• Commentary: Emory students doth protest too much

   

  College isn’t supposed to protect you from unpleasant ideas—like President Trump

   

   March 23, 2016Evan Mah

• On Monday, approximately 40 students at Emory University drew up signs that read “Stop Trump” and “Stop Hate.” They gathered at the foot of the administration building, chanting phrases like “You are not listening!” and “We are in pain!” They demanded a meeting with President James Wagner. According to the Emory Wheel, the campus paper, they walked into the administration building shouting, “It is our duty to fight for our freedom. It is our duty to win. We must love each other and support each other.” They even yelled, “We have nothing to lose but our chains.”

   

  Freedom? Chains? One would have thought that Emory had made Donald Trump the next chair of its center of ethics. Or had just invited Trump to be commencement speaker (after all, they did have Ben Carson wax poetic in 2012). If only the spark were so sensible. Rather, the protests came about merely because someone had written the words “Trump 2016” and “Accept the Inevitable: Trump 2016” in chalk on sidewalks around campus.

• As an Emory graduate, I find this overreaction deeply embarrassing. Three years ago I was editor-in-chief of the Emory Wheel during one of the more turbulent episodes in the school’s 153-year history. In the fall of 2012, the school abruptly announced that it was shutting down several departments, including journalism, and the graduate programs in economics and Spanish. The move blindsided students and professors alike, and the rest of the academic year saw a series of sit-ins and protests. I watched professors berate the dean in faculty meetings. I watched police haul protesters off campus. At stake was the very direction of the university and whether its leaders were the right people to determine it.

   

  But protests over a political endorsement? Written in chalk? Colleges today are blamed for coddling a fragile generation of students who are terrified of disagreement. The protests at Emory only give the anti-P.C. crowd more ammunition. As one student told the Wheel, “I’m supposed to feel comfortable and safe [here], but [Trump] is being supported by students on our campus and our administration shows that they, by their silence, support it as well . . . I don’t deserve to feel afraid at my school.”

• Students reportedly asked Wagner to send a campus-wide email denouncing Trump, as if that would accomplish anything. One has to wonder: If the written words “Trump” are enough to send some students into a tailspin, how do they react to sound bites of Trump on NPR or clips of him on cable television? Do they unplug the TV? Do they submerge the radio in a vat of acid?

   

  The concerns of these students come from a good place. It is the same place that has brought attention to issues of mental health, equality, and race on campus. But to find solutions to these problems, they’ll have to address those pushing back, those who believe there isn’t a problem at all. And isn’t that sort of the whole point of college, a chance to challenge and study one’s own beliefs and the beliefs of others?

• Wagner released a statement promising to implement “immediate refinements to certain policy and procedural deficiencies, regular and structured opportunities for difficult dialogues, a formal process to institutionalize identification, review and [the] addressing of social justice opportunities and issues and a commitment to an annual retreat to renew our efforts.” In case you just got lost in Wagner’s argle bargle, that’s shorthand for, “I’m going to finish season 4 of House of Cards.”

   

  It’s not up to the university president to concoct a panacea every time a student feels threatened by other people’s opinions. Does nobody remember high school? Every day was a minefield of pubescent anxiety that we all had to navigate on our own. In college, the burden should again be on the students. Only this time, the challenge isn’t finding a prom date. It’s deciding how best to frame and plant a righteous cause in fertile ground, around which an entire campus can rally behind.

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• Jesse Watters: If Trump Offends You, ‘You’re An Illegal Immigrant Or A Total Sissy’ [VIDEO]

   

   

     

   

   

   

  Christian Datoc

  Reporter

   

   

   

   

     

  2:43 PM 03/24/2016
• Appearing as the #OneLuckyGuy on Fox’s Thursday broadcast of Outnumbered, Jesse Watters delivered a sharp message to those who might be offended by Republican front-runner Donald Trump.

• “If you’re afraid of the name ‘Trump,’ you’re either an illegal alien or you’re a total sissy,” Watters explained. “Either way, you shouldn’t be on college campuses.”

  Special: John Goodman Loses 100lbs - So Skinny He's Unrecognizable

   

  “What do you make of these students needing counseling?” he then asked host Andrea Tantaros. (RELATED: Emory Student Gov. — Pro-Trump Chalk Justifies ‘Emergency’ Measures)

   

  “I think they’re pretty wimpy,” she responded. “It’s a generation of wimps.”

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• Letter from the Editor-in-Chief

   

   

  By Zak Hudak -

  March 23 2016

• Dear Emory Community,

   

  Over the past few days, we have been confronted with controversy, fear and demand for change surrounding the chalking of “Trump 2016” and other phrases in support of the Republican presidential nomination frontrunner. The Wheel’s Editorial Board discussed extensively the position that the paper would like to take and, as our hour of print approaches, we have realized that the discontent on campus requires more nuance and cannot be addressed as hastily as our editorial process would have required.

   

  The Editorial Board agreed that Donald Trump is an offensive man. Publicly, he has made racist, sexist and xenophobic statements. For many students, their concern is more palpable than mine – it is a concern not merely of what will become of the country should Trump be elected, but one of what will become of their own lives. Trump has changed the game, so to speak. I was proud to be an Emory student when I saw students protesting on the Quad and voicing their concerns regarding their mental and physical safety on campus.

• But the very idea that allowed students to speak up — especially those who felt attacked by the Trump chalkings — is under siege by those very same student protesters. The legendary U.S. Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis wrote that “sunlight is said to be the best of disinfectants,” and this holds true here. Institutionally prohibiting an ignorant, hurtful or violent idea does not destroy it; it allows the idea to grow and worsen in the shadows, far from the moderating effects of public scrutiny. The best way to destroy an idea is to confront it.

   

  I do not take lightly the fears and pains of those students who felt victimized by the “Trump 2016” chalkings around campus, and I try my best to support oppressed groups on campus. The duty of a newspaper to give a voice to the voiceless surpasses that of echoing those in power. I acknowledge again that Donald Trump is unlike any recent candidate who has lasted to this stage of a presidential election and that, for many Emory students, support of  him  holds a different connotation than support for Hillary Clinton or John Kasich.

• It is nonetheless necessary to ask those protesters what would happen should the tables be turned. Suppose we had a different administration. Suppose it was ruled that protests, such as the one on Tuesday, made Trump supporters feel threatened on campus. Freedom of speech works both ways, and its hindrance affects both sides. It is not the role of an institution that is devoted to the critical education of its students to tell those students which opinions they are allowed to have.

   

  I urge the Emory community to respond to me, respond to our news coverage and respond to the campus climate surrounding the chalkings and protests. I will also be holding open office hours 2 to 5 p.m. Friday, March 25, in my office on the fifth floor of the Dobbs University Center (DUC), and I encourage those who find fault with this letter to speak with or email me.

• The Editorial Board will continue to move toward an official stance over the next days, but a constructive conversation over free speech at Emory can exist only with a total allowance of speech — and with a concerted effort to remain sensitive and respectful toward the opposition and its views. Protesters, protest. Chalkers, chalk. Let us not forget each side of an argument is reliant on its opposition for progress.

   

  If we shut down the opposition, we lose our purpose as a university. We lose the courage to inquire, and we lose the ability to engage with the contention that we will encounter outside of the Emory community.

   

  Sincerely,

   

  Zak Hudak,

   

  Editor-in-Chief

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• Emory Students Express Discontent With Administrative Response to Trump Chalkings

   

   

  By Sam Budnyk -

  March 22 2016

• UPDATE (3/22 at 9:49 p.m.) Scroll down for the original article:

   

  The following day, University President James W. Wagner, as well as representatives from College Council (CC) and Student Government Association (SGA) sent emails to the Emory community to address student concerns and responses. In his University-wide email, Wagner wrote that he intends to implement “immediate refinements to certain policy and procedural deficiencies, regular and structured opportunities for difficult dialogues, a formal process to institutionalize identification, review and [the] addressing of social justice opportunities and issues and a commitment to an annual retreat to renew our efforts.” Wagner added in his email that the previous day’s chalkings represented “values regarding diversity and respect that clash with Emory’s own.”

• In the joint email sent on behalf of CC and SGA, representatives wrote that they “remain unapologetically dedicated to inclusion, diversity and equity,” and that both institutions will stand in solidarity with any Emory students who have encountered a lack of safety and support. To provide Emory students an opportunity to discuss such support and inclusivity on Emory’s campus, SGA will hold office hours on Thursday, March 24 from 10 a.m. to 11 a.m. and CC will hold office hours on Thursday from 3:30 p.m. to 5 p.m.

   

  According to the Dobbs University Center’s (DUC) Posting Policy, chalking must be reserved and approved through Emory’s campus reservation service, 25Live. The Posting Policy says that: chalk cannot be on columns or walls, it must be done on horizontal, ground surfaces and areas where rain can easily wash it away. Failure to comply with these policies results in a clean up fee. Chalking also may only remain for 48 hours. After this time, another group can chalk, if they reserve their chalking through 25Live.

• The DUC’s Posting Policy also points out that the DUC is guided by the University’s policy on open expression, and any member of the Emory community who violates the open expression of others will be held in violation of said policy.

   

  According to Emory University’s Open Expression Policy 8.14.5.8, “nonpersonal protests” such as chalking, should follow “all applicable flyer posting policies and banner reservation rules.” It also states that “no nonpersonal protests will be denied because of the content” of the display as long as they falls within the law, and that members of the community who “deface the open expression of others” are also violating this policy.

• The article will be updated as information becomes available.

   

  Students protested yesterday at the Emory Administration Building following a series of overnight, apparent pro-Donald Trump for president chalkings throughout campus.

   

  Roughly 40 students gathered shortly after 4:30 p.m. in the outdoors space between the Administration Building and Goodrich C. White Hall; many students carried signs featuring slogans such as “Stop Trump” or “Stop Hate” and an antiphonal chant addressed to University administration, led by College sophomore Jonathan Peraza, resounded “You are not listening! Come speak to us, we are in pain!” throughout the Quad. Peraza opened the door to the Administration Building and students moved forward towards the door, shouting “It is our duty to fight for our freedom. It is our duty to win. We must love each other and support each other. We have nothing to lose but our chains.”

• After approximately ten minutes outside from the start of the demonstration, the gathered students were ushered into the Quad-facing entrance to the Administration Building and quickly filled a staircase to continue their demonstration. Pausing in the staircase, a few students shared their initial, personal reactions to the chalkings.

   

  “I’m supposed to feel comfortable and safe [here],” one student said. “But this man is being supported by students on our campus and our administration shows that they, by their silence, support it as well … I don’t deserve to feel afraid at my school,” she added.

• A short time later, students moved into the Henry L. Bowden Board Room, surrounding the long table that dominates its center, the students themselves surrounded by portraits of Emory University’s former presidents.

   

  “What are we feeling?” Peraza asked those assembled. Responses of “frustration” and “fear” came from around the room, but individual students soon began to offer more detailed, personal reactions to feelings of racial tension that Trump and his ideology bring to the fore.

   

  “How can you not [disavow Trump] when Trump’s platform and his values undermine Emory’s values that I believe are diversity and inclusivity when they are obviously not [something that Trump supports]” one student said tearfully. “Banning Muslims? How is that something Emory supports?” asked yet another.
• University President James W. Wagner, who had been standing just inside the threshold of the door, had been called  into the board room by students and listened at the head of the table while they described how the appearance of the chalkings made them feel. He addressed several questions throughout the time in the board room, including “Why did the swastikas [on the AEPi house in Fall 2014] receive a quick response while these chalkings did not?” to which Wagner replied that they “represented an outside threat” and clarified that it was a second set of swastikas that received a swift response from the University. “What do we have to do for you to listen to us?” students asked Wagner directly, to which he asked, “What actions should I take?” One student asked if Emory would send out a  University-wide email to “decry the support for this fascist, racist candidate” to which Wagner replied, “No, we will not.” One student clarified that “the University doesn’t have to say they don’t support Trump, but just to acknowledge that there are students on this campus who feel this way about what’s happening … to acknowledge all of us here.”

• Other students asked for improving diversity in the “higher positions” of the University, including the Board of Trustees and the faculty in general who should not be simply “diversity sprinkles” to improve statistics, as one student described it.

   

  Grievances were not restricted to shortcomings of the administration. “[Faculty] are supporting this rhetoric by not ending it,” said one student, who went on to say that “people of color are struggling academically because they are so focused on trying to have a safe community and focus on these issues [related to having safe spaces on campus].”

   

  While Wagner initially stated that he would not be writing a University-wide email regarding Trump, after over an hour of discussion in the board room, he appeared to have decided to begin working on an email concerned with at least the chalkings, at which point he gently wrapped up the conversation so that he could begin drafting it.

• Assistant Vice President for Community Suzanne Onorato, who was also present during the protest and suggested that she would look into hosting a forum for those involved, agreed with Wagner’s sentiments. “I think it’s wonderful that students are taking a stand for something that they’re passionate about, for something that’s so much about themselves  — and we want to support that,” she said in an interview with the Wheel.

   

  The chalkings that generated such controversy appeared overnight throughout Emory’s campus. College junior Harpreet Singh said that, initially, he did not find the chalkings significant. “I saw one big one, ‘Trump 2016,’ so I thought it was an isolated incident and I didn’t think much of it,” he said. “I thought, ‘Okay, it’s just a guy who wants to write whatever he wants to believe in for his political campaign.’ I was like, ‘Okay, I’m fine with that, to a certain extent.’”
• Singh reported having seen multiple chalkings that read “Trump 2016” between Cox Hall Bridge and the Dobbs University Center (DUC). “What I also saw on the steps near Cox [Hall] Bridge was ‘Accept the Inevitable: Trump 2016,’” he said. “That was a bit alarming. What exactly is the inevitable? Why does it have to be accepted?”

• The University will review footage “up by the hospital [from] security cameras” to identify those who made the chalkings, Wagner told the protesters. He also added that if they’re students, they will go through the conduct violation process, while if they are from outside of the University, trespassing charges will be pressed.

   

  Organization and coordination of the protest appears to have fermented in individual student groups independently of one another. Singh, who participated in the protests, also had a part in their planning. While he said that each group or community held their own discussions on the chalkings over social media, he noted that “[he] also reached out to the Muslim community” and that several of these students attended the gathering.

• While the University has not released an official response as of press time, Donald Trump obviously remains a flashpoint for many students, but according to Singh there is comfort to be found for those who feel oppressed. “For the students, it’s reassuring to see how they are able to voice out their opinions and, although it might be safe or uncomfortable, we know that we have a community behind us, whether that be the Latin[x] community, the Muslim community or the black student community — there are pools of safety we can go to,” Singh said.

