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06/01/2015

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Matthew Smith

Hi Eric -

Interesting and thoughtful comments.

Your post doesn't address one ground some might have for worrying about the current focus on uses of language in the university setting.

Some - by all means not all or most - students have mobilized or threatened to mobilize quasi-juridical machinery (e.g., Title IX hearings) in an effort to shape the conversation. It is not beyond the pale to ask whether this is an appropriate response to the problems you rightly note students are thankfully bringing to the fore and challenging.

It is hardly rhetorically exciting to separate and critique different political strategies for realizing a certain end. But, in this case, some people may change their tune if they think through these different ways to protest. For example, one might abandon objections to lots of student action (e.g., protests like Emma Sulkowicz's) while reasonably arguing that other forms of student action (e.g., filing Title IX complaints) are objectionable.

What do you think?

Eric Schliesser

Thank you for your kind comments.
Title IX has been an important tool to break the abuses surrounding the culture of confidentiality on these matters; it is easy to forget how self-serving and immoral universities (and faculty) have been without it. So I am not very supportive of wholesale condemnations of efforts to deploy Title IX machinery.
But as I noted in the post, each case is full of complex, contextual detail and undoubtedly it is possible that sometimes (the threat of) Title IX complaints will be abused by some of the parties. If such abuses become systemic there is reason for concern, but I have not seen dispassionate evidence yet that this is the case.

Peter Lambert-Cole

I have no idea what you mean when you compare safe spaces and the "(Shining) City on a Hill". The main rhetorical theme of the latter is American exceptionalism, which seems completely orthogonal to the therapeutic purpose of safe spaces. Could you elaborate?

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Here's a link to my past blogging (and discussions involving me) at: New APPS.

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