activism – E367: Writing and Diversity

Scared Safe

Safe spaces are an interesting concept that is a place or environment where a person or category of people can feel confident that they won’t be exposed to discrimination, criticism, harassment, or any emotional or physical harm. Many people are drawn to a safe space because the spaces that should be safe for them—such as home, school, community—are not safe for them and they want to be around people are in a similar situation as them. There is also making a publicly occupied space such as a school campus, a recreational center, and such areas a safe space—as a well to reassure the occupants that they will be safe during their time there. The basic structure of a safe space is positive, but only when it occupies a space and isn’t occupying someone’s whole life.

Although, I know I should focus on the article by Heller, I found his piece to offer too many viewpoints and opinions and different facts of similar problems where I found myself unable to coherently focus on a topic. I decided the only way I could write without feeling overwhelmed was finding someone speaking about the same issue, but a little bit narrower.

A few years ago, Van Jones, a CNN political contributor, spoke at David Axelrod’s institute of Politics at the University of Chicago. During this 80 minute discussion, that included S. E. Cupp, Axelrod brought up that he had hosted President Trump’s former campaign manager, Corey Lewandowski, the week before that discussion. Students protested the event, saying having him on campus normalized the Trump Administration. Axelrod, who disagreed with the students’ outcry, asked for Jones’ opinion on the protest.

Van Jones proposes two idea about safe spaces—a positive and a negative one. There’s the idea that a campus should be a safe space that is free from sexual harassment or physical abuse, or any kind of hate speech that’s targeted—this is the normal definition of a safe space and is in no way harmful and should be adopted. Then there’s the idea that these student are being “safe ideologically” and think they need to feel good all the time—almost putting a blanket over their eyes to anything they disagree with. Jones’ explains that he doesn’t like the second idea as it assumes that we don’t care about people’s emotional safety and wellbeing. Instead of criticizing those who want safety, we should be pushing people to be stronger. Passionately, he says, “I’m not going to pave the jungle for you. Put on some boots, and learn how to deal with adversity. I’m not going to take all the weights out of the gym; that’s the whole point of the gym. This is the gym. You can’t live on a campus where people say stuff you don’t like?!”

He goes on to speak about his parents and other older black Americans who dealt with far worse adversities such as beatings and dogs, but nowadays people cannot deal with a mean tweet. Which is true, there is still adversity today, but it not as nearly bad as it was fifty or sixty years ago. All these students grew up with President Obama as their first president they knew and grew up believing times have changes. So any instances where that shiny optimism cracks, like Tamir Rice or the transgender military ban, it’s really disappointing. But, then again these students have grown up dealing with a mass shooting every week in their schools, their churches, their concerts, or their supermarkets. And with that we have tried to harden ourselves because it hasn’t stopped and we’ve learned to get used to it—which makes us furious. So are these students still lacking adversity and hardship?

Continuing on with more passion Jones says, “You are creating a kind of liberalism that the minute it crosses the street into the real world is not just useless, but obnoxious and dangerous. I want you to be offended every single day on this campus. I want you to be deeply aggrieved and offended and upset, and then to learn how to speak back. Because that is what we need from you in these communities.”

I do agree that students need to hear and absorb and deal with ideas that aren’t similar to their own. It’s one of the ways to truly gain intelligence. How can you learn if you stay in a bubble of what you believe if you can’t understand the things you don’t believe? But, I also agree that the students, who pay insurmountable funds to attend college, should have some sort of say in what their campus does. And if they fight back on certain things that they don’t like, does that truly mean they are weak and ignorant—closing their eyes and ears to all things scary?

The students were protesting that the school was normalizing the Trump administration—an administration that unarguably promotes hatred and negative messages—and as a student, I don’t know if I would want my school to give a platform and allow someone that took part in that hatred. It would have been different if a professor played a video of someone from Trump’s white house to spark discussion or if a student-run republican group invited him to speak at one of their events. I feel like it’s even different than bringing a member of Bush’s cabinet because I don’t think it’s an issue of disagreeing with political ideologies, but more about possible the inflammation or spreading of a negative rhetoric. But, then again, if we don’t listen to such negative rhetoric, how would we ever understand to combat it? It’s an interesting balancing game that is going to take a while to truly understand.

Van Jones’ talk: Van Jones’ Excellent Metaphors About the Dangers of Ideology Safety, Jon Haidt, https://heterodoxacademy.org/van-jones-excellent-metaphors/

Response to Heller

In “The Big Uneasy,” by Nathan Heller, many different opinions about student activism are acknowledged. Heller specifically talks to students and faculty from Oberlin College located in Ohio. Heller doesn’t mention much about his own opinions on the issues discussed, he just mentions a bunch of other conflicting ideas and then leaves it up to the reader to determine what they want from the interviews that he conducted. I think that the main issue of this article was where to draw the line when it comes to student activism. If you’re too hard on the students then they will fight back, however, if you’re too easy on students then they’re not being challenged enough.

