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I don't think it's fair to equate berating a professor for weeks because his wife wrote an E-mail with students not wanting to support a company who is active in the destruction of a third world country. I think you illustrate my frustration with this kind of thing-- it tends to view missteps as intentional, violent acts. I also don't think it's necessarily confined to the university campus either. Every time I go to breitbart I know at least half the articles will be berating well known liberals, and at Huffington Post the same will be true for well known conservatives. It's become fashionable to value a person entirely on one thing they've said or done, and there seems to be no upper limit on what the punishment for that is. People have been fired, marginalized, what have you, for having the wrong opinions, but Gap still makes their clothes in sweatshops, Exxon is still stealing land from poor farmers, and so on. I think at a certain point you have to admit this kind of activism is fundamentally selfish.

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I do think it's well within the realm of concern to take a look at overreaction, which I believe is often unintentional, but a completely anticipated outcome now.  That was my point in bringing up the way the two Yale professors were being treated, not that it represented the over sensitivity of college kids, but that it follows the same trend of overreactive smack downs that follow so many public fuckups.  I also have the same reaction to the people being harassed in my earlier link about the journalists at Mizzou.  The mass comm professor fucked up, but doesn't deserve the volume of shit she's getting either. 

 

 

 

I'm seeing something interesting (and not surprising) go down on Facebook today.  I have a lot of western Kansas farm and ranch types on my feed, and a lot of them are talking about how two Sheriff's deputies shot and killed an Idaho rancher a few days ago.  The rancher had a gun in his hands and was in the process of putting an injured bull down when something went horribly wrong and the result was him being shot to death.  The interesting thing is how many of these people are calling for a full investigation that must result in the two deputies being charged with murder, because obviously the rancher's wife is telling the truth.  These are all the same people who lose their shit defending the police when it's a black person killed.  Not that I expect any of them to have an epiphany about cops killing other people, of course.

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I don't think it's fair to equate berating a professor for weeks because his wife wrote an E-mail with students not wanting to support a company who is active in the destruction of a third world country. I think you illustrate my frustration with this kind of thing-- it tends to view missteps as intentional, violent acts.

 

Okay, for starters, it hasn't been "weeks." Christakis wrote the email on October 30, so it's been just over a week on the outside, even if the outrage and escalation of that outage was immediate. Said email is full of remarkably dumb, offensive, and dismissive things. Comparing the students to pre-school children by implying that her knowledge on the latter is transferable to the former, she says that offense is something that a person chooses to feel and that all opinions are equal in that regard. This is someone who's supposed to be an advocate for the students and instead she's saying, "Don't rock the boat," in multiple different ways. Despite this clear failure in compassion, she hasn't apologized, nor has her husband for his tone-deaf attempts to justify his wife's ill-considered words. No, the administration took six days to apologize generally for the hurt that the email caused, without apologizing for the email itself, which is classic damage control, and then Nicholas Christakis met with the students in person, saying things that made it plain he felt his wife had done no real harm. So... a lecturer sends out an email encouraging minorities to be doormats in the name of fairness, the administration gives an apology that carefully admits no fault, the lecturer's spouse confronts the ongoing outrage to it as a matter of abstract ideals, and we're sitting here wondering why the students are still upset?

 

Above all, if students are hurt, angry, or scared, they can't and won't learn. Anyone I know who's an educator can tell you that you need to have trust and respect really to be effective at teaching students anything. The current obsession in mainstream media and public discourse with forcing college students to confront the nebulous "hard truths" of systemic racism and sexism, embodied in the people charged with their education and support, is antithetical to building a classroom and campus where students can learn. If one of my black students had taken Christakis' advice and had a calm discussion with a fraternity brother who'd chosen to wear blackface for his costume, I don't think that they'd be enlightened by the interaction. What's to learn there that a lifetime in American society hasn't already taught them? No, the consequences of that conversation would be (at best) to distress or (at worse) to enrage them, so that they come into my classroom on Monday as closed-off and disengaged as that girl in Spring Valley High before the police officer started throwing her around. That kind of teacher-knows-best-what-you-need paternalism in higher education is becoming obsolete, in my opinion.

