So would you be ok with “trigger warnings” if they were not called trigger warnings?
I see no difference between trigger warnings and those tv/video warnings. They’re both meant to give you a head’s up and you can decide for yourself.
And I will echo julliet. TWs are very rare even for those of us (like me) who teach very difficult topics (eugenics, genocide, murder, rape, racism, etc).
I skipped ahead from around page 5, but I want to highlight a post/part I found to be an incredible step in a mostly negative and fruitless thread:
Credit @CollegeAngst for actually bringing some real meat to the table.
I think this makes very good arguments for both, but I do want to note one point at the end: I haven’t seen people anywhere arguing that colleges are required to provide “safe spaces”, and very few for “trigger warnings”.
It appears that the main problem with all these arguments is that the subjects have been politicized and polarized so much that it’s gotten away from the whole point. The words have more connotation than meaning. Based on all that, I want to make a proposal, and I’m curious as to what people think here. The goal being to not infringe free speech in any way while still being sensitive the complaints of both sides here.
Proposal:
On Trigger Warnings:
Rename to Content Warnings. They would not allow a discussion not to happen - they are there to warn others what the content is, and if it was to bother someone so much that they did not feel comfortable discussing, the would have the right to work with the professor to find an alternative if it was needed for something related to a grade. The professor would keep the right to deny as he saw fit, and if the student and professor could not come to an agreement, it would be brought to a school council. This would handle most cases very easily, and allow for discussion and workability for each of the harder cases rather than a clear cut ruling one way or the other.
On Safe Spaces:
First, let’s rename again to get rid of the connotations of the former ideas. Let’s use Constructive Space. Frankly, I think safe space is the best fit, but for the illustration of the effect of connotation, let’s use constructive space. In the vein of the argument above, colleges should not be required to have constructive spaces, but they shouldn’t be able to stop them from existing. A constructive space should be primarily related to a personal subject, not an intellectual one. You couldn’t have a constructive space on “Pro-Choice”, but you could have one on “Emotionally Dealing with an Abortion”, if a group ever came to exist naturally. The core idea being that it is not a place where the primary goal is discussion, but rather personal sharing, coping, and understanding.
Do either of those things sound so bad to anyone? Do any of those limit speech or discussion or academic pursuits in any way?
PS: From the parts I did read, I do like the direction of how Rawls fits into this discussion. Saved for my personal notes.
@dstark: Yes, if you are in public you should expect to be filmed. In fact, given how pervasive traffic cameras and security cameras are, there’s a good chance you are being filmed. I wouldn’t be surprised if most colleges had CCTV.
@PengsPhils: Content warnings, trigger warnings, the issue is the same. College is, or is supposed to be, the place children transition into adulthood while being educated. Real life involves plenty of content that a person may find offensive and that appears without warning. To the extent college is supposed to teach you how to deal with life, it needs to teach you to handle things as they come up. Nothing stops a given professor from issuing warnings. They just shouldn’t be mandatory.
Similarly nothing is preventing people from forming groups of like-minded people. Support groups and other such things have existed for a long time. The concern is both the rapid expansion of those ideas into other spaces (e.g., the Yale dorms) and the designation of university-owned physical space as exclusive to those ideas (e.g., the women-only study hall). If you draw “safe space” narrowly enough, then you’re just describing a home. That’s fine; homes are nice. But the whole world isn’t a given person’s home, and it’s concerning when they can’t recognize that.
@Ohiodad51: I’m not sure where we got the idea that Lukianoff is conservative? He’s ex-ACLU and environmental groups, which both swing decidedly left. I’m not sure why his politics should matter, but to the extent they do I think he’s probably on the other side of the spectrum.
You listed off a lot of large categorical yays and nays, but do you disagree with either of my proposals? If so, what specifically? I want to get a working model rolling here.
In regard to what you mentioned:
A dorm is a home, is it not? Studying quietly is a personal activity, not an intellectual discussion, correct? Why should either of these be places that aren’t safe? I don’t see a problem with either of these existing.
I just don’t see this “rapid expansion” and what it would be hindering. You’re making a slippery slope argument, but I think we’re just moving towards where we need to be - stopping before going to far is important, but not at stopping the progress in the first place, right?
This is the straw man at the heart of this debate: Where are topics and discussions being limited by safe spaces?
FIRE is not left. Let’s see. Who funds FIRE?
http://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Foundation_for_Individual_Rights_in_Education
@Demosthenes49, do you think Yale’s students know they are being filmed? Do you think students think FIRE films them?
I don’t agree with your content warnings. I think it’s ridiculous that a professor should have to go to some council just because a student felt “uncomfortable” with a given topic. To the extent we’re talking about about real, diagnosed PTSD (as some other poster claimed was “really” at issue) then the ADA already requires reasonable accommodation. If it’s just some kid who doesn’t like to hear about difficult topics, too bad.
As for “constructive spaces,” you’re just describing a support group. I have no problems with support groups. I’ll note that your “safe space” is therefore far more narrowly drawn than many of the demanded spaces.
