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queenluahere, have an article on campus activism, focused on oberlin specifically, but probably more broadly applicable than that. (also, the list of student demands referenced in the article.) also, a tumblr post on the subject, and some blogger dude.
i share these links because i think they're the only ones i've been able to find that try to offer a balanced perspective on the recent spate of student agitation over SJ-y issues. i thought the new yorker article was interesting enough that i tried to google responses to it, and i couldn't find anything beyond "lol these oberlin students are so DUMB and SPOILED and want to GET PAID TO SKIP CLASS whiny yanks need to stfu and go back to class," which was depressing. given that a lot of similar movements have been sparking across the country (u of missouri, yale, stanford, seattle university are the first ones that come to mind, but i know there's many others), i think it's important/interesting to try and understand where the students are coming from.
so, here's me cobbling together my own response.
the sense i get from the new yorker article is, the current wave of activism is a sort of third-wave pomo activism. the previous wave of student activism in the 60's/70's gave rise to stuff like, say, affirmative action, which is a good way to get more underrepresented/lower-class students into universities, where they can then learn upper-middle-class values and join a middle-upper-class profession and have middle-upper-class babies. for folks who had been kept down for so long, this was awesome progress, and i don't have actually statistics/links on hand, but i know people have drawn pretty strong links between these policies and stuff like "hey now there are actually black lawyers" and "hey now there are actually enough black lawyers that they can support each other and form professional networks" and "hey now the idea of a middle-upper-class mostly-black suburb is a thing that can actually happen." hashtag progress.
but the most recent generation of underrepresented students is showing up on campus and saying, jeez, this is a sham, upper-middle-class values suck. why am i learning only about dead white guys? how come no one cares about non-western cultures? how come i feel like a token rather than a fully-integrated part of this campus community?
(this is probably not-dissimilar to the phenomenon where first-generation immigrants families are pretty ok with appropriation, whereas the next generation tends to find it insulting.)
and i think they have a pretty good point, especially with respect the curriculum questions. like, if you want to study western philosophical thought, you major in philosophy; if you want to study eastern philosophical thought, you major in, uh, east asian studies i guess. this is super-weird if you think about it, because my general understanding is that the eastern world had a really long history of rigorous, well-thought-out philosophy prior to western interaction, and while modern philosophy doesn't really engage with the eastern tradition, there doesn't seem to be any good reason why it should be this way, or why someone can get away with majoring in philosophy without ever having to touch the tao te ching, especially given that you certainly would have to touch plato's the republic at some point. you hear all kinds of goofy counterarguments for why this is the case: "eastern philosophy just isn't as rigorous, it isn't as complex, it's more of a religion or a way of life than it is philosophy"—but these objections fall apart under close scrutiny. rigorous by whose terms? surely submitting turgid essays to a handful of western-philosophy-journals isn't the only form of rigor in the world, right? separating religion from philosophy is hard but working on hard problems is what philosophers should do, right; a ton of western philosophy has its roots in christianity but that hasn't kept them from doing the hard work of teasing apart the purely-religious bits from the abstractly-reasoned bits.
so the oberlin student demands include increasing the size and influence of the africana studies department, but it also demands hiring black professors teaching black-centric scholarship outside of that department. you could quibble with objections to the front-and-center-ness of identity politics in these demands, but it's probably a net Pretty Good Thing to ask for. i know when i was in college, i jumped at the chance to take a west african history class, just because i knew there was this rich history of these hugely powerful islamic kingdoms in medieval times, i knew nigeria was one of the most populous countries in the world, but i never got exposed to any of the history around the whole continent the whole time i was in high school, and that seemed like a fucked-up knowledge gap to me. the class was in the history department. it was probably the most rigorous humanities class i've ever taken. a+ definitely would do again. expanding learning opportunities like that seems pretty awesome.
okay, so that's the good. next two points i want to mull over are The Bad and then the It's Complicated.
