0:00

Peter Michael, what do you know about

0:02

campus controversies?

0:04

I know that we're about to get very

0:07

technical about the definition of bond me

0:23

So today I will be walking you through through three

0:26

of the dumbest campus free speech

0:28

controversies of the last decade in

0:31

honor of our coddling of the American mind episode.

0:34

And yes, we are starting with the

0:37

Bonn Me incident Oberlin 2015.

0:40

I knew it. Do you want to walk me through what you know

0:43

so far? Yeah, my memory of this is

0:45

relatively hazy.

0:46

what I recall

0:49

is that a student at Oberlin complained

0:52

about cafeteria banh

0:54

mi. And I can't remember the

0:56

format that they complained about it in, but eventually

0:58

this complaint

1:00

trickled its way into

1:03

right wing media. And so

1:05

what was a pretty anodyne

1:08

complaint about the quality

1:10

of food at a cafeteria

1:13

gets sort of laundered into

1:16

a meta discourse about

1:19

whiny students complaining about

1:21

woke stuff. All of these

1:24

college campus controversies are so

1:26

much easier to understand

1:27

as human behavior when you

1:29

hear them in the order in which they

1:31

happened. So four

1:33

years after this controversy, we finally

1:36

get a retelling from

1:38

the beginning

1:38

from the Columbia journalism review of

1:40

like what actually happened. So we don't actually find this out until

1:43

four years later. The beginning

1:45

of this story was basically a journalism professor

1:47

at Oberlin was speaking to one of

1:50

his journalism students and she was pitching a story

1:52

about how like the Vietnamese food in the cafeteria

1:55

like sucks ass. The Chinese kids

1:57

say the Chinese

1:57

food sucks. Japanese kids say the Japanese food.

2:00

And this is just like a pretty common gripe among

2:02

international students. I bet the American food sucks

2:05

too. Yeah, exactly. It's cafeteria food.

2:07

This is an essential part of the student experience

2:09

complaining about the cafeteria food. It's also

2:11

an essential part of the student journalist

2:14

experience. So the professor

2:16

eventually is like, well, why don't you like write this

2:18

up as a story? And like, this

2:20

is

2:20

so much student journalism

2:23

is just like the lowest stakes. Right.

2:26

Nothing burger ass thing. it's like as a student journalist,

2:28

you got to fill like 16 pages

2:30

every week of the student newspaper. Yeah.

2:33

My first article at my student newspaper was about seasonal

2:35

allergies. There wasn't any

2:37

like new information or anything.

2:39

It was literally just like it's April. Right. I

2:42

remember like walking around the grassy areas

2:44

of campus and just asking people like, do you have allergies?

2:47

Do you have allergies? And finally I found somebody

2:49

who did and the opening

2:51

paragraphs of the article were like,

2:54

April, Jessica Smith gets a stuffy

2:56

nose and itchy eyes. It's allergy

2:59

season. That was basically

3:00

the whole story,

3:02

just like allergies exist. One

3:04

thing I really, I deeply

3:06

empathize with the people writing these stories

3:08

because it's like, this is student journalism.

3:10

You're kind of practicing, right? You're

3:12

learning what it's like to talk to random people. You're

3:14

learning what it's like to package anecdotes

3:17

and information

3:17

into some sort of coherent structure.

3:20

So this student basically

3:22

just like she trundles off to the cafeteria

3:25

to like write up the fact that

3:27

international students have complaints about the international

3:30

food. And so I am going

3:32

to send you the first four paragraphs

3:34

of her story. Okay. Deep

3:36

Nguyen, a college first year from Vietnam,

3:39

jumped with excitement at the site of Vietnamese food

3:42

on Stevenson Dining Hall's menu at orientation

3:44

this year.

3:45

Craving Vietnamese comfort food, Nguyen

3:47

rushed to the food station with high hopes. What

3:49

But she got, however, was a total

3:51

disappointment. The traditional Banh

3:53

Mi Vietnamese sandwich that Stevenson Dining

3:55

Hall promised turned out to be a chief imitation

3:58

of the East Asian dish.

