Then the battle is lost, because universities, at least
in the USA, are the home of "free speech areas" and not
letting people speak who a group disagrees with.
STEM is often criticized as unwelcoming, but humanities
has become a place of "agree with me" or be condemned.
I'll leave you with an excellent write up on the topic of this brand of groupthink and shutting down opposing views, on campuses, by Brendan O'Neill in The Spectator :
Have you met the Stepford students? They’re everywhere.
On campuses across the land. Sitting stony-eyed in lecture
halls or surreptitiously policing beer-fuelled banter in
the uni bar. They look like students, dress like students,
smell like students. But their student brains have been
replaced by brains bereft of critical faculties and
programmed to conform. To the untrained eye, they seem
like your average book-devouring, ideas-discussing,
H&M-adorned youth, but anyone who’s spent more than five
minutes in their company will know that these students are
far more interested in shutting debate down than opening
it up. [1]
http://www.spectator.co.uk/features/9376232/free-speech-is-s...
Also, doesn't the constant talk of debate and free exchange of ideas rather presuppose a form of antirealism about everything under the sun? After all, we don't talk about a free exchange of ideas on the laws of motion. You can be accurate or incorrect about those.
FIRE is an EXCELLENT group.
I understand what you're getting at, but some people really do have PTSD, and some speeches really do contain things like graphic recountings of abuse. Should those people just not attend university? (I'm actually undecided.)
Perhaps don't attend that speech then? Life at a university doesn't involve dodging "pro rape" speeches blasted over the PA system multiple times a day.
The recent article about the "safe spaces" full of coloring books and toys notes that people were fleeing to those rooms simply because _someone was on campus giving a speech that challenged their beliefs / "triggered" them_. If universities are catering to folks that simply can't handle the thought of someone with a conflicting viewpoint talking on campus then the ideals of the university truly are dead.
A "safe space" might have valid medical reasons to exist—in fact, it would likely be a concept quite easily unified with that of a counselling office.
But, for it to have the correct incentive structure, it would probably require you to get a note from a real honest-to-god psychiatrist at the beginning of the year before you could make use of it. Otherwise you end up in the stupid rut of the "ignorant-but-unaware-of-it" people avoiding the very properties of an education designed to bash their narrow views open.
Contrary to the collective opinion of certain Internet communities, I think it quite likely that reports of PTSD in the average person have been greatly exaggerated.
It's great to provide support in the rare case that a person really does have an unmanageable reaction to certain memories. But mitigating this edge case by making that support a default condition in every interaction on a campus stymies the free thinking and free expression that are supposed to flourish in a liberal learned environment.
If you don't like what someone is saying, walk away.
That's an unbelievably dismissive view. What makes you think these areas are merely about exclusion from offense?
If people are afraid or forbidden to speak their minds, then the university won't be able to function as a place to advance our understanding of the world.
PTSD is not Tumblr-fairy disease; it's the thing you get from being interned in a POW camp or locked in someone's sex dungeon for months/years. People do have a right to avoid reliving that sort of experience.
Which, like I said, might mean that they'd have to avoid going to university altogether. It's probably nearly impossible to have an environment that both allows for a free-flowing exchange of ideas, and yet protects people with this sort of permanent mental disability.
But making an allowance for rape survivors to leave the room when there's going to be a live screening of Salò isn't all that hard, is it?
The biggest irony, which you probably can't even see, is that your own comment is an example of the disturbing and vile speech you claim to hate ("sex dungeon", "POW camp", "Salo"). You didn't need to bring those up to make your point, but you did. Somehow disturbing and vile things like burning the flag and condoning drug abuse never seem to upset the left (and I could go on...), but talking about individual rights and respnsibilities does. Funny how that works.
Now, I'm not from the US, haven't been to a university for quite some years, and so am not personally experienced with what these "safe zones" are about in practice, the politics surrounding them, etc.—but I was trying to say that, if they had any justification at all as a theoretical construct, it was in giving people with PTSD a way to get away from "broadcast all over campus" things like graduation speeches, if and when a planned speech is found to have content that might trigger specific kinds of traumatic stress attacks.
Not because it might offend someone. Not with voluntary ability to leave for any reason one might like. Just a medical excuse from attendance, like a person with acrophobia would get from a field trip to the roof of a skyscraper.
And again, even then, it might be better for those people to just leave the university campus, or avoid coming in the first place.
I once worked inside a social program and the first lesson is to heal. Painfully, that often means scar tissue. If you have trama from words, you need to deal with it, not hope the world will.
> PTSD is not Tumblr-fairy disease; it's the thing you get from being interned in a POW camp or locked in someone's sex dungeon for months/years. People do have a right to avoid reliving that sort of experience.
