Glasperlenspieler

Tip #1million
Don't read your application materials once you've sent them off. You're bound to find an error or something that, in retrospect, you wish you had changed. Boohoo. You can't lol. Just shake it off . Don't freak out like I just did lol.

No, and no.

Committees care about the case you make for your proposed research, not the number of languages you know. Now if you're some sort of Comparative Medievalist, and you can make an argument for knowing 7 languages, go for it. However, it's not going to elevate you above someone proposing an equally compelling project involving 2-3 languages. 
The same goes for any sort of negative impact. If you submit a ridiculous SoP that tries to link all 7 languages in a nebulous fashion, you're going to get rejections—not because of the number of languages, per se, but because of a lack of coherence. Likewise, you could propose a very compelling and coherent area of research involving 2-3 of those 7 languages, and have far more success. This wouldn't really have anything to do with the other 4-5 languages. Rather, it would be a result of the argument you made for the relationships between the 2-3 languages you chose to focus on. 

Honestly, to be blunt and succinct, no one cares how many languages you know if you're not doing something interesting with them. Focus on the "interesting."

I feel like you're mixing together things that aren't a big deal with things that are. 
The male student forming friendships with faculty is not an issue- in fact, it's a large part of what grad school is about. 
The issue, as I would read it, is that there's such a strong connotation of impropriety for female graduate students forming friendships or doing things with male professors, and that's a hard one to change. I can't quite read from your comments, but do you actually want to form strong 1 on 1 relationships with your male faculty? Or is this something that you would also consider inappropriate?
Overall, this is something I've had to struggle with a lot as a young male professor. I'm generally informal with students, and I have a lot that I would consider friends. I find myself having to be a lot more cautious and reserved with female students than male students, largely due to the worry of what it looks like from the outside. I try to interact with groups, and all of the students doing research with me are (currently) female. 
But I could easily take my male students out for the weekend and go camping or fishing, and no one would think anything of it. Doing the same thing with my female students would invite a lot of scrutiny, and likely have negative effects for both them and me. Similarly, I've let my (male) students crash with me if they need a few nights here and there between, say, semester and summer housing. Again, having female students stay with me (even though I'm married) is a line that would likely get me in a lot of trouble. 
It is a double standard, and I do find that it hurts my female students, as there are fewer people they can "appropriately" form close mentor relationships with, but I'm at a loss for solutions short of "broad sweeping change in perceptions and opinions". I feel this is an issue that needs a lot more attention (broadly) in the academy, where the general rule seems to be that male faculty should be very cautious around female students, but that male faculty/male students and female faculty with either male or female students can be a lot more personable. It's not something I see openly discussed much at all, but it's something that does worry me. 
I would say that you and your predominately female cohort could do a lot of good brainstorming ways to open up the social behavior of the department- I second the ideas of inviting faculty out for drinks after seminars, etc. as small groups. That said, as mentioned, I wouldn't think it would be productive to try to disrupt the relationships the male student in your department has formed- the idea is for you all to be able to form similar relationships, not for no one to be able to!

To follow up on what Ramus says, you could contextualize the stakes of your philological/historicist work on Shakespeare's sonnets within larger fields that contain them, which could include: 
Most broadly, Renaissance poetry - including genres/modes other than the sonnet and/or lyric like the epic (enter Spenser, Milton, and if you chose to look backward, Chaucer's Troilus and Criseyde) or, for lack of a better term, narrative poems (what happens if you translate your methods to the Rape of Lucrece or Venus and Adonis?); 
Or, collapsing the sonnet within the larger genre of the lyric - such a historical sweep could look at what happens with the lyric in the Renaissance (Spenser, Wyatt, Donne, Herbert, Milton, etc) or could look backward, again, to where the medieval and early modern blur in the 15th and early 16th -- so that it's not constrained by sonnets only (but certainly can incorporate them); 
Or, again within the Renaissance, the poetic sequence, which includes the sonnet sequences (Shakespeare, Spenser's Amoretti, Sidney's Astrophil and Stella) but also other kinds like Herbert's Temple and Spenser's Shepherd's Calendar; 
All of which is to say that you could focus on the history of a genre, the history of a poetic mode -- and/or then decide how you want to bookend it and where. Do you see yourself looking forward toward the 18th century, for example, or perhaps backward toward the Middle Ages? These are just examples of how you can fold a historicist philology of the sonnet form into larger critical conversations. 
I agree that methodology is important, but as that's a toolkit that travels wherever you choose to take it, I'd contend giving an equally concrete outline of the field(s) you imagine yourself inhabiting -- Renaissance poetry, or a scholar of the lyric, etc -- even if it all ends up being fictive in the end. 
 

