Fun Home - A University Controversy

[all swedes are racist]

Hah!

[Hayyoth]

 

 

No shit. It's like you just missed the entire point of assigning "Fun Home" to incoming first-year students to begin with. Does that look like an institutionalized policy to coddle and to shield to you?

 

The point of your post that makes it rather useless is your characterization that trigger warnings are about avoiding subject matters that make people feel challenged or uncomfortable. That means your understanding of what trigger warnings are supposed to accomplish is about at the Tumblr level, and really have no relevance to the discussion of its place in college classrooms. That's the signifier that your comment needs not to be taken seriously. 

 

http://www.nytimes.com/2014/05/18/us/warning-the-literary-canon-could-make-students-squirm.html?_r=0

 

When these kids leave school and get their first job let's hope their bosses and customers remember to keep a list of their triggers to hand when interacting with them.

[Jo498]

Solmyr - I think the financial competition between universities is a big factor. State-funded European universities have no need to pander to the students.

But most western social democracies don't have anything close to the 30% attendance at 4yr university programs. Most are more like 10-20%, at least from data I saw in the Economist (I can't post a link from my phone, and perhaps not at all given the paywall).

It is very difficult to count those percentages because in countries like Germany there used to be (and still is) a whole host of educational institutions and corresponding degrees that used to be considered "sub-university" (because more vocational, shorter or considered less rigorous than a university degree) but are usually similar to college degrees in the US. Stupidly, German politicians usually only looked at some numbers and often compared "apples and oranges" and decided we needed more academically trained people. There is of course still very strong vocational training for traditional trades and also many industry jobs, nowadays sometimes combined with some more academically inclined training later on.

 

But in any case, humanity degrees have lost the role to make a well-rounded "gentleman" (or lady) a long time ago. If almost everyone attends secondary school until 18 or so there should be plenty of time to give a general education (especially if not everyone is supposed to be pretty good at useless elite stuff like Latin or Greek). It's exactly the humanity subjects (like art history, literature or philosophy etc.) that are not more or less directed at some career that should be the most restricted and elitist subjects. They should not be the soft options because if they are studied as a soft option they really are pretty useless.

Very loose and self-directed programs in such subjects worked in earlier times when most of those humanities students usually came from the top 5-10%, already had a pretty good grounding in foreign languages, reading/writing skills etc. before college and were often well-connected so they would get a good job later on anyway. Or if they really were obsessed with their subject and put a lot of reading etc. in without being goaded. And of course without such juveline complaints. Of course this was also a time when "graphic novels" did not exist and comic books were for children only.

[Ormond]

The shift towards seeing college as a first-step job training center and less as a place for intellectual growth has been going on for at least a decade or more. This comes as a consequence of who's paying more of the bill to go to school. While Duke itself is a private school, it is still in the larger higher ed landscape. The mentality of seeing college education more like a customer service issue is now common and accepted. In this cultural context, it is not surprising at all that students and their parents will feel mistreated when asked to step outside of their comfort zone.

 

I assure you, it is quite definitely MORE than a decade.

 

I am a Duke graduate, class of 1973. If I remember correctly, my freshman reading assignment was Viktor Frankl's Man's Search for Meaning. I don't remember having to write an essay on it -- but that may be because I got advance placement in English and so didn't have to take the basic freshman writing course. 

 

But I wholeheartedly agree with Mlle. Zabzie's position. 

[TerraPrime]

 

http://www.nytimes.com/2014/05/18/us/warning-the-literary-canon-could-make-students-squirm.html?_r=0

 

When these kids leave school and get their first job let's hope their bosses and customers remember to keep a list of their triggers to hand when interacting with them.

 

 

The article was clear on 3 things:

 

1. The wide-spread use of generic trigger warnings is limited to a few campuses, out of the thousands of campuses.

 

2. There is substantial push back from the professors to resist the overly-broad use of these warnings.

 

3. Nobody interviewed said that trigger warnings are inappropriate and useless in all cases.

 

 

The only thing that the article showed is that on a small number of campuses, the use of trigger warnings is applied in an overly broad manner in a way that actually stifles the mission of most colleges. This is, of course, entirely foreseeable and reasonable to expect. It no more invalidates the use of properly placed trigger warnings than a few cases of people not following gun safety guidelines justify banning all handguns.

 

So, maybe, try to actually formulate an argument on why trigger warnings are things to be laughed and scoffed at?

[Jaxom 1974]

When did schools require freshmen to do a reading? They do it at the school I'm at right now, but we didn't have anything like that when I wad a freshman nearly 25 years ago.

[TerraPrime]

When did schools require freshmen to do a reading? They do it at the school I'm at right now, but we didn't have anything like that when I wad a freshman nearly 25 years ago.

 

 

Many schools have been doing it a long time. Some are picking up on it in the last 10 to 15 years or so. One of the goals is to give all in-coming first-year students a shared experience. They also often run book discussion groups in the first week of class to talk about the assigned reading, too. Typically led by faculty in small groups and last for about a couple hours. That's fairly common these days.