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

it's a free country! or is it....

never saw this as a college prof in the USA and haven't seen it yet in frogland though over here kids get yelled at a lot more, by parents, by teachers, than in the USA so I don't expect it to cross over here, if indeed it is a thing aux États-Unis

xp :)
(btw sorry for omission of 'j' in 'linked by j')

links by j

I think this culture exists (mostly) among politically active left-wing kids in relatively-elite universities. so a subset of a subset of college kids. that doesn't mean it's 'not a thing' but it's also not something you want to associate w/ a whole generation. I would guess the majority of American college students have never heard the term 'trigger warning'.

a related atlantic article
http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2015/09/will-black-lives-matter-be-a-movement-that-persuades/407017/

On the left, I constantly see activists and cultural critics trying to police public discourse by calling out people who run afoul of their preferred social norms, even when the vast majority of the public does not share a given social norm. What if Americans all started hashing out our disagreements again instead? The social-justice movement in particular relies heavily on shaming and norm-policing, tactics responsible for a large part of its unpopularity and, I’d argue, its ineffectiveness. The left should start recognizing that its focus on policing social norms in enclaves where it wields unusual influence undermines its effectiveness everywhere else.

codling warning

http://cs4304.vk.me/u1753898/87471552/x_cbabc6e4.jpg

i just wanna know why their voices go up at the end of a sentence, and they all have the Valley Girl accent

you mean, the young?

Obama's fault

uptalk is just a sign of a generation willing to question everything and anything

disruptors, is their appellation

codling warning
http://www.worldseafishing.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/05/mt_cobh_cod.jpg

disruptors are throwing figurative bang snaps at the feet of startled normies everywhere.

please, it's neurotypicals

i wonder if what is really at issue here is something like the "political" in carl schmitt's sense: the political as the space of legitimate conflict. or if schmitt's critique of liberalism as obscuring the political could be useful here.

oh boy, a whole other thread for this shit

shit, now we've bummed out qualx too. good ol' qualx.

I don't work in academia, but I find it hard to believe that kids today are more "sensitive" or demand more coddling than they did a decade ago when I was in college. I feel like the trend pieces have been popular due to:

-The insane insecurity of the academic job market, and how easy it is lose work if you're not tenured. This is not necessarily the students' fault, but I get the impression reading these things that some academics feel besieged on all sides, and students are an easier scapegoat because students are more likely to be obnoxious and self-righteous than the administrators who are actually the ones with the power.
-The fact that young people now have a "published" platform in the form of social media, particularly in the post-twitter age. So suddenly things that professors wouldn't have even heard about a decade ago may be more likely to develop publicly, and that has people nervous and scared. Even if there's a certain boogeyman quality to the whole thing.

Add this to editors knowing that bashing millennials will get you clicks, and you get a slew of stories like this.

Also one thing that bothers me about a lot of these pieces is that they imply that trigger warnings let students opt out of course readings without providing any evidence that professors are actually allowing that. It's in the Atlantic article repeatedly.

What are we doing to our students if we encourage them to develop extra-thin skin just before they leave the cocoon of adult protection?

Hopefully they will find the unmitigated courage to get a job writing for the Atlantic about how college kids are wimps.

I read the thread title as The Coddling Of the American Mind (Trigger Warning -- Article in the Atlantic)

that was exactly how i read it too, a warning against articles in the atlantic, which is the sort of warning i'm cool with tbqh

one of my typed-and-deleted posts this morning was "thread title needs a colon"

yeah I was thinking like trigger for IA at nu-Atlantic terribleness

intheblanks otm

there is also a totally lame element of "political correctness gone mad!!!!" bullshit imo

shit, now we've bummed out qualx too. good ol' qualx.

― scott seward, Saturday, 3 October 2015 20:01 (Yesterday) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

lol <3

contemporary college students are awesome (i teach them) and seem exactly the same as college students did when I was in college

― Guayaquil (eephus!), Saturday, October 3, 2015 1:28 PM (Yesterday) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

i would say "yes" except for one thing, i think they've largely lost the ability to read more than a few paragraphs at a time. all but the very the best students seem constitutionally unable to process an entire chapter (let alone an entire book) and follow an argument. i can even feel this happening to myself, gradually, as a result of spending too much time on the web.

