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Protests at the University of Missouri, Chancellor and President step down


Ser Scot A Ellison

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So the hot news right now is that there are threats being made against black students, largely via the anonymous messaging app YikYak. At least two professors told students that they still had to come take exams despite the threats; the university has forced the issue the other way.

Additionally, one black girl reports being trapped in a parking garage by a pickup truck full of white students, and there are reports of a group of white students chanting "White power" on campus.

This whole situation is gross and horrible. I've been out of college for over a decade, and I remember students being ignorant shits but nothing like this. It's horrifying. I don't know what should be done about it but it's clear SOMETHING needs doing.

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So the hot news right now is that there are threats being made against black students, largely via the anonymous messaging app YikYak. At least two professors told students that they still had to come take exams despite the threats; the university has forced the issue the other way.

Additionally, one black girl reports being trapped in a parking garage by a pickup truck full of white students, and there are reports of a group of white students chanting "White power" on campus.

This whole situation is gross and horrible. I've been out of college for over a decade, and I remember students being ignorant shits but nothing like this. It's horrifying. I don't know what should be done about it but it's clear SOMETHING needs doing.

Her tweets didn't really add up to me, frankly. Tweeted like seven times in five minutes about how she was shaking and terrified. I can't even tweet that much if I'm sitting on my couch with no other concerns on my mind, let alone when a group of people are surrounding me and threatening to do me harm. 

 

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Good. The problem is, though, that those threats are typically "cheap" to make -- not financially, but in terms of effort and risk -- and you can't afford to ignore them.

No idea how they found the guy, since YikYak is supposed to be anonymous, but if that's taken care of then good.

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The universities are playing with fire here. It's a slow burn, but there's a pretty good chance that it will roast them nonetheless. I don't mean Yale or the rest of the Ivy League or their West Coast equivalents (i.e. Stanford et al) or the other wealthy, private ones -- these stand on their own and they are strong enough to survive almost any social change. However, they are only a small minority and the others are not so lucky. There are already major conservative newspapers calling universities "rotten to the core" and minor news sources that are outright saying "it’s time to burn the universities to the ground (metaphorically speaking, of course) and start over from scratch." These people are out of power at the moment, but this can change relatively quickly (i.e. within a decade) whereas change in academia in the absence of external forces is extremely slow.

Of course, a university taking a certain political side is nothing new -- during the Cold War, Harvard was nicknamed Kremlin on the Charles. However, there are quite a few differences between then and now. First and most importantly, universities are significantly more dependent directly on the federal government for their funding. This PDF from the New York Federal Reserve does a good job of explaining how this came about:

When students fund their education through loans, changes in student borrowing and tuition are interlinked. Higher tuition costs raise loan demand, but loan supply also affects equilibrium tuition costs—for example, by relaxing students’ funding constraints. To resolve this simultaneity problem, we exploit detailed student-level financial data and changes in federal student aid programs to identify the impact of increased student loan funding on tuition. We find that institutions more exposed to changes in the subsidized federal loan program increased their tuition disproportionately around these policy changes, with a sizable pass-through effect on tuition of about 65 percent.

It's a positive feedback loop: the higher the tuition, the more loans and the more loans, the higher the tuition. University costs have grown much, much faster than inflation and if the government stopped backing them now (or at least reduced the amount), a substantial number would be pretty screwed.

Second, academia is generally less popular and less respected than it was. Half of the reason is the same as above: higher prices. The other half is that a college degree is not nearly as useful as it once was -- one is still better off having one, but as more and more people have them, they become less useful as even a status signal (and of course very few majors actually prepare an individual for decent jobs in an efficient way). The end result is a non-trivial number of people with substantial loans (i.e. between $10K and $100K or occasionally even more than that)  who can't get the kind of job that would allow them to pay these loans off in a timely manner.

The current situation is a harbinger of the third and possibly final difference. Whenever the above point about college not being an efficient way to prepare for jobs is mentioned, defenders of academia (including to some extent and up until now, myself) reply that that is not its purpose. College is supposed to expand one's horizons, present challenging ideas and thereby foster one's evolution as a person. It's not possible for this to happen if colleges begin taking the ideas of "trigger warnings", "safe spaces" and similar drivel seriously. There was an analogous issue with initial rise of political correctness, but it didn't go nearly as far (e.g. I can't find an instance of the Chancellor and President of such a large system resigning because of student protests without some major personal fault on their parts) and the other factors weren't fully developed at the time.

I'm not saying this will happen soon, but in my opinion, it is become more and more likely that somebody in power will begin seriously pushing the idea that the emperor has no clothes: the teaching sector of academia consumes a great deal of money to provide a service that simply isn't worth the opportunity cost in today's society. Note that the entity I'm discussing is distinct from the research sector which almost universally gets most of its funding from completely different sources (places like the National Institute of Health, the Department of Energy, the National Science Foundation, etc.). Note also that I'm not saying it is completely useless -- this is not true. However, for that kind of money and in that kind of time, it is certainly possible to do a whole lot better.

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Good. The problem is, though, that those threats are typically "cheap" to make -- not financially, but in terms of effort and risk -- and you can't afford to ignore them.

