@Ohiodad51, I think Ellison’s letter was written in response to the social activism on his own campus, where he used a heavy hand, nearly expelling the student body president immediately before his graduation. And FYI, the uchicago students posting on the uchicago FB “overheard at uchicago” think their dean misunderstands the definitions of trigger warnings and safe places.
@Ohiodad51 #800
The letter is an embarrassment, for reasons I’ve outlined several times in previous posts, EVEN if you happen to agree with the Dean’s position. I’m not going to make assumptions about his intelligence based on a one page letter and I also doubt that he is uninformed on the issues, which makes the letter’s fundamental dishonesty even more reprehensible.
Frankly, as someone who is in opposition to his positions pretty much completely, I think the letter is a gift to my side of the argument. I think it’s a shame that it has had a negative impact on the school and its students.
Honestly, U of C can do whatever they want. Most elite schools are interested in increasing the diversity of their campuses, opening themselves up to previously under-represented populations. Why they would want to present themselves to prospective and current students like this is beyond me, but perhaps they feel there is untapped market in the children of reactionary parents? Or maybe the Dean overstepped his remit with this one, overreacting to the campus issues in the last year? Time will tell, I guess.
God, the drama! You would have thought the letter read: “Dear Incoming Students. If you are part of a minority group, we hate you! Stay away and tell your friends not to apply either! Love, U of C”
This thread has taken over my notifications column! Yet I keep following it, just to see pizzagirl and Ohiodad51 and hebegebe and momandboystwo and others make sane and plainspoken defenses of a great school’s stand for intellectual freedom… Maybe ‘I need some muscle over here’ to pull me away to somewhere else…
@NickFlynn, I think your obvious interest in and passion for one side of the issues involved predisposes you to a particular view of Ellison’s letter. I am not at all sure that outside of the community of individuals who are already so predisposed, the letter is being viewed as negatively.
At the end of the day, I take no issue with saying the letter missed its mark, or that Ellison is wrong to put his focus where he did. But I do the man the curtesy of assuming that he meant what he said and that he is informed on the topics at issue.
@RenaissanceMom, that is kind of my point. I am not terribly persuaded that the Dean of Students at one of the world’s foremost universities doesn’t know what he is talking about, but a bunch of anonymous students on a facebook group do. FWIW, the student body president was not “nearly expelled”. The kid was sent to a disciplinary hearing, just like a normal student would be who broke the rules.
And for full disclosure, I don’t feel at all bad for the kid. He lied to get into a building and then let in a several other students. What did he expect to happen? Is it ok to enter a building under false pretenses if you are there for a socially approved purpose but not to steal hot dogs from the cafeteria? How about if the kid let people in the building so they could hang “Make America Great Again” posters?
The university will be speaking to first-year students on this topic during orientation.
Seems to me like they take their duty to educate students on these issues seriously at UChicago …
[QUOTE]
The University has tapped the campus’s most prominent champion of free expression to deliver this year’s Aims of Education Address, a University spokesperson said Saturday. …
Stone decided to focus on freedom of expression the last time he gave the Aims of Education address—in 1995—when he said, “Today, the principal challenge to academic freedom turns on issues of so-called political correctness.”
Stone’s position has not changed much since then—the 2015 report by the Committee on Freedom of Expression, which has been adopted by Princeton faculty and Purdue University’s board of trustees, states that “it is not the proper role of the university to attempt to shield individuals from ideas and opinions they find unwelcome, disagreeable, or even deeply offensive.”…
The Provost’s office is also asking the newly created faculty Committee on University Discipline for Disruptive Conduct to “provide recommendations for educational programming on the importance of freedom of expression, fostering understanding among students that their right to free expression is the same right that they and we must accord to others,” after a year in which talks on campus by a pro-Israel Palestinian human rights activist and the sitting Cook County’s State’s Attorney were interrupted by protests. The recommendations are due by December 31 of this year …
“We didn’t feel we were doing something, internal to the University of Chicago, that was in any way radical or different,” he told the New York Times, “but my guess, if you asked most of these institutions 10 or 20 years ago, they would have said more or less what we said in our statement.”…
“The right thing to do is empower the students, help them understand how to fight, combat and respond, not to insulate them from things they will have to face later,” Stone told the Chicago Tribune. …
**“The student reaction in general to the university policy has been extraordinarily enthusiastic,” **he said. “Chicago has long defined itself as an institution that is deeply committed to academic freedom, or free expression. People who come here know that, they take pride in that and frankly people who I think are intimidated by that sensibly choose to go somewhere else.”