THE BAD:
i think some of the demands they're advocating for are pretty dangerous, and assume that their powers will never be used for ill ever. "we are angry so fire these professors and mid-level administrators" can be used as mob-justice against some bad people, but if you start down that path, a bunch of white students could get together and start firing people you actually like. it seems uncomfortable. that's the most egregious example, but some of the suggestions at other universities for handling, say, reports of sexual assault make me equally anxious—stuff like "if a student is accused of x let's put all these sanctions against them without any kind of due process," gee i'm sure that will never be used for ill ever, etc etc.
it's interesting to me, in the oberlin demands letter, that the uneasy tension of "admit more x students" vs "admit student y just because they are x" is never addressed. i know there's arguments for and against quota systems and i actually don't think SJ-y folk are unilaterally pro-quota, or at least, they shouldn't be. the worry of "was i admitted to x just because i am a member of y group" never goes away, no matter how full of Social Justice Righteousness you are, so even if you're unambiguously trying to help group y, it's a double-edged sword. i think the various supreme court decisions on affirmative action (example) are pretty great reading material here, and they're fascinating because they tend to be much more nuanced than either side of the debate tends to give it credit for. in particular, current law as i understand it draws a very fine but important distinction between promoting class diversity versus enforcing quotas (and remember, quotas are often used to discriminate against groups we'd probably like to protect, i.e. former jewish quotas at ivy league schools, modern-day de facto quotas that seem to admit far fewer asian students than test scores should suggest, etc), and even the liberal-leaning members of the supreme court hope affirmative action can be a temporary measure, a sloppy but effective way of redressing a wrong, blah blah blah, just read some stuff yourself.
the "just have a conversation with your prof instead of taking the test" thing, which is widely derided in Other Responses To The Article—well, i think there's a kernel of something interesting there, which i'll get to in "the interesting," but yeah, even if such a form of alternative assessment were implemented, it sounds like the kind of old boy's club atta boy way of giving people better grades than they deserve if their professor really likes them. seems abuse-able.
THE INTERESTING:
so, that widely derided bit, where the student complains he can't write the midterm, but he'd do a perfectly fine job talking out the ideas with the professor. i think what he suggests is probably a bad idea on the whole, but i do think it indicates a valid unrest with liberal arts education as a whole.
like, a liberal arts education optimist would say college is about teaching students how to think, and the best way we know for doing that is having students read the classics and write papers and do scholarship in a variety of subjects.
a liberal arts pessimist would point out that it's teaching students how to think like an academic, which is probably a strict subset of just being able to think, and also that the curriculum is hilariously narrow and outdated. you used to learn about Plato and Marx because that was what it meant to be an Educated White Person and you could go to Educated White People Parties and have the Correct Discussions, and there's nothing especially timeless about them.
i suspect the quoted student is a pessimist, and thinks learning shit just to sound like an Educated Person is bogus.
what i think the student is also complaining about, without outright stating it (or perhaps being conscious of it), is the prerequisite of "speaking academicese". to be respected in academia, you need to be able to communicate in an academic tenor. (think of the problem of accents; people tend to either consciously or unconsciously discount the opinions of people with a thick southern drawl peppered with "ain't" and "fixin' to" and the like.) the student who complains that he can't write the midterm, but he can talk about the ideas—i suspect he just never learned how to write in academicese, and so he gets frustrated when his papers get handed back with poor marks because of {grammar/spelling/flow errors, not structuring his thoughts in a proper way, having an unclear or mixed thesis statement, etc}, and he's like i know this material, i know i fucking know this, how can i communicate in a way they'll understand.
it's an understandable complaint. first-wave activism's response would be to keep pushing, learn the language, get so good at it that no one can discredit you, and then use that against them. current-wave activism is like, upper-class kids in private high schools learn this shit, i never had a chance to learn this shit, but i know how to think, this system is bogus. both sides have a point.
i think it also spawns out a little into larger debates about what colleges should be teaching. on the one hand you have hampshire college and new college of florida, which seem to be advocating something closer to what the student in the article wants—deemphasis on grades, the important thing is forming intellectual relationships with professors and using your own creativity and perspective to come up with a final thesis, project, etc that reflects that. it's a neat idea and i could certainly see the arguments that this teaches thinking better than a standard liberal arts curriculum.
but it doesn't scale well. and so you've got the other half of the equation, the increase of trade schools, learn-to-code schools, emphasis on rising tuition, etc, that are all relevant to contemporary students' concerns. i think it's two ways of looking at the same coin: we should be broadening the scope of liberal arts education because we're paying an awful lot for a result we're disappointed in; we should be narrowing the scope of liberal arts education because education is expensive as fuck and i need to get paid when i graduate.
