The Dumbest Campus Controversies Of The Last Decade [TEASER]
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Peter. Michael. What do you know about campus controversies? I know that we're about to get very technical about the definition of bond me.

So today I will be walking you through three of the dumbest campus free speech controversies of the last decade in honor of our Coddling of the American Mind episode. And yes, we are starting with the Bon Me incident at Oberlin in 2015. I knew it. Do you want to walk me through what you know so far? Yeah, my memory of this is relatively hazy. But what I recall is that a student at Oberlin complained about

cafeteria bond me. And I can't remember the format that they complained about it in, but eventually this complaint trickled its way into right wing media. And so what was a pretty anodyne complaint about the quality of food at a cafeteria gets sort of laundered into a

Meta discourse about whiny students. Yes. Complaining about woke stuff. All of these college campus controversies are so much easier to understand as human behavior when you hear them in the order in which they happened. So four years after this controversy, we finally get a

retelling from the beginning from the Columbia Journalism Review of like what actually happened. So we don't actually find this out until four years later. The beginning of this story was basically a journalism professor at Oberlin was speaking to one of his journalism students and she was pitching a story about how like the Vietnamese food in the cafeteria like sucks ass and

The Chinese kids say the Chinese food sucks. The Japanese kids say the Japanese food sucks. And this is just like a pretty common gripe among international students. I bet the American food sucks, too. Yeah, exactly. It's cafeteria food. This is an essential part of the student experience, complaining about the cafeteria food. It's also an essential part of the student journalist experience, too.

So the professor eventually is like, well, why don't you like write this up as a story? And like, this is so much student journalism is just like the lowest stakes, nothing burger ass thing. But it's like, as a student journalist, you got to fill like 16 pages every week of the student newspaper. My first article at my student newspaper was about seasonal allergies. There wasn't any like new information or anything. It was literally just like, it's April. And so I remember like walking...

Yeah.

Allergy season. Nice. That like that was basically the whole story. Just like allergies exist. And one thing I really I like I deeply empathize with the people writing these stories because it's like this is student journalism. You're kind of practicing. Right. You're learning what it's like to talk to random people. You're learning what it's like to package anecdotes and information into some sort of coherent structure. Yeah.

So this student basically just like she trundles off to the cafeteria to like write up the fact that international students have complaints about the international food. And so I am going to send you the first four paragraphs of her story. Okay. Deep Nguyen, a college first year from Vietnam, jumped with excitement at the sight of Vietnamese food on

on Stevenson Dining Hall's menu at Orientation this year. Craving Vietnamese comfort food, Nguyen rushed to the food station with high hopes. What she got, however, was a total disappointment. The traditional banh mi Vietnamese sandwich that Stevenson Dining Hall promised turned out to be a cheap imitation of the East Asian dish.

Instead of a crispy baguette with grilled pork, pate, pickled vegetables, and fresh herbs, the sandwich used ciabatta bread, pulled pork, and coleslaw. I do feel like it was undersold in the press, the extent to which these students were correct about the food being shitties.

It was ridiculous, Nguyen said. How could they just throw out something completely different and label it as another country's traditional food? Nguyen added that Bon Appetit, the food service management company contracted by Oberlin College, has a history of blurring the line between culinary diversity and cultural appropriation by modifying the recipes without respect for certain Asian countries' cuisines.

This uninformed representation of cultural dishes has been noted by a multitude of students, many of who have expressed concern over the gross manipulation of traditional recipes. So here we have it. It's basically just like, here's a student who's griping about the food. Turns out lots of students gripe about the food. I've never been on a campus where people were not complaining about the food providers. And then we get to the two paragraphs where

that will launch years and years of takes.

And you are going to read them. Perhaps the pinnacle of what many students believe to be a culturally appropriative sustenance system is Dascom Dining Hall's sushi bar. The sushi is anything but authentic for Tomoyo Joshi, a college junior from Japan who said that the undercooked rice and lack of fresh fish is disrespectful. She added that in Japan, sushi is regarded so highly that people sometimes take years of apprenticeship before learning how to appropriately serve it.

It is appropriative. Hmm.

I want to put a very fine point on this. This entire thing of like students at Oberlin think that the food is cultural appropriation appears to stem from literally one random student from Japan. This is, of course, used to portray all American college students as, you know, snowflakes or whatever. But it is weird to me that the fact that these are foreign students didn't seem to come up in the discourse about it. Like,

I feel like if anyone is allowed to complain about sushi, it's probably like a Japanese person. It's totally sensible. Do I think that this is like the spot on definition of cultural appropriation? Probably not. But it's like...

You see what she's saying. Right. And also at worst, one random foreign student maybe use wording that wasn't the most precise. Right. Even if even if you disagree with this complaint, it's sort of like, OK, you know, maybe she could have expressed that differently or maybe I would have expressed that differently. But it's like I.

Yeah.