 

Erika Christakis' email emphasizes the need to talk to people and understand them for the shitty things they say and do, but it doesn't seem like she had any experience talking to people of color or other minorities about why they get upset and choose not to talk. That's fuckin' hard to hear, in a society where Ferguson is still a thing, and I don't fault any of the students in the video confronting Nicholas Christakis for their anger, as poorly as it plays on the national news. They're teenagers, they're expected to overreact and be upset and act selfishly. Christakis is the adult not getting the value of apologizing and being contrite, instead choosing to start a debate with them about their feelings. The presumption there is infuriating to me, honestly.

 

 

EDIT: The most bizarre thing to me, reading the article in the Atlantic again, is how baffled the author makes himself out to be that a student would walk away from a conversation with Nicholas Christakis after catching the drift of the latter's intent. Imagine, for a second, that an acquaintance says something incredibly hurtful to you, maybe reminding you of something one of your parents did that really fucked you up in the past, and you don't talk with them for days. When, finally, they contact you about talking, you agree because you expect an apology. You had let them know how much they hurt you, surely their first impulse is going to answer that hurt. Then you meet with them and realize that an apology isn't forthcoming, they just want to explain to you why they disagree with you being hurt. In a gesture of good faith, they offer to have you over for dinner, to explain that disagreement in full. Would you walk away, saying, "You don't deserve to be listened to?" I probably would, if I was angry enough. I try not to be, but then I'm not in my late teens anymore.

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The email really isn't that bad unless you want it to be. What she is saying is pretty standard in the world of developmental psychology, even mundane stuff. I know this sounds odd, but in the world of developmental psychology the idea that play shouldn't be structured at all is standard. She even takes the time to point out that her opinion is based on her professional understanding of her life's work. Could you be upset by it? Sure. Does that justify demanding aa person be fired, or removed from their position? She doesn't ask the students to be doormats about the issue, she urges them to express their anger at the idea rather than the person. Also, the man in the video's wife wrote the email, why does that make him not worth listening to? The idea that the students reactions are justified assumes the people they are talking to have the same perspective as then, and not having that is bad. Those reactions aren't about proving a point- they are to make yourself feel better. And you're right about the weeks thing, that was autocorrect.

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For an academic to assume that her knowledge of preschoolers applies to these college students, many of whom are people of color, is incredibly presumptuous. Young people of color are more than familiar with being spoken down to by well meaning white ladies. For her to respond to a request to avoid offensive & appropriative halloween costumes with a comparison to a child wanting to dress as Mulan is so much missing the point that I can't even begin. Maybe if we had honest discussions of race with those children, there would be no need to send an email to the Yale student body to not use black face or dress as an Arab terrorist, but apparently it's necessary. It was incredibly ill considered to respond the way she did. Telling students of color who or what they should be mad at and why is incredibly condescending and I totally understand why the student body reacted the way it did.

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The email really isn't that bad unless you want it to be. What she is saying is pretty standard in the world of developmental psychology, even mundane stuff. I know this sounds odd, but in the world of developmental psychology the idea that play shouldn't be structured at all is standard. She even takes the time to point out that her opinion is based on her professional understanding of her life's work. Could you be upset by it? Sure. Does that justify demanding aa person be fired, or removed from their position? She doesn't ask the students to be doormats about the issue, she urges them to express their anger at the idea rather than the person. Also, the man in the video's wife wrote the email, why does that make him not worth listening to? The idea that the students reactions are justified assumes the people they are talking to have the same perspective as then, and not having that is bad. Those reactions aren't about proving a point- they are to make yourself feel better. And you're right about the weeks thing, that was autocorrect.

