1A Agenda 5-23-18: "Trigger Warning Myth" and "Why College Rankings Are a Joke"

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Hanging Indent 

 

One. Check Homework #20 

Four. Final In-Class Blue Book Exam for June 4:

You can prepare for your in-class blue book exam by reading Bell Hooks’ “Learning in the Shadow of Race and Class” (available in your book and online as a PDF).

Here is your prompt:

In a 4-paragraph essay, develop a thesis that addresses how Bell Hooks’ race and social class conflict with her aspirations to climb the educational ladder at the college level. Do you agree with her assessment? Do you find her burden too personal to generalize to other people of color who come from a similar social class? Explain.

You can take notes at home, but you must write the exam in class on June 4th.

http://cindykopp.weebly.com/uploads/1/2/9/3/12938517/bell_hooks_shadow_of_race_and_class_.pdf

You don't need an introduction. You can simply begin with your thesis. 

Example of Thesis in Support of Hooks

Bell Hooks has written a sympathetic portrait of someone climbing the educational ladder as she must confront her own demons arising from the conflict between her race and social class with bourgeois values. This conflict results in _________________, ______________, ___________________, and ___________________. 

Example of Thesis That Partly Refutes Hooks

While Hooks is a sympathetic figure in her quest to climb the educational ladder, her expressed grief in the face of her race and social class conflicts seems overplayed when we consider ________________, ________________, __________________, and ____________________. 

 

Purdue Owl MLA Works Cited for Kindle, eBooks, PDF, Etc.

 

Essay #5 Options: Capstone Essay with 5 Sources for Works Cited Due 6-6-18.

One. Support, refute, or complicate Alfie Kohn’s assertion from “Degrading to De-grading” that grading is an inferior education tool that all conscientious teachers should abandon. In other words, will students benefit from an accountability-free education? Why? Explain.

Two. Support, refute, or complicate the inferred lesson from bell hooks’ essay, “Learning in the Shadow of Race and Class” that upward mobility requires a betrayal of one’s economic class and even family. To rub shoulders with the privileged, do we have to "sell out," to conform to their snobbish ways, and in doing so, are we betraying our core values and turning our backs on our roots?

Three. In the context of Kristina Rizga’s “Everything You’ve Heard About Failing Schools Is Wrong” (253), support, refute, or complicate the assertion that standardized testing is a money-making canard sodden with incompetence, corruption, and moral bankruptcy, and therefore must be abolished.

Four. Addressing Aaron Hanlon’s “The Trigger Warning Myth” (309) and Ferentz Lafargue’s “Welcome to the ‘Real World’” (317), develop a thesis about colleges, microaggressions, and hate speech. You can also refer to Greg Lukianoff’s and Jonathan Haidt’s online Atlantic essay, “The Coddling of the American Mind.”

Five. In the context of Frank Bruni’s “Why College Rankings Are a Joke” (296) and Ben Casselman’s “Shut Up About Harvard” (301), develop a thesis about the notion that college rankings “skew the broader debate about education.” 

This is an essay about the guilt for "playing the game" to ascend the education and economic ladder. 

Sources You Can Use for Bell Hooks Essay Option

"Keeping Close to Home"

“Learning in the Shadow of Race and Class” by Bell Hooks (287)

"The Cost of Balancing Academia and Racism"

"One Day, Two Students" from The Washington Post (to see your dog 99)

 

Two. "Trigger Warning Myth" by Aaron Hanlon

Study Questions

One. In what ways does Hanlon argue that the influential essay "The Coddling of the American Mind" by Greg Lukianoff and Jonathan Haidt is misguided?

Hanlon agrees that coddling students by overplaying the trigger warnings, political correctness and microaggression card can be bad, but not as bad as the authors claim. 

Further, the essay in question, according to Hanlon, is misguided about trigger warnings in general. 

A trigger warning doesn't lead to censorship; to the contrary, a trigger warning helps professors talk more about sensitive material.

Two. How would Hanlon's course syllabus offend both social justice warriors on the Left and morality crusaders on the Right?

He goes to very extreme places in his literary works, which some would argue would cause PTSD in the snowflake students and others would say are encroaching on basic decency and morality of the student population. 

Three. What is Hanlon's defense of using a trigger warning? 

He wants everyone to be ready for some disturbing material:

trig·ger warn·ing

noun

noun: trigger warning; plural noun: trigger warnings

 

a statement at the start of a piece of writing, video, etc., alerting the reader or viewer to the fact that it contains potentially distressing material (often used to introduce a description of such content).

"there probably should be a trigger warning for people dealing with grief"

 

Four. Does Hanlon do a good job of critiquing "The Coddling of the American Mind"?

