9 ms·

The New Activism of Campus Life

47 points by tosseraccount 10y ago

Aelinsaar 10y ago
It's great that people are exploring themselves and their world in college, but to be frank, I avoided those people along with the hard partiers, and everyone else who wasn't really at school to work and learn.
- dev1n 10y ago
  Back in the day (I'm talking way back) college was all about exploring the scientific method, history, literature, and economics. Today these kids aren't doing any of that and, thus, have too much free time on their hands. So they go out and protest about the fact that their school’s Afrikan Heritage House lacked truly authentic food.
  - geogra4 10y ago
    Depends on whose history, literature and economics you're studying....
    - Aqueous 10y ago
      But it also doesn't. And a lot of this culture on campus is about replacing objective facts and knowledge with highly individual, subjective facts and knowledge, privileging "my truth" above all else. In this mindset, there's no 'objective truth' at all because all objectivity is tainted by power dynamics. The problem is, just because the facts were placed in our textbook by some culturally privileged Caucasian scholar doesn't mean they're not true.
      - locopati 10y ago
        When it comes to history and literature and other non-science fields, are there actually meaningfully objective facts and knowledge? Even a 'fact' like X event happened on Y date involves a lot of subjective perspectives on how X came to pass and even more subjective perspectives on why and even more on what the ramifications were.
      - nicoburns 10y ago
        I think the purpose of a lot of these movements is to point out the natural counterpoint to this: Just because the facts were placed in our textbook by some culturally privileged Caucasian scholar doesn't mean that they are true. Academia has a history of claiming things as objectively true, and then changing it's mind. It's healthy to question these things from the beginning. If you're doing secondary research then you ought to be asking who wrote what you are reading, what was their outlook on life, and why did they choose to write what they wrote. If you are doing primary research then you ought to be asking the same thing about your methodology. There surely is such thing as 'objective truth', but it isn't to be found in textbooks written by human beings.
        morgante 10y ago
        > There surely is such thing as 'objective truth', but it isn't to be found in textbooks written by human beings. Really? The fact that a textbook was written by a human does not mean it cannot contain facts. No amount of politics will change the fact that the Normandy landings occurred on June 6, 1944.
        mikerichards 10y ago
        by some culturally privileged Caucasian scholar there ya go...just what the article is talking about. Sorry to have to clue you in, but nobody buys that weird leftist newspeak.
        jmorphy88 10y ago
        Bingo. Progressive leftist ideology, in its essence, is anti-white racism. All of its purported ideals are really about stripping whites of any power or identity and giving it to others.
        morgante 10y ago
        That goes entirely too far. There is certainly a subset of "leftist" thought which is about searching for offense, but you shouldn't paint the whole progressive left with that stroke. Plenty of progressive movements (including the original Progressive Era) did not make racial causes central or important.
      - Aelinsaar 10y ago
        When I was 15, and struggling to accept the limits of what I was learning in high school, a teacher explained it to me very well. "You're here to learn how to learn, as much as to learn anything in particular. You're hear to learn how to think critically about the world around you, how to formulate a question based on observation, and then go into the world and find the answers."
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    - dev1n 10y ago
      Agreed but the point of the article is that these students are rebelling against literally any form of challenge to their own ideals. They actually don't identify with any ideals; they make up their own! On no factual basis. The article even says so. The fact is that these students are rebelling against the education they are paying for in order to gain more visibility for non-issues. Some of these issues are actually fairly fascist. They asked for a piece of artwork to be taken down because it insulted them. If we extend that argument, no art would be allowed, ever! Coddled is the word that comes to my mind.
      - kingkawn 10y ago
        That rebellion against anything but your own ideals is how any given canon came to be in the first place.
        cLeEOGPw 10y ago
        And this is exact polar opposite of science. Science is all about challenging not only other, but your own ideas and rejecting those that don't hold on to the tests thrown at it. The rebellion at the campus today is a rebellion against science, against very idea that facts are universal. I sometimes wonder if rebellion like this can cause another dark age someday if it gains enough support from young people. Or maybe a beginning of "Idiocracy" type dystopia.
        pigpaws 10y ago
