The Ithaca "savage" incident.

From a NYT article, "Racial Discrimination Protests Ignite at Colleges Across the U.S.":

At Ithaca [College], one of the issues is the on-campus panel on Oct. 8, in which Tatiana Sy, a 2009 graduate, said she had a “savage hunger” to do everything in college. Another panelist, J. Christopher Burch, the chief executive of Burch Creative Capital who is also an alumnus, responded, “I love what the savage here said,” according to YouTube clips of the event. The moderator, Bob Kur, a former NBC News correspondent, joined in, pointing to Mr. Burch, saying, “You are driven,” and pointing to Ms. Sy and saying, “You’re the savage.” The men are both white, and Ms. Sy describes herself as Afro-Cuban. When Ms. Sy objected, Mr. Burch said, “It’s a compliment.”...

Whether this incident justifies protest is up for debate, but I just want to say that, reading that, I was leaning toward blogging that it's sad that we've lost the freedom to play with language. But then I watched the video.

This is, for me, a very striking example of video making an impression that the standard fact-orient text of journalism fails to convey:



That man really is doing something quite offensive. Perhaps he has no awareness of it, but I suspect that he uses that style to achieve his professional ends all the time. He's the chief executive of Burch Creative Capital! I'm sure he feels at ease in his skin, exercising power, experiencing dominance. He doesn't merely flip the "savage hunger" language into a playful epithet, "the savage." He calls her a "girl," and she is consistently amiable, even when she finally, and in a very friendly way, voices a small objection to being called "the savage." She says, laughing, "All right, I mean." That's all! He then reaches out and pats her on her bare arm.

And all the while he's lolling back in his chair with his big, red-panted legs extended and crossed. You can see that he's trying to regain his grounding as his big foot flaps a tad desperately. But he doesn't sit up, he doesn't show any awareness that he's been diminishing her and that it isn't fun for her. His red pant leg is hiked halfway up his shin, he's not wearing socks, and the flapping foot is wearing a greenish slip-on shoe. He's so comfortable being himself there, and she's supposed to get it and like it. And she knows that too. She can't stop giggling and helping him feel good about himself.

I can see the reason for protesting, for reaching back to her, there, exposed on that stage, and to support her and to make him feel uncomfortable for a change.

"If you give into bullies, they win. The only way bullies are defeated is by standing up to them."

I don't get it. Didn't he give in to bullies?

Those Yale student activists are "behaving more like Reddit parodies of 'social-justice warriors' than coherent activists, and I suspect they will look back on their behavior with chagrin."

"The purpose of writing about their missteps now is not to condemn these students," writes Conor Friedersdorf in The Atlantic.

Their young lives are tremendously impressive by any reasonable measure. They are unfortunate to live in an era in which the normal mistakes of youth are unusually visible. To keep the focus where it belongs I won’t be naming any of them here.

The focus belongs on the flawed ideas that they’ve absorbed....

It's a longish article, describing the uproar at Yale, but it does not develop the idea I am most interested in: how university faculty taught the very ideas that the students are now throwing back in their faces.

The Yale student appears to believe that creating an intellectual space and a home are at odds with one another. But the entire model of a residential college is premised on the notion that it’s worthwhile for students to reside in a campus home infused with intellectualism, even though creating it requires lavishing extraordinary resources on youngsters who are already among the world’s most advantaged....

But for many decades, in the intellectual space of the American university, it's been presented as deeply intellectual to think in the very terms that the students have processed into activism.

"Students form a perimeter around the #ConcernedStudent1950 tent village and ask media to leave."

"This is what civic-level censorship looks like at a university with the largest and oldest public college for journalism."



ADDED: The protesting students are making many rudimentary PR mistakes here and could use some training in basic protest technique. They end up looking repressive and brutish, right in front of a camera, and they keep cranking up the intimidation. The photographer knows he's getting video that he'll be able to put up on the internet, and he's using a very effective technique of remaining calm and standing his ground in the face of what looks like scary intimidation. I have walked with a camera into big, passionate protests here in Wisconsin, and — with a few exceptions — the protesters were much better prepared to resist making the photographer seem like a sympathetic victim.

As for the First Amendment: The students and the photographers have free speech rights against the government, but not against each other. At 1:43, the photographer calmly cites the First Amendment, which, he says, gives all of them all "right to be here," in the public space, which is true. One of the black female protesters says "We do have our space as human beings," to which the photographer responds, emphasizing each word: "There's not a law about that." The woman then makes what I think is the most interesting statement in the video: "Forget a law. How about humanity? Respect?" He says, "How about documenting this for posterity?"

