Posted on 08/12/2018 7:49:39 PM PDT by DoodleBob
A new study out of Harvard—the first randomized controlled experiment designed to examine the effects of trigger warnings on individual resilience—may indicate that Greg Lukianoff and Jonathan Haidt were right about trigger warnings.
In the fall of 2015, Greg Lukianoff, First Amendment Lawyer and president of the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (for which I work), and social psychologist Jonathan Haidt, the Thomas Cooley Professor of Ethical Leadership at NYU’s Stern School of Business, published an article in The Atlantic. In it, they detailed how college campuses may inadvertently promote mental habits identical to the “cognitive distortions” that cognitive behavioral therapists teach their clients to recognize and overcome. The pair argued that some campus practices—presumably intended to protect students from being harmed by words and ideas deemed offensive or distressing—seemed to be interfering with students' ability to get along with each other, and could even be having a deleterious effect on their mental health. Among those practices: training students to identify microaggressions (things people say or do, often unintentionally, that are interpreted as expressions of bigotry), turning classrooms and lecture halls into intellectual safe spaces (where students are protected from words and ideas they might find upsetting), and the issuing of trigger warnings: alerts about the potentially “triggering” content of written work, films, lectures, and other presentations.
(Excerpt) Read more at psychologytoday.com ...
In short - colleges are teaching students to put a chip on their shoulders...
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I have been maintaining for years that a person who has never been disciplined is not likely to learn personal discipline on one's own, and hence will be a danger to self and others.
Learned it from flunking out of university and going to boot camp where drill sergeants rule the roost. Later was able to self-discipline enough to attain PhD in hard science.
Microaggression? Hah!
No "safe spaces" out there in corporate culture combat, eh?
Don't handicap your children by making their lives easy."
Robert Heinlein
I’m talking about the domain of a college, in which bar-roomish declamations are not supposed to carry the day. Rave profanely all you want — the best you’ll be is a bad example.
As in many things there is a happy medium, a blessed center.
But for what it’s worth, when Harvard still had a robust Christian ethic, it wouldn’t be choosing materials that wallowed in these edgy and dicey areas in the first place. And like as not, theses would be about some point of Christian faith.
Harvard does not need a trim. Harvard needs a reboot.
It’s a printed warning akin to “What you are about to read is graphic and may not be fit for all ages. Parental discretion is advised.”
The researchers categorized passages as Neutral, Mildly Distressing, and Markedly Distressing. The example given of the latter is in fact from Crime and Punishment, by Fyodor Dostoevsky
He had not a minute more to lose. He pulled the axe quite out, swung it with both arms, scarcely conscious of himself, and almost without effort, almost mechanically, brought the blunt side down on her head. He seemed not to use his own strength in this. But as soon as he had once brought the axe down, his strength returned to him.
The old woman was as always bareheaded. Her thin, light hair, streaked with grey, thickly smeared with grease, was plaited in a rat’s tail and fastened by a broken horn comb which stood out on the nape of her neck. As she was so short, the blow fell on the very top of her skull. She cried out, but very faintly, and suddenly sank all of a heap on the floor, raising her hands to her head… Then he dealt her another blow with the blunt side and on the same spot. The blood gushed as if from an upturned glass, the body fell back. He stepped back, let it fall, and at once bent over her face; she was dead. Her eyes seemed to be starting out of their sockets, the brow and the whole face were drawn and contorted convulsively.
I suspect a sizable percentage - not all - of liberal professors aren't super-radicalized..,they are in favor of only a soft tyranny, where guns are highly regulated, free healthcare for all, and they cheer when FB shuts down some "radical conservative." However, I bet they don't mind hunters having shotguns, having Anne Coulter talk on campus, and secretly smiled at the comedic value when Trump said "because you'd be in jail."
I imagine there are scores of liberal professors who, only in the darkness of their bedroom at night, on a Tor app and under a hard-to-track pseudonym, are posting online and calling their students "snowflakes."
They probably are clueless to the Frankenstein monster they've built and wonder how we got here. They see former proud alumni who donated to their largess waking away. Ironically, the only force capable of turning back the barbarians storming the gate are Deplorables, and that rescue operation ain't in the cards.
I would agree, however, that a Trigger Warning in a college textbook or classroom or a SpongeBob episode like "Wormy" is asinine.
Ya think? Sheesh.
But it's noteworthy that they still published the study...something like this in and of itself could fan the flames burning under the academy. Indeed I expect some freshman to shortly say "your priviledged study saying I can't handle Trigger Warnings have triggered me...I cannot attend class. Give me an A."
Where did I rave profanely? Do you have me mixed up with some other poster?
;-)
Passages from “The Possessed” would cause “feelings” to go off the charts. Even “The Idiot” is hard to take.
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