Re Are elite universities 'safe spaces'? Not if you're starting a union

["Dave Farber" <dave () farber net>]

---------- Forwarded message ---------
From: L Jean Camp <ljeanc () gmail com>
Date: Mon, Sep 11, 2017 at 2:20 PM
Subject: Re: [IP] Re Are elite universities 'safe spaces'? Not if you're
starting a union
To: Dave Farber <dave () farber net>
CC: ip <ip () listbox com>


On Sun, Sep 10, 2017 at 7:13 PM, Dave Farber <dave () farber net> wrote:

> ---------- Forwarded message ---------
> From: RJR.C <rjr () rjriley com>
> Date: Sun, Sep 10, 2017 at 6:21 PM
> Subject: Re: [IP] Are elite universities 'safe spaces'? Not if you're
> starting a union
> To: <dave () farber net>
As to safe spaces, college students need to be exposed to a broad spectrum
> of ideas, regardless of rather or not their feelings might be hurt.  I do
> not understand how they can learn to think without broad exposure.
>
> Ronald J Riley

>
Ronald Riley,

When you went to university white men were so safe and protected that women
were not allowed in your classes.  Nonwhite people -- with their radical
opinions about their equality -- were denied access. You so were delicate
and required so much protection that more than half the college age
population was denied admission to most universities and colleges on the
basis of protecting your delicate intellectual sphere. Even today the focus
on dress codes is to prevent distractible, easily flustered, delicate young
high school men from discovering OMG women have shoulders. Women and
nonwhite people have been policed to keep your spaces safe, to keep you
from having to confront the injustice of sexism and racism, to protect you
from  challenges to your myths of meritocracy (and thus superiority).

MIT did not adopt equal admissions policies for women until 1970. And MIT
was a pioneer. Today we do not have gender-blind admissions at most
universities because so few men would be admitted. It would result in very
imbalanced admissions.

You have been in the safest possible place. You were so coddled and
protected that even today you do not  have to hear a non-white person or
woman speak and threaten your beliefs about your own merit, your own
competence, and fairness of the system.  ... please do identify the
editorial for example that you read about the POV of a black woman who
enthusiastically voted for Clinton. How many  Understanding Trump
Supporters essays do you have to wade through? Does such an essay even
exist? Has it been written by a nonwhite woman? Has it been published by a
major newspaper?

Safe spaces are about making room for voices that are pushed out of other
spaces. They are about having students today hear all the voices and
opinions from which you were protected. From which we are still protected
unless you seek them out.

And then at the University some people want a center without the everyday
sexism of rape jokes, explanations of our inferiority like the ridiculous
Google Dude, or arguments about how yes we actually did the work to get
here and no are not a diversity hire/admit/token.

Broad exposure is created, not challenged, by a diverse range of spaces
including spaces where the feeling of white people are not central. The
experience that conservative white men are having in so-called safe spaces
is one where their ideas are challenged. These can be places where their
beliefs about their superiority, the inherent fairness of the meritocracy,
and the moral rightness of their beliefs are questioned, even if their
feelings are hurt.

I tire of this ridiculous safe spaces rhetoric. Rhetoric that opposes safe
spaces is about silencing non-conforming voices, ensuring the protection of
feelings of the right kind of people, it is NOT about broad exposure to
ideas.


