It could have been a joke. It could have been the Onion, or for that matter, the Babylon Bee. But it wasn’t. It was Colorado State University being serious.
See all those places you can turn if you’ve been “affected”?
The resources in question are phone numbers and websites for the Dean of Students, Office of Equal Opportunity, CSU Health Network Counseling, Ombuds (for CSU employees), Multicultural Counseling, Employee Assistance Program, Vice President of Inclusive Excellence, Victim’s Assistance Hotline, Bias Reporting hotline, and several others.
Those last two provide means for aggrieved students to summon the campus authorities to investigate their alleged mistreatment. CSU’s bias reporting form asks that submissions include identifying details—including identification number, phone number, and residence hall—about the perpetrator so that school officials can track them down.
Is it a disease? A disaster, natural or otherwise? A crime that somehow managed to avoid recognition?
CSU is committed to Free Speech as both a legal protection and a foundation of the robust debate that is core to higher education,” a spokesperson for CSU told Fox News in a statement. “We also recognize the power of speech to impact people deeply, and we are committed to supporting all of our students. The sign is a list of some of the many resources available to our students. It is not related to any event in particular, but rather is intended to share resources knowing that protected speech will always, and must always, be part of higher education.
As Robby Soave notes, the sign is “being widely mocked in conservative news media for playing into the delicate snowflake* stereotype about modern college students,”
But sometimes, the shoe fits: Universities should not feel the need to offer investigative resources to students who were merely “affected by a free speech event.”
This ignores CSU’s “explanation,” that while they may recognize that they are obliged, as a state university, not to impair free speech, and perhaps accept the general premise that free speech is a fundamental American principle beyond the limits of the First Amendment, that it doesn’t mean that words don’t hurt, just likes sticks and stones.
“We also recognize the power of speech to impact people deeply…”
One would certainly hope so, or a great deal of speech proffered to persuade would be wasted. But beyond the breathless rhetoric of “impact people deeply,” does this impact compel a quick trip to the Emergency Room of campus pain and sending out the SWAT Team of mean words?
The easy answer is that people get to speak, and you might like it or not, but it didn’t inflict trauma upon your ears or psyche. Maybe it angered you. Maybe it annoyed you. Maybe it pissed you off so badly that you no longer want to play with the speaker. Even worse, that you want to give the speaker a piece of your mind, assuming you’ve got a piece to spare.
Not only are all these reactions to free speech fair and normal, but good. The message from a university is that people get to speak. You do. So do others. No one can force you to listen, although a lesson that some universities might want to teach is that listening might be a pretty good idea because maybe what you think now might be wrong. After all, there have been people thinking, writing, speaking since the start of humanity and the current brain trust of woke ideas contends that they’re all dopes and now, after all the failed thinking of all of humanity for all time, you’ve suddenly achieved the pinnacle of correct thought.
Then again, so did some of the dumb wrong-minded thinkers in the past. And maybe you’re not even as smart as they are.
Colorado State University put up the sign as a marketing tool to inform the children that they care, they love them, and they have expended a great deal of state funds in the staffing of offices to serve the new critical pedagogical functions of rubbing their hurt tummies and burning the heretic who exercised free speech that “impacted them deeply.”
What CSU chose not to do was to make this a teaching opportunity, as one might expect a university to do.
What CSU chose not to do was to tell their students that free speech was a glorious principle and they should honor it not only when the speech is what they want to hear but what they hate hearing.
What CSU chose not to do was to tell their students that the transitory tinge of unpleasantness they might feel deeply at words that are bad won’t harm them, won’t be traumatic, won’t make their ears bleed and cause them to collapse in a puddle in the corner sobbing uncontrollably until a puppy appears to lick their face.
What CSU chose not to do was to tell their students that screaming “trauma” whenever they hear a word or idea that they’ve been trained to recognize as unauthorized isn’t going to get them a hug anymore.
Part of a university’s mission is to take their students from child to budding young adult. The maturation process can involve distinguishing between a serious harm and a boo boo. CSU chose instead to conflate the two.
But far worse is that this sign teaches students that free speech is a threat to their emotional safety that they are forced to suffer. And that their boo boos are real, so that free speech can harm them and their harm deserves to be taken so seriously that it requires treatment and their offenders should face consequences.
CSU is committed to Free Speech as both a legal protection and a foundation of the robust debate that is core to higher education.
They can mouth the words but if you wonder why so many young people view free speech as something to suffer rather than honor, it’s because that’s what they are being taught. And as long as they remain perpetual toddlers, the lesson will remain with them as they assume roles outside the campus but with no more maturity than they had when they first walked onto the campus.