 

For me, it boils down to presupposing the legitimacy of the students' viewpoints, as participants in and the pretext for an intellectual culture here in academia. The biggest effort for me, as a teacher, is to get students to voice their opinions, to own them, and to feel good about that. It takes so much work to get the average freshman to do the work and speak up in class, I'd be overjoyed to have students speaking and acting out like they are in these articles about the protests. I don't care that their motives for doing so seem unworthy to me or anyone else, at least they're engaged in the culture of an academic institution. In light of this, I'm deeply troubled by the apparent preference of so many people to defend the speech of university authorities, professors and administrators, over the speech of their students. If the intent is to show that responsibility and consideration needs to accompany personal expression, then why don't the authorities make the first move, as the adults in the situation, rather than the teenagers whom these authorities have offended? It doesn't really matter if the authorities (or random bystanders) feel that they're justified in their actions, it's not like the students don't feel the same way. Compassion and empathy are as much liberal values as free speech, but they regularly get left behind because someone's job has been threatened (although probably not seriously) and kids just need to take their lumps. Fuck that, I say.

 

I also really don't want to get into a disagreement about whether or not the email is offensive. It is not offensive to me, but I see literally dozens of statements that are entirely justifiable prompts for someone else's offense. Overall, emphasizing the value of "free speech" over the value of freely-expressed offense is emphasizing the oppressiveness of the status quo to minorities. To take examples directly from the email, it is more important for Erika Christakis to be able to wear a sari and imitate a foreign accent in the name of "play" than for an Indian student to have a night free from middle-class white women wearing his or her culture as a Halloween costume. Honestly, I see it no different than the "free speech" argument asserting that not wanting to hear rape jokes in a comedy routine makes you an enemy of that culture as a whole. It's not about censorship or silencing dissent, it's about not wanting to deal with assholes, however unintentional their assholery. The fact that Christakis sent out an email putting the onus on students not to let assholes provoke them into offense is so telling to me.

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Except for the power of a national-scale news outlet aggregating the reactions of dozens upon dozens of different students to a campus scandal, making it seem a massive and coordinated response by the entire student body, I don't see anything particularly out of the ordinary here for a university campus, neither when I went to college a dozen years ago or when I teach at a college today.

...snip

Sorry, I know I'm being glib, but I can't emphasize enough how this "coddled college culture" phenomenon seems manufactured to me. Campus scandals have always been like this, if my time reading back issues of my university's newspaper has anything to say about it, but now there's the infrastructure for them to get national attention and a cottage industry devoted to spinning them into a pattern of problems leading to... something bad? I had more I wanted to write, but there's a recent article in the New Republic, another publication that's made some hay in the past on the moral panic over trigger warnings, that covers most of my broader thoughts about the changing dynamics of sensitivity and tolerance in campus culture as a whole: http://www.newrepublic.com/article/122543/trigger-warning-myth

 

Wonderful post.  You should combine your recent comments into a medium article or something.  I can't even count the number of hot takes I'm seeing this week on pc culture run amok, the same pundits going back to the story multiple times in the same week.

 

For me, the issue thing was summed up by someone on twitter with: "If I got into an argument with my condominium manager would it make national news?"

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An activist I'm friends with in St. Louis made this comment about the Mizzou journalist stuff:

 

The learning curve for the student protesters: 24 hours.
For the University of Missouri: 65 years.

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That Atlantic article is pretty amazing. It says a lot more about the author than it does the situation - so much so that I had to look him up: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conor_Friedersdorf The whole part where he talks about the plight of the white male student is pretty amazing...

 

I wonder why the husband is involved in defending his wife. It was her name on the email so why is he involved? Is it just because he is "master" of the residence hall?

 

I was a grad student at a big 10 college for a decade where I taught pretty much every semester and now i'm an adjunct at a smaller midwestern college and i'm not sure what generalization I can make about college students. I started to write about a consumer/"customer is always right" mentality among students but upon reflection I can't really say that I have experienced it. Sure students get upset when they don't get good grades but with few exceptions they don't make a big deal of it when I explain their grade to them (and the one time a student did make a big deal it was such a clear cut situation that there was little chance anything would come of it).

