PC tiranija

University of Chicago triggers a fresh debate about free speech on campus

Aug 30th 2016, 16:26 by S.M. | VANCOUVER

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IT IS safe to say that no welcome letter to incoming university students has attracted more attention, or inspired more tweets, than the missive John Ellison, the dean of students at the University of Chicago has sent to freshmen. After telling the class of 2020 that “our commitment to freedom of inquiry and expression” is one of the “defining characteristics” of their new academic home, Mr Ellison noted a few things the newbies will not find on campus: “Our commitment to academic freedom means that we do not support so-called ‘trigger warnings’, we do not cancel invited speakers because their topics might prove controversial, and we do not condone the creation of intellectual ‘safe spaces’ where individuals can retreat from ideas and perspectives at odds with their own.” “Trigger warnings” alert students to potentially distressing passages in literature or speeches.

His comments sparked predictably polarised responses. Many cheered the letter for standing up for cherished academic values. Geoffrey Stone, a law professor who chaired a faculty committee on freedom of expression at the University of Chicago, said “we've been deeply committed to the notion that we're here to learn from one another and to learn from the world and to study things and to figure out the answers”. The best recipe for this inquiry “is to hear all sides of everything”. The Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (FIRE) praised the letter for “push[ing] back against the nationwide trend toward student-led calls for censorship”.

Some student leaders at the university criticised what they saw as an inhospitable message. They also detected hypocrisy in the statement of principles. “The most insidious threat to 'freedom of inquiry and expression' on campus right now is not trigger warnings or safe spaces”, the student-body president and vice-president wrote, “but rather the heavy-handed suppression of free speech and free press by the university administration”. And reflecting on the influence the dean seemed to be asserting over faculty members’ pedagogical choices, Jeet Heer issued this counter-charge in the New Republic: “The University of Chicago is attacking academic freedom” by pressuring professors to keep warnings off their syllabi.

The rhetorical excess on both sides may be unsurprising, given the broader culture war into which the letter lobs a rather pointed missile. But supporters and detractors of the welcome note are both exaggerating the stakes. Many colleges and universities have experimented with trigger warnings, but none currently require professors to issue them, and few students are demanding that their professors warn them about every conceivable upset. Most pedagogues who use trigger warnings reserve them for material with particularly disturbing depictions of rape and sexual assault and do not enumerate all the ways that Joyce’s “Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man” or Chinua Achebe’s “Things Fall Apart” might trigger an emotional reaction. Cautions about the sky falling if these warnings are used—or not used—should be taken with a grain of salt.

One of the most unfortunate aspects of the debate, exacerbated by the letter and most responses to it, is the assumption that cancelling speeches, preserving safe spaces and issuing content warnings are all of a piece. They are not. It is clear why rescinding an invitation to a campus speaker because he might bring along a controversial message is inconsistent with a university’s mission of sponsoring free and vigorous debate. But it is less apparent why syllabus warnings or allowing groups to gather in “safe spaces” outside the classroom for discussion and commiseration are threats to freedom of speech.

Admittedly, composing content warnings in academic settings is an odd idea. Few professors are psychologists: they are not experts in what will set students off. Nor do they have training in how to help young adults cope with past trauma. Even the most thoughtful academics will view the material they teach through their own experiences, missing some potentially triggering materials and perhaps being unnecessarily over-sensitive with regard to others. But nobody thinks that film ratings and their accompanying justifications (“contains strong language, drug use and nudity”, for example) infantilise cinema-goers or ruin the surprise once the lights dim and the picture rolls. Likewise, it is unclear why a heads-up on a syllabus is an occasion to set a dean’s bow tie a-spinning.

For 25 years, invoking this vague and ever-shifting nemesis has been a favourite tactic of the right – and Donald Trump’s victory is its greatest triumph
by Moira Weigel

...

