Feminism

[Problem Machine]

I mean this just seems like the traditional focus group problem where something that has to go through a lot of filters ends up kind of bland. It hardly seems like a grand threat to freedom of speech that comics booked for free events on college campuses aren't booked to tell their rape jokes: Clowns booked for birthday parties usually don't either.

[Mangela Lansbury]

I would say the order of things I hear my academic friends complain about is state level politicians, administration, parents and then their actual students.  And these are the people working with students every day. 

 

I'm affiliated with a university and am friends with a lot of faculty, and people will complain about the regents, the administration, and the parents in an earnest, I can't do anything about this and it's infuriating way, but when they complain about the students it's in more of a, "I'm not reaching this person. How do I better reach this person?" way, or a "listen to this thing about this young little asshole" way. It's different in the tone and the amount of complaining, definitely.

 

But I also have a friend who works in Conflict Resolution (the university department committed to settling problems between students and students, and students and faculty), and there is a very real problem with students making mountains out of molehills. Not in a life ruining way, but in that naive way that young people do things. I think a lot of the perceived problem is that people attribute malice to what is a natural phenomenon for young people -- they're trying to prove themselves, so they commit to things that people who are more fully realized adults think are ridiculous. I don't think that's a problem. The university should provide a safe space for that kind of action, and a safe space for failure.

[BadHat]

I can't help but read those kinds of criticisms of college students as a natural extension of the old conservative line about colleges being brainwashing facilities for young libruls. Actually there are a lot of "moderate" arguments going around now that remind me of conservative talking points from 5-10 years ago.

 

Also that particular piece, and the earlier one about "new progressives," remind me of arguments I've personally made where I take a general trend and extrapolate it out way too far and then look back later and go "oops." It's easy for those big picture arguments to seem 100% logically consistent in your head at the time, until you realise you've stumbled over 1,000 obvious details to get there.

[Gormongous]

The university should provide a safe space for that kind of action, and a safe space for failure.

 

Quoted for truth. Also, all of these pieces just sound like older people, a little set in their ways, who are afraid of younger people judging them (or even just not listening to them). As a teacher actively working on a college campus (and having attended the "Iowa college" that the writer elliptically references), I can say with reasonable certainty that this is not the greatest issue facing college students. It's not even in ninth or tenth place. They could be writing about the indentured servitude of adjuncts or the corporatization of higher education, but instead they're writing out their anxieties about saying something awful and not getting a pass for it anymore.

 

Living around a college town, and having a college aged student, I do think the coddling of college kids is worse now than 20 years ago when I started school.  The difference between the dorm rooms the lady and I lived in versus the fucking suites they have now is staggering (at the same school, mind you).

 

To be completely fair, most of them are paying exponentially more than you did. New dorm projects attract more students, see my reference to the corporatization of higher education above.

[Patrick R]

On the flip side I live near DePaul University and 99% of the shitty hateful things I hear people say in public come from the mouths of those college students.

[jennegatron]

http://colleges.usnews.rankingsandreviews.com/best-colleges/depaul-university-1671

​

Judging from this + this

http://www.depaul.edu/about/Pages/key-facts.aspx

 

Here's what I can tell you about DePaul: tuition is expensive and financial aid isn't very generous. A full 2/3rds of the student body is from Illinois, and I would bet that 2/3rds of those are from the Chicago suburbs. These students likely fall into 1 of 2 camps. Either they're rich and not smart enough to get into Northwestern or University of Chicago or they may be Hispanic and the Roman Catholic affiliation is appealing to them.

 

When I was in high school DePaul sent me a lot of mail, and while there aren't that many people involved in the Greek system there, it always came across as very upper class and very bro-y.

 

When you pull a bunch of kids from Naperville into the city, and they go to a wealthy private college and may have to see people less privileged than them, they're probably going to say the most inane things.

 

(Also that school in Iowa, if it is indeed Grinnell as I suspect, I got waitlisted there, I think pretty much solely because neither my teacher nor guidance counselor turned my documents in before their deadline, and since we were on Christmas break, I had no way of reminding them. YES I'M STILL BITTER. NO I DIDN'T WANT TO GO THERE. Between the time I sent out my applications and when I got acceptances back, I had made up my mind where I wanted to go, and it wasn't to the middle of nowhere.)

[Patrick R]

My point was that maybe college kids are just the loudest and most obnoxious, regardless of how progressive or regressive their personal politics are. 

[jennegatron]

I think DePaul as a population is going to skew more conservative than many other schools.

 

On a slightly different note of 18 year olds saying absurd things, my senior year of college I heard a freshman at the bus stop claim that his friend had invented the act of drinking a beer in the shower, as if the bower has not existed for generations. (My favorite version of the bower, just from a naming perspective, is the bower in which you masturbate. You call it the 24, because it's a Jack Bauer)

[Bjorn]

To be completely fair, most of them are paying exponentially more than you did. New dorm projects attract more students, see my reference to the corporatization of higher education above.

