If you have never been on an American college campus, you may be in for a shock. They tend to be highly politicized places, where you have to be careful about what you say or, more precisely, THE WORDS YOU USE. Terms you should know include “cultural appropriation,” “safe spaces,” “trigger warnings,” “microaggressions,” “no-platforming,” and “cancel culture.”

Take, for example, the following episode: In the fall of 2015 at Yale University, Nicholas Christakis, a distinguished professor and head of one of Yale’s residential colleges, was verbally ambushed by a group of minority students who berated him, calling him “disgusting,” and demanding that he step down. What had this scholar-administrator done to invite such abuse from students considered to be among the brightest in the land? Well, it turns out that his wife, also on the Yale faculty, had a few days before sent off an email to a small group of Yale students, encouraging them to dress how they wished for Halloween, even at the risk of offending people.

 

The offending email was composed in response to one distributed by the University’s Intercultural Affairs Committee to the entire Yale student body, asking students to avoid wearing “culturally unaware and insensitive” costumes that could offend minority students. The missive specifically advised students to steer clear of outfits that included elements like feathered headdresses, turbans or blackface – what is referred to in politically-correct vernacular as “cultural appropriation.”

 

The video of the incident described above, which can be found on YouTube, strains credulity in the hysterical response to an innocuous suggestion regarding Halloween costumes. In it the students demand that Professor Christakis apologize for the beliefs expressed by him and his wife, claiming that the two had created a space “unsafe” for students in that particular residential college. When Christakis tries to reason with the harassers, one student responds, between expletives, “It is not about creating an intellectual space! It is not! Do you understand that? It is about creating a home here!” [NB: safe spaces are physical locations on campus where students can retreat from ideas and perspectives at odds with their own.]

 

On college campuses around the country, students, particularly those  of color, are forcing white students and administrators to confront the pernicious effects of racial bias. The question facing campuses, then, is how to weigh those issues of sensitivity and mental health against sometimes-competing values of free speech and academic freedom. As a result, dispensing Halloween costume advice has become an annual rite for college administrators.

 

One representative (and highly regarded) college demanded students pose the following questions to themselves lest their Halloween costume transgress the college’s accepted boundaries: Does your costume mock cultural or religious symbols? Does your costume attempt to represent an entire culture or ethnicity? Does your costume trivialize human suffering, oppression, or marginalization? Does your costume perpetuate negative stereotypes? Yes, respect for diversity is the stated goal of virtually every college in America. Yet, curiously, these schools appear to mandate that everyone appear and think in a more or less homogeneous fashion.

One highly sought-after college prohibits even “unintentional forms of harassment.” That same school also grants students “the right to be protected against actions that may be harmful to [their] emotional stability.” This is in effect what’s called a “trigger warning,” which is demanded by so many students in their classes. Trigger warnings are for instructors so they avoid assigning a reading – no matter how important to the canon or how much can be learned from it – if it may upset students in some way. Books that have been required to bear this warning in recent years include The Great Gatsby  (“A variety of scenes that reference gory, abusive, and misogynistic violence”) and Ovid’s Metamorphoses (“Depictions of assault”). 

Closely related to the trigger warning concept are what are termed “microaggressions”: the mostly unintended but nevertheless offensive, hostile, or derogatory offhand comment (e.g., “You are Asian. So you much be good at math.”). Although such comments may appear harmless (at least to the perpetrator), on most colleges campuses today they are considered to be a form of covert racism or discrimination.

Another term you should be familiar with is “no-platforming.” Objections to providing a platform to certain speakers deemed politically unacceptable (meaning, conservative) is known as no-platforming. Speakers invited to American college campuses in recent years, only to be forced to cancel their appearance due to student opposition, include former Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, IMF Director Christine Lagarde and conservative commentator Ann Coulter.

Finally, you will almost certainly come across the expression “cancel culture,” a close relative to no-platforming. This is common on college campuses and refers to the predilection to simply erase from our collective memory public or historical figures who would not be considered “woke” (the  mental state of being hyper alert to any injustice in society, especially racism) by today’s standards. The fact that Thomas Jefferson was a slaveholder or Napoleon an imperialist, in this view, negates any justification for them to be memorialized in the public space.

Does this all sound to you like American college students don’t want to hear anything that they disagree with? Be prepared when you begin your studies in the U.S., for the prevailing logic on campus is “My right NOT to be offended trumps your freedom of speech.”

Questions about this post: Email robert@designsonlearning.com