I am unaccountably distressed by the Tsarnaev verdict, for nothing is accomplished by killing him except the undesirable result of making him a martyr for jihadists. It’s likely, though, that he’ll never be executed, for there’s a moratorium for the federal death penalty, and at any rate the appeals will take years. Since it’s more expensive to execute someone than jail them for life, and evidence shows that the death penalty is not a deterrent, what, exactly, have the jurors accomplished?
But I digress. I want to call to your attention, on this day of state-sponsored barbarism (the U.S. is the only Western country that still executes people), a less serious but still disturbing problem: the continuing effort to stamp out free speech on American campuses.
The latest transgressor is the University of Colorado at Boulder, another top-flight school. It has instituted a “bias-reporting” system where any hurtful speech can be reported to the university, along with the names and ID numbers of the transgressors. As The College Fix reports (note: I haven’t verified this from an independent source, but the official University webpage gives the protocol for reporting bias), this system was apparently instigated at the request of the “diversity commission” of the student government. These commissions now seem to be the nucleus of this kind of censorship. From the Fix report:
University of Colorado-Boulder has launched a new campaign encouraging students to report any “bias” they come across to campus authorities, who collect details including offenders’ names, birthdays, genders – even social security numbers – along with a description of the “incident.” [JAC: the link above doesn’t suggest that these details are to be collected, but the reporting form requests the names and ID numbers of all students involved.]
The “Bias Incident Reporting” effort aims to “address the impact of demeaning and hurtful statements as well as acts of intolerance directed towards protected classes,” CU Boulder’s website states.
Examples of bias, according to a corresponding poster campaign highlighting the reporting system, include calling people names or making fun of their culture.
. . . Students who perceive or witness “bias-motivated incidents” are asked to report them immediately by filing a “student of concern” report.
These reports are not confidential, suggesting that anyone who’s “reported” can be subject to public shaming.
Of course the campus suggest that this isn’t at all meant to curtail free speech:
“This in no way is meant to curtail free speech,” campus spokesman Ryan Huff told The College Fix in an email. “We support the First Amendment and want our students to challenge one another in academic ways. We don’t support, however, the use of racial slurs and other demeaning bias-motivated acts.”
What, exactly, does “challenge one another in academic ways” mean? What about if a Palestinian student calls a Jewish student, or a Jewish organization, “genocidal Zionists”? Is that bias? And what is a “demeaning bias-motivated act”? Given the sensitivities of students engaged in identity politics, you can imagine where this will lead.
Not long ago the campus put up a series of posters designed to demonstrate the kind of biased speech they decried. Here is one specimen:
Bad idea! The campaign backfired because, as you might expect, the students and some of the staff found the posters “triggering.” Given that climate, how likely is it that the new bias reports will do anything other than chill the atmosphere of free discussion at UC Boulder—if there ever was one?
In a statement [about the controversial posters], Chancellor Philip DeStefano remarked: “What ought to offend here is not the language on the posters, but the language that is used in perpetuating acts of racism, ethnic intimidation, homophobia and other acts of bias in our campus community.”
That shows that DeStefano doesn’t know diddley-squat about what offends students these days. Of course that language on the posters will offend people, for what matters is not the intent, but the language itself—even if it’s meant to demonstrate what constitutes bias! Doesn’t he realize what broad ground is covered by the terms “ethnic intimidation” and “acts of racism”? And I detest homophobia, but some religious people feel that gays shouldn’t be allowed to marry. Should their arguments be reported as instances of bias?
Well, perhaps DeStefano wants a chilly atmosphere on his campus. After all, he doesn’t want to melt all those Special Snowflakes.
“Since it’s more expensive to execute someone than jail them for life, and evidence shows that the death penalty is not a deterrent, what, exactly, have the jurors accomplished?”
I’m with you Jerry.
But what they did was follow the rules that were presented to them.
I support abolishing the death penalty. Until we do, juries will continue to follow the rules and bring death sentences.
Yes, all BM incidents should be reported. In fact, this entire program is one giant BM incident.
A Boulder-sized BM.
I feel bad for university staff who probably really pushed to get this one out, just to see it flushed away.
Readers may recall my sending a note to all my state officials asking for withdrawal of the “conscience” waivers from required childhood vaccinations.
Well, I just received the vaccination form for my son, who is moving to the next school in the series from grade school through high school.
Here is one of the things a parent can fill out and sign, in lieu of actually having their child vaccinated.
This really annoys me!