 

I was actually curious about that when the kiddo moved into the dorms a few years ago, the price did outpace inflation, but it was only by about 20 percent (no where near the tuition difference between what I paid and what she was paying).  But on the corporatization side, I really wish there was still good investigative journalism around here, I'd kill to know (or be able to easily dig) into the finances that go into these dorm remodeling and new dorm projects.  But as part of that privatization, the student housing is (as far as I understand) a private corporation of which the university is a primary owner (just like the part of the athletics department that handles certain parts of the finances), which exempts it from certain disclosure laws.  That shit drives me up a wall, because it's just a bunch of smoke and work paperwork to reduce accountability and disclosure. 

[Deadpan]

I missed most of the discussion around it now, but I'm really not sure what people see in deBoer given that any time people link to a piece of his writing it seems to completely fail to do the nuances of the topic justice, like when we talked about callout culture here a while back, which he seems very fond of describing as needlessly disruptive. Yet telling people not to tear apart the left strikes me as quite similar to Mark Kern's ridiculous campaign to "heal the rift" in gaming: a way of telling people to stop voicing their legitimate grievances for the sake of a common cause, whether they believe in it or not, or whether they are being subsumed into this group against their will or not.

 

It's not that political collaboration isn't a decent goal, it's that it so often translates to self-righteously demanding support from folk because you claim to have their best interests in mind, while simultaneously telling them that they'll have to wait in line (indefinitely) before we can start addressing the issues that affect them. It's what you get when people actually start believing that being less terrible than the other candidate is an appealing proposal in and of itself. Any demand for further improvement is characterized as silly talk that jeopardizes the whole system.

 

I see that same "maintain unity where there is none" rhetoric in this article, for instance when he says:

 

Manarchist, dudebro …. These are terms that are typically employed as a cudgel against the left by centrist Democrats.

 

Perhaps that is the original use of the term, I don't know. But the way I typically see it used today is not centrists pointing out that political groups that wave the anti-discrimination flag still end up with curiously homogenous line-ups (which is a fair point to make), but women (among others) pointing out that the political alignment they identify with is being hogged by bunch of guys telling them how to care about these issues properly, and in what order they're allowed to care about them. Suggesting that these terms describe criticism from the outside world is effectively disavowing that women have any definatory power over that particular alignment.

[Apple Cider]

Yeah, I've definitely called dudes brocialists and manarchists because their own particular strain of leftist/socialist thought is still circumscribed by not recognizing that the patriarchy is still a thing.

[Mangela Lansbury]

Basically, a brocialist is that one guy from your philosophy 101 class who thinks the Great Leap Forward was actually a great leap forward and Mao is a super cool dude and we need to abolish ideas of class because, I mean, look at China, they're doin' great, c'mon man, can't you just get behind me on this.

 

I am ashamed of my past.

[Cordeos]

Basically, a brocialist is that one guy from your philosophy 101 class who thinks the Great Leap Forward was actually a great leap forward and Mao is a super cool dude and we need to abolish ideas of class because, I mean, look at China, they're doin' great, c'mon man, can't you just get behind me on this.

 

I am ashamed of my past.

You forgot the Che t-shirt.

[Apple Cider]

We need the revolution NOW, I don't care that I don't have plans for how to take care of people who can't immediately overthrow the government because it's unsafe for them to do so.

[Argobot]

DeBoer does have a point on how words lose their meaning and effectiveness when they are applied haphazardly. Mansplaining is another good example of a word that once signified something specific, but has now become so diffuse that it no longer feels like a subversive callout of a very real attitude some men have against women. But everyone knows that mansplaining is bad, so labeling someone as such is a really quick way to shut down their argument. I'm sure this kind of critique drift that DeBoer mentions happens on the Right as well, but since I'm concerned with how the Left progresses as a political movement, I'm more invested in fixing this problem among progressive people.

[Dewar]

Living around a college town, and having a college aged student, I do think the coddling of college kids is worse now than 20 years ago when I started school.  The difference between the dorm rooms the lady and I lived in versus the fucking suites they have now is staggering (at the same school, mind you).  That said, I think there is a whole bunch of hand wringing that goes on, and I thought that Seinfeld came off like a sheltered jackass in his earlier thing about this topic.  Kids aren't nearly as fragile or sensitive as some adults make them out to be.

 

I would say the order of things I hear my academic friends complain about is state level politicians, administration, parents and then their actual students.  And these are the people working with students every day.

Off topic: That's interesting about the college housing difference you're seeing. My old college still has mostly the same housing buildings as when I went, but now they try and cram 3 people into a room that had 2 in it before.

