Dartmouth Students Storm President's Offices, Seriousness of Demands Unclear

[Simfan34]

This happened on Tuesday, and the demands of the students come off as a particularly bad caricature, not merely of liberal activists, but of what a caracture of what conservatives think liberal activists sound like:

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http://online.wsj.com/news/articles/SB10001424052702303987004579479501134392562

If you doubt the accuracy of this because of it's place in the Wall Street Journal opinion pages (I wouldn't blame you), take a look at the actual manifesto:

http://www.scribd.com/doc/208843285/The-Plan-for-Dartmouth%E2%80%99s-Freedom-Budget-Items-for-Transformative-Justice-at-Dartmouth

Here are some selected gems:

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(I see they didn't forget the wheelchair kid.)

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(Excellent usage of mathematics, there)

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(I once wrote in a column in the school paper that some person's idea would effectively "entail replacing the curriculum with a series of cultural sensitivity and privilege-comprehension courses".  It seems they actually want to do this.)

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(As a person familiar with many, many "professors of color"- my parents amongst them- I don't know what this is supposed to mean)

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(All right, let's talk about the social justice applications of chemistry....)

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(Did they say "womyn"? Also, why isn't there a red squiggly line under "womyn", Chome?)

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(They said "womyn"....)

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(Since when did Snowstalker attend Dartmouth?)

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Generally, "gender neutral bathrooms" mean individual bathrooms. Do they have any idea how much this costs...?

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(Jesus, Dartmouth must be the worst place on earth...)

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(Are illegal immigrants better people than the rest of us?)

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(And this will do... what exactly?)

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(Literal censorship?)

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(...)

The University President, a mild-mannered mathematician who was heckled, jeered, and accused of committing "micro-aggressions" by the protestors, was held a de facto hostage for some hours. Also, the dean (?) was brilliant when she took them down at the 7min mark when she asked "can you tell me how many millions of dollars of budget requests you have in here?".

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QD3hybciyxQ

Later, someone came to defend the president, but he was a chisel-jawed white man in a bow tie and an embroidered blazer and perhaps not particularly suited to take up the role. Indeed, he seems more of a caricature than the protestors themselves do.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T_iad38Q1Ro


I'm not sure if this is all real or some elaborate hoax. The catch... this happened on April 1st.

[Simfan34]

I enjoy how the white guy in the bow tie (Scott, apparently) is followed by an Asian guy, then by a blond guy, then some brown-haired white woman... this seems comically cast.

[Simfan34]

Liberal Heroism is annoying, but these are a bunch of excitable college kids. Most of them will calm down a bit in a few years but still be reliable liberal voters and activists.

I would have expected you to support them.

[Simfan34]

Wait, why did they say "Latin@"? What does that even mean?

@ has elements of both an 'a' and an 'o' in the way it looks so it's intended to be a (sadly unpronounceable) gender-neutral shorthand for situations where for whatever reason people don't want to use the word 'Hispanic'. I'm seeing it more and more often these days.

Huh. I only see the a, thus defeating the purpose. Can't they just say Latino/a?

Are they seriously that anal over being as non offensive as possible that they want gender neutral spelling with symbols, and not letters???

The irony is that in Spanish, the male pronoun is always used when dealing with mixed genders or an unknown gender. A group of male and female Hispanic Americans is always going to be referred to as Latinos. So in their ham-handed attempt to be politically correct, they willfully disregarded another culture's linguistic conventions. RACISTS!

That reminds me of my reaction when seeing a "alumni/ae" hall in our journalism school. My cringing reminded me that the Latinophone in me was not yet fully dead... By the way, what's the problem with "Hispanic"?

Averroes, I'm thinking the ones with six figure salaries will be the ones who tried to speak in defense of the administration.

[Simfan34]

Wait, why did they say "Latin@"? What does that even mean?

@ has elements of both an 'a' and an 'o' in the way it looks so it's intended to be a (sadly unpronounceable) gender-neutral shorthand for situations where for whatever reason people don't want to use the word 'Hispanic'. I'm seeing it more and more often these days.

Huh. I only see the a, thus defeating the purpose. Can't they just say Latino/a?

Are they seriously that anal over being as non offensive as possible that they want gender neutral spelling with symbols, and not letters???

The irony is that in Spanish, the male pronoun is always used when dealing with mixed genders or an unknown gender. A group of male and female Hispanic Americans is always going to be referred to as Latinos. So in their ham-handed attempt to be politically correct, they willfully disregarded another culture's linguistic conventions. RACISTS!

That reminds me of my reaction when seeing a "alumni/ae" hall in our journalism school. My cringing reminded me that the Latinophone in me was not yet fully dead... By the way, what's the problem with "Hispanic"?

Averroes, I'm thinking the ones with six figure salaries will be the ones who tried to speak in defense of the administration.

Some people feels like the term ties Latin@s (?) to their colonial Spanish oppressors, when their genetic identity is predominantly Native American.  I've never known a Hispanic who minded the term, but I've of course not met that many of them.

I was thinking the same thing, but then I wondered how Latino doesn't do the same, alluding to their Roman roots...

[Simfan34]

Wait, why did they say "Latin@"? What does that even mean?

@ has elements of both an 'a' and an 'o' in the way it looks so it's intended to be a (sadly unpronounceable) gender-neutral shorthand for situations where for whatever reason people don't want to use the word 'Hispanic'. I'm seeing it more and more often these days.

