MurphyBrown: I’m with you on the pizza cutter. It does not take 100 pages of notes to explain what is obviously good about it.
The book the school sent out is fascinating. It recounts the national controversy the university found itself in after Charles Walgreen the founder of Walgreens withdrew his niece Lucille Norton from the university in 1935 after charging that the university had let her impressionable mind become contaminated with communist propaganda by allowing faculty to teach subversive ideas to impressionable students.
Robert Hutchins the President gives a spirited defense of academic freedom and the intellectual pursuit of knowledge but the whole situation gets escalated and things get real interesting.
I found it ironic that most of the cases of academic freedom cited in the book deal with the University administration refusing to muzzle left leaning faculty because of pressure from business, conservative and Republican interests, even though some trustees sympathized with the business interests.
How quaint, that now the calls to stifle academic freedom and free speech is originating from the left.
I guess the university is trying to educate liberal students arriving on campus that lest they forget, the ideas they hold dear today were reviled and hated in the past and yet the university defended their right to openly discuss these so called radical ideas freely on campus, so they must be prepared to show the same courtesy to views they find abhorrent now.
There is even the now famous photo of Bernie Sanders as a student in the booklet.
All in all a very good short read
Here’s an alternative account of what happened at Yale.
- Diversity office sends an email to students prior to Halloween saying make a thoughtful choice about your costume. It doesn't say you can't dress up as a sexy squaw or that you'll be expelled if you and your main squeeze don blackface and go as gangsta & ho. It just says think about how doing that might make other students feel.
- Associate House Master (spouse -- not faculty) sends email to students in her House saying don't let the Administration infantilize you. Halloween and adolescence are times for transgression and subversion.
- Students who are pissed off by her email decide to protest by chalking the quad. It's a peaceful "more speech" approach.
- House Master accosts these students, bringing along his friend Greg Lukianoff (founder of FIRE -- pro-free speech and/or anti-PC group, depending on your POV). Students ask him to apologize for his wife's email. And he provokes/escalates the conflict while Lukianoff films it. FIRE then puts the video online and distributes it to the media.
Calling for the dismissal of the Associate Head Master under these circumstances strikes me as totally legit and no violation of academic freedom. The job is to help create a welcoming living environment for a diverse group of undergrads. E. Christakis failed miserably. And she chose to use her position to undermine the efforts of the Diversity Office and to protect/advance her personal and political interests in a way that caused real damage to the University. So, not really a person you want in that (non-academic) role.
Basically, you have a person in a position of power/authority telling kids NOT to pay attention to how their actions affect other kids. And that such thoughtlessness is a blow for freedom and an important step toward independence and adulthood. When she’s called out on that move, she and her husband recast themselves as victims and take the dispute outside the university to venues where people are eager to see/portray students of color at elite universities as the barbarians at the gate.
Re the confrontation in the quad. I’ve been a professor (and in that capacity I’ve interacted with groups of hostile students). It’s part of your job to be the grown-up and to help hurt and angry students get to a place where they can have productive discussions. It’s also part of your job to listen and learn and to try to understand where your critics are coming from. N. Christakis did a really bad job of modeling/promoting the values of robust intellectual discussions among people who have very different points of view.
Was this published in The Onion?
Because if not, I have no idea how one could read the Associate House Master’s email and come up with this:
Here’s the text of the email:
And here’s the message it was written in response to:
@TomSrOfBoston " I wonder will Yale, Oberlin and Amherst follow Chicago’s lead?"
I wonder what you think it was that Amherst actually did. In the past few years, Amherst has welcomed conservative speakers Newt Gingrich, Charles Krauthammer, Dinesh D’Souza, Scott Brown, Mossab Yousef and others.
As I remember that Yale discussion board, not many were buying that alternative narrative. Yes, there was definitely some criticism of the spouse for having been imprudent and perhaps a bit naïve about the magnitude of the pushback that her observations provoked. I dare say she was saying what many were thinking re the administration’s intrusiveness. In fact, wasn’t her email prompted by students in the residence coming to her with complaints about the administration’s email? The question of whether you think she was acting improperly goes to what you think a university is supposed to be about - a place where questions are ventilated, disputed, talked about; or a place where these things are suppressed for the sake of peace, people having lost the ability to talk to one another. I like to think that at Chicago, with its traditions of openness and encouragement of maverick thinking, such an incident could not have happened. Firstly, the Administration would not have sent such an email; secondly, that even students offended by that kind of riposte to such a hypothetical email would have understood the importance of the principle of free speech at issue here; and, lastly, that students howling for a dismissal under these circumstances would not have been countenanced and allowed ultimately to have their way. I may be wrong about all these things, of course. If so, my error was fostered by my education at the University of Chicago, and the University is no longer the institution it once was. I doubt this is so.
One factual question: You say that the Resident Head provoked/escalated the confrontation by certain actions of his own. I had not read this before. What were these actions? I wouldn’t consider his being accompanied by someone who held libertarian views about free speech to amount to such. I would have thought that his making himself available to talk to angry students was simply the right thing, not a provocative one. I believe he made some form of apology, uncalled for though this seems to me. Clearly it was not enough for these angry students, for whom nothing short of abject self-abasement would have been sufficient. What do you think is missing from this narrative?
