Our office of professional development sent out a survey asking if we want to attend seminars dedicated to dealing with helicoptering parents and to avoiding microaggressions. I’m wondering if the folks who work in that office ever emerge from it and meet our students, many of whom are parents themselves and who inhabit an entirely different reality than the spoiled brats who fuss about microaggressions as their rich parents hover above them.
I’m planning to remain professionally undeveloped and avoid such seminars.
Clarissa's Blog 
Maybe panic over microagressions and helicopters are now status symbols for universities so that places that are free of them want to get on the bandwagon.
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I think you are right. Our administrators even tried to manufacture our own little protest movement in the image of the Yale and Missouri protests. It was a cute little thing that didn’t manage to catch on in a big way because we have a very different student and professor population here. All of our students work and have no time to hang about the campus, feeling slighted.
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Or maybe they’re focusing on microaggressions in professional development to avoid actual professional development or dealing with real issues that would cost money or involve an actual change in behavior. How much do these seminars cost the university?
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“How much do these seminars cost the university?”
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I want to add that some of these seminars have interesting topics and I used to attend them, hoping to learn something useful. But the people who are invited to run them are invariably of such low intellectual and personal characteristics that I gave up.
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… check your privilege! … [chortle]
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