That's right where a good conversation could have begun. The law is not the beginning and end of how people treat each other. There is etiquette and there is respect. There is even love. As human beings, we want all of that. Please respect our space is an understandable request that a person should evaluate in ways that go beyond legal rights. The photographer did engage on that level when he offered a counter-value, documentation for posterity.

Unfortunately, that one-to-one conversation ended when another woman barged in and started yelling, precluding the development of the issues about photographing people who don't want to be photographed, and the crowd —which probably didn't notice the touching moment when Respect and Documentation stood face to face —  got going with the old "Hey hey ho ho" chant format: "Hey hey ho ho/Reporters have got to go."

Wolfe resigns!

The protest at the University of Missouri brings down the president.

ADDED: In his statement, which you can watch at the link, Wolfe says he doesn't think protests, like the hunger strike, are the right way to effect change. We should respect each other enough to have a conversation, he says, but that's not what is happening. But he takes "full responsibility," he says, apparently hoping that the resignation will be enough: "Use my resignation to heal and start talking again."

The football team really is more powerful than the university president:

The Mizzou Family stands as one. We are united. We are behind our players. #ConcernedStudent1950 GP pic.twitter.com/fMHbPPTTKl

— Coach Gary Pinkel (@GaryPinkel) November 8, 2015

AND: A threat to commit slow suicide compelled powerful authority to resign. What will that inspire?

"We will no longer participate in any football-related activities until President Tim Wolfe resigns or is removed due to his negligence toward marginalized students’ experiences."

"On Sunday, MU football coach Gary Pinkel seemed to throw his entire team’s support behind the protests, tweeting a picture of his players along with the protest’s #ConcernedStudent1950 hashtag and the message: 'The Mizzou Family stands as one. We are united. We are behind our players.' After meeting with the team this morning, it is clear they do not plan to return to practice until Jonathan resumes eating."

From a new article in The Washington Post titled "With $1 million at stake, U. of Missouri’s president now taking protests seriously."

For reference: here's the post from 2 days ago where we first talked about the hunger strike.

UPDATE, Monday morning: Wolfe resigns.

Some Yale students are hopping mad at 2 faculty members who didn't see the exquisite importance of repressing Halloween costumery.

The Foundation for Individual Rights in Education explains the multilayered outrage.

This email from Associate Master of Silliman College Erika Christakis is the main source of irritation. She had the nerve to address Yale students as intellectuals, drawing on her expertise — she teaches a class on "The Concept of the Problem Child" — and saying things like:

At the first link there's video of Yale students yelling at Erika Christakis's husband Nicholas:

“As your position as master, it is your job to create a place of comfort and home for the students that live in Silliman,” one student says. “You have not done that. By sending out that email, that goes against your position as master. Do you understand that?”

When Christakis disagreed, the student proceeded to yell at him. “Who the fuck hired you?” she asked, arguing that Christakis should “step down” because being master is “not about creating an intellectual space,” but rather “creating a home.”

To be fair, I'd like to know more about what representations Yale made to the students it lured into matriculating. Was a "safe space" promised? Part of the "marketplace of ideas" that the Christakises champion is the marketplace of colleges where students get their choice. What did the Yale packaging say? I can't really judge the anger and the urgency of these students without knowing what other offers they had and what they were led to think they were buying when they picked Yale. A vibrant "intellectual space" sounds exciting to me, but is that what they were told they'd get if they came to Yale? Maybe some other schools offered a challenging intellectual environment and they passed on it, preferring a caring, nurturing setting. Were they deceived?

There's a lot that could be said here, but I'll just say one more thing. Halloween is childish fun. If you're grimly serious about it, you've aged out. Maybe some of your classmates are still playing around, vacationing from their daily worries, indulging in this annual childishness. If you're too adult to join them, then do the adult thing and stay home and read. Complaining to the authorities is another form of indulgence in childishness — not childish fun but childish whining and tattling.

"The swastika appeared overnight, drawn with human feces on a college dorm’s brand new white wall...."

"Now a graduate student says he is on a hunger strike and is willing to die unless the school’s president steps down."

“I already feel like campus is an unlivable space,” said [University of Missouri student Jonathan L. Butler, 25], who is African American. “So it’s worth sacrificing something of this grave amount, because I’m already not wanted here. I’m already not treated like I’m a human.... It’s just gotten to the point on campus where it’s really not safe for black students or really all marginalized students. Me personally, I won’t feel safe on campus until there is an urgency that things need to change and be taken seriously. It’s just a very hostile environment for black students... We are facing a lot of negativity and oppression on a daily basis... And then you students go to a diversity forums, you see them write letters, you see them write e-mails and send tweets and do all these things, we bare our souls and tell very painful stories but … our lives are still not valued. At some point, after spending all that energy telling people that I deserve to be recognized as a human, like my existence matters, at a certain point you are putting people in a corner and you keep poking them with a stick, things escalate until people feel like they are hurt."

