Well, since he has been ostracized and labelled as some kind of threat to others’ mental health, maybe it IS terrifying to him.
What, now you want to deny HIS reality? /sarcasm
He advertises himself on his facebook profile as specializing in “Annoying Others”. This indicates to me that he enjoys going out of his way to tick people off, just for grins. @consolation, I agree that the content described doesn’t seem egregious, but I am willing to accept the Reed professor’s statements that Mr. True’s actions and behavior were outside the bounds of polite discourse expected in a discussion section.
@ consolation-
What you leave out is that he made his point, and then apparently continually pushed the point, in the face of being told by pretty much the rest of the class that the way he was presenting it and in what he was saying. Even with your points above, someone in a discussion who continues to talk in a way that makes people uncomfortable after they explained to him they felt uncomfortable is a jerk, and being a jerk shouldn’t necessarily be protected. If his mom was a single mom and someone went on about mothers having children out of wedlock, and he told the person what they were saying was hurtful towards him and disrespectful towards his mom, and that person kept belaboring his point, would you tell True that the person had the right to say it? If someone in the class talked about what is still a controversial point, that without the help of the Jewish authorities the scale of the holocaust would not have been as great as it was , and kids who had relatives who died in the holocaust told him that his continually driving home that point made them feel like he was blaming the victims and as the relatives of victims, felt it was personally attacking, would you say the person saying that should have been allowed to go on with it, rather than making his point and getting off of it. Like I said in my last post,I would bet that if someone said something that made True feel like a victim, for being an AA male, or something else close to home, and kept saying it even if he asked them not to, I would bet pretty good money he wouldn’t be so sangunine about ‘free discussion’. There is a big difference between someone who argues the other side of things for discussions sake, or who brings a valid viewpoint into a discussion, and someone who simply wants to create furor because he/she enjoys doing it, and to be honest True sounds like he is in the latter category, he doesn’t want to stir up real debate, he wants to make outlandish statements and expects others to sit there and listen to it, no matter how they feel, and that isn’t discussion, that is quite frankly being a bully. I have seen people like true before, I have them in my family, and usually they are very bright people who have always had their way in discussions, possibly because he was the brightest person in the room, but it didn’t team him much about discourse or how to make a point while being respectful of others either (least that is my guess).
Put it this way, I am for open discussion and Voltaire’s description of supporting to the death someone’s right to say something is very close to my own position, but making outlandish statements simply to rile people up as sport is not discussion IMO, it is an arrogant jerk who thinks riling people up is being clever, and if I was the professor in that case I would ask him to move on to another topic, that he had beat it to death and it was causing others grief, and if he refused I would kick him out of the discussion, too, and I don’t or wouldn’t do so lightly. Yes, I am doing this from the published accounts, and maybe had I been in charge of that class and been there and seen what went on I would have a different opinion, but from what I have read I would have done the same thing.
Perhaps if he was speaking about the US in general, but Portland, Oregon? Unless, he was talking about the obnoxious amount of organic coffee shops and food carts, his fear is not only misplaced, but borders on comical. (btw-I am man of color that previously lived in the Rose City)
I bet he thanks his lucky stars that he’s not a white male, then college would be truly petrifying! :-SS
He sounds like a jerk. He sounds like the obnoxious kid who plays devil’s advocate to watch his classmates steam and broil. He sounds like a kid you don’t want in your class because he makes things difficult.
True is very quite true (I’m sorry.) in this case. If people didn’t sit back and let millions of Armenians be murdered and displaced, perhaps Hitler would not have been such a big name as it is now.
Maybe, maybe not… I’m not going to take the bait. Remind me- was this a seminar on comparative genocides? 20th century European oppression? Was this even a forum on sexual assault or modern day social mores?
No. The title of the course is “The Ancient Mediterranean”. From Reed’s catalog:
From the tiny portion represented in the article, this schmuck clearly took advantage of “The Rape of Lucretia”, a functionally mythological creation story of Rome, and spun his rhetoric off into inflammatory realms. I don’t want to guess at his motivations, but the fact that he wound up fulfilling Godwin’s Law tells me that he was less interested in dialogue than he was in stirring up trouble.
PS - for those who may not be familiar… “Godwin’s Law” is that, given enough time in a discussion, someone will invoke the Nazis.
My favorite variation of this is: “First person to rely on Hitler or the Holocaust to defend their position, loses.”
This sounds much more like an ejection on the manner in which the student conducted himself while making his points rather than the content.
Something that is the prerogative of most responsible teacers/Profs if a student’s manner of expression or behavior is such it’s violating the rights of other students to express themselves, participate, or even feel safe in the classroom.
Incidentally, a few classmates got ejected from classrooms for this very BS in HS and college. It wasn’t the content that was the issue, but the manner in which it was expressed.
One standout example was an older college classmate who was nearly threatened with expulsion from grad school for yelling and being nasty with his admittedly correct criticism of a seminar classmate’s points in class. Despite the fact the Prof agreed with the criticism’s points, she warned him that if he continued to express them in the loud nasty manner that he had, she’d have to initiate expulsion proceedings as it violates university community behavior policies he agreed to as a condition of matriculation.
I do not know the context of the class discussion at that time, but completely separated from the fact that this young man was a button pusher, there is truth in his words below.
Edited to include quote.
