Colleges prepare for another year of "microaggressions" and "vindictive protectiveness"

[GreatGazoo]

as the first social media native generation returns to classes.

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. 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.
...
This new climate is slowly being institutionalized, and is affecting what can be said in the classroom, even as a basis for discussion. During the 2014–15 school year, for instance, the deans and department chairs at the 10 University of California system schools were presented by administrators at faculty leader-training sessions with examples of microaggressions. The list of offensive statements included: “America is the land of opportunity” and “I believe the most qualified person should get the job.”
...
But 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 harm may be more immediate, too. A campus culture devoted to policing speech and punishing speakers is likely to engender patterns of thought that are surprisingly similar to those long identified by cognitive behavioral therapists as causes of depression and anxiety. The new protectiveness may be teaching students to think pathologically.
...

We do not mean to imply simple causation, but rates of mental illness in young adults have been rising, both on campus and off, in recent decades. Some portion of the increase is surely due to better diagnosis and greater willingness to seek help, but most experts seem to agree that some portion of the trend is real. Nearly all of the campus mental-health directors surveyed in 2013 by the American College Counseling Association reported that the number of students with severe psychological problems was rising at their schools. The rate of emotional distress reported by students themselves is also high, and rising. In a 2014 survey by the American College Health Association, 54 percent of college students surveyed said that they had “felt overwhelming anxiety” in the past 12 months, up from 49 percent in the same survey just five years earlier. Students seem to be reporting more emotional crises; many seem fragile, and this has surely changed the way university faculty and administrators interact with them. The question is whether some of those changes might be doing more harm than good.

http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2015/09/the-coddling-of-the-american-mind/399356/

[Gman]

1. Good article

One of my pet peeves is parents that shelter their kids to the point that, among other things, the word "violate" causes them distress. That's child abuse.

[Facility Inspector]

2. Most of these people couldn't make it through

an evening of prime time 1970s television.

[Gman]

3. And the colleges need to wash out

Those like this who's feelings compromise their ability to think critically. Better now and give them more time to adjust than when the real world hits them square on the jaw.

[CrispyQ]

4. Do you think it may have started with American exceptionalism,

which we've suffered from since WWII, but it really took hold after Reagan. The entire culture suffers from a sort of "We're #1!" delusion. We don't want to be told we're not #1 & we refuse to believe it, even as our country falls apart in front of our eyes. I'll bet a lot of these kids have helicopter parents who try to protect them from every negative thing that could happen & now that they're out in the real world, they can't handle it. Wow, that's a great way to prepare your kid - not.

Interesting article. Thanks for posting.

[On the Road]

5. If WWII Patriotism and Reagan are the Reasons,

wouldn't you expect this trend to be coming from the political right?

[zazen]

6. surplus class of non-faculty professional college administrators looking to justify careers/salaries

It's called "administrative latticing." There are advanced degree programs for credentialing for a professional middle management class at universities. It's self-perpetuating.

They create more positions--director, asst director, asst vice provost, for every conceivable special interest group--and those people drive the budgets, so when they're facing ongoing state budget cuts, faculty positions are cut and replaced with adjuncts while more positions are preserved, whose sole justification for remaining is to identify such sensitivities. Universities are still terrified of bad press for eliminating "special assist director for fill in the blank affairs" positions so they cut departments/degree programs that aren't immediately profitable (like gender studies). So the programs for student services related to gender issues continue but degree programs are eliminated.

It reflects the triumph of those who would manipulate identity politics to crush any understanding of neoliberalism's destruction of higher education (and of jobs for graduates).

I'm all for better understanding and prevention of rape and abuse on college campuses, having been on the receiving end of numerous actions for which I could easily bring numerous, winnable grievances today.

But this nonsense, which my daughter at Duke sees daily, is so symptomatic of privileged people who claim they're so sensitive and yet are blind to the profound economic inequalities that are harming many more minorities than these supposed micro aggressions. She faces discrimination on a daily basis there for being poor, but God forbid you question the supposed victimization of anyone's identity group (except her family not having any money).

That's the MACROAGGRESSION on American campuses today. Neoliberal destruction of disciplines, careers, and future jobs.

[1939]

9. Commonly known as Parkinson's Law NT

[MattSh]

7. Rutgers University Warns Students - "There Is No Such Thing As Free Speech"

Let’s turn to Rutgers University, whose “Bias Prevention & Education Committee (BPEC)” recently put out an alert that began with the following statement:



(It's right there, in the fine print). Of course I'd like to point out that all censorship has it's costs and consequences too, especially self-censorship.

And of course, it's no longer there. Surprise, surprise.

And it's my effing Alma Mater. Rutgers, what the hell has happened to you?

[MrScorpio]

8. Coping with the fight against white supremacy, homophobia and sexism is tough to do...

…For those who have benefitted from these forms of discrimination and have never sought to eliminate them from their own privileged lives.

Equality always!

[Waiting For Everyman]

10. "teaching students to think pathologically"

I call it nursing grievances, but yes. There it is.