I've been following a lot of this develop over Twitter and Youtube.
It's both sad and terrifying to see what is transpiring on these college campuses. There was a video filmed ( now taken down from youtube ) where a Yale Silliman College professor was trying to reason with some of these students.
The professor vehemently defended the rights to free-speech, while the students screamed at him that offensive speech should not be allowed on campus.
When the professor asked, "Who should be responsible for determining what is offensive speech?", a student replied with, "Anything that offends me!".
While I'm in agreement with you on this (I've watched the video, and I'm as pissed off as you are), it's worth noting that a few unreasonable students should not serve as the poster child for all student protestors. Lately, they have been, and it's unfair to the protestors (and ourselves, if we're concerned about having a clear understanding of the situation) to assume that unreasonable individuals, of which there are many in any large group, are the norm and not the exception.
The articles and open letters that student groups have been releasing give a more detailed (though obviously biased) view of the situation that shows how complex it is. Here's one from the protests at Claremont McKenna, worth reading to understand where they are coming from: http://cmcforum.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/11/FINALMarginal...
On the flip side, organizers of groups and movements should be held accountable since they directly represent their movement. Earlier today, a protest organizer at Smith College demanded that only journalists that "agreed to explicitly state they supported the movement in their articles" would be welcome at the event. https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-fix/wp/2015/11/19/th...
I'm surrounded by a great many people who unequivocally side with this movement. One of their refrains is that if you are neutral, you have taken the side of the oppressor.
I was raised by journalists and academics. To me, there's no question that universities must be neutral platforms and good journalism reports what's there without taking a side. But I am a straight white man from a middle-class family.
A supporter of the movement will tell you that the elevation of free inquiry and free expression to "value" status, as something with intrinsic worth and deserving of protection, was a fraud perpetrated by white men to sustain their power. A good many of my acquaintances actually believe the idea that there is objective truth that you can uncover scientifically is a similar fraud, so that white male academics would have access to tools like rational arguments or pointing out logical fallacies to better oppress everyone else.
To these people, the only thing that matters is the subjective "lived experience" of people who are not straight white men. Everything else can go to hell. Viewed in this light, their actions actually make perfect sense.
Yes, very well said. I'm currently on a very activist college campus and also have many friends (and follow many people on Twitter) who side with this movement. To an extent, I'm sympathetic to the difficulty of actually being heard. There was an open letter recently from one student activism group that said that they would not protest "respectfully" because they feel that that is just another way for their voices to be suppressed, or some such.
That's a hard problem. It does seem like there has been a lot of talk and not a lot of walk from the people/institutions that hold power, and if I were on the activism side, I'd also be extremely frustrated. Not related to that open letter, but this article gives a view into some of that frustration: https://medium.com/@aaronzlewis/what-s-really-going-on-at-ya...
What's interesting is that the closest case I can find that relates to how some of these student protestors, who seem to be mostly liberal, perceive the situation, are conservatives. In reaction to social science studies that show that, say, African-Americans are systematically disenfranchised in the country, some conservatives attack social science itself, saying that it is inherently leftist, or biased in some way, the methodology is wrong, it's not a real science, etc. Similarly, some activists, like you said, would respond to the appeals to free inquiry and free expression by attacking the 'holiness' of free inquiry and free expression. Certainly possible that that's all a fraud to elevate those in power, but they seem pretty self-evident to me, not the least because free expression and inquiry, on the whole, seem to benefit the minority rather than those in power IMO.
To these people, the only thing that matters is the subjective "lived experience" of people who are not straight white men.
I experienced this in a discussion several years ago with a young lesbian university student (I'm not trying to shoehorn a complex individual into a category - I'm merely adding context). She referred to me as "cis" meaning Cisgender or that my sexuality agrees with my gender. The way she used it was in the white-straight-guy sense of the term, which to translate further meant any perspective I held was probably tainted, unremarkable, and privileged. I was quite a bit older than her so that possibly added an extra layer of distrust.
Getting back to Cisgender, I'd never heard the term before that point but I thought it was fascinating: that by defining people by gender and sexuality it becomes a kind of matrix. You could define yourself as a gay male sexually while possessing the gender of a female. In effect you're in a straight relationship (female and male) but really it's more granular. I actually like the idea. At least by asking about gender-sexuality matrices I was able to turn the discussion into something a bit more positive with the student. But...yeah, in those situations just ask questions. Your perspective isn't welcome.
My understanding of the topic isn't great, but I think a more common definition of "cisgender" would be something like, "with gender matching the 'sex' they were 'assigned at birth'".
I don't think it's generally in terms of sexual attraction?
I think "cisgender" is at least mostly (maybe completely?) synonymous with "not transgender".
This is my understanding of the terminology, based mainly on tumblr posts probably.
You're right in that cisgender is gender matching the sex they were assigned at birth. I sort of went on a tangent without fleshing it out properly. I was interested in the idea of breaking apart sexuality and gender identity but it may have sounded like I was describing cisgender later in my rant (which I earlier described poorly - sexuality was the wrong term and made the definition totally incorrect).
When I mentioned matrices I was trying to describe how you could identify, gender-wise, as a male yet have the physical sex of a female and sexually identify as a homosexual (attracted to other males), which results ultimately in a (physically) male and female relationship...which could then be defined as homosexual if the (physical) male were to accept the (physical) female as transgendered and for him to identify sexually as homosexual and male gender-wise.
I was hoping to illustrate if you break apart gender identity, physical sex, and sexuality you can come up with combinations that are best explained in a matrix or grid (two dimensions) because linear descriptions can seem convoluted.
I don't get it. Why go to a University then? It used to be they went to get access to those tools, rational arguments and pointing out logical fallacies. Now it's... have a party for four years and then go back home to your parents?
I'm 25, and I've lived in two cultures and racially I'm not white. I do not, however, understand this fear of offensive speech. Moreover, I cannot ignore the coincidence of the rise of this hypersensitivity and the rise of helicopter parenting and the general hand holding that has become more common for the last few years. Could these two things be related?
When I was a kid (<5, so in the early 90's), my parents didn't let me leave the neighborhood, and probably rightfully so as I didn't live in a "safe" area. However, my elementary school didn't even let us walk freely on the same block as our school. I then moved to Palau, where my parents were from, in which the local kids make their own firecrackers with kerosene and mountain dew cans. To go from such a protected environment to a less protected one got me to see two different worlds...and may be "balanced" me out.
Either way, when I returned to the US a few years ago, and I've begun to see this protectiveness intensify. Just today, I saw kids walking on the street lead by an adult with their hands holding onto a string. When I was a kid, I perhaps walked holding hands with a partner in line, but a string? I've even seen children on a leash...
I understand, we should look to protect vulnerable children and teens from bad situations, but after a while, should we let people who are, as the article says, old enough to drive, marry, own guns, and some old enough to smoke and drink alcohol, make decisions and perhaps face the consequences of those decisions? This makes them more receptive to situations were they might be hurt or feel offense, and given that they are bound to face this, it will just make them better people and better adults.
I think the overarching trend here is that people are, for some reason, becoming increasingly reluctant to take responsibility for their own lives - they want others to do everything for them so they can essentially be in a continuous state of pleasure and safety/security, even if it means giving up freedom (that old Benjamin Franklin quote seems more relevant than ever today, with all the things it's related to...) The theme seems to be along the lines of "if people are free, they are free to do things that I don't like". In computing, you can definitely see this trend developing rapidly in the form of locked-down devices and software designed to discourage anything potentially "risky", all because of security.
The desire to feel safe and worry-free is instinctive and powerful, but at the same time I believe we should not let the pursuit of that state get in the way of what makes life actually interesting and a unique experience; risk, failure, sadness, anger, and all the other "negative" things are just as important to experience as happiness and the feeling of security.