There's no question: you should put far more emphasis on the methodology . You might eventually write a monograph on the sonnets (à la Joel Fineman's Shakespeare's Perjured Eye), but doctoral dissertations never focus on a single primary text and very rarely deal with only one author. Partly that's a job market thing: there aren't jobs for experts on the Sonnets, but there are (a couple of) jobs for experts of Renaissance poetry, so advisors want you to demonstrate competence in the broader job market categories. It's also partly a consequence of the constraints of academic publishing: monographs on a single author are a pretty hard sell normally, and no one really publishes monographs on single works anymore. Even if you got a job after writing a dissertation on the Sonnets, you'd be in a tough spot when trying to shop around your book project. 
I realize you're concerned about selling a methodology when you don't have a lot of experience applying it to other works, but I actually wouldn't be all that worried about it at this point; programs don't expect you to have your dissertation anywhere near figured out. However, I think it'd be a good idea to suggest plausible expansions for the philological project you're discussing in the SOP.  Since your WS is on the Sonnets, it'd make sense if you proposed writing on Astrophil and Stella, The Temple, or the Amoretti next. 
If you're looking for a model on how you might sell a philological project, I can't recommend highly enough the introduction to Roland Greene's Five Words (Chicago, 2013). It makes the case for a large-scale study of individual words without turning to digital tools. You'd think it'd be really conservative project, but I think Greene makes a strong case for the project's innovation and necessity. Definitely worth checking out if you're doing anything philologically oriented. 

I feel like this is the struggle that faces almost every SOP, so you're certainly not alone.
I'm not familiar with your field, so take what I have to say with a grain of salt, but my advice would be to focus on the skills you demonstrate in your writing sample and how you could apply it to the projects you would like to pursue going further. Like you said, you don't necessarily want to dwell on your writing sample, but clearly you chose it for a reason and it represents some of your best work. Yet it's not the end product, but rather a stepping stone to what you'll do next. By focusing on the skills you demonstrate there, I think you sort of give the committee a key to how to read your writing sample. It need represent so much what you would like to do as that you can do what you would like to do. So explain those abilities and then explain what it is you would like to do going forward and how those to fit together. I think this not only gives a coherent narrative of your educational progress, but also demonstrates a certain degree of critical reflection that I suspect an admissions committee would appreciate.
Good luck!

Their website seems to say otherwise: "Comparative Literature “classics” majors are expected to study Latin and Greek and one modern language in lieu of the two modern / one classical requirement." (http://complit.princeton.edu/graduate-program/program-requirements)

Their website seems to say otherwise: "Comparative Literature “classics” majors are expected to study Latin and Greek and one modern language in lieu of the two modern / one classical requirement." (http://complit.princeton.edu/graduate-program/program-requirements)

I did my M.A. in French, and yes, the majority of my classes were in English, although there was a fair bit of code-switching going on. The bottom line is that at the graduate level, you are expected to have mastered the language already. You are not there to learn or to practice a foreign language; you are there to analyze the literature. Whichever language allows you to best do this is the language that is used. For this reason, you will find that at a lot of schools, the native English-speaking professors generally hold class in English, while the native French-speaking professors will hold class in French, and they couldn't care less what language the students respond in. Typically the students contribute their original thoughts to a discussion in their own mother tongue, and everyone else naturally responds with that same language until another student switches back. I've also had professors who decide that we'd discuss English readings in English and French readings in French. Most scholars in the field in the U.S. do publish their works in English, so it makes sense to write seminar papers in English (if that happens to be your native language), and to discuss theory in English, especially if the theorist is not originally French.
With regards to students resorting to translations, I haven't seen this done all that much, at least not with the students within our own department. Occasionally we'd get a student or two from other graduate groups who do need translations, but the translation is only a resource, and sometimes it's actually quite cool to hear the differences. It's usually up to the professor as to whether or not they accept students with subpar language skills into the class. There are pros and cons either way. I too love using my French and would love to use it in my classes, but sometimes these students from other literature programs or programs in history or philosophy can get a lot out of the class, and their intellectual merit can be of great value to all of us. Therefore, I don't think it's the best idea to always exclude them based solely on their language skills.

