Week 7: Jasmine Vu

Week 7: Academic Freedom and Its Threats—Ethnic Cover, “Diversity,” and Political Correctness (PCness)

What is progress? Surely it cannot be stifling thoughts and allowing evil to prevail because it wears the face of a minority. It cannot be placing us into more and more categories, dropping more labels than ever before, finding every nook and cranny to be marginalized. This week, we examine the shallow facets of “progress”, from safe spaces to ethnic, and why we must be more critical in what we consider a step forward.

Cohen’s article Berkeley Free Speech Movement: paving the way for campus activism demonstrates that free speech is imperative in progress. Without it, students cannot protest, thereby losing a valuable tool for social change. Students who have come before us have fought hard for this right; the FSM helped to legitimize student activism in the eyes of the nation. However, we now face a problem against it — or do we? The Coddling of the American Mind argues that the safe spaces and trigger warnings rampant among campus are creating an echo chamber and making student activists appear oversensitive to the “real world”. Authors Lukianoff and Haidt, much like deBoer from week 4, believe that these places do nothing the help the actual student and only exist as a facsimile of “progress”. I disagree; safe spaces and trigger warnings are neither inherently progressive or harmful; rather, they exist as they are. Having warnings for graphic material isn’t rare; after all, isn’t that what media ratings are for? A trigger warning can give a student a moment to mentally prepare for something that could damage them emotionally or mentally. Why is giving attention to well-being harmful? If we are, like Valverde often says, fighting a war, can we not make our own places to heal?

Our final article is Darrell Hamamoto’s Servitors of Empire: Studies in the Dark Side of Asian America — a cautionary tale against identity politics and why bigotry is still bigotry from the mouths of the marginalized. Reading this article reminded me quite honestly of Milo Yiannopolis. Milo has made a living off of ethnic cover; people on the alt-right only espouse his ideas because he’s a feminine gay man. They made him the face of the movement because his “minority” status gives him a shield against criticism. Complicity in bigotry is wrong no matter your identity; we must not let false “progress” blind us against that.

My question is: How do we allow for freedom of speech on campus while recognizing and accommodating for the emotional needs of students that may arise from time to time because of it?

Above: a UC Davis production explaining trigger warnings.

Resources

• Cohen, R. (1985). Berkeley Free Speech Movement: Paving the Way for Campus Activism. OAH Magazine of History
• Haidt, G. L. (2015, September). The Atlantic: The Coddling of the American Mind. Retrieved from https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2015/09/the-coddling-of-the-american-mind/399356/
• Hamamoto, D. (n.d.). Ethnic Cover: Inquiry Into Norman Yoshio Mineta and Post-Racial Profiling. In Servitors of Empire: Studies in the Dark Side of Asian America. Waterville, OR: Trine Day LLC.
• Josephine, T. (Producer) & Sanchez, S. (Director). (2017). N2K: Trigger Warnings [News segment]. Davis: Aggie Studios.