Also one thing that bothers me about a lot of these pieces is that they imply that trigger warnings let students opt out of course readings without providing any evidence that professors are actually allowing that. It's in the Atlantic article repeatedly.

― intheblanks, Saturday, October 3, 2015 4:15 PM (Yesterday) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

this sort of thing absolutely happens... sometimes... not often. basically these articles take a very real but marginal phenomenon and make it sound as if it's a majority practice at american universities. which it isn't.

that said, some of the things that always come up in these articles (like the "safe space" with stuffed animals and candy brown university set up when a pro-life speaker was on campus...or something like that) are so absurd that you really have to wonder what sort of echo chamber the people involved exist in that they don't recognize their own ridiculousness.

the brown thing was hilarious in that it basically wrote one of thee articles about the infantilizing of undergraduates all by itself....

*these articles

-The insane insecurity of the academic job market, and how easy it is lose work if you're not tenured. This is not necessarily the students' fault, but I get the impression reading these things that some academics feel besieged on all sides, and students are an easier scapegoat because students are more likely to be obnoxious and self-righteous than the administrators who are actually the ones with the power.

this seems v otm, teens using the college space to begin to define themselves personally and politically in often quite unrefined ways is obviously not a new phenomenon, what's more new is university admin who are looking for any opportunity to cut staff* and making lecturers feel like they're walking on a tightrope at all times.

*though have there actually been many / any instances of people losing their jobs over this kind of thing?

there is only one thing that bothers me about the trigger warning clique, who seem to me to be basically saying "hey, don't be an asshole" and all the assholes (well, not all the assholes, because i am definitely an asshole) get all up in arms about it. and that's the "mansplaining" thing. i get where that comes from. these days everybody wants to talk, nobody wants to listen, and i am a chatty fucking cathy when it comes to explaining stuff. that said, i will always be shit at validating other people's emotions, and calling me out on that is not going to do anything to improve the situation. fuck meta-confrontation.

dlh, intheblanks otm itt

i knew i'd read this article but i can't remember which of the dozen articles on this topic i've read in pre-caffeine somnolent facebook-based auto-browsing mode it is. it has the best title of all the articles both pro and anti!.

Jerry Seinfeld and Bill Maher have publicly condemned the oversensitivity of college students.

good to know, good work guys

xxpost The other new thing is Twitter etc. amplifying these petty things into national issues we all have to take sides on. Like back in the day the dickbag who was offended that he was steered toward a graphic novel with icky lesbians would have just been writing in his student paper not starting a national debate.

there is only one thing that bothers me about the trigger warning clique, who seem to me to be basically saying "hey, don't be an asshole" and all the assholes

sadly, this is not at all what "trigger warnings" are about, as much as i might wish it so.

trigger warnings are often just about /broaching/ a topic, not even taking an assholish perspective on it.

http://i.imgur.com/yNDKxYv.gif

i kept reading for the clever twist, the angle that would make this article not just another "oh brother, these sensitive students" piece and it never came. so stewart lee's take on PC perfectly applies, it's the best thing i've ever heard on the subject:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1IYx4Bc6_eE

(^ trigger warning)

Yeah, Lee's spot-on there.

the thing that gets me about trigger warnings is that somehow we've managed to politicize the principles of effective communication. in america, communications is a first-semester college requirement, and if you go that class they say, for instance, that when you speak in public you should tell your audience what you're going to say, say it, and then tell your audience what you just said. so it seems to me that if you're going to talk about, for instance, rape, it's effective communication to point that out.

one of the other things they say in comm 101 is that effective communicators pay attention to their audience. so many people these days get caught up in the fantasy of speaking truth to powerless and wholly ignore this aspect of communication. if your bread and butter comes from scoring meaningless rhetorical points while inflaming pointless arguments, that's at least understandable, but i can tell you from experience those sorts of "victories" tend to ring hollow after a little while. attempting to pummel people into submission with rhetoric simply doesn't work very well.

i wonder if what is really at issue here is something like the "political" in carl schmitt's sense: the political as the space of legitimate conflict. or if schmitt's critique of liberalism as obscuring the political could be useful here.

