Has political correctness actually gone mad?

Pogue Mahone said:
I've seen a ton of "these types of people" on Twitter but never met anyone personally. Of course, it's almost 20 years since I was in University.

The article we've been discussing over the last page or so has a lot of concrete examples. So this is definitely a thing.
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It was more the 'permeate student culture' line that I was taking offence to (it triggered me!). It's nothing like the major influence on student culture that these articles seem to suggest - while it's partly come about as an overreaction to the genuine pervasion of lad culture at universities.
 
Pogue Mahone said:
I've seen a ton of "these types of people" on Twitter but never met anyone personally. Of course, it's almost 20 years since I was in University.

The article we've been discussing over the last page or so has a lot of concrete examples. So this is definitely a thing.
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As someone who's been a student more recently, I can assure you that there's no over-sensitive mindset permeating anything. It's still just a bunch of young people getting fecked up and occasionally running around trying not to miss deadlines.

As for as ludicrous shit happening at universities, I suspect it's nothing new, but that this PC Gone Mad narrative has given a nice banner to write about them. In fact, I suspect you could take any narrative from any era and apply to examples from things at university, the conservative societies used to go on about Nelson Mandela being a terrorist, for example, are we, then, going to say that a racist mindset permeated universities in the 80s?
 
Silva said:
As someone who's been a student more recently, I can assure you that there's no over-sensitive mindset permeating anything. It's still just a bunch of young people getting fecked up and occasionally running around trying not to miss deadlines.

As for as ludicrous shit happening at universities, I suspect it's nothing new, but that this PC Gone Mad narrative has given a nice banner to write about them. In fact, I suspect you could take any narrative from any era and apply to examples from things at university, the conservative societies used to go on about Nelson Mandela being a terrorist, for example, are we, then, going to say that a racist mindset permeated universities in the 80s?
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I don't know how widespread this is, but it's certainly happening in some places. I don't think you can dismiss it as folly. I also don't think anybody can try and claim that it's everywhere and about to ruin education.

This new climate is slowly being institutionalized, and is affecting what can be said in the classroom, even as a basis for discussion. During the 2014–15 school year, for instance, the deans and department chairs at the 10 University of California system schools were presented by administrators at faculty leader-training sessions with examples of microaggressions. The list of offensive statements included: “America is the land of opportunity” and “I believe the most qualified person should get the job.”
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In an article published last year by Inside Higher Ed, seven humanities professors wrote that the trigger-warning movement was “already having a chilling effect on [their] teaching and pedagogy.” They reported their colleagues’ receiving “phone calls from deans and other administrators investigating student complaints that they have included ‘triggering’ material in their courses, with or without warnings.” A trigger warning, they wrote, “serves as a guarantee that students will not experience unexpected discomfort and implies that if they do, a contract has been broken.” When students come to expect trigger warnings for any material that makes them uncomfortable, the easiest way for faculty to stay out of trouble is to avoid material that might upset the most sensitive student in the class.
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Everybody is looking for an opportunity to register their 'outrage' at something. It is very annoying, but then every idiot has an opinion now.
 
Bill.s.preston said:
I don't know how widespread this is, but it's certainly happening in some places. I don't think you can dismiss it as folly. I also don't think anybody can try and claim that it's everywhere and about to ruin education.
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I'm sure it is, but that's still at complete odds with the experience I had. It's this behemoth of a narrative that I don't believe. That my generation is a bunch of pussies who'll cry foul at everything until everyone but black lesbians have lost their jobs. It's nonsense, we're probably more progressive than the generation before, just like the next one will probably be better than us, and we've got our twitters which make it easier to register our discontent, but it's got feck all to do with political correctness. It's just a world where it's easier for people to get heard. I find it hard to believe that little things like the ones being reported in this thread haven't always been happening.


for example the post under yours:
Rozay said:
Everybody is looking for an opportunity to register their 'outrage' at something. It is very annoying, but then every idiot has an opinion now.
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I mean, what the feck is going on here? It's like a parody. It's the equivalent of someone waving a god hates fags flag while blowing a dude.
 
A lot of this seems to be American college professors moaning that they're scared of the odd over-zealous complaint.
 
Pogue Mahone said:
Might be a problem that's more established in the US than the UK?
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America is too vast with too many different things happening, some very much opposed to PC, for it to be an established thing there. I mean, we're talking about a place where people don't want evolution taught to their children and where someone tweeting "I'm going to kill you" is a legitimate enough threat to have events closed down. Just look at Donald Trump ffs, he's the leading republican presidential candidate. "Immigrants are rapist, but a few a good people" boosted his numbers for goodness sake.
 
Silva said:
America is too vast with too many different things happening, some very much opposed to PC, for it to be an established thing there. I mean, we're talking about a place where people don't want evolution taught to their children and where someone tweeting "I'm going to kill you" is a legitimate enough threat to have events closed down. Just look at Donald Trump ffs, he's the leading republican presidential candidate.
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You seem to be implying there that you can't have problems at both ends of the political spectrum, simultaneously.
 
