Aasof’s Reflections

Monday February 8: My Facebook Page provided a link with the title When College Radicals Obliterate History in which the authors use the term malware to describe what they call radical attacks on history. Malware is malicious in its intent and I’m not sure that such a generalisation is valid here. History is perhaps the one subject where the right connection may not necessarily be made between correlation and causation, nevertheless any connection between the two is guaranteed to be controversial and long may it continue.

Tuesday February 9: History is not a morality play: both sides on #RhodesMustFall debate should remember that. In part the article mentions the writer Ta-Nehisi Coates’ account of his horrors as an African American in which he imagined the study of history would identify a unified narrative, free of debate, uncovering what he had always suspected. Instead history upended and complicated his understanding and he realised that “the gnawing discomfort, the chaos, the intellectual vertigo was not an alarm. It was a kind of beacon”.

Wednesday February 10: Meet The Students Fighting Campus.  Over the past three years, Spiked has run a campus campaign Down With Campus Censorship! They’ve met hundreds of students who are sick of being patronised.

Thursday February 11: More from Spiked in The Tyranny Of Safe Spaces. It seems to me that our mores revolve around our responses to a historic or contemporary analysis of a particular subject, a more suo we can nurture in our comfort zone. I suspect that safe spaces is intended to imply something other than a comfort zone. If you are able to live your life cocooned in such a zone it may well turn out to be an arid one.

Friday February 12: University ‘safe space’ policies stifle freedom of expression, warns human rights activist. Maryam Namazie has called for a re-evaluation of “safe-space” policies after she was threatened by student protesters while giving a talk on freedom of expression. A clear case of safe spaces being used to subvert freedom of expression.