The more I read about student demands for censorship at American and English universities, as well as for “safe spaces” and the suppression of “hate speech”, the more worried I get. After all, these students will be running our country and the UK when (and if) they grow up, and may in the future impose their “authoritarian leftist” values on their peers. As far as I can see, American universities are, by and large, caving in to some unreasonable student demands, with the notable exception of my own school and its exemplary free-speech code.
But the latest report of student malfeasance does come from Chicago: from Northwestern University up in Evanston. As reported by The Daily Beast, NU holds a burlesque show as part of its annual Sex Week, and the show is racy and salacious. Students must audition, and everyone who does is guaranteed a part—but not a special part as a solo act or as part of a small group. And that’s the rub. As the Daily Beast reports:
But when the casting decisions were shared with the would-be performers, they revolted. Apparently, they didn’t think the directors’ choices were diverse enough—“marginalized experiences were not sufficiently represented in the selected acts,” reported The Daily Northwestern.
Because of this, some students quit the show.
“It was brought to our attention that there are people in our community who feel that those solos and duets and trios are not best representing what the Burlesque community is,” [NU Burlesque co-director Avril] Dominguez said. “We do have a very inclusive and representative cast at large (and) we’re taking that criticism into account and really trying to reestablish a safe space.”
A safe space! Can you really equate not being given a solo to making you “unsafe”? And what communities weren’t represented adquately? It’s not clear. And apparently the protestors don’t know, either:
“People are upset because they don’t think we have diversity in our small groups, but they don’t know the people who got solos — all they see is a name, so they might have made an assumption based on those names,” the Medill senior said. “We see the diversity in our acts because we saw the auditions, but it’s not our place to broadcast what these acts represent.”
That role, said assistant director Victoria Case, belongs to the performers themselves.
Sensible enough. The Daily Northwestern reports, though, that that wasn’t sufficient:
Medill senior Taylor Cumings, who is in her third year with the NU Burlesque cast, said she appreciates the efforts made to make Burlesque an inclusive community, but she also stressed the need to consciously strive to be more inclusive.
“If we’re claiming to be the most diverse show on campus, we need to be better at representing the groups oppressed in our society than the rest of society,” she said.
So, a “safe space” was made by opening up a second round of auditions. All must have solos!
Another student said burlesque show rehearsals will strive to be more “intentionally inclusive” from now on. The group is apparently drafting some kind of constitution, which will presumably enshrine their right to unimaginable levels of inclusivity.
. . . Following the criticisms, Hernandez said the directors worked on restructuring the show to allow more time for solo and small group performances and opened up a second round of auditions for those acts.
. . . “It’s upsetting to us that people not getting a solo or small group piece makes them feel excluded from the Burlesque community,” she said.
You can see where this will lead: every group that considers themselves oppressed will demand equal time and equal prominence. This is not really political advocacy for social change so much as solipsism writ large. Remember, this is not the political or legislative arena: it’s a burlesque show! I needn’t comment further except to echo the Daily Beast‘s conclusion:
American burlesque has a long, celebrated history of advancing social progress by empowering people—of all genders, orientations, colors, shapes, and sizes—to celebrate their bodies while provoking the censors. This form of expression has played an important role in subverting society’s expectations of conformity and morality. There’s never been anything particularly “safe” about burlesque. It’s edgy! It’s radical self-expression! It inspires people to think and behave differently! It provokes! It challenges!
But for some reason, a whole bunch of today’s college students don’t merely run from challenges—they demand repayment, a formal inquiry, and federal legislation to remedy any instance of provocation. All too often, these are the liberal kids—the ones who are supposedly tolerant and open-minded. Recall what happened last semester at Colorado College, when the screening of a pro-gay film was protested, not by social conservatives, but by the campus’s LGBT+ group, because it didn’t feature a sufficient number of transgender characters. For these students, perfect is truly the enemy of good.
[Do read about the Colorado College episode: the pro-gay movie “Stonewall” was deemed “discursively violent,” . . . reinforcing a hierarchy of oppression…”. Further, one student complained that “the film’s placement of a hunky white boy at the center of events that were often driven by trans women of color, drag queens, butch lesbians, and others is troublesome, to say the least.”]