That professor was mistakenly expecting reason from those students. He behaved and treated them with respect only to be completely disrespected (to put it lightly) himself. It was quite disappointing seeing him try to be honest and fair only to be belligerently yelled at.
It was quite disappointing seeing him try to be honest and fair only to be belligerently yelled at.
I assume you mean the way he was treated was disappointing, not that he acted as a role-model for young, inexperienced and still developing students.
When you say he was mistakenly expecting reason, I think if he was having a discussion with each individual he would have been convincing.
When it comes to hanging out with people I live by a (perhaps mean-spirited) rule - the larger the group of people you're talking to, the fewer topics you can delve into deeply. If you have one person you can find a common topic that you can share and dive into. However if someone else joins the two of you, you now need to find a common topic between the three of you. The likely outcome is that it will need to be more popular and less esoteric, thus probably less interesting. Now have a group of people: discussion will be centered around what's on TV etc and political or philosophical discussions need to be watered down heavily or cut out of the discussion. I think a similar thing is going on here - the crowd, collectively, is dumb. Even if it's composed of smart individuals.
Too much anger. Too much self-entitlement that has arisen out being told one has the right to feel what they want and expect their dignity to be respected. Those are good things in of themselves, however, as your typical kung fu or jedi master would say, anger clouds the mind.
These "kids" can't regulate their emotions or put themselves in another person's shoes. Those are difficult things. Teaching them isn't easy either.
Is this where we pretend that there's no history of racial grievances at Yale (or Mizzou), and that history started afresh the minute before this confrontation? An honest accounting of what happened starts with the fact that there is a long history that had people simmering. Free speech is a wonderful principle, but it conflicts with making students, particularly minority students, not feel alienated.
This started when someone at Yale sent a relatively anodyne email suggesting (but not ordering!) students be reasonably racially conscious in their costume choices (ie no blackface) [0], and someone who is "charged with setting the 'intellectual, social, and ethical tone of the College'" [1] decided to salt the wound and mocked the idea that students may be legitimately offended by cultural appropriation [2].
As mostly male white people, it's easy to defend free speech when it isn't your people or culture being treated as a costume.
If you're curious about Yale, imagine, for starters, how living in, say, Calhoun hall would feel if you're black [3].
Calhoun College, one of the 12 residential colleges at the heart of the
university’s undergraduate life. It is named for John C. Calhoun, a Yale
valedictorian-turned-politician from South Carolina and one of the 19th
century’s foremost white supremacists, who promoted slavery as "a positive
good."
> If you're curious about Yale, imagine, for starters, how living in, say, Calhoun hall would feel if you're black
Repackaging a Reddit comment I wrote:
Actually, let's back up a bit and talk about Elihu Yale, the namesake of the university, who was a slave trader[0]. Anyone who is oppressed by living in a Calhoun building, should have first thought about how they'd feel about spending years on a campus named after a slave trader, putting his name on their résumés and personal history for the rest of their lives, giving money to such an institution (either now, or later as alumni donations), building a career on the name of a man who enslaved their people. Yale has also been funded by slavery[1]. To be honest I had no idea this was the case, but I had a feeling if you dig deep enough, pretty much everything has a past that is looked down upon from the modern view.
Bottom line is that if you're looking for offense, you'll find it everywhere. You can decide to either reboot the entire society because it's all irrevocably tainted by people with some negative elements of their legacies, you can choose not to go to Yale because it's named after a slaver, or you can accept that it's just a name after all and doesn't have any actual oppressive effects on your life.
I'm a student at Brown University, and these issues have been at the front of campus-related tensions for the last 2 years (perhaps longer, but I wasn't aware of them then). Your post reflects the most vocal attitude on campus at the moment (the "free-speech" faction is shrewdly keeping silent). I'm up-voting your post because you echo the perspective of many of my peers who I respect, and I want to give others on HN the opportunity to respond to your post without it being hidden.
I do not know of any black people at my school who openly criticize this recent string of college protests (the debate seems to be predominantly centered around blacks in these incidents). Surely, if this pain is something only black people can understand and they are so united in this movement, then it suggests that their grievances ARE legitimate.
... and yet, something feels wrong here. Something feels wrong when I see hyperbolic signs like "our culture is not a costume" or retroactive counterarguments like "it's not only about the Halloween Costumes". Something feels wrong when I see people sharing FB statuses with #concernedstudent1950 when it implies they support the demands made by the student group [1]. Something feels wrong when my peers believe that whites cannot be the victims of racism, due to their racial privilege. I don't have a good response to your points, but I'm interested to see others' replies to your comment.
At any rate, all I'm sure of is that the political climate has dramatically changed in the last 2 years.
He is largely being down voted for simultaneously invoking history while ignoring the right to protest exists only because of free speech and the right to assemble.
The ability to have protests like we've seen on campuses and elsewhere are defended entirely on 1st amendment grounds. Watering that down to push an agenda, no matter how righteous, is the kind of idea only those truly ignorant of history would propose.
Your username checks out, so take my upvote. That said, the debate has moved past centering on First Amendment Rights as the point of contention; rather, the issue is whether students should dress in "offensive" Halloween Costumes even if they are legally allowed to.
I would say yes, so long as the costume wearer does not engage in threatening behavior toward other revelers. It's offensive and in poor taste, but I think people have the right to wear stupid things, even offensive things.
They can wear nun's dresses or vicar's clothes with very inappropriate insinuations, etc. (given the "misconduct" of priests, etc.)
Or banning Nazi, Ghadaffi, Kone, BinLaden, etc. costumes, they are in poor taste, but I don't see the merit in banning them outright. Or doing untoward things to the effigies of unpopular politicians.
It's my opinion, and I imagine others would be offended, and I might be offended by some costumes, maybe even feel uneasy about them, but I still would say people have the right to express themselves, so long as they don't engage in threatening behavior. Some (political) expression will feel very uncomfortable, but that's necessary to have in a free-ish society.
If the situation was the reverse of now and the majority was openly racist and found anti-racism costumes offensive [say, Martin Luther King Jr costumes] ... would you still favor banning "offensive" costumes?
I guess I just feel we don't have the luxury of determining what speech should be allowed because sometimes the majority is in the wrong.
> Surely, if this pain is something only black people can understand and they are so united in this movement, then it suggests that their grievances ARE legitimate.
Please don't stop here - please try to understand where their grievances are coming from. College is when a lot of people are at their most radical, and on top of that, a lot of nuance is lost in soundbites. There's a lot of noise out there.
I think something especially important that's lost on people here is how emotionally exhausting it is to live in a place where you're constantly denigrated (I mean it's the root of that word, lol). It's especially hard to draw an empathetic picture when there's no common personably relatable situation to draw a comparison to. Like at best you could say "it's like getting picked on for being a nerd," except that misses the hundreds of years of American slavery, Jim Crow, mass incarceration, media representation, and a hundred other small issues.
And then that's multiplied by the fact that when you try to explain it to a single person, you face a mountain of resistance every time, and the rest of your society doesn't really want to hear your complaints. Most people in this thread won't even acknowledge that they MIGHT have a point! Imagine that every day in every interaction for your entire life!
The parent has put forward a polite and reasoned post with links to back up his point of view.
I disagree with the point being made that not alienating students (and minority students in particular) is more important than free speech, but...
if you are downvoting because you don't like what is being said then that speaks volumes for what you really think about the importance of free speech, and your actions are essentially the same as the students trying to shout down the professor.
x0x0, I disagree with you, and think that free speech is more important, but have my upvote.
After sending out a letter arguing that asking students to think about what their Halloween costumes were saying was an attack on free speech because it might make white students uncomfortable wearing blackface, and that doing so was somehow attacking the university tradition and discouraging a vitally important kind of provocative, offensive speech.
That's a rather uncharitable summary of the contents of the email.
