The right to fright

[frigidmagi]

economist

HALLOWEEN is supposed to last for one night only. At Yale University (motto: “Light and Truth”) it has dragged on considerably longer. As happens at many American universities, Yale administrators sent an advisory e-mail to students before the big night, requesting them to refrain from wearing costumes that other students might find offensive. Given that it is legal for 18-year-old Americans to drive, marry and, in most places, own firearms, it might seem reasonable to let students make their own decisions about dressing-up—and to face the consequences when photographs of them disguised as Osama bin Laden can forever be found on Facebook or Instagram. Yet a determination to treat adults as children is becoming a feature of life on campus, and not just in America. Strangely, some of the most enthusiastic supporters of this development are the students themselves.

In response to the Yale e-mail, a faculty member wrote a carefully worded reply. In it she suggested that students and faculty ought to ponder whether a university should seek to control the behaviour of students in this way. Yes it should, came the reply, in the form of a letter signed by hundreds of students, protests and calls for two academics to resign for suggesting otherwise. Tellingly, the complaint made by some students at Yale’s Silliman College, where the row took place, was that they now felt unsafe.

On the face of it this is odd. New Haven, which surrounds Yale, had 60 shootings in 2014, 12 of them fatal. Thankfully, there has never been a shooting at the university. The choice of words was deliberate, though. Last year a debate on abortion at Oxford University was cancelled after some students complained that hearing the views of anti-abortionists would make them feel unsafe. Many British universities now provide “safe spaces” for students to protect them from views which they might find objectionable. Sometimes demands for safe space enter the classroom. Jeannie Suk, a Harvard law professor, has written about how students there tried to dissuade her from discussing rape in class when teaching the law on domestic violence, lest it trigger traumatic memories.

Bodies upon the gears
Like many bad ideas, the notion of safe spaces at universities has its roots in a good one. Gay people once used the term to refer to bars and clubs where they could gather without fear, at a time when many states still had laws against sodomy.

In the worst cases, though, an idea that began by denoting a place where people could assemble without being prosecuted has been reinvented by students to serve as a justification for shutting out ideas. At Colorado College, safety has been invoked by a student group to prevent the screening of a film celebrating the Stonewall riots which downplays the role of minorities in the gay-rights movement. The same reasoning has led some students to request warnings before colleges expose them to literature that deals with racism and violence. People as different as Condoleezza Rice, a former secretary of state, and Bill Maher, a satirist, have been dissuaded from giving speeches on campuses, sometimes on grounds of safety.

What makes this so objectionable is that there are plenty of things on American campuses that really do warrant censure from the university. Administrators at the University of Oklahoma managed not to notice that one of its fraternities, Sigma Alpha Epsilon, had cheerily sung a song about hanging black people from a tree for years, until a video of them doing so appeared on the internet. At the University of Missouri, whose president resigned on November 9th, administrators did a poor job of responding to complaints of unacceptable behaviour on campus—which included the scattering of balls of cotton about the place, as a put-down to black students, and the smearing of faeces in the shape of a swastika in a bathroom.

Distinguishing between this sort of thing and obnoxious Halloween costumes ought not to be a difficult task. But by equating smaller ills with bigger ones, students and universities have made it harder, and diminished worthwhile protests in the process. The University of Missouri episode shows how damaging this confusion can be: some activists tried to prevent the college’s own newspaper from covering their demonstration, claiming that to do so would have endangered their safe space, thereby rendering a reasonable protest absurd.

Fifty years ago student radicals agitated for academic freedom and the right to engage in political activities on campus. Now some of their successors are campaigning for censorship and increased policing by universities of student activities. The supporters of these ideas on campus are usually described as radicals. They are, in fact, the opposite.

[B4UTRUST]

What the actual fuck is wrong with these students today? 'I don't agree with you so your words are damaging to me, assaulting me and triggering me! Your viewpoint makes me feel unsafe and I need an adult!' You are a fucking adult!

My fiancee keeps telling me I need to go back to school and work on a degree like engineering or computer science or something. At this point, if I did I'd be afraid that I'd end up in jail for trying to knock some sense into someone. Do they think that the real world is going to play nice nice with them and worry about their poor feelings and what might possibly offend them? Maybe I'm just an uncaring asshole who was raised poorly but it's not my job, nor the job of faculty or professors to deal with someone being butthurt over stupid shit. Grow the fuck up, grow a thicker skin and fucking deal.

Jesus fucking Christ I've read so many of these types of articles online. Butthurt students throwing a fit and being 'offended,' someone telling them that well you're an adult maybe you should be treated as one and not coddled and them going 'fuck you, I want to be treated as a child and I want you fired for suggesting I grow up!'

[Lys]

Man i remember when 'safe place' was generally reserved for places where people who were victims and/or at high risk of abuse could get a breather from the rest of the world. By this i mean things like rape victims or LGBT youth or things like that. A safe place was somewhere where you could avoid people accidentally setting off a panic attack, or being called a faggot to your face and then threatened, or whatever other hurts and humiliations the world can inflict upon the vulnerable. The safe space was meant to be a place where you knew you could be insulated from an actual tangible risk of harm, at least for a little while.

