“We’re protesting Hum 110 because it’s Eurocentric”
Hmmm. There’s the left, and then there’s…this other thing. I don’t know what to call it. The fight-picking left, the eat-your-own left, the thought-police left, the bully left.
FRESHMEN crowded the lecture hall at 9am for Humanities 110, the first class of their college careers. Elizabeth Drumm, the head of the programme, made some introductory remarks, her voice quavering. As some faculty members moved to take their places at a panel discussion, three demonstrators emerged from the wings of the auditorium. “We’re protesting Hum 110 because it’s Eurocentric,” one began. “I’m sorry, this is a classroom space and this is not appropriate,” Ms Drumm said, immediately cancelling the lecture. Thus began another academic year at Reed College, a liberal arts college in Portland, Oregon.
Last academic year, a dozen or so students continuously occupied the three-day-a-week lecture series by sitting in front of the auditorium with cardboard signs, sometimes taping their mouths in protest at the absence of non-white voices in the syllabus. One even took to lecturing the freshman class on the podium from an alternate curriculum before the start of each session.
This year the president said no we’re not doing that again.
The protesters argue that the Humanities programme is racist because it ignores many of the world’s great civilisations and because its authors are overwhelmingly male and white.
And cis, don’t forget cis.
Assistant professor Lucia Martinez Valdivia, who describes herself as mixed-race and queer, asked protesters not to demonstrate during her lecture on Sappho last November. Ms Valdivia said she suffered from post-traumatic stress disorder and doubted her ability to deliver the lecture in the face of their opposition. At first, demonstrators announced they would change tactics and sit quietly in the audience, wearing black. After her speech, a number of them berated her, bringing her to tears.
Demonstrators said Ms Valdivia was guilty of a variety of offences: she was a “race traitor” who upheld white supremacist principles by failing to oppose the Humanities syllabus. She was “anti-black” because she appropriated black slang by wearing a T-shirt that said, “Poetry is Lit”. She was an “ableist” because she believes trigger warnings sometimes diminish sexual trauma. She was also called a “gaslighter” for making disadvantaged students doubt their own feelings of oppression.
It sounds like a complete festival of stupid, if that really is how it went.
A few weeks later, the college invited Kimberly Peirce, the gender-fluid director of “Boys Don’t Cry”, which was widely praised as the first sympathetic portrayal of trans people in cinema. Protesters ripped down posters promoting the event and put up their own posters that said: “Fuck this cis white bitch”…
Remember that? I wrote about it last year. “Fuck this cis white bitch” – it says it all, doesn’t it.
Many students have said privately that the campus has become a place where they are afraid to express dissenting opinions. Students who disagree with the protesters’ views, on social media, have been denounced as racists by activist leaders. A newly accepted international student was mocked when she asked her future classmates if there were any libertarian groups on campus. White students have complained that they have been told by other students that they are unjustified in speaking about race and identity in class. When one student voiced a dissenting opinion on social media, his classmate threatened to get him fired from his job at the college bookstore. “It’s an environment with limited representation of opinion, and it can be hostile to students who hold other views,” says Yuta Kato, a sophomore.
It’s as if they think they’re in receipt of Holy Writ, and everyone else is a Sinner.
This is the left that the right wing press loves to point to as being representative of all liberals.
Using the ‘cis’ label on one who has not so self-identified appears at odds with maximally-coherent trans-ideology.
By contorting my neural pathways far less than the genderists usually require, I could construe this forced assignment as a pernicious and almost ubiquitous form of transphobia within the trans/transally community.
That’s irrelevant though, because the point of cising women (it’s mostly women) is to slander, abuse and shut them up. It’s a warning shot across the bow for women with an opinion about gender or feminism to pull their heads in, or they’ll be tagged as TERFs. That is, marked as acceptable targets for mobbing, abuse and violence.
There have always been idiots like this. When I was an undergraduate in the 90s, one of my school papers ran some whacky full-page manifesto from the local communist bookstore owner along the lines of “I am a white man. I have raped and killed and committed genocide …[etc for twenty paragraphs] I hope I die.” There were a couple of letters to editor after about the irony of complaining about genocide while hoping for the death of white men, but most of my classmates probably didn’t even bother to read the thing; I did, out of sheer boredom, and … had a good laugh and went on with my day.
I gather things are different now, at least at some places. But these people only have as much power as everyone else gives them. At a certain point, you just have to not give a shit that some idiot is calling you a racist/sexist/transphobe. (Conservatives aren’t wrong when they say that overly promiscuous use of such labels threatens to erode their meaning; they’re just usually wrong about what constitutes “overly promiscuous use.”) So some leftier-than-thou idiot is threatening to get a classmate fired from the campus bookstore: how is that anything more than cheap bluster? Unless the administration is so cowed by the lunatic fringe that they’re going to give in and fire the poor student, who cares? Let them threaten away and reveal their own impotence.
They want to protest lectures? Well, if they do so silently and without disruption, have at it. If they’re interfering with the lecture, campus security arrests them for trespassing. After a couple of offenses, they’re expelled and barred from campus permanently. Problem solved.
What’s that old line? “A liberal is someone who won’t take his own side in an argument”? If people are disrupting a school’s educational mission, stand up to them. The majority of students will be with you. Your alumni donors will certainly be with you. Public opinion generally will be with you. Allow the disrupters exactly what the law requires you to allow, and no more.
But I have to take issue with one thing from the quoted article. Mocking libertarians is a good thing.