 

I read the essay, and I can say the essay does more than talk about trigger warnings. It talks about an obsession with microaggressions that makes students offended by the slightest thing to the point they suffer from being hyper sensitive. That doesn't mean that microaggressions don't exist, coming people who are ignorant, passive-aggressive, or outright belligerent and overtly racist. They do.

 

Five. What are microaggressions?

 

Here are some legit microaggressions posted on Buzzfeed. 

 

Hanlon would have been better served had he argued about microaggressions. By focusing on trigger warnings, he committed a Straw Man fallacy against the essay he critiques. 

 

Six. Does Hanlon defend his claim that irresponsible speech is not dangerous when it comes from marginalized groups. 

 

The backlash against trigger warnings is part of a larger iteration of backlash against political correctness, which tells us something important about where the public thinks the power lies. People on the margins may get press for tweeting things like “kill all white men,” and the occasional professor may be undeservedly shamed or ousted for running afoul of students with certain P.C. language expectations. In both scenarios, however, the heart of the matter is who holds the authority to choose the best (or worst) course of action. The P.C. backlash and the trigger-warning backlash hold a common fallacy: They see pushback from the margins and mistake it for threats to the most institutionally powerful.

“Kill all white people” is a despicable sentiment, but in practice it’s not white people who face the gravest threats of being gunned down by those who wield the authority to do so. Similarly, students can demand trigger warnings or sensitivity trainings, but students remain more vulnerable to institutional power than the professors who assign their grades or the administrators who adjudicate their missteps. And if there exist situations in which professors really are “terrified” by our students, and students are actually lapsing into mental distress because we’re too afraid to cross them, then the problem is much bigger than trigger warnings. The problem is mistrusting the experience and authority of professors in our roles as teachers and intellectual caregivers. If we can lose our jobs either for teaching traumatic material or for failing to warn students adequately about it, what’s really happening here isn’t that we’re ruining students by coddling them; we’re losing the authority we rely on to be sensitive to students’ anxieties without giving into them, to use techniques like trigger warnings judiciously without being forced to use them in some generalized and codified way.

A Refutation of the Idea That Students Should be Stronger and "Grin and Bear It" in the Face of Social Injustice:

Ferentz Lafargue

“The imaginary college student is a character born of someone else’s pessimism. It is an easy target, a perverse distillation of all the self-regard and self-absorption ascribed to what’s often called the millennial generation. But perhaps it goes both ways, and the reason that college stories have garnered so much attention this year is our general suspicion, within the real world, that the system no longer works.”

—Hua Hsu, “The Year of the Imaginary College Student,” The New Yorker, Dec. 31, 2015

In the work I do as a diversity advocate in higher education, I often hear a concern that some of our efforts in pursuit of equity may be doing students a disservice—that we’re not preparing them for the “real world.” The implied logic is that if students feel empowered to voice their discontent with micro-aggressions experienced on campus, then they’re not developing the thick skin necessary to deal with the slights they’ll see in the workplace, out in the “real world.” Students should “toughen up,” and we should stop “coddling” them, we’re told.

I’ve heard these sentiments expressed about Williams’ efforts to counsel students against donning offensive Halloween costumes, the distribution of a “Pronouns Matter” pamphlet last fall and in more general discussions about what constitutes a “safe space” on campus.

To be sure, the real world is full of anti-Semitism, homophobia, sexism and racism. The question is: Do we prepare students to accept the world as it is, or do we prepare them to change it? Telling students either explicitly or implicitly that they should grin and bear it is the last thing one should do as an educator. Yet that’s essentially the gospel that the “wait until the real world” parishioners would have many of us adopt.

The purpose of a college experience isn’t to make students feel as if they’re in a well-insulated bubble. Just as the image of the “imaginary college student” as a video game-addicted humanities major who uses the pronoun “they” and abides by a strict gluten-free diet disregards the lived experiences of countless students, so, too, do any allusions that colleges are idyllic enclaves. It’s worth remembering that being at Williams doesn’t immediately reshape all students’ lives into concentric circles with Frosh Quad at their center.

Instead, each student has a Venn diagram-like series of circles of their families, previous neighborhoods, schools and friend groups, all bartering for space among 2,200 other students. Over the last five years, to help mitigate some of the tensions that are bound to arise from this complex configuration, staff members at the Davis Center have been leading workshops on social identity formation and facilitation as part of the spring and fall training sessions for junior advisors. These trainings are complemented by an array of events during First Days that seek to provide the entering class an introduction to the identities and perspectives they’re likely to encounter here at Williams.

