Only have a moment so may not do the best job of conveying this, but my sibling was at Yale when it went co-ed and I was at Vassar when it too went co ed. We can speak from first hand experience. None of this friend’s cousin’s uncle’s boss in some other decade.
Its hard to explain, but there was a palpable difference in feeling like the minority on the Yale campus vs on the Vassar campus. From my memory, the men at Vassar more quickly assumed positions of “power” (for lack of a better word) in student government positions, on the yearbook staff, etc, than did the women at Yale. The women at Vassar still found their voice, no question about it, but there was a different “feel” on the 2 campuses (and though I was only a student at one, I did spend time visiting both campuses).
What troubles me about the protests and demands at Yale is that the protesting students do not seem to have a strong sense of self; that verbal or cultural offenses by their fellow students or even by faculty leaves them weak in the knees. For example, the demand that Yale abandon the use of the word “master” as a faculty title in their various colleges. Well OK, the word does seem outdated for an academic setting, but I can’t agree that it absolutely connotes an antebellum culture at Yale presently, unless there is something I don’t know about Yale.
When I find such things or persons offensive, I resort to the Mel Brooks School of Comic Diplomacy in the face of tyranny and totalitarianism; ridicule. If the title “master” upsets people, then here are suggestions to replace it:
I didn’t say it was “broadly applicable” in the sense you suggest. I clearly described two specific schools and a specific time.
To me, it was very relevant to the classroom situation reported by the writer at the Yale newspaper: women from an educational background where educating women was the focus of the institution said they felt comfortable speaking out in class, while women from coed institutions did not. As I said, I am depressed that this situation still exists.
That was my point.
But I have often observed that the lessons and achievements of second-wave feminism seem to have been lost, between the “Girls Gone Wild” interpretation of female empowerment and the Victim Industrial Complex. As someone said above, we would have been outraged if someone said we weren’t as strong as men and needed special protections.
"Similarly, marginalized groups like URMs don’t need to learn more about perspectives from the more mainstream/status quo perspectives.
They can’t help, but learn about it as by the very nature of their being mainstream and status quo it’s so normalized in nearly every part of mainstream American life that they can’t help but learn about it during their normative years unless they grew up in an extremely isolated enclave such as a close off religious commune practically cut off from those perspectives from the mass media, town, schools, etc. In fact, with the exception of those who live in those extremely isolated enclaves, those mainstream/status quo perspectives are practically drummed into their heads on a daily basis."
Oh, I disagree. I think you often have quite skewed views of what is “mainstream,” and you certainly engage in tons of stereotyping, especially of white upper middle class suburbanites whom you routinely portray as preppy, snobby, superficial, pretentious, living off daddy’s money, and not serious about academics. You might do well to learn more about life from others’ POV.
I just want to congratulate you all. I haven’t read every post (but many), and it’s well done… if only Presidential debates (bipartisanly speaking) handled issues as well, or as thoroughly.
As with other threads here, the interesting opinions and links to useful sources seems to beat news organizations one might check.
As a result of this thread I’d recommend schools cease spending money on those ubiquitous blue light stations, since they don’t seem to be ensuring a feeling a safety on college campuses.
Re why Yale and the role of affirmative action. My take is there’s a kind of perfect storm here. First you have a well-integrated network of folks with a professional and/or ideological interest in railing about PC. Then you have a group of hard-working, talented, successful URM students who got into their dream school but, once there, feel like their perceptions and experiences are routinely ignored/discounted/not taken as seriously as those who were to the manor born or are willing & able to pass as such. When the Dean and IAC ask for something pretty minor on their behalf (be considerate in your choice of Halloween costumes) there’s this gratuitous blowback, in which this fairly trivial request gets elevated to the level of a threat to"free & open society." And suddenly the national media is trivializing, denying, and distorting the concerns of URM students at Yale and talking about how outrageous and demanding and ungrateful and undeserving these students are.
That story has legs, in part, because it plays into lots of long-established racist (and sexist) themes/narratives/tropes and also, in part, because as college becomes ridiculously expensive, as admission to the most elite schools starts to look like a lottery, and as the middle and upper middle class increasely worry that their kids will be downwardly mobile, you’ve got a lot of people out there looking for someone to blame. Affirmative action (or perceptions thereof) plays into this because, outside Yale’s walls, you can find countless folks who think “How dare these kids piss on an opportunity (“gift”?) so many others would make any sacrifice to have? And, besides, these kids at Yale are not the “real” victims of racism anyway because they’re all going to be affluent professionals and some of their parents already are.”
Meanwhile, I think that the frustration, anger, and disillusionment some of the students who are protesting feel is not simply about false advertising but the experience of seeing just how much resistance they’re up against when they push to make the ideal real. No matter how successful we are and how trivial the thing we ask for, we’re going to have to fight for it and be abused while doing so. And here’s where tomorrow’s leaders are being educated, so if we don’t fight this BS, how are things ever going to get better? And they’ve got to get better because it’s not about Halloween costumes – it’s about a culture in which certain kinds of murders and rape have ceased to be shocking. These are issues that, for obvious reasons, are on the minds of US college students today and if we think of universities as one of the few places in the US in which diverse groups of people are brought together at an impressionable age to learn with and from and about each other in order to make the world a better place (and that’s what elite US universities are selling these days), then stakes are high.
There are lots of things to be said about how to fight more effectively and lots of lessons to be learned about media and messaging and assume tries of power from this incident, but I think that what’s being fought for is real and important.