Make sure to check whether a school actually requires an official transcript. It seems like more and more schools are ok with an uploaded copy of your transcripts, and will only request an official transcript if you are admitted. This can definitely save you some money if you only have to pay for official transcripts for a handful of schools.

TL;DR: make sure your writing sample is good, make sure it reflects what you actually want to work on - this may require writing from scratch, make sure you apply to schools that do what you actually do as shown by your writing sample and not just what you think you do - do not just shotgun the PGR 20 programs in what you think is your subfield or otherwise apply based on wishful thinking.
I wrote an entirely new writing sample and changed my list of schools fairly substantially, and I credit these two changes for my acceptances. I also joined these forums, which is definitely the best thing I've done for my professional development so far, as I get to network with people who got into much more highly-ranked programs than I did, put people whose work I dig into contact with each other, and hopefully help some good applicants do well in the next couple years.
My very first writing sample was a barely edited paper from a graduate seminar that I took for undergrad credit. In hindsight, it was almost more of an English paper than a philosophy paper: the argument boiled down to "some of the things Madison says about 'faction' in Federalist 10 are similar to what Aristotle says about stasis in Nichomachean Ethics, and some of the things Madison says aren't similar at all." (I still think this is really interesting, but it was not an interesting paper.) I solicited feedback from multiple faculty at my undergrad and proceeded to ignore about 95% of it. I deservedly struck out in my PhD applications; I have NO IDEA how I got into UWM with it.
My second writing sample was just the seminar paper I hated least, with a good amount of polish put on it to make it seem like I was actually interested in the problem it addressed. (I was not interested in the problem.) This paper was not my first choice, and it still showed, even after revisions. UWM has a semester-long writing workshop in the second fall semester for everyone who's applying out, and it was really helpful - probably the single most beneficial thing about doing the MA. Unfortunately for me, what I learned from it was that my original choice of writing sample was just totally incoherent (which was true) and wouldn't be of interest to many people (which was also true). There were several other people in my cohort writing on the topic that I switched to, we were applying to many similar schools, and their papers were better. They got in and I did not.
To do my last writing sample, I met with my advisor, talked about what I wanted to write about, and really started hashing out some ideas that I'd had scratching around the back of my head for years. He helped me work out what I should read and react to so that I wasn't just vomiting out my ideas without any context, but he also helped me work out my view so that there was more than just exposition going on. That allowed me to write a paper that's actually a piece of original scholarship which advances and supports a view that nobody else holds, in an area that is finally starting to see a bit of mainstream consideration.
Getting good advice on your writing sample is critical. If at all possible, get it from someone you can actually talk to in person. If that's not possible, do not be shy about contacting people elsewhere and doing it early. Like, now. You need time to get feedback and time for rewrites. No matter what, if someone's not being helpful, be ready to "dump" them and move on quickly. You need professional eyes on your work and you need them to belong to someone who understands what you're trying to write about. Also, they make you better at philosophy. So much better. Those conversations and reading suggestions alone were probably worth the three years I spent in Milwaukee.
I did a lot more research on programs. I looked less for programs that did the work I had always thought of myself as wanting to do (phil. of mind/cogsci/AI stuff), although I kept the ones that I thought could support me. Instead, I looked at programs that seemed likely to be interested in the work I was actually showing I was already capable of in my writing sample. I don't think it's a coincidence that all three of my acceptances came from schools that were new to my list from the previous year, because I was able to show concretely not just how the particular program would be good for me, but also how my work fit into what they wanted to be doing as a department. I think this is my single biggest piece of advice. Everyone will tell you to write a better sample, and they're right. But I think the best bang-for-buck change is to think carefully about where you can demonstrate a strong mutual fit between the program and the actual work that you do as opposed to the work you imagine you do.
I did not retake the GRE, and I don't think it's worth the time, effort, or money unless one of your scores is definitively bad. A better writing sample can save a borderline GRE at most programs; a stunning GRE will not help with a mediocre writing sample at most programs; a marginal improvement will have a marginal effect. On the other hand, my first set of scores was good enough for everywhere except a few really quant-heavy programs like MIT, so I'm biased. I suppose if it would make you feel better to retake it and you can afford it, you may as well.