The Beast continues about Northwestern:
Of course, it seems like there’s also something a tad ordinary going on here: Some students are experiencing a brush with disappointment—possibly their first—at having lost out on a juicier role in the production. It might be better for these students if the directors didn’t erect a safe space to shelter them from reality. As The College Fix’s Dave Huber wrote, “A Broadway director, or better yet, an employer isn’t going to care one whit about some snowflake’s feelings of ‘exclusion.’” Meanwhile, the show must go on—but only if everybody is 100 percent comfortable with it at all times.
I’m not so sure that directors don’t care about “exclusion”: look at the fracas about black representation in Hollywood now. I do feel that’s a legitimate cause for concern—not so much that black actors and films haven’t been nominated for awards, but that films by black or minority directors aren’t getting made. After all, the experience of underrepresented minorities has something to teach us. But I’m not sure that this kind of student entitlement is the way to do it. Perhaps those disappointed students should write their own shows? Or have a demonstration or symposium airing their grievances?
And I’m not so sure that these students will collide with reality when they graduate. Even if they do, some day they’ll be in positions of power—and look out when that happens! What I worry about, as always, is the suppression of disapproved speech as “hate speech,” a trend that shows no sign of waning. As the Beast reports in the Colorado piece,
A recent poll of students’ attitudes conducted by McLaughlin & Associates bears this out. A majority of surveyed students said universities should regulate speech and that people with a history of hateful statements should be banned from campus. A sizeable minority of students incorrectly believed the Constitution did not protect “hate speech,” and that, in ay case, the First Amendment was outdated. Half of the respondents thought their university should crack down on cartoons that criticize religious or ethnic groups, and a whopping 72 percent agreed with the following statement: “Any student or faculty member on campus who uses language that is considered racist, sexist, homophobic or otherwise offensive should be subject to disciplinary action.”
Now that is disturbing!
I see this authoritarian Leftism burgeoning at the University of Chicago—not in our administration, but among our students, whose editorials in the student newspaper increasingly call for the banning of “hate speech,” which, they argue, is not the same thing as free speech. (That kind of doublespeak is becoming the rule among students.) I’d write to the paper arguing that one person’s hate speech is another person’s free speech, but that would only anger our students, and, blinkered by anger and feelings of victimhood and entitlement, I don’t know if they’d understand.
h/t: Melissa Chen
Isn’t every week sex week at colleges and universities?
That’s what my research on the Net suggests.
Yes, my research also suggested that. Of course, my research was more direct. I could hear it going on in the dorm rooms around mine.
What will happen when these students don’t get a job after interviewing for it? Will they demand a follow up with the hiring panel? Will they demand that the company reveal how diverse they are?
No, no, no, they have their parents call to demand things like that (srsly)
and that is exactly what is happening. I get to hear parents calling in when Buffy and Billy didn’t pass their boards to get their licenses. Oh what can they do? Well, mommy and daddy, have them call in themselves and that’ll be a start.
My sister has some friends whose daughter was at university in the UK several years ago. She was back home for a couple of weeks just before her final exams, and there was a possibility that she wouldn’t be able to get back to the university in time for the exams (flights cancelled due to bad weather).
So her father phoned the university and asked if the exams could be postponed until she got back…
I’ll bet some jaws dropped at that one!
There’s a couple things that strike me as odd here. It’s not unreasonable to make a request to the professor to take the exam at a later date if foul weather is really the culprit preventing you from getting back. If that was really an issue from the professor’s standpoint, that’s a rather unrealistic expectation, as I’ve never dealt with expectations that work must be done during weather emergencies. (I was out of work for 2 weeks during Hurricane Wilma in FL in 2005 and for a few days during Hurricane Sandy in 2012 as well as countless times where blizzards have delayed work at least for a half day or so).
However, if I read this correctly, you’re implying that the request was to postpone the exams for everyone. Secondly, was the girl incapable of making the request herself? Why bring her father into it?
Re the girl taking the exam later, there is of course the practical problem of being sure she hasn’t heard from any of her classmates who have already taken the exam. Even inadvertently via a tweet (“The question on co-evolution was a stinker. Who knew they’d ask about pollinating fig wasps?”)
This is probably a much more severe problem these days of internet connectedness.
(By the way I made that tweet example up, I have no idea whether it makes sense)
cr
That is a practical problem anytime a student is absent, yes. I would think in the case of bad weather, documentation could easily be provided, which at least would establish some trust that the student isn’t trying to pull something.
