Mastodawn

I’m not going to say that college students have it all figured out, or are all perfect. They’re struggling with the present moment just like the rest of us.

But folks, I simply cannot express to you strongly enough how wildly popular press descriptions of college campuses fail to match my own experiences. These bullshit “cancel culture” screeds read to me like Orientalist Europeans describing foreign cultures. They’re just embarrassing.

Don’t get me wrong: college students have all sorts of misconceptions about issues of the day, lose their perspective, and put pressure on people who disagree with them — ••just like the rest of us••.

Are my students worse on these fronts than what I hear in a typical Minneapolis municipal election? No.

Are they worse than what adults post on Nextdoor or FB? Oh hell no.

Are they worse than the very same news orgs publishing pundits who opine about the decline of tolerance? AYFKM.

I have a useful point of comparison: I was once a student on the campus where I now teach. Not quite apples to apples (I’m older, now a prof), but with that grain of salt:

Students are if anything somewhat •more• tolerant of differing views and •more• tolerant of diverse groups who are unlike them than when I was a student. There is if anything •more• assumption that we should reach out across differences and listen.

There •has• been a shift on college campuses, one I suspect is relevant here: expectations of human care from faculty and institutions have increased.

There used to be a much larger tolerance for profs just pushing content at students and letting them struggle. There’s more baseline expectation now that we’ll actually think about whether our pedagogy •works•, and take into account the well-being of our students.

The pandemic massively accelerated that, but it’s a ~20-year trend.

Next time you read a screed against “cancel culture” from somebody who teaches college, ask yourself whether it could in fact be this:

“I’m good at my discipline, but kind of bad at teaching. I cling to broken pedagogical approaches, and am used to making my job easier by not thinking too much about my students as human beings, even if that makes me an asshole. That used to be acceptable, but now people are in my face about it! That wounds my ego. Kids these days!”

BUT! There is a real and important version of that same underlying thought:

Teaching •well• and offering real human care to students both make teaching a whole lot harder. That is •work• right there. And this (reasonable! positive!) shift in expectations means that faculty jobs are harder than they used to be — while at the same time they pay less and less, especially because of adjunctification.

This is not sustainable.

As a faculty member, I’d like to see a whole hell of lot less attention paid the the Cancel Culture Grumpus Patrol, and a whole lot •more• attention paid to this question of how we make human care on campuses something that’s •sustainable•.

The need is real. The challenges are real. And the implications are far more daunting — and far more important.

This isn’t limited to college, and it isn’t even limited to education. Optimization, cost-cutting, downward wage pressure, all these things make human caring •harder•.

The airline rep who leaves you out to dry, the doctor who can’t take time to listen, the developer who makes software that’s not accessible — they’re responding to structural pressures.

We need to give a shit about each other. And if we want that, we have to make giving a shit sustainable.

How? •There’s• the question.

/end

(Addendum: I realize my thread ended up being about this accusation of “coddling” at least as much as about “cancel culture.” Those two lines of curmudgeonism have become so entangled that I don’t separate them cleanly in my mind.)

Fugue State Machine Moto Nov 15, 2023

@inthehands Normalize workers violating “corporate policy” in the name of human kindness

It’s the best most of us can hope to do.

(Managers: this ESPECIALLY means you)

@cmdrmoto
Yes. Absolutely. 200%.

Though to my point: it starts there, but it can’t end there. Caring is work. Work stops if it’s not sustainable. We need to make this work sustainable.

Violate institutional policy — and also •change• it! And beyond broken policy, think about what kind of support it takes to sustain the work of caring over time.

Alexandre B A Villares 🐍Nov 15, 2023

@inthehands @cmdrmoto yeah, I'm all for violating corporate policy, and changing it is hard but necessary, just don't forget we can get fired for violating corporate policy and it makes our work suck in so many dimensions.

Violet Madder Nov 16, 2023

In a predatory culture that has totally devalued care work, emotional labor, kindness, and basically anything that isn't vicious competition, abuse is normalized.

Until this stops, we're screwed.

Paul Cantrell Nov 16, 2023

@violetmadder
Being the foolish optimist that I am, I’m firmly opposed to “everything has to be different for anything to get better” thinking. There are always:

(1) things we can do where we are, right now, in the moment,

(2) things we can do in the near-to-medium term, working both with and against existing systems, reshaping them, and

(3) distant destinations we can imagine in a far better, radically different hypothetical world.

All matter. Living with (3) alone is a kind of nihilism.

Violet Madder Nov 16, 2023

Oh certainly there's things we can do. There's work to do, steps to take, to make the abuse stop. The steps and dynamics are very similar, too, on an internal personal level as on the interpersonal AND systemic levels.

Lauralee Dukeshire HAS MOVED Nov 16, 2023

@inthehands Universal Basic Income and a Job Guarantee would be a good place to start building financial stability for everyone and reducing exploitation. As it is, workers have to put up with cruel labour conditions, inadequate compensation and financial precarity. #UBI We need to realize that if our governments can create endless money to fund war they can also create money to feed and house the people within their borders.

Jenni Halpin Nov 16, 2023

@inthehands I need at least 8 more stars on this. Thank you for articulating it.

Paul Cantrell Nov 16, 2023

@Halpin
Always pleased to cross paths with an English prof. My mom, now retired, taught English at CSU for many years. The field has a special place in my heart!