It doesn't even take something that severe, I have a friend who was working at a convenience store at the time when he got PTSD after going through two robberies in two nights, both times from people he knew. My understanding is that PTSD is triggered by episodes of severe, debilitating stress.
PTSD sufferers deserve the freedom of not reliving those episodes, and there are treatments available to help them. They don't have to avoid going to university altogether, they don't even have to wait until they're better thanks to the many online education options available these days.
> But making an allowance for rape survivors to leave the room when there's going to be a live screening of Salò isn't all that hard, is it?
Perhaps there was a miscommunication, but I agree with you on that. That's what I meant in my previous comment when I said 'if you don't like what someone is saying, walk away'.
Ah. See, I figured that with something like a graduation speech, 'just walking away' might be a bit fraught:
- First, you won't know what the content is until you're already there and hearing the things that could be PTSD-triggering, and by that point you already might be mentally "gone" and unable to escape; it would be preferrable to catch such things before then, which is what all that "Trigger Warning: pictures of torture" stuff is about;
- And second, things like grad speeches are usually put on loudspeakers and carried along across the internal campus PA and video-channel to PA speakers and TVs in various places, etc. It's hard to get away from such a thing, even when warned that it will contain something that might trigger your condition, especially if your life is effectively isolated to the campus (you live in the dorms, etc.)
It was under those two requirements that I saw the idea of a "safe space" as being possibly useful: it gives such people a place to go where they know the content won't follow them.
Under any other conditions, it's a horrible idea. :)
If we can agree that it's warranted in that case, then it becomes a matter of agreeing exactly when it becomes unwarranted—which is a much more fact-based debate to have than one where one side just shouts "Freedom of Speech!" and the other side just shouts "Freedom from Persecution!" and neither side believes the other's bullshit one iota.
[1] http://wiki.lesswrong.com/wiki/Steel_man
(Also, I think this is the most I've ever been downvoted for speaking in the classical hacker-vulnerability-probing "but what if a tornado of Hitlers hit the school?" style on HN. I'm not even using any inflammatory language or anything, whereas all the replies to me are acting as if I was some social-justice type spouting off about "my right to not hear some white cis male talk about the time he went to Vegas" or somesuch. It's interesting; is this one of those "if you try to take an orthogonal position then you're supporting neither side, so both sides see you as supporting their opponent and hate you" effects?)
The concept got flipped in the chain here -- what is actually happening on these campuses is the establishment of "free speech zones", where a person can say what they like, and the establishment of rules that, on the rest of the campus, punishment will occur for saying things that could trigger or make someone feel unsafe.
So, what's happening is that an entire campus is made to be this "safe" area.
Is the assertion that there are so many people on any given university campus who might have a breakdown that the entire campus must walk on egg shells? Because that is the side of the debate you're arguing from.
The idea of "well, in this one specific extraordinary case it's totally reasonable" is kinda played out among anyone with half a brain, because it's been used to justify so much bullshit.
Also, the entire dichotomy of warranted/unwarranted is suspect, but that's a different rabbit hole altogether.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BAmkMndtH24
And check out this article for an ironic inversion of politics in the short span of 12 years:
http://www.alternet.org/story/15982/the_silencing_of_dissent...
So you have people on the right were shocked and triggered, screaming at the speaker and pulling the power on his microphone, and people on the left demanded that hard truths must be spoken so suck it up. But I wonder if today he could do this speech without giving trigger warnings for colonialism and war. I wonder if a university would even give him the freedom up front to do a speech without vetting the topic so it couldn't surprise anyone. Is this a price we're willing to pay?
On the first day, the professor told the class that we would be getting into some pretty extreme material, and if at any point someone needed to leave class or even skip it, to just let him know and schedule some one on one time with the professor. That seems to have worked as a good solution. Far better than banning that class or censoring material.
If scientific facts (so-called "HateFacts", think Evolutionary Psychology) offend you, it's your problem really.
The "interpretation of archeological artefacts" kind of science is a lot less durable than the "reproducible double-blind experiment" kind.
Then the battle is lost, because universities, at least in the USA, are the home of "free speech areas" and not letting people speak who a group disagrees with. When people are talking about "safe areas" to protect students from words spoken by a speaker, then criticism is dead. Political parties have more diversity of allowed thought. STEM is often criticized as unwelcoming, but humanities has become a place of "agree with me" or be condemned.
If you didn't forge your ideas in the fire of criticism at university, then you were cheated by others or yourself. The best teachers will make you argue both / multiple sides of a scenario and be offended that you parroted their opinion back to them. The worst teachers only see one valid way to think and are doing "missionary work" instead of teaching.
It is often depressing to read https://www.thefire.org