I also recall this being a practical problem when I was in college before social media existed just by virtue of the fact that professors would give the same tests to multiple classes throughout the day. I’m sure our ubiquitous state of being online probably exacerbates this problem now too. I have no idea how (or if) this is typically handled. My guess is that it varies by school and professor.
As long as Northwestern has the budget, I don’t see a problem with creating multiple burlesque shows. Give several students the director position, let them pick their acts based on whatever criteria they want (diversity, quality, whatever), then open the competing shows to audiences. Some students probably would prefer the shows where the director chose the acts based on actor/actress diversity rather than performance quality. That’s fine by me. Staging multiple shows allows students to compare different approaches to directorship and solo choice.
If you have multiple shows, then people will be required to attend ALL the shows, because expressing the opinion that some shows/ performers are crap by not going is making a safe space unsafe.
They do sound like a right bunch of …. soloists.
ha!
I’m waiting for Northwestern’s chapter of Campus Crusade for Christ demands inclusion in the burlesque show.
The existence of the show destroys the CCC safe space.
And, of course, the pomo liberals are happy to destroy the safe space of anyone they consider part of the “oppressor” class so mission accomplished in their view.
I suppose I should’ve charged my HS football coach with not providing a safe space at practice when I was assigned to play offensive guard rather than defensive tackle.
Not only will these poor students be blindsided by the fact no one cares about providing them a safe space in the professional world, they’re also going to learn that for most of them, the things they’ve been learning in college have no value anywhere outside of an academic setting. I feel, like we’re failing these students on so many levels. They’ll be deeper in debt than any generation of college graduates and they’ll be trying to get a start in life in a society oin which working for a living is increaseingly and it would seem inexorably less rewarding.
This is art. “Quality” is inherently subjective in a way that performance in a sport or on a math test isn’t. Put another way, it much harder to use proxy metrics to assess bias in the choice of burlesque acts compared to, say, the choice of who catches the football more often.
Related but also somewhat in parallel, the whole point underlying the protest is that perfectly good performers might be passed over because of biases against their skin tone or other irrelevant traits. We know that happens; you attach different names and photos to identical resumes, for instance, and the “white guy” resume is more likely to get the job. This is probably at least some of the reason why there is a dearth of black and minority directors in Hollywood; even if they do as good a job as their white counterparts, they get passed over for jobs because of irrelevant factors. Or they get pigeonholed in ways a white guy might not.
So I have no problem with the student body suggesting that diversity in performance is an issue, because it may very well be true that what the director perceives as their unbiased choice based on performance quality has some racial or other component of bias in it, and they just don’t realize it.
Having said that, demanding a safe space for those passed over seems a really ridiculous and somewhat non sequitur-like response. Nobody’s safety is being threatened when they don’t get a solo. Conversations with the director about greater diversity in acts? Okay, sounds good. Making the show longer or staging multiple shows (as I suggested above)? Also a good potential solution. Even if the problem the students raise is a real one, their proposed solution to it is crappy.
“I have no problem with the student body suggesting that diversity in performance is an issue” niether do I, provided they have something substantive to back up their claims. These students are working off of nothing other than a list of names. Of course discrimination happens, but it isn’t reasonable to simply assume discrimination is happeneing as a knee-jerk reaction. SJWs don’t respond to legitimate acts of dsicrimination, they operate under the assumption that it is pervasive, sopcietie’s default setting, if you will. Ironically, they are no less likely to make a character assessment based entirely on a person’s racial or sexual identity. I only made the reference to my FB coach to illustrate the point that there is every likilihood that this childish reaction, and I have no compuntion describing it that way, is simply how the regressives do sour grapes.
“society’s” default setting. I went on typographical and mispelling safari with that one.
As an afterthought, it occurs to me that modern technology might offer a partial solution not available to past old fogie generations. Practice and tape more performances than you can show in the live show. Put them out as you tube videos (or on a DVD). Collect feedback, either beforehand to allow the director to decide which acts to include in the live show, or in parallel with/after the live show as information future directors may want to use to help them select acts in later years. We are in the internet and information age now; we should stop treating past limitations on content and show time as binding. True probably nobody wants to sit in a theater for four hours. You can produce four hours’ worth of show now without requiring that.