No idea how they found the guy, since YikYak is supposed to be anonymous, but if that's taken care of then good.

I just read this Washington Post article a little while ago explaining what YikYak is, and it points out that of course YikYak isn't really totally "anonymous". I will copy the relevant paragraph:

 

If Yik Yak is anonymous, how have police identified the people posting threatening yaks?

Because nothing is truly anonymous these days! (News flash.) Per Yik Yak’s guidelines for law enforcement, the app logs your IP address, GPS coordinates and “user-agent string” — the technical details of your specific device — every time you post a message. Yik Yak also asks for your phone number the first time you post, which it keeps filed away in a database. Law enforcement can file a subpoena, court order, search warrant or emergency request for any of this information, which Yik Yak complies with on a “case-by-case” basis.
Once police have your phone number and device details, it’s a simple matter of cross-referencing those with your cell phone provider to get your name and other information.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-intersect/wp/2015/11/11/what-is-yik-yak-the-app-that-fielded-racist-threats-at-university-of-missouri/

 

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Yeah, I knew most of that, I just thought I had read some time ago that YikYak was resisting such demands for customer information. That makes me feel a lot better. Perhaps they used to but are now complying.

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http://www.foxsports.com/college-football/outkick-the-coverage/is-the-entire-mizzou-protest-based-on-lies-111115

 

Student body president apparently lied about KKK being on campus. An agent of chaos, he is. 

 

It's interesting to note that such a "racist" school like Missouri would elect a gay black man as student body president. 

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This University is being run like a complete shit show. Now a professor is resigning because he encouraged his kids to come to class to take an exam. He got some backlash about it to the point where he feels like he has to resign as a response? What is going on with this school and why is this professor making the call about attendance policies at a class level given the chaotic environment of the last week? I'm assuming school is in session so he asks he students to come to class. How about just apologizing and expecting everyone just understand that this week has been a complete cluster ad no one knows what is going on?

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http://www.foxsports.com/college-football/outkick-the-coverage/is-the-entire-mizzou-protest-based-on-lies-111115

 

Student body president apparently lied about KKK being on campus. An agent of chaos, he is. 

 

It's interesting to note that such a "racist" school like Missouri would elect a gay black man as student body president. 

The majority of students at Mizzou are probably very open and liberal.  All you need to win such a position is the majority.  

This of course has little to do with how many racists there are.  There is a sizable population of racist students...or...more so residents than actually students.  I've spent a decent amount of time in Columbia, and while the student population is fairly liberal overall(like most student bodies), the city population is quite the opposite.  There is a very noticeable population that would be stereotyped as rednecks.  And really, it is pretty indicative of the state overall.  Kansas City is fairly well enlightened, and St Louis isn't too bad in some areas(though there are noticeable issues).  Everything in between and to the North isn't too bad.  The southern half of the state though, in particular the Ozark regions, is very very backwater...  It's like a scene from "The Hills Have Eyes".  I'm talking about as stereotypical as you get...people sitting in their yards(usually a trailer home), flying confederate flags..  I've seen some redneck areas in the US, but this is probably the worst I've seen outside of West Virginia.  Columbia, MO seems to collect people from all over the state, and unfortunately a decent portion of them come from that southern half. 

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http://www.cnn.com/2015/11/11/us/university-of-missouri-racism-protest/index.html

 

Sounds like the alleged threats/rumors on social media are fake. 

That's a misleading summary of the article you linked. The article only says that reports of a KKK presence at the school have been dispelled. Nothing in there about fake threats or rumors on social media.

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That's a misleading summary of the article you linked. The article only says that reports of a KKK presence at the school have been dispelled. Nothing in there about fake threats or rumors on social media.

Well bottom line is the student body president outright lied on twitter about the KKK being there. Just trying to create problems out of thin air. 

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Well bottom line is the student body president outright lied on twitter about the KKK being there. Just trying to create problems out of thin air. 

Well, he could have honestly believed, and had false information. It happens. Unless you have proof that he lied?

Meanwhile, the bottom line is you flat-out lied about the meaning of the CNN article you linked. Just trying to create problems out of thin air.

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The majority of students at Mizzou are probably very open and liberal.  All you need to win such a position is the majority.  

This of course has little to do with how many racists there are.  There is a sizable population of racist students...or...more so residents than actually students.  I've spent a decent amount of time in Columbia, and while the student population is fairly liberal overall(like most student bodies), the city population is quite the opposite.  There is a very noticeable population that would be stereotyped as rednecks.  And really, it is pretty indicative of the state overall.  Kansas City is fairly well enlightened, and St Louis isn't too bad in some areas(though there are noticeable issues).  Everything in between and to the North isn't too bad.  The southern half of the state though, in particular the Ozark regions, is very very backwater...  It's like a scene from "The Hills Have Eyes".  I'm talking about as stereotypical as you get...people sitting in their yards(usually a trailer home), flying confederate flags..  I've seen some redneck areas in the US, but this is probably the worst I've seen outside of West Virginia.  Columbia, MO seems to collect people from all over the state, and unfortunately a decent portion of them come from that southern half. 

Liberals can be racist too.

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