Posted on 08/11/2015 10:05:51 AM PDT by Veto!
In the name of emotional well-being, college students are increasingly demanding protection from words and ideas they don’t like. Here’s why that’s disastrous for education—and mental health.
Something strange is happening at America’s colleges and universities. A movement is arising, undirected and driven largely by students, to scrub campuses clean of words, ideas, and subjects that might cause discomfort or give offense. 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. In June, a professor protecting himself with a pseudonym wrote an essay for Vox describing how gingerly he now has to teach. “I’m a Liberal Professor, and My Liberal Students Terrify Me,” the headline said. A number of popular comedians, including Chris Rock, have stopped performing on college campuses (see Caitlin Flanagan’s article in this month’s issue). Jerry Seinfeld and Bill Maher have publicly condemned the oversensitivity of college students, saying too many of them can’t take a joke.
(Excerpt) Read more at theatlantic.com ...
I demand that Jeannie change her last name. It's distressful and offensive.
The Red Guard arises in America.
GROUPTHINK
So she needs to get rid of her first name as well.
VERY distressing name. Off to the re-education camp with her.
Suk is so offensive, she doesn’t deserve a name at all.
Well, actually they are already doing that. That’s what “Sensitivity Training” is all about.
Wow, what a great article!!! Thank you so much for posting this!!
- Megan
Today they come into Interviews with a highly over-inflated opinion of themselves and a resume stretched so far beyond reality it's easy to see they live in a false world they've created in their own minds.
Once hired they discover company “rules” and protocol to abide by but consistently attempt to bypass or change them all together...they are combative and constantly whine about their rights in one form or another and worse seek to “educate” those they work with.
I personally and easily avoid the youth of today....they're mindless and simple minded robots easily mis-led and stupid when it comes to the real world and how it functions...they get in the way like sniffling brats under your feet.
....“Sensitivity Training”....
Is nothing more than a continuation designed and implemented by ‘the same parents’ who raised their kids to be coddled.
It serves no one in society otherwise.
It’s interesting that this and related topics are suddenly getting so much play in “The Altantic” and similar organs of elite opinion. Could it be that the people who are Better Than Us are noticing that their rising generation has so little intestinal fortitude that they may end up blowing the whole scam?
Elites do tend to degenerate through the generations, eventually resulting in replacement by a new elite ...
I sit on a university committee that advises our administration on matters dealing with religion (I got dibs to serve on it as the most visible Orthodox Christian on campus). Our university has a student body divided between the sort described in the article and a large body of fairly committed evangelical protestants. This has the advantage to academic freedom of the sort of feminists who need fainting couches and smelling salts (oh, sorry, trigger warnings)* not having reached critical mass, but leads to conflicts between students of the sort described in the article and the committed protestants.
I’ve been advocating both classical tolerance — learning to put up with the fact that your neighbor or classmate may be dead wrong about some issue, and not maltreating him or her for it for the sake of social peace and liberty — and “insensitivity training”, not learning how to treat others insensitively, but learning how not to be sensitive to slights, real or imagined. Somewhat amusingly, the committee member who serves as a representative of the “Nones” (atheists, agnostics) is the strongest supporter of my positions.
*I hope that wasn’t a micro-aggression. I was shooting for a deci-aggression, or at minimum a centi-aggression.
Oh gee, what a lot of nonsense you go through to put out a simple declarative sentence sans footnotes.
I love the Insensitivity Training idea. Should be a required course.
Let's hope. They've created this monster, now it's coming back to bite them in the tush. How's that for politically incorrect?
I recently read a book by a Russian psychiatrist. Fiction, but her description of a psychiatric patient who had been to the reeducation camps was very telling. Totally broken in spirit, no way he could live his life with any degree of competence or happiness.
I think the reason you're starting to see articles like this, is because the feral beast has started to turn on them.They were fine with it as long as it was directed towards conservatives.
Thank you for the Ping Megan, Yes great article.
Lotus eaters. Wait until they get out in the world
I’ll bet they never thought their control over university education would be threatened by the fact that the students refuse even to engage with many topics because it’s too upsetting.
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