People did not contact the media. Right. I also think that there's I don't know if this person was sort of prompted to go in this direction by the student journalist. Right, right, right. But like like you said, these are necessarily low stakes issues. And the student journalists might have an interest in making them seem a little higher stakes than they are. Right. Like perhaps. Right.

This isn't just that the cafeteria food sucks. Maybe there's an amount of cultural insensitivity baked into this, too. And that's just sort of like some kid trying to make their story interesting. Yeah, it's not like something that represents a widespread viewpoint on campus or anything like that. So what's also amazing to me is the rest of this story is actually super constructive. So the journalist interviews a kid from Malaysia who's like, I actually think the

food's fine. And then she talks to people from the sort of the cultural clubs on campus. You know, there's like the Chinese American club and there's like the Filipino club and stuff. And a lot of them are like, yeah, we'd love to meet with the cafeteria and like talk about the way to present our dishes or maybe the way to prepare them or what to call them.

And the food director is like, yeah, we'd love to talk more with students about like how we can represent their cuisines better. And so after this article runs, this article runs in November of 2015. In December, we then get a follow-up article about the meeting that took place between various cultural clubs on campus and the food director. And like, it seems like everybody just kind of sat down like adults. It seems like they came to some sort of compromise where they like wouldn't call it a Bon Me anymore. Yeah.

Yeah. Well, maybe don't call it a bond me. You can call it like bond me inspired or something like that. But ultimately, it seems like, OK, there's this fairly minor gripe among the students. And then the adults are like, that's a fair point. Let's talk about it. And then they address it.

It's like, right. This is just all very normal stuff. No one's melting down. No one is protesting anything. Not a national news story so far. Don't really see why I need to have known about this at all. There's also, as a total coincidence,

there is a group of black students who are actually protesting the cafeteria. Okay. Apparently there's like a residence hall for black students on the Oberlin campus. And there's been a process of updating the food to make it more culturally appropriate. This is like something that's been going on for a while. And I guess the effort was not very good. Sure. So at some point, the black students

write an open letter to the food service company with a bunch of demands. There's food stuff on there. They're like, you know, a lot of the food involves cream and like we don't really use cream in a lot of our cooking. Like we'd like you to have more consultation about like what kinds of foods are appropriate. And then there's also stuff like we want better working conditions and we want better procurement practices. There's like this petition open letter thing that has a bunch of complaints on it.

That's like kind of an ongoing issue. And there's one article in the Oberlin student newspaper that says that they did, in fact, stage a protest outside of this one residence hall for black students over the conditions of the food and the fact that the company nor the university had responded to this open letter. So it's not totally clear how many students protested. I remember one.

When I was on campus, you'd see these protests of like three people like outside of various like campus things. So it's not it's not clear like how widespread this was. But it is true that at some point, some Oberlin students did have a protest involving food. Right. Geared towards the food service company. Yes.

So then six weeks goes by and then we get the first national media coverage. Hell yeah. Do you want to guess what, what the headline is? It appears in the New York post in case that's a hint. I don't think I can put myself in the mind space of a New York post headline writer. So just tell me. All right. I'm sending you a screen grab. It's, it's a masterpiece.

Holy shit. I know. Oh, the layers. Students at Lena Dunham's college offended by lack of fried chicken.

Oh, man. So one of the complaints in this open letter from the black students was like culturally appropriate foods such as fried chicken should be served more often. This was like one of many bullet points. Right. The New York Post plucks that out as like the central concern of these students. Yeah, of course. And also just throws fucking Lena Dunham in there for no reason. There's like an insert with Lena Dunham's face in the corner. I know.

So the opening paragraph, of course, leans into just like the most incendiary aspects of this. So it says, students at an ultra liberal Ohio college are in an uproar over the fried chicken, sushi and Vietnamese sandwiches served in the school cafeteria, complaining the dishes are insensitive and culturally inappropriate.

Gastronomically correct students at Oberlin College, alma mater of Lena Dunham, are filling the school newspaper with complaints and demanding meetings with campus dining officials and even the college president. If you read between the lines, it's all kind of there. Yeah. It's just like there's an open letter from these students.

Basically, it quotes this one Japanese student saying that it's cultural appropriation. Right. So you have one student newspaper piece quoting a student using the terminology of cultural appropriation. You have a meeting between students and the food services administrators. Right.