4:00

instead of a crispy baguette with grilled pork, pate,

4:02

pickled vegetables, and fresh herbs. The

4:05

sandwich used ciabatta bread, pulled pork, and

4:07

coleslaw. I do feel like it was undersold

4:10

in the press, the extent to which these students

4:12

were correct about the food

4:14

being shitty. It

4:16

was ridiculous, Winn said. How could they just

4:18

throw out something completely different and label it as another

4:20

country's traditional food?

4:22

Winn added that Bon Appetit, the food service

4:24

management company contracted by Oberlin College,

4:26

As a history of blurring the line between culinary

4:28

diversity and cultural appropriation by modifying

4:31

the recipes without respect for certain Asian

4:33

countries' cuisines, this uninformed

4:35

representation of cultural dishes has

4:38

been noted by a multitude of students, many

4:40

of who have expressed concern over

4:42

the gross manipulation of traditional

4:44

recipes. So

4:46

here we have it. It's basically just like, here's

4:48

a student who's griping about the food. Turns

4:50

out lots of students gripe about the food. I've never

4:52

been on a campus where people were not

4:54

complaining about the food providers. And

4:57

then we get to the

4:59

two paragraphs that will

5:01

launch years and years of

5:04

takes. And

5:06

you are going to read them. Perhaps

5:09

the pinnacle of what many students believe to be a culturally

5:11

appropriative sustenance system is Dascom

5:14

Dining Hall's sushi bar. The sushi

5:16

is anything but authentic for Tomoyo Joshi,

5:19

a college junior from Japan who said that the

5:21

undercooked rice and lack of fresh fish

5:23

is disrespectful.

5:25

She added that in Japan, sushi is regarded

5:27

so highly that people sometimes take years of

5:29

apprenticeship before learning how to appropriately

5:31

serve it.

5:32

When you're cooking a country's dish for other people, including

5:34

ones who have never tried the original dish before, you're

5:36

also representing the meaning of the dish as well as

5:39

its culture, Joshi said.

5:40

So if people not from that heritage take

5:42

food, modify it, and serve it as authentic,

5:45

it is appropriative. It is

5:48

appropriative. I want to

5:50

put a very fine point on this. This

5:52

entire thing of like students at Oberlin

5:54

think that the food is cultural appropriation appears

5:57

to stem from literally

5:59

one random student

6:01

from Japan. This is of course used

6:04

to portray all American college students as

6:06

snowflakes or whatever, but it is weird to

6:09

me that the fact that these are foreign students didn't

6:11

seem to come up in the discourse about it. I feel

6:13

like if anyone is allowed to complain about sushi, it's probably

6:16

a Japanese person.

6:17

It's totally sensible. Do I think that this is

6:20

the spot-on definition of cultural appropriation?

6:23

Probably not, but it's like you

6:25

see what she's saying.

6:26

And also, at worst, one

6:29

random foreign student maybe

6:32

used wording that wasn't the most

6:33

precise. Even if

6:35

you disagree with this complaint, it's sort of

6:37

like, okay, maybe she could have expressed

6:40

that differently or maybe I would have expressed that differently.

6:43

But it's like, I also think it's important to stress

6:45

that this person is talking off the

6:46

cuff. This isn't like a letter that they

6:48

wrote and really deliberated over every single

6:50

word. This is probably the journalist

6:54

wandering around the cafeteria for like an hour

6:56

or two

6:57

with a notebook and like sitting down

6:59

next to students and being like, hey, you look like a foreign exchange

7:01

student. Do you mind if I like talk to you for a little bit, like

7:03

ask you about the food? These people did

7:06

not contact the media.

7:07

Right. I also think that there's,

7:10

I don't know if this person was sort of prompted

7:12

to go in this direction by the

7:14

student journalist. Right. Right. Right.

7:18

necessarily low stakes issues

7:21

and the student journalists might

7:23

have an interest in making them seem

7:25

a little higher stakes than they are right like

7:28

perhaps this isn't just that

7:30

the cafeteria food sucks maybe

7:32

there's an amount of cultural insensitivity

7:34

baked into this too and that's just sort

7:36

of like

7:37

some kid trying to make their story interesting yeah

7:39

it's not like something that represents

7:43

a widespread viewpoint on campus or

7:45

anything like

7:46

What's also amazing to me is the rest of this

7:48

story is actually super constructive.

7:51

The journalist interviews a kid from Malaysia who's

7:53

like, I actually think the food's fine. And

7:55

then she talks to people

7:58

from the sort of the cultural clubs.