What’s missing from this narrative? Respect/empathy for the students and their POV as well as an analysis of power dynamics involved in these exchanges.
Your factual question is actually an interpretive one. Watch the videos, ask yourself how you (and/or a person who was trying to understand, be understood, to teach, to learn, and to resolve a conflict) would/should have behaved in this situation.
There are those who feel the need to be apologists for the students’ behavior and to justify it with dated sociology theory.
There are also those who are pushing a narrative of student extremism that is totally exaggerated. It cuts both ways.
^^ Yes there are. So easy to sit here and belittle college kids without doing any actual research into what they are actually doing and saying and in what context.
I find it hard to rationalize Dartmouth students swarming the library intimidating students who were studying there and demanding that they come out and join their protest. Or Emory students protesting claiming they were in pain because someone chalked Vote for Trump on a campus walkway. And each colleges weak kneed responses to those protests.
I find it hard to understand what the Dartmouth kids did too, though I do get the Emory kids. And as was pointed out earlier, Amherst has plenty of conservative speakers who are not only allowed to speak, enjoy respectful audiences and dialogue. You’re painting with a pretty broad brush, @TomSrOfBoston .
Recent development among the class of 2020: some students find the letter’s dismissal of safe spaces and trigger warnings “inappropriate and unsafe.”
Real life mirrors satire.
As exacademic exhorted me to do, I viewed again the colloquy between Nicholas Christakis and the several students who were upset with him over his wife’s email. I know I am empathy-challenged, but I can’t for the life of me understand what in his conduct on that day could have been considered provocative. Perhaps his sin was that he was truly attempting to have a conversation with these students. Over and over again, however, he was told by them that he must do only one thing - apologize. They didn’t want to hear him. He kept being cut off with “Are you going to apologize?” To the extent he was allowed to talk, he did apologize for hurting anyone’s feelings, but he also went on to make the classic case for free speech. You have rights, and I have defended your rights, but “other people have rights, not just you.” His real offense was to respond to someone who said something like, “your only job here is to make us feel safe”, with “I don’t agree with that.” It was said respectfully and in a low-key non-inflammatory way. That statement was really what got the screaming girl going with her various iterations of “Be Quiet”, “Why did you take this job?” “Who the fuck hired you?” and “You are disgusting?” He stood quietly and took all this. To say that he escalated the situation you would have to believe that his role and duty here was to have given up every belief of his own and every attempt at civilized discourse, to have accepted not only the job description dictated by the screaming girl but her particular understanding of that job description.
Now, look, I can defend this guy without feeling I must condemn these students. They are youngsters finding themselves and venting in the way youngsters do. We were all like that once. If you will pardon a bit of autobiography, I will say that I myself, though not a person of color, came from a working class family, with a father who had an 8th grade education in a one-room rural school. I had a distinctly uncool southern accent and a poor education, and I felt like a hick. I battled a sense of inferiority, failure and a many times experienced desire to cut and run in the face of all the intellectual firepower and sophistication of the University, its profs and my fellow-students - and all the many things in the world I did not know and doubted I would ever be able to learn. I felt this made me a uniquely suffering romantic outcast. However, when I compare notes nowadays with my friends of those days, I see that my situation was not so very different from theirs. We all felt that way. We were all honorary members of the Wretched of the Earth (as I said somewhere once before to some ridicule).
Life is a battle, one we only slowly learn how to wage. We are only half-fledged, all of us, in our college years and for some time thereafter. I feel a lot of empathy for these minority kids. Yet I also feel that they too are privileged: their hard-fought education will ultimately be for them what it was for me - a deliverance. The way through these travails is to keep plugging and struggling, so as finally to be able to internalize and act on the values of the great university and the civilization which stands behind it.
The University should render every possible assistance to these kids, but it should not give up its mission. This Christakis matter is perhaps minor in the scheme of things, but it shows a terrible and symptomatic shortcoming - not of these students but of the University itself - firstly that its culture failed to instil in them the civilized values of respect for discourse and toleration which is the raison d’etre of a University, and, secondly, that it not only accepted but privileged their bad behavior by failing to stand up for its own values.
@NotVerySmart yes, please continue to belittle your classmates and post what they say in their private group to this assortment here of overly-involved parents and alums. Class, my friend, pure class.
If those students can’t tolerate a little criticism, perhaps they belong at Yale instead.
@tutututututuru Posting that a topic is being discussed in a 1,500-person group of students - without linking it to any of the people involved, by using names or other information - is relevant to this thread’s topic IMO, since the same letter sparked both discussions. Reporting the less-publicized viewpoint also serves to dispel the simplistic view some newish posters have expressed on these forums - that Chicago is a shining beacon of free speech where there’s no such thing as “political correctness” (however you define that often-loaded and widely misinterpreted term, it exists everywhere in one form or another).
I have expressed and will continue to express my strong disagreement with the use of trigger warnings and intellectual safe spaces, which I find ridiculous in concept and execution. I’m sorry if you find that belittling, but I value your right to express that opinion, even if it means this forum isn’t a safe space for me. 
Just gonna give an update on the thread. While there are students who are alarmed by the letter there are also many that support its contents, who I would estimate outnunber the former. Discussion however has been pretty good, with many reasonable points being made by both sides, and has generally been respectful (except maybe a certain very long subthread).
@qzombie are you referring to the facebook one?