Irrationalism on Campus?

On a small set of issues related to race, gender, and sexual orientation it's extremely costly for a student or professor to state a non-PC position. These should be considered college mind-kill topics and you should have almost no trust in what you learn about them on most campuses.

I'm a math major, and taking pretty much only math classes, which basically don't deal with any of these topics. I did take an online Intro to Macroeconomics course, and it did seem pretty pro-Capitalist, not overtly, but it in subtle ways made claims about socialism not being effective and such.

TW rape threats, racism.

I have two responses, but I'm separating them because they are two entirely different issues. The first is that I think the article is misrepresenting the background of racism in UCLA in this article.

I'm a UChicago undergrad. In the past few years:

People put up a confederate flag in the window of the Office of Multicultural Student Affairs.

People dressed up as a 'cholo' getting beaten up by a police officer for Halloween.

A group called the UChicago Electronic Army took over the website of an entirely unrelated group and threatened to rape an individual as well as telling people that they will "rape harder to show the class of 2016 who is boss."

The same group hacked into a person's facebook account who was speaking up against the Halloween costume, using slurs and threatening rape against another person. This was in response to a plan to show up to a study area and protest for 7 minutes. (http://assets.feministing.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/11/Screen-Shot-2014-11-19-at-10.26.55-AM.png)

And these are just the ones that were big enough that I found out about it. Until the most recent incident happened, the University had not taken action or even said anything about any of these incidents. In the most recent one, people went to the media and 41 teachers sent a petition to the university to condemn these instances and make it clear that these issues would not be tolerated.

This article is construing actions taken to be issues SJ types are complaining about to be ones that are not serious or concerning, but it feels to me like they are cherry picking these examples while leaving out the more serious ones.

(It is possible that the ones outlined in the article are the only ones in the recent history of UCLA, and there is not a broader scope of racist actions that is being left out. But I place a pretty low prior on that being the case.)

I study at a small campus, that only has grad students of technical majors, more than of whom are international students. There's basically no political or societal discourse on campus. Feels good. I actually get much more exposure to politics via LW meet-ups, and most of the political discourse I interact with comes from local EGL community and their facebook feeds. And reddit, of course. But back on topic, our campus seems to operate on implicit politeness and tolerance principles, which aren't really voiced by anyone.

I am a recent graduate of the University of Toronto, where we've seen that talks on campus that are viewed as opposing or questioning feminism will have their advertisements torn down and mobs organized by the student union will show up to harass and physically block attendees and take other disruptive actions like pulling fire alarms. I expect this would generalize to suppression of other forms of un-PC speech and thinking.

That said, the administration at UofT seems to respond to these incidents more reasonably than the UCLA administration in the article (i.e. they didn't thoughtlessly capitulate), and my experience from taking courses across science, social science, and humanities faculties is that the atmosphere in general is definitely not extreme to the level of fire alarm pulling. I would guess that the extreme elements are mostly local to a small number of particular academic subject areas like women's studies, but that this minority has significant power to influence what is acceptable speech and thought.

I haven't seen anything quite as drastic as the events in the article, but as a current college student, it definitely feels familiar. To me it feels like there is a very strict divide between people who have "bought into" the social justice / PC memeplex and people who have not. I don't necessarily mean that these groups don't intermingle. I mean simply that I could pretty much label my friends' alignments on these issues on a binary scale. Non-PC people will usually be okay with e.g. someone using the word "gay" as a general term of dislike. It also seems like there is very little meaningful dialogue between these groups. When a PC person talks about these issues, they will typically use words like "privilege" and "oppression" which will make it clear what side they are on. A non-PC person will usually not use these terms or verbally surround them with scare quotes. Once people see that a person is on the opposite side as them, they will see them as the enemy and not really make an effort to find common ground, writing them off as "just another one of those PC people" or "just an ignorant privileged person". Of course, within the classroom, PC rules.

The other day I witnessed a big fight within my friend-group on social media because someone referred to a gay friend of ours (not privy to the conversation) as having a "gay voice". Someone said this was offensive, someone told that person to stop being so politically correct, and a vocal argument ensued.

My other response is that it's not that this type of thing is suppressing free speech, it's trading off between two groups feeling comfortable participating in a particular environment. Let's look at the incidents in this article where there was a censorship of free speech:

The professor refused to allow a student to capitalize words in their dissertation paper, citing the Chicago Manual of Style. The students preferred APA, but the professor would not let them use the style they prefer.

Similarly, a TA says they aren't allowed to comment on correcting grammar.

The author of the article commenting over and over on "poor" writing style.

Protesting a t-shirt that pictured a professor who created a theory that states that students who get in on affirmative action are not as good of a match for the college, because they wouldn't have been admitted otherwise.

In many of thees situations, there are two groups where free speech is a concern: Academic groups trying to enforce a certain style of writing, and students trying to write in the way they feel expresses themselves the best.

At best, this is a conflict of different group's ability to speak freely. At worst, it's a continuation of the idea that writing in a style of a non-white cultures is somehow worse or less professional.

The only other thing was the T-shirt. To students who are affected by AA, that teacher was basically saying "you don't belong here." Obviously, that was not the intent of people who were wearing the t-shirts. And I am not sure how I feel on the overall reaction to this, but it is definitely understandable that affected students would feel uncomfortable by seeing a t-shirt with this guy's face on it.

Actually, I hope someone else will respond to the original question of 'what's been your recent experience', and we don't get totally bogged down in "micro-debates"

My own personal experience in the Netherlands did not show one specific bias, but rather multiple groups within the same university with different convictions. There was a group of people/professors who insisted that people were rational and markets efficient, and then there was the 'people are crazy and the world is mad' crowd. I actually really liked that people held these discussions, made it much more interesting and reduced bias overall I think.

In terms of social issues, I never noticed much discussion about this. People were usually pretty open and tolerant to any ideas, if it wasn't too extreme. The exception was during the debating club where any and all rhetorical tricks were considered okay.

I do remember some instances where professors were fired/persecuted for professing the "wrong" beliefs, but that was a while ago now. For example, my uncle was not allowed to say that Jewish people were more likely to have diabetes and that medical students should take this into account. Also, there was a scientist who was hounded in the media for 40 years because he said that crime had a large genetic component, until recently when people suddenly went "oops looks like he was right after all, how about that".

I wouldn't rate too highly the opinion of a woman who lives and works in Manhattan of a campus in Los Angeles.