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Comment by joesmo | Hacker News Reader

'According to the Washington Post, “several students in Silliman said they cannot bear to live in the college anymore.”'

Great. Tell them to get the fuck out. That's the only reasonable response to this. What a bunch of fucking children. If you act like a spoiled child, then you should be treated like one.

EDIT: And no refunds either.

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This unfortunately matches the rhetoric of the students themselves, which is exactly what we should not be doing.

No it doesn't. They want to leave. Let them face the consequences of their own stupid actions. A respectable institution (not saying Yale is or isn't) shouldn't have to deal with such ridiculous bullshit and should stand behind its professors, especially those who have given them decades of service.

What would you do? Fire the professor for standing up for the students? These students are so fucking stupid, they don't even realize the professor is standing up for them!

That's actually the part I don't understand. This professor was actually complaining that the institution should stop treating them like babies and trust them to do the right thing. How can these students get offended by that?

Virtually all of these students are happy to not be treated like babies themselves. What they are complaining about is that their classmates who disagree with them may be trusted to do the right thing. And how can they do the right thing if they disagree with me about what is right? Clearly the only solution is for the school to force them to behave the way I want them to. The right way.

Except that the school didn't force them to do anything, and didn't even suggest that it was going to do so - it just asked them, very politely, to think about how their Halloween costumes would look to minority students before they embarrassed themselves. Apparently this is an attack on free speech because it might make white students uncomfortable wearing blackface, though. The students are protesting someone who literally demanded that the university not ask people to think about other's views because it might make them uncomfortable, and called it free speech, and apparently this is them demanding to be "coddled". Because some speech is more free than others.

You may have missed some sarcasm.

It's clearly not an attack on free speech. The real criticism is that it's prioritizing free expression aka speech over other rights.

As much as I'm sure many of us feel this in our hearts, let's not.

Yeah, let's fire the professor.

Why not, are you afraid of hurting someone's feelings?

I think it's rather a matter of being an unproductive line of discussion. One of the key points to take from this article is that throwing your toys out of the pram because you disagree with others' viewpoints is counter-productive at best and illiberal at worst.

I'm vehemently opposed to the kind of activism described here, but 'if you don't like it then fuck off' is exactly the wrong attitude and will not solve this problem.

There comes a point, though, when you may have to say that they are disrupting the proper functioning of the university enough that they have to go, for the good of everyone else...

That's probably the worst possible outcome.

These people are PAYING to go there. They are PAYING to live there. Are you saying they should have to put up with harassment and bigotry in addition to that?

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