I hadn't seen it before, but I understood it.  It would seem to me however if one wants an explicitly gender-neutral way to express the idea in English that "Latin" would be better than "Latin@".

Or one could not care.

You did ask.

[Simfan34]

I mean you're right- there are conservatives there (I know a few myself)- but they are the ones in the second video speaking in defense of the administration. The ones protesting are unlikely to experience some sort of epiphany and switch sides... likely they'll stop talking about "ableism" or "womyn" at some point but they'll always be very liberal- just as the baby boomers or those who came of age in the 1930s.

It's a generational cycle- I personally think we're on the cusp of one. The flood of articles I see people share on Facebook lamenting the "decline of dating" or the "tone of discourse", for example, seems to indicate a certain discontent with the way things are. It doesn't amount to much, but I think the pendulum has swung very far in one direction for decades now and it is deaccecelerating at the very least. The point being that it's intergenerational rather than intragenerational.

[Simfan34]

It annoys me too. These people are allegedly educated, and yet their grasp of language and its use is execrable. Most of them probably couldn't even identify the origin of that word.

Let's talk about the use of "they" as a singular pronoun... that's a permutation I don't mind. Better than the hideous "he/she".

[Simfan34]

Nice try. Berkeley does not utilize affirmative action. As for privates, it IS the free market after all.

Berkley can say whatever they want. My friend's credentials, references, and connections were peerless. He was deferred because of his last name.

You must realise that when you're dealing with acceptance rates rapidly approaching 5% you're inevitably going to have to cut out some qualified people.

[Simfan34]

You must realise that when you're dealing with acceptance rates rapidly approaching 5% you're inevitably going to have to cut out some qualified people.

40% of the UC Berkeley student body is Asian. He was insta-accepted everywhere he applied, except Berkeley.

I'm not accusing Berkeley of moral-injustice, but I don't believe the official PR, either.

I was also accepted everywhere I applied except for Yale. Therefore, Yale is racist against black people and is serving the white chauvinist patriarchy.

[Simfan34]

People who think that they're capable of judging an acquaintance's college application better than an admissions committee - so well, in fact, that they can explain precisely why their friend was rejected - are hilarious.

Anyway, college students ought to be outraged about how, for example, most universities ignore rampant sexual assault on and around their campuses. Yet somehow I can't help thinking that this group would have been more effective without the neologism-laden manifesto of demands that reads like something written by one of the loopier faculty members from the English department.

This is one of the things, I think is actually quite important. I distinctly remember hearing about a truly awful incident at... Yale? I think, where some students went marching shouting "No means yes! Yes means anal!", a truly atrocious show of... atrocity. But from my experience here, the student movement to force action has been bogged down in the same kind of self-important rhetoric and... if not exactly partisanisation, then something like it, where the issue has moved to a talk about "rape culture" (of which dress codes apparently promote) and equally alienating tone that requires you to hold a sort of radical stance in order to be seen as truly supportive of supporting the problem. I mean, for example, a student organisation of whicch I am a part of a student organisation which was one occasion asked, rather confrontationally, what we "were doing to help fight rape culture", which presupposes a certain understanding of what construes "rape culture" is and how it is combated, which obscures the fact that we're talking about being anti-rape here, which is a shame.

The sort of... political environment, like I said, shifts much like a pendulum. Today we are on a swing towards the left- but I think we're reaching the end. I don't think it's started swinging the other way, or that it's even reached the end, but it is deaccelerating. It might be a decade or more until we reach the middle, and another one before it becomes right wing, but I think it will shift back- just as it did in the eighties, sixties, fifties, thirties, etc, etc. I think it's gotten to a point where it has become alienating with the sort of endless navel-gazing, compartmentalisation, and hyper-relativism, just as the sort of "cigar parties" held by conservative college types in the 1980s alienated people from the sort of rhetoric they used.

When someone like Bacon King says this sort of thinking is "the future" of politics, for me such a statement is disingenuous. It's as if someone in the 1990s deeming liberalism dead (which happened), or in the 1960s proclaiming that the New Left would dominate political discourse or in the 1930s thinking that the future would be Trotskyist. Certainly the sort of spirit will live on, and a few will espouse these views lifelong. But to think that this is going to become a permanent part of the mainstream is a leap too far.

These aren't majority opinions in these communities, I think it might be worthwhile to remember. The tone here whenever similarly minded people (those who like to talk about chauvinism, the patriarchy, oppression, and so forth) raise a heckle is increasingly dismissive- we had an "incident" recently when members of a sorority dressed as Mexicans for a mixer, wearing fake mustaches and sombreros. The Chicano organization got very prissy, writing a long letter about "cultural appropriation" and such things, which was treated by most people as rather ridiculous- the Mexicans I knew didn't mind in the least. Then it turned out that this organisation had, on another occasion, held an event with cut-outs of... mustaches and sombreros. It was less the blatant hypocrisy than the fact that they saw no contradiction that came as alarming, and indicative of the sort of navel-gazing I mentioned earlier. It's become unrelatable.

[Simfan34]

I was also accepted everywhere I applied except for Yale. Therefore, Yale is racist against black people and is serving the white chauvinist patriarchy.

I am very sorry my alma mater declined to accept you.  It is their loss.

So I like to think.

[Simfan34]

The etymology is certainly not the most interesting part of this story.

[Simfan34]

The tides are turning and these beliefs are becoming mainstream in tomorrow's leaders: like it or not but we're about to give way to the tumblr generation.

This will not happen.

This will not happen.

This will not happen.

This will not happen.

I explained why earlier.