More and more this safe space bullshit is infiltrating the former bastions of free-thought.
It is a disturbing trend where it no longer matters if someone can convey a counter argument to any given point of view, the mere presence of a point of view contrary to the modern anti-liberal left world view - even if purely rhetorical - breaches the safe space contract and justifies censuring or even punishment.
It will only lead to a greater chilling effect as time goes on, and whereas great universities once taught the ability to critically consider the available information, they are rapidly reaching the point where they only serve to push people towards grossly limited and increasingly dogmatic world views.
In an increasingly polarised society it terrifies me that both of the the left and the right seem to consider liberty an enemy.
> More and more this safe space bullshit is infiltrating the former bastions of free-thought.
Responding to an article about Duke with this conclusion is rich. Duke is a hyper-wealthy institution that is hardly apolitical. Their neatly-manicured campus right next to impoverished portions of Durham and their decision to destroy a decades-long battle for light-rail by changing their mind last-minute doesn't strike me as an example to hold up for your argument.
Duke isn't some bastion of progressivism - is what I'm trying to say here.
(veered off track a little, but this hits close to home - sorry)
Also, what "safe space bullshit" are you referring to? Seriously, the article is pretty loose with the details.
> It is a disturbing trend where it no longer matters if someone can convey a counter argument to any given point of view
We're not really getting the whole story from the article, but I'm guessing there were some lines crossed. Generally, these sorts of things don't just happen overnight.
> It will only lead to a greater chilling effect ... they are rapidly reaching the point where they only serve to push people towards grossly limited and increasingly dogmatic world views.
This isn't actually happening. I'm sure it seems, logically, that it would happen. But people also have their own minds and make their own decisions. Universities aren't brainwashing anyone - I promise. You dropped Occam's Razor.
> In an increasingly polarised society it terrifies me that both of the the left and the right seem to consider liberty an enemy.
It's not as polarized as the internet and pundits would make it seem. Talking to folks face-to-face, you can find some common ground - even if they're on the opposite end of whatever spectrum.
You seem a bit anxious about this whole ordeal. The world isn't that frightening and people are pretty nice.
That's precisely the point and the problem - the University is there to make money, and the students are the customers. This conceptualization of the goal of the institution had risen on lockstep with the growth of the administration-class in universities, and is at odds with the purported purpose of the academy - to holistically educate students and open minds.
The administration obviously thinks this negative PR is lesser than whatever fallout it would receive from the _sealed_ complaints of a minority of students.
On the free speech front, I'll note that at the moment, the right seems to care more about it than the left, or at least it pays more respect to its dressings.
Whether this changes once the power balance tips is a whole different story.
From where I see it the right has leapt to the defence of certain kinds of speech, but absolutely not all speech, and certainly not all kinds of employer-speech interaction. I don't think the right is really going to stand up for "you can't fire your employees for their public statements", is it? In fact, the right is more likely to be in favour of "employers should be able to fire their employees at any time for any reason", so why is the highly specific case of university professors (and no other educators) different?
The right is also more likely to conflate free speech with some kind of "unchallenge privilege" - the idea that people using their speech to complain about your speech is somehow bad. The giveaway for this is people going on television and writing in the national newspapers to complain about how they are "silenced". If they were really silenced I wouldn't be hearing about it through those channels but through some kind of samizdat.
I think it’s important to separate what one ought to do with what the law ought to force one to do. To the extent that universities are truly privately-funded institutions (they’re not, but in my opinion should be), I think the law should have very little to say about who they hire and fire.
But they are still failing in their self-proclaimed mission as cathedrals of knowledge and discourse if they engage in ideological purges. And really, anyone who makes hiring and firing decisions out of resentment and spite should really think about who they are and who they want to be.
> The right is also more likely to conflate free speech with some kind of "unchallenge privilege" - the idea that people using their speech to complain about your speech is somehow bad. The giveaway for this is people going on television and writing in the national newspapers to complain about how they are "silenced".
Are you sure you didn't you mean "left" here? Though I don't think either party has a monopoly on this behavior.
Specifically the "using their speech to complain about your speech is somehow bad". The left seems to constantly describe opposing speech as violence/bigoted/racist/hateful and claims any criticism is "silencing" them, while asserting anyone who isn't in the intersectionality disadvantaged groups has no right to speak on those issues.
For example, when Chelsea Clinton (on the left) criticized Ilhan Omar's statements about Israel, others on the left accused her of anti-muslim sentiment, and said she was responsible for the New Zealand terrorist attacks. https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/politics/2019/03/16/new-...
Similarly, when Ilhan Omar made her recent comments that included describing 9/11 as "some people did something" (yes, that wasn't her main point, etc.) and was roundly criticized by the right for minimizing the terrorist attack, the left rallied 'round to defend her, saying anyone who criticized her comment was driven by anti-muslim bigotry.
Rashida Tlaib even invoked the complaint about being silenced by not being defended enough - so the Democrats are silencing these prominent new minority congresswomen by not defending them enough:
"They put us in photos when they want to show our party is diverse. However, when we ask to be at the table, or speak up about issues that impact who we are, what we fight for & why we ran in the first place, we are ignored. To truly honor our diversity is to never silence us."
The right has certainly not defended free speech. The same people who complain about the free speech to have the right to be paid tens of thousands of dollars to criticize weaker groups complain when football players decide to kneel during a national anthem. So free speech has little to do with it. But yes, the right has deployed free speech as an effective political weapon, while the left is all over the map.
I am sorry I don’t quite understand the point you’re trying to make here.
Who is the right that you are talking about?
Complaining is part of free speech as long as it doesn’t infringe on others right to complain back as well. If they complain because they disagree, that’s a very different thing than not defending or being hypocritical about free speech.
