Header Image (book)

aowheader.3.2.gif

Thursday, November 12, 2015

Collegiate Tantrums


Have special little snowflakes, ever fretful about microaggressions, taken over the Ivy Leagues.

Student C: It is not about creating an intellectual space! It is not! Do you understand that? It’s about creating a home here! You are not doing that. You’re going against that.
Please watch the following brief video (1 minute, 20 seconds):


Full transcript HERE.

Back story from the YouTube link (hot links added):
On November 5, 2015, students at Yale University gathered on campus to protest an email sent by Associate Master of Silliman College Erika Christakis on October 30. Christakis’ email responded to a separate email from the school’s Intercultural Affairs Council that asked students to be thoughtful about the cultural implications of their Halloween costumes.

Christakis [advocating freedom of expression with regard to Halloween costumes] argued that the council’s email [emphasizing sensitivities with regard to Halloween costumes] was infantilizing and threatened free expression on campus. There was also a concern that because the email was long, detailed, had 13 signatories, and links to acceptable and unacceptable costumes, it would not be interpreted as a suggestion. But rather it had the “color of law” implicit within it.

FIRE President and CEO Greg Lukianoff was on Yale’s campus during the protests on November 5 and captured this footage on his cell phone of Christakis’ husband, Nicholas, meeting with the protestors. By the time Lukianoff arrived on the scene, Nicholas had been speaking with the protesters for about an hour.

The Washington Post reports that students have begun to organize formal demands for the resignation of Christakis and her husband.
Additional reading (worth your time):

(1) The Coddling of the American Mind: 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 (from the Atlantic)

(2) Mizzou And Yale Show Why It’s Time To Burn Universities To The Ground (from the Federalist).

38 comments:

  1. We can only hope that they're all heading for careers in academentia, because out here in the real world no one will give a hirsute rodent's posterior about hurting their feelings.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Viburnum,
      Why don't these students yet have even a clue as to the real world?

      Delete
  2. I can't sum it up any better than J.Kb at Gun Free Zone....who is rethinking his support for campus carry, based on the infantile tactics of some of these student bodies:

    Let that sink in… students, at the No. 3 college in America… kids who are supposed to grow up to be Congressmen, Senators, and captains of industry are losing sleep and having breakdown because of an email that said “Is there no room anymore for a child or young person to be a little bit obnoxious… a little bit inappropriate or provocative or, yes, offensive?” If this is the standard for behavior at the No. 3 college in America (I’m gonna keep driving that point home), what should my expectations be for the kids that come in below that.

    These kids broke me. I want to trust them as adults. They are old enough to drive, old enough to vote, old enough to go to war. But after all this, I can’t trust them with anything more intellectually challenging than a sticker book.

    (I’d of normally said coloring book, but I’m afraid it would be a micro-aggression against the color blind and people who can’t color inside the lines and they will go on Twitter and threaten to burn down my house.)


    http://gunfreezone.net/wordpress/

    My eldest daughter will be college age in 3 years....and I'm seriously reconsidering the plan of encouraging her to attend a university. These nitwits aren't apparently intelligent enough to realize that not only are they willfully isolating themselves from intellectual diversity....but they're setting themselves up for far worse emotional faux-"trauma" when they enter the real world....and someone uses a 'trigger warning' to shove their 'safe space' squarely up their backside...with extreme prejudice.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. CI,
      Do you yet have any idea as to what you will encourage your oldest daughter to do?

      Delete
  3. "Safe space" - the new meme for college campus life - is the bastard child of extreme narcissism. It reeks of "My thoughts are so elevated and perfect that if any dare challenge, I will squash them like a bug."

    Those of us who are mature adults, deal with offenses with humility and understand that we cannot put too much stock in the human race.

    I have a Halloween costume in mind for these spoiled children:

    http://thoughtcatalog.com/tim-hogan/2014/06/5-reasons-to-wear-an-adult-diaper/

    It is the diaper kid generation. The motto of the parents is that we will clean up your sh-it and your sh-t does not stink. The kids are never mentally potty trained by the parents.

    ReplyDelete
  4. College is a nice place to go for certain careers.
    I want a college educated doctor, I've worked with lawyers that should have been welders.
    But when this many people go to academia not knowing why they are there, just went because they could borrow the money to go and were told they should, this is what you get.
    Protesters finding meaning in protest because they have it nowhere else..

    ReplyDelete
  5. I've been meaning to blog on this incident... Guess I need to stop dragging my feet and post it.

    The shrieking, the snapping fingers, the list of demands, including the demand for a publicly-read handwritten apology are straight out of Maoist Communism.

    And did you catch the Mizzou Youtube of the shrieking "journalism professor" screaming for "some muscle" to come over and toss out the journalists covering their protest?