I think having specific research interests is actually an advantage, but you do want to make sure that you don't appear to be inflexibly focused on one small topic. My advice would be to focus more on the theoretical interests you mention, using your research on F for Fake to to emphasize the way you approach them but also indicating how you could/would like to apply those same consideration to other films. That way instead of being the person that studies the film, F for Fake, you can be the person that investigates a particular set of postmodern issues as demonstrated by this film but also translatable to a broader field of research. 

I think that for lots of people it can actually be beneficial. I actually applied for graduate school during my senior year and was shut out (despite a couple promising wait-lists). I'm only now applying for graduate schools again. So if I get accepted it will have been three years out of school. Obviously I'll have to wait and see how things play out, but I'm feeling much more confident this time around. Looking back, I simply wasn't ready. I wasn't mature enough and my intellectual interests hadn't crystallized enough to make me a competitive applicant. Obviously we'll have to wait and see how things play out, but I think that the personal growth, experiences, and time away from school (to consider what I was really interested in with the benefit of a little distance) will only help me be a stronger applicant and more successful in my program if I am admitted. So not only do I think some time off is OK, I'd encourage it for most people (there are obviously exceptions), and while an admissions committee might raise on eyebrow about an applicant who has been out of school for 5+ years (depending on what she was doing in that time), I think they won't care about a few years, especially if you have been using them to grow in some way.

It probably depends a lot on how you write. I'm in the process of writing a new writing sample for this upcoming application season, but I think I'm at a pretty good place. It was an idea that had been sitting on the back burner for a year or so, and when I realized I didn't have anything I wanted to use as a writing sample, I decided to try to turn my idea into a paper. I worked through the corresponding literature over the summer and busted out a solid draft over the course of a week at the end of August. I'll probably continue tinkering with it and sending it to other people until I submit my applications, but I'm pretty happy with what I have so far. So hopefully it works out!
So if you have a good idea and are familiar with the literature on the topic, I definitely think it's possible, but you better get moving. I think I'd be pretty uneasy if I didn't have a good draft by the end of September, but everyone works differently.

Totally agree. It's indispensable for teaching college English at any level, and another reason I would never intentionally denigrate it.
However, there are a lot of programs out there that don't have rhet/comp specialists, and that don't stress teaching. I do know people who graduated without really having taught a writing seminar. Heck, a person on my committee graduated from a (very, very top) program only having taught one class--a literature class--and a few recitation sections of a very large intro to lit class. I don't know if this made this person "completely unable" to teach writing--they weren't hired at our university to teach first-year classes (as is often the case with hires at R1 schools) but upper-level undergrad and grad classes--but it does indeed happen that people get literature PhDs without teaching or knowing much about composition. For those who are lucky enough to walk into a career as a research scholar at an R1 or a very top SLAC, that's maybe more acceptable. But the rest of us need to be able to teach a few other things, and first-year writing is usually high on the list of priorities at a great many universities. 

Two thoughts on the writing sample:
 
1) It seems like the most valuable opinion on the paper should be from the professor whose field it is. So the fact that she is a big fan of it seems like it should be weighted very heavily. That being said, an admissions committee is probably not going to consist only of people in your specialty, so maybe for some reason this paper is less attractive to people not familiar with the field. If so, is there a way you can address this problem?
 
2) Can you run the paper by someone who has a little more distance from you and your work? Maybe a professor from your undergrad who works in your area or someone you've met a conferences? I get the sense that it might be helpful to get an outside voice but from someone who is still knowledgeable on the topic, since these professors have presumably been working fairly closely with you for some time now. Then again, this might just add another perspective to the mix leaving you even more confused. So there's always a risk to hearing from more people.

