Safe Space Policy

Tales From The Safe Space, Part 30 – Students Against The NUS

Samuel Hooper2 Comments

Malia Bouattia - NUS President - Disaffiliation Campaign - National Union of Students

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Some encouraging signs in the growing backlash against the censorious, paternalistic National Union of Students

For once, a positive development in these Tales From The Safe Space – the first green shoots of an anti-NUS, anti-SJW grassroots backlash among students who are sick of being spoken for by the identity politics cultists currently in positions of leadership both in local university students’ union and the national organisation.

NUSceptics is a new forum for students at British universities to advance the free speech agenda and organise disaffiliation campaigns from the irretrievably corrupted National Union of Students.

This piece by student Ellie Spawton hits the nail on the head on the need to resist the growth of the new victimhood culture taking root in universities and wider society.

Money quote:

The NUS panders to this culture of victimhood, seeing it as their role to protect and defend anyone deemed a minority, or lacking in privilege. Whereas traditionally university is where young adults gain their freedom and are subject to debates and ideas, the NUS’ nannyish, moral crusader involvement in students’ everyday lives restricts and stifles not only debate and freedom of speech, but also moral independence and independent thought.

[..] The most concerning issue of the NUS is not its censorious nature, but the fact that it doesn’t trust the students it represents. It treats us like we are unable to be exposed to opinions that don’t conform to the progressive mindset without being offended and needing to retreat to a ‘safe space’. It is removing our ability to make our own decisions and our own mistakes, and depriving us of the ability to speak out and challenge viewpoints. It is condoning and feeding the emerging culture of victimhood, which in turn is creating moral dependence, fuelling conflict and preventing the development of young minds. The NUS needs to step back, stop nannying us and focus on larger issues than identity politics.

It is heartening to see such sensible, small-L liberal ideas being expressed by some students, even if they are presently drowned out by the opposing voices of social justice and identity politics.

Whether or not any of the nascent NUS disaffiliation campaigns will succeed is currently unknown – though it seems like a long-shot since any such movement would have to be comprised largely of people who are not already engaged in student politics (those already politically active clearly being overwhelmingly in favour of recent developments, as it is they who voted for the policies in the first place).

This is where university faculty and administrators need to rediscover their cojones and their commitment to academic freedom, and step in to support these brave students protesting against their own unions. Clearly universities cannot overtly support any attempt to build rival student organisations which aim to represent students while upholding the right to free speech, but at the very least they must make clear that any reprisals against these students by the NUS, local students’ unions or other vengeful individuals will not be tolerated.

As always, the hard work in rolling back the present identity politics-soaked victimhood culture must be carried out by the students themselves. But universities have an academic – and moral – duty to provide them with some valuable air cover.

 

Safe Space Notice - 2

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Top Image: Huffington Post

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Tales From The Safe Space, Part 29 – The Surreal NUS Annual Conference

Samuel Hooper2 Comments

NUS annual conference

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Down with the National Union of Students

We know that they are highly averse to clapping and that many of their affiliate university students’ unions have been entirely conquered by the Cult of Identity Politics, but what is life really like at the NUS annual conference?

Jack Grove has been into the lion’s den (or should that be sheep’s pen?), and reports in the Times Higher Education:

On arrival at the registration desk at the Brighton Centre, I was able to choose from a range of stickers that would indicate to delegates if I’d prefer to be addressed along the lines of “he/him/his” or perhaps “they/them/theirs”. Later in the day, delegates elected a full-time sabbatical officer to deal with trans issues – a major financial commitment for a union that can’t afford a paid post dedicated to postgraduate issues.

When Ms Bouattia was elected as president – the union’s first female black Muslim leader – her supporters were chided by the panel chair for clapping and cheering as this may cause distress to other delegates and trigger a trauma episode.

Instead, delegates were asked by a sincere delegate not to whoop or holler, or clap at all, but use “jazz hands” to show appreciation (people were asked to wiggle their fingers) as the noise created was “ableist” and had indeed caused the delegate in question to have a panic attack on previous occasions.