   

  Read more Wheel coverage:

   

  Read our continued coverage on the Emory administration’s response here. Read the Letter from the Wheel’s Editor-in-Chief here.

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• How Emory's Student Activists Are Fueling Trumpism

     

  The billionaire candidate couldn’t have created more perfect foils for a candidacy built on resentment.
• • Conor Friedersdorf
     
  •     Mar 25, 2016   
• Had Donald Trump’s 2016 campaign for the White House somehow infiltrated the ranks of Emory's student activists and blackmailed the university’s President James W. Wagner, it could scarcely have orchestrated a spectacle more helpful to Trump’s prospects, or damaging to the values that protect vulnerable groups, than what they accomplished on their own this week. After someone wrote “Trump 2016” in colored chalk around campus, several dozen student demonstrators objected that the banal campaign message scared, upset, or offended them, and administrators responded by going Orwellian.
• The Emory Wheel reports that Wagner will review footage from campus security cameras to uncover who made the chalkings. “He added that if they’re students, they will go through the conduct violation process,” the newspaper stated, “while if they are from outside of the University, trespassing charges will be pressed.” Ponder the precedent. An academic authority figure will use surveillance to track down and punish someone for urging support for a political candidate. If possible, he will marshal criminal law to do so. As Jesse Singal wrote at New York, that is “extremely creepy, and a sign that something has gone seriously wrong.”

• Can you imagine how campus progressives would have reacted if a university president threatened to have someone punished or charged with trespassing for chalking “Obama 2012” or “Bernie 2016” on campus sidewalks? But these students see no need for viewpoint-neutral standards about politicking in presidential elections.

  The shortsightedness of all involved is staggering. Set aside the brazen illiberalism of their actions and briefly consider this from a consequentialist perspective.
• For starters, leftist activists are far more likely than anyone else to use sidewalk chalk and should be pushing to dispense with existing, rarely enforced campus regulations. The medium is unusually suited to the powerless, too: It is cheap, easy to use, and very hard to suppress. Yet they’re signing on to surveillance and punishment for chalk-wielding activism, as if it hasn’t even occurred to them that their allies stand to lose the most from future crackdowns, whereas Donald Trump 2016 could foreswear sidewalk chalk forever without suffering from it at all. I don’t know whether these students have an incoherent theory of how power works, or haven’t thought the matter through, but future leftist activists may rue their behavior.

• What’s more, if the sidewalk-chalker is unmasked and punished, the effect will be to fuel the popularity of Trump 2016, not to undermine it. This is so obvious to everyone outside the bubble of campus leftism that I begin to wonder if activists at Emory don’t understand that, or just don’t actually care about outcomes beyond their bubble.

  At ages 18 to 22, many of us were less able to see the world through the eyes of others than in earlier or later years. I find it easy to forgive college students, whether activists or otherwise, when they display that quality. It doesn’t make them bad people. Still, good people can harm important causes. I wish the ideological cohort that makes privilege so central to their analysis would expend more effort reflecting on this fact: Those on track to earn degrees from prestigious universities are unusual in their ability to indulge rhetoric and actions without reflecting on how they will be perceived by fellow citizens or undermine the rights of the powerless.

• Put more simply: Please stop undermining #NeverTrump and the culture of free speech that will be especially vital if the billionaire with authoritarian tendencies is elected president.

  Off campus, these students have managed to generate lots of incredulous coverage—and some open mockery—from the Washington Post, ABC News, Gawker, People Magazine, the Associated Press, CBS, The Week, The Atlanta-Journal Constitution, The Daily Beast, and beyond. Has there ever been a more self-evidently counterproductive course willingly taken by activists than the one presently unfolding? Outsiders can only hope Emory's president doesn’t succeed in finding whoever wrote the messages and making a martyr out of a Trump supporter in media outlets that would in almost no other circumstances regard his partisans as victims of unfair treatment.  
• Already, other damage has been done. Earlier this week, I noted that a black student at UC Davis suffered a hate crime near campus. Three men were later arrested for the assault. Previously, I’ve highlighted the horrifying affects of NYPD spying on innocent Muslim students and the UC Berkeley riot police that turned batons on students. There is sometimes good reason for college students to be concerned about their physical safety on campus, and there are incidents of racism that do not threaten physical safety but are nevertheless abhorrent and understandably upsetting. When students react like this to the mere appearance of the name of a leading candidate in the middle of a presidential-election year, treating the most commonplace political advocacy as if it makes them unsafe, they create perverse incentives for invoking victimhood and deflate the currency of claimed trauma and offense.

• After much searching, the most thoughtful defense of Emory’s student activists I could find came from Osita Nwanevu, a recent graduate of the University of Chicago and editor of the South Side Weekly. By way of background, he recently published a provocative Harper’s essay that casts today’s leftist campus protesters as intellectual inheritors of William F. Buckley and concluded that isn’t actually a bad thing.

  About Emory, he said this:

• Those Tweets gesture at a perceived contradiction: Lots of public intellectuals and journalists at outlets from Gawker to National Review regard Trump as a genuinely dangerous figure. Yet they mock students who feel frightened by support for the candidate.

  For like-minded observers who perceive an inconsistency, let me try to explain why, even apart from consequentialist concerns, I don’t think the widespread backlash to Emory activists is contradictory, even among those who fear a Trump administration.

  It is grounded in these premises:
• All Emory University students have been aware for months that they live amid lots of Donald Trump supporters. He is the leading contender for the Republican nomination. He easily won the GOP primary in the state of Georgia. The fact that one or two Trump supporters with access to chalk live close enough to Emory to write “Trump 2016” on their sidewalks is not new information. For that reason, most observers find it difficult to believe that these students are fearful or traumatized because they’re newly aware of living near Trump supporters and have concluded they’re not physically safe anymore.
• While the students are not literally afraid of chalk, they have given most observers the impression that they are more upset by the fact that someone in their community is speaking out in favor of Trump than the underlying reality of his base. That’s because they—not their critics—have made the chalking the subject of their activism. Doing so has reinforced the notion that college students are irrationally focused on policing what people say at the expense of confronting and grappling with whatever it is that people believe. As the editor of the student newspaper at Emory aptly countered, “Institutionally prohibiting an ignorant, hurtful or violent idea does not destroy it; it allows the idea to grow and worsen in the shadows, far from the moderating effects of public scrutiny. The best way to destroy an idea is to confront it.”
• Indeed, if it really had taken these chalk messages to awaken some Emory students to the fact that Trump may win the presidency and enjoys substantial support among Georgia residents, their appearance would have been salutary, insofar as they would’ve helped these students to confront an ugly reality while there is still time to organize and prevent Trump from winning.
• • Meanwhile, most observers—even those, like myself, who fully see the vile racism and xenophobia that have characterized Trump’s campaign— understand that supporting Trump 2016 does not automatically make someone a racist or a xenophobe, never mind a threat to the safety of those around them. The seeming inability of students to understand that what it would mean for them to support Trump is not what many others mean by supporting Trump—that Americans support politicians for all sorts of complicated, irrational, contradictory, quirky, unexpected, or sui generis reasons—is a major failing on the part of the students themselves and their educators.
• This failure dramatically weakens the ability of these students to understand, engage with, and persuade Trump supporters in the upcoming election, and to participate more broadly in a civic system that depends, at some level, on overcoming the typical-mind fallacy. There are surely actual Trump voters on Emory’s campus. If the campus climate were different, perhaps they could be persuaded, in the course of discussion, to see the error of their ways. Do you think they’ll out themselves to fellow students now?
• 1. And look at this passage in Wagner’s response to this controversey: “After meeting with these students, I cannot dismiss their expression of feelings and concern as motivated only by political preference or over-sensitivity. Instead, the students with whom I spoke heard a message, not about political process or candidate choice, but instead about values regarding diversity and respect that clash with Emory’s own.” In his formulation, the fact that they “heard a message” about “values regarding diversity” is somehow offered as if it proves that they aren’t motivated by “over-sensitivity.” But if someone were acting out of “over-sensivity” wouldn’t it logically be because they heard a message that wasn’t, in fact, there?  Wagner hasn’t yet put together a coherent explanation of his own thought process.
   

  In a subsequent Tweet, Nwanevu wrote this:
• Actually, the more cynical critics of progressive campus activists believe precisely that they are motivated by the relative power they now hold, not by truly feeling unsafe—in this telling, they are using their ideological clout on college campuses to punish speech they don’t like from people with less power in that space, and if the same ideological cohort ever attains power outside campus, it will try to suppress speech there, too. Lots of Trump supporters are motivated precisely by the belief that, without a guy like Trump to represent their tribe, their own speech will be suppressed.
• But there is an even more direct rejoinder to Nwanevu’s claim: Emory activists who believe that they are being effective within the bubble of their campus are wrong.  The student newspaper editor, Zak Hudak, expressed his own aversion to Trump while pointing out the obvious unacceptability of suppressing “Trump 2016” advocacy.

• On Yik Yak, a social media app popular among college students in large part because it permits anonymous speech, the Emory student reaction to the chalk controversy wasn’t mixed, as often happens when one views that platform during a campus controversy. It was clearly, overwhelmingly antagonistic to the student activists. Keep in mind that the content that follows, which went on for scroll after scroll, dominating the platform, was all posted within 1.5 miles of Emory’s campus:

   

• Knowing that is the reaction in an enclave wildly more progressive than America as a whole, you’d think that the activists at Emory might change their approach.

  In activist circles, being “a bad ally” is a serious charge.

  And right now, Emory’s chalk-focused activists and its president are the worst allies imaginable for anti-Trumpism. They’re not just ineffective, they’re doing all harm and no good. They’re focused on how Trump supporters make them feel rather than opposing his rise as effectively as possible. And their abandonment of liberal values bolsters the false belief of Trump supporters that such values are only ever invoked cynically.

• That is fuel for more illiberalism. And insofar as America becomes a zero-sum game to see who can do the most to suppress the speech of whom, the campus left will not win. Why aren’t more tenured faculty members who understand that speaking up?

  Everyone who wants to see Trump and the pernicious trends he represents defeated in American life, or who doesn’t want to see future activists identified by surveillance footage and punished, should look to Emory for a case study in what not to do.

  The liberal coalition can’t afford any more such self-indulgence.
• This is an election season. If you live in a state that Trump could possibly win in a primary or general election, you can buy some chalk yourself. You can learn how to canvas and go door to door; volunteer at a phone bank; or pick a civil-liberties organization that protects the sorts of people that you regard as most vulnerable and see if you can volunteer on their behalf. There are dozens of things that would help weaken Trumpism. Fighting to persuade a university president to denounce and punish Trump supporters is not one of them.

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• Emory President: Students Scared by 'Trump 2016' Chalk Signs

   
   
  • By jeff martin, associated press
   
  ATLANTA — Mar 23, 2016

• A flurry of chalk scrawls supporting Donald Trump on the Emory University campus sparked a demonstration by students who demanded and were granted a meeting with the president, saying the messages made them feel concerned and frightened. At least one of them said he got death threats after the protest.

   

   The students viewed the messages as intimidation, and they voiced "genuine concern and pain" as a result, Emory President Jim Wagner wrote Tuesday, one day after meeting with 40 to 50 student demonstrators.

   

   The Atlanta university on Wednesday provided The Associated Press with a copy of Wagner's letter, in which he said students confronted by Trump's name in chalk "heard a message about values regarding diversity and respect that clash with Emory's own."

• Students at Monday's protest chanted, "You are not listening! Come speak to us, we are in pain!" shortly before Wagner agreed to meet with them, Emory's student newspaper, The Wheel, reported.

   

   Slogans such as "Trump 2016" were written in chalk on campus sidewalks and some buildings sometime during the weekend. At least one of the chalk messages stated "Build a wall," said one of the students at the protest, Jonathan Peraza, 19, who said he is of Latino heritage and went to high school in suburban Atlanta.

   

   "That is a direct reference to brown people on campus," Peraza told The Associated Press Wednesday, adding that "we feel unsafe on our campus."

• "It was an intentional way to rile students up and intimidate those of us who feel we are in danger with this presidential candidate," Peraza said. "We do feel that our lives are in danger with his campaign and the violence that he's been inciting."

   

   Peraza said that since the demonstration, he's received death threats on social media, including a picture of a gravestone with his name on it. He's forwarded the threats to Emory administrators, he said.

   

   Peraza said he was not the leader the protest, but was one of many demonstrators.

• "We're getting targets put on our backs because we're speaking out for the things that we need," he said. "I'm literally watching my back all over campus."

   

   Another student protester, Lolade Oshin, 20, said no one is trying to take away anyone's First Amendment right to free speech.

   

   "Nobody ever told anybody that they can't vote for Donald Trump," Oshin said.

   

   She and other students are frustrated, she said, at what they perceive as rhetoric from university officials and not enough concrete actions to promote tolerance.

• "If there were pro-Hitler things around the campus or swastikas, Emory would have taken a stance on it," she said. In October 2014, Emory University officials said the FBI had joined an investigation into swastikas that were painted on the exterior of a historically Jewish fraternity house.

   

   Oshin said she's meeting Friday with Emory administrators, who have been working for months on several policy changes, which Wagner outlined in his letter to students.

   

   The changes include refinements to the school's "bias incident reporting and response procedure," Wagner wrote. Emory is also taking steps to have regular opportunities for "difficult dialogues," he wrote.

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• Word "Trump" Written in Chalk Terrifies, Harms Emory Students
• Sam Biddle

  Tuesday 5:40pm

  Filed to: safe spaces
• First, it was offensively inauthentic sushi at the Oberlin dining halls. Now, a new—and somehow worse—wickedness torments America’s students: Someone drew the word “Trump” on the ground at a college.
• Thanks to a new report in the Emory Wheel, I’ve learned two things: the student paper at Emory is named the Wheel, and a bunch of these kids are extreme weenie babies, so sensitive and unprepared for the mild psychic hurdles of our shared reality that they are literally crying out in pain because of a letters they saw when they turned their heads in certain directions.
• Because those letter made up words. And not just any words—political words (Words = literal murder? Unclear):

• Students protested yesterday at the Emory Administration Building following a series of overnight, apparent pro-Donald Trump for president chalkings throughout campus.

  [...]