*Metaphors are hard. Teacups are delicate. Snowflakes are unique.
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Am I supposed to be pissed or pleased that Jews were not included among the oppressed groups?
H. L. Mencken.
“ The American people, I am convinced, really detest free speech. At the slightest alarm they are ready and eager to put it down.”
All I see are a list of jobs and groups that cost money and I no longer wonder why tuition is so high
Exactly. “Dean of Students” — legitimate office.
Every other office: This is why the “tuition is too damn high!”
Whatever happened to; “Sticks and stones may break my bones, but words will never hurt me”?
Last night on NHPR I heard a woman say, paraphrasing slightly, that “we all know” that “beautiful” is “code for ‘these people need help'”. So, a compliment/ kind word is really a microagression in disguise? I was stunned.
Freedom of expression means that someone else may say that which you find most offensive/ objectionable/ odious.
Get over it.
Bless her heart.
(CLS can explain it to y’all yankees.)
The investigative part at the end will likely hinder the core purposes of the University. I’m guessing the majority of their investigations will be into protected speach.
“Sticks and stones will break my bones,* but words will cause me horrible trauma.”
There. I updated it.
*NB – punching Nazis, however, is okay.
A more reasonable sign would offer college resources for those who were affected by attempts to deplatform a “free speech event.” That would be anybody in the audience, as the rights the cancelers and censors are trying to violate are not first and foremost those of the speaker but of anybody who is attempting to listen to what the speaker has to say, even from a critical perspective. The true damage is not ubiquitous hurt feelings – the deplatformers consider it a virtue to hurt others’ feelings – but the trampling of the agency and dignity of their fellow students. This is another instance of the narcissistic bullies being the ones who act the most aggrieved and use that to justify aggression.
Some campus or advocacy organization should start putting out that variation of these signs as a counterpoint. Not merely as a snarky parody, but with the same seriousness as messaging about collective threats to other rights. Then it will probably get attacked as hate speech.
I’d have thought that the pandemic would pop the college bubble. But there’s no signs of slowing down: enrollment keeps steady or even increasing, colleges build new facilities, hire new administrators, partner with local landlords and developers to build (overpriced) housing aimed at students. The gender gap in enrollment continues to increase. Colleges tout the increasing minority share of the student population, supposedly necessitating the “reimagining” of what college is about on the “multicultural campus.” Tuition keeps steadily increasing. Admin salaries keep going up. More and more students stay in school longer than 4 years. Meanwhile, there still aren’t a bevy of middle class jobs that a degree from a place like Colorado State would guarantee. More likely students finish and go work somewhere like Starbucks for $14/ hour working 30 hours a week.
So yes, if I was paying tens of thousands of dollars per year for a degree that most likely will see me wind up working for low pay in the service industry, and was told that this was going to be “the best four years of your life”, I’d want the school to take my feelings very seriously, who cares about others’ free speech. I don’t see how this changes until universities start going under en masse or the student loan model we use gets drastically reworked.
Ten years ago, we thought they would grow out of it. Five years ago, we thought they would “learn” when they finally got into the “real world.” I’m beginning to suspect that some adult intervention might be needed. The question is whether there are any adults left on campus.
There’s zero incentive for the adults, whoever they may be, to clean up this mess now. Universities are often major employers, so they operate as de facto jobs programs for people local to the campus and for post-grads with degrees that are otherwise worthless. And if college students are a reliable Democratic vote, as are faculty and admins, and you believe the conventional wisdom that college inculcates people to values that align with the priorities of your party, combined with the university functioning as a jobs program for such voters, why would you as a Democratic politician ever let colleges in jurisdictions your party controls go under, cut funding, or reduce enrollment?
Just keep bailing out universities, no matter how wasteful the spending, how insane the ideas they’re teaching, or how cheapened a Bachelor’s becomes.
Colorado became New California some years ago. Well to do California Wokies acquired Colorado vacation homes, and imported their wokieness with them.
Growing up there some 30 years ago one of the bumper stickers (usually next to a “native” bumper sticker) was “Don’t Californicate Colorado”. We always considered Aspen and Boulder as California outposts. I guess we can now add Fort Collins to the list. At least we still have Pueblo.
Has anyone tried the numbers? Maybe CSU is playing chess as we all assume they are playing checkers, and the numbers all actually go to a psychiatrist who will help the “affected” people grow up? I hope…