Multi-Generational Melodrama

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Clarissa

March 17, 2015

When a drama-queenish, melodramatic professor encounters a group of drama-queenish, melodramatic students, the result is very embarrassing.

A short resume for those who have missed the whole sorry thing. A professor at Northwestern complained in an online article that many of her students are overwrought and behave like “trauma cases waiting to happen.”

The students proved her right by freaking out about the article in really bizarre ways and claiming they were “terrified” of the article.

The professor proved that this was not a generational issue when she responded with outlandish stories of professors being terrified of the terrified students. In professor’s words:

Someone on my campus—tenured—wrote me about literally lying awake at night worrying about causing trauma to a student, becoming a national story, losing her job, and not being able to support her kid. It seemed completely probable to her that a triggered student could take down a tenured professor with a snowball of social media.

The most surprising thing is that none of the participants in this bit of arrant idiocy are noticing how stupid they are making themselves look.

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15 responses to “Multi-Generational Melodrama”

Thoreau

March 17, 2015

I strongly disagree with Kipnis’s stance on student-faculty relationships, but the students running around demanding administrative condemnation of Kipnis are just proving her point about how they worship fragility.

As far as the mattresses that they carried in protest, I demand that the administration ban them from carrying mattresses, and instead compel them to engage in a more accurate form of protest: They should carry fainting couches instead.

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1. Clarissa
  
  March 17, 2015
  “I demand that the administration ban them from carrying mattresses, and instead compel them to engage in a more accurate form of protest: They should carry fainting couches instead.”
  
  Brilliant! 🙂 🙂
  
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AcademicLurker

March 17, 2015

Kipnis has been a professional provocateur (or troll, depending on how you define things) for much of her career. It’s funny to see so many people respond so predictably to such obvious baiting.

Every time I read about someone hyperventilating over Kipnis’s article I want to tell them “Dude, she’s trolling you. Don’t you get it?”

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Z

March 17, 2015

I am obviously not for sexual harassment, rape, etc., but the tone of current protests really gives me pause. My immediate reaction to the mattress person is gosh, yes, it must be freakish to have your attacker in your class and protected by the university … and I do remember being an undergraduate and having the university protect rapists and there being an underground set of rumors about male students it was important to be careful around, not get caught by … but as I say the tone of all this, nowadays, is giving me pause. Is expulsion enough for rapist? If rapist has gone to trial and been exonerated, should university be able to hold its own court and expel … I really don’t know any more. Also, my colleague says students are fragile and need our protection because most of those who quail to sexual harassment because they are already incest victims and too terrified to resist / too conditioned to say yes to authority. Again I wonder: isn’t that yet one more reason to send perpetrators to court, not add one more layer of soft university policy and tsk tsk ing?

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1. Clarissa
  
  March 17, 2015
  “Again I wonder: isn’t that yet one more reason to send perpetrators to court, not add one more layer of soft university policy and tsk tsk ing?”
  
  I couldn’t agree more. And not with just this but the whole comment. If the criminal justice system doesn’t work, let’s make it work. But transferring the functions of the legal system to campuses serves no useful purpose.
  
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2. cliff arroyo
  
  March 17, 2015
  
  “it must be freakish to have your attacker in your class and protected by the university”
  
  the only “protection” he received was due process (university version, but still….)
  
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  1. Z
    
    March 17, 2015
    
    Not necessarily — there isn’t necessarily a process. If you go to police and they don’t take your report or don’t act on it, that’s kind of it.
    
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    1. cliff arroyo
      
      March 18, 2015
      
      IIRC Sulkowicz did not go to the police (and does not want to). There was a hearing at the university whose results she disagreed with and voila! mattress “art” criticizing the university for not expelling students on her say so.
      
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      1. Clarissa
        
        March 18, 2015
        
        “IIRC Sulkowicz did not go to the police (and does not want to). ”
        
        In that case, what is there to discuss?
        
        “There was a hearing at the university”
        
        Words cannot describe how bizarre I find this. What “hearing”? What does this even mean? How come universities conduct “hearings” about crime? I don’t know, maybe this is a cultural thing but, to me, this is all completely outlandish.
        
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        cliff arroyo
        
        March 18, 2015
        
        Actually I looked it up and apparently she did report it to the police a couple of months after the fact. They declined to pursue the case.
        
        The university had an “inquiry” which found the man accused ‘not responsible’.
        
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        Clarissa
        
        March 18, 2015
        
        Rape cases are notoriously hard to bring to prosecution. But it’s not a problem that colleges are in any way equipped to solve.
        
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    2. Clarissa
      
      March 18, 2015
      
      “If you go to police and they don’t take your report or don’t act on it, that’s kind of it.”
      
      Of course, the police are sometimes incompetent at investigating crime. But academics are always and by definition incompetent at investigating crime.
      
      The state is defunding public education while transferring more and more of its functions to the educators. This is wrong. We should demand that public institutions do their job and leave us in peace to do ours.
      
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      1. Z
        
        March 18, 2015
        
        Yes, but my original comment, that Cliff responded to, was a comment on my college days, which took place before any of these policies were in place. You couldn’t run to the university unless the assault took place inside your dorm (then you could ask for better locks on your door, better security, things like this) and UPs were instructed to suppress, and regular police were not too sympathetic to rape victims either, so there wasn’t much recourse for anyone — student or non student. To be noted, though, is that it was true then and is true now that non students suffer assault at least as much as students do.
        
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      2. Z
        
        March 23, 2015
        
        The point on defunding education/deprofessionalizing faculty at the same time as asking us to perform state functions is profound. And I am all for sexual assault programs on campus in terms of education, prevention, and support for victims. I am just tired of universities not following own existing policies, and trying to prevent reporting from going forward. What I see everywhere are enormous overreactions as well as underreactions … there was a student here in a lab who was allegedly raped by another student, professors in charge did not have power to expel perpetrator & just ordered not to repeat behavior; university decided to get counseling for victim but not go to police; perpetrator and victim stayed but professor got fired for not having prevented this in the first place; maybe there was something he could & should have done (make double sure their lab hours were different, I don’t know) … I am not sure.
        
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Kipnis Cleared | Clarissa's Blog

June 1, 2015

[…] Here is the Kipnis story for those who missed it. […]

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