While Spiked’s Tom Slater reports:

The National Union of Students conference is over. But we’ll still have the memories – the jazz hands, the whingeing and the casual anti-Semitism. For this was the year when this tyranny of crybabies, this politburo of plonkers, truly outdid itself. Not only did delegates call for social-media apps to be banned (people are saying nasty things on them) and for Holocaust Memorial Day to be scrapped (apparently it’s not ‘inclusive’) — they also elected as the new NUS president Malia Bouattia, someone who thinks condemning ISIS might ‘send the wrong message’ and is wont to wax lyrical about the ‘Zionist-led media’.

This year’s shitshow has led to students around the country calling for their unions to disaffiliate from the NUS. About time. The NUS is a censorious, anti-democratic husk, propped up by right-on middle-class cliques. Though it claims to fight for students’ rights, it doesn’t have much truck with their right to speak freely, their right to conduct their sexual lives as they see fit, or even their right to party. In 2013, the NUS signed up to minimum pricing: this is a students’ union that thinks beer is too cheap.

It’s time to smash the NUS and start anew. Students need a union that truly looks out for them, that allows them to make common cause on the issues that matter. But, above all, they need a union that treats them as morally autonomous adults, that takes them seriously, that believes students can change the world rather than just be triggered by it.

I cannot emphasise enough that this is no longer a niche phenomenon. This is not a few isolated incidents, or a few overenthusiastic students on a few of the more liberal university campuses. This is not only nationwide, but also transatlantic.  And it is here to stay.

Here is a National Union of Students whose theoretical purpose is to represent the academic and pastoral interests of all students in the country, but which feels the need to lavish resources on a full-time Trans Issues officer at a time when they do not even have a paid officer to represent the different needs of postgraduate students. In other words, here is a union which has left behind any pretence of doing what a union should do, and instead devoted itself wholly to the furtherance of the identity politics agenda.

We would never witness this dereliction of duty in pursuit of secondary objectives in any other trade union, even (or especially) the most militant and prone to industrial action. The RMT union – and one has to hand it to them – seeks to grind out the best financial settlement possible for its members, and uses strikes or even just the threat of strikes to paralyse London, bring an elected Conservative mayor to his knees, and win key concessions for already well-paid tube drivers on the London Underground.

You would never see the RMT being half-hearted in its negotiations with Transport for London because its leadership was too distracted instituting a new Safe Space policy or agitating for mandatory social justice re-education courses for workers. They focus, with undeniable effectiveness, on fulfilling their primary duty to their members – namely, achieving the best possible employer settlements on wages and conditions.

And this is the key point. The National Union of Students not only no longer represents the majority of university students, it now pursues aims and objectives which are irrelevant to many of them and are even sometimes directly antagonistic toward them (particularly in the case of conservatives, small-L liberals or assorted others who simply value free speech). They no longer even claim to act for all students. They act primarily for those students bound up in the social justice movement.

It is now ten years since I graduated, and during my time at Cambridge and Warwick universities the NUS was never anything more than an annoyingly persistent leftist buzzing in my ear. Sure, it was stupid when the Warwick Students’ Union wasted time debating a motion to express their objection to George W. Bush making a state visit to Britain, but they did not actively go out of their way to interfere in my life. This is no longer the case. Now, the Warwick Students’ Union is rated Red in the annual Spiked university free speech rankings, and actively seeks to control what every student in campus is allowed to read, buy, think, hear or say.

In other words, a lot has changed in a decade. In just the last few years in particular, identity politics cultists and assorted Social Justice Warriors have made an unprecedented power play within students union, against university administrators and against any of their peers who do not subscribe to their own worldview. Those who graduated a decade or more ago and do not pay close attention to what is happening in our universities may well see this as alarmism at first glance – “surely things can’t be that ridiculous?” goes the common refrain.

But they are. And it is going to get worse. We are already at a point where holding conservative views on campus attracts outright ridicule and hostility. In a few more years, this opprobrium will spread to those who merely fail to sing from the social justice hymn sheet loudly and sincerely enough. And to date there has been almost zero fightback from the supposed adults in the room, the university faculties and administrators. Liberty-loving students have been left to face the onslaught alone.

Now, nobody can predict exactly what will be the consequence of a growing number of identity politics-infected young people graduating and joining the labour market and becoming involved in party political activism. Some will doubtless be jolted to their senses by their collision with reality, and come to look back in shame on their illiberal student ways. But many others will survive the impact, and when they regroup they will begin to look for ways to recreate their university Safe Space environment here among us. It has already begun.