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I have been thinking a little bit more about why pushback against university officials, whether professors or administrators, is so often interpreted as "silencing dissent." Maybe it boils down to this quote, which has resurfaced on Facebook and Twitter recently:

 

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This quote can be rephrased in several different ways, all of which ring true to me. For my purposes right now, the most relevant phrasing is that, if you don't respect an authority as an authority, you're not respecting them as a person. That's how the one student in the Atlantic article, who flatly states that Christakis doesn't deserve the attention for his explanations, is transformed into a villain, simply by expressing lack of interest in hearing him out. Denying a tenured professor at one of the nation's most prestigious universities an audience is tantamount to denying him his voice, just like denying his authority is tantamount to denying him personhood. If students believe in the values of liberal democracy, they should be obligated or even compelled to hear him out in full, whenever he wants, because otherwise he isn't able to exercise his freedom of speech. If there's been a better example for the experience of privilege over the oppressed lately, I haven't heard it

 

Overall, the politics of authority, namely its self-legitimizing purview to arbitrate all social interactions, are so fascinating to me. When I worked retail at a bookstore, during my year off between college and grad school, I had customers ask for my job on a weekly basis. As far as I can recall, the reasons were never as clear-cut as (say) me composing a long and patronizing email about the need for minorities to be more tolerant and understanding of mainstream culture. One time, I wouldn't open up a sealed boxset of The Sporanos in order to sell a customer the exclusive bonus disc inside. Another time, I wouldn't show a customer the second floor that our strip-mall location didn't have. The worst time, the time that got me sent home, was when I wouldn't accept a return in November for a book that the customer had received in July. It had no stickers or receipts, but when I told the customer that, she went off on this wild tirade about the power trips that retail employees have when really we're at best cogs and at worst grease in the machine. I told her that she didn't have to talk to me like that, and she said, "Today's the last day you work here." Even though I am white, male, and reasonably handsome, I still worked in constant fear of saying the wrong thing while helping a customer find a book they didn't even know they wanted and having them make enough of a scene that I'd be fired. Where are the Atlantic articles about my freedom of speech being sacrificed on the altar of some soccer mom's bad day? I guess I didn't have enough authority for my personhood to be threatened.

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I think I agree with the basic ideas and premises of that post, but if it was meant to be in response to the Atlantic article it completely ignores the specifics of the situation.  First off, the guy in the video was being berated because of an e-mail his wife sent.  He was being told he wasn't worth listening to because of something his wife said.  I don't see how someone can reasonably justify that without twisting themselves into some ideological corner where the principle of the thing is all that matters, and anyone who sees it as having any merit at all is guilty by association.  Second, she didn't tell the students they were children.  She expressed a very common, 101 level idea in developmental psychology.  Namely that play should not be structured, and that there is no evidence that suggests that should change later in a person's development.  This has been a common theme of the field since the 80s at least, it's just not particularly well known, and developmental psychology is typically thought of being the domain of children who don't know better by virtue of it's name.  In fact, developmental psychology has quite a bit to say about people much later in life--development is not something that ever stops--it's just that in most situations the study is focused on children for no other reason than it is easy to study children.  I mean she even makes the point that this lack of structure extends to removing gendered barriers with the reference to a boy dressing up as mulan.  I've read the e-mail a couple times through, and I can't see a situation in which someone could find it offensive unless they wanted to.  The email is simply the observations of a developmental psychologist as they relate to play, the main thing seeming to be that the opinion she expresses is not (for lack of a better phrase) concerned about being tonally or opinionated in a way that is different from me.  The students' response to this disagreement wasn't to confront the argument but to confront the person.  To get them removed from their positions, to scream at them, and so on.  I bet there is a situation in which what you are talking about makes sense, but this is not that situation.  I think the assertion that he is using respect as a means of denying a person's humanity takes so many leaps of logic as to be pure speculation, and not a reasonable basis for the rejection of his position.  I don't know if it's worth going over this anymore, but what bothers me about this style of thinking is that it is the very same thing we see out of gamergame, and often complain about.  We often see something horrible done and see the specific actions as what constitute it being a bad thing, but if you read an article by one of their supporters or vanguards they always argue the principle of the matter as justification.  While we may agree with the premises of the students, I don't think we can reasonably admit that a person not using the tone you would want them to use is enough to discredit their opinion.

