From @tzimmer_history:

“Here is what actually happened in class: We had a calm, nuanced, and deeply serious discussion. That’ it. That’s the everyday normal on college campuses. But if you read the nation’s major newspapers and political magazines, you would not know that.”

I teach college too, and I am here to say: 💯 College students are so, so much better at having a thoughtful discussion about difficult issues than most of the people covering them in the press.

https://mastodon.social/@tzimmer_history/111414733576050400

1/

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.

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@inthehands

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.

@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.

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.