Apparently the Cornell Club in NYC didn’t get the message since they are holding a “Mistletoe Mixer”
@fallenchemist, I had not intended to post again in this thread, but I respect your thoughtful “op-ed”, so I will try to offer a response.
- I won’t speak for others in this thread, but I reacted badly to Dave’s citation of the Daily Caller because, as you rightly point out, it is a highly biased publication, and because I think its coverage of this memo was intended to inflame. And Dave’s starting this thread by quoting the Daily Caller, rather than simply posting the memo itself, felt to me as intended to inflame, not to provoke a thoughtful discussion. I expect more from one of the site’s founders/administrators. From my vantage point, Dave then compounded the problem by taking a thread that, though intended to inflame, was largely being ignored, and turning it into a Featured Discussion. Again, I expect more.
- I disagree with your assertion that the Daily Caller article is a “pretty factual report”. The first paragraph is presented in an inflammatory manner, claiming that the Cornell memo “warns that any decorations that remotely evoke religion” are “incompatible with the school’s commitment to diversity.” I don’t think this is a fair rendering of the memo at all. And this is the paragraph Dave chose to quote in the OP. The memo, which can be found here, https://sp.ehs.cornell.edu/fps/fire-code-compliance/Documents/FCC_Fire_Safety_Guidelines_for_Holidays_Decorations.pdf, is primarily focused on fire safety (in fairness, the article does point this out later on). Only after the discussion of fire safety does the memo then point out that Cornell is a diverse community and it “encourages” (not “warns”) university members to use an inclusive approach in their holiday decorations.
- The guidelines set out in the memo are just that, guidelines. Not requirements. Contrary to your suggestion, the memo does not contemplate that anyone will be “punished” for not following the guidelines or that they will otherwise be “forced” to comply (though I can see how one might reach that conclusion from the slanted first paragraph of the Daily Caller story that was posted in the OP). Moreover, the guidelines are clear (though this is not mentioned in the Daily Caller article) that “Individuals may *privately* display [religious] symbols in their work areas or living quarters.” And that “Any display areas that normally are available to all campus groups shall also be available for the display of religious symbols.” The only limitations stated are that religious symbols may not be displayed in a manner that “would give the impression that the symbol is associated with the university” and that “the university administration shall not sponsor nor provide direct financial support for the display of religious symbols.” All of this seems perfectly reasonable to me.
- As noted above, the guidelines also “encourage” university members to take an inclusive approach and provide some examples of inclusiveness. But it’s clear that, ultimately, it’s up to each individual, subject only to the two limitations cited above, to reach their own judgments. I read the memo as advancing the general proposition that Cornell is a community and that the members of the community should try to be sensitive to one another. Again, perfectly reasonable.
- If you don’t like my office building example, let me try another. In my apartment building, the residents traditionally put up holiday decorations in the building lobby. These have typically revolved around decorations that may be viewed as associated with Christmas, such as wreaths and poinsettias. A few years ago, some Jewish residents of the building asked if they could put a tasteful menorah up in the lobby so that it would feel more inclusive to them. The building’s board (all comprised of residents) said, of course. In a community, you should try to be respectful of your neighbors. I think that is the main point of the Cornell guidelines.
- I will admit to scratching my head as to the inclusion of mistletoe on the list of decorations that are discouraged. I have never thought of mistletoe as a religious symbol. On the other hand, I could see how it might be problematic if some guys were to put up mistletoe in their room or some common space and then feel entitled to kiss any woman who stood under it whether she wanted to be kissed or not. But that’s a different topic for a different thread.
In any event, I will now take my leave from this thread. I just hope that, in the future, if Dave sees a topic that he thinks is worthy of discussion on the site, he’ll present it more neutrally and try to encourage the kind of thoughtful discourse that you demonstrated in your post and that I tried to demonstrate in this one.
P.S., @EmsDad, too funny!
It’s quite a revealing commentary on our troubled times when people attack the messenger instead of discussing the message. The issue here isn’t the credibility of the Daily Caller. It’s the almost too funny to be true political correctness of Cornell.
The Daily Caller accurately reports how Cornell has banned mistletoe as being “incompatible with the school’s commitment to diversity.” And it reveals how this prohibition is “buried inside a Cornell publication concerning fire safety guidelines for holiday decorations.”