Hua Hsu’s “imaginary college student” is, for a casual observer of the various controversies that have affected campuses across the country this past year, an easy explanation. It’s a caricature that allowed vast swaths of the reading public to cast college students as “absurdly thin-skinned, unduly obsessed with ‘safe spaces’ and political correctness,” as Hsu writes in The New Yorker.

Part of the reason that college students are such fraught discursive subjects is because colleges themselves are undergoing their own existential dilemmas. Is college a place for intellectual exploration? Or is it a glorified worker-training program?

We’re not immune to this debate here at Williams, and some of our students and families bear its weight more than others. Students whose families are facing financial distress often feel guilty about engaging in any pursuit that’s not alleviating their family’s hardships. The decisions these students are forced to make range from deciding whether to take time off from school to find jobs so they can better support their families to choosing majors based on projected earning expectations immediately after graduation.

Moreover, a more general national debate over the value of a college education manifests differently for individual students. For some, it’s a question of the value of college broadly or of their particular college education and experience. For others, it’s yet another variable in trying to understand how they fit into this system—and if they are worth such investment.

My colleagues and I at the Davis Center and so many of us here at Williams do our best to assure all students they are worth the efforts that they and their families are making so they can attend college.

Whether one is suspicious of the merits of college as a whole or cynical about the existence of “safe spaces,” the truth of the matter is that “coddled” college students aren’t the problem. The real culprits—on campuses and in the real world—are the persistent effects of homophobia, income inequality, misogyny, poverty, racism, sexism, white supremacy and xenophobia. When students refuse to accept discrimination on college campuses, they’re learning important lessons about how to fight it everywhere.

Ferentz Lafargue is director of the Davis Center.

Four. Addressing Aaron Hanlon’s “The Trigger Warning Myth” (309) and Ferentz Lafargue’s “Welcome to the ‘Real World’” (317), develop a thesis about colleges, microaggressions, and hate speech. You can also refer to Greg Lukianoff’s and Jonathan Haidt’s online Atlantic essay, “The Coddling of the American Mind.”

 

Sample Thesis

While some campuses have gone overboard with their social justice warrior costume resulting in hyper-sensitive students, one can make a strong case that there are legitimate microaggressions and social injustices that can, as Aaron Hanlon and Ferentz Lafargue correctly argue, be addressed in a responsible way and that address these injustices should not be cause for legit protest to be lumped together with extreme protests. To lump both together is to do a disservice to the cause of fighting for justice evidenced by _____________, _______________, __________________, and _____________________. 

 

"Why College Rankings Are a Joke"

Shortly before the newest U.S. News & World Report college rankings came out last week, I got a fresh glimpse of how ridiculous they can be — and of why panicked high school seniors and their status-conscious parents should not spend the next months obsessing over them.

I was reporting a column on how few veterans are admitted to elite colleges and stumbled across a U.S. News sub-ranking of top schools for veterans. Its irrelevance floored me. It merely mirrored the general rankings — same institutions, same order — minus the minority of prominent schools that don’t participate in certain federal education benefits for veterans.

It didn’t take into account whether there were many — or, for that matter, any — veterans on a given campus. It didn’t reflect what support for them did or didn’t exist.

It was just another way to package and peddle the overall U.S. News rankings, illustrating the extent to which they’re a marketing ploy. No wonder so many college presidents, provosts and deans of admissions express disdain for them. How sad that they participate in them nonetheless.

The rankings nourish the myth that the richest, most selective colleges have some corner on superior education; don’t adequately recognize public institutions that prioritize access and affordability; and do insufficient justice to the particular virtues of individual campuses.

Consider a school I visited this month, in conjunction with its 50th birthday: the University of Maryland, Baltimore County.

At the Starbucks in the middle of campus, I met a senior majoring in film. He has the usual Hollywood dreams but more than the usual optimism about making them come true. After all, a short movie that he wrote and directed as a sophomore got a showing at the Cannes Film Festival.

Later I spoke with a renowned mathematics professor, Manil Suri, who is also the openly gay author of an acclaimed sequence of novels set in India, where he was born, and who has contributed frequently to The Times. His conversations with undergraduates range far beyond algorithms.

I slipped into the arts center, completed just two years ago, where there’s a stunning music hall with sumptuous acoustics and a theater of eye-popping technical sophistication.

I dropped in on Michael Summers, a biochemist who has done pioneering research into retroviruses and H.I.V. He said that he’d never trade his faculty position here for one elsewhere, though he has been wooed, because of U.M.B.C.’s almost unrivaled record for guiding African-American undergraduates toward doctorates and other postgraduate degrees in STEM fields (science, technology, engineering and math).

