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Home » Another sign of the continuing decline of the American university

Another sign of the continuing decline of the American university

The New Neo Posted on by

This headline caught my eye: “Univ. of Michigan Cancels ‘American Sniper’ Screening, Made Students ‘Feel Unsafe’.”

At first I thought it was some sort of objection to a film about a sniper and war, although I’m pretty sure other films with bloody themes have been shown on campus, and that “American Sniper” is hardly the most violent. What sort of fragile flowers have American students become, if they couldn’t even view a war film?

But I was wrong; that’s not what the controversy was about. It’s about a Muslim protest:

The signers were mostly students, but also some staff, as well as the Muslim Students’ Association and the president of Students Allied for Freedom and Equality, a Palestinian solidarity group at UMich.

The online memo, titled a “collective letter from Middle Eastern and North African (MENA) and Muslim students on campus,” accused the public university of “tolerating dangerous anti-Muslim and anti-MENA propaganda” by showing the movie, the highest grossing film of 2014…

“Chris Kyle was a racist who took a disturbing stance on murdering Iraqi civilians,” the collective letter stated. “Middle Eastern characters in the film are not lent an ounce of humanity and watching this movie is provocative and unsafe to MENA and Muslim CollectiveLetter students who are too often reminded of how little the media and world values their lives. ”¦ The University of Michigan should not participate in further perpetuating these negative and misleading stereotypes.”

Among other things, that’s not a correct description of the movie and its attitude towards its Iraqi characters and the deaths of civilians. But hey, who cares about correctness when you can have political correctness, by far the most important kind?

I will leave without comment the fact that the film was replaced by the movie “Paddington Bear.”

Here’s more on the decision to cancel, which seems to have been made by something called the Center for Campus Involvement, which apparently was the organizer of the event:

“American Sniper” was set to be shown as part of the center’s “UMix Late Night” program, which brings movies, games, dances and other social events to the student body. The center is responsible for more than 300 co-curricular programs each year, including cultural and educational programs, films, art exhibits, UMix Late Night, athletic/spirit activities and various performance groups and concerts, its website states.

“We in the Center for Campus Involvement and the UMix Late Night program did not intend to exclude any students or communities on campus through showing this film,” the center’s announcement stated.

“”¦ UMix should always be a safe space for students to engage, unwind, and create community with others, and we commit to listening to and learning from our community in the interest of fostering that environment. ”¦ We will take time to deeper understand and screen for content that can negatively stereotype a group.”

I said I wouldn’t comment on the choice to run “Paddington,” but curiosity got the better of me and I watched the trailer. It made me feel very unsafe, not to mention revolted. The first scene here? Disgusting! And if the trailer is any evidence, I do believe it portrays bears as very stupid:

Comments

Another sign of the continuing decline of the American university — 24 Comments

  1. “UMix Late Night” program, which brings movies, games, dances and other social events to the student body”

    Everything in that line from mix to body, with the exception, I think, of ‘and’ and ‘the’ have at one time or another engendered an unsafe space for Islamic aspirations, bigotry, and hatred.

    BTW, is that a bear?… it looks… like a… DOG! The Prophet’s been cleverly, ingeniously, cunningly, pooped on. Behead… …. …. EVERYONE!

  4. “Feeling unsafe” is the new way on campus to get your way. The 18-22 year old equivalent of holding your breath. It works because it invokes much anguish, tears, and emotional outpouring from the leftist faculty/administrators; i.e. just about everyone.

    An incident recently on my campus caused one of our curmudgeonly faculty to state that the students were ridiculous for claiming to “feel unsafe” over a comment that had no threat implied in it at all. At which point, a great number of faculty declared they “felt unsafe” with his comments….it is truly like going to work everyday with Rod Serling writing my schedule.

  5. sad truth is that prior to Obama, people thought the general public was not as dumb as a sack of hammers.

    a movie makes them afraid, but this doesnt

    US aerospace command moving comms gear back to Cold War bunker

    The US military command that scans North America’s skies for enemy missiles and aircraft plans to move its communications gear to a Cold War-era mountain bunker, officers said.

    The shift to the Cheyenne Mountain base in Colorado is designed to safeguard the command’s sensitive sensors and servers from a potential electromagnetic pulse (EMP) attack, military officers said.