The point I was making was regarding whether Yale was a liberal place and thus, a safe place for those with such inclinations. Not necessarily the experience of all Y students alums such as several HS classmates who attended Y in the '90s felt Yale was a conservative preppy place where liberals, especially those who’d currently be pejoratively labeled SJWs*, were subjected to a fair amount of casual snide dismissive remarks and ridicule on a regular basis.
The college classmate who turned down her admission to Y due to her ASD experiences was doing so not because of sexism in her particular case, but because the ASD classmates and their families were making casual snide dismissive remarks about her neo-hippie style** and assumed/actual core values and politics. That’s what prompted her to feel she didn’t want to attend a college which seemed heavily populated by the very same conservative preppy folks she was forced to live and attend school with in her well-off practically all-White suburb.
Among many who hold progressively left values their experience has shown them that those inclined to use the term SJW aren't really interested in hearing out and listening to the perspectives of marginalized groups, but are preemptively dismissive of their perspectives and mainly interested in talking over, baiting, and forcefully pushing their right-wing political views or racially insensitive perspectives/ideas until they provoke an angry reaction or the one being targeted withdraws. If the latter occurs on a forum or a discussion with several other people, the latter effectively shuts the original discussion about progressive-left values or concerns those holding such values have down which serves the interests of the baiter and the larger status quo.
Another tactic they’ve experienced is the use of the red herring “but there are more important issues to talk about like ISIS” which neglects the fact that while that issue is important, that’s not what’s being discussed. This red herring tactic is also very interesting to me as it’s one which was banned in my HS sophomore debate class and any student doing so would be judged as immediately losing the debate by diverting too much from the main issue under debate and be graded accordingly.
In either case, the one using the term SJW wins and some who have had such experiences feel their “debating tactics” are similar to ones used by creationists who similarly…insist on “debating the theory of evolution” even though practically everyone in the scientific community know that doing so is a complete waste of their time and doing so grants legitimacy to positions and parties who don’t merit such.
** Apparent as she exhibited her neo-hippieness in the very clothing choices she wore to campus visits when more mainstream formal wear is not mandated.
Since there is a call to consider sociological factors and national history, perhaps it should be noted that NC, and I assume his wife as well, was an adolescent in the mid seventies in that post-Vietnam period of disillusionment with adult authority. Perhaps EC was merely drawing upon how she had felt toward “the administration” as a teenager when deciding to validate the complaints of the students over the original e-mail reminder.
I also read the alumni magazine. That makes me an expert, too.
@“Cardinal Fang” , I like your post about the refrigerator door, because it suggests that we need to know more details before we can evaluate a situation in which somebody “goes ham” (as my daughter puts it) over something that seems, from the outside, to be trivial. It might be only the tip of an iceberg, or it might just be a little piece of ice.
@cobrat, I understood your point, and your friend’s perception perfectly. It’s just a bunch of hooey. Maybe you should be more skeptical of what members of your circle tell you.
The fact that there were complaints from some of her other students validates her email in my mind. The only criticism I will level at her is that perhaps she should have taken her own advice and let those students voice that criticism themselves. This whole fiasco would have been avoided.
Regardless of the possibility of an iceberg, if you don’t feel empowered, would you get into the face of a school authority to yell and swear at him? Or would you be quiet, timid, afraid, or submissive? The girl in the video did not seem to fear she’d be disciplined for her aggressive behavior, or else she didn’t care. Why? I can tell you that my college kids would never have felt enough empowerment to risk their education by similarly disrespecting a professor. They may have wanted to, but would have been scared to death of being kicked out of college. Frankly, in today’s climate, it seems minorities believe they can get away with bad behavior in schools because all that is required to fight any disciplinary action is to cry racism. I have friends who are high school teachers. They tell me they no longer attempt to discipline AA kids, because almost every time they have, they’ve been called a racist by the kid and/or the parents, and they began to fear for their jobs.
I did NOT mention anything about the student who spit on attendees at a forum on different day and on a different part of campus. I’m concerned about the angry black woman whose contorted visage has become the liberal’s version of the Willie Horton ad these past 24 hours.
For the record, the move to change the title “master” because of its connotations re slavery came from one of the masters, who feels uncomfortable being called that, and not from any student group. He is white, BTW.
I’d feel a lot more empowered to yell and swear at a professor in daylight when I was surrounded by fifty witnesses than I would to confront two drunk guys wearing Frito Bandito costumes when I was alone in the night. I don’t think the two situations are at all comparable.
A large part of that disillusionment is precisely because most university administrations and older adults of that period in positions of power were not only highly dismissive of the concerns and feelings of the students/young adults of that era, they were often subjected to harsh sanctions we’d consider not only overly harsh, but sometimes even likely constitute violations of the student/young adults’ right to free speech/association* and civil/human rights**.
College administrations were also much more controlling of student behavior and conduct even in their own rooms. For instance, up until the mid-1960’s women at my LAC had to keep their room door open if a male was visiting and visiting hours between the genders were heavily regulated.
One seemingly silly admin rule several Oberlin alums from the 50’s and '60s recounted was that if a male visited a woman’s dormroom, one foot of each person must always be on the floor at all times for the duration of the visit.
Many colleges had a mandated dress code where one had to wear formal suit and tie or the female equivalent to class. Failing to conform could prompt a Prof to kick a student out of class and grade the student accordingly. A HS friend's father had this very experience as an NYU freshman in 1964 and cited his generation's(Baby boomer) efforts for among other things, abolishing mandated dress codes through protests, teach-ins, and student occupation of administration/campus buildings which benefited subsequent generations of students like his son and myself.
More seriously, college administrations had far less reservations in suspending or expelling students for being involved with political protests they didn’t approve of. Something which prompted movements like the free speech movement at Berkeley during the '60s.