Why do they have to 'match'? I thought the writing sample was supposed to be just that: a sample of your writing...I don't think it's supposed to be understood as a sample chapter of your eventual thesis/dissertation. Obviously, if your best work is also on the topics of your future work, that's great! But I got into my PhD program based, like you say, largely on the strength of the questions in my SOP. Having never written a paper on those questions, though, I just used a chapter of my college senior thesis from several years ago, as sort of a "here's the level of the work I can do, even though my interests have evolved away from this methodological direction entirely." So perhaps that's what my advice would boil down to? Don't "explain" your choice of writing sample—that phrasing seems to portray it as a detriment you have to overcome, which could produce a defensive and/or distracting tone—but do frame it the way you want. For me that was, "two years ago, my research on this topic was at x place, as you can see in the writing sample. since then, I have done all this additional work and now my questions have evolved to y place, which I am now going to spend the next two paragraphs enumerating." Would something like that work for you?

These methods run a serious risk of turning a debate into a popularity contest.  In the US an idea that I see commonly expressed is that; popular ideas don't need protection by virtue of being popular alone and the real purpose of free speech is the protection of unpopular ideas.
 
I want to use an example of something widely supported now but was extremely contentious in the recent past to put this into context.  How about interracial marriage, in the US this was an unpopular (and illegal in some states) in the 60's.  According to gallop polls in 1968 only 17% of Americans supported it.  I have no doubts that the methods you listed that I've quoted above would have been (and probably were used) very effective in shutting down some debate on this issue. Does that really tell us anything about the merits of this idea, as you implied with the "good reason for it" comment?  Or does it simply affirm the most popular idea of the moment?  
 
Fortunately, despite it's unpopularity, the supreme court struck down all prohibitions on interracial marriage in 1967.  They were allowed to consider both points of view based on their merits alone.
This is pretty much my point of view and I suspect that the author of the U of C letter was trying to imply this but that may be my own internal bias reading what I want to see.

When considering an appropriate response to individuals who disagree with you, you have to think about how you would want somebody to address your own disagreeable ideas. Do we really want to live in a world where the loudest and most annoying protesters win?
I  have grown up with the idea that universities should be safe spaces.  But not safe spaces for ones own beliefs to be coddled and confirmed, but rather a safe space for everyone, regardless of their beliefs, to share and learn from others without fear of judgement and retaliation.  And I think you have to have it one way or the other, not both.  Either the university can be a safe space for intellectual discourse and learning, or it can be a safe space for people who may be traumatized by having their ideas questioned.  
That isn't to say we shouldn't be sensitive to people's background and history. But not bringing something up because it might be painful or offensive is not doing anyone any good.

Sorry, I said I was done, but I guess I lied. A couple more quick comments.
 
1) Another update as the story develops: http://www.cnn.com/videos/tv/2016/08/27/college-pushes-back-vs-political-correctness.cnn
Apparently the administration is not entirely happy with how the letter went down. A law professor attempts to clarify their views in the above interview. I'm pretty much in complete agreement with him.
 
2) Two quick responses to @TakeruK.
 
I guess a lot of my views come from the fact that there have been a number of times where I have changed my mind or even radically altered the way I've looked at something through calm rational conversation and gentle persuasion from my peers. When on the other hand someone shoves their views in my face, my first response is to shut down and I often gravitate toward the opposing view almost on principle. This may be a peculiar fact about my psychology, it's probably also heavily influence by my academic training in philosophy. Maybe I shouldn't generalize here or maybe it's idealistic of me to think that this will always work this way, but it's something I think we should strive for in academic and public discourse.'
 
To clarify, the sort of protesting that actually bothers me is going into an event and deliberately disrupting it. That takes away from people who do want to attend from being able to listen to the speaker. I'm pretty OK with about anything short of that.
 
Finally, while I get where your coming from about closing off new modes of discourse, I guess this is where my old-school intuitions really come in. It seems that one of the primary goals of a university (although certainly not the only one) is to uphold certain wissenschaftlich standards. I get that this can be constricting, and I think it should be done in such a way as to allow as much possibility for change as possible, but it still seems like an important role of universities. Again I think implementing this in effective, fair ways that also support diversity is extremely difficult and I don't have any solution for how to do this.
 
3) Not sure why @telkanuru got downvoted. I very much appreciate you opening up the discussion even if we disagree on the topic. I upvoted you to even it out.
 
 
 
 

Sorry, I said I was done, but I guess I lied. A couple more quick comments.
 
1) Another update as the story develops: http://www.cnn.com/videos/tv/2016/08/27/college-pushes-back-vs-political-correctness.cnn
Apparently the administration is not entirely happy with how the letter went down. A law professor attempts to clarify their views in the above interview. I'm pretty much in complete agreement with him.
 