> On 9/10/2017 12:59 PM, Dave Farber wrote:
>
>
>
>
> Begin forwarded message:
>
> *From:* Dewayne Hendricks <dewayne () warpspeed com>
> *Date:* September 10, 2017 at 12:40:32 PM EDT
> *To:* Multiple recipients of Dewayne-Net <dewayne-net () warpspeed com>
> *Subject:* *[Dewayne-Net] Are elite universities 'safe spaces'? Not if
> you're starting a union*
> *Reply-To:* dewayne-net () warpspeed com
>
> Are elite universities 'safe spaces'? Not if you're starting a union
> For all their trigger warnings and safe spaces, places like Yale and
> Columbia are not very democratic when it comes to unions
> By Thomas Frank
> Sep 9 2017
> <
> https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2017/sep/09/elite-universities-safe-spaces-union
> >
>
> It’s back-to-school season in America, and that means it’s the time of
> year when the pundit class is moved to lament the sad state of elite higher
> education. Over the next few weeks, our thought-leaders will scold this
> year’s class of overly sensitive Ivy League students, what with their safe
> spaces and trigger warnings.
>
> Tough-minded columnists will sputter against fancy colleges that are
> covering up offensive sculptures and censoring offensive speakers. Readers
> will be invited to gape at the latest perversity served up by our
> radicalized professoriate and to mourn the decline of their dear old alma
> mater. What, oh what is this generation coming to, they will cry.
>
> But while they weep, let us turn our attention to an entirely different
> aspect of life on the American campus that doesn’t fit into the tidy
> narrative of fancy colleges coddling the snowflake generation. Let us look
> instead into the actual conditions under which the work of higher education
> is done. Let us talk labor.
>
> In August 2016, the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) in Washington
> decided that graduate students who teach classes at private universities
> can be considered employees of those universities, eligible to form unions
> and bargain collectively with their employers. It was the end point of a
> decades-long process in which the Board has oscillated between ruling in
> favor of grad student unions and then against them.
>
> In the aftermath of the NLRB decision, graduate student teachers at
> Columbia and Yale universities, both schools in the Ivy League, held
> elections and voted to form unions. More organizing elections are scheduled
> for the next few weeks at a number of other private universities, and as
> the school year gets under way grad students should rightfully be
> negotiating new contracts throughout the United States.
>
> But here’s the catch: thanks to the election of Donald Trump last
> November, the NLRB will soon be under the sway of his extremely anti-union
> Republican party.
>
> Once Trump’s members are seated on the Labor Board, there is every
> likelihood they will revisit the matter of graduate student teachers and
> reverse themselves on the question, which would in turn permit university
> administrations to refuse to negotiate and even to blow off the results of
> these elections.
>
> A radicalized university that lives to coddle young people would sit down
> immediately at the bargaining table and give those graduate students what
> they want.
>
> A corporation that is determined to keep its employees from organizing, on
> the other hand, would stall and delay and refuse to recognize the union
> until Trump’s new, right-wing NLRB can saddle up and ride to the rescue.
> And guess what: that is exactly what these universities are doing –
> refusing to begin contract negotiations, filing challenges to the
> elections, appealing this and that.
>
> *
>
> Americans sometimes find it difficult to feel sympathy for the problems of
> graduate students, who are on track to earn prestigious degrees from
> prestigious universities. Why, they wonder, do such students need to resort
> to a workplace strategy we associate with dockworkers and coal miners?
>
> When I talked to them, members of the unions at Columbia and Yale gave all
> sorts of reasons for joining up, most of which would be familiar to workers
> in nearly any quarter of the economy. They want to get paid better for
> their work, to have a say in the conditions of their employment, to have a
> complaint procedure that actually works (this last being particularly
> important in a workplace like academia that is well-known for sexual
> harassment).
>
> The grander reason looming behind everything, however, is that the
> universitiesripped the old academic social contract to shreds some decades
> ago.
>
> The trade-off used to be that, after many years of hard and poorly
> compensated labor teaching college kids, graduate students collected their
> PhDs and headed out into the world to become professors, an honored and
> well-compensated occupation.
>
> But perches in the professoriate have become rare, mainly because
> universities figured out that the more hard-working graduate students they
> could bring in to teach classes, the fewer full professors they needed.
> Then they began replacing those professors with poorly paid adjuncts, a
> different but closely related story.
>
> It is exploitation of the baldest sort. As I was writing this, a story
> came over the wire about an English teacher at a university in California
> who lives in a car, grading her students’ papers in the parking lot of the
> local Wal-Mart.
>
> [snip]
>
> Dewayne-Net RSS Feed: http://dewaynenet.wordpress.com/feed/
> Twitter: https://twitter.com/wa8dzp
>
>
>
>
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