― ryan, Saturday, 3 October 2015 20:51 (2 days ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

I am not sure that BLM, for example, would characterise the current atmosphere as being void of legitimate conflict, so much as "It'd be nice to have a discussion using shared terms without it turning into Reddit every 5 minutes"

these days everybody wants to talk, nobody wants to listen, and i am a chatty fucking cathy when it comes to explaining stuff. that said, i will always be shit at validating other people's emotions, and calling me out on that is not going to do anything to improve the situation.

Mansplaining, in my understanding, is less "validate my emotion" and more "be aware that 'genially tell me to STFU, I already know this' is a response that's selected for in certain environments and selected sharply against in others"

so many people these days get caught up in the fantasy of speaking truth to powerless

Actually that's a better definition :)

I sometimes wonder if it isn't the internet that has made everything so raw. The college experience seems like a good place to learn to grow thicker skin in the new digital age. I wonder how many freshman are concerned about trigger warnings compared to seniors. I didn't really have to read all the articles and threads, just my two cents.

really have TIME to read

i love the last paragraph of this:

"In 1990, when I was eight years old, radical student activists at Wesleyan firebombed the president’s office. This was not, I hasten to say, a constructive way to go about getting what they wanted. And yet I’m struck by how fundamentally different the thinking of campus activists was then, not just at Wesleyan, but writ large. Back then, students wouldn’t have been caught dead making appeals through official channels. They were more likely to occupy administrative offices than to go to them, hat in hand, seeking to get what they want. Somewhere along the line, sit-ins and underground newspapers were replaced with committees and formal complaints. The question for the passionate, committed young activists at Wesleyan and elsewhere is whether they can ever shake up the system by asking it nicely to change."

http://www.newrepublic.com/article/122938/college-students-have-forgotten-how-fight-system

more firebombings plz ty...

I just googled Wesleyan. Who the fuck is going to firebomb a place they're paying $48,704 a year to go to.

It's funny how it doesn't matter how many examples of this behaviour come up, the response of some people on the left is simply to deny it exists. This allows the right to pretend that the left doesn't give a shit about free speech. It doesn't strike me as a great strategy.

my wife is getting a masters at cal state northridge and one of her undergrad classmates likened a pop quiz she took to 'getting raped'. People kinda throw that word around too easily these days imo.

Like, of course it's horrible that people shared nude photos of a teenage girl! Sorry I didn't mention that. I assumed that was a given.

Hot take: maybe it's good for high school boys to be shunned for doing genuinely shitty things to other people. They will eventually graduate, it's not going to ruin their entire life, and it will give them a chance to reflect on what they did and how it has consequences.

I think DJI means well and maybe the reaction is a little unfair to him, but I otherwise agree with gyac. Sharing nude pictures of someone is a kind of cancelation too, and in that case the victim did nothing to bring it on themself.

Not a very hot take to ask boys to be accountable for their behavior?? Gyac otm throughout this discussion imo.

Absolutely.

thirded

Did you guys really read the whole story?

Yaretzi, the young woman in the story who wanted to work for real change - things like counselors for victims, for example - thought that putting up lists of "known abusers"was counterproductive. "Her intent was to lay blame at the feet of the school district, not specific young men."

The guy's ex-girlfriend seemed to have forgiven him:

The vice-principal told Fiona she could file a police report. She didn’t want to do that. (Diego had not disseminated the photo.) In communication with her family, however, the school made a plan to help Diego and Fiona repair. Fiona’s family, the vice-principal wrote in an email to Diego’s, made two requests:

1. That all pictures are deleted from every possible device, cloud, storage/media platform, etc.

2. That it be made clear to Diego and his family that this was a serious violation that is having an impact on the student’s overall well-being.

Done and done. As individuals, at the beginning, the two had managed this incident okay. Fiona had no interest in getting back together. But a couple of weeks after their breakup, when Diego was still eating only a handful of peanut-butter pretzels a day, they’d met at the beach and talked. “I was like, ‘I don’t appreciate getting treated like an abuser,’ ” Diego said. “And she’s like, ‘I don’t think you’re an abuser at all. I know that.’ ” But this had grown way beyond them.