        considering 'new-earthers' and 'flat-earthers' are making a comeback, along with religious extremism taking over (in terms of laws vs traditions) I'd say the next dark-ages are right around the corner...
        rhapsodic 10y ago
        You know this how?
  - DanBC 10y ago
    > Back in the day (I'm talking way back) When? How far back are we going?
    - dev1n 10y ago
      To the 1940's, the last decade IMO when the only people who went to college went because they wanted to learn about meaningful questions on those subjects. Many students go to college now, but very few go on to actually study the foundational subjects that these universities were built upon.
      - dragonwriter 10y ago
        You're off by several centuries if that was ever true. College had been an important element of social status signaling for much longer than since the 1940s, though the particular status level that college in general or particular institutions are associated with had sorry drifted over time. If there was ever a time that people went to college exclusively it off a pure desire to "learn about meaningful questions" on any day of subjects, it was in the very distant past. But there probably never was such a time at all.
      - TorKlingberg 10y ago
        I assume you also object to the 60's civil rights movement in universities in the same way then?
        Aelinsaar 10y ago
        Are you saying that students today are involved in a similarly important, organized, and effective movement as the 60's civil right's movement?
      - sotojuan 10y ago
        Whether that's true or not, part of the reason why things seem bad now is because society tells high schoolers that if they don't go to college (for any reason and almost any major) they're failures.
  - mrdrozdov 10y ago
    Maybe they've learned enough about science, history, literature, and the modern world to the point that they realize they can make a difference. I'm not sure how you measure impact, but it feels like they're succeeding.
    - AnimalMuppet 10y ago
      Maybe, but they're succeeding at the wrong things. The difference that they're making is "learning how to make everyone else shut up", which is not a life skill that contributes to the progress of civilization.
      - mrdrozdov 10y ago
        That's an ironic turn of events.
  - ams6110 10y ago
    It's all summed up nicely as "first world problems." I emphasized to my son when he entered college to always remember why he was there, and my expectations as the one paying for it. He's mostly lived up to that.
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  - justaman 10y ago
    People would choose college based on professors instead of footballs teams as well.
    - tosseraccount 10y ago
      Yale won 27 collegiate football championships. Princeton won 28 . Harvard won 12 . Standford won 2 .
  - ryandrake 10y ago
    I was thinking something similar. WTF are these protestors majoring in? When I was in undergrad, I was taking 18+ credits per semester, and my ass was in the lab 50% of the time. And when it wasn't, it was in the library or cramming for the next exam, or doing the piles of homework that you were never able to finish (by design, so you learned to prioritize). Then in Junior and Senior years it was labs, career fairs, mock interviews, internships, more labs, resume writing, homework, more labs... Who the hell has time to go out there protesting every little thing that bothers them? Don't they have classwork to do?
    - moron4hire 10y ago
      The article goes into that. Their academic standing is slipping. They've even protested to have academic standards loosened so they can continue protesting.
    - caseysoftware 10y ago
      In some cases - like Mattress Girl - these are class projects so they may get credit for going out and protesting, writing letters, etc.
  - dragonwriter 10y ago
    More likely, this ideal is something that lots of people believe is a universal thing rather than an ideal of what college should be about, and when they learn in the real world that its not what lots of people approach college as, they construct a fantasy that there was a time in the past when the ideal they've internalized was true, and the present just represents a fall from that ideal. Similar cultural complaints and conflicts between academic and non-academic communities go back to the establishment of the first universities. (And the idea that "Today these kids...have too much free time on their hands" and that this is the source of all kinds of problems goes back into antiquity, and probably is documented nearly as far back as we have records at all.)
- Disruptive_Dave 10y ago
  It's funny, I had quite a different experience, and I'm very thankful for it. I can find very few regrets for taking my educational duties in college for granted and instead exploring the depravities of a teenage mind. A hell of a time and I'm richer for it.
  - Aelinsaar 10y ago
    Presumably you started off doing alright, if you were free to party your way through uni.
    - Disruptive_Dave 10y ago
      Meaning money or grades? Either way, I partied my way through college AND got that diploma. The last 15+ years in my career have been considerably above average, if I do say so myself. That's more about luck and hustle than anything else...certainly not book smarts.
