How unnecessary is the opinion if it challenges preconceived notions and makes people challenge their assumptions? Isn't that what college is about?

I didn't have time to read the entire article, but here's what I got: helicopter parenting has gone so far off the deep end that the college masters are expected to continue the helicoptering. And worse, students have been so completely indoctrinated into the helicoptering that they are absolutely unwilling to think for themselves. And therefore any incidence of cognitive dissonance causes them to completely implode.

I'm not saying I believe she was right. I am seriously questioning how a campus movement that purports to be pushing toward inclusiveness of different cultures and viewpoints can justify their actions toward this e-mail, which have included public verbal harassment, threatening, calling for firing, and in one case publicly spitting on colleagues who dared to publicly side with this woman, all over a cautiously and respectfully written e-mail that they just did not agree with. The Atlantic article is, in my opinion, spot on.

Not really, I don't think. I think the primary thesis is that a movement that is geared toward promoting inclusiveness and tolerance of opinions is rampantly turning into an extremely exclusive movement that is completely intolerant of different opinions, to the point where one can no longer disagree to any degree with the "party line", so to speak, even if expressed tactfully and even if the differences are only slight, without being violently censored and silenced and in many cases demanded to leave the university completely. This is of course wildly ironic and hypocritical, and I think this piece is attempting to display just that, as well as highlight the absence of healthy debate on college campuses, and the demands that students assume their opinions should not be challenged to any degree because their personal pain trumps the free thoughts of others.

Oh, I agree, the blowback was far out of proportion to the original email. Nobody should lose their job because their attempt at dialogue happened to be the last straw.

But I also think that white people need to have a good think about what they are adding to a conversation like this when they chime in on questions of racism. Not every opinion deserves equal time, and we've gotten to say our piece for a very, very, very long time.

http://www.newyorker.com/news/news-d...eech-diversion

So colleges are turning into Sassy Magazine?

LOL, nice. I bet about three people here will know what that is.

*Raises hand* I remember Sassy!! :D Going off track here, but I remember they wrote an article about UGA sorority rush. I wonder if that's online anywhere.

Me too! My mom always renewed my subscription. It was great.

...I think that's four people already.

She began her email with "Nicholas and I have heard from a number of students who were frustrated by the mass email sent to the student body about appropriate Halloween-wear." I take that to mean that her email was prompted by conversations she and her husband had already had with students—conversations that were in turn prompted by the first email.

She then very quickly tied the perspective she was offering, and the questions she was raising, to her own academic field. Then she said:

I don’t wish to trivialize genuine concerns about cultural and personal representation, and other challenges to our lived experience in a plural community. I know that many decent people have proposed guidelines on Halloween costumes from a spirit of avoiding hurt and offense. I laud those goals, in theory, as most of us do. But in practice, I wonder if we should reflect more transparently, as a community, on the consequences of an institutional (which is to say: bureaucratic and administrative) exercise of implied control over college students.

It seems to me that we can have this discussion of costumes on many levels: we can talk about complex issues of identify, free speech, cultural appropriation, and virtue “signalling.” But I wanted to share my thoughts with you from a totally different angle, as an educator concerned with the developmental stages of childhood and young adulthood.

She acknowledged the valid concerns of others and then offered a different perspective on the conversation, based on her own academic expertise. Seems to me like exactly what it is to be hoped will happen in a university community.

Five! *waving hand Horschach style*

She created a strawman. The initial email was not a "bureaucratic and administrative" exercise of implied control over college students, and categorizing it as such does, indeed, trivialize it.

Again, I'm not calling for consequences for her, I just think she is wrong.

Also, this:
http://www.newyorker.com/news/news-d...eech-diversion

I get that you're not calling for or condoning consequences.

But we'll just have to disagree on whether she was wrong. I don't think she created a strawman at all. I can easily see how students might interpret the email from the Intercultural Affairs Committee—signed by what appear to be 13 administrators or staff members, one of whom is a senior associate dean of the College and five of whom are assistant deans of the College—as an "an institutional (which is to say: bureaucratic and administrative) exercise of implied control over college students." I think that as a student I probably would have interpreted it that way.

As for the New Yorker article, I get that claims of "free speech" can be used as a deflection of hard discussions about racism. I don't see that being the case in this email, though.

SHOW ME THE POO SWASTIKA!

But in all seriousness, I've learned never to underestimate the ability of people to make things up. All of these threats have been anecdotal or hear-say and in a world overrun of smartphones I wonder why no one has filmed or photographed these threats? There was a widely publicized series of tweets from a woman claiming that a group of white guys in a lifted honky truck was trapping them in a parking lot. You can post minute by minute twitter updates on the situation but can't snap one pic of the truck or the license plate for the police? :roll eyes:

As for Yale, what kind of crap pedigree are they producing there now?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7QqgNcktbSA

This was painful to watch. Do students actually speak to their professors and deans like this? The irony of this is when she speaks about how he was supposed to create a safe home for these students and what would freshman students think of Yale based off of the email. I personally find her behavior and attack on him more unsettleing than any email.

Really? You would have thought that an email asking you to be thoughtful about your Halloween costume was the university's attempt to control you?

I don't get any sort of implication that there would be institutional consequences for racism from the original email:

https://www.thefire.org/email-from-i...tural-affairs/

I get that there were students who allegedly complained to Christakis, and she was responding, in part, to that. I really believe that it is her duty, as a professor, an authority figure, and a white person, to help dismantle systems of oppression, and validating those students' complaints does just the opposite.