The linked article, in The Washington Post, describes some other incidents. The scrawler of the swastika is unknown. 

50 years ago today: "War Critic Burns Himself To Death Outside Pentagon."

The NYT reported on the shocking protest by Norman Morrison:



Here's the Wikipedia article on Norman Morrison:

Filmmaker Errol Morris interviewed Secretary McNamara at length on camera in his documentary film, The Fog of War, in which McNamara says, "[Morrison] came to the Pentagon, doused himself with gasoline. Burned himself to death below my office ... his wife issued a very moving statement - 'human beings must stop killing other human beings' - and that's a belief that I shared, I shared it then, I believe it even more strongly today". McNamara then posits, "How much evil must we do in order to do good? We have certain ideals, certain responsibilities. Recognize that at times you will have to engage in evil, but minimize it."

"Standoff in Boulder, Colo.: Prairie dogs hold Buddhist college at bay."

Headline in the L.A. Times.

"If you replaced the 'dog' in prairie dog with 'rat,' would they elicit the same emotion?...I wonder," asked Bill Rigler, spokesman for Naropa University, in what the L.A. Times suggests is sort of kind of a Zen koan.

For years, Naropa has battled some 150 persistent prairie dogs over 2.5 acres of prime real estate on its Nalanda campus.... The struggle is especially poignant in this famously liberal college town, where Buddhists and prairie dogs occupy exalted positions within the local ecosystem....

"We bought this land in 2004 to expand on and the first prairie dogs showed up two years later," Rigler said.

The Buddhists got there first, and — on Buddhist principles — did nothing. The doing of nothing was a nice ecosystem for the "dogs" (which I originally typo'd "gods"):

The industrious rodents swiftly built a prairie dog town of some 200 burrows extending from the campus parking lot to busy Arapahoe Avenue to almost the front door. Plans to expand classroom space stalled, and in 2011, Naropa began searching for ways to relocate the animals.

Four years and $100,000 later, little has changed. Trapping and moving the rodents is easy enough; finding someone who wants them is not. 

I think a lot of people who set "have a heart" traps would be surprised to know that it's illegal to move the animals elsewhere and just set them free, without permission. (And I hope you won't hate me — have a heart! — for burdening you with the knowledge of which you were once free. Who can free you from the trap that is knowledge? Even with the door left open — you're free to seek to believe what is not true — you find it hard to scamper out and run wild in the landscape/parking lot that's just inches away.)

The Buddhists seemed to have decided to kill the "dogs" — I typo'd "gods" again! — inciting protest. On Facebook: "Mommy, I heard that Naropa University is going to have all of us killed" and:



As Rigler put it, quoted in the above-linked L.A. Times article:

"All of sudden it was, 'The Buddhists want to kill the prairie dogs,' but we had no intention of killing them," said Rigler, who isn't a Buddhist. "The very act of applying for a [lethal control] permit triggers an open comment period, which gives everyone the opportunity to say, 'I have a site for relocation,' or put forward other ideas."

This sounds like the doctrine of double effect. Your desire or intention is not to kill the animals... but they may end up dead as you pursue what you do want and intend. The college wants to relocate the prairie dogs and the threat of killing them is a way to get somebody to step up and accept them onto their property. Another way to think of it is like this:



It's a threat. Let us use your land or we'll kill these "dogs."
Click for more »

"Lysistrata" — the ancient Greek play about women withholding sex to stop a war — made the news twice this week.

1. Withdrawing from the race for the Democratic presidential nomination in the setting of the Democratic National Committee's Women's Leadership Forum, Lincoln Chafee said: "Since today is all about women’s leadership it reminds me of one of my favorite Greek plays; Lysistrata, a comedy from about 400 BCE by Aristophanes. In that play, a group of women, fed up with the war mongering of their husbands, agree to withhold their favors until peace returns. And it worked!"

2. Spike Lee is squabbling with Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel. The subject is Lee's new movie, "Chi-Raq," which, Hollywood Reporter tells us, "is an update of the classical Greek play Lysistrata and stars Teyonah Parris as a woman who protests the city's black-on-black gun violence."

Here's the full text of the play at Project Gutenberg, which flaunts this jaunty frontispiece:



ADDED: Here's a full set of the Aubrey Beardsley illustrations for "Lysistrata." They're even jauntier. NSFW.

"You're carrying a gun to class? Yeah well I'm carrying a HUGE DILDO."

University of Texas student begins what she calls #CocksNotGlocks, a protest against the new Texas law permitting the licensed concealed carrying of guns on campus. The protest is accomplished by "strapping gigantic swinging dildos to our backpacks."

