Several readers alerted me to this incident, but at least one of them thought it was an April Fool’s joke. It was not. But that’s how close the actions of college students in the U.S. and U.K. come to parody. And this kind of stuff is getting so common that it’s barely worth noting. The reason I’m putting it up is not only because it’s so ludicrous, but also because it was reported (with unfavorable comments about Authoritarian Leftists) in major media outlets like Newsweek, PuffHo UK, and The Torygraph.
The story is brief. Imogen Wilson, 22, is a music student who happens to be vice-president of the Students Association at Edinburgh University (EUSA). She attended one of their meetings discussing the BDS movement (Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions), whose goal is to change Israeli policy towards Palestinians by boycotting Israeli products, meetings, and so on. The pro-BDS motion passed during that meeting by a vote of 249-153.
Wilson is opposed to BDS, believing it to be anti-Semitic, at least in part, and divisive on college campuses (you can see her published viewpoint here). At some point in the meeting, someone criticized her for failing to respond to an open letter, thereby somehow letting down handicapped students. Wilson, who says she tried to contact the letter’s writers and organize a meeting about it, then tried to raise her hand to get attention and rebut that point. That’s when the trouble started.
Here’s the troublemaker:
At that point, a “safe space complaint” was made noting Wilson’s arm-waving violated the EUSA safe space policy. And indeed it did! Here’s the relevant regulation from that policy. Pay attention to sections c, e, and f:
EUSA safe space policy:
6. All members are expected to conduct themselves in a manner which is respectful and considerate of the contributions of others. This is defined as:
a. Allowing Council members to speak when called upon by the chair.
b. Refraining from speaking over, interrupting, heckling, laughing at or otherwise distracting from the speaker who holds the floor.
c. Refraining from hand gestures which denote disagreement or in any other way indicating disagreement with a point or points being made. Disagreements should only be evident through the normal course of debate.
d. Avoiding using gestures which are not generally known or accepted by Council.
e. Gestures indicating agreement are permissible, if these gestures are generally understood and not used in an intimidating manner.
f. Applause is acceptable when a motion is passed only, not if a motion fails to pass. Otherwise, agreement should be made clear within debate contributions.
The meeting was halted while the participants voted whether to expel Wilson from it for violating the policy. Fortunately, common sense prevailed, but only by a vote of 18-33.
Wilson almost got into hot water a bit later for another unsafe gesture: head shaking! As she explains in the Torygraph:
Ms Wilson said she believed that safe space rules banning gestures of disagreement, which were drawn up under the tenure of previous sabbatical officers, were “a little extreme” and had been used as a “political” tool against her after she spoke out against anti-Semitism.
“I totally do believe in safe space and the principles behind it,” she told the Telegraph. “It’s supposed to enhance free speech and not shut it down, and give everyone a chance to feel like they can contribute.“Safe space is essential for us to have a debate where everyone can speak, but it can’t become a tool for the hard left to use when they disagree with people.”
She said: “At that meeting we were discussing BDS, the movement to boycott Israel. I made a long and passionate speech against us subscribing to this, on the basis it encourages anti-Semitism on campus. It was only after I made that speech that someone made a safe space complaint. I can’t help but think it was a political move against me.
“Later on in the meeting, someone threatened me with a second complaint because I was shaking my head – but when I was addressing the room about my worries about Jewish students, there were plenty of people shaking their heads and nothing happened.”
Two points. Edinburgh University? I thought the Scots were a sober and hard-working folk, not prone to craziness like this (yes, I know that many EU students aren’t Scots). And the fact that this was reported so widely, and not with approbation, shows that people are starting to take note of, and deplore, the excesses of Authorian Leftist college students.
As for Ms. Wilson, I’m sure she can take care of herself. But I’m not so sure about the Edinburgh Snowflakes, who need dumb rules like the above (I do agree with the no-heckling and speak-when-called-upon rules) to keep their spaces “safe.”
Finally, one indicator of how fed up everyone’s getting with this nonsense is Monday’s editorial in the moderate Chicago Tribune, “Defending free speech on college campuses“. A snippet:
Free expression is not faring well on American college campuses these days. In some places, the problem is students taking grave offense at opinions that merit only minor umbrage or none at all. In others, it’s official speech codes that chill discussion. In still others, it’s administrators so intent on preventing sexual harassment that they avoid open discussion of gender-related matters.
