It's not what I would personally do but on the other hand cops (private security guards, Feds, whathaveyou) have been doing it for fucking ever and if somebody gets to do it why can't everybody
"No Rich People's Mouthpieces" wouldn't fit on the sign.
Let me be the first to say that 1 gets it right.
But I do want to add that I'm not sure what the point is of a tent city if you don't want the media involved.
Not that I actually took the trouble to watch the video or anything.
You can have your blog back now.
I want to object to the overuse of the word bully, this post being a great example. This isn't "bullying." Harassing? Assaulting? Sure, but these are professional journalists not kids, and they're not being systematically harassed by someone more powerful than them. At some point recently everyone became obsessed with bullying and now it's used in weird ways.
Why is the university quad a public space, by the way?
This isn't "bullying."
I don't think that's right. There's a sense of "bullying" that's the one you mean: programmatic intimidation over time, or something along those lines, but it's definitely not the only sense of the word, which basically means to try to get your way by show of force.
11: That's not always determinative.
I don't even seen plaques embedded in the pavement.
I suppose it's too late to bring back the early-20th-century, Theodore-Roosevelt-style use of the word bully, though we could try. "Her app was downloaded fifteen million times! Bully for her!"
11, 13: Yeah, just because something is owned or funded by the public doesn't mean the public always has a right of access. Trivial example: Fort Knox.
I am honestly troubled by faculty members calling for force against students. (Adding that it's a white lady calling for force against a student of color does in fact make it worse for me.) So maybe I am getting old. (Totally on board with not trusting the media and get why the students wouldn't!)
The prof calling for "muscle" (someone is letting the mob go to her head) was, at that point, dealing with a white guy, I think. Still completely out of line, obviously.
I'd like to apologize to any lurking former commenters if 4 was out of line.
Tim Tai is a student journalist on an open campus. Also not white. Am I misreading this thread as being supportive of a group of students shoving him out of a place he has a right to be?
Am I misreading this thread as being supportive of a group of students shoving him out of a place he has a right to be?
Assuming you're talking about the part of the thread that starts with comment 1 by me, I can say that yes, you're misreading me. I'm supportive of feeling like this is substantially less bad than any of the constant intrusions on the freedom of the press to be where they need to be to do their jobs perpetrated by people in authority, and that the reason it's bubbled up into the public consciousness is because it's a useful way to kick protesters.
But I definitely don't support any group working to keep the press from doing their jobs. If that's a relevant part of this particular discussion, which I don't think it is.
I'm also supportive of some tortured fucking sentence construction, I tell you what.
I'll just get off this train now before it goes any further.
the reason it's bubbled up into the public consciousness is because it's a useful way to kick protesters
Ding ding ding.
Sifu -- pro-protesters, pro-freedom-of the press and pro-torture.
23: Are you sure? We're bound for glory!
23: I mean, you needn't. Underneath with what I'm asserting might actually be some fairly dramatically radical theories about the rights of authority as compared to the rights of the "mob", so if you want to pick at me about that, go to town.
And if you're talking about my contributions to the thread, I'm just curious about the status of the campus (and I guess campuses in general). I'm used to university campuses, and particularly quads within that campus, in the UK being closed to the public, except on special occasions or tours. Even for public universities, which is in practice almost all of them. If a random journalist tried to get in, they'd be told to fuck off and probably arrested for trespassing if they didn't leave.
But on this particular matter, I have no opinion, not having read up on the detail.
And would be also fair to say that my view that the fact that we're talking about this at all is symptomatic of -- and contributes to -- a structural bias against (particualrly left-leaning) protesters could lead pretty easily to it seeming like I wanted to shut down discussion of the topic entirely which is another thing that you could probably fairly pick at me about.
Tim Tai is, I believe, a University of Missouri student.
In case it helps to provide clarity to what kind of assholes this involves, I'll point out that I was student journalist* when I was an undergraduate.
*But not a journalism student.
Not sure who "the original" are here, but this is interesting.l
32: that seems like a good thing to be distributing. On the other hand, most definitely avoid reading the responses to that tweet.
Really, 1 is right? I really can't get on board with that concept. Yes, the media can be bad, but that doesn't give a group of people using a public space (and yes, the quad at Mizzou is a public space) the right to harass members of the public (including ones with cameras). Tim Tai is quoted as saying " This is the First Amendment. It protects your right to stand here and protects mine." and he's right.
I think the reaction to the photographer produces a backlash against what the Mizzou students are trying to do (which is unfortunate, and we should fight against the backlash, too -- I think they were wrong not to let Tai take photographs, but I don't think they are wrong in general).
And, I'll cite to Peter Magubane: "A struggle without documentation is no struggle." http://www.thejournalist.org.za/kau-kauru/camera-gun-legend-peter-magubane
And, Tim Tai doesn't seem like any kind of enemy (as an aside): http://timtaiphoto.com/black-rodeo/
I'm confused about what's going on in the linked video. The Concerned Students 1950, who are in the camp-out tent city on the quad, are protesting. There's a human wall, or shield, of people around them who are protecting them ... from the media? Not protecting them from, say, racists?
I had heard about these events, but I'd thought the ranks of human wall persons were whites, protective of the University's reputation, who didn't want the media to document the protest. From the video, it appears there's a distinct distrust or even malice among protesters toward media coverage of what's going on.