8:00

on campus. You know, there's like the Chinese American Club

8:02

and there's like the Filipino Club and stuff. And

8:04

a lot of them are like, yeah, we'd love to meet with the

8:07

cafeteria and like talk about the way to present

8:09

our dishes or maybe the way to prepare them or what to call

8:11

them. And the food director

8:13

is like, yeah, we'd love to talk

8:15

more with students about like how we can represent

8:17

their cuisines better. And so

8:20

after this article runs, this article runs in November

8:22

of 2015. In December,

8:25

we then get a follow up article about the meeting

8:27

that took place between various cultural clubs

8:30

on campus and the food director. It seems

8:33

like everybody just sat down like adults. It

8:35

seems like they came to some sort of compromise where they

8:37

wouldn't call it a Bon Mee anymore.

8:40

They're like, well, maybe don't call it a

8:42

Bon Mee. You can call it Bon Mee inspired

8:44

or something like that. Ultimately, it seems

8:46

like, okay, there's this fairly

8:48

minor

8:49

gripe among the students. Then

8:51

the adults are like, That's a fair point.

8:53

Let's talk about it." Then they address it. It's

8:57

like, right. This is just all

9:00

very normal stuff. No one's melting

9:02

down. No one is protesting

9:05

anything. Not a national news story

9:07

so far. Don't really see why I need

9:09

to

9:09

have known about this at all. There's

9:12

also, as a total coincidence, there

9:15

is a group of black students

9:18

who are actually protesting the cafeteria.

9:20

Apparently there's like a residence hall for black students

9:23

on the Oberlin campus and there's been

9:25

a process of updating the food to make

9:28

it more culturally appropriate. This is like something that's

9:30

been going on for a while and I guess

9:32

the effort was not very

9:33

good. Sure. So at some point the black

9:35

students write an open letter

9:38

to the food service company with a bunch of

9:40

demands. There's food stuff on there. They're

9:42

like, you know, a lot of the food involves cream

9:44

and

9:45

like we don't really use cream in a lot of our cooking.

9:47

Like we'd like you to have more consultation

9:50

about like what kinds of foods are appropriate

9:53

and then there's also stuff like we

9:55

want better

9:56

working conditions and we want

9:58

better procurement practices. Like

10:00

this petition open letter thing that

10:02

has a bunch of complaints on it. That's

10:05

like kind of an ongoing issue. And there's one article

10:08

in the Oberlin student newspaper that

10:10

says that they did in fact stage a

10:12

protest outside of this one

10:15

residence hall for black students over

10:17

the conditions of the food and the fact that the company

10:20

nor the university had responded to

10:22

this open letter. So it's not totally

10:25

clear how many students protested. I

10:27

remember when I was on campus you'd see these

10:29

protests of like three people outside

10:30

of various campus

10:33

things. It's not clear

10:35

how widespread this was, but it is true

10:38

that at some point some Oberlin

10:40

students

10:40

did have a protest involving

10:43

food. Right, geared towards

10:45

the food service company. Yes.

10:47

So then six weeks goes by

10:49

and then we get the first national

10:52

media coverage. Do you want

10:54

to guess what the headline

10:56

is? It appears in the New York Post in

10:58

case that's a hint. I don't think I can put myself in the mind

11:00

space of a New York Post headline writer, so

11:03

just tell me. All right, I'm sending you a screen grab.

11:07

It's

11:09

a masterpiece. Holy

11:12

shit. I know. Oh, the layers. Students

11:16

at Lena Dunham's college offended

11:19

by lack of fried chicken. Oh,

11:22

man. So

11:23

one of the complaints in

11:26

this open letter from the black students was

11:28

like culturally appropriate foods such

11:30

as fried chicken should be served

11:33

more often.

11:33

This was like one of many bullet points. The

11:36

New York Post plucks that out as like the central

11:39

concern of these students. Yeah, of course. And

11:41

also just throws fucking Lena Dunham in there for no

11:44

reason. There's like an insert

11:47

with Lena Dunham's face in the

11:49

corner. So

11:53

the opening paragraph of course leans

11:55

into just like the most incendiary

11:57

aspects of this.