There is a lot to be said for making people aware of the ways in which their words and deeds can do harm. No one wants to go back to the days when casual expressions of racial prejudice were common, or when women were mocked for taking places that should have gone to men, or when some professors made passes at students.
But it’s important not to go so far in protecting undergraduates that they lose the spontaneous and open interactions they need to understand the world and the society in which they live. An education that spares students from unwanted challenges to their thinking is not much of an education.
The piece then gives some examples of ludicrous safe-space policies and actions, and ends like this:
. . . . The University of Chicago has taken the lead in defending free speech on campus. Last year, a special committee issued a statement noting the importance of civility but upholding “the principle that debate or deliberation may not be suppressed because the ideas put forth are thought by some or even by most members of the University community to be offensive, unwise, immoral, or wrong-headed.”
We hope the administrators, faculty and students of other universities are listening.
d. Avoiding using gestures which are not generally known or accepted by Council.
I wonder if they know the middle finger gesture.
Note that according to (f), it would be permitted to clap for the passage of a measure eliminating safe spaces, but not permitted to clap for its failure and thus the preservation of safe spaces. 🙂
That gesture is widely known, understood, and used here in the sub-tropics.
That’s an anti-mute rule. People who use sign language are being discriminated against. In fact, even making a speech in sign language with an interpreter would technically break that rule.
It also forbids the providing of sign-language translators.
Which in many places would be required (as needed) for other reasons. Oops.
(I attended a large lecture once at McGill – by Steve Pinker, as it happens – and someone had requested signing, as was their right as a student. The translator was unobtrusive and interesting to see, especially given that it was a linguistics lecture.)
Fascism, under the guise of ‘protecting’ the vulnerable.
I had a bollocking last night from an … associate … In a mobility chair. He’d mentioned having a car previously and I commented on how driving a hand-control only vehicle previously hand been a steep learning curve. First hand-control vehicle, first automatic, first large vehicle, first multi-ton load, first tail-lift.
My error was that, talking to someone in a wheelchair since age 5, I referred to the vehicle’s owner as “handicapped”. Since the owner’s “different abilities” resulted from a car crash in his late 30s, and HE considered himself to be “handicapped”, then I don’t think I was deeply in error. But the man in the wheelchair was castigating me and … I apologised. I can see his general point (and agree with it), though it wasn’t really applicable in this specific case.
I feel the need for a pogo stick and a mine-clearing holiday in Iraq. For the relaxation.
This disabled person disagrees with SJW newspeak. No doubt, they are an evil sh*tlord oppressor for thinking such heretical thoughts:
Firstly, calling someone “differently abled” is euphemistic. It is borderline cutesy and it diminishes the actual experiences of disabled people. It suggests that the term disability should be uncomfortable and therefore should be avoided. What this does is further increase stigma against disabled people by discouraging discussion about disability and what it means to be disabled.
Secondly, using the term “differently abled” to refer to disabled people actually reinforces the idea that there is one normal way to be human — that there is one normal way to move, one normal way to communicate, one normal way to sense, one normal way to feel, one normal way to learn, and one normal way to think. It does not perform its intended purpose of suggesting that all people are different and that this is okay. It suggests that only disabled people, who must now be called “differently abled” instead, are deviant or defective from this normal human model, and it suggests that there is in fact a correct or right way to be “able.” It supports the false idea of the normal body/mind, which is what “differently abled” is supposed to undermine, and thus it fails in its supposed purpose.
http://www.autistichoya.com/2013/08/differently-abled.html
Yeah. It’s patronising. That’s what gets me. “Oh, you are so cute, as you sit there in your wheelchair”
I was at the hospital once and I met a lady who was legally blind and mostly deaf. I had a great conversation with her, and she told me all that she had achieved in life. My immediate response was to tell her ‘oh my ,that is so impressive, you are successful in life despite being blind and deaf’
I quickly realized that I had essentially been talking down to her. Oh, aren’t you a good girl, striving against adversity! I felt ill, and apologized. I had been treating her as ‘less than’ in my gushing enthusiasm for all that she had managed to do in life.
I too hate the “differently abled” description for the reasons you’ve stated above, and a whole lot of others.