So calling attention to the identity politics/social justice takeover of universities is not a fringe interest or a massive overreaction. This new focus by writers – including this blog’s own “Tales From The Safe Space” series – provides an unsettling preview of what life will be like in another decade, unless those who object to this therapeutic, victimhood culture begin to get organised and fight back.

But if you are happy for your future workplace to gradually turn into a never-ending NUS conference, then by all means continue burying your head in the sand.

 

Safe Space Notice - 2

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Top Image: Lancaster University Students’ Union

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Therapets For Students, And The Downward Definition Of Mental Illness

Samuel Hooper2 Comments

Therapets - Mental Health - University - Students

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The current focus on student mental wellbeing infantilises grown adults, pathologises everyday emotions and trivialises real mental health issues

Earlier this month, our “Tales from the Safe Space” series looked at the way in which mental health is being trivialised and used as a tool to infantilise students on our university campuses – specifically Cardiff University on that occasion.

Now, Spiked (one of the first outlets to sound the alarm about the defining downward of mental health issues) take up the case again, in light of goings on at the Edinburgh University Students’ Association:

For the past year, the Edinburgh University Students’ Association (EUSA) has been promoting a message of ‘wellbeing is everything’. EUSA has introduced a special mental-health fund, and our president even took a pay cut to boost the totals. Now, after a year of mental-health activism, some of the dangerous effects are being felt. Students are being infantilised and are pathologising normal experiences. Students at council meetings are complaining that they are being ‘intimidated’ by hand-raising or head-nodding. And, surprise surprise, there has been a 75 per cent increase in the demand for counselling.

EUSA has been advertising its new ‘de-stress therapets sessions’. This follows the rising trend of animal therapy on campuses in the US. For example, students at Oberlin College flocked to their Safe Space along with a ‘therapy dog’ after academic Christina Hoff Sommers (‘the factual feminist’) delivered a controversial speech.

Therapy dogs are used worldwide to help those suffering from PTSD. They are also used by carers to assist children with serious autism, and in hospices to help bring joy to those suffering in isolation. Now, therapy dogs are being used to ‘treat’ students suffering from exam stress. Students, no longer trusted to deal with the challenges of academic life, are being treated as if they are suffering from debilitating illness.

And it’s not just therapets. You can also see the wellbeing obsession in ‘self-care’ initiatives, offered at Oxford and elsewhere, where students are encouraged to do finger-painting or bake cupcakes. Or the Safe Space at Manchester, a plush, comfy room where students can retreat to when the ‘triggering’ is just too much. When students aren’t being told they’re mentally ill, they’re being treated like easily upset children.

Therapets. For students. Not for returning veterans who witnessed death, carnage and unbelievable stress close-up while serving our country in uniform. For students.

The mind boggles.

Charlie Peters, University of Edinburgh student and author of the piece, points out the damaging effect that this dumbed-down mass application of mental health treatments is already having in the real world:

The emotionalisation of politics, academia and debate has damaged the intellectual capacity of students. If you ask a student today what they think about a pressing social issue, they’ll tell you how they feel about it. Thinking is no longer important – emotions are. Rationality and reality go out the window when offence-fearing students are asked a difficult question. As for those who deviate from the prevailing groupthink, they tend to answer weakly, or insincerely, so as not to upset the campus thoughtpolice.

But campus hypersensitivity is not only damaging the academic sphere – it is stretching already limited resources and pulling them away from those who are truly suffering. Student therapists are being overworked, and the quality of care is bound to suffer. Queues of students complaining about exams, deadlines and stress are putting a strain on resources to the detriment of those who are genuinely in need.

It is also dangerous – and contrary to the very idea of university – to debate ideas primarily in emotional terms, as students are encouraged to do by the excessively broad focus on mental wellbeing and the cult of Identity Politics.

There is a real element of selfishness at work here. But then perhaps it is no surprise that a generation raised to believe that they are unique and precious snowflakes have difficulty considering the needs of others, or appreciating that by clogging up student mental health services complaining about exam stress or their”trauma” at hearing contradictory ideas in class might actually result in fewer services available for those with, say, depression or bipolar disorder.