I'm really confused by this - where's it coming from? I recall that outside media groups did become invasive in Ferguson; is that it?
Really, 1 is right?
Really, 1 is right.
Is it that black students, protesting, felt they might be identified (on camera), and felt that they might undergo future threats -- from racists -- therefore?
I'm not sure what 34 is responding to, but it definitely isn't what I wrote. (Or the point that I was, as explained later in greater detail, meant.)
Just to reiterate, I think the actual value of this as a protest action (and again, I personally think it's not a good idea) is something for the protesters to work out internally, but the fact that we're all talking about it is 100% a product of the kind of people who responded to the twitter picture oudemia linked in 32.
If you want to take a bunch of basically sympathetic but not actually terribly activist (in the sit-in sense) liberal people and get them to side with university administrators (or whatever local authority figures) over a bunch of (majority non-white, as far as I understand) college protesters, then you wait for the protesters to do something that reads as bad to natural allies and then you publicize the shit out of that. Who could support protesters who don't believe in freedom of the press??? Tear that tent city down!
And really, that last is the reason this works. Of course I want the press to have access to public spaces. What am I, an illiberal monster? But then that frames the conversation entirely, and nobody talks at all about what the protesters are actually trying to achieve.
Previous tweets from @CS_1950 quoted in news articles seem to have been deleted, and that same account has retweeted the photo linked in 32 with the comment "From original organizers! We're learning and growing through this."
Who could support protesters who don't believe in freedom of the press??? Tear that tent city down!
One might argue that the protesters vitiate their claims, explicit and not, to moral superiority by practicing violent or threatened-violent suppression, leaving observers like us to choose between corrupt administration and champing-at-the-bit-to-get-to-the-purging-part insurgency.
41: of course one might! That's why we're talking about it.
That's the great thing about protesters trying to take the moral high ground against entrenched authority and institutions. They fuck up even once and bam, you've got 'em.
42: See, I would not give a shit if it were just the students. I would disagree with them, but whatever it's their thing and they are undergrads. I don't think there are huge harms here. But the all-too-eager middle aged professor calling for muscle? I think she is absolutely pathetic and any student has more right to be on the quad than she does.
Yeah, it's almost like most political movements can't stand the scrutiny that one applies to detergent advertising and try to obscure their inconsistencies with tacky noise.
44: and hence they all fail in their aims. Truly, this is the best of all possible worlds.
45 cont'd, in response to 43: I would also wager that some number of the people saying "I stand with the protesters and against the press!" on twitter could have stood to put a sock in it. But again, they aren't why this is a Thing.
46: Honestly, I was kind of joking when I remarked the other day that I plan to "ride the White Privilege Train as long as we can make the oppressed keep laying track."
48: that's the train that stops at standpipe's blog, isn't it. MYSTERY TRAIN!
We are all working on the railroad called ideology. All the livelong day.
Sorry, I can't hear you over the sound of my Oppression Engine.*
* I will gladly sell that phrase to China Miéville or somebody for $5.
One would have hoped that the faculty and staff would have worked to move the students towards the message in 32. Rather than give opponents not just a talking point but a ducking video.
Apparently my phone is so embarrassed by 52 it wants to pretend it has no idea who I am.
The lurkers support Sifu in emailEsquire.
Is it that black students, protesting, felt they might be identified (on camera), and felt that they might undergo future threats -- from racists -- therefore?
People are only entitled to muscle their way into crime scenes for intrusive video. Taking pictures in the quad of a public university is unacceptable.
the all-too-eager middle aged professor calling for muscle
...is only getting away with that shit because she's decided to bully some skinny student on a campus with no police around. Start that in a public gathering with a bunch of city cops present and maybe you and your cohorts get taken to jail to rethink what a badass your are.
It sounds like she's screwed. She had a visiting job, and it's "being reviewed."
Hard to imagine the white people in the video would have felt as comfortable getting in the face of a black student photojournalist... it's possible that they just don't see race though.
Not sure why everyone who does something stupid in public needs to get fired, though. Is a sincere and abject apology truly not enough?
Is a sincere and abject apology truly not enough?
From a tenured prof, probably. From a visiting assistant who writes about Lady Gaga...
62: Yeah, people with an otherwise established good track record? Sure. But if you're that stupid as a probationary employee then that doesn't bode well for your long term prospects.
Lots of reports (albeit on twitter) of groups or maybe just one group of white students gathering and chanting about white power. Also, anonymous threats on social media against black students.
A VAP isn't even "probationary" in any real sense.
The clearest way to explain it is by reference to baby animals.
VAPs are born unto trouble, as sparks fly upward.
I think Melissa Click is an assistant professor (tenure track) who also had a courtesy appointment in the journalism school (which she just resigned, and which means basically nothing). She had been a visitor but she's been tt since I think 2010.
Huh, I checked her CV. TT since 2008, which means this is...her eighth year. I wonder what's going on-- usually you'd be promoted or fired by then. Some places do tenure apart from the promotion to associate, or it could be the post-denial year. If so, bad time to be on the market.
Denial and a bad time to be on the market have been constants since about 1985.
28: Oxford quads are enclosed within residential colleges. These are more like big lawns or parks.
This campus really isn't separated much from the city. That's so all the people who work at the hospitals have an easy walk to somewhere they can smoke.
64: Thanks for corroborating what I was asking about in 38. Turns out the concern was well-founded.