A LOL FINAL BIT:
also i suspect people who are all "these students are so mean and out of control and wah" need a dose of perspective. when a conservative friend of mine linked me an article grumbling about students occupying the dean's office at seattle university, i answered by linking them an article about the bombing of uw madison's physics building and pointed out chilling in the dean's office seems pretty tame by comparison. i am not above occasional snerk snerk snerk, sorry :P
and, well, damn, that's about all i got. look at me contributing to The Discourse.
i share these links because i think they're the only ones i've been able to find that try to offer a balanced perspective on the recent spate of student agitation over SJ-y issues. i thought the new yorker article was interesting enough that i tried to google responses to it, and i couldn't find anything beyond "lol these oberlin students are so DUMB and SPOILED and want to GET PAID TO SKIP CLASS whiny yanks need to stfu and go back to class," which was depressing. given that a lot of similar movements have been sparking across the country (u of missouri, yale, stanford, seattle university are the first ones that come to mind, but i know there's many others), i think it's important/interesting to try and understand where the students are coming from.
so, here's me cobbling together my own response.
the sense i get from the new yorker article is, the current wave of activism is a sort of third-wave pomo activism. the previous wave of student activism in the 60's/70's gave rise to stuff like, say, affirmative action, which is a good way to get more underrepresented/lower-class students into universities, where they can then learn upper-middle-class values and join a middle-upper-class profession and have middle-upper-class babies. for folks who had been kept down for so long, this was awesome progress, and i don't have actually statistics/links on hand, but i know people have drawn pretty strong links between these policies and stuff like "hey now there are actually black lawyers" and "hey now there are actually enough black lawyers that they can support each other and form professional networks" and "hey now the idea of a middle-upper-class mostly-black suburb is a thing that can actually happen." hashtag progress.
but the most recent generation of underrepresented students is showing up on campus and saying, jeez, this is a sham, upper-middle-class values suck. why am i learning only about dead white guys? how come no one cares about non-western cultures? how come i feel like a token rather than a fully-integrated part of this campus community?
(this is probably not-dissimilar to the phenomenon where first-generation immigrants families are pretty ok with appropriation, whereas the next generation tends to find it insulting.)
and i think they have a pretty good point, especially with respect the curriculum questions. like, if you want to study western philosophical thought, you major in philosophy; if you want to study eastern philosophical thought, you major in, uh, east asian studies i guess. this is super-weird if you think about it, because my general understanding is that the eastern world had a really long history of rigorous, well-thought-out philosophy prior to western interaction, and while modern philosophy doesn't really engage with the eastern tradition, there doesn't seem to be any good reason why it should be this way, or why someone can get away with majoring in philosophy without ever having to touch the tao te ching, especially given that you certainly would have to touch plato's the republic at some point. you hear all kinds of goofy counterarguments for why this is the case: "eastern philosophy just isn't as rigorous, it isn't as complex, it's more of a religion or a way of life than it is philosophy"—but these objections fall apart under close scrutiny. rigorous by whose terms? surely submitting turgid essays to a handful of western-philosophy-journals isn't the only form of rigor in the world, right? separating religion from philosophy is hard but working on hard problems is what philosophers should do, right; a ton of western philosophy has its roots in christianity but that hasn't kept them from doing the hard work of teasing apart the purely-religious bits from the abstractly-reasoned bits.
so the oberlin student demands include increasing the size and influence of the africana studies department, but it also demands hiring black professors teaching black-centric scholarship outside of that department. you could quibble with objections to the front-and-center-ness of identity politics in these demands, but it's probably a net Pretty Good Thing to ask for. i know when i was in college, i jumped at the chance to take a west african history class, just because i knew there was this rich history of these hugely powerful islamic kingdoms in medieval times, i knew nigeria was one of the most populous countries in the world, but i never got exposed to any of the history around the whole continent the whole time i was in high school, and that seemed like a fucked-up knowledge gap to me. the class was in the history department. it was probably the most rigorous humanities class i've ever taken. a+ definitely would do again. expanding learning opportunities like that seems pretty awesome.
okay, so that's the good. next two points i want to mull over are The Bad and then the It's Complicated.