And you have a protest, right? The separate protest by black students that together weaves into the narrative of an uproar. Right. Right. When it's probably a total of 25 students, if I'm being generous. What they're basically doing is they're presenting the set of basic facts, but they're presenting all of them in the most...

way possible that invites you to fill in the gaps with all of this preexisting students or snowflakes bullshit. Right. So it says students are filling the campus newspaper with complaints and demanding meetings with campus dining officials. Yeah. I mean, I guess in a purely technical sense. Yes. They're like, we'd like to sit down and talk about this. And they're also not filling the student newspaper. Right. They're trying to paint a

an image in your mind of a college where like if you went there right now people would be talking about fried chicken this wasn't even a front page story in the student newspaper the front page was the the allergy story laughing

What appears to then happen over the next couple weeks is that it bounces around like the sort of right-leaning media as like, look at these idiot fucking college kids. And then it bounces around like the liberal media as like, there's a controversy going on over the dining hall food. Have our young liberal allies overstepped once again? This produces one of the worst Atlantic articles I've ever read. This is by Conor Friedersdorf. And he basically ends up

whipping a debate out of this rather than straightforwardly describing what's going on. So I'm sending you a couple paragraphs. All right. This story is hardly all there is to Oberlin. It's an outlying story about a small number of students plucked by the tabloid most adept at trolling its readers from the stream of campus news. There are dissenters at the school and students at many campuses often complain about food in overwrought ways.

Decent start. He's basically saying like, look, this is total bullshit whipped up by right wing media. With the caveat that this is false. Exactly. Still, it's possible to glean insights from the most absurd events at Oberlin, as surely as it's possible to learn something about America by observing the biggest Black Friday sales ever.

Every subculture and ideology has its excesses. And Oberlin, where the subculture is unusually influenced by social justice activism, can starkly illuminate the particular character of that ideology's excesses. So it's like, okay, look, this is fake and based on nothing and is entirely a product of right-wing media, but we can still learn. But what if we still constructed a narrative using...

Using those lies and exaggerations, what if we could still tell a story? What is amazing to me about this article is that Friedersdorf read the original piece. Right. Like he went back to the student newspaper, which like a lot of the right wing media didn't do. Right. And he still manages to frame this.

as like, what if there's a real problem underneath this? He knows enough and has read enough to realize that a caveat is necessary, right? Yes. He has seen the disparity between what actually happened and the coverage of it such that he is like, okay, well, I can't just credulously write about this. I need to give the caveat up top that this isn't really of note. Right, right. And then I need to justify it.

Writing a piece for my employer, the Atlantic. Two paragraphs later, he says, many people relate to the complaint. Gosh, that food is awful. Can't you dining hall people make it better? Yet Oberlin culture reframed a banal, sympathetic complaint in a way that alienated millions. Yeah.

Alienated. It's one. It's a student complaining in a student newspaper. It's literally not possible for that to alienate millions. And also, like, they published this and then six weeks went by. Right. They didn't alienate anybody. They alienated, like, the four people that potentially read it.

even halfway through this story to get to the Japanese student. Am I alienating millions of people with my thought on the dining room food at Oberlin College? Is there something... I mean...

You know, I don't even I don't even have more to say about this. This is just that's just like unreal language to use about a student's comment to a student newspaper journalist alienating millions of people. He's like, in fairness, Lena Dunham is very annoying. But then Friedersdorf quotes, I'm not kidding, a commenter on Rod Dreher's blog calling this a cynical power play on the part of the students. Yes. Connor then says, if this is

is a cynical power play on some level, its effectiveness cannot be denied. And then he quotes from this article about how they sat down with the dining director and how they came up with like this nice compromise plan. We play the national media like a fiddle. The Banh Mi sandwiches at Oberlin are now called Banh Mi Inspired.

Like, are people just not supposed to make complaints about things that they want to change? Right. After this little paragraph, he says, the less cynical explanation is that these students really do feel culturally disrespected by low-wage dining hall staff making do with suboptimal ingredients. Oh, my God. Oh, the less cynical explanation is that, like, the food sucks? Right. You're right, Connor. We should entertain the possibility that everyone here...

was just talking about the food sucking in a completely normal way. Thank you for inviting me to consider what is by far the most likely explanation. You could be having this conversation by leading with that, because I think that is a fair critique. Sure. You're looking at someone who's making almost no money and is being told, like, make this, right? Some cuisine they're totally unfamiliar with. But Connor is just using it as a...

to be like you insensitive pieces of shit. And remember, the petition the black students circulated had better wages and working conditions for cafeteria workers on it. Right. So they are actually concerned about it. Yes. What Conor is doing is the same thing that conservatives always do, which is to when the left,

Right. Exactly. Exactly.

don't actually care about this stuff, which they use as justification for the fact that they don't care either. It's always, this is like such a common complaint about anybody pushing for social change, is that like they don't actually want this. And it's kind of, it's very funny to apply it to a case like this, where it's like they're eating in the cafeteria three times a day. Right. It actually makes a lot of sense to me that the food sucking would actually be something that they genuinely want to change. Right.

Okay, that was number one, the Oberlin-Bahn-Me controversy. It's so fucking stupid. Our next controversy is, I think, ultimately less important than the Oberlin one, but far, far dumber. Okay, hell yeah. This is the tale of the rapping librarian. Oh, fuck yeah. Okay, yes.