The email wasn't saying that white students should be able to wear blackface without feeling uncomfortable - in fact it said the opposite - that social norming (e.g. making people feel uncomfortable for wearing offensive costumes) was the way to deal with the problem, rather than the university dictating what students should/shouldn't wear.
Downvoting should be reserved for posts that do not contribute to the discussion, not used to express disagreement. The purpose of votes isn't to win a battle of beliefs, but to promote insightful discussion.
Honestly I think HN would be better without downvoting at all.
> Honestly I think HN would be better without downvoting at all.
I don't entirely agree with this statement. If you're going to be doing threaded conversations, having a system that can influence the sort order of those conversations isn't necessarily a bad thing.
I've been thinking about HN's downvotes for a while now, and I kinda think -based on my overwhelmingly positive experience with the Pre-SJW Metafilter- that HN should either have strict time-based ordering for threads with up/downvotes only serving to give you Whuffie, or have up/downvotes control sort order, but not grey out comments that are below 1.
These activists need to make up their mind: They can argue that Yale is a white supremacist institution that oppresses minorities (there's certainly evidence for that) or they can argue that Yale's administrators should be further empowered to control discourse and punish students and faculty who won't fall in line.
Arguing in favor of both simultaneously is completely incoherent.
Question: You don't think the behavior of minorities (groups of blacks in this case) sometimes makes white people feel alienated?
You know what.... all races behave badly sometimes and make others feel bad. It's not a white phenomenon. People should be more sensitive towards others. But others should also be less quick to take offense at every perceived or imagined slight. That's just how it's gotta be for this all to work out. Otherwise it's a cycle of negativity with no forgiveness and no progress towards an integrated society.
Also, the entire leftist movement uses a homophobic slur to refer to members of the Tea Party: "Teabaggers". I guess they don't care when they're mad about republicans that they show their true feelings about gay people.
> Is this where we pretend that there's no history of racial grievances at Yale (or Mizzou), and that history started afresh the minute before this confrontation? An honest accounting of what happened starts with the fact that there is a long history that had people simmering. Free speech is a wonderful principle, but it conflicts with making students, particularly minority students, not feel alienated.
For someone who drags up history, are you really going to pretend that Freedom of Speech and Freedom of Assembly aren't the reason we can protest in the first place?
I don’t think anyone is arguing that there’s no history of racial grievances at these institutions, at least as far as informed discussion goes. The closest I’ve seen, aside from some neanderthal Facebook comments, was along the lines of something like “it happened, but it doesn’t matter now.” And while I don’t agree with that notion, free speech at least gives me the ability to debate it with such individuals.
One of the more interesting philosophy courses centered on whiteness and critical race theory, and was taught by a brilliant professor named George Yancy. I remember talking with him as we headed out of the building one night, and we were debating terminology after he had shared an interesting story about walking down the sidewalk while traffic was backed up beside him. As we was walking, he noticed that a number of drivers were reaching over and locking their doors (again) as this black man in suit with a red hat was walking near them. A really stupid little action on their part that made them feel safer—conscious or not—but one that was kind of mind-boggling to him as he walked. It wasn’t just one car, but a large number of them even though it looked like the doors were already locked. Racist? Definitely; he was shoehorned into this stereotype of a “black gangster/thug” that might try to carjack them in broad daylight or otherwise threaten them. They took preventive action to protect themselves from this perceived threat, and the general consensus was to label the action as racist. But the question I asked him was whether the term worked in this context. When we hear the term “racist,” the first thing that comes to mind are images of the KKK. Lynchings. Slavery. Overseers trying to “cure” drapetomania (mental illness causing slaves to run away) by “whipping the devil” out of their slaves (interesting how the cure for supposed illness matched up with their normal practices so perfectly). No one wants to be lumped into that sort of company, so the immediate response is to deny it. “I’m no racist! [insert reasons X,Y,Z here].” He felt that there’s definitely a difference, but that the label still worked because it sought to critique racism in its less obvious forms. In other words, the shock of having one’s actions compared to the horrors of the past helps pin down racial privilege behind the scenes that isn’t even given conscious thought.
My argument was that the term is so loaded that it prevents that introspection from occurring. Worse yet, it whips up a frantic frenzy to avoid the charge that serves to further mask that privilege from being seen. Consider an authoritarian state where neighbors are in a rush to inform on one another, constantly pushing further in an all-out effort to avoid becoming the focus of the state’s secret police themselves. Rather than address the substance of the critique, the individual being critiqued is so concerned with the label associated with the critique--"racist"--that they avoid hearing the critique at all.
The end result is that two groups find themselves looking at the same term and using two radically different definitions for it that are, effectively, mutually exclusive. And the worst part is that neither group realizes that they give such radically different meaning to the same term, leading to confusion and pain for all involved while stifling even the hope for meaningful progress. Neither group will ever be able to fully understand these differences without sustained dialogue between them. That dialogue may be painful at times, but it’s still necessary if you hope to see any sort of change or progress. That’s where free speech comes in.
The students at Yale, and those supporting the broader push for “safe spaces” in general, are missing this point to the point where they're undermining the very progress they seek to achieve. Not just because they’re mocked in the media, but because they’re preventing it from occurring in the first place. What good is it to push for everyone to feel “safe” on campus (again, it comes down to how we define yet another word) if those outside that group don’t understand what it is that makes them feel unsafe in the first place. Authoritarian efforts to force this issue, to carve out the so-called safe space by squashing other voices can only end in one thing: the creation of a new, sacred cow. You aren’t creating a dialogue that fosters genuine understanding and respect. You’re purposely avoiding it, which only serves to take the sacred cow in your midst and have it set aside and ignored out of fear of giving offense. The end result is that those you believe to be marginalized are marginalized further.
Nowhere in the Christakis email does she “salt the wound.” It’s an intellectual effort to engage a debate about Halloween costumes and the nature of interpersonal communication in this context. Agree with her or disagree as you wish. But engage her points; don’t make up this interpretation in order to justify ignoring and silencing her in the first place.
Race relations and progress with them have never been easy. Much of their history is written in pain and blood. Why would anyone be so foolish as to think that you can force this issue and avoid the discomfort that comes with engaging with one another? It's an attempt to take a shortcut that avoids the very reasons for the journey itself. Even if you succeed, you only manage to mask the very issues that concerned you in the first place.
No, this is where we acknowledge that both sides can be varying degrees of wrong and right, and that people can lose sight of their original arguments.
What's wrong with treating someone's culture as a costume?
If I find Mexican clothing nice, let's say, and I wear it to a "let's celebrate Mexico" party, how on earth is that offensive? Is it also offensive when the people of some other country wear American clothing and use red solo cups at their parties?
There aren't candidates of arguably the most powerful nation in the world getting airtime to millions to holler about deporting your kind just because you're Mexican
To elaborate: It's cherry-picking. Why should people pick fun/cute/cool parts of a culture without considering the utter bullshit hurled at that culture for it existing?
This is the attitude that concerns me the most. Preventing people from participating in each others' cultures promotes segregation. How on Earth are people supposed to learn to appreciate each others' cultures if they aren't allowed to participate in the fun/cute/cool parts? I would think doing so promotes a decrease in said candidates shouting things.
I don't understand your point. Can you rephrase it? Are you saying that just because people say bad things about Mexican culture no one should be allowed to participate in it?
Sorry for my delay - HN thought I was submitting too fast and then I had to go to bed. :)
The gist of what I'm thinking is this:
Cherry picking the good without at least acknowledging the bad feeds into a longer process of erasure. Like textbooks insinuating that Africans in colonial times were treated akin to indentured servants rather than slaves - this stuff makes an impression on the overall majority, resulting in the bigger problem where the majority lacks empathy for the struggles of others because they genuinely don't think there's a noteworthy problem. (Which wouldn't matter much, except the majority has significant power and thus can inadvertently enact actual harm!) So I don't want to contribute to that attitude, and I don't want anyone in the HN community to contribute to that attitude either.
