The Rise of Ignorance

I seriously think I need to make and wear this shirt for when I’m book-touring universities this coming year. pic.twitter.com/LYYw8s5OPh

— Alice Dreger (@AliceDreger) August 11, 2015

One of the things that was so frustrating about this week’s mostly useless Atlantic article about “The Coddling of the American Mind,” which was all about how trigger warnings are ruining college *ROLLS EYES* is that there is actual important shit going on. And like, if those bros would just focus up, they could have talked about it like adults. But their arguments were a self-serving mess, their cases undermined and undermining and unconvincing. That’s a shame! If you want to talk about issues on campus, there’s plenty to say, notably bureaucrat fool deans who are terrified of Title IX and don’t know how to say “NOPE” and are unwilling to support academic freedom — as well as totally messed-up sexual assault processes on campus.

Northwestern’s Alice Dreger is coming closer. Here she talks about one thing that’s changed in these debates about science and the academy and social justice: the death of the thoughtful press:

Twenty years ago when I started, I could call all these people who were investigative journalists and they would go and do fantastic work and sometimes show me I was wrong about something, though they’d often support what I was finding. Today there’s virtually nobody, not even the ones I know from twenty years ago, who hasn’t left the business. It used to be they could work on a story for three weeks, and now I’m lucky if they can spend an hour looking at what I’m sending them. It’s horrifying and I don’t know where it’s going to go.

I am really worried about investigative journalism in this country because it’s so absolutely, fundamentally important to the functioning of democracy. I don’t think the American public understands. They think they have more information than ever. They’re on fucking Twitter and they think that that’s news but so much of what they’re reading is just commentary, and it’s commentary on things that aren’t even true.

On the other hand, just after [New York Times columnist] David Carr died, I listened to an old interview with him and he had the most interesting thing to say. When he started out he needed a camera crew and a transcription device and now, just his phone allowed him to do recording audio, recording video, look things up real-time to challenge his source, everything you need to do good investigative journalism. And he felt what we needed was to recognize that and mobilize people to do journalism. But they have to be mobilized, and trained, and inspired to care about facts. And that’s turning out to be harder than I thought it was going to be.