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.
2/
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.
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!
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.