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It's late and I have to get up early, so I'll just put out an outline that I can fill out tomorrow at work, if I feel like it.

  • Nicholas Christakis was being "berated" for appearing in front of protesting students to defend the premise of the offending email rather than to give redress for its effects. He went out to talk with the students, when the administration's apology for his wife's email proved insufficient to answer their protests, and then had the temerity to "disagree" with the offense that they took and with his implicit culpability in it. Honestly, thinking about it makes me want to berate him, too. What was he thinking, that they just hadn't read the email properly? Why should you bother listening to someone that clueless?
  • Erika Christakis took the original IAC email, which suggested that students be mindful of others' feelings when choosing their costumes for Halloween, and rebutted it with an extremely unfocused meditation on the psychological and sociological cost of being mindful of others' feelings. In my eyes, it was the direct equivalent of walking into a poor black neighborhood and trying to engage passers-by on the necessity of the police as the manifestation of the state's monopoly of violence in a well-ordered society. She's not exactly wrong, per se, but why now and why at all? What possessed her to take concrete advice about an actual problem that students were facing and use it as the pretext to start an intellectual debate that was not only inappropriate but unhelpful? I don't know.
  • People were offended. I'm sorry that you don't understand or agree with the legitimacy of their feelings, but isn't your opinion rather irrelevant on that count? To take an example removed from campus politics, you can't look at Mitt Romney's "binders" from 2012 comment and tell women that his intent is clear, even if his wording is poor, so they must just want to have been offended by it. In fact, "wanting to be offended" is a pernicious sort of thing to say, because it places the blame for pain on the recipient and not on the agent that inflicted it. We are all responsible for the effects that our words have, even if we cannot anticipate or account for a given effect.
  • It's funny that you talk about the protesters standing on principle to the detriment of others, because isn't that exactly what both of the Christakis have been doing? From my own experience, I am sure that a prompt apology the moment that it appeared Erika Christakis' email was having an adverse effect, something to the tune of "I realize now that I was treating the damage caused by cultural appropriation as a theoretical exercise and not the lived experience for hundreds of students at Yale," would have prevented further protests. At the very least, it is extremely hard to call for the resignation of someone who appears to understand what they did wrong and regret it because it was wrong. However, they left it to the administration at first and later appeared in public only to double down. Apologizing would have cost them nothing, but they chose to took a stand on an email that a lot of people, right-leaning cultural critics aside, have had no trouble finding problematic. I think that's called "laying in the bed you've made."
  • If you think that the problem with Nicholas Christakis' response to the student protesters was his tone... Okay, I'm officially out of energy. You're saying that screaming at him was the wrong thing to do, but isn't that just tone, too? Are some tones different than others, or just some people?

Oh! Side note (or maybe a chance to move the conversation here forward) that the New Republic published another article, from a black woman who's graduated from Yale, that works the Yale protests into a discussion of the ongoing Mizzou protests as perspective on student activism. Its synopsis of the Yale protests has a lot overlap with my comments, but it's worth reproducing here because Roxane Gay is a better writer than me:

 

At Yale, the Intercultural Affairs Committee, composed of diversity administrators from across the university, sent students an email before Halloween, imploring them to be more thoughtful about their costume choices—to avoid offensive cultural appropriation or misrepresentation. “Halloween is also unfortunately a time when the normal thoughtfulness and sensitivity of most Yale students can sometimes be forgotten and some poor decisions can be made including wearing feathered headdresses, turbans, wearing ‘war paint’ or modifying skin tone or wearing blackface or redface,” the letter read, in part.

 

The counsel in this letter may have felt paternalistic, but given how many college students have historically chosen to paint themselves in blackface and otherwise tread upon cultures and common sense, the email was certainly well-intended and not out of the ordinary. Some students complained nonetheless.