There are ways to appreciate the variety of cultures the world has to offer without being exploitative, ignorant, or otherwise harmful. It just requires work that we as a society are not very accustomed to doing, thus there are a stunning amount of otherwise smart people who need this spelled out very clearly.
Some possible ideas that can make your theoretical Mexican party into a better Mexican party:
- Involve a Mexican in the planning
- Cater the food by a Mexican company
- Find a Mexican resource for clothing, decorations, etc
- Have entertainment from actual Mexicans rather than people costuming as 'Mexican'
- Invite some Mexicans to the party, they're peers after all
These will all help humanize Mexicans to any non-Mexicans at your party. (Don't fuss about whether you find a person immediately immigrated from Mexico versus 2nd or 3rd generation immigrant. Anything's better than nothing.)
(I'm not Mexican, though I do happen to be Latina).
I see we've reached the point in the discussion where HN readers demand for human interpersonal relationships to be spelled out with the same rigor as an RFC.
I agree with much of what you said, but do you have a link to a video containing those quotes? Because I watched the videos from the impromptu conversation with some students[1] and at no point does anyone say anything like what you quoted.
I find it really hard to believe this article is presenting a fair argument when it makes claims like:
> People as different as Condoleezza Rice, a former secretary of state, and Bill Maher, a satirist, have been dissuaded from giving speeches on campuses, sometimes on grounds of safety.
There are some really good reasons why students protested to prevent the school from paying $35k for a 35-minute speech (Condoleezza's speaker fee for the speech in question), such as the fact that many people consider her to be a war criminal (which IIRC was in fact the basis for the protest, that and her role in an administration that promoted torture, not some unsubstantiated claim about feeling unsafe). I was unfamiliar with the Bill Maher speech issue before, but a quick search shows that the protest there was about remarks Bill made on his show that students felt were racist towards Muslims.
I can come up with moral and ethical objections for any given speaker; if one does not want money going to morally debatable speakers, they should object to all paid speakers.
I believe objecting to all paid speakers on campus to be a defensible position, but paying for a variety of speakers also seems to be a strong position.
Everyone has their own lines for when a speaker is too objectionable, I honestly don't have a problem with someone protesting some speakers but not others.
I mean, isn't that precisely what protesting something is?
(That said, there are definitely I think good and bad ways to protest, and also reactionary protests that escalate way past what's acceptable)
If the college republicans weren't able spend their portion of student fees to bring some Republican I found repugnant to campus, how would I ever have the opportunity to ask him very uncomfortable questions during the Q&A after his speech?
Back when I was a college leftist we welcomed these opportunities. The idea that they should be censored was abhorrent.
In fact, we joined forces with them when the college papers editor decided that he could re-write and censor letters published by both groups (and in the process inflaming hostility between us, until we discovered our words had been changed as had theirs.)
I think liberalism has lost sight of the mission of defending ALL people's rights, even ones you disagree with. "I will defend to the death your right to say it" and all that.
----
(so was I downvoted for challenging republicans or because we joined with the college republican to challenge the censorship in the school paper? Oh, maybe it was criticizing "liberalism"? I guess that's not PC.)
----
PPS -- This was during the days of "political correctness" when any position taken from the left was shot down with "that's just political correctness" and it was an insult- like you could never think that you're just being PC. Which of course as not in the least bit true. Back then.
There's various levels of offensiveness. And also bear in mind that both of these cases were for a commencement speech. Commencement speeches are not the places for divisive speakers. If the Young Republicans want to raise money to pay for someone to come speak, that's very different than the school paying the equivalent of free tuition for 3 students for a year for an extremely controversial speaker to give a 35-minute commencement speech.
That's not really an argument because you don't define any selection criteria, which is what the whole issue is about. Would you say that it's acceptable to have a neonazi speak, who charged $10000 per minute?
Furthermore, your argument is a strawman. Where is the line drawn? How about a neocon? A communist? A socialist? A fascist? A liberal? Lots of people have ideas that are objectionable to someone. If they are talking about something unrelated to those ideas you find objectionable, what's the problem?
A small private conference invited a speaker to talk about a marginal piece of technology, unaware that the speaker was best known as a noisome defender of chattel slavery. The invitation was rescinded.
I don't know why Auerbach sees this as a "big problem", but then, I don't know why Auerbach writes much of what he writes at Slate. He's not very good. Slate was probably better off with Farhad Manjoo.
Even with a very negative equivocation of "defender of chattel slavery," which I'm guessing -- I don't have the time or the spare IQ to decipher his writings -- is a hostile simplification, the right thing to do is to forgive him. The reaction to the news he'd be speaking was made of base disgust and deliberate malice. The venue's different, but the mindset of the complainers is similar, albeit not with the same proportions of raw cynicism.
If it's not worth hashing out, then it wasn't worth objecting to a detail of a 7-day-old post in the first place.
(Here's another example for the corpus: When Hillary Clinton was scheduled to speak at the RPI Commencement, there was no end to the whining by the College Republicans. This was in 2005.)
No, it is not a hostile simplification. Unfortunately, I believe I captured it pretty well. Unless you'd like to argue that he's playing a character when he writes as Mencius Moldbug.
Apparently unlike you (and who can blame you?), I took some time to work through the writing.
Here is what is happening: His writing has evolved to be laced with honeypot objectionables (on top of general obfuscation) so that he can sit on his mountain, avoid direct refutation, and look down at people that obviously don't get what he's saying. That they conveniently map with his ur-self's tonal ambitions is icing on the cake.
You're hitting a honeypot, flavored by all the pickup from his ur-self that's present in everything about what he chooses to write about. Your statement, which is about what he says, is not the true true (about what he says) because it's poisoned by what he is. You can unsimplify it back up to a lot of stuff that he doesn't say (in fact, stuff he doesn't believe he believes).
If you have an alternate theory, I should point out that mine also explains Urbit. Does yours?
Students would put those "problems" all aside, if the speakers had ideologies more in line with theirs.
Like the Asian student at Claremont who at first was supported by the movement then disenfranchised when her narrative diverged from theirs when she recounted experiencing racism from the protesters' own ethnicity. In other words they wanted a very simplistic narrative, not one muddled with the nuances of real life.
It sounds like you're dismissing the students' complaints by saying effectively "if the speaker wasn't offensive to the student, the student wouldn't complain". But that's kind of a given, isn't it? If you find someone that everybody can agree is a good speaker to have, then it should be obvious that nobody will protest it.
I'm saying that as I student, I should be able to manage offensiveness. Not meanness, but offensiveness. I should be able to process divergent and disgusting and disagreeable views without getting overworked.
We deal with all kinds of offensive things in our daily lives, we don't need to be coddled. We may not always live in the US or Europe (what "we're" used to, we may have to travel to other places (or vice versa) and we'll need to be able to manage unfavorable opinions on all kinds of things.
But there's a vast difference between saying "I should be able to tolerate opinions I disagree with" and saying "I'm ok with my school spending many thousands of dollars for an enormously controversial speaker to give a commencement address, which is both a tacit endorsement by the school of the speaker itself (which is worth protesting all on its own), a flagrant waste of money, and it's an event where the speaker should be someone that the entire student body can recognize as being qualified to speak and give advice to the student body regardless of any minor disagreements".
I don't think we should limit the scope of speakers... I will agree to limit the money paid to any speaker (set a max fee, adjusted yearly, for example, I'm okay with that).
I think one _could_ interpret bringing a speaker as an endorsement (shudder) but I'd rather see it as bringing a variety of views and giving students a broad exposure to ideas.