“We’re doing something that nobody else is doing,” Summers told me. In a conversation with another journalist years ago, he put it this way: “If you see a group of black students walking together on a college campus, your first thought might be, ‘Oh, there goes the basketball team.’ Here you think, ‘There goes the chemistry honors club, or the chess team.’ It’s just a different attitude.”

The U.M.B.C. chess team has won the national college chess championship six times over the last 13 years. But Summers’s remarks also reflect something else: In 1988, the school started the Meyerhoff Scholars Program, designed to address the paucity of minorities in STEM fields by giving generous financial aid and extensive mentorship to talented African-American students.

More than 1,100 men and women of all races have been through the program, typically going on to extraordinary careers. Summers and I chatted about one graduate we both knew, Isaac Kinde, who said no to Stanford in order to attend U.M.B.C. He recently completed a combined medical degree and doctorate at Johns Hopkins and is now at a biotech start-up.

“He has found a way to detect ovarian cancer with a Pap smear,” Summers said. “That guy is going to revolutionize health care for women.”

Four former Meyerhoff Scholars are on the faculty of Duke University’s medical school, including Damon Tweedy, who wrote the 2015 best seller “Black Man in a White Coat: A Doctor’s Reflections on Race and Medicine.”

Duke is where Tweedy himself went to medical school, and he told me that although most of his classmates there were from colleges more selective than U.M.B.C. and families with more money than his, “I scored in the top 20 percent of my class during that first year of basic science classes, which are the toughest part of med school.” U.M.B.C. had prepared him well, not just academically but also, he said, by making him feel that he was “part of something more than just your individual attainment.”

 

He recalled that before he decided to go there, several Ivy League colleges tried to recruit him — for basketball. In contrast, he first came on to U.M.B.C.’s radar because of his aptitude for science.

More than one in four U.M.B.C. undergraduates qualifies for federal Pell grants, meant to serve low-income families. About 45 percent are white, while 18 percent are Asian-American and 16 percent are African-American.

From the ceiling of the student commons hang flags of countries from which students have come. There are more than 100. It’s a kind of kaleidoscope, and as I walked under it with Freeman Hrabowski, U.M.B.C.’s dynamic president, he stressed the school’s determination to “connect students to people different from themselves and lives different from their own.” The young men and women who ate, talked or studied at almost every one of the tables around us were a mix of colors, and I couldn’t map the room in terms of any obvious tribes or cliques.

Diversity, socioeconomic or otherwise, doesn’t factor much into U.S. News rankings, though a broadening of perspectives lies at the heart of the best education. U.M.B.C., with its acceptance rate of nearly 60 percent, places 159th among national universities.

One of the main factors in a school’s rank is how highly officials at peer institutions and secondary-school guidance counselors esteem it. But they may not know it well. They’re going by its reputation, established in no small part by previous U.S. News evaluations. A lofty rank perpetuates itself.

Another main factor is the percentage of a school’s students who graduate within six years. But this says as much about a school’s selectiveness — the proven achievement and discipline of the students it admits — as about its stewardship of them.

Schools try to game the system and score better on additional criteria that go into their rank, though Robert Morse, the chief data strategist for U.S. News, told me in an email that the methodology had evolved so that “you cannot make a meaningful rise in the rankings by tweaking one or two numbers.”

He also noted, rightly, that the copious information that U.S. News collects about the student bodies and academic tracks at hundreds of schools produces a mother lode of useful facts and figures that go far beyond the numerical rankings.

But those rankings are front and center, fostering the idea that schools are brands in competition with one another. The rankings elevate clout above learning, which isn’t as easily measured.

Intentionally or not, they fuel a frenzy to get into the most selective schools. They can’t adjust for how well certain colleges serve certain ambitions.

And they err. For the newest rankings, in what was obviously meant as an improvement, the sub-list for veterans included only schools at which 20 or more students were using G.I. Bill benefits.

But those benefits flow to dependents of veterans — their children, for example — as well as to veterans themselves. They’re a fatally flawed metric. So M.I.T. is ranked second though it knows of only four veterans among its undergraduates. (I checked.) Duke is tied for third though it knows of only two.

These colleges’ best-for-veterans triumphs still have no real relevance. There’s a larger lesson in that.   

 

"Shut Up About Harvard" 

 

Sample Successful Thesis:

Clearly, college ranking systems are a fraud based on misrepresentation of "high-performance" schools, failure to recognize small-name campuses, a pandering to rich universities, and a failure to acknowledge that some colleges fudge their numbers to appear more successful. 

Sample Failed Thesis:

Fraudulent or not, it is in a student's best interest to attend a high-ranked college because it has more cachet with employers.