THE BAD:
i think some of the demands they're advocating for are pretty dangerous, and assume that their powers will never be used for ill ever. "we are angry so fire these professors and mid-level administrators" can be used as mob-justice against some bad people, but if you start down that path, a bunch of white students could get together and start firing people you actually like. it seems uncomfortable. that's the most egregious example, but some of the suggestions at other universities for handling, say, reports of sexual assault make me equally anxious—stuff like "if a student is accused of x let's put all these sanctions against them without any kind of due process," gee i'm sure that will never be used for ill ever, etc etc.
it's interesting to me, in the oberlin demands letter, that the uneasy tension of "admit more x students" vs "admit student y just because they are x" is never addressed. i know there's arguments for and against quota systems and i actually don't think SJ-y folk are unilaterally pro-quota, or at least, they shouldn't be. the worry of "was i admitted to x just because i am a member of y group" never goes away, no matter how full of Social Justice Righteousness you are, so even if you're unambiguously trying to help group y, it's a double-edged sword. i think the various supreme court decisions on affirmative action (example) are pretty great reading material here, and they're fascinating because they tend to be much more nuanced than either side of the debate tends to give it credit for. in particular, current law as i understand it draws a very fine but important distinction between promoting class diversity versus enforcing quotas (and remember, quotas are often used to discriminate against groups we'd probably like to protect, i.e. former jewish quotas at ivy league schools, modern-day de facto quotas that seem to admit far fewer asian students than test scores should suggest, etc), and even the liberal-leaning members of the supreme court hope affirmative action can be a temporary measure, a sloppy but effective way of redressing a wrong, blah blah blah, just read some stuff yourself.
the "just have a conversation with your prof instead of taking the test" thing, which is widely derided in Other Responses To The Article—well, i think there's a kernel of something interesting there, which i'll get to in "the interesting," but yeah, even if such a form of alternative assessment were implemented, it sounds like the kind of old boy's club atta boy way of giving people better grades than they deserve if their professor really likes them. seems abuse-able.
THE INTERESTING:
so, that widely derided bit, where the student complains he can't write the midterm, but he'd do a perfectly fine job talking out the ideas with the professor. i think what he suggests is probably a bad idea on the whole, but i do think it indicates a valid unrest with liberal arts education as a whole.
like, a liberal arts education optimist would say college is about teaching students how to think, and the best way we know for doing that is having students read the classics and write papers and do scholarship in a variety of subjects.
a liberal arts pessimist would point out that it's teaching students how to think like an academic, which is probably a strict subset of just being able to think, and also that the curriculum is hilariously narrow and outdated. you used to learn about Plato and Marx because that was what it meant to be an Educated White Person and you could go to Educated White People Parties and have the Correct Discussions, and there's nothing especially timeless about them.
i suspect the quoted student is a pessimist, and thinks learning shit just to sound like an Educated Person is bogus.
what i think the student is also complaining about, without outright stating it (or perhaps being conscious of it), is the prerequisite of "speaking academicese". to be respected in academia, you need to be able to communicate in an academic tenor. (think of the problem of accents; people tend to either consciously or unconsciously discount the opinions of people with a thick southern drawl peppered with "ain't" and "fixin' to" and the like.) the student who complains that he can't write the midterm, but he can talk about the ideas—i suspect he just never learned how to write in academicese, and so he gets frustrated when his papers get handed back with poor marks because of {grammar/spelling/flow errors, not structuring his thoughts in a proper way, having an unclear or mixed thesis statement, etc}, and he's like i know this material, i know i fucking know this, how can i communicate in a way they'll understand.
it's an understandable complaint. first-wave activism's response would be to keep pushing, learn the language, get so good at it that no one can discredit you, and then use that against them. current-wave activism is like, upper-class kids in private high schools learn this shit, i never had a chance to learn this shit, but i know how to think, this system is bogus. both sides have a point.
i think it also spawns out a little into larger debates about what colleges should be teaching. on the one hand you have hampshire college and new college of florida, which seem to be advocating something closer to what the student in the article wants—deemphasis on grades, the important thing is forming intellectual relationships with professors and using your own creativity and perspective to come up with a final thesis, project, etc that reflects that. it's a neat idea and i could certainly see the arguments that this teaches thinking better than a standard liberal arts curriculum.
but it doesn't scale well. and so you've got the other half of the equation, the increase of trade schools, learn-to-code schools, emphasis on rising tuition, etc, that are all relevant to contemporary students' concerns. i think it's two ways of looking at the same coin: we should be broadening the scope of liberal arts education because we're paying an awful lot for a result we're disappointed in; we should be narrowing the scope of liberal arts education because education is expensive as fuck and i need to get paid when i graduate.