Unlike the guns, the dildos are not concealed. They are out there in your face, including the faces of those who — in other contexts — urge us to become sensitized to sexual aggression. How is a rape survivor supposed to feel sitting next to students with "gigantic swinging dildos" hanging from their backpacks? And what of the men who have cared about the critique of the "rape culture"? What are they to think seeing their private parts likened to weaponry and bandied about in disembodied form detached from the feeling, caring body of a human being? And why the specification that the dildos be "gigantic"? Is this not body-shaming the vast majority of men, taunting them with a thoroughly unattainable standard?

"What I saw was a powerful demonstration of an impulse and need for African American men to come together to recognize each other and affirm our rightful place in the society."

"There was a profound sense that African American men were ready to make a commitment to bring about change in our communities and lives."

Said Barack Obama, 20 years ago, observing the Million Man March.

From a Washington Post article on the occasion of the 20th anniversary.

There's another rally this anniversary year, called by Louis Farrakhan, the central figure in the rally that took place 20 years ago. He's calling this one "Justice or Else." 

The Washington Post is cagey about the relevance of Farrakhan:

"All we’ve got to do is go back home and make our communities a decent and safe place to live,” Farrakhan said [20 years ago]. “And if we start dotting the black community with businesses, opening up factories, challenging ourselves to be better than we are, white folk, instead of driving by using the N-word, they’ll say: ‘Look. Look at them. Oh, my God — they’re marvelous.’ ”

It was the kind of message that some activists denounce these days as blaming the victims of the nation’s checkered racial history for their plight. But it also resonates with black Americans across the political spectrum, from Clarence Thomas — who has praised Farrakhan — to Obama. Not for a moment would they endorse Farrakhan’s separatism, or his anti-Jewish rhetoric, or the Nation of Islam’s dizzying cosmology. But for them and many others, his self-help message hits home.

So... "self-help," that's the good part, after you carve away everything you don't want attached to you. ("Dizzying cosmology"  — there's a useful phrase for the mealy-mouthed.)

But "Justice or Else" doesn't sound like the self-help of opening businesses and becoming "better than we are."

"Why do so many people think he’s good? Have you looked at his paintings?"

"In real life, trees are beautiful. If you take Renoir’s word for it, you’d think trees are just a collection of green squiggles."

Renoir is considered a good painter because his work is featured in museums, [Max] Geller added. But upon further inspections of his paintings, that line of argument “seems pretty fallacious”....

The Renoir Sucks at Painting... Instagram account... has even received the wrath of Genevieve Renoir, who says she is the painter’s great-great-granddaughter.

On one photo, Genevieve commented: “When your great-great-grandfather paints anything worth $78.1m dollars … then you can criticize. In the meantime, it is safe to say that the free market has spoken and Renoir did not suck at painting.”

Geller, who turned her comment into its own post on the account, said: “I think that is one of the most absurd and insane arguments for anything, the idea that we should let the free market dictate quality.”

Ms. Renoir's argument — staunchly opposed by Geller — bears an intriguing similarity the old free-speech argument that Oliver Wendell Holmes made back in 1919: "[T]he best test of truth is the power of the thought to get itself accepted in the competition of the market."

Would you call that — using Geller's words — "most absurd and insane argument for anything, the idea that we should let the free market dictate quality."
Click for more »

"Holding homemade signs reading 'God Hates Renoir' and 'Treacle Harms Society,' the protesters... chanted: 'Put some fingers on those hands! Give us work by Paul Gauguin!'..."

"... and 'Other art is worth your while! Renoir paints a steaming pile!'... The [Museum of Fine Arts] hasn’t commented on the fledgling movement..."

I'm glad finally somebody cares enough to do something about this longstanding travesty. Catch up with Max Geller's Renoir Sucks at Painting, which has entries like this:

This #Renoir painting is in a museum. It is Not Beautiful. It is offensive and hurts my eyes. A nefarious act of #aestheticterrorism. I had to turn the brightness down on my phone. Then I could start noticing shit. Like, 1. the three (3!) uncircumcised fingers with which she's touching herself. 2. Instead of the usual #sharpie_eyes, she has ball-less sockets. (Please join in my #renoirsucksatpainting brethren.)

A photo posted by Renoir Sucks At Painting (@renoir_sucks_at_painting) on Sep 14, 2015 at 3:45pm PDT

ADDED: This post made me click my "Renoir" tag, and that got me to a quote from "Lady Chatterley's Lover": "Renoir said he painted his pictures with his penis... he did too, lovely pictures! I wish I did something with mine."

#PissForEquality.

I feel like I'd be falling for a hoax if I believed this happened.