Wednesday, September 14, 2016

Chicago Faculty Strike Back With Pro-"Safe Space" Letter

   I made a real effort to read this with an open mind, and I thought it started off pretty well...but I also thought it descended into sophistry fairly rapidly. The problems seem obvious enough, and I'm busy enough, that I don't think me bitching about them is cost-effective. But I might do so later anyway.

2 Comments:

Blogger The Mystic said...

It's pretty short, and I'd say the crux of its sophistry rests on:

'Yet the administration confusingly disconnects “safe spaces” it supports (see the list of mentoring services on the College’s own website) from “intellectual safe spaces” that it does not, as if issues of power and vulnerability stop at the classroom door.'

Ah, there it is; the little false equivocation that makes the whole "safe space" thing relevant to classroom discourse; the "issues of power and vulnerability" that provoked black Americans to gather among themselves to share ideas that threatened racist America during the Civil Rights movement ARE TOTALLY THE VERY SAME ISSUES as those which cause students today to ask that they be given trigger warnings.

In exactly the same way as black Americans faced beatings and lynchings in the 1950s, modern college students face words with which they disagree or which they associate with personal "trauma."

It's the very same.

1:34 PM  
Blogger Winston Smith said...

Well, that's right on the money.

9:24 PM  

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