{"id":32347,"date":"2015-08-14T02:00:19","date_gmt":"2015-08-14T06:00:19","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/?p=32347"},"modified":"2015-10-10T11:28:12","modified_gmt":"2015-10-10T15:28:12","slug":"protecting-college-students-from-the-slightest-potential-offense","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/2015\/08\/14\/protecting-college-students-from-the-slightest-potential-offense\/","title":{"rendered":"Protecting college students from the slightest potential offense"},"content":{"rendered":"

In The Atlantic<\/em>, Greg Lukianoff and Jonathan Haidt<\/a> look at how universities are turning themselves inside-out in an attempt to protect their students from ever being confronted with words, thoughts, or images that might possibly offend them:<\/p>\n

Something strange is happening at America\u2019s 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<\/em> about law students asking her fellow professors at Harvard not to teach rape law \u2014 or, in one case, even use the word violate<\/em> (as in \u201cthat violates the law\u201d) lest it cause students distress. In February, Laura Kipnis, a professor at Northwestern University, wrote an essay in The Chronicle of Higher Education<\/em> describing a new campus politics of sexual paranoia \u2014 and was then subjected to a long investigation after students who were offended by the article and by a tweet she\u2019d sent filed Title IX complaints against her. In June, a professor protecting himself with a pseudonym wrote an essay for Vox<\/em> describing how gingerly he now has to teach. \u201cI\u2019m a Liberal Professor, and My Liberal Students Terrify Me,\u201d the headline said. A number of popular comedians, including Chris Rock, have stopped performing on college campuses (see Caitlin Flanagan\u2019s article<\/a> in this month\u2019s issue). Jerry Seinfeld and Bill Maher have publicly condemned the oversensitivity of college students, saying too many of them can\u2019t take a joke.<\/p>\n

Two terms have risen quickly from obscurity into common campus parlance. Microaggressions<\/em> are small actions or word choices that seem on their face to have no malicious intent but that are thought of as a kind of violence nonetheless. For example, by some campus guidelines, it is a microaggression to ask an Asian American or Latino American \u201cWhere were you born?,\u201d because this implies that he or she is not a real American. Trigger warnings<\/em> are alerts that professors are expected to issue if something in a course might cause a strong emotional response. For example, some students have called for warnings that Chinua Achebe\u2019s Things Fall Apart<\/em> describes racial violence and that F. Scott Fitzgerald\u2019s The Great Gatsby<\/em> portrays misogyny and physical abuse, so that students who have been previously victimized by racism or domestic violence can choose to avoid these works, which they believe might \u201ctrigger\u201d a recurrence of past trauma.<\/p>\n

Some recent campus actions border on the surreal. In April, at Brandeis University, the Asian American student association sought to raise awareness of microaggressions against Asians through an installation on the steps of an academic hall. The installation gave examples of microaggressions such as \u201cAren\u2019t you supposed to be good at math?\u201d and \u201cI\u2019m colorblind! I don\u2019t see race.\u201d But a backlash arose among other Asian American students, who felt that the display itself was a microaggression. The association removed the installation, and its president wrote an e-mail to the entire student body apologizing to anyone who was \u201ctriggered or hurt by the content of the microaggressions.\u201d<\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

In The Atlantic, Greg Lukianoff and Jonathan Haidt look at how universities are turning themselves inside-out in an attempt to protect their students from ever being confronted with words, thoughts, or images that might possibly offend them: Something strange is happening at America\u2019s colleges and universities. A movement is arising, undirected and driven largely by […]<\/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":[10,53,13],"tags":[956,238,351,1025,764],"class_list":["post-32347","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-liberty","category-politics","category-usa","tag-millennials","tag-offensensitivity","tag-politicalcorrectness","tag-triggerwarnings","tag-university"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p2hpV6-8pJ","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/32347","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=32347"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/32347\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":32348,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/32347\/revisions\/32348"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=32347"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=32347"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=32347"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}