2) Two quick responses to @TakeruK.
 
I guess a lot of my views come from the fact that there have been a number of times where I have changed my mind or even radically altered the way I've looked at something through calm rational conversation and gentle persuasion from my peers. When on the other hand someone shoves their views in my face, my first response is to shut down and I often gravitate toward the opposing view almost on principle. This may be a peculiar fact about my psychology, it's probably also heavily influence by my academic training in philosophy. Maybe I shouldn't generalize here or maybe it's idealistic of me to think that this will always work this way, but it's something I think we should strive for in academic and public discourse.'
 
To clarify, the sort of protesting that actually bothers me is going into an event and deliberately disrupting it. That takes away from people who do want to attend from being able to listen to the speaker. I'm pretty OK with about anything short of that.
 
Finally, while I get where your coming from about closing off new modes of discourse, I guess this is where my old-school intuitions really come in. It seems that one of the primary goals of a university (although certainly not the only one) is to uphold certain wissenschaftlich standards. I get that this can be constricting, and I think it should be done in such a way as to allow as much possibility for change as possible, but it still seems like an important role of universities. Again I think implementing this in effective, fair ways that also support diversity is extremely difficult and I don't have any solution for how to do this.
 
3) Not sure why @telkanuru got downvoted. I very much appreciate you opening up the discussion even if we disagree on the topic. I upvoted you to even it out.
 
 
 
 

My view of this is informed by the shitshow that happened at UMass. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Triggering
I feel that student activism has become a performance and nothing more than a performance. The event I refer to above is an extreme, but it illustrates in bright colors my impression that, at this point, people are effectively trolling. I mean, a Republican campus club invited three gutter journalists to provoke a bunch of 19 year olds into becoming reddit memes, and the administration allowed it to happen. And I don't mean provoke in an intellectual sense. What does a guy saying "feminism is cancer" have to do with civil debate and intellectual inquiry? Nothing. It's one thing to have an educated conversation about social justice issues, but this gloating circus freakshow had no goal other than to create a base scene aimed at people who didn't have the wherewithal and maturity to stay away. 
I don't think it's as simple as, am I for safe spaces or against them. I don't think it's as simple as paternalism or being more consumer based. I think that university is a very specific social space that serves a very specific purpose, and this is a question of determining which forms of debate uphold that purpose, and which debase it. For this reason, I have a problem with things like boycotting Israeli academics because of their nationality, or not including necessary readings in a course because they may be triggering, or running speakers off campus when those speakers are there to present an intellectual idea that you disagree with. Yes, that means that, if an abhorrent idea can be couched in academic discourse, then it should be allowed to be on campus. That's because, at the end of the day, all knowledge can be learned from books; the purpose of the university is to train students to engage with ideas through academic discourse - to become citizens of a civil society. It is an institution that is distinguished by this very important social mission. If you want to engage with ideas in a non-civil form, there are many spaces out there for that: the internet, the street, social gatherings of various kinds that are geared towards discussing the ideas you are interested in in the way you want to discuss them. The university is not that. Of course it will be restrictive, or "elitist", if you want, because behavior correction necessitates some level of restriction. But that's the point.

Since no one wants to talk about unions, how about UChicago coming out against safe spaces and trigger warnings?
https://twitter.com/ChicagoMaroon/status/768561465183862785/photo/1
My own response is almost entirely in line with this post here: http://www.thetattooedprof.com/archives/650
To be honest, I'm somewhat wary of saying, as the author does, that I would change assignments based on a student's experiences. It necessarily implies that the texts I've chosen, texts which contain reproductions of the type of events that can be so emotionally and physically devastating, are not really necessary to the subject or concept I'm trying to teach. That, in effect, I'm using them for shock value or out of childish interest.
But that does not mean I should not provide a student with all the relevant information they need to make the decision as to whether or not to take the course in the first place. As a consequence, it feels like the University of Chicago has taken a bold stand for intellectual freedom by (deliberately?) misunderstanding an important concept in order to make themselves feel edgy and important.

