# Coddling of the American Mind



## ruinexplorer (Sep 10, 2015)

http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2015/09/the-coddling-of-the-american-mind/399356/

It's been awhile since I was in college and I didn't notice this much then, but I'm wondering how relevant this article is to those who are either teaching or are current students.


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## Colin (Sep 12, 2015)

Good article, although I wonder if the authors have spent much time on campuses actually watching and listening to how these issues are handled daily, aside from the extreme cases cited. Maybe my institution is unusual, but I'm happy to say I see very little of this overactivism. By that I mean there are plenty of instances, but it is not institutionalized here, and that is the key (I suspect some of the examples in this article are similarly isolated from overall institutional values and policy). We want these issues to come up for discussion, and my institution generally provides appropriate space for that. It can be done without coddling, without restricting language, without punishing and marginalizing those whose minds you're trying to change.

The new Title IX rules have a lot to do with the increasing coverage of the title concept of this article, and perhaps also with the resurgence of efforts to erase words, images, smells, sounds and thoughts without replacing them with something better. Legislation was necessary, but what we got is imperfect and challenging to implement in ways that are not just (sometimes preemptively) accusatory, punitive and exclusionary. Media coverage tends to lack nuance. So does student activism. So do the mindsets that said activism is directed towards. A college's responsibility is to apply limited guidance to keep dialogue on track towards the progressive and not the regressive. That's a fine line. I just read an article about Greensboro College, where freshmen were required to attend a play about sexual assault. They laced the program and promotional materials with trigger warnings, and had extra ushers in the aisles to help any students who might be overcome by the play's content and need to evacuate. Meanwhile, college officials in attendance did nothing as some loudmouth boys in the audience catcalled and otherwise made asses of themselves throughout the performance. As a result, the college is now dealing with a Title IX investigation of those boys for sexual harassment during the very event that was intended to prevent it. Where did they go wrong? Not enough trigger warnings? Nope.

Last spring, we produced a play with similar intent, written by our Playwright in Residence in collaboration with students and a range of academic departments, and with funding from a Department of Justice grant. Big difference in reception. We publicized it as a play about sexual _misunderstanding_ and violence. Multiple story lines drew from interviews of students on campus to address a range of issues around those themes. We addressed extreme cases-- a rape, a groping at a party, violence against a gay couple. We also addressed real students' confusion and anxiety about sex on campus-- inexperience with love and lust away from home for the first time, and with lots of alcohol. Interviews with students revealed tremendous confusion around the line between regretting an encounter and feeling victimized. All sides of each issue were given time on stage. We never explicitly said "rape is wrong" or similar. There was no editorializing-- just a presentation of real circumstances. The cast and artistic team came out for a talk-back following each performance, and that's where expression of opinions happened (so that opinions were part of a dialogue, not a lecture done "at" the audience). We did not give trigger warnings although the topics, actions, and language were certainly disturbing, sometimes violent. Nobody in the audience snickered or made rude comments through the show, nobody left early overcome with anxiety (although of course many assault survivors attended), and almost everyone stayed for surprisingly long and frank discussions in the talk-backs. The space we made was too complicated to allow the shallowness on display in Greensboro. We weren't giving orders to be decent humans, so there was nothing for a contrary personality to push against. Those people just had to sink into the situation and think their way out.

So while the Greensboro case looks like a (perhaps typically) thick attempt at following Title IX guidance, here's another college succeeding with a more nuanced angle and with the support of the DOJ. Inside of and beyond college politics, my observation has been that extreme opinions that don't mesh with most people's experiences tend to get sent back to the margins naturally. Other times, what may initially be perceived as an extreme opinion may come to be understood as a new standard of humanity. As the article's authors (and T Jefferson) argue, a completely open dialogue is necessary to vet the ideas on the margins. Explicitly intellectual settings are supposed to establish the context to allow all the good, bad and ugly to comingle for evaluation. It isn't supposed to be easy to establish that context, though. If it were, we wouldn't need it. So, this was a necessary article that pushes back at a trend to suppress intellectual process, but the trend is not new and it is not necessarily prevailing in the longer history of academia's engagement with social justice.

Here's to the medium of theatre, which when skillfully wielded can do a better job than any other at inclusively socializing and humanizing content that other areas of study commonly mangle with catchphrases and exclusionary political correctness.


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## Colin (Sep 12, 2015)

Edit: in the weirdest auto-correct ever, "harassment" got changed to "harblankment" in my second paragraph. Maybe the forum software was triggered by my microagressive use of the word "harassment". I don't know what harblankment is. Maybe do a play about it.

Edit again: Okay, I posted the above edit and it happened again, so I guess we have an overactive censor. Come on, now. I wrote "asses" above and it got through the filter, but hara$$ment gets censored? Maybe that article was more apt than I realized...


