...But campus activists are supposed to be the problem.
Today’s New York Times piece, Oberlin Students Take Culture War to the Dining Hall, epitomizes why I refuse to take much of the hand wringing over "infantilized" students and PC Culture seriously. It's a ready made (so much so that it seems to be cribbed from the Daily Caller - but we'll get to that later) narrative that says to the reader, let’s all laugh at the entitled, over-sensitive college students! It is also bullshit.
Let's go through the problems with it one by one. First, there's the basic premise that Oberlin students are going to "War" over food. Presumably, the campus is up in arms over "inauthentic" general Tso's chicken. What the article neglects to mention is that these quotes don't come from some protest group, but are statements made by individual students for an article on the subject. So, a few students, when interviewed by their school newspaper, said something that many people think is silly about cultural appropriation. Unless the definitions of “news" and "culture war” have radically shifted, this is neither.
The article also claims "Earlier this month, students with the school’s black student union protested outside of the dining hall at the Afrikan Heritage House, after demands for more traditional meals, including more fried chicken, went unmet." That does sound ridiculous - but that's because it's a gross mischaracterization. If one actually reads the Oberlin article (to which the NYTimes piece links) they will see that students protested the campus dining services for a variety of reasons - first of which was apparently that the food was terrible, and the university had not responded to requests for improvement. They were also protesting the company's allegedly terrible labor practices - something the New York Times piece makes no mention of. The statement that there should be more fried chicken on the menu was one of a number of suggestions made by the students for how to improve the food. Other suggestions included more vegetarian and vegan options - but black students asking for those isn't a ready made punchline, so they are not mentioned. What's being done here is no different than the media coverage of protests against the Vietnam War — which were quick to broadcast scenes of pot smoking hippies, and likely to ignore anything of substance.
Finally, at the end of the article, they state that the previous week Oberlin's Black Student Union released a list of demands to the university, "which include the creation of segregated safe spaces for black students on campus." Again, this certainly sounds like something worthy of ridicule. But before getting to the content, it's worth noting that the list of demands is completely unrelated to the debate over food. It makes no mention of dining services, whatsoever. The Times does not note this. Instead, it elides these issues together, concluding the article with a quote from their demands: “These are demands and not suggestions… If these demands are not taken seriously, immediate action from the Africana community will follow.” Given the article’s title and other content, a reader would not be faulted for thinking the Black Student Union was threatening immediate action over appropriative food — but they would have been misled.
Finally, let's get to the more serious allegation that the Black Student Union is calling for segregation. This language (“segregated safe spaces”) also appears in articles by the Daily Caller (http://www.nationalreview.com/article/428768/oberlin-students-protests-paid-for-document) and the National Review (http://dailycaller.com/2015/12/17/oberlin-students-release-gargantuan-14-page-list-of-demands/). It does not, however, appear in the student demands (to which a link is provided in that very sentence). Given the factual errors and the replicated language I find it difficult to escape the conclusion that the author based her article on secondary sources without bothering to investigate them.
So, the New York Times published recycled right-wing agitprop under their own masthead. By any journalistic standard, they should be ashamed.
