*shakes cane. Tells a punk to get off my lawn*

How do you all feel about this new environment where opposing/uncomfortable ideas are shouted down or silenced (i.e. Trump rally protests (or even Sanders/Clinton), banning/disrupting college speakers, etc.)?

Personally, I hate that shit. I just watched a clip of people shutting down some event (some edgy, gay conservative troll was speaking) at DePaul Univ and it was shameful. They rushed the stage taking the mic and some dude was blowing a whistle into it smh. Eventually, the event was cancelled after security wouldn't intervene.

Why is shutting down opposing speech the way to go? Wouldn't a better course of action be to push your own counter/better ideas?


Anyways, this article here kind of summarizes the new millennial style activist. It's an extreme campus (Oberlin), so it may not reflect the norm (they want guaranteed C's for the semester because they were protesting and want to be paid for their activism lol).
Long article (that made my head hurt lol), but here is a section that kind of gets to this point:

http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2016/05/30/the-new-activism-of-liberal-arts-colleges


"During this academic year, schools across the country have been roiling with activism that has seemed to shift the meaning of contemporary liberalism without changing its ideals. At Yale, the associate head of a residence balked at the suggestion that students avoid potentially offensive Halloween costumes, proposing in an e-mail that it smothered transgressive expression. Her remarks were deemed insensitive, especially from someone tasked with fostering a sense of community, and the protests that followed escalated to address broader concerns. At Claremont McKenna, a dean sparked outrage when she sent an e-mail about better serving students—those of color, apparently—who didn’t fit the school’s “mold,” and resigned. In mid-November, a thousand students at Ithaca College walked out to demand the resignation of the president, who, they said, hadn’t responded aggressively enough to campus racism. More than a hundred other schools held rallies that week.

Protests continued through the winter. Harvard renamed its “house masters” faculty deans, and changed its law-school seal, which originated as a slaveholder’s coat of arms. Bowdoin students were disciplined for wearing miniature sombreros to a tequila-themed party. The president of Northwestern endorsed “safe spaces,” refuges open only to certain identity groups. At Wesleyan, the Eclectic Society, whose members lived in a large brick colonnaded house, was put on probation for two years, partly because its whimsical scrapbook-like application overstepped a line. And when Wesleyan’s newspaper, the Argus, published a controversial opinion piece questioning the integrity of the Black Lives Matter movement, some hundred and seventy people signed a petition that would have defunded the paper. Sensitivities seemed to reach a peak at Emory when students complained of being traumatized after finding “trump 2016” chalked on sidewalks around campus. The Trump-averse protesters chanted, “Come speak to us, we are in pain!,” until Emory’s president wrote a letter promising to “honor the concerns of these students.”

Such reports flummoxed many people who had always thought of themselves as devout liberals. Wasn’t free self-expression the whole point of social progressivism? Wasn’t liberal academe a way for ideas, good and bad, to be subjected to enlightened reason? Generations of professors and students imagined the university to be a temple for productive challenge and perpetually questioned certainties. Now, some feared, schools were being reimagined as safe spaces for coddled youths and the self-defined, untested truths that they held dear. Disorientingly, too, none of the disputes followed normal ideological divides: both the activists and their opponents were multicultural, educated, and true of heart. At some point, it seemed, the American left on campus stopped being able to hear itself think."

http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2016/05/30/the-new-activism-of-liberal-arts-colleges

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