Anyone who doubts the veracity of this report need only click on the Cornell Fire Safety Guidelines referenced in the article to discover that they do, in fact, contain explicit instructions restricting mistletoe.* Why these Fire Safety Guidelines do so is more than passing strange. It couldn’t be – could it – that Cornell is using fire safety as a pretext for political correctness?
Lest you think mistletoe creates a fire hazard, ask yourself why these guidelines permit certain trees adorned with religiously neutral symbols. Then consider whether a tree or mistletoe creates a bigger fire hazard. If you correctly selected the tree, you get a star. Rest assured, however, that it’s not a Christmas star because Cornell bans them as well.
On the bright side, Cornell allows students to adorn trees with snowflakes. This is fitting since it treats its students like delicate snowflakes. It’s also a good thing the fire safety folks intervened. Otherwise, mistletoe might have been regarded as another instance of campus rape culture prompting the demand for safe spaces free of Christmas cookies and other repressive examples of holiday good cheer.
I completely agree with @cosar. And I would add that assessing the reliability and integrity of one’s sources–not just for factual information, but also for their use of rhetoric, sensationalism, biased political “spin,” cherrypicked evidence, and reputation for reliability or unreliability, etc. --is to me (and I think most people on College Cofidential) a fundamental principle of responsible scholarship that is strongly emphasized in all of the colleges we are so busy discussing. It is not merely a “cheap debating tactic.”
@espenser The Daily Caller does not “accurately report how Cornell has banned mistletoe” because Cornell didn’t ban anything. Perhaps you’re referring to the restriction on “plan [sic] material that [has] NOT been treated with a fire retardant material.” However, untreated natural-cut trees are also not permitted, so your argument that mistletoe is no more of a fire hazard than a tree makes me think you were referring to the suggestions later in the page which, to reiterate, were not bans.
Some questions and observations:
- If the rules regarding mistletoe were merely suggestions, why does Cornell include them in mandatory fire safety guidelines?
- If you were a student, would you violate them? Or would be afraid of subjecting yourself to a disciplinary action?
- Is there a rational basis for these Fire Safety Guidelines to group mistletoe in a category that includes explicitly religious symbols such as Christian crosses and the Jewish Star of David? Or is Cornell engaging in the modern version of the medieval practice of counting how many angels can dance on the head of a pin?
- How would you feel if Cornell banned the Star and Crescent of Islam at Ramadan? Would that be justified? Or would you regard it as a discriminatory practice that crushes religious diversity?
- Attacking the credibility of an accurate news story is a ploy that seeks to forestall debate. Indeed, it is an exclusionary rhetorical technique akin to the argumentum ad hominem.
- If the Daily Caller is to be excoriated for a lack of “responsible scholarship,” what media source meets that exalted standard?
- Is there any media outlet – whether liberal or conservative – that does not spin the news or cherry pick the facts to fit its political narrative?
- Granted, some media outlets spin the news more than others. But is the Daily Caller any different in this regard than the Daily Beast, the Daily Kos, or MSNBC?
- If not, why single out the Daily Caller as if it were somehow an outlier in this regard?
- Wouldn’t it be more rewarding to address the merits of this issue? After all, don’t both sides have reasonable positions to assert?
You know, if these things like holiday decoration and Halloween costume guidelines, 50-square-foot “free speech zones,” draconian suspensions for Yik Yak tweets, and all the rest of it were reliably reported in the “reputable” outlets like the New York Times, there wouldn’t be a need to cite the Daily Caller. But the fact is that for the most part, the NYT and sources like it ignore these eruptions of insanity, or give them three inches on page A24. I live in Los Angeles and the LA Times’s coverage of the infant Robespierres at Occidental is pretty poor. Unless you can point to a factual inaccuracy in the stories in the Daily Caller, College Insurrection, and similar sites, it won’t do for you to just look down your nose at them.
- They are not mandatory, they were tacked onto a fire safety memo that started with mandatory regulations. I'll admit that was definitely not the best way to do it, but the suggestions are listed under "Guidelines for Inclusive Seasonal Displays."
- I honestly doubt that people will be too terrified to have a star-topped tree or menorah, especially considering that "any display areas that normally are available to all campus groups shall also be available for the display of religious symbols." These things are basically only an issue if it looks like Cornell is supporting a particular religion.
- I don't understand the inclusion of mistletoe, unless they've actually had a problem with it being used as an excuse for mistletoe. I'll add "inclusion of mistletoe" to the list of things that Cornell could have done better, or not done.