  Many students carried signs featuring slogans such as “Stop Trump” or “Stop Hate” and an antiphonal chant addressed to University administration, led by College sophomore Jonathan Peraza, resounded “You are not listening! Come speak to us, we are in pain!” throughout the Quad.
• “I’m supposed to feel comfortable and safe [here],” one student said. “But this man is being supported by students on our campus and our administration shows that they, by their silence, support it as well … I don’t deserve to feel afraid at my school,” she added.

• The students in question seem unable to distinguish between a wall with “Trump 2016" written on it and Donald Trump, the person:

                    

  Singh reported having seen multiple chalkings that read “Trump 2016” between Cox Hall Bridge and the Dobbs University Center (DUC). “What I also saw on the steps near Cox [Hall] Bridge was ‘Accept the Inevitable: Trump 2016,’” he said. “That was a bit alarming. What exactly is the inevitable? Why does it have to be accepted?”

• It’s true that Trump’s vile campaign has moved straight past the bounds of rhetoric into actual acts of violence, but chalk drawings on a college campus are not instances of such acts. The proposed solution to an imagined non-problem is as vague and fractious as you’d guess:

                    

  One student asked if Emory would send out a University-wide email to “decry the support for this fascist, racist candidate” to which Wagner replied, “No, we will not.” One student clarified that “the University doesn’t have to say they don’t support Trump, but just to acknowledge that there are students on this campus who feel this way about what’s happening … to acknowledge all of us here.”
• Better yet: Free pizza with pepperoni in the shape of a smiley face? Or, short of a pointless email “to acknowledge all of us here,” the university could reject fascism by acting itself like some sort of fascist police apparatus, as is apparently the plan:

• The University will review footage “up by the hospital [from] security cameras” to identify those who made the chalkings, Wagner told the protesters. He also added that if they’re students, they will go through the conduct violation process, while if they are from outside of the University, trespassing charges will be pressed.

                    

  Don’t go to Emory.

9 more annotations...

• Emory University Students Feel 'Afraid' After Trump's Name Was Written in Chalk Around Campus

• By Lindsay Kimble

  @lekimble  

    03/24/2016 AT 02:00 PM EDT 

   

  <!-- begin articleBody -->

  Students at Emory University protested on Monday after finding support messages for Donald Trump written around the Atlanta campus in chalk, according to The Washington Post. 
  
  Charging that the drawings, which said things like "Trump for Pres" and "Vote For Trump," left them feeling attacked, students demanded the university's administration take action, reported the student newspaper, The Emory Wheel. 
  
  The Wheel says that 40 students gathered in an outdoor space on campus holding signs that included messages like "Stop Trump," and chanted to the administration, "You are not listening! Come speak to us, we are in pain!" 
• One of the protestors told the newspaper, "I'm supposed to feel comfortable and safe [here]. But this man is being supported by students on our campus and our administration shows that they, by their silence, support it as well … I don't deserve to feel afraid at my school." 
  
  University President James W. Wagner met with the students, answering questions about what actions he can take to appease their fears. Later, he told the student newspaper that the protests were a "mechanism for interaction." 
  
  Wagner further outlined steps that he and the administrators planned to take to address the protestors' issues in a campus-wide email, according to the paper, suggesting "immediate refinements to certain policies and procedural deficiencies; regular and structured opportunities for difficult dialogues; a formal process to institutionalize identification, review and addressing of social justice opportunities and issues; and commitment to an annual retreat to renew [their] efforts."
• "This wasn't ordinary campaigning," Jonathan Peraza, a freshman student and a member of student minority group LatinAction told The Daily Beast of the drawings. "It was deliberate intimidation. Some of us were expecting shootings. We feared walking alone."
• The university further clarified, despite standing behind the anti-Trump protesters, that students are allowed to chalk on campus in limited areas, as it is a "protected form of expression." 
  
  Students were still dissappointed by Wagner's response, with Lolade Oshin, a junior at Emory, charging that the chalkings were "an act of violence." 
  
  "Emory likes to sell itself as a school that is really devoted to diversity and inclusion, and it's not," Oshin told The Daily Beast. "If I'd known it would be this way, I would have gone to the University of Maryland and paid a quarter of the price to deal with the exact same issues I deal with here."
• Other professors on campus said students were being overly sensitive in regard to the messages. 
  
  "The administration doesn't want some kind of explosion and they think they'll avoid that by placating these students and patting them on the head," political science professor Harvey Klehr told the site. "They're living in a cocoon bubble, and the university is validating their fears. If these students are frightened by someone writing 'Trump 2016' on campus, they need to see a psychiatrist. I despise Trump, but Emory is not some fundamentalist school where white supremacists send their children." 
  
  It's no question that Trump's rallies have inspired violence, with supporters physically attacking protestors at some of the GOP front-runner's campaign events, and vice versa. 
  
  Of the protests, Trump charged that police should begin arresting defectors because they're "violating all of us."

4 more annotations...

• By  Reena Flores    CBS News  March 24, 2016, 10:54 AM

     

  Some Emory University students "in pain" after "Trump 2016" chalked on campus

• The specter of a Donald Trump presidency is so disturbing to some college students that they're protesting pro-Trump chalk writings on their campus, according to a report by Emory University's campus newspaper.

  The words "Trump 2016" appeared earlier this week scrawled in chalk around the college campus, the Emory Wheel reported Monday. In response, a few dozen students gathered at the school's administration building later that day, holding signs that read "Stop Trump" and "Stop Hate." According to the paper, the activists shouted, "You are not listening! Come speak to us, we are in pain!"

• When protesters moved to demonstrate inside the administration hall, school officials issued a swift answer. College president Jim Wagner met with the students, who expressed anxiety that the writings were threats to their safety rather than political speech, considering Georgia's Republican primary was held earlier this month.

  "The students shared with me their concern that these messages were meant to intimidate rather than merely to advocate for a particular candidate, having appeared outside of the context of a Georgia election or campus campaign activity," Wagner wrote in a university-wide email Tuesday. "During our conversation, they voiced their genuine concern and pain in the face of this perceived intimidation."

• Some of the students, according to the Emory Wheel, complained about the slow response time to their grievances, although university administration officials met with demonstrators on the day the protests took place. One question posed to the university during the protest included: "Why did the swastikas [spray-painted on a Jewish fraternity house in 2014] receive a quick response while these chalkings did not?" Another asked if the university would "decry the support for this fascist, racist candidate" in an official campus statement.

  In response, Wagner's Tuesday email said the university "cannot dismiss their expression of feelings and concern as motivated only by political preference or over-sensitivity."

• "As an academic community, we must value and encourage the expression of ideas, vigorous debate, speech, dissent, and protest," he said. "It is important that we recognize, listen to, and honor the concerns of these students, as well as faculty and staff who may feel similarly."

  In the future, Wagner promised to make "immediate refinements" to the procedures addressing social justice issues on the campus.

  The university further ruled the chalk writings a "violation of policy" because of where they had appeared.
• <div class="row"><div class="col-12 "><div class="row"><div class="col-8 "><article data-dashboard-loader-options="{&quot;url&quot;:&quot;\/feature\/election-2016\/dashboard\/xhr\/emory-university-students-in-pain-after-trump-2016-chalk-writings&quot;,&quot;eventName&quot;:&quot;load&quot;,&quot;responseKey&quot;:&quot;dashboard&quot;}" data-target="#dashboard" class="article " data-component="dashboardLoader" id="article"><div itemprop="articleBody" class="entry" id="article-entry"><p></p><p>In a statement to CBS News, a university spokeswoman said, "Chalkings by students are allowed as a form of expression on the Emory campus but must be limited to certain areas and must not deface campus property---these chalkings did not follow guidelines---that's the issue regarding violation of policy, not the content." </p><p>Some conservative students at the campus are launching their own response to the protests.</p><p>According to a Washington Post report, the College Republicans and another university group, the Young Americans for Liberty, scheduled a "free speech wall" demonstration for next week.</p><p>"I think the response from President Wagner was just kind of embarrassing for the school -- because it's not his job to police who students on campus can and cannot support," Amelia Sims, chair of the College Republicans group, told the Post. "Part of being in college is having experiences where you question your values, question what you believe...It should not be that universities are just echo boxes, so people can't encounter opinions they disagree with."</p><br/> </div><br/><br/> <br/> <br/><br/> <div class="copyright"><br/> © 2016 CBS Interactive Inc. 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<a rel="nofollow" href="/news/hillary-clinton-would-beat-donald-trump-ted-cruz-but-would-lose-to-john-kasich/"><br/> <figure data-omniture-track-data="{&quot;clickProperty&quot;: &quot;Deep Story-Post Dashboard|Asset-12-Thumbnail&quot;}" data-click-tracking="genericClickCbsNews" class="media-figure img-inset-thumb"><br/> <span class="img "><img height="60" alt="" src="http://cbsnews2.cbsistatic.com/hub/i/r/2016/03/24/1b9d7514-6242-43c8-a69b-9aa4913a4c8d/thumbnail/60x60/9fc55343b7a15b9bb48da150d03eed84/clinton-kasich-0324.jpg" srcset="data:image/gif;base64,R0lGODlhAQABAAAAACH5BAEAAAAALAAAAAABAAEAAAI=" data-srcset="http://cbsnews2.cbsistatic.com/hub/i/r/2016/03/24/1b9d7514-6242-43c8-a69b-9aa4913a4c8d/thumbnail/60x60/9fc55343b7a15b9bb48da150d03eed84/clinton-kasich-0324.jpg 1x, http://cbsnews2.cbsistatic.com/hub/i/r/2016/03/24/1b9d7514-6242-43c8-a69b-9aa4913a4c8d/thumbnail/120x120/f55d63b2eff4b3aa2bb6927bcd98b143/clinton-kasich-0324.jpg 2x" class=" lazyload" width="60"></span><br/> 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data-lf-site-id="323201"></span><br/> </div><br/> </a><br/> </li><br/><br/> <br/> <br/> <br/> <li data-item="slide" style="width: 300px;"><br/> <a rel="nofollow" href="/news/john-kasich-rejects-pressure-to-drop-out-of-2016-presidential-race/"><br/> <figure data-omniture-track-data="{&quot;clickProperty&quot;: &quot;Deep Story-Post Dashboard|Asset-14-Thumbnail&quot;}" data-click-tracking="genericClickCbsNews" class="media-figure img-inset-thumb"><br/> <span class="img "><img height="60" alt="" src="http://cbsnews1.cbsistatic.com/hub/i/r/2016/03/24/255028b9-2b5b-4b09-b6f6-baa367ac3840/thumbnail/60x60/42a2df06f1f0b6bb26012a5a918c1b30/2016-03-23t200607z91095199d1aesufmhbaartrmadp3usa-election-kasich.jpg" srcset="data:image/gif;base64,R0lGODlhAQABAAAAACH5BAEAAAAALAAAAAABAAEAAAI=" 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  Tuesday evening's hullabaloo centered around an incident at Georgia's Emory University, in which someone wrote "Trump 2016" in chalk all over the college campus. The ensuing panic among students became the subject of ridicule by everyone from Gawker ("these kids are extreme weenie babies") to New York ("College can be a stressful period").
• hurt feelings

   

   

    Edit 

  Emory University erupts after someone writes 'Trump 2016' in chalk on campus

   

   

  March 23, 2016 

• Emory University President James Wagner was further mocked after he promised to review security footage in order to catch the Trump-supporting chalk-vandal. "Your 'unexpected' chalker is engaging in a political debate that will continue through the first Tuesday in November. It is an important and necessary debate. Deal with it, or get thee to a monastery," the Atlanta Journal Constitution jeered.

   

  Others, however, think the students protesting the slogans have a point:

• Libertarian writer Jeffrey Tucker was present on campus earlier this week, when the messages first appeared. He told me that I was wrong to mock legitimate criticisms of the "Trump 2016" scrawlings, which he characterized as vandalism of private property. The campus is a fairly apolitical place and the Trump messages were widely perceived as racial intimidation against the campus's significant minority population — not mere political advocacy — according to Tucker.

   

  "It was like cross burning," Tucker told me. "It was on private property. It was extremely damaging and the students and faculty were totally embarrassed... it was absolutely intended to intimidate everyone and it worked." [Reason.com]
• Trump is undoubtedly a divisive figure — and one everyone has an opinion of. Emory's saga is likely far from over. Jeva Lange

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• Chalk one up for Donald Trump at Emory University

   

    March 22, 2016
• On Monday, an enthusiast at Emory University reportedly wrote “Trump 2016” in chalk many, many times on the campus. Let us repeat the essentials: Trump. And in chalk. Like this one (of many) posted on barstool.com:

• So this morning, James Wagner, president of Emory University, sent out this email on “unexpected chalkings.” Read and believe:

   

  Dear Emory Community,

   

  Yesterday I received a visit from 40 to 50 student protesters upset by the unexpected chalkings on campus sidewalks and some buildings yesterday morning, in this case referencing Donald Trump. The students shared with me their concern that these messages were meant to intimidate rather than merely to advocate for a particular candidate, having appeared outside of the context of a Georgia election or campus campaign activity. During our conversation, they voiced their genuine concern and pain in the face of this perceived intimidation.

• After meeting with our students, I cannot dismiss their expression of feelings and concern as motivated only by political preference or over-sensitivity. Instead, the students with whom I spoke heard a message, not about political process or candidate choice, but instead about values regarding diversity and respect that clash with Emory’s own.

   

  As an academic community, we must value and encourage the expression of ideas, vigorous debate, speech, dissent, and protest. At the same time, our commitment to respect, civility, and inclusion calls us to provide a safe environment that inspires and supports courageous inquiry. It is important that we recognize, listen to, and honor the concerns of these students, as well as faculty and staff who may feel similarly.

• On the heels of work begun by students last fall and advanced last month through the Racial Justice Retreat and subsequent working groups, Emory is taking a number of significant steps:

   

  • Immediate refinements to certain policy and procedural deficiencies (for example, our bias incident reporting and response process);

   

  • Regular and structured opportunities for difficult dialogues (like the Transforming Community Project of several years ago);

   

  • A formal process to institutionalize identification, review, and addressing of social justice opportunities and issues; and

• • Commitment to an annual retreat to renew our efforts.

   

  To keep moving forward, we must continue to engage in rich and meaningful dialogue around critical issues facing our nation and our society. I learn from every conversation like the one that took place yesterday and know that further conversations are necessary. More than that, such discussions should lead to action that continues to foster a more just and inclusive Emory.

