Well, the nonsense continues on college campuses, but first the good news: a letter to friends and alumnae of the University of Colorado from its President, Bruce Bensen. Referring to pushback for hosting a video “seminar” by fugitive/whistleblower Edward Snowden, Bensen reaffirms UC’s principles of free speech. This is heartening, but after you’re heartened, read about the two incidents below the letter (sent to an alumna, Robin Cornwell, and published with her permission):
Now the bad news: two incidents on college campuses involving the melting of Snowflakes:
An Op-Ed by Catherine Rampell in yesterday’s Washington Post describes the consequences of a party at a notorious authoritarian school, Bowdoin College in Maine. A student there, apparently of Colombian descent, threw a birthday party for a friend, with the invitations saying this: ““the theme is tequila, so do with that what you may. We’re not saying it’s a fiesta, but we’re also not not saying that :).” Among the booze, games, and other festivities was the presence of tiny sombreros, a few inches across. Some of the partygoers were photographed wearing the miniature headgear, the photos appeared on social media, and all hell broke loose. As Rampell reports:
College administrators sent multiple schoolwide emails notifying the students about an “investigation” into a possible “act of ethnic stereotyping.”
Partygoers ultimately were reprimanded or placed on “social probation,” and the hosts have been kicked out of their dorm, according to friends. (None of the disciplined students whom I contacted wanted to speak on the record; Bowdoin President Clayton Rose declined an interview and would not answer a general question about what kinds of disciplinary options are considered when students commit an “act of bias.”)
. . . Within days, the Bowdoin Student Government unanimously adopted a “statement of solidarity” to “[stand] by all students who were injured and affected by the incident,” and recommend that administrators “create a space for those students who have been or feel specifically targeted.”
The statement deemed the party an act of “cultural appropriation,” one that “creates an environment where students of color, particularly Latino, and especially Mexican, students feel unsafe.” The effort to purge the two representatives who attended the party, via impeachment, soon followed.
Again, I’m not sure that I would have furnished tiny sombreros were I throwing the party, but even such “cultural appropriation” isn’t deserving of this kind of severe opprobrium. (Do read the “statement of solidarity“.) It’s madness! What’s worse is the hypocrisy of the university evidencd by its own hosting of a different party
. . . The school’s reaction seems especially arbitrary when you learn that — on the very same night of the “tequila party,” just across campus — Bowdoin held its annual, administration-sanctioned “Cold War” party. Students arrived dressed in fur hats and coats to represent Soviet culture; one referred to herself as “Stalin,” making light of a particularly painful era in Slavic history.
What principle makes one theme deserving of school sponsorship and another of dorm expulsion? Perhaps race is the bright line, but not long ago people of Slavic heritage weren’t considered white either. Does intent matter? What about distance (geographic or chronological) from the culture being turned into a party theme?
Why can you appropriate Russian culture, and even represent yourself as Stalin, but can’t wear a miniature sombrero? Is it “punching down” to do the latter, but “punching up” to wear Russian headgear and coats? Isn’t that “ethnic stereotyping” as well? After all, not all Russians wear fur hats and coats.
And at the University of Pittsburgh (“Pitt”), a talk by Milo Yiannopoulos, an editor of Breitbart, a conservative, and an anti-feminist, caused similar pandemonium. I’m not a fan of Yiannopoulos, though sometimes I think he’s being deliberately provocative, inciting controversy and drawing attention by saying things he doesn’t really believe. But what he does say is often repugnant. Nevertheless, his views deserve to be heard, as they challenge current liberal ideology.
When he spoke, though, all hell again broke loose. Today’s Pitt News reports the reaction (remember, his talk was open to students, but they weren’t forced to go). First, Yiannopoulos spouted his usual blather:
Yiannopoulos, a controversial conservative writer and activist who tours colleges to speak about the need for free speech, spoke at Pitt Monday evening to a crowd of about 350 students, some of whom protested the lecture. The Board had allocated funding to Pitt College Republicans, who had invited Yiannopoulos to campus.
During his talk, Yiannopoulos called students who believe in a gender wage gap “idiots,” declared the Black Lives Matter movement a “supremacy” group, while feminists are “man-haters.”
The Student Government Board (SGB), which apparently paid for part of Yiannopoulos’s expenses, said that it was forced by its statutes to air a diversity of views, but they were “hurt” by Yiannopoulos’s talk. Some students even felt unsafe!:
Marcus Robinson, president of Pitt’s Rainbow Alliance, said after leaving the lecture on Monday, he felt unsafe on campus for the first time.
“So many of us shared in our pain. I felt I was in danger, and I felt so many people in that room were in danger. This event erased the great things we’ve done,” Robinson said. “For the first time, I’m disappointed to be at Pitt.”
Robinson suggested that the University should have provided counselors in a neighboring room to help students who felt “invalidated” or “traumatized” by the event.
Counselors only? What about the balloons, Play-Doh, and puppy videos?
Of course students have the right to feel or react however they want, but seriously—they felt in danger because of what Yiannopoulos said? What kind of world is this? It is, of course, a world of victimization, a world in which free speech that you don’t like is demonized as “hate speech” and “violence.” It’s a world where you signal your own virtue by overreacting. And so it went:
While SGB focused on the issue of championing free speech in its release, students argued the lecture was “hate speech” and should not follow the same rights.
“This is more than hurt feelings, this is about real violence. We know that the violence against marginalized groups happens every day in this country. That so many people walked out of that [event] feeling in literal physical danger is not alright,” Claire Matway, a social work and urban studies major, said.
I’m sorry, but I have real trouble empathizing with those students who felt that they were in “literal physical danger” (as opposed to metaphorical physical danger). Snowflakes like these must learn to live in a world where they won’t always hear what they like. (It’s too much to expect them to realize that they should actually seek out views they don’t like.) And, after all, nobody had to attend Yiannopoulos’s talk, and if you did, you’d have a pretty good idea in advance about what he was going to say!
