Oberlin College students are confused about a variety of things, including how to cook General Tso's chicken.

Hold onto your chef's hats, because you're going to be aghast at the culinary travesty going on at Oberlin College in Ohio. At least if you listen to Oberlin College students tell it.

While some college campuses across the country are staging protests over racial inequalities, religious freedoms, and the foundations of free speech--Oberlin students are upset over the food being served at their cafeterias. They claim the vendor in charge of feeding the student body, Bon Appétit Company, and the school itself are serving cuisine that is not only culturally insensitive, but a cultural appropriation.

Why?

According to the school newspaper, The Oberlin Review, and recounted in the New York Times, students find foods offered with an Asian bent offensive. Says the Times:

"The culinary culprits included a soggy, pulled-pork-and-coleslaw sandwich that tried to pass itself off as a traditional Vietnamese banh mi sandwich; a Chinese General Tso's chicken dish made with steamed instead of fried poultry, and some poorly prepared Japanese sushi."

One student, craving some homestyle Vietnamese food, was mortified at what Oberlin thought was a proper banh mi sandwich. "It was ridiculous," he told the Review. "How could they just throw out something completely different and label it as another country’s traditional food?"

That's what tens of millions of Italians have been saying about everything served at Pizza Hut and Domino's, but they're holding strong. THE STRUGGLE IS REAL.

But being a college student doesn't necessarily negate ignorance. See, General Tso's chicken isn't authentic Chinese food by any definition of what it means to be Chinese. That bastardization of Chinese food you're pounding back on New Year's Eve or after a bad breakup? That was created by Chinese immigrants to cater to Americans' horrible taste in fatty foods. If your General Tso's chicken comes steamed, that's not a cultural appropriation--that's a chef actually hoping not to kill you from a glob of grade-A American saturated fat.

And poorly prepared Japanese sushi? Soggy banh mi? That's just called horrible cooking. It's the societal equivalent of getting Kentucky Fried Chicken in Japan. (Of which there are 1,181 locations in Japan.)(Psst: Has anyone ever seen Colonel Sanders and General Tso in a room at the same time? The militarization of our chicken is happening before our eyes! Conspiracy theory!!)

Oberlin students seem confused by a lot of things, like how school cafeterias are supposed to work. You're supposed to be horrified by what's served to you in college, regardless of what style food it is. That way, when you graduate and can afford good food, you know what to avoid.

And that is where you get your education.

TRIGGER WARNING: This blog post might incite a fear of words.

If, in your lifetime as a reader, you've ever read Toni Morrison, John Steinbeck, William Faulkner, Chinua Achebe, Mark Twain, or others, and didn't feel emotionally harmed in the process, you might have escaped a horrible fate--of feeling.

According to the New York Times, colleges are struggling with requests from students (and others) to affix a 'Trigger Warning' in a syllabus regarding texts which might instigate an adverse reaction or emotional trauma to the reading material--for any reason. Colleges and universities like Oberlin College, the University of Michigan, Rutgers University, and George Washington University have all instituted rules regarding these 'Trigger Warnings,' which has some people concerned that things have gotten out of hand.

Says the Times:


"The most vociferous criticism has focused on trigger warnings for materials that have an established place on syllabuses across the country. Among the suggestions for books that would benefit from trigger warnings are Shakespeare’s “The Merchant of Venice” (contains anti-Semitism) and Virginia Woolf’s “Mrs. Dalloway” (addresses suicide)."

Chinua Achebe realizes he just triggered himself.

As the tide toward being overly-sensitive to literary texts gets excessive, professors--who are usually overtly sensitive to texts' potential to offend--are now fighting back. Oberlin College released a guide which suggested professors mark up a syllabus with 'Trigger Warnings' in case any text might offend a student.

Continues the Times:





“Be aware of racism, classism, sexism, heterosexism, cissexism, ableism, and other issues of privilege and oppression,” the [Oberlin] guide said. “Realize that all forms of violence are traumatic, and that your students have lives before and outside your classroom, experiences you may not expect or understand.” For example, it said, while “Things Fall Apart” by Chinua Achebe — a novel set in colonial-era Nigeria — is a “triumph of literature that everyone in the world should read,” it could “trigger readers who have experienced racism, colonialism, religious persecution, violence, suicide and more.”


If you've experienced racism, colonialism, religious persecution, violence, and suicide in your life, not only do you need to reexamine what you did to piss off a variety of religious deities, but you're also going to be a millionaire once you get that memoir published. But I digress.

Pause for a moment to think of Oberlin's logic regarding Chinua Achebe's "Things Fall Apart." Achebe's novel is something "everyone in the world should read," but--hey, not everyone everyone. Just everyone with a pathological inability to feel human emotion.

Since being emotionally cold and distant to literature isn't really how reading works, some are arguing against 'Trigger Warnings,' like Jill Filipovic at London's The Guardian, who writes:


"College isn't exactly the real world either, but it's a space for kinda-sorta adults to wade neck-deep into art, literature, philosophy, and the sciences, to explore new ideas, to expand their knowledge of the cultural canon, to interrogate power and to learn how to make an argument and to read a text. It is, hopefully, a space where the student is challenged and sometimes frustrated and sometimes deeply upset, a place where the student's world expands and pushes them to reach the outer edges – not a place that contracts to meet the student exactly where they are."


Except college is becoming an intellectual vacuum--at least in the humanities departments--where professors fear the wrath of offending students with literary choices, even if those choices lead to enlightening discussion and collective examination of broader topics by the entire class.

Don't believe me? Professor Marc Blecher tells the Times:


“If I were a junior faculty member looking at this while putting my syllabus together, I’d be terrified. [...] Any student who felt triggered by something that happened in class could file a complaint with the various procedures and judicial boards, and create a very tortuous process for anyone.”


"Torture."

And, so, the triggering cycle begins.  A book triggers an unpleasant emotional response in a student...who files a complaint with the university...who sends the faculty member to meetings and judicial boards...who decide the professor was egregious with their literary selection by not realizing the depth of triggering response potential...so the board places the professor on some sort of academic probation...causing the faculty member to be traumatized (because they aren't tenured and are only making $32,000 a year without health benefits, and the rent's due)...so the following semester the teacher can't bring themselves to create a class syllabus with any meaningful text...and are frightened by the sight of stacks of blank syllabi...and, thus, incapacitated and incapable of doing their job, so their employment is terminated.

The circle of life.



photo: mije.org