/QUOTE
@Ohiodad51 #806
Right here in this thread there are several reactions from current and former U of C students who took the letter as an attack on their interests and concerns, so it’s absolutely clear that my reaction to it isn’t just based on some theoretical predisposition to over-sensitivity on my part. It’s playing out exactly as I would have expected/predicted - as all these stupid culture war conflicts ALWAYS do. It’s so cliche, it’s frankly embarrassing. The real question is why a university administrator thought that scoring points by trashing part of his student body in a dishonest grandstanding stunt was a worthwhile use of his time.
I don’t know where you got the impression that I think that Ellison didn’t understand the issues or the very predictable responses to his letter - I absolutely have never had that position - I think my very first post here was something about why would a Dean want to stir up clickbait with this kind of letter?
FWIW, Bollinger said freedom of speech trumps most else in Columbia student discussions at the new student convocation and the school stands for allowing anyone to speak with all that comes with it. The choice students have is engagement and put their points forward and have a discussion as to why they don’t agree.
He is considered a first amendment expert and he is the Bollinger in the Michigan courtcase in supreme court.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grutter_v._Bollinger
Will post a link if the speech gets published or discussed.
Your reaction to believing these anecdotes is a perfect example of how people make decisions based upon biased data. There is even a term for this: “Confirmation bias”. You see and believe what you want to see, and disregard the rest. You can read more about confirmation bias here:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Confirmation_bias
Or you can continue to say “This is just all your opinion”. That too is confirmation bias.
Pizzagirl gave you a big hint: If the liberal-leaning readership of the NY Times is in favor of what the letter said, the vast majority of the population is in favor of what the letter said.
@NickFlynn, sorry and yes I know you understand that Ellison is not a moron. I was speaking more generally and not about you specifically. And I disagree that Ellison was grandstanding. I think he was reiterating that UChicago is not a place where you should expect to get a solo in every show or where you can get chalk banned if the name Trump makes you feel unsafe. I guess we just disagree over whether the majority of the UC community approves of his position.
One thing to keep in mind is that just a few decades ago, awareness of mental illness was even more exceedingly limited* and that the prevailing attitude towards people with mental illnesses was such that they were strongly discouraged from going on to higher education.
The stigma regarding mental illness was so much stronger that students with mental illnesses who wanted to attend were much more incentivized to conceal their condition in order to avoid the roadblocks adcoms, HS GCs, teachers, etc would have placed as they wouldn’t have considered such students to be “college material” back then.
By the same token, the same was the case with students from other marginalized groups ranging from students with learning/physical disabilities to racial/ethnic minorities who as recently as the mid-late '60s were largely barred from most institutions of higher learning…especially the elite private colleges**. They were also not considered “college material” by adcoms, HS GCs, teachers, etc in the very recent past.
- Even 2-2.5 decades ago when I was a HS student, there were still older HS classmates who were subjected to jerky HS teachers who blatantly attempted to deny accommodations to classmates with DOCUMENTED learning disabilities to the point they had to be ORDERED by the city/state Education departments and court rulings to provide such accommodations....and the prevailing conventional wisdom among many teaching admins, some educrats, and many adults in the larger public was such that such jerky teachers were still supported rather than condemned as they should and would be nowadays.
** In the form of outright bans or maximum quotas set on racial/ethnic groups who weren’t part of the prevailing dominant majority. Incidentally, the origin of the modern college application…especially the option to include a photograph which was mandatory up until recent times with Columbia’s application was precisely to facilitate the rejection or severe limiting of “undesirable” racial/ethnic groups in the admissions process. The photograph bit was used in a period when the pseudoscience of judging “desirable/undesirable” racial/ethnic characteristics of physiognomy was very much in vogue across society…including academia and college admissions offices of the time.
A pseudoscience which was only widely discredited after the complete defeat of the Nazi regime which used it with gusto in its genocidal campaigns against Jews and many other “undesirable” groups such as the Roma, etc.
Pizzagirl gave you a big hint: If the liberal-leaning readership of the NY Times is in favor of what the letter said, the vast majority of the population is in favor of what the letter said.
If you think about history, there have been countless times the vast majority of population was in favor of something… and later the vast majority of the same population (or maybe their kids) decided they had been absolutely wrong.