On Topic (the Kill All Men topic at least) I think that most people on here are probably aware that the .EXE files on your computer are "EXEcutables." Further, it makes sense that one term for running them is to execute them. A friend of mine that works at Microsoft loves to tell stories about the last stage of code compilation where they run the entire code base through a word filter to check for any bad words across 140 different languages (probably more, I dunno.) There's a lot of hilarity there when variable names end up coming close to some Chinese swear word and the discovery of what exactly that word means. However, it also flags execute as a sensitive word that shouldn't be used. I always thought that was weird, but then I realized that executions in the United States are fairly rare, but Windows ships out to countries where that shit happens, both government sanctioned and "illegally," a lot more than here. If I knew someone who had been executed, I'd probably be a lot less thrilled by being reminded of the event every time I ran a program in Windows.

[Gaizokubanou]

Maybe it also translates really poorly?  Execute having dual meaning (one to kill, one to simply carry out) might be English exclusive?  Then again, computer language translations are also odd cause so much of it is built on English compared to other aspects of language.  But yeah overall political and cultural climate can vary quite a lot and it's kinda integral to language so always interesting to hear translation details like that.

[Dewar]

The check is run after all the different languages are already in the product, so I assume only people who have the language set to English would actually see the word execute, and translators would have already handled any dual meaning issues. There are a lot of folks in other countries who run in English for various reasons, so I assume it was being sensitive to them, but who knows what MSLegal/Compliance is thinking.

[Bjorn]

The Coddling of the American Mind

 

So that Atlantic issue with the piece on comedy also has this really long piece on the...sensitivity of college kids?  I'm not sure that's the best way to put it. 

 

I don't agree with everything in it, but it presents a more compelling argument than several other pieces I've seen along this subject.  The increasing partisanship and antagonism of our culture, the generations of kids that have been way overprotected, institutional overreaction.  I think the article misses or leaves out some influences, like the increasing amounts of pressure that kids and college students are under.  How state budget cuts have affected the resources available to all levels of schools, and forced schools to look at students more and more in terms of their financial value to the school. 

 

I worry about trying to frame the concerns of minority or oppressed groups in terms of mental health, because that's the kind of framing that's been used as an oppressive tool in the past.  But on the same hand, some of the phenomena described are certainly things I experience or observe on a daily basis in virtually all facets of my life (either from my own thoughts, or watching other people's reactions to things).  Self-care for mental health ought to be as much a part of our education curriculum as teaching good things about physical health. 

 

But then I wonder if this isn't someone trying to take anecdotes and turn them into data.  20 years ago could you have found a similar number of extreme examples as these authors did if you had had the modern Internet available?  We know that the access to all national and global news has skewed our view of reality because the normal is minimized and the abnormal/uncommon is elevated. 

[itsamoose]

Whether or not it is a new thing is always a tough question, and one I don't think we'll ever get an answer to, but I think the change here is that the institutions themselves have adopted these pretty precarious positions.  I'm sure you could find hundreds of examples of women or minority groups getting kicked out of campuses back in the no so good good-old-days, though this information would be difficult to cobble together.  In reading this article the biggest question I came to was how does this affect the school or professors' ability to mediate disagreements?  I certainly was one of the people who would blow things out of proportion in my college days, and I would imagine people in college now wouldn't be any different, but there was always a mandate by the school to kind of bring the energy level down and act as the voice of reason.

[Zeusthecat]

I can kind of buy the argument that college kids can maybe be a bit too sensitive, but I think it has less to do with the current state of our society and more to do with age. When I was in my early 20s, it wasn't all that uncommon for me to get super worked up over things and blow them out of proportion because I was young, naive, idealistic, and just found it frustrating when things didn't work the way I thought they should work. But now that I'm at the ripe old age of 30, it's a whole lot easier to just not get too worked up about things and to understand that there are a whole lot of people with various life experiences that cause them to act in ways that don't make sense to me.

[Argobot]

This issue always leads to divisive discussion, so I want to preface what I'm about to say with I do not agree with everything in this article and I do not think this article mocks sexual assault victims or suggests that those with a history of sexual assault should just suck it up.

 

Trigger warnings started with really noble intentions, but it no longer seems that they are being used in the original way they were intended. Condelezza Rice may have done many things you disagree with politically, but preventing her from speaking at your campus seems like a bad precedent that only encourages groups of young progressives to remain in their progressive bubble. Providing TWs on books that contain examples of racism is fine, unless it is then used for students to avoid engaging with that material all together. Since the majority of college populations are made up of students who are largely white and affluent - and therefore have likely never experienced institutional racism - providing them with an avenue to disengage from potentially upsetting but instructive information is something I find very distressing.