First, by talking incessantly about political correctness, Trump established the myth that he had dishonest and powerful enemies who wanted to prevent him from taking on the difficult challenges facing the nation. By claiming that he was being silenced, he created a drama in which he could play the hero. The notion that Trump was both persecuted and heroic was crucial to his emotional appeal. It allowed people who were struggling economically or angry about the way society was changing to see themselves in him, battling against a rigged system that made them feel powerless and devalued. At the same time, Trump’s swagger promised that they were strong and entitled to glory. They were great and would be great again.


Second, Trump did not simply criticise the idea of political correctness – he actually said and did the kind of outrageous things that PC culture supposedly prohibited. The first wave of conservative critics of political correctness claimed they were defending the status quo, but Trump’s mission was to destroy it. In 1991, when George HW Bush warned that political correctness was a threat to free speech, he did not choose to exercise his free speech rights by publicly mocking a man with a disability or characterising Mexican immigrants as rapists. Trump did. Having elevated the powers of PC to mythic status, the draft-dodging billionaire, son of a slumlord, taunted the parents of a fallen soldier and claimed that his cruelty and malice was, in fact, courage.

In a move to protect students from “racial slurs,” a Virginia school district has banned the reading of two classics of American literature: The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn and To Kill a Mockingbird.

The Accomack County Public Schools has temporarily removed books from the curriculum, after a mother said her high school-age son was troubled by the racial slurs they contain and asked for the books to be removed from school reading lists.

Whether to reinstate the books will be made pending a decision by the district's superintendent after hearing testimony from a selected committee. 

The mother, whose son is biracial, said her son was required to read Huckleberry Finn for a high school assignment, but could not get past a certain page in the story on which the N-word appeared seven times.

“I keep hearing, ‘This is a classic, This is a classic.’ … I understand this is a literature classic. But at some point, I feel that children will not—or do not—truly get the classic part, the literature part, which I’m not disputing,” she argued at a school board meeting. “This is great literature. But there (are so many) racial slurs in there and offensive wording that you can’t get past that.”

A racial slur reportedly appears 219 times in Huckleberry Finn and 48 times in To Kill a Mockingbird.

“So what are we teaching our children?” the mother asked. “We’re validating that these words are acceptable, and they are not acceptable by (any) means,” she said, while noting psychological effects that language has on children.

“There is other literature they can use,” she argued.

The mother proposed assembling a committee of parents and teachers of different ethnic backgrounds to compile a list of books that would be “inclusive” for all students

vox wrote:
In a string of insults against President Donald Trump last night, comedian Stephen Colbert lined up what he surely thought was a great, hilarious diss. Instead, he blurted out some homophobia.
Colbert was in the middle of a monologue launching various insults at Trump, such as “presidunce” and “pricktator.” In the course of this, he said, “The only thing your mouth is good for is being Vladimir Putin’s cock holster.”
This is a kind of insult that has been used against Trump again and again. From murals of Trump and Putin making out to late night show gags, it’s now pretty popular among progressives to paint the US and Russian presidents as being gay for each other.
But the only way this works as a joke is by demeaning gay people. The underlying implication here is that gay relationships are somehow extra funny — that Trump engaging in sexual acts with Putin is hilarious because it’s gay.

In a setting in which Colbert is deliberately trying to find a way to insult Trump, it’s telling that he resorts to suggesting that Trump is engaging in sexual acts with another man. The suggestion is that the worst thing that could happen for these men is if they engaged in homosexual acts together, as if that devalues them as men or emasculates them.
This came up back in 2013 when Alec Baldwin — now also a progressive darling due, in part, to his anti-Trump comedy — after he called a photographer a “toxic little queen” and “cocksucking [inaudible].” Baldwin said at the time that he didn’t understand why his comments were homophobic.
CNN host Anderson Cooper gave a good explanation on Howard Stern’s radio show: Baldwin was in a situation in which he was trying to find the most insulting thing he could call a photographer he didn’t like, and he landed on characterizing the photographer as gay. “The worst thing you can possibly think of to say, which is what this situation was, to talk about a sexual act between two guys as being the worst thing you can possibly think of,” Cooper said.

