do this is to focus on the narrow confines of your discipline and be conscious that because of this focus it's not for everyone and its applicability is not universal.

no classroom discussions are productive

that too. bring back the lecture! some of my favorites classes as an undergrad were lecture focused.

me too

not gonna comment much on j's link for what are by now probably obvious reasons, but I will say: the campus is heavily populated by students from the suburbs of Chicago, and race is the central story to tell about the identity of those suburbs.

also fwiw the advisors they're talking about aren't in general profs

ryan otm re parameters of class discussion

it's hard to ensure that everyone is involved in the material, and assess understanding as you go, if you don't find ways to open discussion to as many students as possible. this might be less important in college than in high school

possibly a personal bugbear, but i think a lot of lit professors are so needy of "classroom discussion" that they aren't really able to tell the difference between a productive one and non-productive one.

otm

I love lecturing, but I know colleagues who don't because professors aren't trained to be good teachers necessarily or how to present their material (i.e. they do research; good teaching is for adjuncts). Also, there's an emphasis on "engagement" that comes from deans and higher ed administrators.

Oh yes Alfred, so true.

In lit classes, students are usually not given enough secondary commentary about the primary texts, for some weird purist reason. An interesting conversation has been going on for decades or centuries - we're going to avoid it, class. That way we'll get fresh takes from you students, even though we profs couldn't have gotten our degrees without laboriously engaging with the ongoing academic conversation.

it's hard to ensure that everyone is involved in the material, and assess understanding as you go, if you don't find ways to open discussion to as many students as possible.

true; good for all students to feel invited/ welcome into discussion. but necessary prof skill here is to paraphrase, redescribe, redirect student commentary back to the text & disciplinary (e.g. literary, philosophical, etc) relevance.

xxxxp yeah ryan this whole issue, like many others in college teaching, makes me wish i could really know what goes on in my colleagues' classrooms

like, i suspect that there is a LOT of 'let us have a discussion now… tell us what U think… o that is an interesting opinion student x… but maaaaybe there is a question we can ask about it… is there anyone who can think of a goooood question???', and associated waffling/blundering about encouraging and excluding moral and political positions, allowing opportunities to express oneself and not be silenced, etc.

but based on seeing that from positions of less authority (from years of teaching-assistanting) and distantly (gleaning what peers were doing) i long ago veered sharply away from that model. i guess in its place i try to do like you say, and focus on the narrow confines of my discipline, but for me that has happily meant that class conversation can be more dialectical and less discussy. WHEN i'm more deeply prepared for it. when i have to teach on things i'm only superficially conversant with, OR teach material that is itself less deep (crummy articles which give little and presume a lot from their intended academic audiences), i find myself groping back toward 'what do you think the author was saying?' 'can somebody tell me what the argument of this piece was?' bullshit. (which of course rhetorically/logically opens up the space in which people can be denied, invalidated, confirmed, etc. since the appearance given by the discourse is that they're 'sharing their opinion'.) when i can do as i prefer then a lot of the issues are mooted and students can walk away with knowledge and understanding and can sort out their ideological junk on their own from a better position.

i think this applies to potentially all material, too. the only time i've really noticed first-hand (overheard) any student resistance remotely in the same register as that UIUC report was 15 years ago when i was much more green and trying to teach texts like anzaldua's 'borderlands' in a counter-curricular culturally diverse philosophy intro course, when i was not in as strong a position as a teacher and had less of an idea how to treat the (unusual) text as a text like any other. i was forced by circumstances a few years back to pick up a couple of sections of that same course as a teaching assistant (after my phd, while i was teaching another course of my own), so i had the experience of looking back from a different position on something i had already done several times over my proto-career, and any and all hints of dealing lightly with 'perspectives' out of concern not to be inappropriate or unwelcoming, from past iterations, really stood out in my memory. i'd say those made the usage of the texts seem something like calling on the black student in the room to provide 'the african american perspective', or trying to productively scold the white suburban students who say oblivious privileged shit. whereas the more i got more familiar with the text as a text (and texts in general as texts), the more i could just say, ok, did you read the thing? these are some concepts in it, let's analyze them - and let the resultant discourse do its own work.

xp ps

i.e. in college; high school is different case; probably doesn't make as much sense (or it's too soon) then to maintain rigorous boundaries on discussion

too soon in students' education (learning to "read")

have u met college students lately : /

( :/ )

my classes are invariably judged by students to be "hard" and I think that's why I get very little in the way of bullshit discussions, like the kids figure out early on that most of what they could say besides "what is this text saying" is stupid, and I don't encourage discussion for its own sake so they don't say the stupid things. maybe I end up lecturing more than other profs? I teach historical texts and technical topics fwiw. I recognize my privilege as a white male to get students to recognize that the texts are hard and that listening to me is their best chance at figuring them out---though I also inform them day 1 that I'm a Latino, hoping to break a stereotype as we head into conceptual outer space. my hardest task is convincing them that they should care about what I'm teaching about; if I'm successful then they'll have questions and we'll have a discussion emerging from their questions.

my absolute favorite college professor was this old crazy-haired guy with a deeply sonorous voice and a v dry sense of humor who would drone on endlessly about colonial American thinkers/writers/morality/politics. The classes where the professors would let the students basically blather and run the game were always worse, (although I def did my share of participating)

this guy: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Schaar (RIP)

it frustrates me how often this thread revolves around university-related flareups because to me the most immediate concern for the abuse of this kind of stuff is in the world of politics, cf http://fredrikdeboer.com/2015/05/13/maybe-time-for-change/

you really only need to get through the first set of asteriks there to get at the point i'm gesturing at here, and god does he need to hire an editor

i think you're right about the academic focus--but there's a lot of academics here so we get riled up easy.

(also we need to poll that list of books freddie links in that post)

omigod hoos do I have to read de Boring again

my life is a university-related flareup

you can't use identity-based criticism to dismiss ppl's arguments ('you can only think that bc of white privilege') and then complain when the reactionaries start using the same arguments at you, esp if 'you' is a white guy calling out other white guys. treesh shared a jacobin piece w/ me recently that said pretty much the same thing.

I think complaining about other peoples right to complain is a sort of universal right by now.