Dorms are homes, sure, but they are not homes of a given person. They are homes to lots of people all with an equal right to express themselves. If someone wants to designate their dorm room as somewhere no one can talk about race, and roommates agree (if any), then fine. People have a right to exclude others from their property. What they don’t have a right to do is expand their personal preferences to cover the entire building. “Safe” isn’t physical safety–no one is supporting that. Advocates mean “safe” as in being free of certain ideas. How can that not limit topics or discussions?
This is not a strawman because it is not invented. The above describes what happened at the Yale dorms, or at the University of Missouri, or at UCSB. And those are just off the top of my head. The last two involved physical violence against those with contrary viewpoints.
@dstark: From your own link:
“Much like the ACLU, this often leads to them defending unpopular or controversial speech. Unlike the ACLU, FIRE ends up disproportionately defending conservative speech, but this may be more due to more liberal speech being less likely to require defending at universities, which tend to be more left-leaning.”
I should also note that we were talking about Lukianoff, not FIRE. Further, just because FIRE gets funding from those with conservative views doesn’t mean it itself has conservative views.
As for Yale students, given some of them appear to be filming I’m thinking they knew. Besides, if they are smart enough to get into Yale then they are smart enough to know about the existence of smart phones and CCTV. If you are out in public, you are probably being filmed. That’s a fact of life in our times. It’s not unfair to the students just because the one publishing the video disagrees with them.
I am pretty sure a lot of Yale students don’t know they are being filmed…because they said so.
http://yaledailynews.com/blog/2015/04/06/campus-cameras-prompt-privacy-concerns/
@Demosthenes49, Did you watch FIRE’s video?
People who are advocates for free speech are against what that young woman said and how she said it?
I have behaved way worse than that. The young woman isn’t talking about a classroom experience, is she?
Or maybe there is another video. Is there a video longer than a little over a minute?
I think a lot of posters haven’t watched the video.
I follow the money. Lukianoff is funded by conservative sources.
@dstark: They may have said they didn’t know, but I doubt they found the proposition that unlikely. Even if they did, too bad. There’s no special rule that excepts those ignorant of reality.
I did see the video FIRE posted. That’s where I saw the students who also appeared to be filming.
Advocates for free speech want to remove barriers to speech. That doesn’t mean they agree with everything people say. I think what the student said was absurd and deeply misguided. If Yale tried to stop her from saying it, however, I’d be up in arms against them.
Instead, she was talking about making her dorm a “safe space,” by which she meant free from ideas with which she disagreed. You’re right that it’s not a classroom experience but that doesn’t make it better. I responded to PengsPhils about this, which may help explain my position.
As for Lukianoff’s personal beliefs, I doubt he’s a conservative because he voluntarily aligns himself with leftist causes and organizations. I’m also quite sure that his beliefs don’t matter. He could be a Jill Stein voter or a Trump voter and neither would affect the substance of his critiques. The only value in pointing out his politics–whichever they are–is to find a convenient excuse to dismiss him.
On Content Warnings:
The professor doesn’t need wouldn’t go to a council unless they couldn’t reach an agreement. I would hope that case is never even used. PTSD and Rape are probably two big ones where something could ever actually affect anything substantially, and there are cases where those could present a large enough issue I think. I do see your point if a frivolous one were to ever come up, so I would add one more clause: The content in question must not be a significant portion of the course - anything more than a week, let’s say for argument.
On Constructive Spaces:
Okay, let’s expand then. Let’s also include any activities (not discussions) that can also be done outside of a group just as easily given the will and number of people, and if selective, states its reasons for its selectivity publicly. So this would be the female-only study hall, your fitness groups, etc etc. Would you object to any of that?
While my second bit hit on it as well, you never responded to why you would be against an all-female study hall. Could you go into that?
More than that, I challenge the premise: if a dorm is a collection of small, personal, homes, what areas would be public? I agree - every student would have control jointly with their roommates. So what’s left? A few common rooms and halls, which no, would not be spaces. I guess we’re on the same page there. I’m not arguing that the limitations could stretch into rooms that are not theirs. But any rules or guidelines that apply to the insides of rooms would have to be respectful not to violate the freedom of each resident in their own room.
I had some stuff typed up on your specific examples, but I think this is going in too many directions at this point. We’ll have to agree to disagree there for now, but I think the idea that “people believe that a safe space should extend into everywhere” is not something widely held at all, and that is the crux. You see it, I don’t see it. It looks real to you but it’s a strawman to me.
For curiosity, I couldn’t find any violence for UCSB - can you link to that? I think I know what you’re referring to for Mizzou.
Also, the way you list it, three incidents (let’s triple it to be generous for those you don’t know or didn’t list) in over a thousand colleges is not some amazingly dangerous trend - its a tiny fraction. I think that the way it is approached is a lot of the polarization. The core ideas, which so far you have mostly agreed with listed out in my original post, have a much larger effect than these incidents do, which I think is part of the frustration on the pro side.
@Demosthenes49, I think the student was right on…probably shouldn’t have sworn, but she was angry and frustrated. The professor wasn’t listening at first. He just wanted to express his views.
There are angry students and instead of listening, the professor was clueless, the professor was ignorant. Too bad for the professor. Shouldn’t have been ignorant.