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## ruinexplorer (Sep 13, 2015)

Colin said:


> Edit: in the weirdest auto-correct ever, "harblankment" got changed to "harblankment" in my second paragraph. Maybe the forum software was triggered by my microagressive use of the word "harblankment". I don't know what harblankment is. Maybe do a play about it.
> 
> Edit again: Okay, I posted the above edit and it happened again, so I guess we have an overactive censor. Come on, now. I wrote "asses" above and it got through the filter, but hara$$ment gets censored? Maybe that article was more apt than I realized...


 
There's a little bit of history to that here on the forum. It's now kind of an inside joke. Though I did not realize we had an autocorrect feature for that. I'm actually giggling quite a bit right now.

As for your assessment, I genuinely appreciate the thoroughness of your response. As I have limited interaction with the college scene these days, I truly am curious. If there are others in other regions, I would also like to hear what your experiences are. I have read scathing articles criticizing certain graphic novels in college classes in addition to other media and it blows my mind. I am under the belief that college is there to help expand your method of thinking, which means that you often need to deal with things that make you uncomfortable. I understand that there are those with certain religious convictions who find some of these topics blasphemous/heathenous/evil, and that parents can be concerned with their children being exposed to these kind of ideas. My opinion has been that if your faith can be shaken so easily, then you may want to do some soul searching. I have discussed this type of material with some with very strong religious convictions and had very lovely discussions. 

Anyhow, I would love to hear others takes on this subject. The discussion doesn't need to be limited to the United States colleges.


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## Pie4Weebl (Sep 13, 2015)

While, I think the whole "PC" thing can be overblown and microaggressions are stupid, I think the premise of it is important. "Think about other people's experiences and circumstances and try not to be an jerk." 

You really can't legislate that, but the next time you go to make a rape joke you can stop and think, "maybe someone in the room is a victim of rape or sexual assault and maybe I'd be making their day shittier by making that joke."


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## Les (Sep 14, 2015)

ruinexplorer said:


> There's a little bit of history to that here on the forum. It's now kind of an inside joke. Though I did not realize we had an autocorrect feature for that. I'm actually giggling quite a bit right now.
> 
> As for your *assessment**, I genuinely appreciate the thoroughness of your response.



Did I miss the inside joke, or has it just been so long that I have forgotten it? Seems like I faintly remember it, but I can't recall. Reminds me of the "Penis van Lesbian Show".

*You mean blankblankment.


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## dvsDave (Sep 14, 2015)

It's a reference to a bug that dates back to 2007 (when CB was on a much more limited platform and the censorship controls were, at best, rudimentary) Someone was very upset with being told that he should stop linking to his competing DJ forum and accused us of hara$$ment, but it came out as harblankment and it was pretty much the funniest thing ever. (just made his rant sound like someone trying to be serious, but in a room full of helium) I'm blown away that it hasn't come up in so long! When we switched forum systems, we kept the auto-correct as a tribute.


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## Les (Sep 14, 2015)

dvsDave said:


> It's a reference to a bug that dates back to 2005 (when CB was on a much more limited platform and the censorship controls were, at best, rudimentary) Someone was very upset with being told that he should stop linking to his competing DJ forum and accused us of hara$$ment, but it came out as harblankment and it was pretty much the funniest thing ever. (just made his rant sound like someone trying to be serious, but in a room full of helium) I'm blown away that it hasn't come up in so long! When we switched forum systems, we kept the auto-correct as a tribute.



I'll bet that was pretty ducking frustrating for him!

Actually, that gives me some ideas for autocorrect pranks with friends' phones.


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## dvsDave (Sep 14, 2015)

Les said:


> I'll bet that was pretty ducking frustrating for him!



@MistressRach says Tens Points to Gryffindor!


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## Les (Sep 15, 2015)

I just googled "harblankment" and filtered it to only show results from this site. Amazing how many times it has slipped through the cracks. Or maybe they autocorrected after the upgrade. Either way, it's funny seeing these (fairly serious) posts discussing 'harblankment' and no one bats an eye. 

Sorry - back to the thread.


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## gafftaper (Sep 19, 2015)

Ha! The old Harassment incident! It's been 5 or 6 years if I remember right. Seems to me it was a high school kid trying to start a DJ forum and he was mad because we wouldn't let him spam our forums with posts about his forum so he accused the CB staff of Harassment.


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## Colin (Sep 21, 2015)

Oh, this is funny. What I want to know now is, from those of you who knew about this issue, when you type harblankment on the forum do you actually type "hara$$ment" with the a, s, s or do you give in to the censors and type "harblankment" to avoid being autocorrected? There's a sociolinguistics dissertation in here somewhere...


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## burgherandfries (Jan 7, 2016)

I can say that my university did see a good number of these types of overactivism cases, though not to this extreme. The problem to me seems to be that in an education setting, there shouldn't be restriction on ideas. The thought that a law teacher, who is presumably teaching future lawyers, shouldn't be allowed to teach rape legislation or use the word "violate" is counterproductive. Instead of teaching students how to effectively deal with rapists they may have to prosecute in the future, they are avoiding the topic altogether. 


Pie4Weebl said:


> "Think about other people's experiences and circumstances and try not to be an jerk."


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