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 ...
What is the end goal here? Making people (including academics) afraid to say ANYTHING, unless it is scripted and pre-approved by some bureaucrat somewhere.
They won't, really, unless they all become attorneys who defend the chronically offended.
I never watch daytime tv, but had it on yesterday for a few minutes……it's almost all about shouting, stomping, chronically offended people. Really, these horrible shows promote dreadful behavior and mindsets.
The college revolutions of the 1960s—the ones that gave rise to the social-justice warriors of today’s campuses—were fueled by free speech. But once you’ve won a culture war, free speech is a nuisance, and “eliminating” language becomes a necessity.
Marxists always knew that.
Probably not. The problem is, their worldview has now created a lot of these really mentally unbalanced people that are going to eventually be let out of their closed little asylum, and the rest of us are going to have to deal with them. I really do think some of these people have been damaged pretty badly. We can expect some really horrific things to come from this.
It’s going to be very difficult for employers and for people getting into personal relationships. A questionnaire (or an app ;-) might be prepared to help diagnose them before one has any personal investment.
BFL
Didn’t we already see this in Red China under Mao? Has the Red Guard arrived on college campuses?
It is even more fitting in the light of most recent events. Thanks. Grace and peace thru the Lord Jesus.
Two terms have risen quickly from obscurity into common campus parlance. Microaggressions are small actions or word choices that seem on their face to have no malicious intent but that are thought of as a kind of violence nonetheless. For example, by some campus guidelines, it is a microaggression to ask an Asian American or Latino American “Where were you born?,†because this implies that he or she is not a real American. Trigger warnings are alerts that professors are expected to issue if something in a course might cause a strong emotional response. For example, some students have called for warnings that Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart describes racial violence and that F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby portrays misogyny and physical abuse, so that students who have been previously victimized by racism or domestic violence can choose to avoid these works, which they believe might “trigger†a recurrence of past trauma.
vindictive protectiveness teaches students to think in a very different way. It prepares them poorly for professional life, which often demands intellectual engagement with people and ideas one might find uncongenial or wrong.
The new protectiveness may be teaching students to think pathologically.
Many Baby Boomers and Gen Xers can remember riding their bicycles around their hometowns, unchaperoned by adults, by the time they were 8 or 9 years old. In the hours after school, kids were expected to occupy themselves, getting into minor scrapes and learning from their experiences. But “free range†childhood became less common in the 1980s. The surge in crime from the ’60s through the early ’90s made Baby Boomer parents more protective than their own parents had been.
In a variety of ways, children born after 1980—the Millennials—got a consistent message from adults: life is dangerous, but adults will do everything in their power to protect you from harm, not just from strangers but from one another as well. - http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2015/09/the-coddling-of-the-american-mind/399356/
And those liberal professors are surprised, just why?
They are merely reaping what they sowed.
This outcome is THEIR fault.
I know this isn't exactly a homeschool article, but homeschoolers are going to be sending their kids off to college some day and they need to know what they're facing.
In general, I don't see homeschool parent mollycoddling their children the way public schools do to the kids attending them.
A college degree sans effort...
In some discussions on the general subject, I’ve seen Lefties blaming the overprotective parents of these special snowflakes who are pushing this nonsense, more so than the Leftist bent of the public schools, colleges, and universities. FWIW
Of course. They’ll never admit that it’s their failed thinking that led to this.
I think not.
I blame it on the name of A bully is mean to me that has been TAUGHT to these poor, fragile people.
Never having to get poked in the eye by fighting back when they were young (tell an ADULT; they will handle it), they are ill equipped to accept the pushback that is NOW coming home to roost.
There is probably a grain of truth there, but the idea that insufferable political correctness wasn’t largely a result of the way our schools and universities ran things is laughable.
We teach them this in grade school; so why not!?
There are NO winners; just game players.
Here's a plastic 'trophy' for your participation.
The Red Guard arises in America.
Coming to YOUR location soon!
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Little_Emperor_Syndrome
There WILL come a time when lightning will flash across 'social media' and stampede these people just as a sudden storm in the plains would affect a cattle drive.
These folks are NOT stupid; just mis- or un- informed about GOD.
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