And when it comes to backlashes - is twitter any different to when the daily mail (or w/e outlet) targets someone and ruins their life? Lucy Meadows being a good example.
 
Silva said:
I'm implying you're making a mountain of a molehill. If the culmination of this attitude is at a minority of student lead feminist events, then it's as close to inconsequential it gets.
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It's not inconsequential when lecturers are losing their shops and amending curricula as a result. I don't think anyone is implying that this is the end of the world, just that it's a real issue with real consequences.
 
Pogue Mahone said:
It's not inconsequential when lecturers are losing their shops and amending curricula as a result. I don't think anyone is implying that this is the end of the world, just that it's a real issue with real consequences.
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The curriculum is always changing, so that doesn't mean much. And we've only seen a few cases of people being fired. Some of them seemingly because the university just wanted any reason whatever to get rid of the person. Some being misunderstandings, obviously. But what's really new about any this? Have professors never lost jobs before the last few years? I suspect that if we had access to job statistics the effect of PC on lecturers jobs will be close to 0. That's what makes it inconsequential.
 
Silva said:
The curriculum is always changing, so that doesn't mean much. And we've only seen a few cases of people being fired. Some of them seemingly because the university just wanted any reason whatever to get rid of the person. Some being misunderstandings, obviously. But what's really new about any this? Have professors never lost jobs before the last few years? I suspect that if we had access to job statistics the effect of PC on lecturers jobs will be close to 0. That's what makes it inconsequential.
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:lol: That's one way to win a debate. Made up stats.
 
Pogue Mahone said:
Doesn't get much better than the student conference where delegates were encouraged to use jazz hands to signify applause in case the noise of clapping was a trigger to some attendees. This actually happened.
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I always thought jazz hands were a description of an octopus-style perv. Turns out I was wrong.
 
I don't recall these sort of analisms occurring in college when I took my liberal art electives. My hunch is that things like this are isolated incidents, and that most respectable institutions of higher learning would laugh at the suggestion of placing trigger warnings before every reading of the Classics. I think most professionals would agree that if you have a problem with trigger warnings, the onus is on you to get mentally checked and healed or shut yourself inside.

That said, there is a strong undercurrent of liberal thought at many schools that fosters a climate of preciousness where opinions that deviate from the majority are not only disagreed and debated with, but shut down unequivocally.
 
Someone this sort of stuff is just Daily Mail style stupidity, some of it is just fogies like me getting irritated by new ideas, some of it is just (mainly) young people testing ideas out and pushing boundaries and some of it is just challenging ideas that will be mainstream in the future. Personally I find it far more refreshing and healthy than the "It's PC gone mad" brigade who in previous eras would have been against things like giving women the vote, recognising Aboriginal people as humans, abolishing slavery, abolishing capital punishment (or even burning witches) and decriminalising homosexuality.
 
Here is how I reply to people who get outraged.

"Your outrage is outraging/triggering me, have some common decency".
 
If you think the hospital did the right thing, in moving him, then perhaps you could argue the reaction is political correctness gone mad.

If you think they shouldn't have moved him, then it seems pretty clear they did this out of concern due to a prior incident and were fearing an altercation. So health and safety gone mad.
 
Police extorting money?

That all sounds weird, are they asking for more money for various protests on the streets for example?
 
Another example, from closer to home:

http://www.politics.co.uk/blogs/201...ash-against-the-censors-shows-tide-turning-in



The Warwick debate started just like all the other travesties of this sort, with the dull thud of comparison between offence, psychological damage and warnings of disorder. This has been the pattern for years now. Political disagreement has been increasingly equated mental trauma in a university culture dominated by a form of therapy-style political discourse. 'Safe spaces', where students are protected from different opinions or people of a particular gender or skin colour, have been largely accepted by authorities. There have been few efforts to challenge the students who demand emotional protection from challenging ideas.

Instead, a terrible combination of managerial impotence, financial caution and political timidity has allowed the campus censors to run amok. It is costly and legally risky to police demonstrations against an event. And student groups have proved very effective at framing their demands for censorship in the language of a 'duty of care' from the university. This is partly to do with the changed relationship between students and the institutions they study in. Fees turned what was once a teacher-pupil relationship into a service-consumer one.
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Adebesi said:
Well yes and also you did a serious degree that actually required work, as far as I understand it, whereas I did history.
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I dunno about that. I just had to cram for a month at the end of every year and pass exams. I was always secretly glad that I never had to do course-work or dissertations. They seemed an awful lot like hard-work. Of course, the real game-changer was having lectures every day, all day, usually with attendance checks. That forced me to learn bits and pieces over the course of the year. If I'd had as few lectures as you arts students it would have been a disaster for me.
 
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