{"id":31449,"date":"2015-05-25T05:00:34","date_gmt":"2015-05-25T09:00:34","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/?p=31449"},"modified":"2015-05-24T11:21:58","modified_gmt":"2015-05-24T15:21:58","slug":"every-word-in-this-article-is-a-microaggression-including-and-and-the","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/2015\/05\/25\/every-word-in-this-article-is-a-microaggression-including-and-and-the\/","title":{"rendered":"Every word in this article is a microaggression, including ‘and’ and ‘the’"},"content":{"rendered":"

Peggy Noonan<\/a> writes an article about the incredibly thin-skinned and censorious generation in university right now … everyone to their fainting couches!<\/p>\n

Readers know of the phenomenon at college campuses regarding charges of \u201cmicroaggressions\u201d and \u201ctriggers.\u201d It\u2019s been going on for a while and is part of a growing censorship movement in which professors, administrators and others are accused of racism, sexism, homophobia, classism, gender bias and ethnocentric thinking, among other things. Connected is the rejection or harassment of commencement and other campus speakers who are not politically correct. I hate that phrase, but it just won\u2019t stop being current.<\/p>\n

Kirsten Powers goes into much of this in her book, The Silencing<\/em>. Anyway, quite a bunch of little Marats and Robespierres we\u2019re bringing up.<\/p>\n

But I was taken aback by a piece a few weeks ago in the Spectator<\/em>, the student newspaper of Columbia University. I can\u2019t shake it, though believe me I\u2019ve tried. I won\u2019t name the four undergraduate authors, because 30 years from now their children will be on Google, and because everyone in their 20s has the right to be an idiot.<\/p>\n

Yet theirs is a significant and growing form of idiocy that deserves greater response.<\/p>\n

The authors describe a student in a class discussion of Ovid\u2019s epic poem \u201cMetamorphoses.\u201d The class read the myths of Persephone and Daphne, which, as parts of a narrative that stretches from the dawn of time to the Rome of Caesar, include depictions of violence, chaos, sexual assault and rape. The student, the authors reported, is herself \u201ca survivor of sexual assault\u201d and said she was \u201ctriggered.\u201d She complained the professor focused \u201con the beauty of the language and the splendor of the imagery when lecturing on the text.\u201d He did not apparently notice her feelings, or their urgency. As a result, \u201cthe student completely disengaged from the class discussion as a means of self-preservation. She did not feel safe in the class.\u201d<\/p>\n

Safe is the key word here. There\u2019s the suggestion that a work may be a masterpiece but if it makes anyone feel bad, it\u2019s out.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Peggy Noonan writes an article about the incredibly thin-skinned and censorious generation in university right now … everyone to their fainting couches! Readers know of the phenomenon at college campuses regarding charges of \u201cmicroaggressions\u201d and \u201ctriggers.\u201d It\u2019s been going on for a while and is part of a growing censorship movement in which professors, administrators […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[10,28,53,13],"tags":[459,238,351,997,1025,764],"class_list":["post-31449","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-liberty","category-media","category-politics","category-usa","tag-censorship","tag-offensensitivity","tag-politicalcorrectness","tag-socialjustice","tag-triggerwarnings","tag-university"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p2hpV6-8bf","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/31449","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=31449"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/31449\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":31450,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/31449\/revisions\/31450"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=31449"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=31449"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=31449"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}