I don’t think Yale says to its students, “Welcome to Yale. You are ignorant. Too bad.”
I used to be a libertarian but that no longer works for me because we live in a society. My individual rights can conflict with others individual rights and with society’s rights. So we have to make choices. Maybe we draw the lines in different places.
I am not being original here. There is a time and place for everything. I think a home should be a safe space. Somebody comes to my home and mouths off, I would tell them to leave. It is harder to do that in a residence hall, but a residence hall is still a place where people live. So it is not so easy for me to say, yeah you can walk around with a sheet over your head in a residence hall. That has a big meaning to a lot of people.
And they are not mandatory at any college in the US.
Time for kids to grow up… at the U of Chicago they grow up faster without the coddling. a university with some balls.
This topic just made front page on CNN:
http://www.cnn.com/2016/08/26/us/university-of-chicago-trigger-warnings-safe-spaces/index.html
“The purpose was not to shield students from these things; it was to allow them to prepare themselves mentally for it and decide whether or not they were able to handle the potential ‘triggering’ of PTSD flashbacks and related issues that might crop up”
Great post, juillet. I think part of the problem is that the word triggered has morphed into an expression for just being annoyed. At my kids’ schools (esp my D’s LAC) it gets used as such - “I was triggered when the prof in art history class asked us if any of us had seen the Mona Lisa live and hands shot up and I was too poor to have ever gone to Europe.” You may have been discomfited, embarrassed, upset, flustered, uncomfortable - but you weren’t triggered.
“is the straw man at the heart of this debate: Where are topics and discussions being limited by safe spaces?”
Uh - the girl in the quad at Yale wanted there to be a safe space where one position on the role of Yale vis-a-vis Halloween costumes was just accepted as a matter of fact and no other nuanced positions were reasonable for a reasonable person to support. I’m a liberal but I found Erika Christakis’ position a reasonable one (as was the original Yale email, of course) and the behavior of the girl in the quad appalling.
What strikes me as weird is that UChicago chose to make this announcement at the beginning of the school year.
There may be some freshmen (for example, kids with PTSD or rape victims) for whom trigger warnings/safe spaces are a very important issue. Those kids are now trapped on a campus with policies they didn’t expect and that may lead to difficult situations for them.
I don’t have a strong opinion on trigger warnings and safe spaces one way or the other. But there could have been more tactful times to make this announcement.
Found some interesting stats in the following news paper article on this issue
The gist of the policy seems to be that
@dstark, I am often confused, trying to decide if your posts represent a rigid adherence to ideological principle no matter where it takes you, or if you are in fact a satirical genius. Of course college students standing in a college quad would be aware that they are not acting in private. If for no other reason than shrieking girl would have seen her fellow students filming her.
@Demosthenes49, I don’t know Lukanoff, and know nothing of his personal politics, but you are correct that there is nothing in what FIRE does which in a normal world would be considered solely conservative. My point is that branding Lukanoff and FIRE as conservative permits the argument that has been going on over these last few pages. Namely, that what is being reported as happening isn’t really happening, and this is all a massive, made up conspiracy by nefarious conservatives who want to stop well meaning people from helping veterans and refugees.
@PengsPhils, I don’t want to speak for @Demosthenes49, but UCSB was where the professor assaulted a pro life demonstrator, stole her sign and then crowed about it. She basically argued that she was required to assault the demonstrator because the demonstration was actively harming people who don’t hold pro life views. The administration then sent an email around basically saying the protestors got what was coming to them, and should have known better than to espouse a controversial position on a college campus.
Re whether the incident at Yale shows that proves that the threat to free speech is real/not a straw man.
The message the girl in the Silliman quad wanted reaffirmed was “be thoughtful” about how your actions affect your fellow students and the context in which she wanted it reaffirmed was her home away from home and the people from whom she wanted reaffirmation were the couple whose job it was to make that home a welcoming and comfortable place for a diverse group of residents. She was making a claim about the role of house masters – not about what topics/positions are off limits. Had the Christakises hosted a debate over Halloween costumes, it wouldn’t have provoked the same reaction.
Re the girl’s behavior. I see a kid pushed to the edge by NC’s failure/refusal to understand why she and others are so upset. I also recognize that teenagers and their actual parents sometimes have shouting matches that include a similar mix of tears, obscenity, and condescension. What struck me was that this girl was still engaging after other kids had walked away in disgust. She was invested in getting to a point where her house master understood what had gone wrong and why, as well as what students needed/wanted from him and from his wife in the context of this role. In short, she cared and she thought something important was at stake and that, eventually, she could get through to him.
I find her behavior regrettable but not appalling. I do find his behavior appalling (particularly bringing along his friend to film, pushing the kids (by saying the same thing over and over again and not seeming to listen/think about/engage with their responses) until someone cracked, and then apparently doing nothing to prevent/discourage his friend from distributing the video).
Note that a similar, lengthier, difficult conversation on another quad just before this incident produced a very different outcome. Students who started out really angry ended up applauding the Dean they were angry with after he listened attentively and reacted substantively to what he had heard.
^Thank you for this very thoughtful post.