12:00

Students at an ultra-liberal Ohio

12:02

college are in an uproar over the fried

12:04

chicken, sushi, and Vietnamese sandwiches

12:07

served in the school cafeteria, complaining

12:09

the dishes are insensitive and culturally

12:12

inappropriate.

12:13

Gastronomically correct students at Oberlin

12:15

College, alma mater of Lena Dunham, are

12:18

filling the school newspaper with complaints

12:20

and demanding meetings with campus dining

12:22

officials and even the college president.

12:25

If you read between the lines, it's all kind of there.

12:27

It's just like there's an open letter from

12:30

these students. Basically, it quotes

12:32

this one Japanese student saying

12:34

that it's cultural appropriation. Right. So

12:37

you have one student newspaper

12:39

piece quoting a student using the

12:41

terminology of cultural appropriation. You

12:44

have a meeting between students and

12:46

the food services administrators,

12:49

and you have a protest, right? The separate protest

12:51

by black students. That

12:53

together weaves into the narrative of an uproar.

12:56

Right. Right. of 25 students

12:59

if I'm being generous.

13:00

What they're basically doing is they're presenting the set of basic

13:03

facts, but they're presenting all of them in

13:05

the most incendiary way

13:07

possible that invites you to fill in

13:09

the gaps

13:10

with all of this pre-existing students

13:12

or snowflakes bullshit, right? So it says, students

13:15

are filling the campus newspaper with complaints

13:17

and demanding meetings with campus dining

13:19

officials.

13:20

Yeah. I mean, I guess in

13:22

a purely technical sense, yes,

13:25

they're like, we'd like to sit down and talk about this. And

13:27

they're also not filling the student

13:29

newspaper. Right. They're trying

13:31

to paint an image in your

13:33

mind of a college where like

13:36

if you went there right now, people would

13:38

be talking about fried chicken.

13:39

This wasn't even a front page story

13:42

in the student newspaper. The front page

13:44

was the allergy story. What

13:49

appears to then happen over the next couple

13:51

of weeks is that it bounces

13:53

around like the sort of right leaning

13:55

media as like, look at these idiot fucking

13:58

college kids. and then it...

14:00

He bounces around like the liberal media as like, there's

14:02

a controversy going on over the dining

14:04

hall food. Have our young liberal allies overstepped

14:07

once again? This produces one of the worst Atlantic

14:10

articles I've ever read. This is by Connor

14:12

Friedersdorf. Oh, yeah. Yeah,

14:14

yeah. And he basically

14:16

ends up whipping a debate out

14:19

of this rather than straightforwardly

14:22

describing what's going on. So

14:25

I'm sending you a couple

14:27

paragraphs. All right. This story

14:29

is hardly all there is to Oberlin. It's

14:32

an outlying story about a small number of students

14:34

plucked by the tabloid most adept at trolling

14:36

its readers from the stream of campus news. There

14:39

are dissenters at the school,

14:40

and students at many campuses often complain

14:42

about food in overwrought ways. Decent

14:46

start? He's basically saying, like, look, this

14:48

is total bullshit whipped up by right-wing media. With

14:50

the caveat that this is false.

14:54

Exactly. Still,

14:56

it's possible to glean insights from

14:59

the most absurd events at Oberlin. As

15:01

surely as it's possible to learn something about

15:03

America by observing the biggest Black

15:05

Friday sales,

15:07

every subculture and ideology

15:09

has its excesses. And Oberlin,

15:12

where the subculture is unusually influenced

15:14

by social justice activism,

15:17

can starkly illuminate the particular

15:19

character of that ideology's excesses.

15:21

It's like, okay, look, this is

15:23

fake and based on nothing and

15:26

is entirely a product of right wing media,

15:28

but we can still learn. What

15:30

if we still constructed a narrative

15:34

using those lies and exaggerations? What

15:37

if we could still tell a story? What

15:39

is

15:39

amazing to me about this article is that Friedersdorf

15:42

read the original piece. He

15:45

went back to the student newspaper, which

15:47

a lot of the right wing

15:47

media didn't do, and He still

15:50

manages to frame this as like,

15:52

what if there's a real problem underneath this? He

15:55

knows enough and has read enough to

15:57

realize that a caveat is necessary.

16:00

He has seen

16:02

the disparity between what actually happened

16:04

and the coverage of it such that he

16:07

is like, okay, well, I can't just credulously

16:09

write about this. I need to give

16:12

the caveat up top

16:14

that this isn't really of note. And

16:18

then I need to justify

16:20

writing a piece for my employer, The Atlantic.

