Trigger warnings, safe spaces, and fascism on college campuses

[USUC]

if you read those and are too dumb to distinguish the facts in them from the non-facts, i don't know what to tell you

The onus is on the reader to recognize agiprop placed in "hard news" peices and not the journalist/publication to provide a good faith factual account of the situation? This is the AP, mind you.

[Jeff Lebowski]

if you read those and are too dumb to distinguish the facts in them from the non-facts, i don't know what to tell you

I agree with your main point, but you have to admit that those two examples are absurdly bad.

[Jeff Lebowski]

For the record, here is a very conservative take on the Gay resignation published by the NYT:

https://www.nytimes.com/2024/01/02/o...signation.html

I had written and filed a column about Harvard and its president, Claudine Gay, when news of her resignation broke on Tuesday afternoon after fresh allegations of plagiarism in her published work. I’d like to record what I wrote: “Cancel culture is always ugly and usually a mistake. If Gay is to go, let it be after more deliberation, with more decorum, and when pundits like me aren’t writing about her.” Oh, well.

The point may now be moot, but the important question for Harvard was never whether Gay should step down. It was why she was brought on in the first place, after one of the shortest presidential searches in Harvard’s recent history. How did someone with a scholarly record as thin as hers — she has not written a single book, has published only 11 journal articles in the past 26 years and made no seminal contributions to her field — reach the pinnacle of American academia?

The answer, I think, is this: Where there used to be a pinnacle, there’s now a crater. It was created when the social-justice model of higher education, currently centered on diversity, equity and inclusion efforts — and heavily invested in the administrative side of the university — blew up the excellence model, centered on the ideal of intellectual merit and chiefly concerned with knowledge, discovery and the free and vigorous contest of ideas.

[old_gregg]

The onus is on the reader to recognize agiprop placed in "hard news" peices and not the journalist/publication to provide a good faith factual account of the situation? This is the AP, mind you.

yes, the onus is always on the reader regardless of the source. it is part of having a brain.

[beefytee]

Is publication and past research a big determining factor for university president positions at schools like the Ivy League ones? I'm not sure how useful that is for administration. You obviously need an academic background, but I don't know that your research background and academic contribution translate into effective administration. How effective of a dean they were would be more telling. And I wouldn't usually put my top scholarly professor as dean.

Obviously, plagiarism is a big deal and potentially disqualifying, but the number of published papers? Who cares?

I obviously don't have a big background in academia, so these are sincere questions from my mostly ignorant observations.

[Bo Diddley]

Is publication and past research a big determining factor for university president positions at schools like the Ivy League ones? I'm not sure how useful that is for administration. You obviously need an academic background, but I don't know that your research background and academic contribution translate into effective administration. How effective of a dean they were would be more telling. And I wouldn't usually put my top scholarly professor as dean.

Obviously, plagiarism is a big deal and potentially disqualifying, but the number of published papers? Who cares?

I obviously don't have a big background in academia, so these are sincere questions from my mostly ignorant observations.

This I know: they dress up in black robes of a false priesthood.

[Jeff Lebowski]

Is publication and past research a big determining factor for university president positions at schools like the Ivy League ones? I'm not sure how useful that is for administration. You obviously need an academic background, but I don't know that your research background and academic contribution translate into effective administration. How effective of a dean they were would be more telling. And I wouldn't usually put my top scholarly professor as dean.

Obviously, plagiarism is a big deal and potentially disqualifying, but the number of published papers? Who cares?

I obviously don't have a big background in academia, so these are sincere questions from my mostly ignorant observations.

It is very important for deans and high-level administrators to have a solid foundation of experience in academia in order to be effective leaders. They need innate leadership qualities of course, but if they haven't been in the trenches they are going to be less effective. And for arguably the most high-profile academic position in the country, Gay's academic background was shockingly weak.

[USUC]

yes, the onus is always on the reader regardless of the source. it is part of having a brain.

So we have gone from "media bias doesn't exist" to "its up to the dumb readers to figure out if the media is gaslighting them?" Just trying to keep up.

[old_gregg]

So we have gone from "media bias doesn't exist" to "its up to the dumb readers to figure out if the media is gaslighting them?" Just trying to keep up.

bias is and always has been inherent in everything that is created by humans. there is no such thing as an unbiased distillation of information from one form to another. someone who cannot consume media without identifying and setting aside bias is someone who is missing a basic skillset required to interact with the world around them. this golden age of a bias-free media apparatus never existed.

[USUC]

bias is and always has been inherent in everything that is created by humans. there is no such thing as an unbiased distillation of information from one form to another. someone who cannot consume media without identifying and setting aside bias is someone who is missing a basic skillset required to interact with the world around them. this golden age of a bias-free media apparatus never existed.

