Canada's Globe and Mail reports (via Inside Higher Ed) on spying at Queen's University in Kingston, Ontario. The university is spying on students, and the purpose is of course thought control.
Your friend's new fuchsia fedora might be hideous. But don't call it gay, or you might get a language lesson from the conversation cops.
Students at Queen's University who sprinkle their dialogue with an assortment of "homo" or "retarded" could find out the hard way that not everyone finds their remarks acceptable.
The Kingston university has hired student facilitators to step in when they overhear homophobic slurs, remarks bashing women or racially tinged insults, along with an array of other language that could be deemed offensive.
The university's defense is the sort of thing that a thuggish administrator skilled in double speak would come up with.
But Mr. Laker [Queen's dean of student affairs] said the new "intergroup dialogue program" focuses on respectful, non–confrontational discussions that don't impede freedoms.
"This is difficult work. It needs to be done very respectfully," Mr. Laker said. "There's really no interference."
Right. Some stooge of a university bureaucrat sticks his nose into your conversation, and that is not interference. And "War is Peace; Freedom is Slavery; Ignorance is Strength".
My guess is that a lot of conversations will get quieter. And there will be trouble.
If the facilitators jump into a group conversation, "they risk hostility from students who don't want to be approached in what they consider private social settings," said the editorial published in the campus newspaper.
There may also be the ocassional student with a temperament like, say, mine, who will use a banned word just to find out who the spies facilitators are, and when once identified, will tell said facilitator to go away from his conversation and back to his Stasi paymaster. I do however see why the university administration would want to watch out for students saying "retard", because of course they want to know who is talking about them. And I am willing to grant, knowing several wonderful people with Down's Syndrome, that it is genuinely offense to compare them to thuggish university administrators.
No story about a thuggish university would be complete without a comment from a really stupid, pompous ass professor.
Patricia Gurin, professor emeritus of psychology and women's studies at the University of Michigan, is one of the founders of the intergroup dialogue concept.
While she didn't comment specifically on the program launched at Queen's, she warned that such activities could backfire if they are not carried out by highly trained individuals who have experience with a variety of conflicts and social issues.
"It takes a lot of skill to do this work," Ms. Gurin said in an interview yesterday.
She said that facilitators who haven't been trained properly could end up reinforcing defence mechanisms of privileged students.
"White males say 'This is more white–male bashing.' What are they learning from that? Reinforcement of defensiveness rather than opening up and exploring is the consequence."
Gee, do you think? Not just anybody can be a spy. But of course the utterly special bit is the reference to "privileged students". Because of course only whites are hostile to gays, as the Proposition 8 vote in California showed.Posted by sjostrom on November 20, 2008 10:33 AM
