![]() Neither have my employers.īut students do talk to me. Yet when studying difficult topics, as they routinely do, my students have never asked for a trigger warning or a safe space. I teach at private universities, so my students are relatively privileged - though they do not attend the kind of elite college, like Oberlin or Columbia, that furnishes most of the critics’ anecdotes about political correctness. And the attacks on trigger warnings often trivialize the very real trauma that some students have experienced. But in general, the critics do not describe the higher education system - or the students - I know. I do think some educators are overprotective. I have taught history courses in US universities for about a decade. Young Americans, they argue, are being trained for lives of anxiety and overreaction, even in college. Greg Lukianoff and Jonathan Haidt wrote a whole book about it in The Coddling of the American Mind, associating trigger warnings with rampant “safetyism,” along with empty playgrounds and peanut-free schools. Besides microaggressions and safe spaces, the chief villains in this tale are trigger warnings, which supposedly let students avoid hearing any uncomfortable ideas. In the name of “safety,” liberals are silencing campus debate. If you believe what you hear, American colleges are suffocating under political correctness. My aunt praised the episode on Facebook, marveling that she “can’t believe they’ve left him on this long,” given how often Tim Allen “speaks his (conservative) mind.” But as a university instructor who teaches American and world history, I wondered how to explain why I found the episode strange. He scoffed that this was “the latest liberal attack on free speech” in “one of those safe spaces.” They wanted to protect students “from what, ideas?” Professors banned his speech for microaggressions. ![]() Two years ago, on ABC’s Last Man Standing, Tim Allen played a self-made sporting goods executive who was writing a commencement address for a business college. ![]() You know Americans have heard of a thing when it shows up in a sitcom.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |