“He DISAGREES WITH ME!! ARRGH!! It’s too painful to BEAR!!!”
It is unethical to make students or their parents pay obscene amounts of money to be rendered incompetent and dysfunctional for the life challenges that face them. Based on this bizarre incident at Rutgers—tuition about $25,000 per year, per student—that is exactly what that esteemed institution is doing. How many others are doing the same?
Journalist Milo Yiannopoulos—that’s being generous: I’d call him a professional troll, or a white, gay Ann Coulter—kicked off his “Dangerous Faggot” tour at Rutgers. He’s an in-your-face, liberal shibboleth-shattering, intentionally provocative rabble-rouser of the hard right, famously banned by Twitter, which now appears to be sucking up to Social Justice Warriors. Milo, who is one of the ugly, culture-scarring mutants created by the radiation emanating from the hyper-partisan environment encouraged by the Obama Administration, expounded on gender wage gap myths, feminism, the “rape culture” and Black Lives Matters in as offensive a manner as he could, and he is talented at being offensive. Some 50 students in the audience who were there to bury Milo, not to praise him, stood up and smeared fake blood on their faces to signal their opposition. Ten protesters left, forty stayed.
Then they had a collective breakdown, or something. The Daily Targum, Rutgers newspaper, reported that following Yiannopoulos’ appearance, students and faculty gathered in the Paul Robeson Cultural Center to discuss their trauma at his words and the reaction to it from students in the audience. “We are here to show support,” was the mantra repeated by nearly every person in the crowd as they introduced themselves, as if voluntarily listening to a hard-right, politically incorrect conservative provocateur was the equivalent of experiencing sexual assault or the death of a child.
Incredibly—be still, my explosive head!—Rutgers had representatives from the University Police Department, the Office of Violence Prevention and Victim Assistance, Counseling, Alcohol and other Drug Assistance Program and Psychiatric Services and the Bias Prevention and Education Committee attend, like the expression of unpopular view was a cataclysm. .Members from the Black Student Union, the Asian American Cultural Center, Center for Latino Arts and Culture, College Student Affairs and many more groups also attended, as “students and community members participated by sharing their personal experiences from the event and by looking for resolutions.”
Resolutions? What resolutions? Censoring speech? Mandatory re-education centers for non-conforming students? Lobotomies? The man spoke. He has opinions. People listened. This isn’t a tragedy or a crime. So why is a university not only allowing students to think it is, but encouraging that delusion?
Students described feeling scared, hurt and discriminated against following Yiannopoulos’s visit. Well, a website editor expressing his views in colorful ways don’t justify any of those feelings. First, the students who didn’t like his speech were free to leave. Second, this representation of mere opinions and words as physically and psychically harmful is a ploy that the school, if administrators had a spine and a sense of their responsibilities as educators, would immediately condemn as destructive to both character and free speech. The goal, of course, is that by acting as if words were deadly arrows and pathogens, speech can be restricted, banned and punished as actually harmful.
It is one of the jobs of universities to make students smarter, tougher, and more open-minded than that. What is Rutgers doing, sending its Office of Violence Prevention and Victim Assistance to care for students who can’t listen to opinions they don’t agree with without having an emotional breakdown? The school’s chancellor should have come and said simply, “Grow up. The antidote to words you don’t agree with are more persuasive words that counter them. You came here to learn that skill. Weakness, intolerance for dissent and cowardice are not virtues, and we’re not going to nurture them at Rutgers.’
Melissa James, a School of Arts and Sciences junior, told the empathy brigade that she broke down crying after the event, because of what Mean Milo said about the rape culture not being real. “How can you say that is not violent? Maybe they did not hit me, but that took such a big toll on me emotionally,” she said. How? So violence is no longer defined by what someone does, but how some sensitive plant reacts to it, is that what Rutgers teaches now?
Boy, I wish I had known that after Bucky Dent’s home run in the Red Sox-Yankees play-off game sent me into a cosmic depression in October of 1978. I could have had the little bastard arrested!
James also said she was scared to walk around campus the next day, and many others agreed, saying that they felt “unsafe at the event” and around campus afterward. Where are the Rutgers faculty members who are obligated to remind these self-handicapped victims that in a democracy you cannot be “safe” from conflicting views and opinions, and a college campus is stealing their money if it is “safe” from discomforting words and views?
Dianne Techwei, a School of Environmental and Biological Sciences sophomore, said people were clapping about things that are not true!
Because she knows all about what is true, right now. Why is she even in college, then?
Not to learn what free speech is, that’s for sure. Nyuma Waggeh, a School of Arts and Sciences junior said she believes Yiannopoulos’s comments cross the line between hate speech and free speech. The Daily Targum wrote that questions remaining unresolved after the pity party include the line between hate speech and freedom of speech.
Hey! I can resolve that question! There is no line! There is no such thing as hate speech, and there is no exception to free speech that encompasses any definition of “hate speech” as these pathetic weenies think they understand it. Do I get my $25,000 now? Why haven’t Rutgers students learned that yet? Rutgers, what good are you?
“Our universities are creating adults who are wholly dependent on authority to shield them from alien ideas. This is exactly the opposite of what the college experience is supposed to be. Instead of graduating confident, clear-thinking, tolerant adults capable of functioning in almost any work environment, the modern university is sending out into the world whiny, weak, intellectually vapid, intolerant fascists.”
Exactly.
Ethics Alarms 
Not all college students can (or should) be painted with the same brush. There are still those 5% of outliers.
Now, you do know that the post was about the college treating those—5% (if you say so)—students as if their reaction was legitimate, rational and worthy of anything but ridicule, right? You did notice that the headline and the entire orientation of the post was on Rutgers not doing it’s job? You did read this central quote, right?
He has opinions. People listened. This isn’t a tragedy or a crime. So why is a university not only allowing students to think it is, but encouraging that delusion?
Now, in that statement, it doesn’t matter if the idiotic vapours are being felt by a thousand students or SIX. ONE whole college is saying, in essence, there, there, we’re so sorry, we’ll make it SAFER for you. So what the hell does your statement have to do with the post?
You know what comments that intentionally misunderstand a clear and direct post make me feel like? DO YOU? This…
Maybe I misunderstood your post. Sorry for that. I’ll try harder next time.
Happens to me all the time.
For what it’s worth, I think the 5% is right… For the most part, the majority of people still go to college to learn things and acquire skills, the campus activists have always been failed or failing students and Van Wilder-esque trust fund abusers.
I can’t understand that the people who were offended didn’t do the slightest homework and checking out his books/blogs etc. I’d read a lot of Asimov before he spoke at mine, but I would not go to a speech by someone I knew nothing about. I had far too much classwork and part-time work to hang out listening to some loud mouth.
Oh, they definitely knew who he was, went anyway, heard exactly what they expected, and whined about it.
To be fair to Milo, they painted themselves (Is that cultural appropriation? Redface? Whatever) damn near the second he said “Good Evening.” The censors here weren’t waiting in the reeds for the (admittedly inevitable) triggering speech before throwing their tantrums, they wanted to shut him down.
And see, a year or two ago, they very might well have. I’m not sure if the ability of voices like Milo to talk in the face of extreme opposition is a factor of their perseverance of the speaker or the gradual reduction in effectiveness these censors have. Milo is a great example, because he’s basically run the gambit. There was a speech he tried to give where the censors were allowed their tantrums in a hallway until a censor pulled the fire alarm, and then in future speeches protesters were relegated to exterior venues. The SPJ debates had apparently credible bomb threats phoned in to the venues, and while that was effective in shutting down the speech in the short-term, it also raised the event’s profile and made sure that it reached far more of an audience than it would have otherwise, which made it a demonstrably bad censoring tactic.
But on the other hand… Who would have thought that 20 years later, the party of free speech and big ideas would have withered into a party of censorious asshats?
I need to proofread what I post here. I have this awful habit of forming thoughts as I type and not doubling back to adjust things like tenses. The resulting paragraphs end up reading terribly. I apologize to whoever reads these messes, and I’ll strive to do better in the future.
I just watched the video (it was included in a story about the students attending therapy sessions). As a late student (29 yrs old), I couldn’t believe how immature my fellow classmates were. Most were commuters and still very much under their parent’s wings. Although kids today seem older than when I was that age some still stay naive even after their college days. To me, the fact that the speaker is a kid himself helps deflate the drama. Had that been a parental or adult figure, then maybe the kids would have taken what upset them more to heart. If you don’t like the speaker, you get up and leave. I did that many times in College. It usually wasn’t due to the content as the speaker was just not engaging enough to hold my interest. Some comments on other sites are from parents saying “Well, I won’t be sending my kid there!” which basically takes me to another point where parents feel that the colleges still need to babysit their children. I’d babysit for $25,000.
Jack, please scrap this if you don’t think it’s relevant. Here is a quote from a comment on the “therapy” article. “These kids are so fragile and dumb that we may just have to scrap the whole generation and start over.”
You already know I think Jack. I’m certainly glad that Rutgers has a Bias Prevention and Education Center so that these impressionible weenies will be re-educated after their “trauma”.
“How can you say that is not violent? Maybe they did not hit me, but that took such a big toll on me emotionally.”
This goes into the Hall of Fame of Answering One’s Own Stupid Question.
What the hell is wrong with these people? How the hell are they ever going to function outside the university?
Idiot Rutgers! For a few dollars more they could have had Hillary.
“the University Police Department, the Office of Violence Prevention and Victim Assistance, Counseling, Alcohol and other Drug Assistance Program and Psychiatric Services and the Bias Prevention and Education Committee”
Crikey! No wonder a year’s tuition at a state university costs and outrageous $25,000 a year. Do they have any money left over to hire professors?
When I asked the “Director of Development” (i.e., fundraiser in chief) of my college whether he thought over $50,000 a year in tuition, room and board was justifiable, he squawked: “That doesn’t even cover the actual cost!” As if that was supposed to make me feel better. Kind of like HRC squawking, “At this point, what difference does it make?”
My bet is the members of the Bias Prevention and Education Committee don’t teach any classes and are paid a full salary. An “Education Committee” at a university? So what are all the people who are not on the education committee doing at Rutgers? I’ve never been able to finish “1984” but I have to say this sounds Orwellian to me.
And wouldn’t a police department be somewhat involved in violence prevention and victim assistance? Authentic Frontier Gibberish.
I’m surprised they allowed the event to go forward, given Brown University’s squishy response to Ray Kelly being forced offstage by students who decided to cancel an event themselves when the University wouldn’t. Rule #1 of political correctness is that if you don’t like what someone has to say, don’t let him say it to begin with.
Another great example of political correctness going completely insane.
I predict that Rutgers will use Milo’s speech as an excuse to allow the silencing of any speech that the PC silencing brigade on campus pre-determines to be “violently” offensive. In fact I’m going to go out on a limb here and openly state that the “college” intentionally planned and encouraged this kind of negative student reaction to the speech well ahead of time so they could use it to silence speech in the future.
I have absolutely no hope for the future if these kind of irrationally twisted thinking coddled students are what’s in-store for the future leadership of the United States. Our culture and rational thinking is doomed! 😦
I’m sick and tired of being sick and tired.
Huh, I read “The Daily Targum” as “The Daily Tantrum” for some reason, but in hindsight it seem appropriate.
Rutgers has a “Bias Prevention and Education Committee”? Hmmmm. That seems to say it all, no?
jvb