Moreover, I think it's more beneficial to thought to bring in people who one would disagree with (anti endorsement) in order to foment more thought and make for more fertile ground for thinking, rather than maintain or exacerbate a positive feedback loop.
On the endorsement bit, would you consider inviting a drug addict to speak about drug addition, or a convict to speak an "endorsement"? I don't. I see it as enlightening. It's good to get exposed to good and bad ideas. Terrible and offensive ideas, as well as the ones which make us feel warm and fuzzy.
You continue to completely ignore the difference between some group bringing a speaker on campus, and the school bringing in a commencement speaker. It's an extremely important difference.
Commencement speeches are pretty tame, so it seems people would be more concerned about baggage or perception than anything the speaker would actually say, that's pretty damning if people are so politically bound it would pain them to entertain someone of a different stripe.
I don't really know the details, but the source I found used the word "racism" so that's what I used. And anti-Muslim sentiment is very closely tied to racism against people of middle-eastern descent anyway, because most people (or at least most Americans) tend to equate the two.
The last I had heard of the term was in high school where a handful of teachers and administrators had a small rainbow sticker on the windows of their doors indicating that the room was a place where one would feel safe from discrimination. It was an anti-bullying movement that not provided a place to eat lunch, do work, etc. but more importantly gave victims a place to seek help and privately report offences. Bear in mind the system came into existence to fight homophobia.
The beast this movement has evolved into, if it has any relationship to the system I knew, has come completely off the rails and seems to me to be turning into the bully.
As with many articles on the subject, I think it's important to define what precisely "safe spaces" mean.
The Economist attempts to define a "good" version:
> Like many bad ideas, the notion of safe spaces at universities has its roots in a good one. Gay people once used the term to refer to bars and clubs where they could gather without fear, at a time when many states still had laws against sodomy.
I've seen it written elsewhere that there are many existing safe space where people can come together and talk: an Asian American gathering, or Black Student Union meetings, or LGBT support groups, etc. I think these spaces are critical for the comfortable discussion and sharing of some pretty private details about a person's struggles and thoughts. These spaces aren't meant to dissuade dissenting opinion so much as provide a place where people feel safe to express their thoughts with others who understand, empathize, or have undergone similar situations/thoughts.
But there's always going to be impletations taken to extremes, and the Economist article appears to be targeting those. But I wonder: exactly how prevalent are safe spaces that act as "justification for shutting out ideas"?
At least anecdotally, I haven't seen that many. This feels like taking what seems to me a minority of safe spaces and painting the entire idea with broad strokes.
I worry that people are strawmanning the idea of safe spaces by only using egregious examples as examples of bad, while ignoring the (IMO) vast amounts of good they have helped foster.
That's a really interesting historical perspective, thanks for bringing it up. That concept of safe spaces seems wholly constructive and positive. However I think the concept has been coopted by an illiberal leftist movement on college campuses. Its practitioners seek to shut down dissent on the topics of race and sexuality in particular. It seems to be a return of the political correctness movement. There was an interesting article on it recently: http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/2015/01/secret-confessi...
My only real experience with "safe spaces" has been a continuing call for an internet forum that I frequented to be a "safe space." In my experience with that, 100% of the time "safe space" meant "throw out anyone who disagrees with me even a little on this topic."
The historical sense of safe places is a good idea. Places where a class can feel free(er) from judgement and can also feel free(er) to discuss things which may be more difficult outside the safe places. So, a student org. house, a "siblingity".
The issue is wanting to make whole campuses and extending beyond into safe places and also wanting to control others' abilities and rights to express themselves. That's the issue.
> The issue is wanting to make whole campuses and extending beyond into safe places and also wanting to control others' abilities and rights to express themselves. That's the issue.
I agree that can be an issue, but I think that's also stretching the normal definition of "safe spaces" quite a bit. And I'm wary of articles like this that take that stretched definition, and apply it across the board.
Thanks for the thoughtful contribution. I suspect the term 'safe space' has at least partially gone the way of 'hacker' in popular consciousness - but that doesn't have to stop anyone from using it.
If you are so weak that words hurt you, that the mere speaking of words makes you damaged, I am afraid that you need psychological help. I feel for men and women who face real dangers. I don't feel for Yale students who must listen to scary ideas.
I can't recall the last compliment I received over the last month, but I can tell you with vivid detail the racist words that have been thrown at me over the last ten years for being non-white. One of my friends who is black can recall the exact time years ago when he was sitting on a bus and a complete stranger from across the street called him a nigger.
No, words do not hurt. I don't let words hurt me. You control your feelings and emotions. Its part of being a complete, mature adult. It is your responsibility to not let someone else's words hurt you and define you. Its called dealing with life and the fact that not everyone and everything in life is rosy and a great experience.
Here's my tip - when someone does or says something that hurts you, examine why you feel the way you feel and treat it with amusement. I'm a minority that has dealt with racist comments. It is what it is. Do the words hurt me? No. I'm amused at how ignorant some people can be, and I move on with my life and write some code.
Good read - thanks for sharing. I quite liked this:
'Padmasambhava said that when a stick is thrown to a dog, the dog will chase the stick. A dog’s gaze follows the object, the stick. The lion gazes steadily at the source, the thrower. We need to look at our mind, the source of the emotion. An emotion like anger is the stick. The source hurling that emotion is our mind. It is the mind that projects. The source of our experience is our own mind.
Dzogchen [Buddhism] turns our gaze inward toward the source of experience, which is mind. Pristine mind is our lion's gaze.'
For the record, I think freedom of speech is more important than anyone's general comfort level (almost by definition).
But it's important to acknowledge there's a huge difference between singleton one-off insults -- where it's easy to take a "sticks and stones" attitude -- vs. being immersed in an environment where you frequently hear insults from a wide variety of people around you. Which also inevitably comes coupled with equally if not more non-verbal slights, ranging from the subtle and physically harmless (locking car doors, being followed by store security guards) to the economically painful (statistical disadvantages in the job market or justice system) and even physically dangerous (e.g. the recent spate of police shootings).
Not being a minority I can't directly identify with that experience, but I have to imagine the "laugh it off" argument doesn't really apply well to a life filled with such experiences.
But is it not you hanging on to those words that is doing the harm, and in that you doing the harm? Those words of an ignoramus disappeared years ago. At this point you are hurting yourself.
When I was about 13 my grandfather died in Jacksonville Florida. He lived in the same house for maybe 50 years and the racial makeup of the neighborhood changed during the time he was there. I remember walking out of the funeral home and down the street for a soda only to be taunted and called names by a group of blacks out of a window. And yes, my skin color was mentioned. Anyone who has spent any time in the ghetto, in the projects, in whatever you want to call it has witnessed some pretty bad behavior. Racist behavior. It sucks. I imagine it sucks for blacks as well.
Some people are assholes. Some assholes are white and some aren't. We can't rid the world of assholes but it would sure be nice if they reformed themselves. In the meantime, there are no safe spaces in the real world. We should ask people to be polite where we can but that's as far as it goes.
I can't relate to the experience of being black in the U.S., but I was once being loudly called names for being a nerd in the subway (by some probably drunk guy). (We were discussing Forth with a coworker and the guy apparently took it personally.)
I just laughed it off (which probably didn't help), and I didn't feel threatened by it at all (but my coworker didn't, so we went out next station, which looking back was probably a good idea).
To get to the point, I don't think insults from someone (words) can hurt unless one of the two conditions is satisfied:
(1) The words (or circumstances) indicate that the insulting person may escalate from words to actual physical attack
(2) The words may cause the bystanders to stand with the insulting person
In my case, I didn't felt threatened by (1), which was probably a little risky. It seems to me that we consider case (1) hurtful because it's a potential risk and we want to avoid it. The real emotion here is fear of being attacked.
In case of (2), I didn't worry about that either (in fact, there was a girl sitting next to me who was apparently very sympathetic to me laughing it off), because the person that did the name calling had obviously low social status.