    The Pentagon last week announced a $700 million contract with Raytheon Corporation to oversee the work for North American Aerospace Command (NORAD) and US Northern Command.

    Admiral William Gortney, head of NORAD and Northern Command, said that “because of the very nature of the way that Cheyenne Mountain’s built, it’s EMP-hardened.”

    now why would they suddenly out of the blue start preparing for an EMP type nuclear attack? couild it be the new chinese nuclear missiles on their new subs? they can reach the US now… or is it the idea that iran may have something? maybe korea? maybe if iran hits israel, and israel hits iran, and then russia, hits them, and so we hit something,. or maybe, russia will invade nato, and see if war starts or not…

    regardless, the idea is what i said things would converge on given putting certain quality people in certain positions where not only what they will do is scrutable, but how they will react, and what they will try…

    though this line is very funny

    The Cheyenne mountain bunker is a half-acre cavern carved into a mountain in the 1960s that was designed to withstand a Soviet nuclear attack. From inside the massive complex, airmen were poised to send warnings that could trigger the launch of nuclear missiles.

    oh… a half acre shelter is massive..
    yamentau mountain
    given its reported size it may span as much as an entire degree of latitude and longitude. 400 square miles in size

    there is also the Ramenki bunker…
    an area of about 500 acres

    and Russian television has reported that 5,000 new emergency nuclear bomb shelters were scheduled to have been completed in the city of Moscow alone by the end of 2012.

    from Zero hedge
    Has the U.S. government constructed any bunkers for the survival of the general population in the United States? Of course not. In the event of a nuclear war, I guess they just expect pretty much all of us to die.

    Russia launches ‘wartime government’ HQ in major military upgrade Published time: December 01, 2014
    The new top-security, fortified facility in Moscow includes several large war rooms, a brand new supercomputer in the heart of a state-of-the-art data processing center, underground facilities, secret transport routes for emergency evacuation and a helicopter pad, which was deployed for the first time on Nov. 24 on the Moscow River. The Defense Ministry won’t disclose the price tag for the site, but it is estimated at the equivalent of several billion dollars

    The U.S. doesn’t have anything like the S-500

    in fact, the s-500 was hidden under the old 1960s designation of a similar name… in fact, i long ago mentioned that they were replacing old stuff using the same names so that Americans, dumber than a sack of hammers, could say “no, those are old systems” and ignore it

    to qyote zero hedge

    adly, most Americans are not interested in this stuff at all.

    These days, most Americans just assume that the Russians are “our friends” and that a war with Russia could never possibly happen.

    What they don’t realize is that the Russian people see things very, very differently. Today, 81 percent of Russians have a negative opinion of the United States. Our interference in the conflict in Ukraine has made the Russian people very angry, and there are many over there that now believe that a shooting war with the United States is inevitable.

    and yet… they are as afraid of the USA as russian citizens are… i guess if we merge countries if obama gives up on the first day of conflict, they will learn what to really be afraid of…

  6. Perhaps no aspect of Political Correctne ss is more prominent in American life today than feminist ideology.

    While feminism’s history in America certainly extends longer than sixty years, its flowering in recent decades has been interwoven with the unfolding social revolution carried forward by cultural Marxists

    Where do we see radical feminism ascenda
    nt? It is on television, where nearly every major offering has a female “power figure” and the plots and characters emphasize inferiority of the male and superiority of the female. It is in the military, where expanding opportunity for women, even in combat positions, has been accompanied by double standards and then lowered standards, as well as by a decline in enlistment of young men, while “warriors” in the services are leaving in droves. It is in government-mandated employment preferences and practices that benefit women and use “sexual harassment”charges to keep men in line. It is in colleges where women’s gender studies proliferate and “affirmative action” is applied in admissions and employment. It is in other employment, public and private, where in addition to affirmative action, “sensitivity training” is given unprecedented time and attention. It is in public schools, where “self awareness” and “self-esteem” are increasingly promoted while academic learning declines. And sadly, we see that “a woman’s right to choose” leads many fellow Americans, including many with stewardship of public law and culture, to believe it is “the right thing to do” to allow the most helpless to be put to death.

    the Dems had to switch to race because feminist women had so few kids that they wont matter in under 20 years… so they are being abandoned by the state in favor of the larger groups of hispanics and others.