Seems that over the last few years the meaning has been co-opted to mean an ideologically secure space where nobody so much as feels uncomfortable. Much as i would like to say that this is weird, it's actually rather unsurprising. It's simply human nature for people to want to create echo-chambers and censor anything that they find discomfiting or offensive. In this case it seems to me that increased concern for the safety of various groups in the face of actual abuse and harassment has been slowly experiencing mission creep until we get to the point where mere discomfort is treated as a problem. Plus there's always self-serving individuals who see that another group's been getting what they see as special treatment by using certain code words, and so they co-opt the code words in the hopes of getting that same treatment themselves.

[Norseman]

Any of you seen the news about the Dartmouth profane protest. I want to comment some, but I am too tired and worn right now, it is exam season. Still thought I'd link y'all.

EDIT: Seems to mostly be covered by somewhat right-wing sources, just FYI.

[Lys]

Jesus that happened near where i live! Dartmouth is just a 50 minute drive from where i live in New Hampshire. Hell i've been there, one day i had to go into town with Marina early in the morning to drop off a rented van, and rather that drive all the way home and then drive back later to pick her up, i decided to just spend the day in Hannover. It was late summer, the freshmen were coming into the school and for a couple of hours i insinuated myself into a freshman orientation tour because i can still pass for a teenager and i was feeling nostalgic. So i've been to that library, talked to people who work there and students who now use it. It's really not the sort of place i would have expected something like that to happen.

[General Havoc]

"But Havoc, shit like someone throwing flaming bricks through your windows at night just doesn't happen on college campuses. You must have PROVOKED it somehow with all your right wing racist evil whiteness..."

[Lys]

Man was the brick really flaming? Because that takes some dedication, clay's not exactly flammable. You'd have to soak it in a combustible liquid or something.

There's an interesting though that occurred to me about all this. Consider this: Dartmouth College probably does not have much in the way of racial problems, if anything it makes a concious effort to reach out to minorities students and generally be inclusive. New Hampshire is the third whitest state in the Union (behind Maine and Vermont), it's only 1.1% black, and yet Dartmouth's undergraduate student body that is 8% black (3% for graduate students). Having actually attended a freshman orientation there this year, i can tell you first hand that they have an entire office dedicated to giving all kinds of support to minority students, and means through which anyone can anonymously report any problems or incidents they might encounter while at school. They took pains to emphasize that they want to have a supportive and inclusive environment. Now i can't tell you whether those efforts actually bear out, i don't go to school there, but they seem to be trying. They're certainly trying harder than the college i went to in Illinois.

So if there are few racial problems at Dartmouth why would there be such an enthusiastic protest there? Well the thought that occurred to me is that it's the inevitable result of the socialization of modern media. It can make events feel personal and close to home even when they're not. It's not just video feeds of bad shit happening, we've had that for decades, but the fact that social media activism makes it possible to feel involved in a situation even if it's distant. If an unarmed black boy gets shot to death tomorrow in Chicago, people could organize protests about it in Atlanta with the support of people in Boise. There's a certain interconnectedness to events around the country which leads to the issue that people are more inclined to want to do something about problems that are close to them, but at the same time still can't do much if the problems are in truth far away. So i think what you're seeing here is essentially activism frustrated by impotence, in that students in Dartmouth just aren't relevant to racial problems in Saint Louis or New York City, but they still want to do something. The result is... well this.

What strikes me about it more than anything is how farcical it all is. Here we have a bunch of kids chanting, "Black Lives Matter!" in the library of a liberal school in New England of all places. It would be kind of like having a gay rights protest in the fucking Netherlands. What are you hoping to accomplish? Who are you hoping to reach? It's worse than preaching to the choir, it's threatening the choir with damnation and hellfire if they don't show more piety.

[General Havoc]

Man was the brick really flaming? Because that takes some dedication, clay's not exactly flammable. You'd have to soak it in a combustible liquid or something.

They wrapped it in a rag soaked in paraffin or something similar.

[Lys]

It still amazes me that people seem to choose you, a right-leaning moderate, as a target for harassment instead of someone actually on the far right. Not saying it would make the harassment any less wrong, it's just that i figure politically-minded assholes would tend to gravitate toward their counterparts other end of the political spectrum, opposites attract and all that. It's probably (in this case) a combination of moderates being easier to find in liberal areas and moderates being generally less threatening. It's easier to throw a brick through someone's window when you're not worried they might reply with gunfire.

[General Havoc]

It still amazes me that people seem to choose you, a right-leaning moderate, as a target for harassment instead of someone actually on the far right. Not saying it would make the harassment any less wrong, it's just that i figure extremist assholes would tend to gravitate toward their counterparts other end of the political spectrum, opposites attract and all that. It's probably a combination of moderates being easier to find in liberal areas and moderates being generally less threatening. It's easier to throw a brick through someone's window when you're not worried they might reply with gunfire.

By the standards of the school, there were no right-leaning moderates. And the school had engaged in a pretty pervasive campaign to ensure that anyone right-leaning was not a moderate by anyone's definition. There were actual right wingers around of course, and for all I know, they got the same treatment. But probably I'd guess the people doing this had no means of distinguishing between me and a literal Nazi. I would expect that goes a long way to explaining why they kept calling me one.

[Norseman]

Just FYI...

As a Norwegian I think all of this is insane. I mean I suspect that some of my professors and lecturers may have political and religious views, but that is all, something I suspect. The idea of a lecture hall being used as a bully pulpit is absurd.

As for inter-student violence... Whut?

I mean other than the chance of a punch-out at the student pub (unlikely, but possible) I seriously can't imagine any violence between students, unless it is a personal grudge.