    That vulgar, screaming student will not be expelled or even punished, and the leftwing fascist professor will face no censure whatever.

    Parents, you are stupid if you cast your precious young adults upon such a sea of deliberate obscurantism, indoctrination and neo-fascism. Send them to a junior college for two years, then find a small, quiet campus for them to finish up their degree. You and your children's minds, bank account and souls will be better off for it.

    ReplyDelete
  6. You're all wrong. ;)

    The problem is NOT with the kids. It's ENTRELY with the teachers/administrators...(excepted from a SZ interview)

    Despite what any of the college kids are saying, we don’t have racism today because blacks are exploited only today, but they became much more sensitive to it today. The paradox is the following one, if you look, for example, at the typical genesis of a revolution: the terror never became so bad that the people exploded. No, it was always a kind of spiritual revolution, which raised the standards. And then usually those in power began to lose their nerves and accept these new standards silently. Out of this loss of legitimization, it exploded.

    For example, in a wonderful text by Bernard Williams that deals with David Mamet’s "Oleann"a, the harassment play, that made a nice point. If you look closely, Mamet is a little more refined than people usually think. The point is not that the young student is complaining about harassment, but that what she is complaining about is that she came to him as a student, she wanted guidance from him and so on. And basically, he was too liberal, not giving her any authentic guidance as an authority, and precisely because he renounced his authority, his power which remained as a professor appeared as irrational power. So paradoxically, it is precisely when the professor renounces his standard authority and behaves like we are all the same that, between the lines, he keeps his power (he can grade you and so on). At the moment when he pretends to be tolerant, you experience his power in all of its irrationality.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Where Williams is correct is in his emphasis on how the very permissiveness of the power-figure, his restraint from exercising authority by directing, controlling, his subject makes that authority appear as illegitimate power. Therein resides the vicious cycle of today's academia: the more professors renounce, 'authoritarian' active teaching, the imposition of knowledge and values, the more they are experienced as figures of power. And, as every parent knows, the same goes for parental education: a father who exerts true transferential authority will never be experienced as 'oppressive' - it is, on the contrary, a father who tries to be permissive, who does not want to impose his views and values on his children, but allows them to discover their own way, who is denounced as exerting power, as being 'oppressive'...

      Delete
  7. Farmer,

    Thank you for the Zizek post. I have been struggling with how to explain what is going on not just here in the US, but all over the world. The adults have lost control, lost legitimacy. They've lost the "divine right to rule," (for lack of a better term. This right was always an illusion, but they broke the spell by voluntarily questioning their own legitimacy and by not "staying in character." I've struggled and failed to say what Zizek says in your bulls-eye quote from him:

    The paradox is the following one, if you look, for example, at the typical genesis of a revolution: the terror never became so bad that the people exploded. No, it was always a kind of spiritual revolution, which raised the standards. And then usually those in power began to lose their nerves and accept these new standards silently. Out of this loss of legitimization, it exploded.

    ReplyDelete
  8. They've lost their collective @#*&^ minds! God forbid they get out in the real world and have to deal with that... sigh... I'd be kicking them out of school for behavior like that!

    ReplyDelete
  9. Two critical points here:

    1. In the case of Missouri there hasn't been anything published that establishes a systemic racism.
    Someone yelled a slur from a pickup. Student? Is it a repeat occurrence?
    Just what does it take to be "systemic".

    In the case of Yale it's just trivial and I don't think the university is going to fold.

    2. The identity of the snowflakes is interesting.
    The hunger strikers father is an executive with Union Pacific and made 6 million last year. If he wants to talk about privilege you could do worse than slap a little Marxist class analysis on his punk ass.

    The Yale screamer is from an upper middle class family living on the Connecticut "gold coast".
    Her Facebook page indicates that her hobby is traveling and she's been to over 20 countries with a goal to visiting at least four fifths of the world nations.
    Again, slap the class analysis on this clueless brat.

    But point two is the most important. Those two have no way to identify with the likes of Freddie Gray so they feel insecure in their identity. An insecurity that is largely of their own making.

    So we are know closer to the truth and we move further from a position of being able to discuss these snowflakes honestly.
    Can't discuss it on campus, bad for business and like most everything else in this sad culture education is just a business.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Well, you continue to amaze me, Ducky.

      I will quibble and say I don't know how relevant Marx is to today, but could we agree that Rerum Novarum is just as relevant today as it was back in 1891?

      I also agree with you that we have some serious structural problems with our major institutions. It heartens me that you appear to share my belief that this this bourgeois slummer activism is not the answer.

      Delete
    2. what does it take to be "systemic".

      at a University? How about, "#ConceredStudent1950 is dividing into seven groups,They're asking white allies to leave."