    If this “feminization” trend were driven only by radical feminists seeking to pull down a perceived male-dominated hierarchy, there would be more hope that the cycles of history would move America toward a stable accommodati on between men and women.

    But the drive is deeper, and it will not be satisfied by any accommodation. The radical feminists have embraced and been embraced by the wider and deeper movement of cultural Marxism. For dedicated Marxists, the strategy is to attack at every point where an apparent disparity leaves a potential constituency of oppressed” persons — in this case women, who are the largest of all constituenci
    es.

    Only those that made the revolution successful have the power to reverse it, and they wont..

    at least not till some super crisis happens and then they want their patriarchal protectors back… even more so when the feds start drafting the women to fight…

    you can read the rest at
    Chapter V
    Radical Feminism and Political Correctness
    by Dr. Gerald L. Atkinson
    https://www.lifesitenews.com/ldn/2005_docs/PC5.pdf

  7. physics guy:

    The “feeling unsafe” charge is not so very new. I was at a university about 25 years ago and it was already the new standard back then. If a professor said or did something that made a student uneasy, even if by objective standards there was nothing wrong what what the professor had said, or no reason it would make the average person the least bit uneasy or offended, the professor was always in the wrong.

    The locus of the definition of the “crime” switched from an objective standard to the subjective feelings of the observor, and the feelings could never be defined as “wrong.”

  8. We all here know that the Left takes Muslim sensibilities very seriously indeed. That it is the ONLY religious group to which it extends that protection is not an accident.

    Art,

    The Russian preparations are very disturbing. And the NORAD and US Northern Command moving back into the Cheyenne Mountain complex specifically to safeguard against an EMP attack is BOTH disturbing and reassuring as well. It’s disturbing because it indicates an assessment of an existential threat. Besides Chinese and Russian capabilities, both N Korea and Iran are suspected of having programs to develop SuperEMP nukes. Iran has conducted low-mid altitude missile tests in the Caspian Sea, the only plausible purpose of such tests being EMP strikes.

    It’s reassuring because any EMP attack that doesn’t wipe out the technological capabilities of the US Military ensures a massive retaliatory strike. I wonder if its occurred to the Russians that, in the event of a successful nuclear attack upon America, that one or two of our nuclear submarines might have orders to wait until the Russians emerged from their lairs before launching their nuclear retaliation? We can do ‘sneaky’ too…

  9. artfldger “a movie makes them afraid, but this doesnt”

    They live in a cosy, padded, parallel universe. You have to receive, read, and understand the real world news in order to be worried about real world [Russian] hostilities.

  10. More likely, the USN SSBNs are working on their retargeting orders for Indiana.

  11. College Student Claims White People, Patriarchy Giving him Heart, Breathing Problems
    http://thepunditpress.com/2015/04/08/college-student-claims-white-people-patriarchy-giving-him-heart-breathing-problems/

    According to Timmons, people who “are not privileged” are suffering greatly from the intentional and unintentional triggers that others are causing. “On a campus,” he writes, ” – and nation at large – in which whiteness, patriarchy, heteronormativity, cissexism, ableism and classism prevail, students that are not privileged by these constructs often have difficulty navigating hegemonic, oppressive environments.”

    Timmons writes about different maladies that have come about because of these microaggressions.

    He writes that some people have “pressure in the chest” after a microaggression. “It leads you,” he explains with specificity, “to the public restroom on the second floor – too much traffic on the first – of some indiscriminate building that you stumbled into only out of proximity and the immediate need for safety and silence.

  13. Paddington is a transgender female dog that through the wonders of therapy and surgery has been transformed into a male bear, and is a perfect representative of the sensitive youth offended and threatened by words and images. Time to buy American Sniper dvds for Christmas and birthday presents.

  14. ““On a campus,” he writes, ” – and nation at large – in which whiteness, patriarchy, heteronormativity, cissexism, ableism and classism prevail, students that are not privileged by these constructs…”

    Of these, my absolute favorite is “ableism”. Ability is a “construct”. I have to wonder how Mozart, Einstein and Ruth managed to “construct” such abilities? And such “constructions” are not limited to mere whites, so one must wonder if Tiger Woods, Michael Jordan and the very Muslim Kareem Abdul-Jabbar admit to their talent and ability being mere “constructs”? I’d be willing to wager that none them have even a clue as to how they did it 😉

    A close second might be “cissexism” which posits that other than reproductive biological differences all other disparities between men and women are social “constructs”.

