Group 16 SAPSA Video

https://youtu.be/xWC90I3NtaM

Week 10 (7) - presentation write up

Kevin Mo

Billy Chen

Eric Gip

Academic Freedom and its Threats

Mineta

In Ethnic Cover: Inquiry into Norman Yoshio Mineta and Post-Racial Profiling by Darrell Hamamoto, he exposes the machinations of racial profiling in politics from high level executives in national media and government. The article studies the career of Norman Mineta, an ethnic leader appointed to keep the status quo of racism by manipulating political correctness as a veil of critical immunity. Systemically, for over 30 years, non-white actors have been placed in figurehead positions to sell “post-racial” multicultural facism to the public. They hide behind their race to push their agenda; critics of them are called racist or bigots. Race, as a result, has devolved from a liberal-progressive force for equality back to the divisive pseudo-scientific weapon of control. Mineta rose up from the era of Japanese internment to local politics and became a congressman before leaving to become an executive for Lockheed Martin. After selling out to the big business of Wall Street, the cabinets of Presidents Bush and Clinton gobbled him up where he staged public relations exchanged as a political fixer. This epidemic does not end at high-level politics; it has also invaded the core of academia where there is a high emphasis for ethnic diversity. High ranking administrative positions are held by corrupt individuals that prevent student activism progress.

“Berkeley Free Speech Movement: Paving the Way for Campus Activism,” by Robby Cohen examined the early protests for civil rights and political movement of the 1960s on university campuses. More specifically, he wrote about the UC Berkeley Free Speech Movement and it’s issue with freedom of speech on campus. He brought up how students of that era stood up to campus authorities during a time of injustice. When Jack Weinberg, a former graduate student set up a table for donations on campus, he was immediately arrested. Only when thousands of students blocked the police car from moving by sitting in front of it for two days was action taken.

Usually, you would think that universities support this kind of thinking and action that students had towards the discrimination and hate of the civil right movement, but in this situation, it was totally different. Instead, the university used its power to shut them down the political activity. Even though most people today would deem this unacceptable from the university, I can see why the university wouldn't want protests on campus. They probably didn't want to show the media that the university is taking a side in the Civil Rights Movement and ruin their reputation as a place for education only.

The Berkeley Free Speech Movement was the first of its kind for on campus protest and rebellion and is now recognized as the start of students standing up to campus officials and regulations all over the United States. Many on campus protests have been all over the news, such as the UC Davis pepper spraying incident or the UC Irvine 11, and have had serious and negative outcomes, but show the heart and courage that many young people still have to share and voice their opinions about injustices.

Trigger warnings are the idea that words can trigger people’s post-traumatic stress disorder. By basic psychology, your perspective on situations is skewed by whatever you believe in, so you believe that by avoiding trigger warnings you’re arguing that exposure to hateful things could traumatize them and therefore it becomes a moral obligation to protect them. By supporting this idea, some problems come along with it.

For one, studies show that this way of vindictive protectiveness such as policing speech and punish speakers inhibits the same patterns of thought similar to those with depression and anxiety and doesn’t teach you cognitive thinking.  Cognitive thinking, almost by definition, is putting your emotions and desires behind and basing your beliefs by evidence; teaching you to learn how to search for and evaluate evidence that might contradict initial hypothesis. This nurtures hypersensitivity that will lead to mental filtering that dwells on negative details, therefore perceiving the whole situation is negative, teaching students to catastrophize and have zero tolerance.  

Secondly, by believing that the solution to the problem is forgetting and completely forgetting about these “microaggressions”, we give these words even more power than they actually have and teach students to catastrophize and have zero tolerance. If they don’t like something, they can just report it to the administration and  get them fired immediately. Offensive is subjective and there have been absurd arguments, such as the case at University of St. Thomas in Minnesota with an event called Hump Day, allowing people to pet a camel; students banded and argued for animal cruelty and being insensitive for people from the Middle East, all from an event that meant absolutely no harm and as a stress reliever for the students.  

So what should can we do? A great philosophy that many other traditions and religions teach you is that you can never achieve happiness by making the world confirm to your desires, but you can master your desires and habits of thought – the goal of cognitive behavior therapy.