      Delete
    3. I repeat:
      Protesters finding meaning in protest because they have it nowhere else..

      Delete
  10. “I’m sorry about the misinformation that I have shared through social media. In a state of alarm, I was concerned for all students of the University of Missouri and wanted to ensure that everyone was safe. I received and shared information from multiple incorrect sources, which I deeply regret,” Head(student body president) wrote on Facebook Tuesday. He told students earlier in the day to stay away from windows as he worked with police and the National Guard to deal with a KKK sighting.
    ------
    So more total bull.
    Why isn't this guy being expelled?

    ReplyDelete
  11. We are looking at a cultural revolution Maoist style and we know how that ended. Our very special snowflake Hussein Obama cut his teeth at one of these elite institutions. More to follow apparently. We are in for one swell ride.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Bunkerville, yes! I missed your post and added the same info below.

      We need to keep remembering history lest we be led around in circles. Again.

      Delete
    2. meant to write "comment" rather than "post"

      Delete
  12. What FJ quoted is well worth a lot of thought; they come for guidance and they get PC BS.........
    The students have had hovering, spoiling parents and so everything that doesn't feel GREAT is suspect and needs to be stopped.
    This isn't probably a dangerous trend in violence; somehow we got through the really violent horrors of Kent State (with a pretty good song or two thrown in, by the way) and others, but it's a dangerous trend.

    These kids need to know they don't rule the world, that feelings get hurt and they'll live through it, that their professors and employers will never find them as adorable as their parents do, and they need to somehow learn RESPECT.
    fat chance?

    ReplyDelete
  13. And BY THE WAY...the way the liberal kids are so anti First Amendment is scary..THAT is probably the worst trend of all. Imagine journalism majors telling the press to get out? ...because it might print the truth instead of their opinions? And we thought the stupidity at MSNBC was an anomaly?

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. This threat to free speech is serious business.

      I do not ascribe the sources of this thread to only the Left or only the Right.

      That said, what is transpiring on these various campuses was set in motion by the Left -- primarily, anyway.

      The genie is out of the bottle, and this is not a fairy-godmother type of genie.

      Delete
    2. Yes, AOW, it's serious business and I think you know me well enough to know that I highly value free expression.

      That expression is stifled in any number of ways currently.
      Privileged little snowflakes who want all they find offensive silenced to those who would have Zinn removed from classrooms.

      It crosses the spectrum.

      Delete
  14. Replies
    1. Yes, this is beyond Left and Right (as are most things today). But the precedent was the 1966 Maoist Cultural Revolution.

      Delete
  15. I'll just say that I've read more than once where the extremely librtard perfessors have been attacked and made very afraid for not being libtard enough for today's incredibly libtard and evil children showing up at university. Literally scared.

    ReplyDelete
  16. A brief rundown of this current jihad.

    https://youtu.be/F_fDIsGufPY

    ReplyDelete
  17. This has all happened before. It was called the "Cultural Revolution".

    Between 1966 and 1976, the young people of China rose up in an effort to purge the nation of the "Four Olds": old customs, old culture, old habits and old ideas.

    ..."struggle sessions," in which they heaped abuse and public humiliation upon people accused of capitalist thoughts (usually these were teachers, monks and other educated persons). These sessions often included physical violence, and many of the accused died or ended up being held in reeducation camps for years. According to the Mao's Last Revolution by Roderick MacFarquhar and Michael Schoenhals, almost 1,800 people were killed in Beijing alone in August and September of 1966.
    (asianhistory about dot com)

    From another source, "On the afternoon of August 5, 1966, students at an elite girls' school linked to Beijing Normal University turned on their supposedly "counter-revolutionary" teachers, pummeling them with nail-filled batons and dousing them with boiling water."

    Is there any difference in kind between what is happening in American colleges and what happened only 50 years ago in China?

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. How about "culturally"? China wasn't a democracy. Perhaps this events marks the "last gasp" of western democracy.

      Much like the cultural revolution, this is also an attempt at "purging the olds" (racism, domination)... we can look forward to saying 'goodbye' to democracy, as the cultural revolution, in attempting to "purge the last vestiges of capitalism from communism", resulted in China saying "goodbye" to communism and embracing capitalism.

      Delete
    2. 1. Student demonstrators have not come close to crippling the U.S. economy.

      2. They have not surpassed the power of the (militarized) police and aren't likely to.

      3. They have not been iconoclasts nor have they inflicted Soviet realism on us. We can look to religious conservatives for that service.

      Delete

We welcome civil dialogue at Always on Watch. Comments that include any of the following are subject to deletion:
1. Any use of profanity or abusive language
2. Off topic comments and spam
3. Use of personal invective

Note: Only a member of this blog may post a comment.

!--BLOCKING--