firasd 10y ago
The professor who says, “But then, at some point, it became really solipsistic” really gets to my issues with the rise of ‘Social Justice’ politics this decade. As a non-white guy, I understand and sometimes agree with claims like: “Your literary canon/history/point of view/etc. is rooted in Western hegemony.” That’s a claim that can be analyzed. It’s another to just say: “You’re [Various Identifier Here]-Splaining.” What can someone really do with that? At that point the claim becomes pure politics, you have to just support the person making the claim or not. (Not to get on a soapbox but the theatre prof joking “I’m thinking, Oh, God! I’m cast in one of my least favorite plays of all time, ‘The Crucible,’ by Arthur Miller!” gets to another issue I have. People don’t seem understand that the tools they use to oppose others should be applied with proportionality and good judgement, if for no other reason than that in another circumstance those same tools can be used against them as well. In general I think when people are ensconced in any ideology, they begin to overlook Kant’s reminder to “treat humanity, whether in your own person or in the person of another, always at the same time as an end and never simply as a means.”)
- protomyth 10y ago
  > What can someone really do with that? At that point the claim becomes pure politics, you have to just support the person making the claim or not. Not a whole lot, and that's by design. Subjectivism of what is art in the modern art movement was annoying but didn't really affect most people's lives. Now, we have the same thing with the same rhetoric and tactics (well, with the added violence) happening on US campuses.
- adityab 10y ago
  Agreed. These days, Identity politics is absolutely dominated by the idea that everything is just a point-of-view and ideas/arguments are inseparable from the identity of the person putting them forth. I often say that a "scientific temper" is something we should all strive towards - the scientific method is possibly the greatest achievement of civilization - but there are an inexplicable number of people (who have never heard of it) that simply claim that enlightenment ideals are Eurocentric and that my subscription to those (as a non-white) would count as internalized oppression. By some, nuance is denounced, absolutism is glamorous. Some others cannot be argued with; they grow an argument for every exception to their blanket theories until the entire ideology is a tangled mess of patchwork, at which point the application of this monster to any real-world situation becomes intractable and the evaluation of new observations strongly correlates with in/out-group membership. It is incredibly sad to see this dynamic being played out by otherwise smart people that I respect. That you and I have to explicitly advertise our non-white status when saying this for it to hold any water is a travesty, and demonstrates how bad the environment has become.
6stringmerc 10y ago
New activisim? Last time I checked, Socrates was accused of corrupting the youth with his activism against the prevailing politics, was tried and sentenced to death. So, um, new? Granted I don't think this particular strain of activism has such high stakes, but come on, impressionable youth-becoming-adults is a really lucrative demographic for "buy in" to lots of different ideologies (see also: "extremism" in the name of one cause or another). Those flames tend to burn out rather on the quick side, personal experience as my reference point.
- bobcostas55 10y ago
  In the Socrates analogy, the "new activists" are playing the part of Meletus, not Socrates.
mikerichards 10y ago
So called "progressive" campuses have become mini Orwellian dystopias because of demented leftist ideology run amok.
- VeejayRampay 10y ago
  North-American campuses. And maybe in some places of Northern Europe as well. This is not a worldwide thing.
  - sampo 10y ago
    As far as I know, the new concepts like trigger warnings and safe spaces have so far only spread to UK universities, not other European countries.
cLeEOGPw 10y ago
> “You include Black and other students of color in the institution and mark them with the words ‘equity, inclusion and diversity,’ ” it said, “when in fact this institution functions on the premises of imperialism, white supremacy, capitalism, ableism, and a cissexist heteropatriarchy.” Black is written with capital b in the middle of sentence like some title, while white is not. Nice to see that one race is finally being recognized as superior over the other. New "Aryan" race. Can't see anything wrong neither with it, nor all the other very meaningful and truthful terms told by this intelligent man.
vilda 10y ago
David Sacks and Peter Thiel wrote an excellent book "The Diversity Myth". They report on how corrosive impact have certain ideologies on higher education and academic freedom. I recommend to read it just to get a boarder view into the problem no matter on what side you are now.
djschnei 10y ago
SJWs have done more to set the race discussion back in this country than anything else in recent history. Identity politics is ruining this country.
Jtsummers 10y ago