This could be a problem, though, since even a silent, non-disruptive protest could have the effect of stifling discussion. Protests should be kept outside the classroom; if you have valid points, the school should listen, and the teachers should consider altering the syllabus. But you should not enter the classroom and disrupt the learning process. With so many students and teachers that have various stress-related and anxiety related problems, having even a group of quiet protestors there can be threatening/intimidating, and it is meant to be. It is meant to stifle academic freedom.
If I had protestors in my classroom, I would not be able to teach. I have an anxiety disorder that would probably paralyze me the minute they started waving their sign “Global Warming is a Chinese Hoax”, especially since I am pretty sure that most of the administration would be sympathetic to the protestors.
So we’ve got highly obnoxious protesters whose conduct borders on criminal, a prof who has no business teaching if it gives her PTSD, and totally incompetent and clueless administrators. We hear a lot about the protesters and the prof, but little about the administrators who seem unwilling to support their faculty, discipline unruly students, and address reasonable student complaints that the Intro to Hum course should go beyond the European canon. Yet unlike the other people at this college, only the administrators are pulling down six-figure salaries or better. It’s time they earned them.
You realize this is a very ableist statement, right? We give the students every accommodation possible if they have PTSD, and the ADA also requires that for employees (including the administrators with their big salaries if needed). If she is able to do her job under the conditions normally expected of the job, there is no good reason to say she cannot teach. This is a circumstance that is not usually covered by the job description of a college professor, and therefore to refuse to have her in the classroom because of PTSD in the face of something not required by her job description would be highly questionable.
I couldn’t parse this. She’s ableist because she thinks trigger warnings ameliorate the effects of trauma (and are therefore good)? Or because she thinks trigger warnings minimize trauma (and are therefore bad)?
You could not make this bullshit up: though there must be some bullshit factory down some back lane somewhere devoted to its craft.
If there are nits to be picked some trendy nitwit will be onto them.
#3
The dilution of meaning is already well underway. The overabundance of ‘triggered’ serves as an example, taking that term from a medically relevant term of art, to a joke. TERF I think is gradually running out of currency, especially when coupled with the naked dishonesty it often comes with. Cis transmisogynist TERF! …Because you frame trans politics differently to us!
The shame of it all is that they are also dragging more useful terms with them. Racist and sexist are at risk of becoming almost as dilute.
iknklast, public speaking is at least implied if not explicitly in a lecturer’s job description. Whether you’re a politician, stand-up comedian, school teacher or college lecturer, anyone who’s in the business of talking to groups of people needs a thick skin and the ability to control the crowd. This lecturer seems to have neither. As a lecturer myself, I know that treating adults like children (trigger warnings, seriously?) is a sure way to create hostility.
Which brings me back to the administrators, who as you point out have a duty to accommodate. If the college is aware that this prof has medically diagnosed PTSD (and not the self-diagnosed kind), then the college should not be leaving her without help in a situation likely to exacerbate it. Where is campus security to eject anyone disrupting the class? Is the prof getting help to improve her public speaking and class control skills? Is the prof being reassigned to another class? These things don’t seem to be happening, and my question is why not? Until they do happen, she has no business teaching this class as her condition will worsen.
So…they should invite some Nazis to give lectures in defense of Freezepeach?
Ben @ 7 – I had to pause over that one too. I think it must mean the second, because the first doesn’t fit with the rest – but the word should have been “trivialize” rather than “diminish.”
Thank you, Ophelia. I wasn’t sure whether the Super Left was now against trigger warnings, and this professor was guilty of not keeping up.
>>You could not make this bullshit up: though there must be some bullshit factory down some back lane somewhere devoted to its craft. <<
My WAG is that the biggest pile of BS is in the protesters' social media. I mean, if you can hack an election with well placed ads and comment bots, why not take down a whole political ideology?
@14: I’m currently reading Sunstein et al on group polarization, and this sort of thing is a prime case study. I occasionally get an indirect look-in to some people’s social media (you know, FB friend-of-friend-of-friend stuff) and there’s some serious echo-chambering going on. Add to that the shaming that will occur if one steps out of line (at which point one either knuckles under or buggers off) and it’s virtually guaranteed to generate cliques of self-righteous, unreflective fanatics.
Sam Day: “address reasonable student complaints that the Intro to Hum course should go beyond the European canon”
Now I am neither American nor a Humanities scholar, but knowing how these things go in other contexts the first question I’d ask is if there is any way of addressing the complaints that will satisfy the students in question.
There are people with whom you just can’t win. For example, Disney makes movie about white characters, Disney is eurocentrist; Disney makes movie about non-European hero, Disney is appropriating (or not genuine enough, never genuine enough). Disney has thin characters, Disney is body-shaming; Disney has characters with variable body types, Disney is perpetuating the obesity-stereotype associated with Pacific Islanders.
Or in other words, I can just about see the next step in this game, once the syllabus has been changed: how dare a white professor discuss Ancient Indian philosophy without being from India themselves? Because for some people it is not about the topic, it is about having a pretext to disrupt and bully. This doesn’t mean that there shouldn’t be a broader syllabus – in fact I would have been ecstatic if we had learned more about non-European history when I went to what you’d call college – but it would have to be taken into account in terms of whether the problem of protests is solvable through accommodating these demands or not.
A very power hungry lying racist white narcissist male would thrive in the alt right now? Where would a a vary power hungry lying racist narcissist woman of color thrive? I think we are seeing it.
alex’s Comment is dead on. The slime in charge or the Reedies against Reason will object to anything that is not what she demands. Mommy created a monster with this toxic prep school princess. As entitled as it gets and still wanting in on the victim olympics..