   

  Sincerely,
   Jim Wagner

• Note to President Wagner and others on the Emory University campus: Yes, Georgia’s presidential primary is over. Yet, while it might sometimes appear so, Georgia is not hermetically sealed from a discussion that continues elsewhere. Hillary Clinton has turned her head to the general election, and so has Donald Trump. Many others have as well. This is what happens when the field narrows to two likely candidates. You have an excellent political science department that will vouch for me on this.

   

  Your “unexpected” chalker is engaging in a political debate that will continue through the first Tuesday in November. It is an important and necessary debate. Deal with it, or get thee to a monastery.

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• PARANOIA

  03.24.16 1:00 AM ET

  Emory University Students Think Donald Trump Is Out to Kill Them
• Lizzie Crocker
• After the GOP frontrunner’s name was written in chalk on a campus wall, students said they ‘feared for their lives.’ The school vowed to identify the taggers. But professors at the school are now pushing back.

  Support for Donald Trump in the form of chalk markings on campus at Emory College sent the university into a tailspin this week, with the administration scrambling to appease students who felt threatened by the sudden scourge of pro-Trump scribblings on school grounds.

   

  Early Monday, students say, they were “attacked” by Trump’s name in large, pastel letters on campus walkways and buildings. “Vote for Trump,” “Trump for Pres,” “Accept the Inevitable: Trump 2016” and more chalk sloganeering for the Republican presidential frontrunner was written all over the most trafficked areas on campus.

• “I legitimately feared for my life,” Paula Camila Alarcon, a freshman at Emory who identifies as Latino, told The Daily Beast. “I thought we were having a KKK rally on campus.”

  Word spread quickly among student minorities and activist groups on social media, including the Muslim Student Association, Emory’s NAACP chapter, Black Students at Emory, and LatinAction.

  “Some of us started scrubbing the signs,” said Alarcon, who is a member of LatinAction. She noted that writing on school buildings is considered vandalism, irrespective of content. But when other students accused them of censorship, they made “#StopTrump2016” fliers and disseminated them around campus.

• “This wasn’t ordinary campaigning,” Jonathan Peraza, another member of LatinAction and a freshman at Emory, said of the chalkings. “It was deliberate intimidation. Some of us were expecting shootings. We feared walking alone.”

  That afternoon, Alarcon and Peraza were among 40 or 50 students who protested the graffitied support for the likely GOP nominee on their campus.

  Meanwhile, their emails urging the administration to condemn the pro-Trump messages went unreturned. So the protesters stormed Emory President James Wagner’s office.

   

  “To us, the administration’s silence sanctioned the fact that this Nazi reincarnate is threatening to deport our parents—to put us in concentration camps and kill us,” said Peraza.

• The chalkings were the tip of the iceberg for Alarcon, Peraza, and dozens of other minorities at Emory who feel marginalized by the school’s white, middle- and upper-class students and professors.

   

  Like many other students across the country, they’ve spent the past year agitating for what they perceive to be increased social justice and diversity initiatives at Emory—only to be let down by the university, they say, when their campus was defiled with Trump propaganda.
• n Monday, the group of 40-plus students demanded “transparency” from President Wagner and the administration that would involve them in the process of implementing these initiatives, plus a more diverse faculty and student body and a statement from Wagner saying Emory doesn’t support Trump or his ideology. The students also insisted that the administration review security footage to determine who carried out the pro-Trump “vandalism.”

• According to the school newspaper, The Emory Wheel, Wagner told protesters at the meeting that the university would examine footage “up by the hospital [from] security cameras.”

  The university did not respond when asked to confirm this report. The school did, however, clarify in a statement to The Daily Beast that chalkings by students “are a protected form of expression on the Emory campus, but must be limited to certain areas and surfaces.”

  The pro-Trump messages “did not follow guidelines—that’s the issue regarding violation of policy, not the content.”

• In an email to the Emory community on Tuesday morning, Wagner stood by the anti-Trump protesters, for whom the chalkings were “not about political process or candidate choice, but instead about values regarding diversity and respect that clash with Emory’s own,” he wrote. “It is important that we recognize, listen to, and honor the concerns of these students, as well as faculty and staff who may feel similarly.”

   

  He also vowed commitment to “a formal process to institutionalize identification, review, and addressing of social justice opportunities and issues.”

• Still, many student activists were disappointed by the email, which they claimed was more of the same empty rhetoric he’s failed to deliver in the past.

  “Don’t tell me about you being here for black students, because when black students actually need you, you’re never there,” said Lolade Oshin, a junior undergraduate in Emory’s business school who participated in Monday’s protests.

• “I think it was an act of violence,” Oshin said of the chalkings. “It was an active threat, intentionally meant to create opposition on campus and to segregate groups on campus that are already segregated.”

   

  While she expects students to be racist, she said, she also expects Emory to be an ally to students of color.

  “Emory likes to sell itself as a school that is really devoted to diversity and inclusion, and it’s not,” Oshin said. “If I’d known it would be this way, I would have gone to the University of Maryland and paid a quarter of the price to deal with the exact same issues I deal with here.”

• To Oshin and other students who protested on Monday, racial, ethnic, and socioeconomic diversity at Emory is paramount to a progressive education. The protesters are less invested in (and perhaps less accustomed to) diversity of opinion, so much so that they assumed the sight of Trump’s name on their campus was likely a prelude to physical violence and invasion by the KKK. There have been no documented ties between Trump-based graffiti and terrorism.

  Indeed, many students believed the chalk markings themselves constituted violence.

   

  In a statement issued in solidarity with the NAACP and the Black, Latinx, Muslim, Jewish, and disabled communities, LatinAction referred to the pro-Trump chalkings as “attacks” on Emory’s minority students. “We are angry and determined to bring light to the violence that we experience,” the statement reads.

• Tyler Farrell, a junior studying political science in Emory’s business school, said he was not disturbed by the protesters but rather by the university kowtowing to their demands and thus implying that “one person’s political beliefs are inherently inferior to another person’s beliefs.”

  President Wagner’s email to the community “made that distinction by favoring the people who protested and only further divided people on campus,” Farrell said. “However well meaning the protesters were, their protests were centered around an attempt to urge the university to condemn a form of political speech. ”

• Farrell had previously conveyed similar sentiments in a Facebook post, which one student protester sent to The Daily Beast to highlight what she believed to be the “most offensive” student response.

   

  He added that while he was “no fan of Donald Trump’s, I think it’s important that people who are have the right to express their opinions.”

  Harvey Klehr, a longtime professor of political science at Emory, was also unimpressed by the university’s response to students.

• “The administration doesn’t want some kind of explosion and they think they’ll avoid that by placating these students and patting them on the head,” he said. “They’re living in a cocoon bubble, and the university is validating their fears. If these students are frightened by someone writing ‘Trump 2016’ on campus, they need to see a psychiatrist.

  “I despise Trump, but Emory is not some fundamentalist school where white supremacists send their children.”

  Indeed, the student body does not lack diversity. While 37.8 percent of its current freshman students self-identify as white, roughly 40 percent are self-identifying minorities. A remaining 17.7 percent describe themselves as “international.”

• At Emory, it’s up to the adults to value diversity in all forms—and to ensure that speech and political expression are not censored. Reviewing security surveillance tapes at the request of students who want any pro-Trump vandals identified or monitored is not leading by example. It’s an unnecessary precaution and a slippery slope.

  In his final speech as Distinguished University Professor at Emory last year, Salman Rushdie—who was censored and targeted with death threats for years after Iran’s former supreme leader issued a fatwa over his 1989 book, The Satanic Verses—stressed the importance of free speech in a democracy. He remarked that the urge to squelch it is “beginning to be the greatest where they should be most defended, that is to say within the walls of the academy.

• “These rights have been hard won, hard won,” Rushdie said. “Do not easily give them up. Do not give an inch.”

  Emory students who protested on Monday should continue to protest loudly. They should continue to take the administration to task on empty promises and other issues that they believe hinder their ability to thrive at the university.

  In turn, the university should remind them that they cannot thrive when freedom of expression, no matter how offensive, is stifled.

  Correction: A previous version of this story referred to Emory’s president as Bill Wagner. His name is James. 

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• Chalk It Up to Trump

      

   

         

   

      

   

         

   

  Backlash is mounting against Emory students who protested pro-Trump chalk messages. University's president is under fire for not dismissing them outright.
• March 25, 2016

      

   

     

  By

       

    Josh Logue

• A group of students, many of them minority students, held a protest Monday at Emory University over chalked messages that appeared at many places on campus over the weekend in support of Donald Trump’s presidential campaign. The Internet has not been kind to the students (or Emory).

    

  The demonstration, in which students reportedly said the chalkings made them feel unsafe, eventually moved from the quad to the administration building in search of James Wagner, Emory’s president. Wagner met with the students, and in an email to the campus afterward, he said, “They voiced their genuine concern and pain in the face of this perceived intimidation.”

• “The students shared with me their concern that these messages were meant to intimidate rather than merely to advocate for a particular candidate, having appeared outside of the context of a Georgia election or campus campaign activity,” he wrote. “After meeting with our students, I cannot dismiss their expression of feelings and concern as motivated only by political preference or oversensitivity. Instead, the students with whom I spoke heard a message, not about political process or candidate choice, but instead about values regarding diversity and respect that clash with Emory’s own.”

    

  Most of the chalked messages were limited only to the word “Trump” or “Trump 2016,” though some students also reported seeing “Build a Wall” and “Accept the Inevitable.” At some high schools and colleges, the word “Trump” has become a taunt used against minority students on campus, along with graffiti including the candidate's name and swastikas. But at Emory, while many would say “Build a Wall” is a taunt, most of the chalkings simply said “Trump 2016.”

• Right-leaning websites and blogs were some of the first to pounce -- on students for what critics deemed excessive sensitivity and on the college's president and administration for taking the students seriously. But criticism spread all over. Even headlines from national news organizations like CBS, which proclaimed, “University students 'in pain' after 'Trump 2016' chalked on campus,” seem to have a bit of an edge to them. Even Trump-hating Gawker chimed in to say simply, “Don’t go to Emory.”

    

  Many of those criticizing the Emory students said the messages were par for the course in a campaign year and that if students can chalk their support for Hillary Clinton or Bernie Sanders, they should be able to chalk support for Trump. Emory is now stressing that it has no plans to take action against anyone for chalking, and that concerns were not because of the views of the person who chalked but because some of the pro-Trump statements were not made in places where chalking is permitted.

• Now protesters are taking to social media to say critics have mischaracterized their actions.

    

  “No one at Emory is afraid of chalk,” wrote one student who said she participated in the protest. “Students are upset by the environment of hatred that is created by seeing 'Trump 2016,' 'Accept the inevitable' and 'Build a wall' written all over campus and dealing with an administration that doesn't seem to care about what that implies for those who hold identities Trump has continuously been attacking throughout his campaign.”

• Many students, at Emory and elsewhere, are uniting behind a sort of social media form letter expressing support for the Emory protesters. Dozens on Facebook and Twitter have posted something identical or similar to a statement reading: "If you'd like to stand in solidarity with us, please use this as your status: 'I, a [identity] from [college/university/state/country], stand in solidarity with the Black and Brown students at Emory, against the intimidation, lies and deeply rooted racism that people of color continue to face -- on their campus, nationwide and globally. #1969not1836 #BlackBrownAndHere.'"

    

  Several students have also said that they received death threats after the protest.

• One student who says he participated in the protest wrote, “As many people have pointed out, yes, Trump supporters have the right to chalk and campaign for this racist and fascist presidential candidate. But we also have a right to protest it …. None of the protesters wanted to deny anyone 'freedom of speech.' People were concerned that there was vandalism and it took hours before the chalkings were washed out.” He went on to write that the protest Monday was about a host of issues in addition to the chalked messages, including “expanding the funding for undocumented students, hiring more faculty of color, and generally expanding resources for students of color.”

    

  Still, as Josh Goodman, a member of the Emory College Republicans, pointed out on the Fox News show The O’Reilly Factor, it was the Trump chalkings that sparked these protests: “I’ve seen a lot of support for Bernie Sanders in chalk, I’ve even seen pro-Black Lives Matter support,” which “raised no controversy.”

• Goodman also went on to express disapproval of the president's response to the students. “The president, I think he legitimized their claim,” he said. “I was pretty disappointed. I expected President James Wagner to come out fiercely against this, to stand for First Amendment rights, to stand for this student’s rights to support one of our two major parties’ political candidates, a front-runner, and he didn’t.”

    

  So far, it appears that no student had claimed responsibility for the chalkings.

    

  The Emory College Republicans Executive Board supports Ted Cruz and has previously condemned Donald Trump, writing in a statement, “It is not American to advocate for discrimination against one’s countrymen based on faith or national origin.”

• Zak Hudak, editor in chief of the student newspaper, The Emory Wheel, put out a call in a letter he posted for students to share their opinions with him as the paper’s editorial board works its way toward a stance. “I’ve heard criticisms from this very pro-speech side that it’s wrong for me to even acknowledge the feelings of fear and so forth of the protesters,” he said. The other side reached out as well, calling for “more extreme measures” and saying “you just don’t understand this.”

    

  Speaking for himself, and not for the Wheel, Hudak said, “I personally have taken a very strong stance in favor of the need to maintain free speech and open discourse even when that’s painful.” But, “I’m in no way against these protesters …. If we’re going to have freedom of speech, that means we have the freedom to talk about whether we have freedom of speech.”

• “This is genuine,” Hudak said. “This is a genuine thing [the protesters] are feeling. They’re afraid, they’re hurt, they’re not making this up. Nonetheless, I have to default to the paramount placement of freedom of speech. There are just no means by which you can say you can’t support a presidential candidate on campus.”

    

  In a statement sent to Inside Higher Ed, the university said it “has not identified the individual(s) responsible for placing chalking graffiti in various campus locations earlier this week, and no follow-up action is planned related to the incident. It’s important to note that chalkings by students are allowed as a form of expression on the Emory campus but must be limited to certain areas and must not deface campus property -- these chalkings did not follow guidelines -- that’s the issue regarding violation of policy, not the content."