Hyman started college in the eighties. Her generation, she said, protested against Tipper Gore for wanting to put warning labels on records. "My students want warning labels on class content, and I feel-I don't even know how to articulate it," she said. "Part of me feels that my leftist students are doing the right wing's job for it." The current generation entering college in the US has grown up in a time of authoritarianism-as-the-norm. Parents that hover too close. Schools with zero tolerance policies. A nation that goes to war against people who they shouldn't, when they should be pursuing criminal investigations and charges. Torture as the norm. Surveillance as the norm. It's not terribly surprising, then, that the current generation of leftists don't see liberal democracy as a solution. Rather, they expect a continuation of what they've grown up with, but applied to their particular ideological preferences.
- caseysoftware 10y ago
  The problem with this reasoning is that Tipper Gore is not right wing.
  - Jtsummers 10y ago
    I take the professor's viewpoint on right and left wing to be (a product of its times) more a contrast between paternalistic authoritarianism under claimed democratic ideals, and liberal (as in freedom, particular personal liberties) democracy. Beyond that, right and left have no meaning anymore so it's best to read statements regarding them in the context they were made. Thus why I switched the language to refer to authoritarianism and liberal democracy in my comment. Right and left, if they have any meaning, represent only a single dimension of a very complex space. Right can mean: fascism, anarcho-capitalism, libertarian, Republican (confused mix of various ideologies), religious authoritarianism (under an ostensible democracy or not), generally conservatism. Left can mean: libertarian, anarchist, socialist (various forms, including anarchism), communism, Democrat (confused mix of various ideologies), various green movements, etc. It's far better to break out what we're actually wanting to discuss. Tipper Gore's motion, from the professor's perspective, was a right wing motion. Even if she is not right wing in general. Warning labels on records was seen as part of a paternalistic authoritarian attitude, that it happened to be coming from a left wing person did not make it a left wing idea. It really appealed to more conservative individuals. It is bizarre, I agree with the professor, that modern college students might actually be in favor of such governmental mandates. It's not the warning label on records, or trigger warnings before a class, that are a problem. It's the mandate from on high. It's authoritarianism, it removes agency from individuals (producers and consumers), it's potentially anti-free speech (certain labels will, while being on good products or good lectures, turn many people away, so the material itself is avoided because the market is left barren of consumers). Whether intended or not, that last part is the really frightening part, to me. Once we mandate ratings and warnings, it becomes difficult, if not impossible, for people to even discuss difficult or challenging topics. It breaks the first amendment without actually having to do anything, society will censor itself. Individual speech, the press, etc.
drhayes9 10y ago
Remember how Occupy America didn't have an easily articulated set of politics? It was mostly an expression of anger at the current state of things? I think this is something similar, an acknowledgement that things are fucked up but no knowledge of where to go from that statement. That seems really similar to this. I sympathize with what I'm reading here. Trigger warnings, for instance, seem like a good idea: we do the same thing for our movies (Deadpool is rated R, maybe your kids will have a Bad Time) and our food (has tons of carbs! lots of processed sugar!). And I think there's value in giving people the choice in what adversity they face day-to-day if they're already struggling (people with suicidal ideation don't need a lot of exposure to more suicidal ideation). OTOH, I really agree with what Wendy Hyman from the article says. When you bend that far backwards you end up on the far right, circumscribing what people can think or say because you think you know better. For instance, outrage/call-out culture has made it a crime to be called a racist, so now everyone doesn't want to talk about race for fear of being called a racist. But if we can't talk meaningfully about race as an issue then it won't ever be untangled. It's okay to be angry about this stuff but using that as a foundation to halt all discussions forever just guarantees that the problem won't go away. My mom is a Chicano activist and she's always warned about what she calls the "más que tus": people who used their identities and politics as cards in a game of one-upmanship rather than as ways of understanding and ultimately changing the status quo. I'm worried that we're feeding that now in our search for a progressive means forward.
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rhapsodic 10y ago
Note to self: Avoid contact with Oberlin grads at all costs.
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47 points by tosseraccount 10y ago