- You're right, I would feel like it limits religious diversity. Luckily, Cornell hasn't banned any symbols. I imagine this display would be most common around Ramadan in "celebrative and/or educational displays utilizing religious symbols," which are 100% permitted.
- Yep, attacking a message for being from a certain source is a legitimate logical fallacy. However, one poster who did that has already pointed out that what they meant was the story itself wasn't legitimate because it had politically slanted writing.
- Yes, each article should be reviewed individually for bias, although you can usually get a pretty good idea about how biased the majority of articles will be just by knowing the source.
- Nope.
- Also nope, which is why articles from the examples you listed are frequently not suitable for citation of facts.
- Probably since it's the only news source involved in this discussion. If Daily Beast, the Daily Kos, or MSNBC had been cited, they would actually be relevant.
- Yes, but part of discussing the merits of an issue is understanding what a document actually says, rather than just what a biased article told you it says.
I hate how political correctness is destroying our country. How far will this stuff go?
The Harvard masters thing was ridiculous, but this strikes me as kind of pointless to argue all that much about. True, Cornell hasn’t explained how mistletoe is not religiously inclusive, and its placement on the list is silly.
But however poorly it was communicated, the idea behind the memo was to prevent overtly religious symbols from being placed so as to make it appear that the college is endorsing a specific religion. To me, that’s not going to destroy the country.
I guess I’m just bugged by the “PC is destroying us!” idea because it seems like 90% of the time it’s used to justify racial, homophobic, and xenophobic slurs. It annoys me that a few rare examples of vocabulary restrictions (and other things, like holiday decoration guidelines) going too far are designated as “political correctness,” even though political correctness is basically the idea that you should use respectful language and not slurs.
There’s a difference between political correctness and “not using slurs”. Political correctness seeks to limit free speech, and those who are PC call people racist, even when such individuals don’t deserve that label. Not using slurs is just common sense; PC is antithetical to that.
Except it seems that PC is usually used as a defense for saying things that are really obviously offensive and discriminatory. No, that’s not always how it’s used, but it’s pretty common.
Nowadays, PC is just a way to limit free speech and insult people with differing, yet valid and nondiscriminatory opinions.
I am for inclusion, but I do not see the connection between mistletoe and the christian religion. Mistletoe has no significance at all in christianity, as far as I know. It is also not used exclusively by Christians. Banning mistletoe seems extreme to me.
@slicedgabe Maybe save your PC ammunition for something real? I my post (btw, thanks for the huge upshot in my points with so many people’s votes! haha), and if you’d bothered to read the real issue vs. just buy the either the salacious title of this thread or the ridiculously slanted and overblown article, you might even come to the conclusion that this ENTIRE issue is a straw man.
Or maybe you’d like to ignore that challenge and continue to use this as fodder for the “anti PC” watch? I dunno. Maybe that doesn’t even matter to you?
They may not have banned mistletoe, but warning students not to use a decoration because it may not be culturally inclusive is ludicrous.
@slicedgabe: you miss my point. This entire thing started b/c buried DEEPLY INSIDE some fire safety guidebook issued and unread by some office within a large college, were found suggestions about decorations and (to your point) an unwise/unnecessary judgment about mistletoe. Then some anti-PC guardian took that one line and ran with it – and it got picked up by the daily caller – and now it means what?
Another sign of the apocalypse of Western civilization?
Really? That’s why I made my point in the first post to begin with.
May I instead, turn you to this Washington Post article about the end of a column called “The Intersect”? It was started to debunk weekly internet hoaxes. But the author is closing shop because 1) there’s a huge market of purposeful hoax writers or story exaggerators extant and 2) those who believe them and pass them along as FB memes are so entrenched in their confirmation bias worlds that they are the exact people to whom debunking evidence means nothing to them.
I’m clearly fighting a Quixotic battle. But in my efforts to promote rational discussion, I put my paddle in the water and still push upstream…
Ok. I’m sure some stories are made up to create drama and increase profits - it’s a very common tactic. But at the same time, some of these stories about PC culture are true, and we should still be wary of the mindset that everything is offensive and should be banned.
Like good satire, life sometimes provides metaphors that are both funny and illuminating. Mistletoe at Cornell is one such metaphor. It represents and importantly reveals how PC culture has become a comedy of the absurd. It also signifies and convincingly discloses the hysterical efforts colleges take to infantilize their students by protecting them from imaginary harm.
This is buried in a fire safety publication for heaven’s sake.