 

For as many victims of sexual assault who say that TWs really help them cope, I see an almost equal number of people say that TWs do nothing for them. It seems like the actual benefit of TWs really depends on the person, like any mental health practice, so it might be a good policy to just blanket decide what works for half of the group should work for everyone. 

 

On its face, I see no problem with TWs for upsetting content. There's no harm in a professor who is about to teach Tess of D'Ubervilles letting her class know that the book contains rape, but there is harm in those students then using avoidance and the lawsuit-fearful college administration to either have the book banned or the professor reprimanded. I guess the real issue here is whether or not you believe TWs can be used without being abused, and it sadly seems that there is a lot of anecdotal evidence to suggest that this is not the case.

 

A few people in response to this article pointed out that adults can choose what media to consume and can avoid all these potentially upsetting topics. I have zero problem with a grown adult not wanting to read something containing rape; I am not a rape victim and I often avoid media like that because I find it upsetting, so I completely understand this inclination. What I do have a problem with is adults avoiding any material that presents a different, potentially upsetting worldview from their own. I don't expect people to go around reading white supremacist literature, but I do believe that to be a thoughtful person requires that you engage with people with whom you disagree with. The ease at which our world allows us to avoid anything we find remotely upsetting is not good and it is not good to encourage college students to start disengaging with parts of the world at an age when they should be exposed to a lot of diverse viewpoints.

[Gormongous]

In my experience, having offered trigger warnings a few times in my classes, I have never found the students who abused them to be students who would invariably find some other way to excuse themselves from engaging with the material, even just skipping class, were the trigger warnings not there. Maybe, somewhere out there, there are students who are perfectly happy to read everything I assign and to understand it, too, until trigger warnings are made an option, at which point they start shirking their implicit responsibilities as students out to learn the material, but I highly doubt it. Like Bjorn said, I think this article tries mightily to turn a dozen or so anecdotes into an actual trend, even citing other articles that do the same as corroboratory evidence, but I don't see it as particularly different than students have ever been, young and impulsive and sensitive and unpolitic. I have yet to talk in person to a student or a professor who's actually encountered this supposed phenomenon of "runaway PC culture," and I went to one of the most liberal colleges in the nation and now teach at a conservative Catholic university. It's all just articles on the internet.

 

I don't know. Overall, it's my opinion that students have never lacked for ways to avoid material that makes them uncomfortable, whether that discomfort comes from boredom or distress.

[Deadpan]

Somebody may have already made that point regarding the misandry discussion we've now moved on from, but I think it may be useful to think of #KillAllMen as ultimately not dissimilar from #AllLivesMatter. Both are presumably said with decent intentions (to mock toxic masculinity or reassert the value of all human life), but both take a generalizing, non-specific perspective that feels wrongheaded in the specific context of these conversations (some lives being disproportionately in danger of being ended prematurely by police violence, and feminism's history of neglecting queer, trans, race etc. issues that also affect men, as well as stuff like white MRAs killing men of color with the stated intention of protecting white women). That's not to say they're the same, just possibly similar.

 

 

The Coddling of the American Mind

 

I generally agree with what Lana Polansky had to say on this.

 

The entire framing of this conversation strikes me as very disingenuous. The article complains that we're treating students like babies, but it seems to me that providing people with the tools and opportunity to make informed choices about how, when and if they consume certain material is actually a far less patronizing position than unilaterally deciding what's best for people. It's said that this will allow privileged students to avoid challenging material, but being able to comfortably avoid confronting certain ugly realities is something their privilege already allows them to do. Professors share these horror stories of people abusing the system, as if trigger warnings were the cause of student laziness and not the excuse they cite, as if students never before worked their way around reading something even if it's required, as if students automatically take something to heart if they read it.

[itsamoose]

The entire framing of this conversation strikes me as very disingenuous. The article complains that we're treating students like babies, but it seems to me that providing people with the tools and opportunity to make informed choices about how, when and if they consume certain material is actually a far less patronizing position than unilaterally deciding what's best for people. It's said that this will allow privileged students to avoid challenging material, but being able to comfortably avoid confronting certain ugly realities is something their privilege already allows them to do. Professors share these horror stories of people abusing the system, as if trigger warnings were the cause of student laziness and not the excuse they cite, as if students never before worked their way around reading something even if it's required, as if students automatically take something to heart if they read it.

 

I had a slightly different reading on the article, mainly it being a condemnation of the universities' handling of trigger warnings.  Sure students will try to get out of doing work, but the way the university handles trigger warnings allows them a reasonable means of getting out of doing that work, and possibly even preventing other students from realizing the full extent of their education.  The students seem to now have the means to determine what is worth learning, and in some cases any challenge to these notions results in some punishment for the professor.  The article's premise, at least from my reading of it, isn't that students are whiny babies but that universities are creating highly sanitized, anodyne environments for financial reasons.