I’ve even got to the stage where I hate inspirational stories of what people have done “despite” their particular disability. You get people saying, or worse, obviously thinking, so-and-so has done this, why can’t you? Quite apart from anything else, usually the last thing I want to do is go into details like that because in those situations it sounds like a competition for whose injury is worse or just a pathetic whine justifying something you shouldn’t have to.
I suck at running distance and get painful stitches. I’ll never forget my elementary school gym teacher yelling at me that so and so has asthma and can run so why can’t I. I wish I could go back in time and say 1) is so and so tuning during the asthma attack? 2) genetics. Not my fault, jackass
Yeah. Actually the teachers from our generation and older often have more to answer for than the kids.
Also, refusing to acknowledge that some conditions are inherently harmful leads to a world in which people do not get treatment for their various conditions.
I was involved in an awful discussion yesterday with a philosophy type (biological philosophy?) over whether or not it is a ‘value judgment’ to state that, for example, CANCER IS INHERENTLY HARMFUL.
Yeah, yeah, in this cold dark universe, cancer just is. Evolution just is. Things just ‘are’. We cannot state from an objective viewpoint that something is ‘bad’ or ‘good’.
But comeon, let’s get real. From the pov of a sentient animal, SUFFERING IS NO GOOD.
He, and others, btw, were trying to explain to me (and calling me ignorant too) that conditions that cause INFERTILITY are just rich variations and that such a ‘mutation’ adds to the richness of diversity on this planet. Yeah. Those ‘rich traits’ are gonna get passed on to the next generation how exactly?
For goodness sake! What a painful discussion! I find a lot of this sort of attitude among extreme libertarians and for them it’s often an excuse not to provide any sort of government assistance.
In NZ for example, the poor do not pay for prescription medications. Everyone else pays $5 per prescription up to a maximum of 20 per family per year. After that you pay nothing for the rest of the year. Your average libertarian thinks that everyone should have to pay the $5 for everything. There’s no consideration of how much tougher it is for the poor or anyone with a chronic condition. Libertarians usually seem to think people bring their life circumstances on themselves and should have to pay the consequences. Even if they were right in some cases, it would mean people would have to prove they deserved help, which reminds me rather a lot of religion.
I’m envious of NZ’s pharmacare. I don’t think Canada will get it anytime soon because Canadians tend to look to the US and think we have it so much better because of universal healthcare so they don’t bother to make things even better. That’s my opinion of course, but I remember the big fight I got in over 20 years ago in a biomedical ethics course when some spoiled girl tried to argue that anyone in Canada could get the help they needed if they needed it unlike in the US. I explained as a poor person I had no access to dental, mental health or medication and everyone yelled at me. As a student I couldn’t get welfare and that was the only way for me to get these services, leaving you with the choice of losing everything to go on welfare (and often be trapped there because they make you hit an inescable rock bottom before you can receive welfare) or getting nothing. This left the working poor without help and the working poor are a lot of people. Oh but to these people the system was perfect because they thought the US was worse.
Jerks! Even the TA yelled at me (but this was the same TA who thought Roman slavery wasn’t like the slavery of the South because Plato had slaves).
Yeah, some people have no idea. It reminds me of the people who say we shouldn’t complain about women’s rights because it’s much worse for women in other countries.
Even here, there are people who don’t pick up their medication because getting to the pharmacy is too hard (cost of transport) and for some even the $5 is a lot if they’re just above the cut-off for being considered poor or they’re on a lot of medications so have to pick up several at once. Depending on your situation a visit to the doctor is free (which includes all children 13 yrs and under), subsidized, or full price, so you’ve just had to pay that too which can be a struggle for many. When you live from week to week, which even many middle-class people do, a visit to the doctor can make a big difference.
Haha! Were they worried they were going to offend the cancer if they said it was bad for you? How about an experiment? We give them cancer and they tell us what they think of having the cancer.
I remember at uni the philosophy grads used to get lost sitting in trees. Nuts.
It’s easy to be in awe of a disabled persons accomplishments, but as soon as you say it out load you realize how patronizing it is. My awakening was seeing my nieces teammate with nothing below his elbows or knees in a swimming competition. My comment was something like, damn I can’t swim that fast, it was patronizing and his look put me in my place.