In my experience, this doesn't really work. Put yourself in the shoes of a person who objects to a speaker. It means you have to attend the entire event yourself, subjecting yourself to the objectionable material and then speak to the speaker, and supposedly the audience who is going to be generally supportive of the speaker. Remember that this is a speaker/event that you strongly object to---perhaps they are speaking about an issue you strongly care about. This means you have to put yourself through a lot of distress to make your point, while the other person has everything arranged for them by the university and their supporters. And, the whole thing is uneven---the other side gets to speak for about an hour, and the opposing side only gets a few minutes.
And in addition, generally, the University can be more effective and more justified in preventing protestors from actually getting into the room where the lecture/event is being held. Sometimes the event is invite-only, so you can't go in to protest. Also, I am not 100% supportive of protests that actually go into the event and protest because if you, e.g. have a group of 20-30 students that disagree coming in with matching t-shirts, signs, etc. it will be even more distracting and disruptive than just protesting outside. 
I also think the students that protest the events aren't just protesting the speaker. They are also protesting the fact that the school is choosing to host the speaker. The message is not just "don't listen to this guy", it is also "hey University of X, we're a large group of students that don't like what you are doing". And, a responsible university would and should listen. I'm writing this from a perspective of my undergrad experience, where all the major universities are public and paid for by tax dollars and therefore they should be responsible to and report to the taxpayers (in an indirect sense). The private US schools are certainly very different from this.
I agree with you there. I'm not a fan of the over the top gestures myself and when I work with other students on writing messages to our universities, I tend to steer projects that I lead / am involved in towards more "moderate" messages. 
However, I try not to judge other causes based on their moderate or not-moderate messages. It's their decision and right to voice their thoughts. In addition, I think, for causes that we do agree with (but do not agree with their over-the-top-ness), instead of judging their words as a mistake, we should be more empathetic and recognize that these messages are a product of their frustration and anger. This probably means it's a problem that affects them in a more profound way that it affects us, so we should pay attention to perspectives outside of our own. What seems "moderate" and "fair" to us may be unacceptable to someone who have had much worse experiences. 

I suppose I’m somewhat more sympathetic to the University of Chicago’s position. While I’m not against the use of trigger warnings per se and I do thing Chicago could have approached the topic better, it strikes me that their message is not so much an attack on a particular pedagogical practice as a statement that they are unwilling to condone the sort of shenanigans and serious attacks on academic freedom and intellectual integrity that have gone on in the past few years.
 
Consider:
-The Kipnis affair at Northwestern (http://jezebel.com/feminist-students-protest-feminist-prof-for-writing-abo-1707714321)
-Columbia students demant trigger warnings for greek mythology: https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/morning-mix/wp/2015/05/14/columbia-students-claim-greek-mythology-needs-a-trigger-warning/
-Identity politics run amok at Oberlin (http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2016/05/30/the-new-activism-of-liberal-arts-colleges) and Wesleyan (https://www.insidehighered.com/news/2015/09/23/wesleyan-students-boycott-campus-newspaper-threaten-funding)
-Speakers being disinvited or disrupted for holding unappealing views at Cardiff (http://www.politics.co.uk/comment-analysis/2015/10/28/comment-the-attack-on-germaine-greer-shows-identity-politics), Yale (http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2015/11/the-new-intolerance-of-student-activism-at-yale/414810/), and Brown (http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2015/12/06/brown-university-professor-denounces-mccarthy-witch-hunts.html)
 
And this is all in the past two years!
 
So while I agree that we ought to approach difficult topics with caution and let students make informed decisions about what is best for them and their intellectual development (and perhaps trigger warning are an effective way to do this). I can understand Chicago’s position and see it as taking a stand for academic freedom and the free exchange of ideas, and I rather appreciate their reluctance to get pulled into the muck that these cases demonstrate.
 
Indeed, I tend to think that a lot of the above problems come from the increasingly consumerist approach to higher education that exists in this country where students see colleges and universities as offering a service and thus have the right to complain and demand change when the service doesn’t match their perceived needs and desires. I think there are some strengths to this approach but a number of risks as well. I certainly don’t know the best way to handle these difficulties and I’m not convinced that Chicago has the right approach, but I do appreciate them taking a stand.
Two other pieces of food for thought:
http://thehill.com/blogs/blog-briefing-room/news/253641-obama-hits-coddled-liberal-college-students
http://www.tabletmag.com/jewish-news-and-politics/189543/trigger-warnings-on-campus