Posted on 05/20/2014 11:33:07 AM PDT by Kaslin
Academia is hell. In the latest higher-education fad, students want "trigger warnings," according to The New York Times. It appears that some students are so fragile that they want university staff to protect them from big bad ideas.
Students around the country say they want "explicit alerts that the material they are about to read or see in a classroom might upset them or, as some students assert, cause symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder in victims of rape or in war veterans." An Oberlin College draft -- now "under revision" -- for trigger warnings suggested faculty "be aware of racism, classism, sexism, heterosexism, cissexism, ableism and other issues of privilege and oppression."
At Rutgers University, a sophomore wrote, "Studying art is an emotionally draining experience." And: "By creating trigger warnings for their students, professors can help to create a safe space for their students."
Be aware: "Safe" also can mean keeping students safe from having to think freely. In March, University of California, Santa Barbara feminist studies professor Mireille Miller-Young got in an argument with anti-abortion protesters. I guess she lost, because she grabbed a protester's sign; once in a "safe place," her office, she destroyed it. Police charged the professor with vandalism, battery and robbery. According to the police report, Miller-Young, who was pregnant, said that the sign "triggered" a reaction in her and that she had acted in defense of her "right to go to work and not be in harm."
Like Miller-Young, I find photos of aborted fetuses offensive. That leaves me with two options: Don't look. Or try to persuade the young women waving the sign to desist.
The professor chose a third: to use force. Sadly, more than 1,000 students signed a petition that supports Miller-Young and urges UCSB Chancellor Henry T. Yang to re-evaluate "rules and regulations that allow outside community members to so heavily trigger and target students and faculty on this campus."
Translation: We cannot handle free speech.
Miller-Young's dissertation is titled "A Taste for Brown Sugar: Black Women, Sex Work and Pornography." Free speech worked for her then, but now she doesn't want to share it.
Then there's the "hate speech" excuse. My pal Steve Hayward was invited to be the University of Colorado's first visiting scholar in conservative thought. Before his year was up, a small group of academics wanted to haul him before the faculty assembly for a formal censure. His offense? He had posted a blog with a lame joke about "LGBTQRSTUW (or whatever letters have been added lately)." One professor charged that the post was "bordering on" hate speech.
Miller-Young called the anti-abortion sign "hate speech." In Colorado, you don't have to use hate speech; just border on it and they'll go after you.
The trigger-happy may tell themselves politics have nothing to do with their efforts to silence others. The Miller-Young petition framed the issue as a matter of "safety." In a way, they're right. In many quarters in academia, it is not safe to think for yourself.
Just what I was thinking. If you look at the word “trigger” just right, from a certain distance and with your eyes squinted just a tad, it looks like the N word.
Wrap them up in a blankie and give them a bottle.
Forget about finding a job. They don't even have the constitution to look for one.
They better have a “trigger warning” on all the dictionaries, since they all contain words that are objectionable to someone or everyone.
Trigger, please!
Triggers must be banned. All of them, including the stuffed one.
I hope that is a satire.
Life is hard. And there is every reason to believe that on the path were on, it’s going to get a lot harder. Being protected from “triggers” is not doing anybody any favors.
And yet again, I’m beginning to wonder if the PTSD diagnosis is being run into the ground. I am the one whose neighbor claimed that her PTSD was triggered by other residents playing Scrabble in the hallway. And another one had her PTSD triggered by construction noise across the street. I don’t know how these women came to have PTSD in the first place.
Sorry, but I think the woman who tore up the girls sign just didnt like pro-lifers and made that up so it wouldn’t sound so bad.
Linear Algebra traumatized me for life...
...plane geometry did me in...I found it such a useless thing for me to be involved with that even today I’d like to go dig up Euclid’s body from whatever sarcophagus he is in, and riddle the corpse with bullets...after I give proper trigger warning, of course...
It appears that some students are so fragile that they want ... "explicit alerts that the material they are about to read or see in a classroom might upset them or, as some students assert, cause symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder in victims of rape or in war veterans." An Oberlin College draft -- now "under revision" -- for trigger warnings suggested faculty "be aware of racism, classism, sexism, heterosexism, cissexism, ableism and other issues of privilege and oppression."
Yeah, ART majors are the ones suffering through a brutal schedule at the university level! Those Medical and Science doctoral candidates have it easy. Just try sitting in an art class touching up a chalk drawing at your whim for 4 hours! Why, that project is due in 2 weeks!!!
(And exactly why is ART class delving into race, gender, sexual preferences, etc? Exactly how many students don't feel like they're in a "safe space" in ART class?!?)
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