It's great that people are exploring themselves and their world in college, but to be frank, I avoided those people along with the hard partiers, and everyone else who wasn't really at school to work and learn.

dev1n 10y ago
Back in the day (I'm talking way back) college was all about exploring the scientific method, history, literature, and economics. Today these kids aren't doing any of that and, thus, have too much free time on their hands. So they go out and protest about the fact that their school’s Afrikan Heritage House lacked truly authentic food.
- geogra4 10y ago
  Depends on whose history, literature and economics you're studying....
  - Aqueous 10y ago
    But it also doesn't. And a lot of this culture on campus is about replacing objective facts and knowledge with highly individual, subjective facts and knowledge, privileging "my truth" above all else. In this mindset, there's no 'objective truth' at all because all objectivity is tainted by power dynamics. The problem is, just because the facts were placed in our textbook by some culturally privileged Caucasian scholar doesn't mean they're not true.
    - locopati 10y ago
      When it comes to history and literature and other non-science fields, are there actually meaningfully objective facts and knowledge? Even a 'fact' like X event happened on Y date involves a lot of subjective perspectives on how X came to pass and even more subjective perspectives on why and even more on what the ramifications were.
    - nicoburns 10y ago
      I think the purpose of a lot of these movements is to point out the natural counterpoint to this: Just because the facts were placed in our textbook by some culturally privileged Caucasian scholar doesn't mean that they are true. Academia has a history of claiming things as objectively true, and then changing it's mind. It's healthy to question these things from the beginning. If you're doing secondary research then you ought to be asking who wrote what you are reading, what was their outlook on life, and why did they choose to write what they wrote. If you are doing primary research then you ought to be asking the same thing about your methodology. There surely is such thing as 'objective truth', but it isn't to be found in textbooks written by human beings.
      - morgante 10y ago
        > There surely is such thing as 'objective truth', but it isn't to be found in textbooks written by human beings. Really? The fact that a textbook was written by a human does not mean it cannot contain facts. No amount of politics will change the fact that the Normandy landings occurred on June 6, 1944.
      - mikerichards 10y ago
        by some culturally privileged Caucasian scholar there ya go...just what the article is talking about. Sorry to have to clue you in, but nobody buys that weird leftist newspeak.
        jmorphy88 10y ago
        Bingo. Progressive leftist ideology, in its essence, is anti-white racism. All of its purported ideals are really about stripping whites of any power or identity and giving it to others.
        morgante 10y ago
        That goes entirely too far. There is certainly a subset of "leftist" thought which is about searching for offense, but you shouldn't paint the whole progressive left with that stroke. Plenty of progressive movements (including the original Progressive Era) did not make racial causes central or important.
    - Aelinsaar 10y ago
      When I was 15, and struggling to accept the limits of what I was learning in high school, a teacher explained it to me very well. "You're here to learn how to learn, as much as to learn anything in particular. You're hear to learn how to think critically about the world around you, how to formulate a question based on observation, and then go into the world and find the answers."
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  - dev1n 10y ago
    Agreed but the point of the article is that these students are rebelling against literally any form of challenge to their own ideals. They actually don't identify with any ideals; they make up their own! On no factual basis. The article even says so. The fact is that these students are rebelling against the education they are paying for in order to gain more visibility for non-issues. Some of these issues are actually fairly fascist. They asked for a piece of artwork to be taken down because it insulted them. If we extend that argument, no art would be allowed, ever! Coddled is the word that comes to my mind.
    - kingkawn 10y ago
      That rebellion against anything but your own ideals is how any given canon came to be in the first place.
      - cLeEOGPw 10y ago
        And this is exact polar opposite of science. Science is all about challenging not only other, but your own ideas and rejecting those that don't hold on to the tests thrown at it. The rebellion at the campus today is a rebellion against science, against very idea that facts are universal. I sometimes wonder if rebellion like this can cause another dark age someday if it gains enough support from young people. Or maybe a beginning of "Idiocracy" type dystopia.
        pigpaws 10y ago