Great, we have a baseline of understanding that all media are biased to a certain degree. This is obvious with outlets such as Fox News, News Max, Politico, and MSNBC. They are explicit in their goals and ideology. Legacy media has built their reputation on providing objective coverage. Bias has always been seen in the coverage by these outlets, but they generally did a good job of sticking to "just the facts." Thus, these outlets have been trusted by the population/masses to provide the most accurate news coverage. The WP, NYT, and most of the legacy outlets still do amazing coverage, but their bias' all slant one way and it has become more prevalent as graduates from progressive journalism programs have flooded the newsrooms (full disclosure, I am a graduate of a progressive journalism/media studies program). News coverage has become infused with activism and stories in the hard news pages have become more likely to frame conservative viewpoints, not just corrupt conservative personalities, as morally bankrupt, an existential threat, and "genocidal." This is apparent in the AP article. Criticism is fair, justified and important. But if the standard we are all comfortable with now is that it's up to the reader to decide if they are being gaslighted, then we are already there. Conservatives are no longer getting their news from these outlets and going to where they feel they aren't being vilified and getting gaslit by MAGA.

[Non Sequitur]

For the record, here is a very conservative take on the Gay resignation published by the NYT:

https://www.nytimes.com/2024/01/02/o...signation.html

To become a president for some universities you just need to check the diversity boxes, and for others you just need to have been a General Authority.

[old_gregg]

Great, we have a baseline of understanding that all media are biased to a certain degree. This is obvious with outlets such as Fox News, News Max, Politico, and MSNBC. They are explicit in their goals and ideology. Legacy media has built their reputation on providing objective coverage. Bias has always been seen in the coverage by these outlets, but they generally did a good job of sticking to "just the facts."

no they didn't. what era are you talking about here? some five year stretch between the fall of the soviet union and the founding of fox news?

Thus, these outlets have been trusted by the population/masses to provide the most accurate news coverage. The WP, NYT, and most of the legacy outlets still do amazing coverage, but their bias' all slant one way and it has become more prevalent as graduates from progressive journalism programs have flooded the newsrooms (full disclosure, I am a graduate of a progressive journalism/media studies program).

your sequence of events here is funny. liberals did not create fox news, rush limbaugh, evangelical news radio, hannity, glenn beck, or coordinated social media campaigns to poison boomer brains and cause retreat en masse into bitter ideological enclaves devoid of critical thinking and the capacity to understand. liberals did not make an about face on the value of truth by electing donald trump. the culture wars are not an invention of the left.

News coverage has become infused with activism and stories in the hard news pages have become more likely to frame conservative viewpoints, not just corrupt conservative personalities, as morally bankrupt, an existential threat, and "genocidal." This is apparent in the AP article. Criticism is fair, justified and important. But if the standard we are all comfortable with now is that it's up to the reader to decide if they are being gaslighted, then we are already there.

that has always been the standard, and other than the stupid headline the ap article is mostly ok factual reporting. how do you report on a tweet by the guy who has architected a full on tilt at the critical race theory windmill celebrating the firing of a racial minority woman by saying "scalped" without bias?

Conservatives are no longer getting their news from these outlets and going to where they feel they aren't being vilified and getting gaslit by MAGA.

no, the "fuck your feelings" ideology just turns out to have real big feelings.

[USUC]

no they didn't. what era are you talking about here? some five year stretch between the fall of the soviet union and the founding of fox news?



your sequence of events here is funny. liberals did not create fox news, rush limbaugh, evangelical news radio, hannity, glenn beck, or coordinated social media campaigns to poison boomer brains and cause retreat en masse into bitter ideological enclaves devoid of critical thinking and the capacity to understand. liberals did not make an about face on the value of truth by electing donald trump. the culture wars are not an invention of the left.



that has always been the standard, and other than the stupid headline the ap article is mostly ok factual reporting. how do you report on a tweet by the guy who has architected a full on tilt at the critical race theory windmill celebrating the firing of a racial minority woman by saying "scalped" without bias?



no, the "fuck your feelings" ideology just turns out to have real big feelings.

Is your contention here that the progressive take-over of the liberal legacy media is the product of Trump being elected or that the legacy media has not become more progressive at all, its just conspiracy minded conservatives?

[old_gregg]

Is your contention here that the progressive take-over of the liberal legacy media is the product of Trump being elected or that the legacy media has not become more progressive at all, its just conspiracy minded conservatives?

my contention is that there has never not been and never will not be a time where bias was absent from any form of media or human work product and that feeble minded people use bias to discount the underlying factual reporting and the more sinister use it to divide and exploit. in particular, the claim that liberal journalists are uniquely to blame for that bias is nonsense. the current state of american discourse is the result of historical conservative efforts to radicalize and spoonfeed their audience mixed with a soup of social media illiteracy, baby boomers' reaction to the rejection of beliefs they viewed to be unassailable, and millenial/gen z ennui generated by the belief that they are the first generation in american history that they are inheriting a future less promising than their fathers.

[Jeff Lebowski]

To become a president for some universities you just need to check the diversity boxes, and for others you just need to have been a General Authority.

The BYU BoT must have missed the memo. The current BYU president is not a general authority.

The last BYU president (who is/was a seventy) is now a visiting scholar at Yale. I won't comment on the two before that.