But art is judged for it’s quality all the time and we do arrive at consensuses as to what’s good. Maybe tastes are subjective but it’s all still good. If it’s bad, no one likes it.
Some people like Vivaldi. Or, gack, Libby Larsen.
In a related story, the MLB is considering banning curveballs next year, for many college players who never made it due to an inability to hit it have deemed MLB stadiums unsafe. If this works, next year all 30 teams will receive a World Series trophy, because they’re all winners.
Aren’t baseball stadiums (marginally) more unsafe when batters do hit the ball? 😉
That’s a fair point. Let’s put a 200 yard gap between the field and the stands and all baseballs must be wrapped in soft velvet. Now we can really feel safe!
I’m somehow vaguely reminded of the following dialogue from Monty Python’s “Life of Brian”
Judith: [on Stan’s desire to be a mother] Here! I’ve got an idea: Suppose you agree that he can’t actually have babies, not having a womb – which is nobody’s fault, not even the Romans’ – but that he can have the *right* to have babies.
Francis: Good idea, Judith. We shall fight the oppressors for your right to have babies, brother… sister, sorry.
Reg: What’s the *point*?
Francis: What?
Reg: What’s the point of fighting for his right to have babies, when he can’t have babies?
Francis: It is symbolic of our struggle against oppression.
Reg: It’s symbolic of his struggle against reality.
Where’s the foetus going to gestate?
Your point is the reason that I don’t worry too much about this, it just comes in waves and goes away again. Python were satirizing it in 1979.
Here you go:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Dgp9MPLEAqA
That last line of Reg’s always cracks me up.
That sketch was one of the funniest in the whole classic movie.
If Life of Brian was released today, the howls of protest from the religious faithful would be drowned out by the outrage from the regressive left. It mercilessly makes fun of the foibles of social movements, liberation fronts, stoning, people with speech defects… I’m not sure it could be released today.
cr
Busting up… esp. when Idle, Cleese & eventually Palin almost ruin the take with their corpsing. An excellent save.
That scene is, when you consider it, quite an achievement. Four of them on screen for almost two minutes, with no cutaways for closeups, so all four had to play it right through with no flubbed lines or missed cues, and (as you said) no actual corpsing.
Remarkable.
cr
I once played to my sister the scene of Brian’s interview with Pontius Pilate (the ‘Biggus Dickus’ scene) from the ‘LoB’ DVD – which I consider to be the funniest sequence ever committed to celluloid – and she did not even smile once.
Humour is subjective indeed!
“If we’re claiming to be the most diverse show on campus, we need to be better at representing the groups oppressed in our society than the rest of society,”
Am I misreading this or is she saying by diversity she means disproportionate representation of oppressed groups?
I DEMAND to be allowed to sing on the stage of the Metropolitan Opera, preferably in a solo role, and, in addition, have a safe space thereon to protect me from the tomatoes that would certainly be hurled my way…
+1 🙂
Don’t be silly. Who brings tomatoes to the opera?
People usedta-)
I’d need a cage like The Blues Brothers had.
Really, this is just affirmative action, right? Any and all outstandingly talented auditioners will automatically be disregarded unless they are considered a member of an oppressed group.
This is not affirmative action this is straight up Handicapper General. They don’t know who was and why someone was not give a solo but they are already sure its because of their oppression.
University students seemingly are always in the forefront of speech movements. In the McCarthy era, university students, in general, maintained a safe and respectful silence so as to avoid attention by the FBI. We should have spoken, and the few that did paid for it. So, later generations spoke up loudly and, sometimes violently, to oppose political, racial and sexist agendas. Attempts were made to shut them up, sometimes violently. Now, we have university students wanting “safe spaces” and solos for everyone in a burlesque show in order to be representative (of the diverse oppressed, but no one else). The pendulum swings. When will it be remembered that universities are supposed to be places of diversity AND learning? When will we remember that all of us have freedom of speech (which means we can say some pretty ugly and disturbing things, if we’re so inclined). All others are free not to listen, or to respond verbally in kind.
There just has to be something terribly wrong with the parenting that has been going on for the past 30 years or more. Can’t blame it on the water since these people are everywhere. I don’t think we can blame this defect on evolution but it is a serious cultural problem on college campus around the country.
