Senate The Atlantic on Trigger Warnings and College (TRIGGER WARNING: Trigger Warnings, Recursion)

Here is The Atlantic's take on the state of the college student's psyche, or lack thereof:

http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2015/09/the-coddling-of-the-american-mind/399356/

Summary:

This new climate is slowly being institutionalized, and is affecting what can be said in the classroom, even as a basis for discussion. During the 2014–15 school year, for instance, the deans and department chairs at the 10 University of California system schools were presented by administrators at faculty leader-training sessions with examples of microaggressions. The list of offensive statements included: “America is the land of opportunity” and “I believe the most qualified person should get the job.”

The press has typically described these developments as a resurgence of political correctness. That’s partly right, although there are important differences between what’s happening now and what happened in the 1980s and ’90s. That movement sought to restrict speech (specifically hate speech aimed at marginalized groups), but it also challenged the literary, philosophical, and historical canon, seeking to widen it by including more-diverse perspectives. The current movement is largely about emotional well-being. More than the last, it presumes an extraordinary fragility of the collegiate psyche, and therefore elevates the goal of protecting students from psychological harm. The ultimate aim, it seems, is to turn campuses into “safe spaces” where young adults are shielded from words and ideas that make some uncomfortable. And more than the last, this movement seeks to punish anyone who interferes with that aim, even accidentally. You might call this impulse vindictive protectiveness. It is creating a culture in which everyone must think twice before speaking up, lest they face charges of insensitivity, aggression, or worse.

We have been studying this development for a while now, with rising alarm. (Greg Lukianoff is a constitutional lawyer and the president and CEO of the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education, which defends free speech and academic freedom on campus, and has advocated for students and faculty involved in many of the incidents this article describes; Jonathan Haidt is a social psychologist who studies the American culture wars. The stories of how we each came to this subject can be read here.) The dangers that these trends pose to scholarship and to the quality of American universities are significant; we could write a whole essay detailing them. But in this essay we focus on a different question: What are the effects of this new protectiveness on the students themselves? Does it benefit the people it is supposed to help? What exactly are students learning when they spend four years or more in a community that polices unintentional slights, places warning labels on works of classic literature, and in many other ways conveys the sense that words can be forms of violence that require strict control by campus authorities, who are expected to act as both protectors and prosecutors?

Discuss?

 

I know one Yale professor is trying to eliminate the word "Master" because of the connotation of slavery/misogyny. Instead of "headmaster", the new phrase should be "head of college".

http://yaledailynews.com/blog/2015/08/14/stephen-davis-asks-pierson-students-not-to-call-him-master/

 

This thread's title made me LOL. Congrats.

I'm not a fan of the whole "trigger warning" concept, as I explained in some other thread. I think it inhibits dialogue and can be used (and is frequently used) to editorialize content. Plus it's lazy as ****.

 

Generically, my position has always been that I'm a fan of okay with professors including trigger warnings on their syllabi for items to be read/covered in the course but not to go any further than that in any class.

 

In my view, this didn't really bring up the most common usage for trigger warnings, which is for rape, eating disorders, and similar personal experiences. Those are the only instances I've seen the term used, and rightly so.

Empathy has always been in short supply, and this doesn't show any differently. Overall, this seems to be more of a solution in search of an actual problem, or perhaps is the misappropriation of a term.

 

I sure can understand TWs when posting traumatic stuff, but... racism? Sexism? Conservativism? Because I see those often, and I think they are terribly counter-productive.

 

I've definitely never seen or actually heard of that happening, and I've been in a good position for one or both over the past five years. I agree that usage is very counter-productive. Just never come across it.

 

"Last December, Jeannie Suk wrote in an online article for The New Yorker about law students asking her fellow professors at Harvard not to teach rape law—or, in one case, even use the word violate (as in “that violates the law”) lest it cause students distress. "

"In February, Laura Kipnis, a professor at Northwestern University, wrote an essay in The Chronicle of Higher Education describing a new campus politics of sexual paranoia—and was then subjected to a long investigation after students who were offended by the article and by a tweet she’d sent filed Title IX complaints against her." (BTW, this was about consent and rape primarily in relationships between students and professions, and the complaints about her were specifically Title IX about causing a "chilling effect" on women to come forward for rape accusations)

And the term microagression I have only ever in my life seen applied to racism, and really I've only seen it from the 2000s onward in my own experience. There are many, many people who claim TWs about this, which our white privilege do not afford us, Josh.

As an aside, this is why I'm okay with the syllabi being labelled with the TWs and people can curate their own emotional states. That's reasonable, no?

 

That's my feeling as well. I think it's perfectly reasonable to give students advance warning of things like torture/rape/etc so that -- if they've had personal experience with those things -- they have advance warning to prepare themselves. But it shouldn't regulate classroom content or opinions.

 

This never happened at my college despite the cases of sexual assaults going up.

