How is banning trigger warnings and protesting supporting free speech? To me it seems like the exact opposite.
Most colleges don’t have specific required classes, so it’s already easy to avoid courses that you think would make you uncomfortable. How do trigger warnings make this worse? Don’t you still get a bad grade if you take a class and don’t engage with some of the material?
Here are two aspects where trigger warnings and safe spaces make it worse:
They apply not only to classes, but to other people’s ideas and viewpoints. Therefore, many trigger warning confrontations (meaning a lack thereof) come in standard conversational exchange, not in debate necessarily, in normal classes because anyone can claim to be triggered by anything someone else says, even a standard use word can do this or saying you support something he other person does not. Think about how nonsensical that is.
Second, schools, which prescribe to safe spaces, are actually set up not to penalize students for their “run to their safe spaces and do not engage” behavior for to penalize would defeat the concept of the space being safe. There is this level of bizarre acceptance of students being unable to handle/deal with issues they disagree in an adult fashion and the need to be protected from hearing these issues and to run and hide in a safe space is accepted - teachers are not allowed to penalize for that disengaged behavior.
U of Chicago seems to be saying that it i a place where one could now be penalized for not engaging properly and professionally.
If you had the opportunity, I hope you took the opportunity to engage him about what annoys you about him. If you did not, then think about it next time.
Just make sure your questions and answers are well-formed and express your ideas well - that would put you miles ahead of others who are so fluttered that they either try to shout him down or they run and hide when he is on campus. And who knows, you might even make him have to adjust his position to be closer to yours.
This has nothing to do with free speech, as U of C is a private institution. It can ban any behavior it wants, as one does not have to attend the school.
Specifically, though, this policy has everything to do with promoting the free flow of ideas and not allowing others to stop the flow of ideas because they do not like those ideas. How novel is that thought on a college campus?
Not sure where you read this is a ban on protesting. It is only a ban on disruptive, harassing behavior, and being rude with the express aim to impede/limit the freedom of expression of others. The policy does not say one cannot respectfully, even in a very public way, present another point-of-view - just do not be thuggish about one’s protest.
There has been a forty year old debate in this country over whether and under what circumstances to label something or someone as racist. We euphemistically refer to different things as being PC or not PC, but, essentially that is the subtext. I, for one, reserve my right to call David Duke a racist.
It seems to me that if I am a professor or TA at the University of Chicago, I am not allowed to include trigger warnings in my course, or else I might be disciplined.
Hm… this begs a simple question: if the premise is false, then why do safe spaces and trigger warnings even exist?
And another simple question: exactly how do you know these are widely-exaggerated? You know the actual incidence rate of such events on college campuses? Your opinion is not fact. I respect that you think that, but it is not supported by anything except what you want to believe.
However, safe spaces and trigger warnings are facts, as they do actually exist. And they are so common at colleges that the president of U of C felt the need to let attending students know they should not expect them at his school. So are all these safe spaces and trigger warnings responding to a false premise? Hint - no institution spends time and money putting systems in place for something that is not really happening in a major way. Therefore, I think it very safe to say that these are not over-exaggerated events, as real money and time are being spent addressing them.
Interesting that you think going to a space where one purposely hides from others with different ideas and only surrounds oneself with those who think like you is a reasonable action on a campus campus. Good luck with that behavior in the workplace and the real world; talk about setting students up for a constant world of hurt, as companies do not have time to waste with employees’ idiosyncrasies, as they (companies) have real work to do.
That may be the case,
However, Chicago can ban whatever it thinks reduces the freedom of expression that it wants students to be able to have and enjoy. The professors are employees at a private school, and there is no free speech issue that applies to them.
Now, if this were a public school. then there might be an issue. However, I have not a clue the legal technicality under which such a complaint might be filed.
But in many of these campus “debates” it devolves to “If you disagree with me you are a racist.”
We’ve had a whole lot of threads about these issues, some more thoughtful than others. It is always interesting to me to read the perceptions of those actually teaching at universities compared to those getting their information from sensationalized media accounts.
Presumably if you aren’t a racist, then you have a better response to that than “Am not!” In which case the discussion continues. It shouldn’t be shut down or grind to a halt just because someone is afraid of/can’t tolerate being called a racist.
Why in the world should someone have to “tolerate” being called a racist if they are not? If someone publicly defamed me by calling me a racist, I would consider legal charges.
The example above said nothing about “publicly” publishing accusations of being a racist. Does “discussion” mean “one-sided diatribe in the opinion section of the newspaper” now or something?
This conversation is ridiculous. As usual.
So, we come full circle. Some people sue, others ask for safe spaces.
Calling someone a racist is no longer a discussion of ideas. It is a personal attack. My reaction to personal attacks is to escalate quickly, usually to the great surprise of the person making the attack, who was expecting submission.
^^Some people would prescribe the same action, word for word, in addressing racism. Chicago may well wish they had instituted trigger warnings to everyone, Right and Left.
Love this quote, sorry if it has already been posted.
"Education should not be intended to make people comfortable; it is meant to make them think. Universities should be expected to provide the conditions within which hard thought, and therefore strong disagreement, independent judgment and the questioning of stubborn assumptions, can flourish in an environment of the greatest freedom.”
—Hanna Holborn Gray, UChicago President 1978-1993, from her book Searching for Utopia: Universities and Their Histories
Good for them!
That said, there’s nothing inherently educational about discomfort. Yes, each of us should be willing to experience discomfort when it’s the price of learning – and arguably we each need to learn to recognize when (or the extent to which) our own feelings of discomfort come from a strongly-held belief being somewhat effectively challenged. But it doesn’t follow that the discomfort others experience should be discounted or seen as salutary/necessary for their education.
To put this another way, the real question wrt HHG’s quote isn’t about the merits of discomfort but about the conditions under which hard thought flourishes.