I’m with you.
On a similar matter, I’ve just discovered that my Council stopped putting fluoride in our water four years ago, without asking ratepayers (rates = council taxes). Every survey shows fluoridation has overwhelming support, but a bunch of fools have used pseudoscience to scare the council into removing it. It’s going to take a major battle, which I will be engaging in, to get it back.
Well, as I was informed by a cashier at the now-defunct Wild Oats health market (bought and dismantled by Whole Paycheck) that the Nazis put fluoride in the water because it is used for mind control. And that’s why I only drink unicorn milk and brush my teeth with free-range dragon tears.
I used to live in Flagstaff Arizona. Famous for its incredible beauty and bizarre refusal to fluoridate its water, pretty much thanks to some very powerful kooks who got the voting public all worked up with every scare tactic imaginable. ‘Citizens for Safe Drinking Water’ was the organization.
To me they (the anti-fluoride lot) and the anti-vaxxers jblilie is dealing with are in the same camp with the homeopathy crowd, Deepak Chopra et al, the Scientologists,Raelists, eschatologists and the rest.
I was raised in Portland, Oregon, surely the largest metropolis to eschew fluoridation.
I did not know that about Portland, Diane. I assume they have since come around???
Oh, no, they were just in the news recently for their recalcitrance. If you want to see some really la-la-liberals, go to Portland.
Strangely enough, my most right-wing friend from college lives in Portland.
Perhaps within the US, but it looks like Montreal (where I’m originally from) is bigger – but that might be a function of the different notions of metro area, and it doesn’t either. (It is also possible some of the regional municipalities on the island which do their own water supply- which I think some do- might well have it fluoridated.)
On the fluoride, I wish you all success Heather. And I detest the pseudo-scientific scaremongering the anti-fluoridationists use. (Though they seem to have got a little bit more sophisticated than the old ‘fluorine is a deadly gas and sodium is a violently reactive metal’ nonsense).
Saw a piece on PBS Newshour tonight about a great-, to me, sounding idea to kill off dengue fever-causing mosquitos in Florida by sterilizing the males through gm means. The anti-gmo types were, of course, trying to put the fear of science in the populace, including one woman who spoke about getting “stung” by a mosquito…Where to begin, where to begin…
That sounded so amazing I had to look it up–what a fascinating method. And it’s hard to believe it could ever be cost effective–but apparently it is.
http://www.nature.com/scitable/blog/viruses101/are_modified_mosquitoes_the_future
and, OMG, better watch out for that NaCl!
Welcome to Planet Boulder, aka The People’s Republic of Boulder, 25 square miles surrounded by reality. Interestingly places like Austin, Madison and Ithaca also use the “xx square miles…” schtick. A favorite joint in Boulder is the Village Coffee Shop with the tag line “890 square feet of reality surrounded by Boulder.” Like many administrators, Chancellor Phil drops the ball now and then, and there is usually a direct link between the fumble and some special constituency of the University – not sure which one is being catered to in this instance. Even more distressing than this new system is the the administration’s apparent undermining of the annual Conference on World Affairs and its misdirected attempt to fire a tenured professor because he did his own independent follow up on a poorly conducted University investigation of a harassment case.
Yep, AKA the “Boulder Bubble”. I defended Boulder for a while when my Denver friends would mention this, but after being here for several years I know it’s real.
And don’t forget to “keep Boulder weird”. Yeah, good weird, not bad weird.
Perhaps for once we could bypass the appeals process and take him out to the public square in Boston where they used to do hanging and behead him.
Dozens of members of my extended family are people of colour. Most describe going through their life not personally coming across any racism except when they see posters like the one above. They find it really shocking, and feel sick to be reminded in such a way that racism still exists. It’s a real kick in the guts. They find it much more upsetting than a news report or similar on the same subject. These posters are worse than the behaviour they’re trying to stop.
On the plus side, they cancelled their anti-“revenge porn” campaign, the posters for which were similarly indistinguishable from the offending photos.
Part of it is the powerlessness. When you have to deal with a racist person in the real world, (or a sexist, or whatever it is) you can argue back against their stupidity. When it’s just a poster, you can rip it down. But when it’s one that’s purporting to help you, you can’t even do that. So you’ve got the same shock from encountering the ignorance as with real racism, without being able to respond.
So this means every one, get lots of forms to turn in those complaints. They will need a large department, probably called the offended persons department who will process all the complaints and take appropriate action on each one. It will be a small version of something like the veterans administration where you go to make appointment.