 

Lecturer Erika Christakis, associate master of Yale’s Silliman College (an administrative role essentially equivalent to a dean of student life), wrote an email responding to the students troubled by the IAC’s letter. With willfully detached intellectual curiosity, she argued that it’s fine for students to be students and to make mistakes—for children, in a word, to be children.

 

I wonder and I am not trying to be provocative: Is there no room anymore for a child or young person to be a little bit obnoxious … a little bit inappropriate or provocative, or yes offensive? American universities were once a safe space not only for maturation but also for a certain regressive, or even transgressive, experience; increasingly, it seems, they have become places of censure and prohibition.


It is seductive in theory: Why not let people indulge their basest whims? Why not encourage unchecked curiosity?

 

Christakis did, however, intentionally misread the letter the Intercultural Affairs Committee sent; the committee did not prohibit anything, nor did it suggest that it wanted to. The organization simply offered suggestions to create for Yale students a better world than the one we live in. Christakis, on the other hand, suggests we take our arguments out of their real-world context—eliding real people in the process—and instead move them into the realm of the theoretical, where no one can feel hurt.

 

In the real world, though, we have to question the cost of the transgression Christakis argues for so eloquently, and who will pay the price. For some, these matters are engaging intellectual exercises. For others, they are matters of dignity, emotional wellbeing, and safety. Hundreds of Yale students have not taken kindly to Christakis’s suggestions, protesting her words and calling for the resignations of both her and her husband Nicholas, Silliman College’s master—the principal faculty member “responsible for the physical well being and safety” of students in his residence hall. Neither faculty member should resign or even apologize, but the students are well within their rights to protest the troubling spirit of Christakis’s email.

 

In The Atlantic, Conor Friedersdorf took offense to some of the people involved in the protest, labeling them intolerant. “They’re behaving more like Reddit parodies of ‘social-justice warriors’ than coherent activists, and I suspect they will look back on their behavior with chagrin,” he wrote, espousing the curious notion that protest should be a polite and demure endeavor that pleases everyone.

 

I have to say, I disagree that an apology is not necessary from one or both of the Christakis. Apologies cost literally nothing and I've never understood the insistence of university administration to have officials do it rather than the offending parties. Still, maybe Gay's point is that an apology would have no effect now, two weeks out from the email with multiple failures in diplomacy since then. I might agree there...

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The point about the apology illustrates my frustration perfectly. You express an opinion that someone finds offensive, for whatever reason, and the only legitimate recourse is to recant that opinion, apologize, and admit it is a wrong opinion. That kind of thinking simply does not allow for disagreement, and suggests that only correct or popular opinions are legitimate. It treats anything that offends you, for whatever reason, as illegitimate and unworthy of consideration. That is my frustration with this mode of thinking, and it is one I see as becoming more common. It simply gets ignored or excused by people that agree with whatever offense has taken place.

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The point about the apology illustrates my frustration perfectly. You express an opinion that someone finds offensive, for whatever reason, and the only legitimate recourse is to recant that opinion, apologize, and admit it is a wrong opinion. That kind of thinking simply does not allow for disagreement, and suggests that only correct or popular opinions are legitimate. It treats anything that offends you, for whatever reason, as illegitimate and unworthy of consideration. That is my frustration with this mode of thinking, and it is one I see as becoming more common. It simply gets ignored or excused by people that agree with whatever offense has taken place.

 

When you talk about admitting a "wrong opinion" as one component of an apology, I think you are losing a distinction between the correct thing to say and the right thing to say. If someone is mourning the death of a friend, it would be correct for you to say that mourning can't bring them back and that they should move on with their life, but it wouldn't be the right thing for you to say and I don't think that they would be out of line to expect an apology from you. Neither would someone be wrong to expect an apology if you made truthful criticisms about them several hours before a car accident or a breakup. Being correct in your words does not excuse you from accountability towards the people whom those words may hurt, regardless of intent. To make their recognition of your correctness a precondition to your recognition of their hurt is a deeply immature position to take, in my eyes. The legitimacy of an opinion is not only tied up in its content, but also in its time, place, and manner. That's why the latter three are a frequent set of restrictions placed upon freedom of speech in US law.

