Free Speech and Creepy Liberalism

Problematic: blind person, “dumb”

i thought "dumb" meant mute, not blind?

http://i.imgur.com/VOKAwGv.jpg

that mom looks like paulie's mom from the sopranos

http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2015/09/thats-not-funny/399335/

caitlin flanagan visits the annual National Association for Campus Activities convention

The colleges represented were—to use a word that their emissaries regard as numinous—diverse: huge research universities, tiny liberal-arts colleges, Catholic schools, land-grant institutions. But the students’ taste in entertainment was uniform. They liked their slam poets to deliver the goods in tones of the highest seriousness and on subjects of lunar bleakness; they favored musicians who could turn out covers with cheerful precision; and they wanted comedy that was 100 percent risk-free, comedy that could not trigger or upset or mildly trouble a single student. They wanted comedy so thoroughly scrubbed of barb and aggression that if the most hypersensitive weirdo on campus mistakenly wandered into a performance, the words he would hear would fall on him like a soft rain, producing a gentle chuckle and encouraging him to toddle back to his dorm, tuck himself in, and commence a dreamless sleep—not text Mom and Dad that some monster had upset him with a joke.

'blind person' is problematic, but not 'person who is blind'? this makes zero sense. all the second one does is add unnecessary words, while the meaningful words remain unchanged.

That's overwrought writin'.

in that excerpt

there's some more

gotta justify the junket

https://www.uillinois.edu/common/pages/DisplayFile.aspx?itemId=278006

document dump from the salaita affair

"This place is so messed up."

otm

also those campus activity conventions have been lame since the 90s. I went to one as an undergrad when I was involved in that world. by contrast when we actually hosted events on campus things were less hung up (iirc the unofficial rider of the Village People was to score them coke, which was not a problem). good times, great oldies.

lol up to like at least halfway through the emails they're all just calling salaita 'this guy'

guess you saw that the chancellor resigned? joy in mudville today

yeah but what l31t3r said seems plausible - she had to go, probably was scheduled to go.

actually what i found most aggravating was the condescension about the unionization efforts among faculty - i assume the chancellor was not the only faculty member among that group of emailers, either.

yeah there were other faculty against the union in those mails, and they're the only faculty the chancellor "consulted" re SS

I don't read the blog you mentioned anymore and his inside contacts are tainted fwiw

like his butt

otm

A young gay man with a Broadway background named Kevin Yee sang novelty songs about his life, producing a delirium of affection from the audience. “We love you, Kevin!” a group of kids yelled between numbers. He invited students to the front of the auditorium for a “gay dance party,” and they charged down to take part. His last song, about the close relationship that can develop between a gay man and his “sassy black friend,” was a killer closer; the kids roared in delight, and several African American young women in the crowd seemed to be self-identifying as sassy black friends. I assumed Yee would soon be barnstorming the country. But afterward, two white students from an Iowa college shook their heads: no. He was “perpetuating stereotypes,” one of them said, firmly. “We’re a very forward-thinking school,” she told me. “That thing about the ‘sassy black friend’? That wouldn’t work for us.”

i saw this guy in honolulu the other day (on a bill also including a short movie a friend was in, and as it happens that "if a robbery report were treated like a rape report" video) and "delirium of affection" is about right but i was mortified to the point of flight-impulse by the sassy black friend song and got a miffed look for my unenthusiasm so apparently i am part of caitlin flanagan's problem

http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2015/09/the-coddling-of-the-american-mind/399356/

Some recent campus actions border on the surreal. In April, at Brandeis University, the Asian American student association sought to raise awareness of microaggressions against Asians through an installation on the steps of an academic hall. The installation gave examples of microaggressions such as “Aren’t you supposed to be good at math?” and “I’m colorblind! I don’t see race.” But a backlash arose among other Asian American students, who felt that the display itself was a microaggression. The association removed the installation, and its president wrote an e-mail to the entire student body apologizing to anyone who was “triggered or hurt by the content of the microaggressions.”

lol

long article by social psychologist jonathan haidt and some dude from FIRE

The only thing I know about FIRE is that right-wing people keep referring me to it to prove something about PC culture or whatever.