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• It’s Time to End ‘Rape Culture’ Hysteria

     
   
   
   
  •   Caroline Kitchens  @cl_kitchens 
   
      March 20, 2014
• <h2 itemprop="alternativeHeadline" class="article-excerpt">The nation's largest and most influential anti-sexual-violence organization is rejecting the idea that culture — as opposed to the actions of individuals — is responsible for rape.</h2><br/> <div class="clipper-content clipper--loaded clipper--is-clipped" style="height: auto;"><br/> <aside class="right-rail__container right-rail__container--ad"><div class="right-rail__ad__wrapper right-rail__module"><div class="right-rail__ad" id="right-rail__ad-30545"><div id="tim_3"><div style="border: 0pt none;" id="google_ads_iframe_/8484/tim/opinion_3__container__"><iframe frameborder="0" height="250" marginwidth="0" title="3rd party ad content" name="google_ads_iframe_/8484/tim/opinion_3" scrolling="no" style="border: 0px none; vertical-align: bottom;" width="300" marginheight="0" id="google_ads_iframe_/8484/tim/opinion_3"></iframe></div></div></div></div><br><br/><div style="display: none;" id="ob_holder"><iframe 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She and her sisters-in-arms describe our society as a “rape culture” where violence against women is so normal, it’s almost invisible. <span style="line-height:1.5em;">Films, magazines, fashion, books, music, humor, even Barbie — according to the activists — cooperate in conveying the message that women are there to be used, abused and exploited. Recently, rape-culture theory has migrated from the lonely corners of the feminist blogosphere into the mainstream. In January, the White House </span><a rel="nofollow" href="http://www.whitehouse.gov/blog/2014/01/22/renewed-call-action-end-rape-and-sexual-assault" style="line-height:1.5em;">asserted</a><span style="line-height:1.5em;"> that we need to combat campus rape by “[changing] a culture of passivity and tolerance in this country, which too often allows this type of violence to persist.”</span></p></div>
• Tolerance for rape? Rape is a horrific crime, and rapists are despised. We have strict laws that Americans want to see enforced. Though rape is certainly a serious problem, there’s no evidence that it’s considered a cultural norm. Twenty-first century America does not have a rape culture; what we have is an out-of-control lobby leading the public and our educational and political leaders down the wrong path. Rape-culture theory is doing little to help victims, but its power to poison the minds of young women and lead to hostile environments for innocent males is immense.
• On college campuses, obsession with eliminating “rape culture” has led to censorship and hysteria. At Boston University, student activists launched a petition demanding the cancellation of a Robin Thicke concert because the lyrics of his hit song “Blurred Lines” allegedly celebrate “systemic patriarchy and sexual oppression.” (The lyrics may not exactly be pleasant to many women, but song lyrics don’t turn men into rapists. Yet, ludicrously, the song has already been banned at more than 20 British universities.) Activists at Wellesley recently demanded that administrators remove a statue of a sleepwalking man: The image of a nearly naked male could “trigger” memories of sexual assault for victims. Meanwhile, a growing number of young men find themselves charged with rape, named publicly and brought before campus judicial panels informed by rape-culture theory. In such courts, due process is practically nonexistent: guilty because accused.

• Rape-culture theorists dismiss critics who bring up examples of hysteria and false accusations as “rape denialists” and “rape apologists.” To even suggest that false accusations occur, according to activists, is to engage in “victim blaming.” But now, rape culturalists are confronting a formidable critic that even they will find hard to dismiss.

   

  RAINN (Rape, Abuse & Incest National Network) is America’s largest and most influential anti-sexual-violence organization. It’s the leading voice for sexual-assault victim advocacy. Indeed, rape-culture activists routinely cite the authority of RAINN to make their case. But in RAINN’s recent recommendations to the White House Task Force to Protect Students from Sexual Assault, it repudiates the rhetoric of the anti–“rape culture” movement:
• In the last few years, there has been an unfortunate trend towards blaming “rape culture” for the extensive problem of sexual violence on campus. While it is helpful to point out the systemic barriers to addressing the problem, it is important not to lose sight of a simple fact: Rape is caused not by cultural factors but by the conscious decisions, of a small percentage of the community, to commit a violent crime.

• RAINN urges the White House to “remain focused on the true cause of the problem” and suggests a three-pronged approach for combating rape: empowering community members through bystander intervention education, using “risk-reduction messaging” to encourage students to increase their personal safety and promoting clearer education on “where the ‘consent line’ is.” It also asserts that we should treat rape like the serious crime it is by giving power to trained law enforcement rather than internal campus judicial boards.

   

  RAINN is especially critical of the idea that we need to focus on teaching men not to rape — the hallmark of rape-culture activism. Since rape exists because our culture condones and normalizes it, activists say, we can end the epidemic of sexual violence only by teaching boys not to rape.

• No one would deny that we should teach boys to respect women. But by and large, this is already happening. By the time men reach college, RAINN explains, “most students have been exposed to 18 years of prevention messages, in one form or another.” The vast majority of men absorb these messages and view rape as the horrific crime that it is. So efforts to address rape need to focus on the very small portion of the population that “has proven itself immune to years of prevention messages.” They should not vilify the average guy.

   

  By blaming so-called rape culture, we implicate all men in a social atrocity, trivialize the experiences of survivors, and deflect blame from the rapists truly responsible for sexual violence. RAINN explains that the trend of focusing on rape culture “has the paradoxical effect of making it harder to stop sexual violence, since it removes the focus from the individual at fault, and seemingly mitigates personal responsibility for his or her own actions.”

• Moral panic over “rape culture” helps no one — least of all, survivors of sexual assault. College leaders, women’s groups and the White House have a choice. They can side with the thought police of the feminist blogosphere who are declaring war on Robin Thicke, the Sports Illustrated Swimsuit Edition, male statues and Barbie. Or they can listen to the sane counsel of RAINN.

   

  Caroline Kitchens is a research assistant at the American Enterprise Institute

7 more annotations...

• Changing Course on Anti-Semitic Remarks?

      

   

         

   

      

   

         

   

  Oberlin releases statements that seem to contradict its earlier position defending the right of a controversial professor, Joy Karega, to say what she wants on social media.
• March 7, 2016

      

   

     

  By

       

    Colleen Flaherty

      

   

         

   

      

   

         

   

  Despite criticism that it was being soft on anti-Semitism, Oberlin College doubled down last month on its position that a professor’s remarks on social media were protected speech. Now the college appears to be backtracking in a set of statements released over the weekend.

• “These postings are anti-Semitic and abhorrent,” Clyde S. McGregor, chair of Oberlin’s Board of Trustees, said regarding Facebook posts by Joy Karega, an assistant professor of rhetoric and composition. “We deplore anti-Semitism and all other forms of bigotry. They have no place at Oberlin. These grave issues must be considered expeditiously.”

    

  McGregor said that in consultation with Marvin Krislov, Oberlin’s president -- who has previously backed Karega’s right to say what she wants on social media -- “the board has asked the administration and faculty to challenge the assertion that there is any justification for these repugnant postings and report back to the college.”

• In 2014-15, after she came to Oberlin, Karega wrote that ISIS was really U.S. and Israeli intelligence personnel, and that they -- not terrorists -- had planned the Paris attacks on Charlie Hebdo. She also said Israel had downed Malaysian Airlines flight No. 17 over Ukraine, and supported Nation of Islam leader Louis Farrakhan’s declaration that Zionists and Israeli Jews were behind the Sept. 11 attacks.

    

  In addition to those falsehoods, Karega shared anti-Semitic images, such as a picture of the Jewish banking heir Jacob Rothschild with the words, “We own your news, the media, your oil and your government.”

• The posts have come to light recently, amid student and alumni concerns about escalating anti-Jewish rhetoric on campus.

    

  While factually unsound and otherwise questionable, many experts said, the posts were protected speech and covered by academic freedom, and Oberlin was doing the right thing in supporting Karega -- if not her statements.

    

  In a statement last month, Oberlin said it “respects the rights of its faculty, students, staff and alumni to express their personal views.” Yet acknowledgment of this right does “not signal institutional support for, or endorsement of, any specific position,” the statement continued. “The statements posted on social media by [Karega] are hers alone and do not represent the views of Oberlin.”

• Others still, including several major Israeli newspapers, said Oberlin was allowing free speech to be used as a veil for hate speech, and called on Oberlin to do more.

    

  Last week, Krislov, Oberlin’s president, responded personally to that criticism in a statement revealing that he’d been personally affected by Karega’s statements (Krislov is Jewish). But he didn’t seem to waver regarding Karega.

    

  “Cultivating academic freedom can be difficult and at times painful for any college community,” he wrote. “The principles of academic freedom and freedom of speech are not just principles to which we turn to face these challenges, but also the very practices that ensure we can develop meaningful responses to prejudice.”

• This freedom, he continued, “enables Oberlin’s faculty and students to think deeply about and to engage in frank, open discussion of ideas that some may find deeply offensive. Those discussions -- in classrooms, residence halls, libraries, and across our campus and town -- take place every day here. They are a vital part of the important work of liberal arts education at Oberlin and in our country.”

    

  McGregor’s statement strikes a different tone and seems to hint at possible action against Karega, or at least some kind of investigation. A second statement released Saturday -- saying that Krislov had met with several third-party groups, including the Jewish Federation of Cleveland, the Cleveland Hillel Foundation and the Anti-Defamation League -- hints at something similar.

• That joint statement, from Oberlin and the community groups, said the college’s administration “is taking its role seriously” and they’re working with Krislov to “recommend programming that can facilitate a positive discourse on campus to address the consequences and sources of anti-Semitism.”

    

  All parties “understand and accept that the college is required to follow established academic procedures when addressing questions regarding an individual faculty member,” the statement continues. “The Jewish community members present were satisfied that Oberlin is following those procedures and look forward to learning the outcome of that process.”

• “In a welcoming atmosphere, we discussed, openly and candidly, the potential implications of a professor’s personal views on classroom activity and student intimidation,” the joint statement said. “We also discussed our shared respect for academic freedom.”

    

  A college spokesman had no immediate comment as to precisely which next steps Oberlin is taking regarding Karega, if any.

    

  Karega referred questions for comment to her Facebook page, where she wrote that she was no longer making public statements about her case and that she was deferring to legal counsel.

• “Those of you who know me know that I have been and will continue to be firm in my convictions and resolve,” Karega wrote. “The messages of love and support have been overwhelming. Keep those coming. I read them all. And I also read the messages filled with slurs, harassment and threats too. Those messages have been overwhelming as well. Keep those coming too. I catalog and save them. Right along with the emails and phone messages. Again, I remain firm in my convictions and resolve.”

    

  Oberlin wouldn’t be alone in reversing course on a controversial faculty member. Steven Salaita, who was famously unhired by the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in 2014 for his anti-Israel remarks on Twitter, initially enjoyed the support of the university.

• John K. Wilson, an independent scholar of academic freedom and co-editor of the American Association of University Professors’ “Academe” blog, criticized Oberlin’s newest messages, saying he was especially disturbed by McGregor’s saying that the board “has asked the administration and faculty to challenge the assertion that there is any justification for these repugnant postings.”

    

  That’s because academic freedom means “that you don't need a ‘justification’ for saying something controversial or disliked,” Wilson said via email. “The justification is needed for punishing someone for their speech, and it must be an extraordinary justification.”
• Wilson also questioned the board’s apparent order that the administration and faculty change their views on academic freedom. Such a command itself is an attack on academic freedom, he said, and “undermines any future academic procedure in this case, because instead of a fair hearing, this professor would be evaluated by faculty and administrators who have already been commanded by their bosses to reach a particular conclusion.”

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• Concordia’s CFO Gets $235,000 Severance After 3 Months in Office

     

  Sonia Trudel’s Departure Was a “Mutual Agreement”

     

  News by Michelle Pucci — Published February 10, 2016

• Concordia gave $235,000 to now-departed executive Sonia Trudel, less than three months after she took up the university’s Chief Financial Officer position.

                    

  The severance package is stipulated in Trudel’s contract as being a year’s salary, according to documents obtained by The Link in an access to information request. She will receive the $235,000 as a salary continuance.

    

  Trudel was also given the right to insurance, benefits and access to an “annual professional development or scholarly research allowance” of $5,000, according to her termination letter. She had access to these benefits for 60 days after she was fired.

    

  Concordia is also offering “transition assistance” for four months.

• President Alan Shepard chose not to comment on the severance package in an interview on Friday. He said the departure was amicable.

    

  Trudel began working at Concordia on Aug. 17, and assumed the CFO position on Sept. 21. She left Concordia on Nov. 12, according to her discharge documents.

• According to Quebec labour laws, employers are supposed to provide up to eight weeks of pay, depending on the employee’s seniority. This doesn’t apply if the employee worked for less than three months.

    

  Before joining Concordia, she worked in CBC/Radio-Canada’s Real Estate Division and SNC-Lavalin Nexacor, a property management subsidiary of engineering and construction company SNC-Lavalin.

    

  Outgoing CFO Patrick Kelley resumed as interim head of Financial Services. Kelley had been Concordia’s CFO since 2010.

• “We are searching again for the next CFO,” Shepard said on Friday.

    

  The job posting will be up soon, he added, while commenting that the hiring process will “fundamentally” be the same.

    

  Her departure came at a time when universities in Quebec face budget cuts from the provincial government. Concordia’s 2015-2016 budget expects a deficit of $8.2 million and the university has lost more than $36 million in government subsidies since 2012.

    

  Concordia has offered six-figure severance packages to dismissed executives in the past.

    

  In 2010, Judith Woodsworth was urged to leave her position as president by the university’s board of directors halfway through her term in office. She returned the following year to Concordia as a French translation professor, but not before she was promised $703,500—or the equivalent of two years salary.

    

  Before her, former president Claude Lajeunesse, was dismissed in 2007 and took the $1 million remaining in his contract.

    

  The university was fined $2 million by the Minister of Education in 2012 for the payouts to senior administration.

    

  Read the documents here.

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• Concordia University executive hired to slash budget makes off with $235,000 in severance after 90 days

   

  

  Andy Riga, Postmedia News | February 10, 2016

• Concordia University gave a $235,000 severance payout to an executive hired last year to help deal with budget cuts. Sonia Trudel had been on the job for 90 days when she left the university.

   

  Trudel, a chartered professional accountant, joined Concordia on Aug. 17, first as a special adviser to the university’s president, and then, as of Sept. 21, as chief financial officer.

• When it hired Trudel, Concordia said it was “impressed by her experience, which includes working for public institutions that have faced funding cuts similar to those we are dealing with.”

   

  On Nov. 16, Concordia announced Trudel had “stepped down by mutual agreement.”

   

  On Wednesday, La Presse disclosed Concordia gave Trudel a $235,000 severance payout, the equivalent of one-year’s salary.

   

  Concordia spokesperson Chris Mota confirmed the payment but could not say why Trudel left. “We honoured the terms of her contract — that’s all I can say,” Mota said.