The conditions you describe here [https://zirk.us/@Halpin/111153849748263758] sound utterly intolerable to me, and also sound like they’re the •opposite• of caring more for students. Instead, your institution is asking you to care about process & paperwork. Hot garbage.

Jenni Halpin Nov 16, 2023

"Hot garbage" indeed.

Among admin's worst pieces of anti-care decision-making: having English faculty teach 5-3 instead of 4-4. I'm hard put to think of a worse example of radically reducing our capacity to extend care to brand new students. (Not counted as overload + no reductions in service expectations during this 15-credit fall; I could make a case for asking faculty to do a 3-5 to present increased availability to new fall students, but only for making such a REQUEST.)

John Wilson Nov 16, 2023

@inthehands this is also a good point

Paul Nov 15, 2023

@inthehands it always annoys me when I see a related sentiment in other places - "it was really hard when we were going through it, and we didn't have this support, so you shouldn't either"

John Wilson Nov 16, 2023

@inthehands my memories of college were you signed up for classes and had no idea how much work each class would be. Figure it out, Poindexter.

That said, the switch from trimesters to semesters at our school while I was there has me seeing the point.

When terms were 10 weeks long plus finals, if I had a rough set of classes I could power through a trimester a lot easier than a whole semester.

Sam Armstrong (pseudonym)Nov 15, 2023

@inthehands I get the impression that it is highly variable by college and even departments/classes. From friends who have been in college recently, their experience has been very different in schools in Indiana vs Harvard or Duke as examples. Friends in engineering, computer science, and business have had different experiences than my friends in pre-law or similar.

@SamStrongTalks
It’s certainly variable by department, by class, and by student at my institution. That makes it especially hard to gauge whether there’s change over time.

I would venture that one underlying source of distress here that people walking into a new discipline or a new geographic region encounter an unfamiliar subculture, and mistakenly think “college is weird!” when it’s really “I just discovered there’s a world outside my previous bubble!”

Sam Armstrong (pseudonym)Nov 15, 2023

@inthehands That is quite possible, for sure.

In college, interacting with different departments was a bit of a culture shock. I had grown up close to that college. The business school was more or less what I was expecting, but one of the art department classes featured a female professor making dick jokes on the first day of class... can't say I stuck that one out.

Can't imagine how different it would be when changing geographic regions and disciplines, etc.

Dan Seitz Nov 15, 2023

Every time I have heard about cancel culture, without fail, one or both of these things is true:

1) The incident is vastly exaggerated in both scale and vitriol.

2) The person claiming to be "cancelled" has omitted important facts about the incident, most commonly what the protestors' grievance actually was.

Dan Seitz Nov 15, 2023

Also let's not forget the entire root of this was right wing students complaining that their peers and professors didn't take their opinions seriously. And it's like...well, kid, your opinions came in a can. You haven't thought about them at all. What'd you expect?

@Dseitz
One of my pet peeves is the use of students feeling “discomfort” as a metric of whether they’ve experienced intolerance.

I have a whole soapbox I give to students about how discomfort and frustration are often what learning feels like — and I teach •computer science•, for heaven’s sake. Discomfort is a goal!

Dan Seitz Nov 15, 2023

Yeah, there's a LOT of that across the age spectrum. You can't even put in a bike lane without somebody losing their mind over the idea of even a minor inconvenience.

FYI bailed on that documentary thread in part for my own mental health and in part because I could tell that dude was about to throw a big hissy fit.

Anders Hovmöller Nov 16, 2023

@Dseitz @inthehands read up on what happened to The Unredacted. For a different perspective.

@boxed @inthehands

You're going to have to actually tell us what you're talking about. Especially since the only Google hit on that is a documentary that's widely available and seems to have done quite well on the festival circuit. I'm sure it was controversial, hard to see how it couldn't be, but it seems to have done fairly well.

@boxed @inthehands

Oh wait. Is this what you're talking about?

Oh buddy. No. Have a seat.
https://theintercept.com/2022/10/20/guantanamo-jihad-rehab-documentary/

Did a Woke Mob Cancel the “Jihad Rehab” Doc? Here’s the Real Story.

The substantive objections over informed consent were completely obscured by a ruckus over “cancel culture” and identity politics.

The Intercept

Anders Hovmöller Nov 16, 2023

@Dseitz @inthehands that's a hit piece imo. You found one source fitting your preconceived idea. I understand if you don't see any problem with cancellation if you dismiss the concerns this fast.

It's like all things: extremes are bad. Cancellations can go overboard and cause a great deal of harm. Hell, drinking too much water will kill you!

Anders Hovmöller Nov 16, 2023

@Dseitz @inthehands The Wikipedia article is a start. Then https://www.samharris.org/podcasts/making-sense-episodes/300-a-tale-of-cancellation

Sam Harris | #300 - A Tale of Cancellation

Sam Harris speaks with Meg Smaker about the controversy around her documentary, "The Unredacted (Jihad Rehab)."

Sam Harris

@boxed @inthehands

Yeah the involvement of that guy tells me all I need to know.

Read that Intercept article. If you've had any documentary training at all, there are some pretty dismaying ethical problems here.

You got fed a narrative you wanted to hear. Don't waste my time.

I Can't Believe It's Not Zero!Nov 15, 2023

@inthehands @tzimmer_history The kids are alright!

@steve
They are indeed, can confirm from direct observation. Just hoping we can hold the world together long enough for them to take over running it.