Tag: micro aggressions

Rutgers Residence Hall Warns Students Against ‘Microassaults,’ ‘Microinsults’ & ‘Microinvalidations’

Guest Post by Michael Krieger 

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Just when you thought you had a handle on the treasonous thought-police infractions known as microagressions, folks at Rutgers University had to go ahead and further muddy the waters of what is and isn’t allowed to be uttered on today’s college campuses.

Since I know you’re all dying to find out, let’s turn to Campus Reform to learn about the latest verbal (and nonverbal) transgressions: “microassaults,” “microinsults’ & “microinvalidations”:

Students in at least one Rutgers University residence hall are being encouraged to use only language that is “helpful” and “necessary” to avoid committing microaggressions.

The display, photos of which were obtained by Campus Reform, is titled “Language Matters: Think,” and was placed in the College Avenue Apartments by a resident assistant, according to a current resident of the building who does not wish to be identified.

Erected as part of the university’s “Language Matters” campaign, the bulletin board instructs students to ask themselves whether their choice of words is “true,” “helpful,” “inspiring,” “necessary,” and “kind” before speaking out, and also includes a list of potentially-offensive terms, such as “retarded” and “illegal aliens.”

These kids are going to be in for a rude awakening, as well as possible multiple nervous breakdowns, when they enter the real world (was that a microagression, micro insult, or microassault? I’m so confused).

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Liberal Activism Is Giving Students Panic Attacks, Depression, Failing Grades

Life outside the safe space is even harder, though

Guest Post by R

CollegeDreamstime

 

It’s exhausting work, being offended all the time. But is activism actually ruining college kids’ mental health? A report on the emotional state of Brown University student-protesters—who suffer from suicidal thoughts, sleeplessness, panic attacks, and failing grades as a result of their advocacy—paints a weirdly alarming picture.

Brown University’s inattentiveness to students’ demands for greater diversity is slowly killing them, according to The Brown Daily Herald:

“There are people breaking down, dropping out of classes and failing classes because of the activism work they are taking on,” said David, an undergraduate whose name has been changed to preserve anonymity. Throughout the year, he has worked to confront issues of racism and diversity on campus.

His role as a student activist has taken a toll on his mental, physical and emotional health. “My grades dropped dramatically. My health completely changed. I lost weight. I’m on antidepressants and anti-anxiety pills right now. (Counseling and Psychological Services) counselors called me. I had deans calling me to make sure I was okay,” he said.

As students rallied to protest two racist columns published by The Herald and the alleged assault of a Latinx student from Dartmouth by a Department of Public Safety officer, David spent numerous hours organizing demonstrations with fellow activists. Meanwhile, he struggled to balance his classes, job and social life with the activism to which he feels so dedicated. Stressors and triggers flooded his life constantly, he said.

I don’t begrudge students choosing activism over classes. If that’s what they want to spend their time on, fine.

But their anguish seems grossly disproportionate to their situation. The publication of two racially problematic columns does not exactly suggest that Brown is in the midst of a great civil rights crisis. In fact, if this is students’ paramount concern, then they are enormously fortunate and privileged people.

National Review‘s Katherine Timpf suggests that students struggling to balance their mental and emotional needs with the demands of their coursework might consider giving up on school entirely. One doesn’t need a degree to be a full-time activist, after all.

But there’s a problem with that idea: when separated from their precious campus safe spaces, ex-students might encounter some actual injustices in the real world (police brutality, the War on Drugs, warrantless government spying, unauthorized foreign interventions—you name it). And I’m just not sure people who burst into tears every time they encounter some mild pushback on a relatively trivial issue—like an offensive column—are ready to turn pro.


Good Little Maoists

Guest Post by Jim Kunstler

Sometimes societies just go batshit crazy. For ten years, 1966 to 1976, China slid into the chaotic maw of Mao Zedong’s “cultural revolution.” A youth army called the Red Guard was given license to terrorize authorities all over the nation — teachers, scientists, government officials, really just about anyone in charge of anything. They destroyed lives and families and killed quite a few of their victims. They paralyzed the country with their persecutions against “bourgeois elements” and “capitalist roaders,” reaching as deep into the top leadership as Deng Xiaoping, who was paraded in public wearing a dunce-cap, but eventually was able to put an end to all the insanity after Mao’s death.

America’s own cultural revolution has worked differently. It was mostly limited to the hermetically-sealed hot-house world of the universities, where new species of hierophants and mystagogues were busy constructing a crypto-political dogma aimed at redefining status arrangements among the various diverse ethnic and sexual “multi-cultures” of the land.

There is no American Mao, but there are millions of good little Maoists all over America bent on persecuting anyone who departs from a party line that now dominates the bubble of campus life. It’s a weird home-grown mixture of Puritan witch-hunting, racial paranoia, and sexual hysteria, and it comes loaded with a lexicon of jargon — “micro-aggression,” “trigger warnings,” “speech codes,” etc — designed to enforce uniformity in thinking, and to punish departures from it.

At a moment in history when the US is beset by epochal problems of economy, energy, ecology, and foreign relations, campus life is preoccupied with handwringing over the hurt feelings of every imaginable ethnic and sexual group and just as earnestly with the suppression of ideological trespassers who don’t go along with the program of exorcisms. A comprehensive history of this unfortunate campaign has yet to be written, but by the time it is, higher education may lie in ruins. It is already burdened and beset by the unintended consequences of the financial racketeering so pervasive across American life these days. But in promoting the official suppression of ideas, it is really committing intellectual suicide, disgracing its mission to civilized life.

I had my own brush with this evil empire last week when I gave a talk at Boston College, a general briefing on the progress of long emergency. The audience was sparse. It was pouring rain. The World Series was on TV. People are not so interested in these issues since the Federal Reserve saved the world with free money, and what I had to say did not include anything on race, gender, and white privilege.

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