Yes Boulder, this is a great idea and money well wasted.
What if some people in the “Department to Receive Complaints about Meanies”, are triggered by reading all the stories in the complaints? Will they get to fill out a form to complain about the people who made the complaints because there wasn’t a warning on top?
Maybe as they move forward in a fluid situation, they could have racialized employees only review LGBTQ reports and vice versa. (I know. I should be an administrator -I got all the great ideas!!)
Sub
What about the N-word laden, misogynist, and gay-bashing lyrics contained on many of the student’s phones and university cloud accounts? Are they accessories to hate speech? What is CU going to do when someone takes them up on their policy to “report it”?
Logicman – excellent point. Admittedly I am an old fart, but there certainly are a lot of offensive lyrics out there that many students seem to take nonchalantly. I might have to bring this up at our retired faculty meeting 🙂
no no no, that’s culturally relative! Now you’re just punching down!
Well, I am sure the University of Colorado will be the subject of many lawsuits stemming from this. Likely students will be, too, since it’s hard to imagine being reported in this way as not be defamatory in many cases. I wonder what the resolution of these reports is. The article doesn’t say. Do they just hang out there forever, or does the University resolve them in some way? It seems horribly biased against whoever is reported. Hopefully, FIRE (Foundation for Individual Rights in Education [fire.org]) will do a piece on this.
When is the Department of Education going to step in and put an end to speech codes that have been shown time and again to be unconstitutional? It’s time they used their purse strings on this topic.
Those stupid posters (and they are stupid) do point out a real issue: it is impossible to discuss a topic like racism, without discussing racist behavior. But if that is offensive, how do you ever discuss it?
I don’t know if or when the Department of Education will put an end to speech codes, but it looks like some schools are starting to do that by themselves.
https://www.thefire.org/purdue-university-eliminates-all-of-its-speech-codes-earns-fires-highest-rating/
Good news!
Typo ergo sum Merilee
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I’m offended by anyone who admires Tennyson. Could I go to Lit 101 and report that kind of thought crime?
I’m offended by anyone who is offended by Tennyson. Not that I especially like Tennyson myself, you understand, but your offendedness could cause grievous offence to any Tennyson-admirers out there and somebody has to stand up for their rights.
I have to say that the students were right to object to that poster. It consists largely of an insulting sentence, which (I think it highly probable) black students will encounter more often on the poster itself than anywhere else.
But at least the overall intent of the poster is clear. For sheer weirdness it can’t top posters at the ANU, which were designed (I presume) to promote campus security, showing a woman walking across a sward of grass looking nervously over her shoulder with the slogan: “If you don’t, who will?”
If you don’t what? I never met anyone who could answer this question with confidence, nor work out exactly what behaviour the poster was trying to promote.
If you have to ask, you don’t know.
As tautologies go, that’s a good one.
Wow–they’ve deputized the entire campus to be thought police. ‘Culture’ is so broad that almost anything that someone takes offense at is fodder for a report.
I kinda hope a bunch of students go nuts with this reporting–flood the administration with complaint forms. If everyone on campus does 5 complaints a day for the whole school year…
…the university will go broke, since it will have no students left to pay the extravagant tuition it no doubt charges.
I hate censoring language. When I worked horrible customer service jobs, I told people it was okay for them to swear and yell as long as they didn’t make it personal toward me. If they did, the conversation was over. The reason I said this is because people need to express themselves. Sometimes, it’s important to be deliberately provocative and use language that is upsetting to some because you are trying to convey a terrible thing and you want your language to evoke a terrible emotion.
What will we happen when we can no longer express ourselves with language?
Delete the extraneous “we” in the last sentence.
point and grunt. just like the rest of the hairy apes. and fling poo. but I promise to only fling up, not fling down.
8)
You win the thread
I have a certain relative who has no problem directing “bracing” language at others, so breath-taking is her sense of entitlement. She crowed to me about calling her cellphone company with a complaint, telling me that the customer service rep asked her if she were directing her comments toward him personally. (This falls under the general heading of “straightening someone out,” as she describes it.) Her response was to the effect that he was the one available.
I figure that reps receive training dealing with these hot-tempered types, and compose and discipline themselves to deal with them, and that she must have said something quite provocative to prompt that comment from him.
He’s lucky in that that will probably be the only interaction he will have with her.