    These people are mentally ill and profoundly separated from reality, as they posit that human nature itself is literally a “construct”.

  15. GB

    Cis-sexism is chemically opposite to trans-sexism.

    They are optical mirrors of each other.

    So, one must conclude that this is a reference towards their “through the looking glass’ world view.

    &&&&&

    As for risk factors: the narcissistic should not play with mirrors.

    &&&&&

    This social trend may be nothing much more than macro-narcissism: when entire voting blocs dope out on self-infatuation, self-importance and self-indulgence.

  16. Did anyone of them actually feel “unsafe”? Who knows. But the tactic is typical of how the activist game is played on campus.

  18. We need to go on the offensive. Start samizdata presses. Put up posters of Forbidden Knowledge in the middle of the night. Dare the millennials to take in a screening of a Verboten movie. Start throwing cultural Molotov cocktails.

    They’ve taken the fort; we need to take it BACK.

  19. The university cancelled the cancellation.

    http://www.foxnews.com/us/2015/04/09/university-michigan-reverses-course-will-show-american-sniper-as-scheduled/

    The University of Michigan said late Wednesday that it will show the film “American Sniper” as originally scheduled after a protest by students and staff caused the screening to be scrapped.

    University Vice President for Student Life E. Royster Harper called the decision to cancel the Friday night showing a “mistake” in a statement.

    “The initial decision to cancel the movie was not consistent with the high value the University of Michigan places on freedom of expression and our respect for the right of students to make their own choices in such matters,” Harper said. “The movie will be shown at the originally scheduled time and location.”

    Harper added that the university will also screen the family-friendly film “Paddington” as an alternative.

    –SNIP–

    “The movie ‘American Sniper’ not only tolerates but promotes anti-Muslim and anti-MENA [Muslim, Middle Eastern and North African] rhetoric and sympathizes with a mass killer,” the letter read in part. “Chris Kyle was a racist who took a disturbing stance on murdering Iraqi civilians.”

    “Watching this movie is provocative and unsafe to MENA and Muslim students who are too often reminded of how little the media and world value their lives,” the letter continued.

    The cancelation drew a strong reaction, and The Michigan Daily reported that a third-year Law School student named Rachel Jankowski circulated a petition calling on the university’s Center for Campus Involvement to restore “American Sniper” to the UMix schedule. The university’s football coach, Jim Harbaugh, weighed in on the controversy by tweeting that he would watch the movie with his team.

    –SNIP–

    I’m sure the hothouse wallflower special snowflakes protesting the showing of a movie will now have to go on permanent disability because what passes for their psyches are forever damaged. And with such psyche scarring damage affecting the entirety of their future lives, how will they ever pay back their student loans for their Ethnic Transgender ‘Hate Whitey’ Poetry Studies degrees? It’s all just so unfair.

  20. “Paddington” wouldn’t have helped anyway. It’s already been in trouble for being “transphobic” for a “comic sequence in which a man disguised as a woman is flirted with by another man”. You can never please the PC crowd.

  22. Beverly,

    The best activist arena to get started in terms of cost/benefit is college campuses that are social/cultural/political founts for the country (they’re the modern Church), where the student churn is constant and relatively low-cost grassroot student-led, alumni and faculty-joined effort can yield outsized, magnified, multiplicative, replicative effect on campus and society beyond.

    Just because the Left dominates the activist game on campus, don’t be fooled into thinking only the Left can play the activist game on campus. Left domination on campus is at least as much due to Right abdication of the activist game on campus as any fundamental social characteristic.

    The nature of campus means dedicated, skilled Right activists committed to playing the activist game for keeps can make inroads on campus better than in most any other social arena dominated by the Left.

  23. Remember it was the showing that got them upset…
    not that they would actually attend and see it!!!!!!

  24. I’m a Buckeye through and through and have very little use for the University of Michigan, but I actually thought that, if they had to replace Sniper, it was very clever of them to replace Sniper with Paddington. It made the whiners look so very very lame, and in a way that would probably go right over their heads.

    Sorry, I said “lame”. Mea culpa, differently abled.

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