Yale's big fight over sensitivity and free speech, explained.

[romanic]

Yale's controversy tapped into a national debate on college culture

The "I don't want to debate" line spoke to a growing trend worrying some observers of higher education, and beyond just Yale: in the balance between sensitivity versus critical thinking and academic freedom, students are increasingly emphasizing the former over the latter.

On college campuses around the country, students, particularly students of color, are forcing white students and administrators to confront the pernicious effects of racial bias.

At the same time, students are demanding that colleges be more sensitive to their mental health and well-being. They're feeling empowered to make requests that professors sometimes feel interfere with their long-cherished right to research freely and to speak their mind in public.

The question facing campuses, then, is how to weigh those issues of sensitivity and mental health against sometimes-competing values of free speech and academic freedom.

Students have called for graduation speakers who have done things they consider offensive to be disinvited from commencement. Some have requested "trigger warnings" for material on syllabuses that could exacerbate mental health issues. At Northwestern University, a professor who wrote an essay about a dispute involving a professor accused of sexual assault ended up facing a Title IX complaint due to her comments about the students involved.

Even President Obama weighed in on the debate in September, criticizing college students who want to be "coddled." "Anybody who comes to speak to you and you disagree with, you should have an argument with ‘em," he said. "But you shouldn’t silence them by saying, 'You can’t come because I'm too sensitive to hear what you have to say.' That’s not the way we learn."

The debate over how colleges should weigh these requests is complicated by the contradictions at the heart of colleges' relationship with their students. College students are supposed to act like mature adults, but they're subject to the authority of administrators in a way that 18- and 19-year-olds not in college are not. As the price of college has risen, students are increasingly considered paying customers. At the same time, the goal of college is not simply to be happy and comfortable, but to be challenged and grow intellectually.

These are the tensions that Erika Christakis was trying to address in her e-mail. In it, she asked, "What does this debate about Halloween costumes say about our view of young adults, of their strength and judgment?" It's clear that the students in Sillman college want the university to take a more active role in their lives than some faculty would prefer.

http://www.vox.com/2015/11/7/9689330/yale-halloween-email

Very interesting article (from Vox no less) and speaks volumes on the outrage culture that has tainted our universities and stifled debate and the maturation of ideas that used to be prevalent on college campuses. i swear our generation of college students are being coddled to a point where they can't even handle simple issues without calling for resignations and censorship. There was also a video at Yale on Youtube of few students protesting in regards to the emails but I think the source is from a right-wing propaganda site so I don't want to link it - but you can search for it on youtube if you're interested in watching it.

[geek tragedy]

1. That shit is ridiculous.

Every good fight is tainted by immature individuals who take it too far.

[Igel]

2. It's a slippery slope.

The only defense against a real slippery slope in logic is basically common sense and gut instinct.

One sociology research article called it "grievance culture." Because we all want to get our way, we all want to win, we all pretty much would like something for nothing and to be special, it's a way of mustering the community (whatever that happens to be) to back you in your complaint or grievance. And grievances make us special because over the last 40 years grievances have, for many, been the best winning stategy.

Not shame culture. Not honor culture. (But, I suspect, derived from honor culture.) It splats the other side with dishonor and shame while protecting you from any responsibility for a lack of achievement or even outright failure.

Think about it. "I'm in this group, and this group is discriminated against in this way. I can't be held responsible for my relative lack of achievement and deserve some compensation for it, or at least seeing them over there punished." And the justification: "Look at this research, if X happens, 5% of the time my group has to do more/gets less/is underrepresented/overrepresented." Granted, for 19/20 people this doesn't apply, but everybody in the group gets to claim collective damages because nobody wants to worry about the actual numbers except when they help "prove" the claim.