• “That’s too much money for someone who stayed for just three months,” said engineering professor Ted Stathopoulos, president of the Concordia University Faculty Association. “I’m surprised.”

   

  Cinema professor Dave Douglas, president of Concordia’s Part-Time Faculty Association, said Trudel’s quick exit was “quite scandalous.”

   

  Questions must be asked about “the process for hiring this person,” Douglas said. “It seems there was a fundamental problem that somehow was not addressed in the hiring that quickly made the position untenable. I certainly wouldn’t want to repeat that process.”

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• The Coddling of the American Mind

     

  In the name of emotional well-being, college students are increasingly demanding protection from words and ideas they don’t like. Here’s why that’s disastrous for education—and mental health.
• • Greg Lukianoff and Jonathan Haidt
     
  •     September 2015 Issue     
      
  •    
• Something strange is happening at America’s colleges and universities. A movement is arising, undirected and driven largely by students, to scrub campuses clean of words, ideas, and subjects that might cause discomfort or give offense. Last December, Jeannie Suk wrote in an online article for The New Yorker about law students asking her fellow professors at Harvard not to teach rape law—or, in one case, even use the word violate (as in “that violates the law”) lest it cause students distress. In February, Laura Kipnis, a professor at Northwestern University, wrote an essay in The Chronicle of Higher Education describing a new campus politics of sexual paranoia—and was then subjected to a long investigation after students who were offended by the article and by a tweet she’d sent filed Title IX complaints against her. In June, a professor protecting himself with a pseudonym wrote an essay for Vox describing how gingerly he now has to teach. “I’m a Liberal Professor, and My Liberal Students Terrify Me,” the headline said. A number of popular comedians, including Chris Rock, have stopped performing on college campuses (see Caitlin Flanagan’s article in this month’s issue). Jerry Seinfeld and Bill Maher have publicly condemned the oversensitivity of college students, saying too many of them can’t take a joke.
• Two terms have risen quickly from obscurity into common campus parlance. Microaggressions are small actions or word choices that seem on their face to have no malicious intent but that are thought of as a kind of violence nonetheless. For example, by some campus guidelines, it is a microaggression to ask an Asian American or Latino American “Where were you born?,” because this implies that he or she is not a real American. Trigger warnings are alerts that professors are expected to issue if something in a course might cause a strong emotional response. For example, some students have called for warnings that Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart describes racial violence and that F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby portrays misogyny and physical abuse, so that students who have been previously victimized by racism or domestic violence can choose to avoid these works, which they believe might “trigger” a recurrence of past trauma.
• Some recent campus actions border on the surreal. In April, at Brandeis University, the Asian American student association sought to raise awareness of microaggressions against Asians through an installation on the steps of an academic hall. The installation gave examples of microaggressions such as “Aren’t you supposed to be good at math?” and “I’m colorblind! I don’t see race.” But a backlash arose among other Asian American students, who felt that the display itself was a microaggression. The association removed the installation, and its president wrote an e-mail to the entire student body apologizing to anyone who was “triggered or hurt by the content of the microaggressions.”
• This new climate is slowly being institutionalized, and is affecting what can be said in the classroom, even as a basis for discussion. During the 2014–15 school year, for instance, the deans and department chairs at the 10 University of California system schools were presented by administrators at faculty leader-training sessions with examples of microaggressions. The list of offensive statements included: “America is the land of opportunity” and “I believe the most qualified person should get the job.”
• The press has typically described these developments as a resurgence of political correctness. That’s partly right, although there are important differences between what’s happening now and what happened in the 1980s and ’90s. That movement sought to restrict speech (specifically hate speech aimed at marginalized groups), but it also challenged the literary, philosophical, and historical canon, seeking to widen it by including more-diverse perspectives. The current movement is largely about emotional well-being. More than the last, it presumes an extraordinary fragility of the collegiate psyche, and therefore elevates the goal of protecting students from psychological harm. The ultimate aim, it seems, is to turn campuses into “safe spaces” where young adults are shielded from words and ideas that make some uncomfortable. And more than the last, this movement seeks to punish anyone who interferes with that aim, even accidentally. You might call this impulse vindictive protectiveness. It is creating a culture in which everyone must think twice before speaking up, lest they face charges of insensitivity, aggression, or worse.
• We have been studying this development for a while now, with rising alarm. (Greg Lukianoff is a constitutional lawyer and the president and CEO of the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education, which defends free speech and academic freedom on campus, and has advocated for students and faculty involved in many of the incidents this article describes; Jonathan Haidt is a social psychologist who studies the American culture wars. The stories of how we each came to this subject can be read here.) The dangers that these trends pose to scholarship and to the quality of American universities are significant; we could write a whole essay detailing them. But in this essay we focus on a different question: What are the effects of this new protectiveness on the students themselves? Does it benefit the people it is supposed to help? What exactly are students learning when they spend four years or more in a community that polices unintentional slights, places warning labels on works of classic literature, and in many other ways conveys the sense that words can be forms of violence that require strict control by campus authorities, who are expected to act as both protectors and prosecutors?

• There’s a saying common in education circles: Don’t teach students what to think; teach them how to think. The idea goes back at least as far as Socrates. Today, what we call the Socratic method is a way of teaching that fosters critical thinking, in part by encouraging students to question their own unexamined beliefs, as well as the received wisdom of those around them. Such questioning sometimes leads to discomfort, and even to anger, on the way to understanding.

  But vindictive protectiveness teaches students to think in a very different way. It prepares them poorly for professional life, which often demands intellectual engagement with people and ideas one might find uncongenial or wrong. The harm may be more immediate, too. A campus culture devoted to policing speech and punishing speakers is likely to engender patterns of thought that are surprisingly similar to those long identified by cognitive behavioral therapists as causes of depression and anxiety. The new protectiveness may be teaching students to think pathologically.

• How Did We Get Here?

  It’s difficult to know exactly why vindictive protectiveness has burst forth so powerfully in the past few years. The phenomenon may be related to recent changes in the interpretation of federal antidiscrimination statutes (about which more later). But the answer probably involves generational shifts as well. Childhood itself has changed greatly during the past generation. Many Baby Boomers and Gen Xers can remember riding their bicycles around their hometowns, unchaperoned by adults, by the time they were 8 or 9 years old. In the hours after school, kids were expected to occupy themselves, getting into minor scrapes and learning from their experiences. But “free range” childhood became less common in the 1980s. The surge in crime from the ’60s through the early ’90s made Baby Boomer parents more protective than their own parents had been. Stories of abducted children appeared more frequently in the news, and in 1984, images of them began showing up on milk cartons. In response, many parents pulled in the reins and worked harder to keep their children safe.

• The flight to safety also happened at school. Dangerous play structures were removed from playgrounds; peanut butter was banned from student lunches. After the 1999 Columbine massacre in Colorado, many schools cracked down on bullying, implementing “zero tolerance” policies. In a variety of ways, children born after 1980—the Millennials—got a consistent message from adults: life is dangerous, but adults will do everything in their power to protect you from harm, not just from strangers but from one another as well.

  These same children grew up in a culture that was (and still is) becoming more politically polarized. Republicans and Democrats have never particularly liked each other, but survey data going back to the 1970s show that on average, their mutual dislike used to be surprisingly mild. Negative feelings have grown steadily stronger, however, particularly since the early 2000s. Political scientists call this process “affective partisan polarization,” and it is a very serious problem for any democracy. As each side increasingly demonizes the other, compromise becomes more difficult. A recent study shows that implicit or unconscious biases are now at least as strong across political parties as they are across races.

• So it’s not hard to imagine why students arriving on campus today might be more desirous of protection and more hostile toward ideological opponents than in generations past. This hostility, and the self-righteousness fueled by strong partisan emotions, can be expected to add force to any moral crusade. A principle of moral psychology is that “morality binds and blinds.” Part of what we do when we make moral judgments is express allegiance to a team. But that can interfere with our ability to think critically. Acknowledging that the other side’s viewpoint has any merit is risky—your teammates may see you as a traitor.

  Social media makes it extraordinarily easy to join crusades, express solidarity and outrage, and shun traitors. Facebook was founded in 2004, and since 2006 it has allowed children as young as 13 to join. This means that the first wave of students who spent all their teen years using Facebook reached college in 2011, and graduated from college only this year.
• These first true “social-media natives” may be different from members of previous generations in how they go about sharing their moral judgments and supporting one another in moral campaigns and conflicts. We find much to like about these trends; young people today are engaged with one another, with news stories, and with prosocial endeavors to a greater degree than when the dominant technology was television. But social media has also fundamentally shifted the balance of power in relationships between students and faculty; the latter increasingly fear what students might do to their reputations and careers by stirring up online mobs against them.

• We do not mean to imply simple causation, but rates of mental illness in young adults have been rising, both on campus and off, in recent decades. Some portion of the increase is surely due to better diagnosis and greater willingness to seek help, but most experts seem to agree that some portion of the trend is real. Nearly all of the campus mental-health directors surveyed in 2013 by the American College Counseling Association reported that the number of students with severe psychological problems was rising at their schools. The rate of emotional distress reported by students themselves is also high, and rising. In a 2014 survey by the American College Health Association, 54 percent of college students surveyed said that they had “felt overwhelming anxiety” in the past 12 months, up from 49 percent in the same survey just five years earlier. Students seem to be reporting more emotional crises; many seem fragile, and this has surely changed the way university faculty and administrators interact with them. The question is whether some of those changes might be doing more harm than good.

  The Thinking Cure

  For millennia, philosophers have understood that we don’t see life as it is; we see a version distorted by our hopes, fears, and other attachments. The Buddha said, “Our life is the creation of our mind.” Marcus Aurelius said, “Life itself is but what you deem it.” The quest for wisdom in many traditions begins with this insight. Early Buddhists and the Stoics, for example, developed practices for reducing attachments, thinking more clearly, and finding release from the emotional torments of normal mental life.
• Cognitive behavioral therapy is a modern embodiment of this ancient wisdom. It is the most extensively studied nonpharmaceutical treatment of mental illness, and is used widely to treat depression, anxiety disorders, eating disorders, and addiction. It can even be of help to schizophrenics. No other form of psychotherapy has been shown to work for a broader range of problems. Studies have generally found that it is as effective as antidepressant drugs (such as Prozac) in the treatment of anxiety and depression. The therapy is relatively quick and easy to learn; after a few months of training, many patients can do it on their own. Unlike drugs, cognitive behavioral therapy keeps working long after treatment is stopped, because it teaches thinking skills that people can continue to use.
• The goal is to minimize distorted thinking and see the world more accurately. You start by learning the names of the dozen or so most common cognitive distortions (such as overgeneralizing, discounting positives, and emotional reasoning; see the list at the bottom of this article). Each time you notice yourself falling prey to one of them, you name it, describe the facts of the situation, consider alternative interpretations, and then choose an interpretation of events more in line with those facts. Your emotions follow your new interpretation. In time, this process becomes automatic. When people improve their mental hygiene in this way—when they free themselves from the repetitive irrational thoughts that had previously filled so much of their consciousness—they become less depressed, anxious, and angry.

• The parallel to formal education is clear: cognitive behavioral therapy teaches good critical-thinking skills, the sort that educators have striven for so long to impart. By almost any definition, critical thinking requires grounding one’s beliefs in evidence rather than in emotion or desire, and learning how to search for and evaluate evidence that might contradict one’s initial hypothesis. But does campus life today foster critical thinking? Or does it coax students to think in more-distorted ways?

  Let’s look at recent trends in higher education in light of the distortions that cognitive behavioral therapy identifies. We will draw the names and descriptions of these distortions from David D. Burns’s popular book Feeling Good, as well as from the second edition of Treatment Plans and Interventions for Depression and Anxiety Disorders, by Robert L. Leahy, Stephen J. F. Holland, and Lata K. McGinn.

• Higher Education’s Embrace of “Emotional Reasoning”

  Burns defines emotional reasoning as assuming “that your negative emotions necessarily reflect the way things really are: ‘I feel it, therefore it must be true.’ ” Leahy, Holland, and McGinn define it as letting “your feelings guide your interpretation of reality.” But, of course, subjective feelings are not always trustworthy guides; unrestrained, they can cause people to lash out at others who have done nothing wrong. Therapy often involves talking yourself down from the idea that each of your emotional responses represents something true or important.

• Emotional reasoning dominates many campus debates and discussions. A claim that someone’s words are “offensive” is not just an expression of one’s own subjective feeling of offendedness. It is, rather, a public charge that the speaker has done something objectively wrong. It is a demand that the speaker apologize or be punished by some authority for committing an offense.

  There have always been some people who believe they have a right not to be offended. Yet throughout American history—from the Victorian era to the free-speech activism of the 1960s and ’70s—radicals have pushed boundaries and mocked prevailing sensibilities. Sometime in the 1980s, however, college campuses began to focus on preventing offensive speech, especially speech that might be hurtful to women or minority groups. The sentiment underpinning this goal was laudable, but it quickly produced some absurd results.

• Among the most famous early examples was the so-called water-buffalo incident at the University of Pennsylvania. In 1993, the university charged an Israeli-born student with racial harassment after he yelled “Shut up, you water buffalo!” to a crowd of black sorority women that was making noise at night outside his dorm-room window. Many scholars and pundits at the time could not see how the term water buffalo (a rough translation of a Hebrew insult for a thoughtless or rowdy person) was a racial slur against African Americans, and as a result, the case became international news.