“A president’s job is to push past contradictions, while an activist’s duty is to call them out. The institutions that give many people a language and a forum to denounce injustice are, inevitable, the nearest targets of their criticism.”
Heller

The whole point of college is to challenge its students. Heller mentions that there are some people who believe that if a college protects its students from unwelcome ideas, then that college isn’t doing its job in preparing its students for the real world. I’ve heard this term “real world” so many times in my college career and I have yet to fully grasp its concept. What is the real world and what makes it so different from college? What will happen if students don’t face enough challenges in college and are then thrown into the real world? I don’t know if I agree with this huge distinction between college life and the real world because it almost diminishes all the experiences that students have during college. What you face during school aren’t “real” challenges. However, Heller mentions some examples of students who facing some very real challenges.

One student, Megan Bautista shares that exposing herself to opinions that were different from her own just exhausted her. She tried to engage in activism outside of campus but due to the impact on her grades, this idea quickly fizzled. Students tried to compromise with the college asking for activism to be looked at like a job that should be paid, or by having a minimum grade that the college couldn’t go below while their students were involved in activism outside of campus. These ideas were rejected and students felt like they had to choose one over the other because doing both seemed impossible.

“Today they are told that they belong there, but they also must take on an extracurricular responsibility: doing the work of diversity.”
Heller

There are students who feel like they aren’t being reflected in their college community. Jasmine Adams leads a discussion about Oberlin’s indifference towards racial oppression. Adams, as well as other students, bring up the issue that they feel like they are being forced to conform to the standards of their college and these standards don’t reflect what they have experienced in the real world. They aren’t going to change who they are for four years of their life just to satisfy the college’s expectations.

The problems that students are facing on campus extend to the faculty as well. One teacher, Wendy Kozol, had to disband the class because the class seated themselves by race and weren’t communicating with each other. Another teacher, Roger Copeland, who has been teaching at Oberlin for over 40 years, noticed that his teaching style wasn’t being well received by his students recently. He spoke sharply to a student once who reported to the dean that Copeland was creating “a hostile and unsafe learning environment.”

Heller mentions a lot of different views about student activism that all seem validated. It’s hard to organize my own thoughts on this idea because I feel like in order to understand what’s happening, I have to respond to each individual that’s mentioned. There are a lot of issues that are talked about that seem circumstantial, but bring each issue to light and the school is having to deal with students clashing with teachers, teachers clashing with students, and students clashing with students. Which, I guess is all ok, if the point of college is to challenge its students right?

Activism at School

In Nathan Heller’s article “THE BIG UNEASY” publish in the New Yorker, he addresses many points of view on the activism taking place at universities, and especially, Oberlin College. He began by citing examples of this activism through – what is mostly comprised of Liberal-Arts educations – the changes that universities and colleges alike had to go through in order to appease its students. For example, Yale was told that they had to avoid offensive Halloween costumes for the sake of it denouncing transgressive expression. Harvard also went through many changes, one of the more impactful ones being that they had to change their “house masters” to faculty deans in fear of it being offensive. Finally, Bowdoin student, Heller notes, were punished for wearing sombreros to a tequila party. With this information at hand, I think it to be incredible that so many people are so offended by so many things these days. I am not justifying anyone’s actions and I am certainly not agreeing with or denying the wrongdoing of any of these actions, but I find it incredible to see how coddled so many young people are today. A quotation I found to be interesting on the matter was,

“…arguing that young people taught to embrace “vindictive protectiveness” were being poorly educated for the challenges of the real world. Shielding students from the unwelcome ideas was unhealthy for the workforce and the democratic commonweal,”

I agree with this statement wholeheartedly. I do not think that this statement could be any more accurate than it is.

I believe this statement to be true because in the workforce, not everybody is going to see eye-to-eye on everything. Most people will not respect one another and most people are only there to work for themselves so that they can earn enough money to support their family and themselves. There are a few natural-born leaders who make everyone feel like a unit and address issues properly, however, that is definitely a small minority. But, to go back to my argument of sorts, if we are not teaching people how to deal with adversity and how to deal with people who do not like them, then what are we teaching people about how to deal with the real world? Socially, how can they survive? How can someone survive who is easily offended? I am not saying that people who are offended easily can succeed or survive in a social climate. But, I am saying that if one does not learn to have thick skin and be able to deal with adversity, then they will be dealing with a lot of anger and sadness and not a whole lot of optimism or happiness about being who they are. If I have offended anyone with my previous statements, I apologize and am always open for a discussion about it. However, truth be told, I think it is a bit ridiculous that I even have to include an apology to begin with. Just trying to start an interesting discussion!