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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.
So let's be clear: pretty much all of these situations are completely unacceptable, and most disturbingly they show a tendency for much of these sorts of problems to occur on the left, what essentially amounts to the "illiberal left" http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2015/01/liberals-and-the-illiberal-left/384988/. However, FIRE's own biases are coming into play in this list, in that every example they decide to include is on the left or has no political aspect. But there were a lot of rimilar activities with an apparently right-wing bent, such as the situation at Wheaton College https://www.insidehighered.com/news/2016/01/06/wheaton-illinois-moves-fire-professor-who-wore-hijab. It may be that FIRE's top list is still more of an issue for legitimate reasons because many of these universities are large, public universities and thus engaging in trampling on free speech is even more serious, but it does seem like FIRE's own biases may be having a role in what they've decided to highlight.
However, the general upshot should be clear: trampling on free speech is not ok. And we should support free speech whether or not it is speech we agree with. Universities must be bastions of free expression for them to effectively do their jobs. And groups of all sorts should remember that even if they have power now to censor others, they may not always be the ones in power.
Religious universities have doctrinal statements you sign when you enroll. If that offends you, don't go there.
The Daddy casts sleep on the Baby. The Baby resists!
The "source" is one of the heads of FIRE, which is a civil liberties organization specifically devoted to issues like protecting the free speech rights of students and faculty from everything from overly broad speech codes, to not getting tenure because the professor fails to hold the right views. Chances are that if you are a university student or professor who has been victimized by campus commissars of political correctness, you will be represented by FIRE if you aren't doing it by yourself.
Your whole comment just screams "ad hominem" because it focuses on one particular source cited when the writer is the head of a different organization that has an excellent record at defending the rights of students and faculty from campus autocrats. And yes, that is "ad hominem" in the true sense. Hey folks, don't believe it because damn dirty right wingers are involved, even if they are arguing that college campuses are trampling the rights of political minorities.
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 ?
Full-disclosure: I attended BYU and actually really enjoyed my time there. Brigham Young University should be on that list. Student's will be expelled (and their transcripts locked so they can't transfer credits either) if they convert from Mormonism to any other religion while a student. You can literally get academically disciplined for profanity or criticizing LDS leaders. It isn't just student's though. Faculty can also get in serious trouble for what they say. For example, a BYU professor and historian (Michael Quinn) was strongly pressured to leave after he published honest histories of the LDS church's history with polygamy. He had been an excellent professor as evidenced by the fact that one of his years at BYU the graduating class voted him the best professor on campus. BYU is absolutely not a place where you can talk about the LDS church honestly and openly without getting kicked out (at least if you want to talk about large parts of history that the church tries to bury).
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.
No, they don't. They have doctrinal statements for faculty and staff, and may have stricter conduct codes, but they are generally willing to enroll students of any faith/non-faith who are will to abide by the conduct codes
I attended Brigham Young University (owned and operated by The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints). Tithing from the faithful subsidize students' education, so members of the faith pay a lower tuition (like how residents pay less at state universities). Faculty and students must sign the Honor Code and receive an Ecclesiastic Endorsement on a yearly basis. In essence, you promise to live up to dress and grooming standards, live the Word of Wisdom (no alcohol, tea, coffee, tobacco, or illicit drugs), follow moral rules (no extra-marital sex, no men in the ladies dorms [or vice verse] after midnight), etc. This does not exclude students from other religions - or even atheists - but most students are LdS.