It’s not really much different from accepting or excusing bad behavior in “kids” 18-21 years old. Anyway, if these are the leaders of tomorrow, my only comment can be that luckily I won’t be around to see it.
A total armchair spitball here, but I’ve always been bothered by the message, promulgated on Sesame Street & Mr. Rogers of all places, that “you are special, because you’re you.” There’s no one quite like you, and that’s what makes you so special… etc. The sentiment behind it seems so noble — esp. as these shows (esp. Sesame Street) were designed with poor, inner-city kids in mind, many of whom were getting the opposite messages from their caregivers. So they were trying to put positive messages in their programs that anybody could glom onto.
It just seemed so counter to my sense of equity that people should be praised merely for taking up space. Seemed to send the wrong message.
I’m only fishing in the dark as well. Seems like they might have focused more time on thinking for yourself and not following the herd. Question everything and don’t except things without evidence. Kids need to learn how to lose sometimes and life is not fair.
On Sunday I tried to unearth some of the science behind this university trend – fairly obscure even by my somewhat lax standards of cartoon clarity.
http://pictoraltheology.blogspot.com/2016/02/brain-teaser.html
Pretty much a straightforward extension of the treatment afforded young kids these days. All children get a trophy even if they came in dead last.
All of these events have a whiff of fictional familiarity to them…I believe Kurt Vonnegut wrote a short piece about a time in the future when, by law, we are all handicapped in order to make us “equal” to one another. I believe it ends badly.
Interesting–the 2nd reference to this short story. (the other, above, being the “Handicapper General”… Diana Moon Glampers, if memory serves).
I first read Harrison Bergeron (link contains plot spoilers) in “Welcome to the Monkey House”, and recently discovered it was produced as a made-for-TV movie in ’95. (it’s also freely available as an online PDF. I recommend the prose over a TV production, and also a more-concise short film called “2081”) for those wishing to look it up.
> Recall what happened last semester at Colorado College, when the screening of a pro-gay film was protested, not by social conservatives, but by the campus’s LGBT+ group, because it didn’t feature a sufficient number of transgender characters.
I wonder how a screening of “Gay Niggers from Outer Space” might go …
Only it’s in a double-bill with ‘Santa Claus Conquers The Martians” !
What a bunch of fairies!
I find it slightly bizarre that burlesque is traditionally borderline offensive, so what they are protesting about is their perceived lack of an equal-opportunity chance to offend other people.
(Btw, to pre-empt a lecture on appropriate language, I’m taking back the word ‘fairy’ as a pejorative epiphet directed at precious and hypersensitive individuals regardless of gender).
cr
shades of Harrison Bergeron.
dammit, dammit. when will I learn to read the comments. 🙂
Students these days need to realize that the reason they’re in school is because they DON’T know something; not because they DO…..
What’s going to happen when someone complains that the fact that everyone’s act didn’t get the same amount of applause made some feel “unsafe”? How much more ridiculous can this whole scenario get, before it collapses of its own absurd weight?
What if someone boos or gets really old-fashioned and throws cabbages or fruit? The hurtness of the feelings and the magnitude of the unsafeness would be unimaginable.
cr
And imagine if the produce is GMO!
The horror🐸
😀
Safe space at Sex Week? And not as refuge from the frivolities, but for inclusion? If I think of this anymore, my head might explode.
It does seem a tad ironic, doesn’t it? Possibly even bizarre.
P.S. Please don’t explode, that would be unsafe for bystanders.
cr
Aside from their radical egalitarianism, what is it that qualifies these students as “leftists” — beyond, perhaps, a vague sense that they don’t overtly oppose that which the traditional left holds dear? I’m unaware of any broad upsweep in campus political activity on behalf of progressive causes.
And I’m not sure it’s even an egalitarianism simpliciter that motivates these kids, so much as it is a desire to see that every interest group with a voice on campus gets its piece of the cake.
Anyway, I’m more concerned that their authoritarianism will survive into adulthood than that their inchoate leftism will. The latter is merely a political philosophy, subject to the shifting vagaries of the times as one ages. The former is a personality trait and, thus, prone to be more durable.
sub
I think that this just about sums the whole thing up:
https://grrrgraphics.files.wordpress.com/2015/11/farce_book.jpg?w=640
I find it amusing that the screenshot includes a message stating that the crybullies have succeeded in getting this offensive cartoon removed from face book.