        considering 'new-earthers' and 'flat-earthers' are making a comeback, along with religious extremism taking over (in terms of laws vs traditions) I'd say the next dark-ages are right around the corner...
      - rhapsodic 10y ago
        You know this how?
- DanBC 10y ago
  > Back in the day (I'm talking way back) When? How far back are we going?
  - dev1n 10y ago
    To the 1940's, the last decade IMO when the only people who went to college went because they wanted to learn about meaningful questions on those subjects. Many students go to college now, but very few go on to actually study the foundational subjects that these universities were built upon.
    - dragonwriter 10y ago
      You're off by several centuries if that was ever true. College had been an important element of social status signaling for much longer than since the 1940s, though the particular status level that college in general or particular institutions are associated with had sorry drifted over time. If there was ever a time that people went to college exclusively it off a pure desire to "learn about meaningful questions" on any day of subjects, it was in the very distant past. But there probably never was such a time at all.
    - TorKlingberg 10y ago
      I assume you also object to the 60's civil rights movement in universities in the same way then?
      - Aelinsaar 10y ago
        Are you saying that students today are involved in a similarly important, organized, and effective movement as the 60's civil right's movement?
    - sotojuan 10y ago
      Whether that's true or not, part of the reason why things seem bad now is because society tells high schoolers that if they don't go to college (for any reason and almost any major) they're failures.
- mrdrozdov 10y ago
  Maybe they've learned enough about science, history, literature, and the modern world to the point that they realize they can make a difference. I'm not sure how you measure impact, but it feels like they're succeeding.
  - AnimalMuppet 10y ago
    Maybe, but they're succeeding at the wrong things. The difference that they're making is "learning how to make everyone else shut up", which is not a life skill that contributes to the progress of civilization.
    - mrdrozdov 10y ago
      That's an ironic turn of events.
- ams6110 10y ago
  It's all summed up nicely as "first world problems." I emphasized to my son when he entered college to always remember why he was there, and my expectations as the one paying for it. He's mostly lived up to that.
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- justaman 10y ago
  People would choose college based on professors instead of footballs teams as well.
  - tosseraccount 10y ago
    Yale won 27 collegiate football championships. Princeton won 28 . Harvard won 12 . Standford won 2 .
- ryandrake 10y ago
  I was thinking something similar. WTF are these protestors majoring in? When I was in undergrad, I was taking 18+ credits per semester, and my ass was in the lab 50% of the time. And when it wasn't, it was in the library or cramming for the next exam, or doing the piles of homework that you were never able to finish (by design, so you learned to prioritize). Then in Junior and Senior years it was labs, career fairs, mock interviews, internships, more labs, resume writing, homework, more labs... Who the hell has time to go out there protesting every little thing that bothers them? Don't they have classwork to do?
  - moron4hire 10y ago
    The article goes into that. Their academic standing is slipping. They've even protested to have academic standards loosened so they can continue protesting.
  - caseysoftware 10y ago
    In some cases - like Mattress Girl - these are class projects so they may get credit for going out and protesting, writing letters, etc.
- dragonwriter 10y ago
  More likely, this ideal is something that lots of people believe is a universal thing rather than an ideal of what college should be about, and when they learn in the real world that its not what lots of people approach college as, they construct a fantasy that there was a time in the past when the ideal they've internalized was true, and the present just represents a fall from that ideal. Similar cultural complaints and conflicts between academic and non-academic communities go back to the establishment of the first universities. (And the idea that "Today these kids...have too much free time on their hands" and that this is the source of all kinds of problems goes back into antiquity, and probably is documented nearly as far back as we have records at all.)
Disruptive_Dave 10y ago
It's funny, I had quite a different experience, and I'm very thankful for it. I can find very few regrets for taking my educational duties in college for granted and instead exploring the depravities of a teenage mind. A hell of a time and I'm richer for it.
- Aelinsaar 10y ago
  Presumably you started off doing alright, if you were free to party your way through uni.
  - Disruptive_Dave 10y ago
    Meaning money or grades? Either way, I partied my way through college AND got that diploma. The last 15+ years in my career have been considerably above average, if I do say so myself. That's more about luck and hustle than anything else...certainly not book smarts.