My niece has CP, played sledge hockey (a great sport, go to a game if you can) for team USA, is an IHSA swimming gold medalist, archer, triathlete, and chess champion. She and her teammates that I’ve met may be disabled, but they don’t want pity and they won’t be talked down to.
I’m not sure what she’d say to being called differently abled. Besides, why point it out, she already knows she has CP.
A classmate in high school said that the best way to appreciate such athletes was to play with them. He used to be an assistant (for those who needed it) at a place where folks could play wheelchair basketball. One day they were missing a player but had an extra chair. My classmate volunteered – and was astonished at how challenging a sport it was. He *looked up* to them after, not as awe, but as profound respect of one athlete to another. (I think that’s more human-friendly.)
‘Differently abled’ offends me on every level. First, it’s an offence against grammar – there is no verb ‘to able’ from which the adjective ‘abled’ could derive.
But more relevantly, it’s self-evident nonsense. The ‘differently’ implies there’s some ability the sufferer has that ordinary people don’t have; we know that isn’t so. We don’t have to rub it in, nothing wrong with saying ‘mobility impaired’ instead of ‘lame’ for example, but ‘differently abled’ is so obviously desperately trying to avoid any suggestion that their condition might be sub-optimal, it draws attention to it.
And further, if it has any meaning, we are all ‘differently abled’ than each other. Just some are more differently abled than others.
cr
Where’s the rule against making people feel unsafe by accusing them of safe space violations?
Well we all know where this is heading; hand votes and all other sorts of voting are gestures that often indicate disagreement. That is, in fact, exactly what a vote against indicates; disagreement with the proposed legislation or disagreement with the choice of candidate. Therefore, democracy violates safe space and the only form of acceptable government becomes leftist autarchy
Sit down. Shut up. Don’t move.
And NO dissent.
Now… let’s start the debate.
Sub
Is this part of reality? I am feeling very distant from parts of my own species who live in some manufactured, existential plane of perpetual offense.
Where did this ridiculous notion of “safe space” come from? The world just ain’t like that.
Have fun in the working world, snow flakes when you’ll find yourself interrupted, talked over and your ideas ridiculed. You’ll have to be a lot tougher when you graduate and learn to defend your positions with reason not whining.
In the Fry/Rubin thread, some commenters thought Fry’s term “infantilizatiin” was too extreme, or in some other way not apt. I think “infantile” is a very apt way to characterize the behavior of Wilson’s accusers here. It is precisely the same behavior that a 4 year old engages in when complaining to his parents “mommy, Jeffy’s looking at me!”
I disagreed with what Fry considered infantile, but at the same time there’s no way I’d ever say he’s not entitled to that opinion. I would like to argue the point with him.
I agree with you that the behaviour Wilson describes is infantile. They should have got over this long ago. Rules to ensure a meeting runs smoothly and people are respectful of one another are good, but this safe space stuff is ridiculous and embarrassing.
I also suspect she is correct that it was a tactic being used against her because she’s anti-BDS.
Look at the Safe Space Policy document: in the list of things towards which discrimination will not be tolerated is Political Affiliation.
Not sure what they mean exactly by discrimination in this context, but I assume that EUSA members are forbidden from making Nazis feel unwelcome. Or Zionists.
I learned a new word today from the same document: whorephobia.
I’m not sure I want to look at the policy! I suspect it would leave me feeling unsafe. Seriously – I’d be too scared to go near those people in case I caused some infraction of the rules or upset someone. I wouldn’t mean to, but it seems like it would be so easy to do.
And I’ve never heard of whorephobia either. I wonder what it’s supposed to mean? Fear of prostitutes? 🙂
Fear of prostitutes, exactly. As in, prostitutes will not be discriminated against. I suppose something must have provoked this being included in the ever-growing list.
I see absolutely zero wrong with the idea of not discriminating against prostitutes (or any other sex workers, for that matter).
I do have a problem with the cry-bullies inventing yet another neologism they can use to bludgeon people who disagree with them.
Maybe we should think about a new, stigmatizing word for SJWs who disagree with normal people (yes, that was intended).
Normalphobia?
Using the word ‘normal’ is a micro aggression!!!
g. Not letting that vein in your temple throb visibly while trying to refrain from choking the living shit out the speaker.