But I think the reason we find (2) hurtful is a slightly different one; it's a status problem. If we want to be part of some group, we may be disappointed by that group rejecting us. It's not just a question of pure survival as in case of (1), it's our own emotional projection (of our status) that makes it hurtful.
Another example, I can imagine a girl being more hurt by somebody criticizing (with a sexist insinuation) her at work than somebody low status catcalling her on the street. The latter is much more risky, but the first can hurt lot more because that's where her aspirations are.
I wonder if you agree or not and what you think context of your situation was?
To sum up, I think there are two very different reasons why we consider words "hurtful", and each only happens in specific circumstances, which should be recognized (although they might be subjective). And while I do think people should be protected by law from potential risk in case (1), I am not sure if people should be protected from finding that they have low social status in the group they want to belong, as in (2). If anything should be protected at all then it's the potential to gain social status.
Do you think this experience altered the course of his life? Have any of your experiences with hate speech altered yours? It's not a question that can really be answered for sure, but I would like your honest opinion.
I remember being called a "white monkey" by a black girl in school when I was a kid. In that class, I was the minority, the only white kid. I don't think that experience affected my life negatively. Roll eyes, move on with life.
That particular incident gets a memory due to the fact that nobody before or since has called me that particular thing. During the time I went to that school, it was an everyday occurrence that I would be singled out for one reason or another (primarily because my skin was different, I suspect).
Sitting in public was not an option in that area. Walking down the street wasn't really something that ever happened either. You might get shot doing that. We had drills in school for what to do when, not if, but when gun shots were reported in the neighborhood.
Whoah, that's a bloody wide gap you have there, stretching from "doesn't hurt at all" to "should be imprisoned". The world is nowhere near that polarised.
I think it would give me a good perspective on the comment author's mindset, which is why I am curious.
But do you, vacri, see a huge gap between completely destroying a professor's life, i.e. forcing them to resign their position, give up their salary, tenure, and reputation (which is what these students were asking), and going to prison? Going to prison implies all of the former, it's just an extra debasement on the other penalties, although an extreme one.
You're mixing up your arguments. colmvp said that words can hurt - and in response, you're retorting that students are asking for imprisonment of a professor? What? How is that a rebuttal? Regardless of whether the students are successful or are laughed out of college, it has no bearing on colmvp's comment that words can hurt.
Basically you're trying to force a false dichotomy, where the options are "nothing at all" and "complete destruction of life". Someone's opinion on such a ridiculously polarised fantasy isn't going to grant any useful insights.
In contrary, the gap is non-existent. If I touch you, without even really hurting you, you can sue me and the police can arrest me. That is the extent that violence (actual violence) is discouraged in our society.
So you can hardly argue that speech is actually hurtful and that you shouldn't be punished for it.
Abstractly, I see the idea that words are intangible and can't possibly hurt you. But we are social animals and it doesn't work that way in reality. Words can get you loved or hated, married or fired, can put you in jail or set you free, start wars and end them, destroy someone's ego and life or elevate it. Words are the most hurtful things there are. The pen is far mightier than the sword.
Spoken like a true first world child who has never experienced the sectarian violence, highly infectious diseases like TB/malaria/hiv, starvation, lack of clean drinking water, and the psychological effects of practically insurmountable poverty. These arent theoretical possibilities but facts of life experienced by billions of humans, the vast majority of whom have practically zero chance of escaping the cycle unless they happened to be born to well educated or wealthy parents.
I apologize for how offensive my comment is to you and your PC Principal, but christ, how can you think a perceived verbal assault on American college students (who are supported to the tune of tens of thousands of dollars a year by their parents and/or Freddi Mac) can even possibly compare to the life and death situations experienced by billions of people in the world on a daily basis?
You can't dismiss the lived experiences of people simply because someone has it worse.
It doesnt matter if theres a genocide going on in every single country in the world - its still going to hurt when you get dumped, cheated on, fired, break your leg, get in a car accident, suffer a loss in the family, etc
I wasn't dismissing anyone's pain or suffering outright, I was simply responding to an absolute assertion of fact ("Words are the most hurtful things there are", emphasis mine). The GP's post said unequivocally that offensive speech is worse than everything else and I found that to be a very selfish and ignorant statement, entirely disconnected from a reality where hundreds of millions of people don't so much as have access to clean drinking water (literally an order of magnitude more than there are college students in the United States [1][2]). I'm not saying that one group's suffering is irrelevant just because another's is more dire and life threatening, I'm just trying to put things into perspective in the face of a ludicrous statement.
>The pen is mightier than the sword because a pen will move armies with swords.
And that is exactly what the right words will do. If it's seen as socially acceptable to insult someone, then it's not far from that to having it be socially acceptable to commit physical violence against them. Historically, that's the way it's always worked. I've never once seen or read about an instance of a marginalized group where the insults stopped at racial or ethnic slurs.
You really have to measure these things against the numbers involved though. One person using racial slurs is just one person being a fool. One person with thousands of followers might be a problem.
This is anecdotal (is it really that anecdotal?), but I have been called so many names throughout my life, and my response is almost always "go fuck yourself", whether said out loud (in so many words) or internally. I honestly don't care, and the bullies don't stop me.
Adults don't need institutions to protect them from name calling and hurtful words. Children do.
>Adults don't need institutions to protect them from name calling and hurtful words. Children do.
Meh, divorces happen over words, massive conflicts happen because of it, etc. "Just words" is not a great counterargument for anything.
Saying we don't need safe spaces is basically exactly the same as saying reddit doesn't need moderation. Or a community doesn't need a code of conduct. Sure, you don't need it, but the words used end up forming the cultural base of the group, and I really don't need to go to University 4chan.
> Adults don't need institutions to protect them from name calling and hurtful words. Children do.
That's a remarkably naive way of looking at the history of hate speech and hateful rhetoric both in the United States and globally.
(I'm not saying what happened at Yale approaches hate speech, but the idea that "words can't hurt you, and if they do you're just a child" is, well, pretty child-like in its understanding of social forces.)
Actually, in contrast to what you're saying, words hardly matter at all. What's important is intention of the communication, not necessarily it's form. You can be the nicest-spoken lady/gentelman and have a vicious effect on the well-being of people or whole communities, by being hypocritical, judgemental or manipulative.
For a concrete example, black people are usually OK with being called "niggers", as long as it's by other black people; I assume that's because they assume different intentions than when a white person says that word (which is quite racist, ironically).
I understand what you're getting at, but that is hilariously untrue and a perfect representation of the delusion that the social justice movement operates under.
I totally empathize with people that are truly affected by words or ideas. What I can't tolerate is people trying to impose me what I should be offended by.
I realize it's an inflammatory article (Harvard and Yale having their differences, what else is new) but it's definitely a unique take on this phenomenon from a historical perspective.
An email about costumes and culture vs. hundreds of 4channers threatening physical violence and assault are entirely different things. An idea, which is free speech, and harassment, which is what you are suggesting, are entirely different things.
I can certainly agree with that, but the nuance that some words might have an impact while others won't (or shouldn't) was lost in your original statement that "If you are so weak that words hurt you, that the mere speaking of words makes you damaged, I am afraid that you need psychological help." It depends on the words.
I'm reminded of this piece from a year ago. Called "Everything is problematic" it's written from the perspective of someone heavily involved with the radical left/queer scene and how they increasingly noticed a certain brand of anti-intellectualism that has taken hold. somewhat long, but well written
http://www.mcgilldaily.com/2014/11/everything-problematic/
This is the result of a privileged class (if you're going to college, any college, in America, you're doing better than the vast majority of the world) wanting to be part of what it perceives as the revolution of our time. Whether or not this was based on legitimate claims or not, this has devolved into a completely arbitrary "revolution for revolution's sake" morass of nonsense. It's shameful thinking that this is how my generation is going to be perceived in years to come.