firasd 10y ago

The professor who says, “But then, at some point, it became really solipsistic” really gets to my issues with the rise of ‘Social Justice’ politics this decade. As a non-white guy, I understand and sometimes agree with claims like: “Your literary canon/history/point of view/etc. is rooted in Western hegemony.” That’s a claim that can be analyzed. It’s another to just say: “You’re [Various Identifier Here]-Splaining.” What can someone really do with that? At that point the claim becomes pure politics, you have to just support the person making the claim or not. (Not to get on a soapbox but the theatre prof joking “I’m thinking, Oh, God! I’m cast in one of my least favorite plays of all time, ‘The Crucible,’ by Arthur Miller!” gets to another issue I have. People don’t seem understand that the tools they use to oppose others should be applied with proportionality and good judgement, if for no other reason than that in another circumstance those same tools can be used against them as well. In general I think when people are ensconced in any ideology, they begin to overlook Kant’s reminder to “treat humanity, whether in your own person or in the person of another, always at the same time as an end and never simply as a means.”)

protomyth 10y ago
> What can someone really do with that? At that point the claim becomes pure politics, you have to just support the person making the claim or not. Not a whole lot, and that's by design. Subjectivism of what is art in the modern art movement was annoying but didn't really affect most people's lives. Now, we have the same thing with the same rhetoric and tactics (well, with the added violence) happening on US campuses.
adityab 10y ago
Agreed. These days, Identity politics is absolutely dominated by the idea that everything is just a point-of-view and ideas/arguments are inseparable from the identity of the person putting them forth. I often say that a "scientific temper" is something we should all strive towards - the scientific method is possibly the greatest achievement of civilization - but there are an inexplicable number of people (who have never heard of it) that simply claim that enlightenment ideals are Eurocentric and that my subscription to those (as a non-white) would count as internalized oppression. By some, nuance is denounced, absolutism is glamorous. Some others cannot be argued with; they grow an argument for every exception to their blanket theories until the entire ideology is a tangled mess of patchwork, at which point the application of this monster to any real-world situation becomes intractable and the evaluation of new observations strongly correlates with in/out-group membership. It is incredibly sad to see this dynamic being played out by otherwise smart people that I respect. That you and I have to explicitly advertise our non-white status when saying this for it to hold any water is a travesty, and demonstrates how bad the environment has become.

6stringmerc 10y ago

New activisim? Last time I checked, Socrates was accused of corrupting the youth with his activism against the prevailing politics, was tried and sentenced to death. So, um, new? Granted I don't think this particular strain of activism has such high stakes, but come on, impressionable youth-becoming-adults is a really lucrative demographic for "buy in" to lots of different ideologies (see also: "extremism" in the name of one cause or another). Those flames tend to burn out rather on the quick side, personal experience as my reference point.

bobcostas55 10y ago
In the Socrates analogy, the "new activists" are playing the part of Meletus, not Socrates.

mikerichards 10y ago

So called "progressive" campuses have become mini Orwellian dystopias because of demented leftist ideology run amok.

VeejayRampay 10y ago
North-American campuses. And maybe in some places of Northern Europe as well. This is not a worldwide thing.
- sampo 10y ago
  As far as I know, the new concepts like trigger warnings and safe spaces have so far only spread to UK universities, not other European countries.

cLeEOGPw 10y ago

> “You include Black and other students of color in the institution and mark them with the words ‘equity, inclusion and diversity,’ ” it said, “when in fact this institution functions on the premises of imperialism, white supremacy, capitalism, ableism, and a cissexist heteropatriarchy.” Black is written with capital b in the middle of sentence like some title, while white is not. Nice to see that one race is finally being recognized as superior over the other. New "Aryan" race. Can't see anything wrong neither with it, nor all the other very meaningful and truthful terms told by this intelligent man.

vilda 10y ago

David Sacks and Peter Thiel wrote an excellent book "The Diversity Myth". They report on how corrosive impact have certain ideologies on higher education and academic freedom. I recommend to read it just to get a boarder view into the problem no matter on what side you are now.

djschnei 10y ago

SJWs have done more to set the race discussion back in this country than anything else in recent history. Identity politics is ruining this country.