Reblogged this on Talmidimblogging.
I have no words to explain accurately the exact degree of schadenfreude I feel seeing the SJW’s cannibalize each other.
They’re definitely “eating their own”, aren’t they? Not surprising for any authoritarian movement; reminds me of the waves of communist “internal purges” and what the Tea Party’s done to the Republican Party.
The stupidity is pretty funny but I feel for people who aren’t SJW’s who are caught up in it
Reblogged this on The Logical Place.
Kind of glad I finished university twenty years ago…
Oh boy, yes! (30+ years for me.)
It’s bad enough for them to pronounce that such silly rules would be in force at their “meeting” but how can they use the word “debate” to describe such a group interaction? What’s next on their list of offenses, eye rolling?
Also, it seems a little disappointing for Wilson to be beating the old, tired claim that BDS has anything to do with anti-Semitism. Doesn’t she have any rational arguments to make against it?
Sky News is debating whether Thomas the Tank Engine is Racist and if it has enough “Multi-Ethnic” trains
https://twitter.com/JamesLiamCook/status/717664800050950144
Actually some of the responses are downright offensive but the actual original controversy is pretty ridiculous
I am reminded of the old tagline –
When you wave at me, use all your fingers.
cr
I happened to be reading an old piece from The New Yorker by George Steiner on Robert Maynard Hutchins, the great University of Chicago Chancellor. Steiner was awarded a place at Yale but ‘found Yale as suffocating and, socially, as sultry as the end-of-summer days. What to do? (It was already September.) I had, by chance, come across a Time account of the wild and woolly life of the mind at the University of Chicago. I wrote to its chancellor, reporting on my disarray at Yale. Customary admissions bureaucracy was waived. Summoned to the Midway, I sat the batteries of examinations that determined what subjects and requirements a student could be exempted from. My education had been classical and ultra-literary, so I found myself sweating through superbly taught courses in physics, chemistry, and biology, with some sort of remedial mathematics mercifully added. . . . What very probably decided my life and work was the sheer genius of intellectual exhilaration, the passionate electricity of spirit, that had made the University of Chicago under Hutchins the best there was.’
‘Here, Hutchins ordained, there was to be none of that “coddling, nursing and pampering of students” characteristic of American education but “quite unknown anywhere else.”
(1989)
Ehm, ridiculous is the only word I have for it. What type of colleges are these? I remember our professors said a lot of offensive things all the time and we would argue back at them (I’m 28 so this is not far in the past or anything). There were no safe spaces.
One of our professor would make a slur about his wife while cutting open a corpse during autopsy session. He also liked to put on insane YouTube videos on the big screen during our exams. Another would start arguing religion with us (in neurology class). Yet another was making a lecture about relationships with USA and made it seem like Scandinavians were communists. When us students started arguing with him, he called us idiots (yes, he used that exact word). It was a fun time.
Too bad that these students miss out on stuff like that, because they’re so afraid that someone will say something offensive.
As a side note concerning boycotting Israel. I’ve always found it amusing how no one ever suggests boycotting USA over here (in Norway). USA has done a lot of horrible things as well, and the people that are against Israel are usually against USA too (for some good reasons). Yet they would never boycott the US because it would require a lot more of them than boycotting Israeli oranges.
Basically, people only boycott stuff they already don’t want. I’ve seen plenty argue that they are boycotting Israeli oranges because other oranges taste better anyway. Well, then it’s not really an effort on your behalf is it?
“I thought the Scots were a sober and hard-working folk”
BWAHAHAHAHAHAHA!!!
(But really, I agree)
A lot of them have to work hard at being sober.
Headline: “Most Scots sober”
meanwhile Glasgow police tweeted that people should be kind* on social media lest they be visited by the police.
*Don’t criticize Muslims.
Actually, in my opinion, someone’s casually racist speech is protected.
The public’s reaction to it should be ridicule, not censoring. And ridicule is perfectly OK — it has along history of use in tearing down bullshit.
sub
“I thought the Scots were a sober and hard-working folk, not prone to craziness like this (yes, I know that many EU students aren’t Scots).”
Sober? Yes, we compete with the Irish for the title of ” world’s most sober”. About 40% of Edinburgh University students are scots. I’m hoping the madness is coming from the other 60%.