Exactly.
If you want a SAFE space go to a bank.
Was this your page or do you know whose page it was? I posted this picture on FB and a friend of mine who works for them says that sounds like a mistake if they removed that.
Safe space at a *burlesque show*???
The price of freedom is vigilance about getting your careful social systems coopted.
OBITUARY
Today we mourn the passing of a beloved old friend, Common Sense, who has been with us for many years. No one knows for sure how old he was, since his birth records were long ago lost in bureaucratic red tape. He will be remembered as having cultivated such valuable lessons as:
– Knowing when to come in out of the rain;
– Why the early bird gets the worm;
– Life isn’t always fair;
– And maybe it was my fault.
Common Sense lived by simple, sound financial policies (don’t spend more than you can earn) and reliable strategies (adults, not children, are in charge).
His health began to deteriorate rapidly when well-intentioned but overbearing regulations were set in place. Reports of a 6-year-old boy charged with sexual harassment for kissing a classmate; teens suspended from school for using mouthwash after lunch; and a teacher fired for reprimanding an unruly student, only worsened his condition.
Common Sense lost ground when parents attacked teachers for doing the job that they themselves had failed to do in disciplining their unruly children.
It declined even further when schools were required to get parental consent to administer sun lotion or an aspirin to a student; but could not inform parents when a student became pregnant and wanted to have an abortion.
Common Sense lost the will to live as the churches became businesses; and criminals received better treatment than their victims and everything was politically correct.
Common Sense took a beating when you couldn’t defend yourself from a burglar in your own home and the burglar could sue you for assault.
Common Sense finally gave up the will to live, after a woman failed to realize that a steaming cup of coffee was hot. She spilled a little in her lap, and was promptly awarded a huge settlement.
Common Sense was preceded in death by his parents, Truth and Trust; by his wife, Discretion, by his daughter, Responsibility, and by his son, Reason.
He is survived by his 5 stepbrothers
– I Know My Rights
– I Want It Now
– Someone Else Is To Blame
– I’m A Victim
– Pay me for Doing Nothing
Not many attended his funeral because so few realized he was gone.
If you still remember him, pass this on. If not, join the majority and do nothing
Actually, the step-brothers remind me of someone who worked for the same company as me, twenty-odd years ago.
He joined the company at the new graduate level, but thought it was outrageous that he was not immediately getting paid the same salary as experienced engineers. He always expected everyone else to act with *his* best interests at heart, and his favourite word was “should” – he was always laying down the law about how things should be, and if anyone did not agree with him he would look them in disbelief and whine “But it *should*!”. He seemed to think that there was only one possible viewpoint – his – and he was utterly incapable of “putting himself in another’s shoes”. Everything was always someone else’s fault, and he was not responsible for anything that happened in his life (e.g. he got his girlfriend pregnant at university, but of course it was her fault because “she wanted to get pregnant”).
“look them” => “look at them”
Also, he thought it was an outrageous imposition when he was asked to do any work, but at the same time was convinced that “one day” he would get right to the top of the company.
“Common Sense finally gave up the will to live, after a woman failed to realize that a steaming cup of coffee was hot. She spilled a little in her lap, and was promptly awarded a huge settlement.”
This is a simplistic and patently false rendering of what happened. It should read that common sense died when a multi-Billion dollar business put their customers health at risk after repeated incidents of customers being severely burnt by extremely hot coffee. The women you refer to didn’t just spill some hot coffee, she was burned through her clothing and required multiple surgeries to repair her vagina. The “huge settlement” you speak of was equivalent to 1 days sales of coffee for McDonalds.
Common sense dies when you take a simplistic view of issues and decide you know the full story without bothering to do any research.
I have to agree. That McDonalds thing is a well-known red herring.
I’d also take issue with “It declined even further when schools were required to get parental consent to administer sun lotion or an aspirin to a student; but could not inform parents when a student became pregnant and wanted to have an abortion.”
I do agree with the first part; but there are very strong reasons why a pregnant student should be able to seek advice secure in the knowledge that her parents would *not* immediately be told about her predicament.
Obviously one person’s ‘common sense’ is another person’s idiocy.
cr