  Claims of a right not to be offended have continued to arise since then, and universities have continued to privilege them. In a particularly egregious 2008 case, for instance, Indiana University–Purdue University at Indianapolis found a white student guilty of racial harassment for reading a book titled Notre Dame vs. the Klan. The book honored student opposition to the Ku Klux Klan when it marched on Notre Dame in 1924. Nonetheless, the picture of a Klan rally on the book’s cover offended at least one of the student’s co-workers (he was a janitor as well as a student), and that was enough for a guilty finding by the university’s Affirmative Action Office.
• These examples may seem extreme, but the reasoning behind them has become more commonplace on campus in recent years. Last year, at the University of St. Thomas, in Minnesota, an event called Hump Day, which would have allowed people to pet a camel, was abruptly canceled. Students had created a Facebook group where they protested the event for animal cruelty, for being a waste of money, and for being insensitive to people from the Middle East. The inspiration for the camel had almost certainly come from a popular TV commercial in which a camel saunters around an office on a Wednesday, celebrating “hump day”; it was devoid of any reference to Middle Eastern peoples. Nevertheless, the group organizing the event announced on its Facebook page that the event would be canceled because the “program [was] dividing people and would make for an uncomfortable and possibly unsafe environment.”
• Because there is a broad ban in academic circles on “blaming the victim,” it is generally considered unacceptable to question the reasonableness (let alone the sincerity) of someone’s emotional state, particularly if those emotions are linked to one’s group identity. The thin argument “I’m offended” becomes an unbeatable trump card. This leads to what Jonathan Rauch, a contributing editor at this magazine, calls the “offendedness sweepstakes,” in which opposing parties use claims of offense as cudgels. In the process, the bar for what we consider unacceptable speech is lowered further and further.
• Since 2013, new pressure from the federal government has reinforced this trend. Federal antidiscrimination statutes regulate on-campus harassment and unequal treatment based on sex, race, religion, and national origin. Until recently, the Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights acknowledged that speech must be “objectively offensive” before it could be deemed actionable as sexual harassment—it would have to pass the “reasonable person” test. To be prohibited, the office wrote in 2003, allegedly harassing speech would have to go “beyond the mere expression of views, words, symbols or thoughts that some person finds offensive.”

• But in 2013, the Departments of Justice and Education greatly broadened the definition of sexual harassment to include verbal conduct that is simply “unwelcome.” Out of fear of federal investigations, universities are now applying that standard—defining unwelcome speech as harassment—not just to sex, but to race, religion, and veteran status as well. Everyone is supposed to rely upon his or her own subjective feelings to decide whether a comment by a professor or a fellow student is unwelcome, and therefore grounds for a harassment claim. Emotional reasoning is now accepted as evidence.

  If our universities are teaching students that their emotions can be used effectively as weapons—or at least as evidence in administrative proceedings—then they are teaching students to nurture a kind of hypersensitivity that will lead them into countless drawn-out conflicts in college and beyond. Schools may be training students in thinking styles that will damage their careers and friendships, along with their mental health.

• Fortune-Telling and Trigger Warnings

  Burns defines fortune-telling as “anticipat[ing] that things will turn out badly” and feeling “convinced that your prediction is an already-established fact.” Leahy, Holland, and McGinn define it as “predict[ing] the future negatively” or seeing potential danger in an everyday situation. The recent spread of demands for trigger warnings on reading assignments with provocative content is an example of fortune-telling.

  The idea that words (or smells or any sensory input) can trigger searing memories of past trauma—and intense fear that it may be repeated—has been around at least since World War I, when psychiatrists began treating soldiers for what is now called post-traumatic stress disorder. But explicit trigger warnings are believed to have originated much more recently, on message boards in the early days of the Internet. Trigger warnings became particularly prevalent in self-help and feminist forums, where they allowed readers who had suffered from traumatic events like sexual assault to avoid graphic content that might trigger flashbacks or panic attacks. Search-engine trends indicate that the phrase broke into mainstream use online around 2011, spiked in 2014, and reached an all-time high in 2015. The use of trigger warnings on campus appears to have followed a similar trajectory; seemingly overnight, students at universities across the country have begun demanding that their professors issue warnings before covering material that might evoke a negative emotional response.
• In 2013, a task force composed of administrators, students, recent alumni, and one faculty member at Oberlin College, in Ohio, released an online resource guide for faculty (subsequently retracted in the face of faculty pushback) that included a list of topics warranting trigger warnings. These topics included classism and privilege, among many others. The task force recommended that materials that might trigger negative reactions among students be avoided altogether unless they “contribute directly” to course goals, and suggested that works that were “too important to avoid” be made optional.

• It’s hard to imagine how novels illustrating classism and privilege could provoke or reactivate the kind of terror that is typically implicated in PTSD. Rather, trigger warnings are sometimes demanded for a long list of ideas and attitudes that some students find politically offensive, in the name of preventing other students from being harmed. This is an example of what psychologists call “motivated reasoning”—we spontaneously generate arguments for conclusions we want to support. Once you find something hateful, it is easy to argue that exposure to the hateful thing could traumatize some other people. You believe that you know how others will react, and that their reaction could be devastating. Preventing that devastation becomes a moral obligation for the whole community. Books for which students have called publicly for trigger warnings within the past couple of years include Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway (at Rutgers, for “suicidal inclinations”) and Ovid’s Metamorphoses (at Columbia, for sexual assault).

  Jeannie Suk’s New Yorker essay described the difficulties of teaching rape law in the age of trigger warnings. Some students, she wrote, have pressured their professors to avoid teaching the subject in order to protect themselves and their classmates from potential distress. Suk compares this to trying to teach “a medical student who is training to be a surgeon but who fears that he’ll become distressed if he sees or handles blood.”

• However, there is a deeper problem with trigger warnings. According to the most-basic tenets of psychology, the very idea of helping people with anxiety disorders avoid the things they fear is misguided. A person who is trapped in an elevator during a power outage may panic and think she is going to die. That frightening experience can change neural connections in her amygdala, leading to an elevator phobia. If you want this woman to retain her fear for life, you should help her avoid elevators.

  But if you want to help her return to normalcy, you should take your cues from Ivan Pavlov and guide her through a process known as exposure therapy. You might start by asking the woman to merely look at an elevator from a distance—standing in a building lobby, perhaps—until her apprehension begins to subside. If nothing bad happens while she’s standing in the lobby—if the fear is not “reinforced”—then she will begin to learn a new association: elevators are not dangerous. (This reduction in fear during exposure is called habituation.) Then, on subsequent days, you might ask her to get closer, and on later days to push the call button, and eventually to step in and go up one floor. This is how the amygdala can get rewired again to associate a previously feared situation with safety or normalcy.
• Students who call for trigger warnings may be correct that some of their peers are harboring memories of trauma that could be reactivated by course readings. But they are wrong to try to prevent such reactivations. Students with PTSD should of course get treatment, but they should not try to avoid normal life, with its many opportunities for habituation. Classroom discussions are safe places to be exposed to incidental reminders of trauma (such as the word violate). A discussion of violence is unlikely to be followed by actual violence, so it is a good way to help students change the associations that are causing them discomfort. And they’d better get their habituation done in college, because the world beyond college will be far less willing to accommodate requests for trigger warnings and opt-outs.
• The expansive use of trigger warnings may also foster unhealthy mental habits in the vastly larger group of students who do not suffer from PTSD or other anxiety disorders. People acquire their fears not just from their own past experiences, but from social learning as well. If everyone around you acts as though something is dangerous—elevators, certain neighborhoods, novels depicting racism—then you are at risk of acquiring that fear too. The psychiatrist Sarah Roff pointed this out last year in an online article for The Chronicle of Higher Education. “One of my biggest concerns about trigger warnings,” Roff wrote, “is that they will apply not just to those who have experienced trauma, but to all students, creating an atmosphere in which they are encouraged to believe that there is something dangerous or damaging about discussing difficult aspects of our history.”
• In an article published last year by Inside Higher Ed, seven humanities professors wrote that the trigger-warning movement was “already having a chilling effect on [their] teaching and pedagogy.” They reported their colleagues’ receiving “phone calls from deans and other administrators investigating student complaints that they have included ‘triggering’ material in their courses, with or without warnings.” A trigger warning, they wrote, “serves as a guarantee that students will not experience unexpected discomfort and implies that if they do, a contract has been broken.” When students come to expect trigger warnings for any material that makes them uncomfortable, the easiest way for faculty to stay out of trouble is to avoid material that might upset the most sensitive student in the class.

• Magnification, Labeling, and Microaggressions

  Burns defines magnification as “exaggerat[ing] the importance of things,” and Leahy, Holland, and McGinn define labeling as “assign[ing] global negative traits to yourself and others.” The recent collegiate trend of uncovering allegedly racist, sexist, classist, or otherwise discriminatory microaggressions doesn’t incidentally teach students to focus on small or accidental slights. Its purpose is to get students to focus on them and then relabel the people who have made such remarks as aggressors.

  The term microaggression originated in the 1970s and referred to subtle, often unconscious racist affronts. The definition has expanded in recent years to include anything that can be perceived as discriminatory on virtually any basis. For example, in 2013, a student group at UCLA staged a sit-in during a class taught by Val Rust, an education professor. The group read a letter aloud expressing their concerns about the campus’s hostility toward students of color. Although Rust was not explicitly named, the group quite clearly criticized his teaching as microaggressive. In the course of correcting his students’ grammar and spelling, Rust had noted that a student had wrongly capitalized the first letter of the word indigenous. Lowercasing the capital I was an insult to the student and her ideology, the group claimed.

• Even joking about microaggressions can be seen as an aggression, warranting punishment. Last fall, Omar Mahmood, a student at the University of Michigan, wrote a satirical column for a conservative student publication, The Michigan Review, poking fun at what he saw as a campus tendency to perceive microaggressions in just about anything. Mahmood was also employed at the campus newspaper, The Michigan Daily. The Daily’s editors said that the way Mahmood had “satirically mocked the experiences of fellow Daily contributors and minority communities on campus … created a conflict of interest.” The Daily terminated Mahmood after he described the incident to two Web sites, The College Fix and The Daily Caller. A group of women later vandalized Mahmood’s doorway with eggs, hot dogs, gum, and notes with messages such as “Everyone hates you, you violent prick.” When speech comes to be seen as a form of violence, vindictive protectiveness can justify a hostile, and perhaps even violent, response.

  In March, the student government at Ithaca College, in upstate New York, went so far as to propose the creation of an anonymous microaggression-reporting system. Student sponsors envisioned some form of disciplinary action against “oppressors” engaged in belittling speech. One of the sponsors of the program said that while “not … every instance will require trial or some kind of harsh punishment,” she wanted the program to be “record-keeping but with impact.”

• Surely people make subtle or thinly veiled racist or sexist remarks on college campuses, and it is right for students to raise questions and initiate discussions about such cases. But the increased focus on microaggressions coupled with the endorsement of emotional reasoning is a formula for a constant state of outrage, even toward well-meaning speakers trying to engage in genuine discussion.

  What are we doing to our students if we encourage them to develop extra-thin skin in the years just before they leave the cocoon of adult protection and enter the workforce? Would they not be better prepared to flourish if we taught them to question their own emotional reactions, and to give people the benefit of the doubt?

• Teaching Students to Catastrophize and Have Zero Tolerance

  Burns defines catastrophizing as a kind of magnification that turns “commonplace negative events into nightmarish monsters.” Leahy, Holland, and McGinn define it as believing “that what has happened or will happen” is “so awful and unbearable that you won’t be able to stand it.” Requests for trigger warnings involve catastrophizing, but this way of thinking colors other areas of campus thought as well.

• Catastrophizing rhetoric about physical danger is employed by campus administrators more commonly than you might think—sometimes, it seems, with cynical ends in mind. For instance, last year administrators at Bergen Community College, in New Jersey, suspended Francis Schmidt, a professor, after he posted a picture of his daughter on his Google+ account. The photo showed her in a yoga pose, wearing a T-shirt that read I will take what is mine with fire & blood, a quote from the HBO show Game of Thrones. Schmidt had filed a grievance against the school about two months earlier after being passed over for a sabbatical. The quote was interpreted as a threat by a campus administrator, who received a notification after Schmidt posted the picture; it had been sent, automatically, to a whole group of contacts. According to Schmidt, a Bergen security official present at a subsequent meeting between administrators and Schmidt thought the word fire could refer to AK-47s.

  Then there is the eight-year legal saga at Valdosta State University, in Georgia, where a student was expelled for protesting the construction of a parking garage by posting an allegedly “threatening” collage on Facebook. The collage described the proposed structure as a “memorial” parking garage—a joke referring to a claim by the university president that the garage would be part of his legacy. The president interpreted the collage as a threat against his life.

• It should be no surprise that students are exhibiting similar sensitivity. At the University of Central Florida in 2013, for example, Hyung-il Jung, an accounting instructor, was suspended after a student reported that Jung had made a threatening comment during a review session. Jung explained to the Orlando Sentinel that the material he was reviewing was difficult, and he’d noticed the pained look on students’ faces, so he made a joke. “It looks like you guys are being slowly suffocated by these questions,” he recalled saying. “Am I on a killing spree or what?”

  After the student reported Jung’s comment, a group of nearly 20 others e-mailed the UCF administration explaining that the comment had clearly been made in jest. Nevertheless, UCF suspended Jung from all university duties and demanded that he obtain written certification from a mental-health professional that he was “not a threat to [himself] or to the university community” before he would be allowed to return to campus.

• All of these actions teach a common lesson: smart people do, in fact, overreact to innocuous speech, make mountains out of molehills, and seek punishment for anyone whose words make anyone else feel uncomfortable.

  Mental Filtering and Disinvitation Season

  As Burns defines it, mental filtering is “pick[ing] out a negative detail in any situation and dwell[ing] on it exclusively, thus perceiving that the whole situation is negative.” Leahy, Holland, and McGinn refer to this as “negative filtering,” which they define as “focus[ing] almost exclusively on the negatives and seldom notic[ing] the positives.” When applied to campus life, mental filtering allows for simpleminded demonization.

• Students and faculty members in large numbers modeled this cognitive distortion during 2014’s “disinvitation season.” That’s the time of year—usually early spring—when commencement speakers are announced and when students and professors demand that some of those speakers be disinvited because of things they have said or done. According to data compiled by the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education, since 2000, at least 240 campaigns have been launched at U.S. universities to prevent public figures from appearing at campus events; most of them have occurred since 2009.

  Consider two of the most prominent disinvitation targets of 2014: former U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice and the International Monetary Fund’s managing director, Christine Lagarde. Rice was the first black female secretary of state; Lagarde was the first woman to become finance minister of a G8 country and the first female head of the IMF. Both speakers could have been seen as highly successful role models for female students, and Rice for minority students as well. But the critics, in effect, discounted any possibility of something positive coming from those speeches.

• Members of an academic community should of course be free to raise questions about Rice’s role in the Iraq War or to look skeptically at the IMF’s policies. But should dislike of part of a person’s record disqualify her altogether from sharing her perspectives?

  If campus culture conveys the idea that visitors must be pure, with résumés that never offend generally left-leaning campus sensibilities, then higher education will have taken a further step toward intellectual homogeneity and the creation of an environment in which students rarely encounter diverse viewpoints. And universities will have reinforced the belief that it’s okay to filter out the positive. If students graduate believing that they can learn nothing from people they dislike or from those with whom they disagree, we will have done them a great intellectual disservice.

• What Can We Do Now?