If you ask me, it's more of a diversionary revolution to distract from the current corporate power grab and disappearing civil liberties. Controlled opposition, if you will.
Major political donors will tend to lean toward candidates that support these social justice policies rather than ones which might endanger their position of power. When that happens, the ideology of an entire political platform, and that of everyone associated with it, is up for grabs. It may not be intentional, but these are the results that we're left with.
Thank you for posting this, because it's something I've personally suspected for quite a while. If you want to destroy a counter movement or opposing political side/class, the best thing to do is to turn them against each other. Now notice how just before this whole privilege/safe spaces/other crap started, things like Occupy were pointing out income inequality and perhaps making a few people nervous...
That's basically what is happening with rent in SF. The landlords and other owners have basically turned the middle and lower class against newcomers to distract everyone from the real problem, which is a lack of supply.
Before discussion takes off, maybe we can have a factual basis for talking about this issue and learn something too:
Could anyone who knows describe specifically how 'safe spaces' are implemented? Obviously we would need to talk about particular campuses because each school operates independently and has its own rules. Perhaps a link to the rule itself?
I humbly request that you don't respond with a general impression or with memes or things you read or heard about. We're overwhelmed with unreliable information already; more won't make the facts any more clear.
Every debate takes place under a constraint of limited information; if you do not wish to base the argument on what may be anecdotal or flawed data, it would be advisable to debate the principle of safe spaces. Which is to say, that it may be more productive for you to ask or answer the questions 'are safe spaces moral if we assume a perfect implementation (as described by the proponent)?', and 'what conditions are required for a good safe space, or what makes a safe space bad?'.
> it would be advisable to debate the principle of safe spaces
I think that would be valuable to discuss but we need to know what that principle is. I haven't seen anything that informs me about it. For example, one person in this discussion said they are basing their conclusions on one video they saw of one incident at one college.
My experience with similar issues in the past is that what most people discuss, in any forum, doesn't turn out to be true - they are solving problems that don't exist.
> What do you mean? I would not expect to find the words "safe space" in the mizzou bylaws.
I'm guessing it's defined someplace, if not in the by-laws then either by the school or by the groups that use them. Maybe it's a statement of principles of some group. Also, the idea of a 'safe space' may be based on certain papers or books or research. And that would apply to other issues besides 'safe spaces', such as the effects of racism on the educational environment, etc.
It would be useful to see links to some of the student groups' own statements; I only see second-hand information and not even many quotes or interviews with the protesters themselves.
The only way to resolve a conflict is to face it, not pretend it isn't there. I think people these days are overly sensitive to sensitive topics. As a (maybe isolated example), just today, I was called closed minded by a few attendees for asking a question during a "open" Q&A session about Islam and terrorism at school. Can't we just get over it and talk maturely?
For the record, in the 1980s I started a campus liberal organization that eventually went nation wide. The Progressive Student Network. Our positions were totally in favor of free speech and totally defending "offensive speech" in particular.
One thing todays liberals don't seem to get is that marginalized people are the ones who get silenced when free speech isn't protected.
I never thought I would say this, but without Jesse Helms to kick around, liberals seem to have forgotten what they stood for. (we stood for human rights, unequivocally back then. But there was no right "not to be offended.")
Let's remember that these are students in their world, college, and an essential part of college and learning is to experiment with ideas and ways of doing things. It has two implications:
1) This is their world, college, even if it's talked about on HN they should not be conforming to our standards. Education, like software development, is about experimenting and failing and learning from it all. College is the place where they can do that. Step back and give them room to grow up.
2) They would be poor students if they weren't doing things that challenge everyone else, especially the older generation. This is where innovation and innovators will come from. I hope they don't give %!#@! what everyone is saying about them; it would be tragic if we quashed their spirit.
The problem I identify is that such "safe places", from what I understand, discourage experimentation and new ideas by shaming concepts that may offend them.
I am interested in hearing your logic behind how this specific movement is going to generate innovation & innovators, as I think you are claiming (correct me if I'm wrong please). I think you may be mistaken if you believe this is just a challenge against the older generation- it seems to be a challenge against the ideas that do not conform to their criteria of having to be inoffensive.
>discourage experimentation and new ideas by shaming concepts that may offend them.
Yeah, experimentation with new ideas like blackface and rape jokes.
I think the main issue with arguments against is that they rely on some black and white vision of the world (also ignoring that you can have places that aren't "safe spaces" to do your experimentation). Darwin would not have been limited by safe spaces. But hey, maybe KKK recruitment would.
My knowledge on this topic is limited to only the video I saw of a group of students arguing with a professor.
The students were arguing about the FUNDAMENTAL criteria of what should be allowed to be expressed. If something offends people, that's not acceptable. So, this criteria is not limited to only "new ideas like blackface and rape jokes"- it's anything that is considered offensive, and that's why it may discourage experimentation.
Well, it is also the world of professors, grad students, administrators, etc.
I know American culture is in love with undergrads and their "college experience", but I don't see why they are such key stakeholders that they should be allowed to demand that members of those other groups be fired and otherwise make their lives and work difficult.
Customers usually don't have any mechanism for getting the CEO fired other than not buying the product.
>This is where innovation and innovators will come from.
That's the really scary part - you'll have to sift trough these guys to hire someone one day, fortunately this doesn't represent 100% of student population.
This sort of attitude is a really scary thing -- the west seems on the brink of losing all of its values. How on earth am I going to make sure that my 5 year old doesn't end up this way?
Frequent trips to the third world. Let your child not be so coddled that he/she thinks the greatest misfortune that can befall a person is seeing an offensive costume.
Actually, we already live in the third world :) (Thailand), but the attitude exists here too. When university professors suggested that there should be less censorship the university students rose up against them.
So who decides what is or is not offensive? Can anyone?
How is one to predict what may or may not offend someone?
What if I find your comment and tone offensive? does that mean that you have to now remove it? or that you'll censor youself in the future, lest you continue to offend me?
And if you attempt to question the genuineness of my offense, then I take further offense at you attempting to de-legitimizing my original offense taken.
To ground my point by way of example, consider this lunacy about the cry of "Japanese cultural appropriation" and how that is 'offensive':
Happily it was put to rest (by an ethnically Japanese person) but this is typical of the insanity that has taken over most campuses in the US right now
Yes, it is infantalization to request that others self-censor just in case they may cause offense to you.
Actually, I'm not sure we'd agree. Personally I'd probably find that costume hilarious (depending on how well it was executed) but then I have a dark sense of humor. For example, I find this anecdote from John Cleese about his mother hilarious: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f74L2hRZE1Y
But let's assume that I found that costume 'offensive'. What would I be entitled to do? that is, what should I be able to do? Nothing.
That is, other than get offended, I don't have a right to do anything other than that. I certainly don't have a right to not be offended.
Taking offense is so subjective that it is meaningless. Think of it this way, you may not like mayo on your french fries but a lot of people do.
Does that mean that you have to force others to not enjoy their french fries with mayo?
No.
It just means that you eat what you like and leave others to enjoy the foods they enjoy.
Gosh... now that I've typed that out I hardly can believe that it has become so irrational that we have to actually spell out such things to one another as adults in the year 2015.
It's not about politeness; it's about political power. In particular, the definition of "polite" is entirely asymmetric, with "marginalized groups" (basically, everyone but straight white males) given carte blanche to police others' speech and actions. In the case of Halloween costumes, you can see the asymmetry easily: a Native American man can dress as the Lone Ranger, but a white man can't dress as Tonto. (More precisely, a white man complaining that it's racist for a Native American to dress as the Lone Ranger would probably be ignored, and might even be called a racist himself.)
