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.

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'.

And the next person over didn't immediately start screaming "microaggression!!!"?

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

Odd thing about the recent articles posted is they don't mention tuition at all. Which seems like it should be a huge factor in student/admin relations.

Like I can buy the idea that these colleges are bastions of free speech where students should be compelled to challenge everything if tuition didn't saddle most of them w lifelong debt. These power dynamics don't exist in a financial vacuum.

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.

On the contrary, this is the kind of thing I both heard and said routinely when I was in college 20 years ago. But as I grew up I started to understand that was actually kind of a gross thing to say, and I stopped saying it, and it seems to me that I hear it less too. And my increased understanding of this is largely thanks to the kind of efforts the Atlantic likes to shit on. My rights are not in danger from people encouraging me to talk and write mindfully instead of mindlessly.

xp i suppose one instance of this kind of thing that i've noticed in british universities does come down to that, students insisting on getting their money's worth. and tbh that's completely understandable, fuck getting into a dizzying amount of debt and not getting what you perceive that you've paid for, though it is obviously a terrible way to approach university

eephus emphatically otm

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.

― impossible raver (Re-Make/Re-Model), Monday, October 5, 2015 10:33 AM (29 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

I don't know, I think there is plenty of policing of speech and social norms on both sides of the political divide. TBH we're not that that far removed from the "how dare you question america, don't you support our troops"-era among conservatives, and that's still very much a part of that discourse.

Anyway, I don't deny that there are examples of college students going to unnecessary extremes that contradict traditional American ideas of free speech. I do, however, deny that it is a very important social trend that deserves cover stories in major magazines, or frankly much of my attention at all. Like, I wouldn't even put this in the top 100 problems with American's higher education system.

yeah - beautifully put eephus xpost

xp like trigger warnings are stifling our freedom of speech? jesus christ, wait until you find out there are rating systems for movies and video games that tells you how much sex and violence they contain!

eephus otm

tbh how our ratings systems of movies works in practice is actually a bigger threat to free speech than trigger warnings on college campuses.

I do, however, deny that it is a very important social trend that deserves cover stories in major magazines, or frankly much of my attention at all.

two things:

i basically agree, this isn't a huge societal problem or really even a major problem on campuses (maybe there are some exceptions). it is however of particular interest to a few of this on this board since we're "in" academia. it's also likely fodder for a lot of articles because a lot of journalists are not-so-distantly connected to that milieu.

er wait was that two things? it was originally. oh well.

More than anything cases like Seinfeld etc seem more about connecting money w speech in a post citizens united world.

Seinfeld not admitting the culpability for his sins of the 90s. If I ever hear anyone my age or older using the phrase "not that there's anything _wrong_ with that!" again I'm going to walk out of the room.

like let's get real these middle-aged white comedians are horrible

@amateurist

Yeah, totally, I'm not saying that we shouldn't discuss this or other articles, or that they're of interest to no one! I was responding specifically to RM/RM's claims that the left is shooting itself in the foot by not publicly distancing itself from this "trend," because the right can now accuse the left of not supporting free speech. I think actors on the left have no obligation to respond to this because it seems pretty clear that there's less to this trend than meets the eye. Also "the conservatives will call us fascists" isn't really that scary, it's been an ineffective strategy for like 15 years now.

I think that you're absolutely right that journalists' connections to that milieu is one reason why editors are happy to run these articles. I think it's interesting to think about why there is a recent spate of articles, and I've posted about that upthread!

the left is shooting itself in the foot by not publicly distancing itself from this "trend,"

As if the world doesn't have enough articles about this "trend".

Feel like Free Speech these days is more akin to saying "Not it!" while playing tag.

I guess in the same way that what you do as a rebellious young person can come back to you via scandalous FB photos, what you do as a young person in the social sphere can come back to you via an article from the establishment shaming your way of protest.

Unless the article starts with "We should raise minimum wage for teachers nationally and make drastic cuts to tuition." there is no reason for any school-going folks to listen to these clowns. If student protests are supposed to be held to some national standard then let's make public tuition free. If teachers are expected to add more micromanaging to their already overflowing schedules then let's give them some of that plutocrat dough.