Many people think customer service reps are there to b abused. I once had so one tell me, “you’re paid to take the licks!” Really? At minimum wage? Whenever I call a customer service person I’m never nasty to them even when their company has screwed up. I’m probably too nice but I know what it is like to take call after call of abusive person and how that affects you. This people have feelings too.
I am nice to telemarketers too. They are just trying to make a living. However, the really annoying scam artists from Pakistan etc get the silent treatment. I put the phone down and walk away.
As for customer service reps, I like to ask how they are doing, and to find some commonality. I talked to a Filipino Amazon employee, and we discussed the recent typhoon. I find that people are also more willing to be helpful if you treat them as human beings, and not a mere means to an end.
“I find that people are also more willing to be helpful if you treat them as human beings, and not a mere means to an end.”
What a radical idea.
I am very polite to customer service reps, but not to telemarketers. I feel as if they are trespassing on my time/privacy.
Typo ergo sum Merilee
>
Same here.
Re telemarketers, my natural instinct is to take out my feelings on being disturbed in my own home by some moron trying to sell me worthless crap. The one reason I don’t is that they must have the shittiest job in the world short of actually shovelling shit, so I just say firmly ‘Not interested, sorry’ (or if they have one of those bumptious ‘marketroid’ voices ‘NOT interested!’) which usually saves their time and mine. I’m far too soft-hearted.
The calls I really let myself go on are the ones where a bloody recording machine talks at you, unfortunately there’s no-one at the other end to hear it.
Somehow this is integral with the shrink-wrapping of today’s youth by the “helicopter parents” of my generation. People say all kinds of offensive things and have all kinds of dumb beliefs: shall we criminalize them all?
It’s remarkable that this is an epidemic now, when people are generally more careful and aware than they were back in the 1970’s. I knew more racial epithets and racist jokes by grade school than my daughters may hear their whole lives. I didn’t shake off my backwards upbringing under threat of punishment, I developed an emotion called “empathy” by, you know, “learning things” and “talking with” (or “rapping,” as we called it in those days) people who were different from me.
My concern is the heavy hand will cement young people’s ignorance by keeping them from expressing themselves and having their minds changed through human interaction.
🐾 / MSP (homeward bound)
Hope your presentation went well.
Thanks! All the feedback I heard was positive.
/@
Just wondering whatever happened to the nursery rhyme, “Sticks and stones will break my bones, but words will never hurt me.”
I guess the youth of today are simply more “sensitive” than we were (you know, back in the day – damn I miss the 60s). The poor little darlings.
Perhaps it would do them some good to have an impatient, hot-/short-tempered parent with a gift for cussin.’ Sorta a desensitization a la allergies.
Sub.
One can understand the need for revenge , and in any case that’s all a Death Sentence is Revenge! it won’t prevent any future Terrorist Outrages and indeed may in fact encourage them as he will now be lauded in the Posters and Literature of Terrorism as a Martyr, so all the jury have done is grant his wish for Martyrdom and in so doing given invaluable material for Terrorist Recruiters, after all what delusional young Islamist could resist the surefire path to “Paradise” with all its pleasures.
“University of Colorado-Boulder has launched a new campaign encouraging students to report any “bias” they come across to campus authorities, who collect details including offenders’ names, birthdays, genders – even social security numbers”
Even social security numbers?!? The front of my social security card contains the words “for social security and tax purposes-not for identification”. I have pointed this out on numerous occasions when people or institutions asked for my social security number and in the vast majority of cases they back down. I received my card years ago (I’m 57) and maybe the newer cards don’t provide this protection.
Anyway, that’s not the only thing wrong with the University of Colorado’s “bias reporting system”, but it caught my eye.
Re that poster, I wonder how long it took for some smartass to take a big black marker pen and black out the “It Happens Here” and “Report it” panels…
Since when is it the business of an institute for higher learning, whose students are all legally adults, to coddle the Pwecious Feewings of the adults it’s trying to teach? People’s emotional reactions are their own responsibility, and nobody else’s. Recall what happened a few decades back when New York tried to define “obscenity” as anything that anybody found “offensive”; everybody and his uncle ran around the city claiming that anything they didn’t like “offended” them, and was therefore “obscene”! This rule is essentially no different, glorifying offendedness to the babyish point. Consider: I’m religiously a Pagan. Think of what *I* could find “offensive”, or “triggering” at the U. of C. Come to think of it, enough clever students could launch enough complaints to paralyze the entire campus. Maybe that’s what it will take to make the regents see sense.
–Leslie < )O(