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America's Ten Most Oppressive Colleges
An anonymous reader writes: A new review of free speech on campuses across the United States has listed the country's ten most oppressive colleges, with examples of why they earned this odious status.
The first link is the actual report, while the second provides a good quick summary. In either case, the behavior of college officials in attempting to squelch dissent is quite disgusting. Far more horrifying and worrisome for the future were the number of cases where the students themselves moved to stamp down on opposing views. They are the future, and that future does not look pleasant. In South Carolina students are suing their college for interrogating them for daring to hold an event in support of free speech that offended some students.
The first link is the actual report, while the second provides a good quick summary. In either case, the behavior of college officials in attempting to squelch dissent is quite disgusting. Far more horrifying and worrisome for the future were the number of cases where the students themselves moved to stamp down on opposing views. They are the future, and that future does not look pleasant. In South Carolina students are suing their college for interrogating them for daring to hold an event in support of free speech that offended some students.
I'm 40, so way out of college, but mainstream media targeted at us old folks loves to hype up the "soft squishy hypersensitive Milennial" meme. It's presented in the form of "look at these damn kids, they can't handle the real world, and everyone should be able to say whatever they want to each other without any consequences."
I have the opposite view -- I feel there needs to be some sort of consequences for inflammatory speech. Look at how awful political discourse is now, on both the left and the right. Everyone is hyper-focused on their opinions, partially because social media and targeted advertising continuously reinforces it. I really don't want a country of 300 million angry loudmouth Donald Trump clones walking around. People should be sensitive to others' feelings and opinions. Even tenured professors need to operate within an authority structure, as do most of us. Anyone who has worked for a large corporation with crappy office politics knows that you don't get far by shooting your mouth off at every turn.
When so many people started talking about the importance of "trigger warnings" and how they had developped "PTSD" from encountering divergent opinions from theirs, I just shrugged and. When my younger brother transitioned to female and started raving hard about all things Social-Justice-y, I was stupefied. When she started talkign about her anxiety attacks over the mere mention of the word "rape" (she has never been sexually assaulted nor witnessed any rape except on TV), I started digging into the science of anxiety fits to see what there really was about it.
It turns out that one can indeed teach one's own brain to develop PTSD over any kind of stimuli at all. All you need to do is to foster a sense of being threatened every time you encounter the stimulus of your choice. For example, you start thinking about people trying to beat you up, of menacing predators pouncing, of natural disasters closing in on you, whenever the stimulus is there. You can also jsut go and read detailed testimonies of aggressions - the more expressive and vivid, the better. You then reinforce and validate this self-inflicted perception of threat by expressing to other people how you feel threatened by the stimulus of your choice, and have the other people agree with you. Basically, this retrains your amygdala into stimulating your cingulate cortex so that it activates the limbic axis for fight-or-flight response. With enough practice, you can push yourself deep into somatization, and develop identical symptoms to that of genuine PTSD-sufferers, to the point where you will have nausea and dizziness just from thinking about the stimulus.
The interesting thing is, it's the kind of the reverse of desensitization therapy for actual PTSD: if you have a rape victim with severa agoraphobia, you can slowly train their amygdala into NOT stimulating the cingulate cortex and thus not triggering panic attacks by desensitizing them to open spaces or the outside, until the link between "outside" and "being attacked" ceases to exist in the brain.
That, IMO, is how SJWs make themselves sick, and make others around them sick, with an acquired mental disorder.
Maybe we deserve this world ?
I have the opposite view -- I feel there needs to be some sort of consequences for inflammatory speech.
Careful there. You are correct that free speech does not (and should not) equal consequence free speech except where Constitutionally defined. HOWEVER sometimes what is considered inflammatory by some is considered ordinary by others. Just because an opinion is unpopular doesn't mean there should always be consequences. It wasn't that long ago that saying something like "man evolved from apes" or "interracial marriage is ok" could get you into some serious hot water. Heck there are still parts of this country that (technically) you cannot hold public office if you say you don't believe in god. Always having consequences for spoken ideas can result in things like Jim Crow laws if you aren't careful. It can easily become a tyranny of the majority or of the powerful.
I caused a minor revolt and pissed off the ultra-leftists (the sane leftists sympathized with my views) when I publically accused our micro-aggressions indocrnitator that she was being culturally insensitive and that it was absolutely unethical and a violation of university policy for her to conflate cultural idioms with aggressions. Something like "When speaking a rural Appalachian dialect is a microaggression, you have banned my culture" and then quoted our "cultural diversity" statement. Itw as funny. The indoctrinator was red faced and puffy. The ultra-leftists went off on their screed, the sane leftists argued with them, and then the hour allotted was over. I'm sure I'll be summoned to the dean's office again, and I think I'll have the EO complaint written.
That's because it's a Catholic university and not an Evangelical Christian university like Liberty U. Catholics have long been very tolerant of other religions that way (they had some real problems back in the time of Galileo, but they've had centuries to improve), and have long been big promoters of education. Catholic grade schools are much the same: they take kids of all (or no) faiths and aren't real pushy about the religion angle.
Berkeley, the town, is as hardcore liberal as ever. Berkeley, the University, transitioned some years ago to overachiever central. Everyone over at Cal is too busy studying and working hard to get their science, engineering, business, and law degrees to have time for SJW-ism. UCSC has taken up the kookiness mantle lately. But they get less press because they don't have the historical notoriety of Berkeley.
Imagine all the people...
I attended & worked at a Catholic college; the head of the Philosophy department (of all departments!) was not Catholic (something Protestant, I do not recall specifically - well after the fact, he told me of being approached for the position - he was floored to be considered not being Catholic, but they told him they would rather have a better qualified non-Catholic than a less-qualified Catholic). A friend of mine in the nursing department was Mormon & I new various other people of various other faiths (I was Catholic at the time).
That said, Catholics may be more open-minded than some deep-south Baptists (please don't flame me if you are Baptist in the deep-south - I have many friends that are as well, but institutionally IME they tend to think Catholics, Mormons and others are basically 'the devil'). YMMV, etc
"If you have nothing to hide, you have nothing to fear." - Every fascist, ever
FIRE does take a lot of those cases, but yeah your post is pretty ignorant and downright incorrect. Let me list a few: 1) Defending a self-described socialist - http://web.archive.org/web/200...
2) Student suspended for reading a book from school library on the downfall of hte KKK - http://www.thefire.org/article...
3) Defending a student who'd been unilaterally expelled over a joke - http://chronicle.com/article/F...
4) Defending an atheist college professor - http://insidehighered.com/news...
5) Calling out Depaul for not recognizing a pro-marijauna group - http://thefire.org/article/123...
6) FIRE calls out university for denying an LGBT group school recognition - https://www.thefire.org/fire-l...
I can go on if you want. Lots of these cases do seem skewed toward benefitting white males, but if you look at the actual cases well you'd see why. Lots of the decisions they draw FIRE's ire are fucking stupid, short-sighted, and somehow scraped their way out of a poorly run administration meeting.