Some anti-free speech bollocks from the opposite direction:

http://www.newstatesman.com/politics/feminism/2015/10/goldsmiths-diversity-officer-bahar-mustafa-receives-court-summons-wake

I did wonder if anyone on ILX was going to bring up that specific case and the background to it.

It seems like understanding the context of a joke meme like "#KillAllWhiteMen" requires a kind of nuance with regards to understanding the context of what it's like to be a woman living in a world of constant male harassment, and what it's like to be a PoC living in a world of constant racist harassment. This is nuance that gets lost, but it's harder to get people who have never experienced any of it to recognise, let alone care about that kind of nuance.

I've been going back and forth about even reading this thread, let alone contributing to it... to be honest, I can't even begin to explain the kind of cringe I experience on contemplating getting involved. Like, even down to the titles, and how they already slant the discussion in certain ways: the specific choice of phrases like "creepy liberalism" and "coddling" just indicate to me that a certain opinion and mindset has already been formed about them (a negative one) and as someone who is not just in favour of trigger warnings and content warnings but (gasp... even worse!) is the kind of person who needs them is starting, not with a level playing field of "what's this about" but already facing an uphill battle of having to justify one's own existence.

I've been operating for over a decade (maybe more? the idea of content warnings were discussions I was having in the 90s, though we didn't call it that, then, because we lacked the terminology) in communities that now use them by default. It's never been a big deal. But I've given up on reading news articles about them because the blatant lack of understanding or misrepresentation of What They Are For and How They Work just bears absolutely no resemblance to how I've seen them function in communities I'm in that use them. I honestly sometimes feel like, if Trigger Warning were a doom-metal band from Siberia releasing lathe vinyl on some trendy label, you can bet that every dude on ILX would have found more relevant an accurate information about what they were than simply taking the word of scaremongering Atlantic thinkpieces making them the scapegoat for the ills of the American educational system. But "it's a Social Justice thing" just seems to make some people kick in an automated defensiveness where they do not want to investigate further than reacting to what is presented in some kneejerk thinkpiece. If you find yourself missing "nuance" in the discussion of things, maybe that's a gap in your own knowledge and understanding, that you could remedy?

I have a lot of experience (on both sides) of What Trigger Warnings Are For, Who They Are For, How They Work, that in a perfect world, I'd be happy to share. But it's obvious from just skimming this thread that there's a vast disparity in terms of knowledge, and I don't want to over-explain to people who already know all about the subject and are tired of it, or under-explain to people whose literal only exposure is to Atlantic articles or "college kids today are kinda weird and I don't understand their lingo." And I can't shake the nagging suspicion that a lot of the hostility directed towards "Trigger Warnings" is actually veiled hostility directed towards "The Kind Of People Who Need Trigger Warnings" - that is, ~college kids~ as cipher for feminists; rape survivors; abuse survivors; refugees; veterans; people who have been on the receiving end of hate crimes for race, gender, sexuality etc; people with mental health conditions (and how scary and needy and yet oddly... "Coddled" we are?) This list is starting to look, kinda... hmmmmm?

Talking about this stuff is hard. It often makes people uncomfortable. But I often feel like people who experience discomfort at these conversations (because they are not part of the groups likely to need these things) project this idea of "this is awkward and discomforting for me to hear" into their mental picture of what People Who Want Trigger Warnings are talking about when they say "Triggered". It really isn't; it's people who are dealing with the kinds of trauma that may be totally outside of your experience. I get nervous when I see "I want a nuanced conversation" becoming a kind of code for "I don't want to feel awkward or uncomfortable by difficult conversations that implicate people like me." So it becomes this kind of handwaving ~why can't we all be more reasonable~ which is again, not a level playing field, when for one side of the debate, it's an academic discussion involving "something they read on the internet" and for the other side of the debate, it's a highly charged emotional discussion asking people to defend and justify their experiences of some of the most harrowing events of their lives.

I understand this may have contributed absolutely 0 to the thread or the debate or whatever. But this thread has been eating away at me for days now so there it is. I'm not going to be in for the rest of the day to discuss it any further though.

If you need a place to vomit, the toilet is that way.

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)