As many of us felt when the letter came out, the writer agrees it was mostly a PR move.
http://www.nytimes.com/2016/09/11/opinion/trigger-warnings-safe-spaces-and-free-speech-too.html?_r=0
In related news,
No surprise here. This is an op-ed piece written by someone who is clearly biased towards the trigger warning crowd.
Personally, I side 110% with the school administration, and hope they don’t submit to media pressure.
I thought the writer did a great job with how trigger warnings have been used - and ARE STILL USED EVEN AFTER THIS LETTER AT UC.
What’s your specific problem with that @fractalmstr ?
Do you think UC should have said they will not allow trigger warnings as described by this student going forward? Because that’s not what they said. SO I guess you were the target audience for the UC letter, people who will be swayed by tough talk about triggers and speech while making no actual changes in policy, lol.
My problem is very simple: I do not feel it is in a student’s best interest to receive this kind of special treatment in college that will not exist once that student graduates from said college.
Facts:
1.) Trigger warnings do not exist in the world outside of college (at least not reliably)
2.) Safe spaces do not exist in the world outside of college
Therefore, logic would dictate that it does not make much sense to have students get used to these things when they simply will disappear after graduation.
It’s not really true that safe spaces don’t exist outside of college. Plenty of people involve themselves in clubs or groups that share specific ideologies and refuse to allow non-believers in. These vary in form from political groups, support groups, religious groups, and social circles.
Actually, they do.
A few examples are private social/country clubs, gated communities, condo/co-op communities…especially ones with HOAs*, religious organizations, political organizations, etc.
And some would argue that for those in the dominant majority within the given society, the entire society and its institutions serves as an effective safe space for them.
** It excluded folks who worked as firefighters, police officers, sanitation workers, etc because it was considered “not upper/upper-middle class” in the community’s bylaws of the time.
@cobrat: I am unaware of any HOA, gated community, or condo/co-op that dictates the beliefs of its members.
Most may not officially, but some effectively do in practice when it comes to selecting and retaining members.
Also, some religious residential communities do officially dictate the beliefs of its members. And I’m not just talking groups like FLDS.
The comments seemed overwhelmingly against her position with one person suggesting that if she couldn’t get NY times readers to see her point, she should reconsider her position because these readers were probably the most thoughtful and sympathetic audience she might find?
Is that really true?
The NYT commenters are a predictable group. My guess is that they formed their opinion from the way the NYT first reported and represented the dean’s letter, slanting it (in my opinion) in favor of the U of C administration. I continue to believe the letter was largely a grandstanding PR move, but a smart one: it waved the banner of academic freedom and constructed straw-men opponents. (At other campuses they run and hide from alternative perspectives! Not here! Good grief.) A lot of people bought it hook, line, and sinker.
@cobrat: I am confused by your post #7. Are you suggesting they will not sell unless the buyer has a particular set of beliefs? That strikes me as an FHA violation. Or are you suggesting they will sell but the buyers will then be ostracized by the community? That one is legal but I’m not seeing how it makes the community a “safe space.”
Keep in mind that the NYT is not nearly as liberal as portrayed in popular mass media and by some CC posters here.
Especially considering most of its readership is increasingly skewing older as younger Gen Xers like yours truly and moreso…millennials seek out much more variety in their news* media sources and no longer trust mainstream newsmedia like the NYT or moreso…Fox News as much as older generations.
I’m suggesting both exist.
And I’ve wondered whether there’s a religious exception carved out for religious communities such as FLDS before the criminal actions came to light or large sections of Brooklyn neighborhoods like Williamsburg which are owned and lived in by Orthodox Jewish or Satmar communities and which has had some tensions as a result of conflicts between them and other minority groups in the neighborhoods over housing access and enforcement of religious norms on non-orthodox neighbors/passersby.*
In a NYC co-op it is not enough to find a buyer who wants to pay the negotiated price and to whom you wish to sell. The buyer has to be interviewed and approved by the co-op board. If you are turned down they do not always give you a reason. And if they do it is usually something vague like your financials are “thin.”
@fractalmstr there are a lot of things that exist in college that don’t exist in the real world. That, on its own, seems a poor reason not to like something. I mean in the adult world no one puts out buffets for you to roll out of bed in your sweats to eat and yet colleges find this useful, because they like all their students to have eaten. I could come up with a dozen examples of things college kids get or do that adults don’t. It’s logical, since they are in different places in life.
I also do not see how a trigger warning as defined here in any way impacts free speech. Quite the opposite, actually.
I know many “real-world” safe spaces, fwiw. They’re quite common on the web and in the physical world, and they serve very real needs.
I think we can agree to disagree here. These are philosophical differences we are talking about now…
It is my belief that safe spaces are regressive, hypocritical, and counterproductive, and therefore I wholeheartedly side with UC. I don’t feel it is in any student’s best interest to be coddled and shielded from differing opinions/viewpoints.
You are aware, right, that UC does allow content warnings and safe spaces…? (If anything’s “hypocritical” here it’s the dean’s letter–he says one thing, but his school does the opposite…)
G / PG / PG-13 / R / NC-17 movie ratings are a long standing example of trigger warnings.
Warnings about graphic violence and such on security videos showing crimes and suspects are commonplace when such security videos are shown on television or web sites to try to get witness help with solving the crime or identifying the suspects.
Does not prevent people from trying to create them. Some seem to think that they need a safe space against immigrants, people of other religions, etc… For long periods of time, real estate often came encumbered with covenants, conditions, and restrictions against the selling or renting to non-white people, presumably because a significant number of white people felt that they needed a safe space without non-white people.
Indeed–[url=https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Redlining]Redlining[/url] has been a particularly unsavory and widespread practice.
Re redlining, that is an excellent example of a safe space that the world does NOT need.