This has a rationalization, of course; it's OK because straight white males perpetuate "structural racism," imposing a "heteropatriarchy" on gays, women, and people of color. The practical result involves stripping power from straight white males and giving it to everyone else.
From an adaptive point of view, ripping off chunks of power and giving them to your supporters is a winning political formula. But pleasant nostrums about sticking up for the downtrodden are little more than a thin veneer over a good old-fashioned tribal throwdown.
This is the key point. Yale basically "politely requested" that students do not wear offensive costumes, but that they are adults and are free to make their own decisions and that the school would take no official action. This was the point of protest by the safe-spacers.
What I find most strange in this is that safe spaces used to be places where individuals voluntarily gathered to be insulated from something and to feel comfortable opening up to their peers. The classic examples are supports groups.
The problem as I see is it that people who appreciate having a safe space are now trying to change the venue to one where participation is no longer consensual.
Take three locations, A, B and C. A and B are empty and C is a large room with all of society. Now take two groups, a majority and a minority group.
Members of the minority group wants a space where they can relate to other members of their group and avoid those who aren't members and can't relate. This is space A and what most people are calling a "safe space". Members of the majority group do the same. This is space B. Members of the majority group call this a "club/clubhouse". There really isn't much difference between a safe space and a clubhouse. Both are places where likeminded people can gather, relate to one another and conveniently ignore everything around them that they don't have to interact with.
The tragedy now is that space C, the public space is crumbling because it contains people from both groups trying to "improver the public clubhouse" from their perspective, ignoring the perspectives of the others.
You simply can't take a public space and make it a more comfortable/safe place for one group without likely alienating some of the people already occupying that same public space.
A lecture hall on campus can be a safe space, but designating an entire campus as a safe space without enthusiastic consent from everyone already occupying that public space is oppressive to anyone that disagrees.
Question - doesn't that give wonderful options for further discrimination? While excluding someone for his race is a non starter, not hiring him because of activities he was involved, especially causing unrest in college could fly.
I believe that many people genuinely feel unsafe when in the presence of someone whose political beliefs offend them. The problem arises when that person, or those beliefs, do not in fact represent a threat. In such a case, feeling unsafe is delusional. Indulging this delusion just invites more delusion, which predictably spirals out of control.
The solution is to explain that feeling unsafe is unjustified when there is no credible threat. This strategy is not presently a reliable route to political power, which is why it's not being pursued. On the contrary, every concession to the delusion—e.g., the creation of "safe spaces" to protect people from largely imaginary threats—is testament to the present power of complaint. As long as there are special "protected" classes under the law (in the name, of course, of equality), we can expect more of the same.
I think it's becoming evident that 18 is no longer an appropriate age to consider someone an adult. This isn't really even unprecedented, the age at which children were considered adults has shifted throughout history, and to me, it looks like it's shifting again.
These problems seem to arise because children are demanding to be treated like children, but we're making the mistake of thinking of them as adults.
As someone who recently turned 18, I disagree. From my perspective, these children are coddled to hell and back.
They're expecting colleges to parent rather than to teach. That's just how they grew up, that's just how they'll try to shape the environment. They don't want to fit the environment, they want the environment to fit them.
I've been a competent programmer since I was 16 and not having a degree means no one cares. What does it even mean to be an adult?
I've thought of that often. The more time went by the more I found the adults around me were ultimately fallible. The older I've gotten I've questioned my capacity as well. Am I being a good adult? What qualities to I aspire to have?
The people I see make it the farthest have the toughest hides. Life doesn't just throw shit at you from time to time it is a waterfall of crap. There is never a right time and waiting for it doesn't help. The adults I like the most set boundaries on life and work. They generally complain a great deal less. They have just as much to complain about, but choose not to waste time on trying to change the things they can't.
O God, give us the serenity to accept what cannot be changed,
The courage to change what can be changed,
and the wisdom to know the one from the other
I've fallen back to that recently. I've focused my energy on things that I can do to make a difference. For me, for my family and friends.
I haven't figured it out. You've no doubt heard of the programmer's imposter syndrome? Well I'm starting to believe that some of the best adults feel like adult imposters.
What do you disagree with? You just joined me in calling them children.
If society shifts such that most 18 year olds act like children, them perhaps 18 is no longer the appropriate age to consider someone an adult.
I'm not arguing that this is a good or bad thing, but childhood has been lengthened before and it appears to be happening again. There's nothing magic about 18, it's a function of the culture and if the culture changes...
>What does it even mean to be an adult?
Most definitions of adult say something like: an adult is someone who is independent, self sufficient, and responsible for their own actions.
Now obviously being an adult (in the social sense) is more of a spectrum than a binary distinction, and those attributes I listed are more goals than hard requirements.
>You blame an external boogeyman you call "society" for the sins of the individual parents. I do not.
Society is just the action of individuals in the aggregate.
What determines the age at which we consider someone an adult? The answer is cultural norms. My argument is that the trend to treat 18-year-olds as children is growing to the point where more of them act like children than adults.
>Just because many coddle their kin doesn't mean all of society does. Not all kids should be treated as if they were once coddled.
There are 16-year-old kids who can act as capable adults, but the vast majority can't, so we consider them children. 300 years ago this wasn't the case--society changed and the length of childhood increased.
If society changes like this again (and I think it is) the length of childhood will again increase, regardless of whether some 18-year-old kids are capable of acting like adults.
Again, it's happened before. Societal shifts are made up of individual changes like parents "coddling" their children. I'm sure that 200 years ago many people considered not sending 14-year-old kids to work was "coddling".
I think the easiest to define mark of adulthood come when you're attempting to provide for yourself (and perhaps others). For many, college is essentially four years of an all-expenses paid vacation. This is hardly a time of maturity. It's fun as anything for sure, but at this point most people are consuming from the world and contributing little back.
Kids who have to work (for more than just spending money) or who have to play a large part in taking care of their siblings seem to grow up faster.
This is admittedly a somewhat boring answer to the question, if anyone thinks they have a better version of what adulthood is, I'm interested in hearing it.
I don't see older people behaving much better. They just do it in different ways over different issues. Just look at the news for endless examples of older adults behaving badly.
Yes this is true. There have always been adults who behave badly. However, that doesn't have anything to do with the changing length of childhood.
In cultures where a person was considered an adult at 15, there were older people behaving badly. And in cultures where a person is considered an adult at 18, there are older adults behaving badly.
This is not about adults killing or stealing or just acting like asses. This is a very specific issue. 18 year olds demanding that colleges treat them like children in order to protect them from being offended.
Ugh! I'm so sick of seeing the media flip out over.. all of this.
Did I miss something, or is this piece not attributed? If the author is not an educator than I'm not gonna trust their opinion on what's good for education. If they're not a minority I'm not gonna trust their opinion on safe spaces. Just a matter of having the right qualifications.
The title statement claims to have some insider knowledge as to what's a "worthwhile" protest, while at the same time dismissing concerns for space space as worthless. What in the ever living hell.
> The University of Missouri episode shows how damaging this confusion can be: some activists tried to prevent the college’s own newspaper from covering their demonstration, claiming that to do so would have endangered their safe space, thereby rendering a reasonable protest absurd.
That's "damaging" only to the media wanting to tear into the story so quickly. CRY ME A RIVER.
The Economist has its quirks, one of which is to never assign attribution. The newspaper itself stands behind everything printed. If you disagree with the article, you disagree with the institution's opinion.
It's both sad and terrifying to see what is transpiring on these college campuses. There was a video filmed ( now taken down from youtube ) where a Yale Silliman College professor was trying to reason with some of these students.
The professor vehemently defended the rights to free-speech, while the students screamed at him that offensive speech should not be allowed on campus.
When the professor asked, "Who should be responsible for determining what is offensive speech?", a student replied with, "Anything that offends me!".