Although this isn’t directly related to our topics at hand, I recently recalled a great article I read earlier this year that is relevant to today’s higher education. The September issue of The Atlantic featured a cover story, written by Greg Lukianoff and Jonathan Haidt, that raised a lot of questions about the way college students protect themselves from words and ideas that they don’t like in the name of emotional well-being. Their basic premise was that the hypersensitivity rampant on most college campuses is damaging both to students’ education and their mental health.
Students have more and more been using “emotional reasoning” as legal evidence; the argument “I feel it, so it must be true” is considered legitimate. For instance, a white student was found guilty at Indiana University–Purdue University at Indianapolis for reading a book titled Notre Dame vs. the Klan. The picture of the Ku Klux Klan rally on the book’s cover offended another student, despite the fact that the book valued the student opposition to the Ku Klux Klan. Examples like this one show that it has been considered unacceptable to doubt the reasonableness of someone’s emotional state, especially when tied to group identity. Claiming offense to something has become “an unbeatable trump card.”
Something else very common among college campuses is the use of trigger warnings in class. Students assume that they know how others will react, and that reaction will be devastating. Preventing this becomes a “moral obligation” incumbent upon everyone. Some books that have been called out for trigger warnings include Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart (racial violence) and F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby (misogyny and physical abuse). The authors point out that according to basic tenets in psychology, it is completely counterproductive to help someone with anxiety disorders avoid the thing they’re afraid of. Furthermore, it is detrimental to one’s education as a student and a person to just skip over the parts of history and literature that are uncomfortable.
The list goes on and on, and the examples get even wilder. One professor faced angry demonstrations after he lowercased the I in the word indigenous in a student’s paper, which she had capitalized; students claimed it was an insult to her and her ideology. One student wrote a satirical piece for a student newspaper about students’ hypersensitization to absurd microaggressions. He was terminated from another paper he wrote for and his dorm room door was vandalized with raw eggs, hot dogs, gum, and notes with messages such as “Everyone hates you, you violent prick.”
“When speech comes to be seen as a form of violence, vindictive protectiveness can justify a hostile, and perhaps even violent, response,” Lukianoff and Haidt write. In terms of education (the point of college?), this atmosphere creates “intellectual homogeneity,” and in fact does a disservice to students by allowing them to think that they can make everyone agree with them. Instead, college should be a place where students feel intellectually engaged with diverse viewpoints and honest discussion. The way it stands now, we are perpetrating the idea that you can’t learn anything from someone who thinks differently than you, which is harmful to students’ learning process and mental development.
Real life doesn’t comfort people by giving them “trigger warnings.” College shouldn’t be a cocoon where we can snap our fingers and make all ideas we disagree with disappear. Instead, our college education should be equipping us with the skills needed to respond to people we disagree with in an open way, not in one that allows extreme subjectivity to reign and demonizes our opponents. We need, of course, to be respectful and sensitive to all students, but we need to do that while allowing for students and their opinions to grow and be heard. Universities need to rethink the type of student they want to develop.
I highly recommend you read the full article; it’s much more interesting than I make it seem. The authors go into a lot of other interesting things happening on campus as well as a sociological account of why this is happening with the current generation of students. Also, I’d be really interested in hearing people’s thoughts, because at it’s very nature, this is a sensitive topic. Do you see this sort of behavior on Brooklyn College’s campus?
Excellent example of the problems of freedom of expression/speech that we say we value in general in our society. Colleges and Universities are particularly considered places where debates about controversial topics should allowed and even encouraged, except sometimes, when it is one group’s treasured perspective. Trouble can also occur when the debate spills out into the larger community, where, particularly for public universities, the belief of some citizens seems to be that if it’s an institution paid for by public dollars, I have a right to object if something I find offensive is discussed on campus. One example that recently was sent to me by a colleage is about how CUNY colleges are anti-semitic because of various speakers that different campuses have hosted. This particular article names Hunter, Brooklyn, CSI, and John Jay where the claim is that there is a hostile campus climate because of protests about the Palestinian situation (in its full complexity). This link is at: http://zoa.org/2016/02/10315402-letter-to-cuny-chancellor-and-board-of-trustees-jew-haters-spread-fear-at-cuny-colleges/. In response to the climate of restriction of views that some students feel unpopular or threatened by, see: http://chronicletest.com/article/Colleges-Draw-Hard-Lines/235429?cid=rc_right. The article cites a statement adopted by U. Chicao on free expression, part of which states: “the university should not try to shield people from ideas ‘they find unwelcome, disagreeable, or even deeply offensive,” and has a responsibility to ensure visiting speakers on campus are unhindered by student protesters'” . These are very difficult issues, as no one is saying that hate speech per se is protected if it occurs on a college campus. Another recent Chronicle on this highly charged issue about the role of higher education as a forum for the discussion of trigger warnings and microaggressions is at: http://chronicle.com/article/Speaker-Beware/235428?cid=cp32. The issue is not only about content but about the importance of learning to deal with controversial topics as an important outcome of college (some agree, some don’t) but whether it is even possible to protect students in this era of anonymous input such as Yik Yak and other platforms. What recourse is there aside from disabling wifi, and that would not go over well? Hard but very timely questions.
Prof. Hainline
I just read an article from Inside Higher Ed relating to the issue of free speech on campus, so I figured I’d include it on this thread (although truthfully I have very little faith that anyone will actually see this comment). The article, https://www.insidehighered.com/news/2016/03/25/debate-grows-over-pro-trump-chalkings-emory, reported the reaction of Emory students to chalk writing on campus urging students to vote for Trump (most messages were simple “Trump 2016”). I thought this is a good discussion piece, because it really puts theoretical discussions to the test. A number or students, many of them minority students, protested the chalk, claiming it made them feel unsafe and intimidated. These students received a lot of blacklash for being “hypersensitive.” I’ll be honest, I don’t know how I feel in this situation. While Trump repulses every moral fiber of my being (don’t want to get too political here…), the original article that I posted claimed that this sort of hypersensitization–where it leads to the point of wanting to shut down others’ opinions–is unhealthy to students. Is it insensitive to dismiss minority students who claim that messages of Trump for president is fearful and hurtful? Is it too sensitive to ban pro-Trump students from exercising their opinions? Where do we draw the line?
I was just at a meeting of the University Faculty Senate that passed a version of an Freedom of Expression statement from the U. Chicago. We are all struggling with the idea that colleges and universities feel they have a special role in being a neutral forum for free speech, even for ideas and content that many people feel is inappropriate or even noxious.
I recently watched this short clip that addressed exactly this topic. A reporter visited Occidental College, a College in California that is cracking down on micro aggressions. He gave students scenarios and asked if they believed they were micro aggressions. The scenarios seemed so benign, yet the students believed that nearly all of them were potentially racist. It really was quite disturbing to watch. I understand that racism is a serious issue, but this approach seemed to threaten our basic right of speech.