Jtsummers 10y ago

Hyman started college in the eighties. Her generation, she said, protested against Tipper Gore for wanting to put warning labels on records. "My students want warning labels on class content, and I feel-I don't even know how to articulate it," she said. "Part of me feels that my leftist students are doing the right wing's job for it." The current generation entering college in the US has grown up in a time of authoritarianism-as-the-norm. Parents that hover too close. Schools with zero tolerance policies. A nation that goes to war against people who they shouldn't, when they should be pursuing criminal investigations and charges. Torture as the norm. Surveillance as the norm. It's not terribly surprising, then, that the current generation of leftists don't see liberal democracy as a solution. Rather, they expect a continuation of what they've grown up with, but applied to their particular ideological preferences.

caseysoftware 10y ago
The problem with this reasoning is that Tipper Gore is not right wing.
- Jtsummers 10y ago
  I take the professor's viewpoint on right and left wing to be (a product of its times) more a contrast between paternalistic authoritarianism under claimed democratic ideals, and liberal (as in freedom, particular personal liberties) democracy. Beyond that, right and left have no meaning anymore so it's best to read statements regarding them in the context they were made. Thus why I switched the language to refer to authoritarianism and liberal democracy in my comment. Right and left, if they have any meaning, represent only a single dimension of a very complex space. Right can mean: fascism, anarcho-capitalism, libertarian, Republican (confused mix of various ideologies), religious authoritarianism (under an ostensible democracy or not), generally conservatism. Left can mean: libertarian, anarchist, socialist (various forms, including anarchism), communism, Democrat (confused mix of various ideologies), various green movements, etc. It's far better to break out what we're actually wanting to discuss. Tipper Gore's motion, from the professor's perspective, was a right wing motion. Even if she is not right wing in general. Warning labels on records was seen as part of a paternalistic authoritarian attitude, that it happened to be coming from a left wing person did not make it a left wing idea. It really appealed to more conservative individuals. It is bizarre, I agree with the professor, that modern college students might actually be in favor of such governmental mandates. It's not the warning label on records, or trigger warnings before a class, that are a problem. It's the mandate from on high. It's authoritarianism, it removes agency from individuals (producers and consumers), it's potentially anti-free speech (certain labels will, while being on good products or good lectures, turn many people away, so the material itself is avoided because the market is left barren of consumers). Whether intended or not, that last part is the really frightening part, to me. Once we mandate ratings and warnings, it becomes difficult, if not impossible, for people to even discuss difficult or challenging topics. It breaks the first amendment without actually having to do anything, society will censor itself. Individual speech, the press, etc.

drhayes9 10y ago

Remember how Occupy America didn't have an easily articulated set of politics? It was mostly an expression of anger at the current state of things? I think this is something similar, an acknowledgement that things are fucked up but no knowledge of where to go from that statement. That seems really similar to this. I sympathize with what I'm reading here. Trigger warnings, for instance, seem like a good idea: we do the same thing for our movies (Deadpool is rated R, maybe your kids will have a Bad Time) and our food (has tons of carbs! lots of processed sugar!). And I think there's value in giving people the choice in what adversity they face day-to-day if they're already struggling (people with suicidal ideation don't need a lot of exposure to more suicidal ideation). OTOH, I really agree with what Wendy Hyman from the article says. When you bend that far backwards you end up on the far right, circumscribing what people can think or say because you think you know better. For instance, outrage/call-out culture has made it a crime to be called a racist, so now everyone doesn't want to talk about race for fear of being called a racist. But if we can't talk meaningfully about race as an issue then it won't ever be untangled. It's okay to be angry about this stuff but using that as a foundation to halt all discussions forever just guarantees that the problem won't go away. My mom is a Chicano activist and she's always warned about what she calls the "más que tus": people who used their identities and politics as cards in a game of one-upmanship rather than as ways of understanding and ultimately changing the status quo. I'm worried that we're feeding that now in our search for a progressive means forward.

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rhapsodic 10y ago

Note to self: Avoid contact with Oberlin grads at all costs.

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