 

Just a few minutes ago, a friend of mine linked to a timeline of events at Yale, which shows that much of the student protesters's outrage stems from the university administration's seeming indifference to several incidents with a racial dimension to them, the email being just the most publicized one. Looking over it, it seems difficult to deny that Erika and Nicholas Christakis chose an exceptionally poor moment to champion transgressive costume-wearing as part and parcel with the values of liberal democracy. Really, beyond a certain point, reasonable people (like a university professor and a dean of student life) ought to be able to see that the pain, distress, and insult inflicted on others by their opinion, however correct or sincere it happens to be, outweighs the utility of that opinion as part of the public discourse. At that point, I do expect them to apologize, even if there was nothing else "wrong" with their opinion besides the offense it caused. There simply is no other alternative, since it is worse than useless to disagree with someone over the hurt that they are feeling.

 

Opinions have no corporeal form. They cannot be defaced or destroyed. If the moment is not ripe for them, they will keep until another day, indefinitely if need be. The same cannot be said for the happiness and dignity of fellow human beings. That is how I determine my priorities in complicated situations such as the one at Yale.

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Sigh.

In unrelated news NZ Prime Minister John Key stating that his political opponents in a debate about the Australian led deportation of New Zealanders and their confinement in the already controversial Australian Refugee Detention Centres (never mind the daily human rights abuses that occur there) are backing rapists while he backs New Zealanders caused mass offence as many women in parliament stood up and started speaking about their offence and experiences with sexual assault and were promptly ejected from the chamber which lead to a mass walk out on the part of mostly Green and Labour MPs in protest of the PM John Key not apologising.

 

 It's just been really gross seeing this. Seeing the speaker of the house silencing these women who are coming forward and talking about their offence and experiences, many for the first time. Meanwhile the PM has been complaining about the amount of abuse he's been receiving over these comments and still there's no apology.

 

Watching the videos and interviews made about this has demonstrated for me what silencing culture is about; when the PM says something like that in an attempt to win banter points in a parliamentary debate and is not reprimanded in any way while people who have actually experience what he's making light of are talking about why his comments are so hurtful and are speaking about the power of using this type of accusation as 'banter' to many of the people who are victim to it and are well, further shat upon by a culture of people who treat sexual assault as the victim's fault and feel like it's pretty fine to bant about but treat it as a disruptive topic to bring up when someone wants to say how hurtful it is.

I think from now on if someone wants to debate on what privilege is in a 'real world' context I can show them this incident. Where someone not affected by sexual assault can make a disruptive claim like John Key has and have his party's appointed speaker silence and throw out people who are affected and experienced with sexual assault for.. causing a disruption.

 

Prime Minister John Key says he does not need to apologise to women MPs about his comments on rape because he is a strong advocate for victims of crime.

Mr Key also said abuse had been "hurled at him" this week by people who were standing up for criminals. link

 

Funnily enough there's more than a few echoes of this within debates about "PC culture gone MAD" amongst people focusing on college campuses.

 

Also what I'm hearing at least from some journalists is that this might be John Key's version of Lynton Crosby's 'Dead Cat' trick of changing a conversation. Essentially after a labour MP on a tv show called JK 'weak' in his attitude toward Australian Deportations he decided to punch down on these issues and change the conversation on how weak he is to how much of a bully he is; using sexual violence as fodder.

 

Meanwhile we have a well sourced post detailing the budget cuts to Woman's Refuge, the closing of Rape Crisis support centres, and the struggling state of our sexual assault support community after cuts to their public funding over sums as low as $30,000 which is peanuts comparatively for a government budget. All done over JK's three terms of office and all showing how he sticks up for rape victims and New Zealanders.

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Just a few minutes ago, a friend of mine linked to a timeline of events at Yale, which shows that much of the student protesters's outrage stems from the university administration's seeming indifference to several incidents with a racial dimension to them, the email being just the most publicized one.