As this blog recently remarked:

This is dangerous stuff, inflating good mental health with a regression to a sanitised version of childhood, with face painting and cookies and puppy dog videos. And whatever transitory benefit it may provide to students who are not really mentally ill but are simply stressed or homesick, it will do nothing for – and in fact diverts attention and resources away from – the far smaller number who are genuinely in need of help.

True mental health comes about by building a healthy resilience to the kind of everyday emotional bumps and scrapes which characterise adult life. In the real world, people sometimes have completely contradictory views about fundamental issues, but must nonetheless live, shop and work together.

Safe space policy makes that harder by sending the message that students should not have to so much as glimpse opposing ideas, while the entire cult of Identity Politics is built on the notion of a backbiting Hierarchy of Privilege, where everybody is an oppressor and nearly everyone (except for cis white men at the top of the pyramid) is also oppressed.

Therapets for students. And bouncy castles, and finger-painting, and Play Doh and puppy videos.

Soon these people will have jobs.

 

Safe Space Notice - 2

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Top Image: Queen Margaret University Students’ Union

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White Privilege Conference: Social Justice Warriors Can Never Be Placated

Samuel HooperLeave a comment

WPC2016 twitter anger

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Social Justice Warriors do not want to end oppression. They merely want to become the oppressors themselves

If any further proof were needed that Social Justice Warriors can never be appeased or placated – and that they will keep on moving the goalposts indefinitely so that people with “privilege” can only ever fail the moral tests set for them – then one needs to look no further than the seventeenth annual White Privilege Conference which just concluded in Philadelphia.

One might have thought that an annual confab of contrite white people and their Allies in Privilege to self-flagellate and ruminate on the many ways in which they structurally oppress minorities would have been met with some approval by the SJW brigade. If anything could possibly please the Social Justice Warriors, it should be this event.

And so naturally, the SJWs crawl all over the conference and pick through every speech and interpersonal interaction to find fault with it, to wail and clutch their pearls in shock at the terrible oppression and insensitivity taking place, and to generally flaunt their More Moral Than Thou credentials in public.

The Daily Caller reports:

Disaffected participants in the 2016 White Privilege Conference (WPC) have taken to Twitter to complain that the conference was, ironically, too white and was actually filled to the brim with white supremacy.

Adopting the hashtag #WPCSoWhite, inspired by the recent #OscarsSoWhite campaign, Twitter users claimed the conference that was supposed to battle white privilege instead served to entrench it.

The tag appears to have been started and pushed with particular vigor by Aeriel Ashlee, an education consultant who attended WPC and objected to several parts of a keynote address delivered by (white) historian James Loewen.

She said Loewen’s rhetoric, which was solidly progressive throughout, actually entrenched white supremacy, partly because his speech allegedly lasted too long. When Loewen attempted to defend himself, Ashlee said that any defense was invalid and only further showed his white supremacy.

Every act by non-SJWs, even those desperately designed to appease them and lessen their anger (like university administrators resigning for upsetting their crybaby student populations or whole conferences being set up to discuss the problem with white people) is only more evidence of their guilt. Non-SJWs literally can do no right in the eyes of these totalitarian complainers.

This Twitter exchange between one of the keynote speakers and an antagonist shows the futility of debate, or even of complete capitulation to their demands:

James Loewen - Aeriel Ashlee - Twitter exchange

What exactly was Loewen supposed to do after being accused of overrunning his speaking time when in reality he did no such thing? According to SJW logic, the only appropriate response would have been for Loewen to fall on his knees and beg for forgiveness, even though he had done nothing wrong. And when Loewen failed to do so, the mere act of correcting Ashlee’s false accusation was interpreted as “a white man’s defensiveness intead of accepting responsibility”.

This is madness. In this universe, factual errors and misunderstandings can no longer be corrected if it involves a white male attempting to defend himself or contradicting a POC (person of colour) or other identity group, whose judgement is always final when it comes to determining whether any word or act constitutes “oppression”.

As Rod Dreher commented when social justice warriors criticised a classical music scholar for having the temerity to spend his free time teaching a class about “opera and ideas” to prison inmates:

SJWs ruin everything. They kill everything they touch. Why would anyone want to work in a field where these nuts run rampant?

There is literally no good deed or benign intention which modern Identity Politics cultists will not pick through, determined to find fault. But more tragically for these SJWs, this mindset dooms them to be prisoners of their own (real or perceived) circumstances, passing up endless opportunities for personal growth and even material advancement because they are so self-obsessed and captivated by the injustices meted out on past generations decades and even centuries ago.

