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Kirata -> RE: News from the Society for the Perpetually Offended (3/23/2015 5:49:55 PM)
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quote:
ORIGINAL: PeonForHerquote:
ORIGINAL: Kirataquote:
ORIGINAL: PeonForHer
'You don't argue with these people, you just beat them up'. This was because such racist views were 'devoid of reason - and without reason, there's no ground on which you can have an argument'.
The question, again, is who gets to decide? I do not subscribe to the notion that people whose views may be deemed to be held "without reason" should be punished. I find the idea repugnant, and certain to be dangerous in the hands of power.
I don't think anybody gets to decide, K. The reality is that civil society only operates by coming to some never-very-comfortable accommodation with that sort of view on the fringes. If the much-maligned 'political correctness' has a benign purpose, this would be it.
In College and Hiding From Scary Ideas
At Brown University last Fall, a student group organized a debate between Jessica Valenti, founder of feminista.com, and Wendy McElroy, a libertarian. When Katherine Byron, a student member of Brown's Sexual Assault Task Force, learned that the term "rape culture" might come under critical examination in the debate, she became alarmed. Alarmed! One result of her alarm was a "safe space" for students upset by the talk.
The safe space, Ms. Byron explained, was intended to give people who might find comments "troubling" or "triggering," a place to recuperate. The room was equipped with cookies, coloring books, bubbles, Play-Doh, calming music, pillows, blankets and a video of frolicking puppies, as well as students and staff members trained to deal with trauma.
Brown is not alone.
Two weeks ago, students at Northwestern University marched to protest an article by Laura Kipnis, a professor in the university’s School of Communication. Professor Kipnis had criticized - O.K., ridiculed - what she called the sexual paranoia pervading campus life . . . The protesters carried mattresses and demanded that the administration condemn the essay. One student complained that Professor Kipnis was "erasing the very traumatic experience" of victims who spoke out.
Northwestern's president wasn't having it, and affirmed the university's committment to academic freedom. But not all schools have Northwestern's spine.
At Oxford University’s Christ Church college in November, the college censors (a "censor" being more or less the Oxford equivalent of an undergraduate dean) canceled a debate on abortion after campus feminists threatened to disrupt it because both would-be debaters were men...
A year and a half ago, a Hampshire College student group disinvited an Afrofunk band that had been attacked on social media for having too many white musicians; the vitriolic discussion had made students feel "unsafe"...
Last fall, the president of Smith College, Kathleen McCartney, apologized for causing students and faculty to be "hurt" when she failed to object to a racial epithet uttered by a fellow panel member at an alumnae event in New York. The offender was the free-speech advocate Wendy Kaminer, who had been arguing against the use of the euphemism "the n-word" when teaching American history or "The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn."
"Why," the NY Times asks, "are students so eager to self-infantilize?" But maybe they're just being propagandized and employed as useful idiots to attack academic freedom and freedom of speech.
The theory that vulnerable students should be guaranteed psychological security has roots in a body of legal thought elaborated in the 1980s and 1990s and still read today. Feminist and anti-racist legal scholars argued that the First Amendment should not safeguard language that inflicted emotional injury through racist or sexist stigmatization...
In other words, any language, any debate, or even any research that someone might find "triggering" or "offensive" in the jargon of social justice theory. Thus, from Harvard...
Let’s give up on academic freedom in favor of justice
Yeah, no.
K.
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