A LOL FINAL BIT:
also i suspect people who are all "these students are so mean and out of control and wah" need a dose of perspective. when a conservative friend of mine linked me an article grumbling about students occupying the dean's office at seattle university, i answered by linking them an article about the bombing of uw madison's physics building and pointed out chilling in the dean's office seems pretty tame by comparison. i am not above occasional snerk snerk snerk, sorry :P
and, well, damn, that's about all i got. look at me contributing to The Discourse.
no subject
Date: 2016-05-31 10:49 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2016-06-01 07:07 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2016-06-01 12:34 am (UTC)From the linked tumblr post: "The first is that it can be used in pursuit of bad goals exactly as easily as in pursuit of good goals; there is no truth-seeking in it."
See, this is precisely why I cannot and will not be on the same page as this kind of activism. They are using bad tools for supposedly good ends with no actual underlying morality to it. Attacks on the principles of free speech and due process are appalling to me, and they're something that I've mostly seen in the right-winger's toolbox (this art is immoral, these terrorists have to be detained, etc). Progressives are using these same shitty tools, and to make it even worse the reactionaries are already co-opting everything from the language of rape culture to no-platforming to their own advantage. So we'll end up, in the worst case scenario, with a situation where whoever's in power for the moment can abuse those tools to their heart's content with no way of combating it, because the basic principles of free speech no matter what, or due process no matter how heinous the allegation, have already been jettisoned. Then it's all about who can scream the loudest.
Remember what you said some time ago about that young woman who was against gay marriage because she felt a two-mommy family was bad for her? How when you're basing arguments around personal testimony and subjective feeling rather than any underlying bedrock principle, you have to acknowledge the feelings of the other side, too? Yeah.
no subject
Date: 2016-06-01 12:53 am (UTC)but in everything else i'd read, all i was able to get out of it was, stuff that looked like hypersensitive overreactions to petty slights, and really shitty tools. i thought the new yorker piece at least hinted at some underlying thing i could sympathize with—not just raw identity politics and trying to shut down other voices, but a potential bedrock in "let's broaden the voices represented" and "let's rethink what education should focus on, given more people are going to college than ever before" and whatnot. i think that's a charitable interpretation of their platform, but it's also something that can be worked with that isn't just awfulness. in that way, i actually found the new yorker piece a little hopeful, because it suggests maybe you can satisfy these nobler goals without ceding freedom of speech on campus.
it is entirely possible i am too much of an optimist! but i'd like to think it's possible the uglier aspects of this movement may fade away. the linked tumblr post also pointed out that institutions have a lot of power in this game, if they choose to exercise it—students tend to leave campus after four years, and the university can just wait them out without ceding to any of their awfuller demands.
no subject
Date: 2016-06-01 02:31 am (UTC)I am a middle-class white girl whose brain slots fully and easily into academicese, so I never had the kinds of problems that are being discussed, but that doesn't mean I don't recognize them, and don't think there's a lot of good conversations to be had about better ways to structure learning (and grading, because markers of how well you are performing to the expecations are useful EVEN IF you're in teh process of restructuring the expectations).
I also think we could do so much better with teaching a broader range of (literature, history, etc.) by adjusting the framing we put it in. Not "we're reading Zora Neale Hurston because she's black" (I know this is not the reason, I vastly oversimplify) but just--trying to pick a balance of books from a balance of perspectives and talking about each book on its own merits and trying to present the broader spectrum without making it clear We Are Reading This Because Representative Minority.
I have no idea if that made sense. I'm operating on 4 hours of sleep.
no subject
Date: 2016-06-01 07:06 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2016-06-02 12:03 am (UTC)In related news, just yesterday someone left me a review going "this is essentially great except for these Grammatical Errors; let me educate you on 'lie down/lay down'" and I essentially went "I'm a linguist and when writing about boys kissing I don't care about prescriptive grammar norms that people no longer feel in their gut"
and you know, I don't really believe in The Importance Of The Liberal Arts but I think that some parts of that education give you a really valuable vocabulary with which to engage with the world. I've seen a lot of comeuppance posts where a young black woman sasses a middle-aged white woman on a subway who's trying to correct her grammar with "it's valid in African American Vernacular English. I have an MA in linguistics." I feel like there's some stuff in the core of academia that's really useful in pursuit of multiculturalism because it's the kind of swiss army knife that has tools for so many situations.
I don't know if that's actually relevant. Just a thought I had.
no subject
Date: 2016-06-05 12:08 am (UTC)But of course if they're presented as non-negotiable there's really no choice but to... decline.
no subject
Date: 2016-06-28 10:44 am (UTC)