  Attempts to shield students from words, ideas, and people that might cause them emotional discomfort are bad for the students. They are bad for the workplace, which will be mired in unending litigation if student expectations of safety are carried forward. And they are bad for American democracy, which is already paralyzed by worsening partisanship. When the ideas, values, and speech of the other side are seen not just as wrong but as willfully aggressive toward innocent victims, it is hard to imagine the kind of mutual respect, negotiation, and compromise that are needed to make politics a positive-sum game.

  Rather than trying to protect students from words and ideas that they will inevitably encounter, colleges should do all they can to equip students to thrive in a world full of words and ideas that they cannot control. One of the great truths taught by Buddhism (and Stoicism, Hinduism, and many other traditions) is that you can never achieve happiness by making the world conform to your desires. But you can master your desires and habits of thought. This, of course, is the goal of cognitive behavioral therapy. With this in mind, here are some steps that might help reverse the tide of bad thinking on campus.
• The biggest single step in the right direction does not involve faculty or university administrators, but rather the federal government, which should release universities from their fear of unreasonable investigation and sanctions by the Department of Education. Congress should define peer-on-peer harassment according to the Supreme Court’s definition in the 1999 case Davis v. Monroe County Board of Education. The Davis standard holds that a single comment or thoughtless remark by a student does not equal harassment; harassment requires a pattern of objectively offensive behavior by one student that interferes with another student’s access to education. Establishing the Davis standard would help eliminate universities’ impulse to police their students’ speech so carefully.

• Universities themselves should try to raise consciousness about the need to balance freedom of speech with the need to make all students feel welcome. Talking openly about such conflicting but important values is just the sort of challenging exercise that any diverse but tolerant community must learn to do. Restrictive speech codes should be abandoned.

  Universities should also officially and strongly discourage trigger warnings. They should endorse the American Association of University Professors’ report on these warnings, which notes, “The presumption that students need to be protected rather than challenged in a classroom is at once infantilizing and anti-intellectual.” Professors should be free to use trigger warnings if they choose to do so, but by explicitly discouraging the practice, universities would help fortify the faculty against student requests for such warnings.
• Finally, universities should rethink the skills and values they most want to impart to their incoming students. At present, many freshman-orientation programs try to raise student sensitivity to a nearly impossible level. Teaching students to avoid giving unintentional offense is a worthy goal, especially when the students come from many different cultural backgrounds. But students should also be taught how to live in a world full of potential offenses. Why not teach incoming students how to practice cognitive behavioral therapy? Given high and rising rates of mental illness, this simple step would be among the most humane and supportive things a university could do. The cost and time commitment could be kept low: a few group training sessions could be supplemented by Web sites or apps. But the outcome could pay dividends in many ways. For example, a shared vocabulary about reasoning, common distortions, and the appropriate use of evidence to draw conclusions would facilitate critical thinking and real debate. It would also tone down the perpetual state of outrage that seems to engulf some colleges these days, allowing students’ minds to open more widely to new ideas and new people. A greater commitment to formal, public debate on campus—and to the assembly of a more politically diverse faculty—would further serve that goal.

• Thomas Jefferson, upon founding the University of Virginia, said:

  This institution will be based on the illimitable freedom of the human mind. For here we are not afraid to follow truth wherever it may lead, nor to tolerate any error so long as reason is left free to combat it.

  We believe that this is still—and will always be—the best attitude for American universities. Faculty, administrators, students, and the federal government all have a role to play in restoring universities to their historic mission.

• Common Cognitive Distortions

  A partial list from Robert L. Leahy, Stephen J. F. Holland, and Lata K. McGinn’s Treatment Plans and Interventions for Depression and Anxiety Disorders (2012).

  1. Mind reading. You assume that you know what people think without having sufficient evidence of their thoughts. “He thinks I’m a loser.”

  2. Fortune-telling. You predict the future negatively: things will get worse, or there is danger ahead. “I’ll fail that exam,” or “I won’t get the job.”

  3. Catastrophizing.You believe that what has happened or will happen will be so awful and unbearable that you won’t be able to stand it. “It would be terrible if I failed.”

• 4. Labeling. You assign global negative traits to yourself and others. “I’m undesirable,” or “He’s a rotten person.”

  5. Discounting positives. You claim that the positive things you or others do are trivial. “That’s what wives are supposed to do—so it doesn’t count when she’s nice to me,” or “Those successes were easy, so they don’t matter.”

  6. Negative filtering. You focus almost exclusively on the negatives and seldom notice the positives. “Look at all of the people who don’t like me.”

• 7. Overgeneralizing. You perceive a global pattern of negatives on the basis of a single incident. “This generally happens to me. I seem to fail at a lot of things.”

  8. Dichotomous thinking. You view events or people in all-or-nothing terms. “I get rejected by everyone,” or “It was a complete waste of time.”

  9. Blaming. You focus on the other person as the source of your negative feelings, and you refuse to take responsibility for changing yourself. “She’s to blame for the way I feel now,” or “My parents caused all my problems.”

• 10. What if? You keep asking a series of questions about “what if” something happens, and you fail to be satisfied with any of the answers. “Yeah, but what if I get anxious?,” or “What if I can’t catch my breath?”

  11. Emotional reasoning. You let your feelings guide your interpretation of reality. “I feel depressed; therefore, my marriage is not working out.”

  12. Inability to disconfirm. You reject any evidence or arguments that might contradict your negative thoughts. For example, when you have the thought I’m unlovable, you reject as irrelevant any evidence that people like you. Consequently, your thought cannot be refuted. “That’s not the real issue. There are deeper problems. There are other factors.”

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• The Real Reason We Need to Stop Trying to Protect Everyone’s Feelings

   

    By Ryan Holiday • 09/10/15

• Like every kid, I was forced to read Fahrenheit 451 in high school.

   

  If you’d asked me what it was about before last week, I would have told you: “Firemen who burn books.”

   

  And if you’d asked me why on earth they did that, I would have answered just as confidently: “Because a tyrannical government wanted them to.”

   

  There is a trend afoot to conveniently remember the works of authors like Ray Bradbury and Aldous Huxley as warnings against distant totalitarianism and control. But this only scratches the surface of what these books are about.

• Earlier this year a community college student in San Bernardino protested being required to read a Neil Gaiman graphic novel in one of her classes. It was too graphic, apparently. Her father—who does not seem to understand that his daughter is a separate human being (an adult one no less)—told The Los Angeles Times, “If they [had] put a disclaimer on this, we wouldn’t have taken the course.” A mom in Tennessee has complained that the gynecological information in the book in the bestselling nonfiction science book, The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks, is too pornographic for her 10th grade son.  

   

  While these conservative complaints about the content of books is unfortunately as old as time. We’re also seeing surge in a different type.

• A Rutgers student has proposed putting trigger warnings on The Great Gatsby. Robin Thicke’s song “Blurred Lines” was banned on many college campuses for promoting rape. Last year, Wellesley students created a petition to remove an art project featuring a lifelike statue of a sleepwalking man in his underwear in the snow because it caused “undue stress.” Controversial speakers (many conservative) have been blocked from speaking at college commencements. Pick up artists—never convicted of any crime—have had their visas revoked due to trending Twitter hashtags.

   

  In August, Jezebel ran the headline “Holy Shit, Who Thought This Nazi Romance Novel Was a Good Idea?” I remember thinking, “Um, probably the fucking writer who spent a lot of time writing it.” Whether they succeeded at making anything good, I cannot say, but should they be shamed for trying? It’s not as if there aren’t good books of Nazi love stories. In fact, there is one called The Reader!

• The people in these examples are certainly a bit ridiculous—but by no means bad. None of them see themselves as censors, naturally. They were being sensitive, outraged, protective or triggered. And to be fair, most of their complaints and protests stop short of actually saying “This should not be allowed anywhere.”

   

  But that distinction matters less than they think.

   

  Let’s go back to 451, which I found myself re-reading recently. It begins with Guy Montag burning a house that contained books. Why? How did it come to be that firemen burned books instead of putting out fires as they always had?

• The firemen have been doing it for so long they have no idea. Most of them have never even read a book. Except one fireman—Captain Beatty—who has been around long enough to remember what life was like before. As Montag begins to doubt his profession—going as far as to hide a book in his house—he is subjected to a speech from Beatty. In it Beatty explains that it wasn’t the government that decided that books were a threat. It was his fellow citizens.

   

  “It didn’t come from the government down,” he tells him. “There was no dictum, no declaration, no censorship, to start with, no!”

   

  In fact, it was something rather simple—something that should sound very familiar. It was a desire not to offend—of an earnest notion to literally have “everyone made equal.” And it’s at the end of this speech that we get the killer passage:

• “You must understand that our civilization is so vast that we can’t have our minorities upset and stirred. Ask yourself, What do we want in this country above all? People want to be happy, isn’t that right?…Colored people don’t like Little Black Sambo. Burn it. White people don’t feel good about Uncle Tom’s Cabin. Burn it. Someone’s written a book on tobacco and cancer of the lungs? The cigarette people are weeping? Burn the book. Serenity, Montag. Peace, Montag. Take your fight outside. Better yet, to the incinerator.”

   

  And before you get offended, let’s clarify what Bradbury means by minorities. He’s not talking about race. He’s talking about it in the same way that Madison and Hamilton did in the Federalist Papers. He’s speaking about small, interested groups who try to force the rest of the majority to adhere to the minority’s set of beliefs.

• I don’t mean to cherry pick. I see no need to pile on to college students as being particularly responsible for the “coddling of the American mind.” (Great piece, read it.) Though I do find it ironic that we require kids to read this book in high school and just a few years (or months) later, they’re leading the charge on exactly the kind of well-intentioned censorship Bradbury was talking about. I don’t mean to say that these examples come close to the kind of overt censorship that every reasonable person dreads. But I do mean to say that they come from the same place—and very alarmingly—ultimately end together in a much worse place.

   

  In the 50th anniversary edition, Bradbury includes a short afterword where he gives his thoughts on current culture. Almost as if he is speaking directly about the events above, he wrote: “There is more than one way to burn a book. And the world is full of people running around with lit matches.”

   

  There’s that saying: The road to hell is paved with good intentions. When it comes to censorship, one might say that the road to thought and speech control is paved by people trying to protect other people’s feelings.

• It’s important to realize that today, we have a media system paid by the pageview and thus motivated with very real financial incentives to find things to be offended about—because offense and outrage are high-valence traffic triggers. We have another industry of people—some call them Social Justice Warriors—who, despite their sincerity of belief, have also managed to build huge platforms by inventing issues and conflicts which they then ride to prominence and influence. One might call both of these types Rage Profiteers. They get us riled up, they appeal to our notions of fairness and empathy—who likes to see someone else’s feelings hurt?—without any regard for what the consequences are.

   

  Of course, the real and fair solution is much less politically correct but effective. It’s to stop trying to protect people’s feelings. Your feelings are your problem, not mine—and vice versa.

• Real empowerment and respect is to see our fellow citizens—victims and privileged, religious and agnostic, conservative and liberal—as adults. Human beings are not automatons—ruled by drives and triggers they cannot control. On the contrary, we have the ability to decide not to be offended. We have the ability to discern intent. We have the ability to separate someone else’s actions or provocation or ignorance from our own. This is the great evolution of consciousness—it’s what separates us from the animals.

   

  What also separates us is our capacity for empathy. But how empathetic the speech we decide to use is choice for each one of us to make. Some of us are crass, some of us are considerate. Some of us find humor in everything, some of us do not. It’s important too—but those of us that believe it and live our lives by a certain sensitivity cannot bully other people into doing so too. That sort of defeats the purpose.

• There is a wonderful quote from Epictetus that I think of every time I see someone get terribly upset about one of these things (I try to think about it when I get upset about anything): “If someone succeeds in provoking you, realize that your mind is complicit in the provocation.”

   

  He said that some 1,900 years ago. Even then we felt that it was easier to police the outside than examine our inside.

   

  Control and discipline of one’s own reactions make for a successful person and a functioning society. I don’t think you want to live in a world where that isn’t the expectation of each of us. I don’t think you want to see the things that will need to happen when the burden of making sure everyone is happy and not offended is put on the government—or worse, a corrupt and bitter blogosphere.

   

  But that seems to be the road we’re going down. Even though we’ve been warned.

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• Wheaton Moves to Fire Hijab-Wearing Professor

      

   

         

   

      

   

         

   

  Illinois college acts in response to her statements that Christians and Muslims worship the same God.

   

      

   

         

    January 6, 2016

      

   

     

  By

       

    Scott Jaschik

• What started as a gesture of interreligious solidarity may be ending with the dismissal of a tenured professor.

    

  Wheaton College in Illinois, a leading Christian college, announced Tuesday that it is moving to fire Larycia Hawkins, a tenured faculty member in political science, over her statements about wearing a hijab during Advent to show solidarity with Muslims at a time when some politicians were using anti-Muslim rhetoric. The college has said that the act of wearing the hijab was not the issue. Rather it was a statement by Hawkins that Muslims "worship the same God" as do Christians. Theologians are divided on that point, and many supporters of Wheaton disagree with her statement.

    

  Hawkins was placed on leave late last year, and the college said it reached an impasse with Hawkins after Wheaton requested clarification of her views. She has denied saying or doing anything that is inconsistent with Wheaton's commitment to Christian thinking.

    

  In Wheaton's announcement Tuesday, the college stressed that it had not fired Hawkins but started the process to do so -- a process involving a faculty committee review.

    

  In a December statement, Wheaton rejected the idea that Christians and Muslims worship the same God.

• "While Islam and Christianity are both monotheistic, we believe there are fundamental differences between the two faiths, including what they teach about God’s revelation to humanity, the nature of God, the path to salvation and the life of prayer," said the statement. "As an institution of distinctively evangelical Christian identity, the core of our faith, as expressed in our Statement of Faith, is our belief that 'the Lord Jesus Christ died for our sins, according to the Scriptures, as a representative and substitutionary sacrifice, triumphing over all evil; and that all who believe in him are justified by his shed blood and forgiven of all their sins.' We affirm that salvation is through Christ alone."

    

  Hawkins is holding a news conference today to respond to the college's action and has declined to comment before then.

    

  The Chicago Tribune reported that the conflict over her recent statement is not the first time the college has subjected Hawkins to scrutiny regarding whether her views are inconsistent with Wheaton's theology. For example, she was asked to affirm her commitment to Wheaton's views after she wrote an academic paper about what Christians could learn from black liberation theology.

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