This is all speculation. The professor said his statements were making others uncomfortable. The kid is arguing that all he did was question some of the statements made about the prevalence and definition of sexual assault. I think he would argue that he did not deny that it exists.
It is not clear if the professor was going out of his way to avoid “triggers” for some students who may have been victims or know victims, or if this kid was behaving in a way that went beyond discussion to harassment. It was hard to read through all of his email, but he seems to suggest that some other professors may be looking at whether this was appropriate or not.
Certainly, he should not be subject to so much abuse outside of class, even if he is kind of a jerk, that it interferes with his education.
Again, irrelevant. Irrelevant to his disruptive intrusion to the classroom. Irrelevant to our discussion about the situation…
It’s not the message, it’s the delivery.
“Certainly, he should not be subject to so much abuse outside of class, even if he is kind of a jerk, that it interferes with his education.”
I would agree, but the other side when you decide you are going to be a lightening rod, you are going to get struck. Hopefully he learns something from this, I suspect he is an intelligent kid who for many years was the most intelligent kid in the classroom and like more than few kids like that, got off on using his ‘superior intellect’ to rile others up for his own amusement.
As far as his statements about the holocaust, I wonder what he really said in class. The Holocaust happened in part because of the concept of obedience to authority which Millgram’s experiments showed how even people otherwise normal and decent can be led to do horrible things because an authority told them to do it, power systems are systems of authority (note, it also is because people’s prejudices allow them to see someone else as ‘not fully human’, lot easier to hurt someone you consider the ‘other’ than someone you consider to be a fellow human being…I wonder how he presented that idea, though, if, for example, he said something like the victims of the Holocaust were led to their doom by their trust in authority, rather than being a commentary on those who perpetuated the holocaust, it could cause understandable friction.
I do not care that you find it irrelevant. I said what I thought. I objectively read what he said and thought, “Hmmm, there’s truth in that. History supports that sentence.”
You can lecture some other poster about classroom politics and delivery methods. I don’t need an explanation.
Yes, yes, and yes. +1
I don’t like the term “rape culture” or feel it is appropriate but I wouldn’t go to bat to argue whether it is inappropriate and why I think so. Let alone perseverate as this guy apparently did.
I do think that at some point, the job of a professor is to rein in students whose views are either so controversial and offensive, or just *annoying and repetitive", and if they refuse to keep civility (like interrupting constantly if someone disagrees, etc.), they can be banned from free discussion. I feel perhaps that the Dean of Students should have a role in that however, but some students would rather not have it “escalated” and keep it “in the class”.
This guy appears to be an attention monger, and leads us back to the “when do my rights end and yours begin”? The ultimate libertarian argument, that my rights supercede your rights until yours are non-existent…
For the GZ/TM case (at risk of starting a flame war), “Stand Your Ground” was 100% clear if GZ was on his lawn and TM refused to leave his lawn. SYG was 100% clear if someone was walking down the street and approached. But what happened was that GZ approached TM, after being told not to (some argue this as the dispatcher was not a “law enforcement officer”, as if the dispatcher was someone random), and started the situation.
Point being, the line has to be drawn somewhere, and it continually gets moved, back and forth. Reed College is a private institution, so infringing on someone’s right to free speech, in a classroom setting, should not come into play.
And furthermore, the title of this thread is misleading, he was not ejected from the lecture (conference part of the class) for his views, he was ejected for how and when he conveyed them.
It sounds like he was trolling to derail discussion, actually. Assault is the threat of bodily harm coupled with an apparent and present ability to harm, so I don’t want to go around determining that one person being groped has nothing to complain about because other people are assaulted more violently.
EXACTLY what rh said. By the student’s own admission, he was warned multiple times.
This student was not asked not to come because he made A comment. He was asked not to come because he made the learning environment uncomfortable and distracting in a non productive way. And he had been warned.
I want professors to have some control of the learning environment. It sounds like that was what he was doing after exhausting other options.
I’m a Reed student and I’ve heard really bad things about this person’s behavior in conference. I also suspect he may be going through a rough patch personally/mentally, so I wish his name weren’t being dragged all over the internet and he were given the space and counsel to get better.
Just for the record, the BuzzFeed article is pretty misleading. For example, Jeremiah did not say the Holocaust was understandable and could be explained as a consequence of people’s inability to question systems of oppression. He said one shouldn’t blame the people responsible for the Holocaust because they didn’t know any better. This is indicative of the strange style of argumentation he displays in his public statements.
The Reed Quest article about this incident has more factual detail:
http://www.reedquest.org/freshman-excluded-from-conference-petition-sparks-controversy/
No, I don’t play that. If that is indeed what he said, I would tell him straight to his face that he’s dumb*. Those who commit genocide know very well what they were doing.
*I wouldn’t actually say that because that is mean, but I’d most likely go on a historical rant.
The fact that he said, of the controversy, ““This is the most fun I’ve had all year and I have not this much fun since I was a kid. It’s so liberating,” suggests to me that he is annoying people for the sake of annoying people.
That would be one way to look at it. However, in the context of the grim conclusion to his petition statement and other statements he’s made on Facebook, I would guess he’s swinging back and forth between depression and euphoria, which is a symptom of great inner turmoil.
He does seem like an asshole, but I’m also worried about him.
(To be clear, I don’t know him personally. I’ve just seen his comments on various Reed-related Facebook pages and talked to people who know him. My opinion of his mental health is pure speculation.)