Cooper clarified back then that he didn’t know if Baldwin is homophobic, because “I have no idea what’s in his head.”
Similarly, we don’t know what’s in Colbert’s head, and his comment was meant as a joke. But it’s not a good look for the comedian who’s fashioning himself as the anti-Trump progressive on late night.

Let’s Embrace Our Blubbering and Make Cry Closets Happen


Across the country, college semesters are slowly coming to a close. Summer, once so far away, is theoretically around the corner—but first, final exams must be taken. To help students over the last hurdle of the academic school year and assist them in regurgitating 15 weeks’ worth of knowledge in five days, one university has allowed a student to install an inventive coping method in the campus’ library. Devised by University of Utah student and visual artist Nemo Miller, the “cry closet” is pretty self-explanatory. The closet, outfitted with black felt, stuffed animals and a strict ten-minute cry-policy, is a self-described “safe space for stressed-out students” to have a breakdown in the privacy of large wooden box.

Besides the ten-minute limit, the cry closet’s other rules stipulates that students knock before entering to ensure no one’s stress-induced bawling session is interrupted. And to ensure that the cry closet isn’t used for nefarious purposes, it only accommodates one person at time. But that doesn’t mean criers have to cry alone—to cry in solidarity, the closet asks that if users post about their closet session that they use #cryclosetuofu on all relevant social media. The cry closet’s appearance was, of course, met with snowflake crybaby derision and alarmed hysteria that the closet meant students wouldn’t be prepared for the real world—because instead of crying, as one enlightened Twitter commentator put it, adults just “grab life by the balls and manhandle that shit!” One alumnus even insinuated that she would stop donating if Miller got academic credit for their art installation—almost as if the University of Utah should be a safe space where this particular alumnus’ views go unchallenged, even after she graduated.

Hypocrisy aside, I happen to think the cry closet is a great idea. It should be celebrated and replicated across the country. There’s an unfortunately popular misconception that being a mature adult means taking all of life’s gut punches with stoic silence and a stiff upper lip. For those of us who aren’t emotionally repressed, that’s neither realistic or healthy. Life is hardand crying is both a completely natural reaction to stress and a way to reduce it. According to prominent tear researcher William H. Frey II, when humans cry in response to emotion, rather than say, onion fumes or pollen, their tears contain more of certain chemicals that are released when the body is under stress. Frey theorizes that shedding these hormone-infused tearsreduces the levels of stress hormones in the body, which could then reduce stress. There’s also research that suggests that in addition to acting as a way to self-soothe, crying releases oxytocin and endorphins—both chemicals that help ease physical and emotional pain. And then there’s the fact that in a 2008 study, almost nine out of ten people reported “some degree of post-crying mood improvement.”

Anecdotally and scientifically, crying helps us feel better, and we would all be better off if we stopped equating maturity with a lack of emotionality. Rather than increasing your tolerance for life’s highs and lows, bottling up your feelings tends to shorten your emotional fuse. Instead of being able to take annoyances in stride, you’re now one delayed train away from yelling at the Starbucks cashier who accidentally gave you whole milk instead of soy. Not to mention the fact that research suggests emotional suppression could increase the risk of dying from heart disease and certain forms of cancer. So while my full-throated support for the cry closet is certainly in the interest of public health, I’m also just tired of dealing with emotionally constipated adults.

Of course, some of my tear-inclined fellows might say, “Rachelle, we have bathrooms and a lot of companies are instituting wellness rooms, why do we need cry closets?” To which I would say, neither of those spaces’ primary functions includes crying. One of the obstacles to crying in public is feeling like a nuisance—a feeling that would only be exacerbated if I felt like I was keeping somebody from breast-pumping or checking their glucose by hogging the wellness room. And let’s be honest here, the sounds of other people using the bathroom do not a good crying environment make. When I moved to New York, one of the positives said to balance out the smell of hot garbage is that you can cry on the subway and your fellow commuters would pay you no notice. This suggests to me that we’re all seeking a place to cry for ten minutes before going on with our day. Wouldn’t a plushy, cozy closet be better for that than an active bathroom or a crowded train?