16:23

Two paragraphs later, he says, many

16:25

people relate to the complaint, gosh, that food

16:28

is awful. Can't you dining hall people make it

16:30

better? Yet Oberlin culture reframed

16:33

a banal sympathetic complaint in

16:35

a way that alienated millions.

16:37

Alienated. It's

16:40

one, it's a student complaining

16:43

in a student newspaper. It's

16:46

literally not possible for that to alienate

16:48

millions. And also like they published

16:50

this and then six weeks went by.

16:53

They didn't alienate anybody. They alienated the

16:55

four people that potentially read even

16:58

halfway through the story to get through the Japanese

17:00

student. Am I alienating millions

17:02

of people with my thought on the dining

17:05

room food at Oberlin College? Is

17:07

there something? I mean, you know what? I

17:10

don't even have more to say about this. That's

17:13

just unreal language to use about

17:15

a

17:16

student's comment to a student

17:18

newspaper journalist alienating

17:21

millions of people. He's like,

17:22

in fairness, Lena Dunham is very

17:24

annoying. But then Friedersdorf

17:27

quotes, I'm not kidding, a commenter

17:29

on Rod Dreher's blog calling

17:32

this a cynical power play on the part

17:34

of the students. Yes. Connor

17:36

then says, if this is a cynical

17:38

power play on some level, its effectiveness

17:41

cannot be denied. And then he quotes from

17:43

this article about how they sat down with the dining

17:45

director and how they came up with this

17:47

nice compromise plan. We play the national

17:49

media like a fiddle. The Banh Mi

17:52

sandwiches at Oberlin

17:54

are now called Banh Mi inspired.

17:58

supposed

18:00

to make complaints about things that they

18:02

want to change. After this little paragraph,

18:05

he says, the less cynical explanation

18:07

is that these students really do feel culturally

18:10

disrespected by low-wage dining hall staff

18:12

making do with sub-optimal ingredients.

18:15

Oh,

18:16

the less cynical explanation is that the food sucks?

18:19

You're right, Connor. We should entertain the possibility

18:22

that everyone here was just

18:24

talking about the food sucking in a completely

18:27

normal way. Thank you for inviting

18:29

me to consider what is by far

18:31

the most likely

18:32

explanation. You could be having this conversation

18:34

by leading with that because

18:36

I think that is a fair critique.

18:38

Sure. You're looking at someone who's making almost

18:41

no money and is being told like

18:43

make this, right? Some cuisine they're

18:46

totally unfamiliar with. But

18:48

Connor is just using it as

18:50

a cudgel to be

18:52

like you insensitive pieces of shit.

18:54

And remember, the petition

18:56

the black students circulated had better

18:59

wages and working conditions for cafeteria

19:01

workers

19:01

on it. Right. So they are actually concerned

19:04

about it. Yes. What Connor is doing is

19:06

the same thing that conservatives always do,

19:08

which is to when the left

19:11

makes a complaint, point at another

19:13

plight and be like, well, you're ignoring that

19:16

person's plight, right? Not because

19:18

the conservatives actually give a shit or have

19:20

any interest in addressing

19:23

that person's plight, but just so that

19:25

they can play marginalized people against each other

19:27

and be able to talk about

19:30

how liberals and leftists

19:31

don't actually

19:34

care about this stuff which they use

19:37

as justification for the fact that they

19:39

don't care either. It's always, this is like such

19:41

a common complaint about anybody pushing for social

19:43

change

19:43

is it like they don't actually want

19:45

this. And it's kind of, it's

19:48

very funny to apply it to a case like this

19:51

where it's like they're eating in the cafeteria three

19:53

times a day. Right. It actually makes a lot

19:55

of sense to me that the food sucking

19:57

would actually be something

19:58

that they genuinely want. to change. Okay,

20:02

that was number one, the Oberlin-Bonn-Me

20:05

controversy. It's so fucking stupid.

20:07

Our next controversy is, I think,

20:10

ultimately less important than the

20:12

Oberlin one, but far, far dumber.

20:14

Okay, hell yeah. This is the tale of the rapping

20:17

librarian. Oh fuck yeah, okay,

20:20

yes.