Sanctuaries?
Another strange thing to think.
https://twitter.com/DrJoGrady/status/1140729246110953472
Universities & colleges should be sanctuaries, not spaces where staff & students are exposed to oppressive attitudes from those charged to teach them.
Really? Universities and colleges should be sanctuaries? What about being places where people on the edge of adulthood learn things they didn’t know before, and learn how to learn new things, and learn to question things they thought they knew, and to ponder why they thought they knew them?
In short, no, universities and colleges should not be sanctuaries. They should of course be places where people are treated decently, and where the older professionals in charge don’t use their status to bully or abuse students or other underlings…but sanctuaries, no. Education isn’t always soothing; it doesn’t always even feel “safe” in the sense of cozy and reassuring. New ideas and new ways of thinking can seem threatening, but they’re worth the discomfort.
Also, I suspect Grady’s claim rests on the pervasive trope that trans people, mostly meaning trans women, are especially “vulnerable” and fragile and in need of protection…which is odd when you remember that trans women are not literal women. Yes, boys and men can be bullied and abused for not being Manly enough, but male bodies are still not fragile as cobwebs.
Several people share my skepticism of the idea that universities should be sanctuaries.
What does it mean that universities and colleges should be "sanctuaries"? Should they become silent meditation spaces devoid of critical thought, kept separate from anything which anyone decides is an "oppressive attitude"? How about discourse, dialogue & conversation takes place
— Tom Smith (@SmithTGeo) June 18, 2019
Universities and colleges should NOT be sanctuaries. When you go there, you should expect to be challenged, and be open to learning about different views.
— Ori (@_JustOri_) June 18, 2019
Universities are not sanctuaries. They are places of advanced scholarship, free inquiry, research and tertiary education.
They most certainly must not be allowed to continue to be sanctuaries for traders of pseudoscience or snake oil salesmen, as has been recently revealed.
— Rattlecans (@rattlecans) June 18, 2019
Hearing a professor saying something you know is wrong is not a violation of your human rights. I had a Biochem professor who was way down the rabbit hole of evo pysch and “sociobiology” back when those were big. He was also a male chauvinist pig (as we called them then). I would roll my eyes and sigh LOUDLY when he would make some stupid remark and he would notice and give me a look but that was that. Fortunately, it was Biochem and the answers on the tests were either right or wrong so he couldn’t take any personal digs via grades (though to be fair, I don’t think he would deign to do that because he would have thought it made him look weak).
A former boss thought my class (Environmental Science) should avoid all mention of any environmental impacts of agriculture, since this is a state that is agricultural, and we are in the epicenter of corn country. I felt that being safe from hearing that you think something that is wrong was inappropriate, and kept on discussing the impacts of agriculture – as well as talking about the farmers who are the ones making a difference because they realize this is their livelihood.
And I talked about the oil industry when I taught in Texas.
When I started college, I began to learn a lot of things that made me uncomfortable. Some of them turned out to be wrong, and I could breathe a sigh of relief (such as the evo psych stuff southwest88 is talking about). Some of them turned out to be right, and I worked to incorporate them into my worldview. In short, I learned to live with the discomfort, and become a better educated person.
A lot of these comments respond, correctly, to the absurdity of thinking of universities as sanctuaries. But in my view, there is a bigger problem that deserves to be highlighted. Rarely has a phrase been more overburdened with unstated assumptions that wouldn’t stand up to even a moment’s critical scrutiny than this particular usage of “oppressive attitudes.” There are a WHOLE lot of people who consider it “oppressive” when anyone fails to accept and endorse their every declaration and assertion (about themselves or about matters of objective fact, two categories which — contra some au courant ideologies — are NOT mutually exclusive) as clearly true at face value. The *mildest* thing I can say about that perspective is that it is operating with a clearly incoherent and incorrect definition of “oppressive.”
G Felis, haven’t you heard? Dictionary definitions are sooo last century. The truly woke use the Humpty Dumpty theory of words nowadays.
This one needs to enter the lexicon along with Poe’s Law, the Streisand effect, and Dunning-Kruger.
At least Humpty Dumpty paid his words well.