 

Adding to this link are a few others sent to me by friends and acquaintances on university campuses:

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As someone who is still learning about all this stuff, and still holds prejudices, that I am now aware of and actively working to stop...how do I actually...do anything to help people? Reading what people write about and making sure I don't say horrible things feels pretty empty to me.

It's better than being an asshole, but only in the sense that it's neutral rather than negative behaviour.

I will recommend looking for opportunities to help folks become more capable of helping folks be more capable of helping folks. The details of how this can be done is often personal, and circumstantial.

An example would be to be patient in everyday interactions, learn to recognize what it looks like when someone is ready to help others be more capable but lacks a tool (you can provide) to do it, and try to make yourself available to them. In your quest to do this, I recommend being aware of and constantly questioning your evaluation methods because they will tend to favor people similar to yourself (which isn't necessarily bad, but something worth being aware of). I also recommend being able to say "no" because some people just horde free-labor.

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http://nymag.com/scienceofus/2015/11/myth-of-the-fragile-college-student.html

What separates present-day moral panics about college students from past ones is that we live in a golden age for confirmation bias. We have greater, more intimate access to scenes from campus life than ever before, which makes it easier than ever before to slip into the trap of “I’m sure this thing is happening because I see evidence it’s happening.” But prior to YouTube and Twitter and the morass of think pieces choking the internet anew every morning, there were also campus-politics freak-outs, there were also nervous breakdowns in counseling centers, there were also tragedies involving students and their mental health — and there were also adults proffering cultural theories for why everything was falling apart.

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The protests at Mizzou and Yale have spread to some other campuses, including KU.  KU students are now calling for the firing of a professor after she showed that she's an ignorant asshat in a discussion about how TAs can handle discussions of racism in the communications classes. 

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I feel kind of weird about that for some reason. While she may be an ignorant asshat, I'm just not sure that I agree that people should be stripped of their jobs and livelihoods simply for displaying an ignorant attitude about a pressing social issue. Now if there is a clear history of discriminatory and racist remarks from the professor, that is one thing. And maybe that's the case here.

 

I don't know, at first glance, this seems like it might actually be an example of outrage culture going just a tad too far. I just feel like maybe there is some path forward here that is maybe a step or two below just straight up firing her.

 

Edit: Well I guess if the stuff in that last section is accurate then it sounds like she was a pretty miserable person and maybe has a history of being shitty. So, eh, maybe this is fine then.

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I generally try to be an advocate for second chances, people fuck up and need room to grow.  But, in this specific situation, my understanding is that she serves in a supervisory/training/director role over graduate teachers, and the fallout of her words in that discussion are such that she's lost the respect and authority she had over the people she's supposed to be training.  I don't know that she needs to be removed from the university, but if someone in a leadership position fails hard enough, they may have put themselves in a position of simply no longer being able to execute their job duties anymore. 

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I really dislike that jobs are dependent for survival in American society. When considering that someone isn't a good fit for a position, it's distracting to know that the their ability to live in a building, eat, and pay for medical bills is being threatened. If jobs were just positions of pride, staffing would be done much more efficiently imo.

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I really dislike that jobs are dependent for survival in American society. When considering that someone isn't a good fit for a position, it's distracting to know that the their ability to live in a building, eat, and pay for medical bills is being threatened. If jobs were just positions of pride, staffing would be done much more efficiently imo.

 

Yesyesyesyesyes

 

Nations like USA should really just move on from 'survival-motivated-economy' and move towards thriving focused one.

 

I keep fantasizing about a society where homeless shelters are more like a college dorm (no roommate version since the whole point is to drastically improve safety), with some generic stock food available (thinking of 2 boxes of instant ramen per month allowance (so that it's not necessarily wasted on people who don't want it)).

 

There is some serious hypocrisy in trying to tell people to exclude violent or other unsavory means as part of their living while at the same time very essentials of survival is largely contested.

 

And it's just awful to have such powerful society operate on labor that's strongly tied to fear of death.

 

Huh, maybe that explains a whole lot about American politics...

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