My problem is certainly not with holding rapists and sexual assaulters accountable! I also don't want innocent people to get swept up in a witch-hunt, or for young people to have their lives ruined over a forgivable mistake - whether criminal or not. This is where the usual restorative justice routines might make sense, if they were moderated by the right person, perhaps? Obviously it wouldn't be ok to force assault victims into a restorative justice session with their abusers, but if the offense falls short of assault, maybe it would be better than just letting a bunch of kids get all Lord of the Flies on each other.

I mean, she's forgiven him based on the testimony of Diego. I don't think the guy is an unforgivable monster, but I thought the story was really weirdly written - it seems desperate to make you sympathize with him, going on about how beautiful his girlfriend was, as if he couldn't help but want to show off her nude photos to people. It only gives you second-hand, glancing accounts of the innocent people who were swept up, while giving you endless detail about the tragedy of the guy who did something fucked up. But his life isn't ruined - I'm sure the rest of his high school experience was indeed stressful and painful, even if he went to four proms (!), but he's graduated and does not have to exist in the drama mill of high school for the rest of his life. Clearly the school handled the entire situation terribly, but the article would have been a lot more effective without "he's really a good kid!" in every other paragraph.

god just fuck off DJI.

Go piss up a rope with Noel emits

^ winning hearts and minds one "fuck off" at a time

well gyac already said everything that needed saying. you're just feeling superior, as usual

you're just feeling superior

and brimstead, ofc, was just feeling, uh, smugly, morally... (looks for a word that means 'superior', while avoiding the blatant irony of it. fails. seeks an alternative, gentler approach)

go piss up a rope, sleeve

and brimstead, ofc, was just feeling, uh, smugly, morally... (looks for a word that means 'superior', while avoiding the blatant irony of it. fails. seeks an alternative, gentler approach)

go piss up a rope, sleeve

― more difficult than I look (Aimless)

i'm sorry, i don't know the social dynamics involved, what are you doing here again?

dick measuring, apparently.

i will say that i am, in fact, grateful to brimstead for telling dji to "fuck off". to me, that's allyship. in a practical sense, telling dji to fuck off isn't something i can really do anymore, so i'm glad that brimstead did.

as far as aimless goes... thank you for getting your dick out on stage. is there a joke you're trying to set up by doing this, or were you just trying to be edgy for the sake of it?

Glad I could provide some catharsis.

fuck off

Glad I could provide some catharsis.

― DJI

fuck off, you didn't provide jack shit in terms of catharsis. you provided a hostile environment, you want to take credit for that, be my fucking guest

gyac otm throughout obviously

Now that the dust settled I'm curious what people now think of that original atlantic article scott posted in 2015?

you know what's funny is a lot of my liberal friends who have full-on embraced safe spaces and are sympathetic to triggers were positively railing against this article back then.

mocking the idea outright. guessing Trump brought them around to seeing their benefit.

there were a lot of things that i had to have very patiently explained to me by people who knew a lot better than i did. i'm grateful that they took the time. it wasn't their responsibility to do so.

Now that the dust settled I'm curious what people now think of that original atlantic article scott posted in 2015?

still very dumb moral panic stuff. just tries to tie a bunch of unrelated anecdotes into the idea that content warnings are bad and coddling students, it's a very weak argument.

Anything that resolves to "kids these days amirite" should be rejected out of hand and anyone pushing it should be ridiculed at every opportunity.

^^^^
Words to live by but damn does it get hard as you get older.

Anything that resolves to "kids these days amirite" should be rejected out of hand and anyone pushing it should be ridiculed at every opportunity.

― papal hotwife (milo z)

kids these days are based af amirite

heh, I was going to say that includes zoomer fetishism to a lesser degree

The excellent If Books Could Kill podcast recently did an episode of the The Coddling Of The American Mind book, no spoiler to say they were not very impressed.

https://pod.link/1651876897

Ooo, I love Michael Hobbes on Maintenance Phase, will check that out.

that pod is great (and so is the ep)