 

KW, that's specifically addressed in the article, as a function of Federal funding:

Since 2013, new pressure from the federal government has reinforced this trend. Federal antidiscrimination statutes regulate on-campus harassment and unequal treatment based on sex, race, religion, and national origin. Until recently, the Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights acknowledged that speech must be “objectively offensive” before it could be deemed actionable as sexual harassment—it would have to pass the “reasonable person” test. To be prohibited, the office wrote in 2003, allegedly harassing speech would have to go “beyond the mere expression of views, words, symbols or thoughts that some person finds offensive.”

But in 2013, the Departments of Justice and Education greatly broadened the definition of sexual harassment to include verbal conduct that is simply “unwelcome.” Out of fear of federal investigations, universities are now applying that standard—defining unwelcome speech as harassment—not just to sex, but to race, religion, and veteran status as well. Everyone is supposed to rely upon his or her own subjective feelings to decide whether a comment by a professor or a fellow student is unwelcome, and therefore grounds for a harassment claim. Emotional reasoning is now accepted as evidence.

So, wait, can we unironically say...

 

Hm. This is a strange trend. There's no real defensible counterargument to TWs without opening oneself up to strawman attacks. I don't fully buy either stance, to be honest. We should be able to discuss most topics in a reasonable manner, especially in a college or university, but simultaneously we should be respectful that maybe some topics are quite sensitive to certain individuals. Granted, there's no way of knowing who those people might be unless they have a sign floating above their head, so: what do you do?

I think, in part, this can be chalked up to attitudes swinging one way thanks to a number of external factors. It certainly doesn't help that sites like Tumblr can become extremely vocal echo chambers, with ideas and movements self-cannibalizing on a regular basis. However, a lot of that is reacting to external stuff like (very clearly) awful things happening in the world around us to certain portions of the population. So...back to square one, it feels like.

The real problem is that people are people and as people are wont to do they take things too far. Which is painfully obvious, but there you go, I said it.

 

Considering that those are stupid, meaningless things to say, I have no problem with them being banned.

Anyway, I think this is a Daily Mail-esque overreaction. There are much bigger things wrong with U.S. universities than going too far in trying to accommodate certain groups.

 

I know you're joking. But what we would do is then grade a student on those statements if they weren't backed up with evidence or data to support those statements. If they do back them up, job well done. If they do not, then it's hollow and meaningless…dinged.

 

I think there is actually a lot of fire to the smoke, though, even beyond the actual lawsuits and other things mentioned. When you have someone like Jerry Seinfeld -- who is like the anti-Richard Pryor -- saying that the PC culture on campus is such that it's toxic to comedians... that's real bad.

Though, I will note, I disagree with much of the strident tone of the article's authors in eliminating all forms of trigger warnings on a college campus. That's probably counterproductive and I will note that all of the associations they cited who wants that are all educational groups and not mental health groups.

 

Yeah, like those awful fraternities and sororities. SJU and CSB banned them completely, but according to some of my friends that attend the U of M, fraternities and sororities have become much more notorious as of late.

 

These articles, blogs, and tv segments make me wonder if they're doing an overall look at the uni system or just focusing on UC's.

 

Do you want the "spoiler alert" answer or the "I'm going to humor your belief that it could possibly be the former" answer?

 

The accurate one.

edit: Are you doing the comic book character thing too?

 

Accurately, I'd question if it's a universal phenomenon; I work at a large public university and the guidelines for our syllabus policies have not actually changed substantially since 2012, and insofar as I am aware there are no plans for a change (Admittedly, mathematics doesn't leave much room for triggers). Practically, I'd agree with Darth Guy that there are other problems that probably need addressing first. Philosophically, these articles are written in mauvaise foi but that's hardly surprising as in my experience all arguments about academic "freedom" are. Financially, support research funding so they can pay me more.

E: And I don't follow the meaning of your edit.

 

I agree.

Oh, there's a "share a comic book character to reject the negative stories on social media" thing going around. I was wondering if you were part of that with your avatar.

I look at the title of this thread and immediately think of hurricanes.

 

I see; no, in fact if there's a bright center of rejection of negative stories then Violence Jack is the character that is farthest from.

 

Violence Jack is for people who think Hokuto No Ken was for wusses.

 

I'm not sure how the notion of the most qualified person getting the job is "stupid" or "meaningless" since in practical terms you're going to hire someone who feels like the best fit (combination of experience on their resume, and how they behave in interviews). But the notion of America as "the" land of opportunity is, given an indefinite article would lessen the idiocy substantially.

But honestly, I've seen butter in the midday sun that's harder than these university students.

 

It's probably not a comment made in isolation. As a dig, it's used to imply that the person who receives the position was in fact unqualified.

For instance, someone might have commented during Janet Yellen's nomination to chair the US Federal Reserve that they "prefer to choose the most qualified candidate" rather than a woman. Likewise, you can see it in basically all of Dead Reagan's commentary about Obama, where he consistently fails to acknowledge the actual reasons people have supported Obama, instead suggesting that all votes were motivated by race or racial guilt.