More to the point, in the shorter term they will quickly become friendless. Except within their hermetically sealed circle of fellow Identity Politics cultists, nobody will want to socialise or work with these people. Because who wants to be in the company of highly-strung perpetual victims who consider themselves so morally superior that they police the words and behaviour of everyone around them?

But maybe that is where this will end up – with Identity Politics cultists sequestering themselves away in a closed, parallel society, unwilling to engage with the real world lest it corrupt or “harm” them. Perhaps SJWs will be the monks of the twenty-first century, worshipping their narcissistic god of self-identity and living unbearably tense lives as they seek to purge any oppressive behaviour from their systems and excommunicate those who make the smallest transgressions.

Far better than the rest of us having to submit to their tyranny.

 

The White Privilege Conference

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Identity Politics: Where Does It End?

Samuel Hooper1 Comment

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When asked, a majority of these students accept that a short, white male is in fact a tall, Chinese woman simply by virtue of declaring himself so

Where does it lead when young people percolate in an environment where personal feelings always trump objective reality and where there is no greater crime than failing to praise and play along with the assumed identity of another person?

This video gives us a clue. Take 4 minutes of your time to watch it.

When the interviewer (Joseph Blackholm, director of the Family Policy Institute of Washington and a white male of average height) posits to students on campus that he is, in fact, a very tall Chinese woman, almost none of the students are able to bring themselves to contradict him, or to admit that they disagree with his statement.

What this video shows, above all, is a level of terror of committing thought crime more commonly seen in totalitarian societies and dystopian novels. Identity Politics makes every person (with a partial exception for cis white men) simultaneously an oppressed victim, a champion of the oppressed and a potential oppressor, with adherents gaining in status the more they can emphase their “victim” and “champion” sides while negating their “oppressor” qualities. And because this is a revolution which readily eats its own children – even those with long records of fighting for the movement can be undone with nothing more than a careless choice of words – everyone is perpetually on edge and terrified of giving offence, for fear of looking like an oppressor and consequently losing status within the community.

None of these students want to appear on camera failing to readily accept the declared racial and gender identity of another person, even when that other person is a smirking young man who is clearly trying to entrap them. They cannot tell him simply to take a hike, that he is obviously not a six-foot Chinese woman, because video footage would then exist of them being oppressive and failing to validate the existence of this man’s non-existent identity. And in identity politics circles, this would be committing social and reputational suicide.

Dreher sighs:

This is a freaky thing to watch. These are actual college students. Adults who have the right to vote. And their reason is so compromised that they are unsure what the man in front of them is, so terrified are they of saying the wrong thing.

Ah yes, students at the University of Washington, where they are scared out of their minds by the possibility of seeing a Halloween costume that makes them turn tail and run for their Safe Space™. These people are ripe for dictatorship. They will not let themselves see reality if it offends against the party line.

The only difference between this cowed behaviour and that seen in a totalitarian society is the fact that the students and other identity politics cultists do this to themselves. There is no higher authority, no dictatorship, which transmits these values and insists that they are observed. It is an entirely self-enforcing cult, though concerted efforts are underway to bully university administrators into enforcing the doctrine and punishing the new heretics without first having to be cajoled into doing so through protests and shaming.

Blackholm and the Family Policy Institute of Washington may have been joking, but we are now seeing real-world cases to test our judgement – like that if Stefonknee Wolscht, a 52 year old father of seven who decided that despite having had a family and raised numerous children, he is, in fact, a six-year-old girl.

Where does it end? Nowhere good. This madness will not stay confined to the academy – indeed, it is already leaching out into wider society. But as this blog remarked earlier this year:

Since we seem intent on burying our heads in the sand and denying that there is anything wrong with our new Politics of Identity, by that time our Prime Minister will probably identify as a Beagle, the Home Secretary will be a barn owl except on Tuesdays, and the Chancellor of the Exchequer will be a goldfish who looks suspiciously like George Osborne’s grown-up kid wearing a wetsuit, Number 11 Downing Street having been converted into a walk-in aquarium in deference to their “mental safety”.

Something to look forward to.

 

Safe Space Notice - 2

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