yeah i don't know anything about it, just the name makes me apprehensive - and i don't exactly trust haidt to pick appropriate collaborators

still, hella scholarlyish

Thank god, we have so many colleges and universities like Oral Roberts University, which are run by right-thinking conservative evangelicals to compete with all these effete mind-coddling colleges and universities, so we are all safe and the problems cited above are trivial. After all, the free market is always right, and a healthy competition will solve the problem effortlessly via the Invisible Hand without our having to lift a finger.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foundation_for_Individual_Rights_in_Education

boring article but I lolled when they got butthurt about Condi Rice being uninvited to campus events

well right i know THAT

weird board of advisors

one of the things i hate most about politics is groups that make all kinds of representations that seem obfuscatory of their exact position when you just wanna know like, cmon are you a friend or foe

(this is why i am not made for anything political)

Aimless otm.

in politics assume foe

why should i assume anything you say

ass out of you and me iirc

like out of requiem for a dream huh? but i don't even know you!!!

when you just wanna know like, cmon are you a friend or foe

valid, but tbh i'm wary & weary of only seeing things though this lens

fair and balanced

http://chronicle.com/blogs/ticker/faculty-union-wins-new-protection-from-student-abuse-after-yik-yak-incident/103067

speculatively wondering if the shift isn't mainly on the part of the administrators, and if it isn't basically driven by a changed sense of academic "mission" -- the "ideal" of some sort of liberal-artsy jousting ground of "big ideas" increasingly disappeared into "an efficiently organized place for young people to learn job skills" from which flows a very different notion of the sort of campus culture they wish to create, cultivate, enforce, etc.

When I was in college they had Ice Cube play our SpringFest thing and he closed with Fuck the Police

dear old Yale

the first time i ever even had to think about asking a student to leave my classroom, i also wondered, like, why the fuck should they do what i say? if i call this student out, is my awesome magic authority as an instructor going to carry it, or will i lose face when they refuse? liberal-artsy jousting land seems to go along with that, honor codes, that sort of thing. whereas codifying instructors' procedures to perform classroom-management actions that exclude students sounds hella corporate to me.

had a kid (not a student) show up with a knife to class once, playing with it in the back of the room while I lectured on some intro bullshit. he took copious notes and gave them to the student next to him, stream of consciousness big ideas, scared the students. we called the cops, didn't seem too corporate iirc

knives = clear-cut criterion

stream of consciousness big ideas?

http://www.businessanimals.cz/wp-content/uploads/2015/03/tumblr_inline_mzzpq9vhXQ1qb6mtc.gif

this is the free speech and creepy liberalism thread, you gotta choose your words carefully

ideas not promoting workforce readiness

Must be the awesome magical authority that keeps kids seated and listening to teachers for 12+ years. It's the same magical authority that will throw a kid's parents in jail for not sending them to school.

búm

it isn't basically driven by a changed sense of academic "mission" -- the "ideal" of some sort of liberal-artsy jousting ground of "big ideas" increasingly disappeared into "an efficiently organized place for young people to learn job skills" from which flows a very different notion of the sort of campus culture they wish to create, cultivate, enforce, etc.

Students have long formed the foremost cohort in society that presents a potential threat to the stability of existing power structures. They protest the status quo more often and more vigorously than other segments of society, take to the streets or barricades with less hesitation, and often form the vanguard for more general social movements.

Conservatives instinctively prefer to manage this threat through the imposition of conformity by threat (and use) of force. Current university administrations seem to have grasped that enforcing uniformity of thought among students can best be achieved through the rhetoric of idealism, where the elimination of conflict and emotional distress through consensus is posed as the ideal social goal. They could almost be Quakers, but the resemblance is only superficial.

That is a huge turnaround from a few decades back, when the standard rhetoric of college students embraced class struggle and armed revolution as the preferred means to their social ideal. Conservatives can only see this as 'coddling', because they look at the rhetoric, but not the results. They ought to see it as a brilliant strategy to pacify what is traditionally the most unruly and volatile segment of society.

Maybe off by 'a few decades'. The Reagan 80s were def not like that.

I was well out of college by then, but my impression was that the social ideal of the Reagan era was (I'm paraphrasing here) "times are tough, so it's every man for himself, buckos".

https://news.google.com/newspapers?nid=1310&dat=19700607&id=bqpVAAAAIBAJ&sjid=M-EDAAAAIBAJ&pg=6708%2C1324457&hl=en

LIASON WITH THE YOUNG