11/4 Notes
- Ground rules: be explicit about what you’re talking about and what you’re trying to achieve
- Themes/small groups: Trigger warnings, microaggressions, academic freedom/free speech
- Trigger Warnings: give students choice; flips teacher/student dynamic; professors may not be equipped to handle discussions on sexualized violence, race, trauma, and so trigger warnings are needed, professors need to know how to manage those conversations
- Free Speech: how should we equip faculty to deal with every situation that may come to them? Market place of ideas, not everyone has access to that market; more limits on free speech, the more they’ll feel like you can’t speak out; authors are worried that students are losing the ability to speak out; students may associate certain types of material with inherently hurting them – from “Coddling of the American Mind” – don’t want to create new associations that weren’t there before; As classrooms are supposed to become more diverse, will discussion-based classrooms be able to be maintained? Are we actually limiting speech more than we used to, or we talking about harder stuff? Trigger warnings are a way to have hard discussions in a classroom; prevalence of the thing we’re having trigger warning for -> we’re more cognitive and self-aware of who we’re made up of and who is in the space and that is a good thing
- Microaggression: ‘if you’re not used to understanding the world as a power hierarchy, then you wouldn’t understand why microaggressions are important’
- Alums group: Salaita case -> how interrelated this week, last week, and all weeks -> related to governance (donors made the choice to reconsider), academic freedom; high school and college divide: students in HS are passive learners and don’t have a say in what they’re learning; Do you think trigger warnings will move off campus? (Museums, movies, online)
- Social media is regulating free speech now and not the government (Sanneh)
- The more people believe they’ve already addressed these things, the easier it is for something to slip out that could really hurt someone; using your liberal education as a pass
- Critiques of microaggressions don’t distinguish between: Offensive v. harmful, silencing, and damaging
- “real world” arguments (what are you going to do in the real world?): you shouldn’t get used to being dehumanized; we expect the world to validate our humanity and open up to us and be there for us even though they should have been this whole time
- What determines people’s stances about these issues?
- Who and what is driving the push for safe spaces and regulated speech on campus?
- What types of institutions are calling for safe spaces? (or acknowledging them)
- Are these changes actually going to affect the public sphere? [not colleges]
- In response to 1: generational in a lot of cases
- “dignity culture”: those calling attention to microaggression are moving away from dignity culture as opposed to calling attention to a racist culture; calling racism racism
- when people ask for accommodations /trigger warnings, the people opposing it feel threatened at giving up space in the classroom
- concepts aren’t new, but coining them give them more weight; makes it easier to point things out
- recognizing impact of psychological impact of racism as well as physical
- what does it mean to call trigger warnings a movement?
- The people who are saying their rights are being impinged upon are the ones who have always been protected
- Sue article:
- what is driving the push? There is no research that says coddling is the case
- the fact that one would want safety in an environment that is unsafe and adding issues of trauma-> what that means for teachers is that their basic responsibility is how do you create an environment where everyone can learn?
- If you think something will be triggering than you take the time to prepare it too, not just put a tagline
- https://muse.jhu.edu/journals/wicazo_sa_review/v020/20.2gross.html
- liberal arts schools are always targeted when attacking trigger warnings: why is it happening here? What it is about the culture here? Why is it that the press enjoys using these cases over and over to ramp up their own conservative outrage machine?
- We’re naming the challenges we still have interacting with each other