I have no idea whether the letter should be applauded or condemned, but appreciate all the time some of you have taken to write some very thoughtful posts here. And I particularly appreciate posts by university faculty and administrators. Thank you.
@Ohiodad51 #811
We’ll just have to agree to disagree on the grandstanding thing.
What in name of the Flying Spaghetti Monster does “having a solo in every show” have to do with anything?
It just sounds like “these kids today are all spoiled with their participation trophies and all that” grumpy old man yells at clouds stuff. To be blunt, that is what I believe this entire controversy is really all about - the world has changed, and a bunch of grumpy white old men don’t like it. Bad luck for them, because time marches on, and they are going to die, and the damned kids with their tolerance and different ideas about how to run things ALWAYS win in the end.
Hakuna Matata, circle of life, same as it ever was.
Except a lot of us who are in favor of the letter are NOT grumpy old men looking to turn the clock back and I really wish you would stop stereotyping us this way. A lot of us are liberals - sometimes to the core - who disagree that the proper response to a speaker whose views you disagree with is to drown them out and shut them down. Groupthink on the far left isn’t any more honorable than groupthink on the far right.
And yeah, sometimes the intersectionslity and the privilege all comes across like a bunch of blah blah blah mental masturbation, a lot of sound and fury signifying nothing. That’s our opinion. Deal with it.
Btw, I’m sitting in the U of Chicago main quadrangle as I type this. I love how some of you can be so smarmy about “not offending big donors.” Seems to me I’m looking at a bunch of hardworking people, mostly POC, who on this muggy day are pruning the trees, raking leaves, fixing electrical wiring, repairing buildings, delivering the mail and doing all the other little tasks to keep the administration going. Their salaries don’t materialize out of thin air and I for one would like to see them continually employed. Let’s not live in some fantasy world where money isn’t important.
PG: I get agitated about these topics because I feel like peoples’ attitudes have the potential to adversely impact kids very dear to me. It’s personal. I’m pretty sure I’ve shared that with you more than once.
I am having difficulty understanding your reaction to this controversy. Is this somehow personal for you? Or just an intellectual debate?’
of course, that’s a very personal question you absolutely shouldn’t feel a need to answer unless you want to do so
@Pizzagirl #815
Many, many posts ago, I offered a challenge for anyone to attempt to explain exactly how “trigger warnings” and “safe spaces” inhibit the free exchange of intellectual ideas - I did that because that’s what I felt was conspicuously absent from the Dean’s letter. Not one person in this thread has actually attempted to do so - instead the entire issue has been repeatedly conflated into some sort of vague frame of “political correctness run amuck” and that is exactly the kind of sloppy thinking that in my opinion made the Dean’s letter nothing but clickbait grandstanding.
You are doing the same thing in this post - how do “trigger warnings” and “safe spaces” have anything to do with “the proper response to a speaker whose views you disagree with is to drown them out and shut them down”? Who is defending that position?
Do you see the disconnect here? The sloppy conflation of completely different things? The hiding behind “I’m defending intellectual freedom” instead of actually addressing the real issues of how a modern campus can properly accommodate a diverse student population with different perspectives and needs?
Frankly, I expect a lot better from a Dean of Students and also from a student at an elite school.
@hebegebe #810
Previous reply was deleted for being insufficiently polite - here’s the revised version:
I am familiar with confirmation bias, but it is very generous of you to offer your expertise.
Here’s something for you to ponder - it’s pretty well known that people who leave comments on internet news articles aren’t actually a representative sample of the general public or even the set of people who read the article.
Have a nice day.
PG: Because you and I have been on this board a really long time together, I know you are a very thoughtful and caring person. To me, that is not coming across in your posts on this thread. I think that’s a shame. fwiw
I’d also add that calling NYT or its commenters “mostly liberal”,just like calling Columbia U’s student culture “liberal” says much more IME of the political leanings of the one doing the labeling.
[puts on poli-sci minor hat]
It’s much more accurate to say NYT is left of center by US political standards…or if one uses an international political overton window…centrist/center-right as mainstream US party politics tends to be much further right leaning than those of other societies…especially Western democracies. [/takes off poli-sci minor hat]
Some of the discussion here has got me wondering: What are the arguments going to be about in 50 years, once the ones we’re amidst now have been laid to rest (aside from the inevitable oddball fringe)?