FWIW from my experience, the people I talk to respect players’ right to kneel even if they don’t agree with that action. That is the key to free speech I think —- to disagree peacefully but respect people’s right to express themselves.
In the left's defense you have to be all over the map to defend a position. And with the right attacking on multiple fronts it makes consensus on how to respond even harder. Take global warming and climate change. You only need one person to cast doubt to cause thousands of scientists to go into whirlwind of having to defend their data.
"Such protectiveness is motivated less by a reasonable concern for students’ mental health and more by political ideology. The complaint of a group of conservative students who felt singled out or disrespected or uncomfortable in class would be taken far less seriously. I have been on the receiving end of faculty emails making light of just such complaints.
Nor would a complaint by religious students that God and Christianity were mocked by their professor have much purchase. And I have never heard that Sanford’s “safe space” is a welcome refuge for the (generally reviled) minority of “open” Trump supporters on campus, nor have I heard of “trigger warnings” for depictions of disrespect to the American flag or harm to the unborn."
It seems clear to me this professor believes the institution has a left-leaning bias.
If it's true, it would have to be detrimental in the long run. The institution should be straight down the middle.
The institution should be straight down the middle.
I cannot agree with this; both the left and the right are motivated to manipulate world views in order to control perception of the world and the direction of social progress.
The institution should cover the mainstream social perspectives and attempt to ascertain the motivations behind them.
It should not, however, base its own perspective on any number of transient world views (at least not without transparent and reasoned analysis) - the middle line is not unbiased.
Welcome to the Heckler's Veto becoming the norm of higher education if not corporate life. This is the method of choice in almost all instances of issues surrounding race, religion, and orientation, now.
Look at Intersectionality[1] for clues to why the situation has gotten out of hand. In essence there are so many levels of grievance. In effect, unless you are part of the class of people your right to discuss or raise an issue is called into question and by default denied.
While I agree and sympathize with Professor Charney's on one level, on another the real problem (IMHO) is the lack of legit opportunities in Higher Ed.
In the corporate world people are fired or let go for silly reasons or non-reasons all the time: that's at-will employment. But for people in most fields they just find another job and move on; the problem here is there aren't many opportunities to teach at a prestigious university, at least not at anything resembling a living wage.
Years ago I was working for this one tech company who terminated a guy in his late 50s who'd been there over 30 years. I ran into him crying in the bathroom -- he asked me at his age, what was he going to do?
Two wrongs don't make a right -- but making people unfireable (tenure) doesn't seem fair either.
Hope Professor Charney finds another gig but I don't know if it's the outrage he presents it as here.
The article is not about his contract not being renewed, but about the reason for that lack of renewal.
Saying someone who consistently rates amongst your top performers as having unsatisfactory performance is clearly false.
Which means that not only did Duke cave in to an amount of complaints far outshone by praise, it also tried to hide this fact (circumventing its own bylaws).
Yep. I'm not disputing the injustice (at least, as his essay lays it out -- some comments on the article tell a different story of him being difficult to work with).
But contracts not being renewed -- happens all the time in the "real" world. My point is just: good people don't get their contracts renewed all the time, often for silly or dumb reasons, and it's not some cosmic injustice because most people find another job.
The fact that finding one of these jobs is so difficult should not change the basic risk/reward stature of at-will employment.
It's never happened to me personally, but a friend that managed a team of email content developers took more than six months to fire an employee who literally didn't know HTML. PIP after PIP, meeting after meeting, a union rep getting involved, etc.
The reward is not having to work with that person. Probably not a good enough reward to justify the downsides, but still a reward.
I assume this was in Europe? I've read elsewhere about some of the protections over there and length of time it could take to lay someone off as well as even putting in your own notice (like a month in the UK?).
I really wish there was a bit of a balance here in the US but I think the at-will stuff (along with stagnant wage growth) is why companies have such a hard time keeping people. Most of my working career has been (about 15 years discounting part-time work in high school) has been one in which I've worked with other people that very clearly knew or experienced that there was no such thing as stability in the modern workplace and you can be out on the street on a whim.
At least in the Duke professor's case, there was a process and a means of appeals it seems. There has to be a more human way for us to do this that balances the needs of people (and their faults) with that of a business.
Once a probationary period has been completed (usually about 2 months in most companies) a month's notice on both sides is usually the bare minimum for someone in Full Time Employment in a non trivial job in the UK. after some length of service (in the order of 5 or 10 years) that can increase to 3 or more years. Of course the employer can opt to just pay your that notice period and say farewell if you are judged a security risk, and even with this notice period in place a UK firm cannot simply "fire" you because of trivial reasons (like you manager has a hangover and doesn't like your chirpy attitude that particular day) it has to go through a process - with exceptions for gross misconduct but they are usually explicity laid out in a contract and can be validated/overturned by industrial tribunal
Maybe there's not enough academic jobs because too many people try to obtain them. And the reason there's too many is because of false advertising of what academic life is really like.
Who would really want to be a professor given what this professor is going through? And he probably didn't earn much.
In the media, though, a professor is always presented with respect. It's a professor! So kids get the wrong idea. They don't realize the professor is a bitch of the administration.
I think this varies a bit from place to place and is misleading in some ways.
I was a tenured professor who left academics for two reasons, the administrative nightmares of the university and department (to put it one way), and unrelated family reasons.
The year before I left they did a survey of faculty satisfaction at the university I was at, and found that, although about 2/3-3/4 of faculty reported that they were generally satisfied with their jobs, about 1/2-2/3 seriously wanted to leave (following an actual trend of faculty leaving in exodus). So these satisfaction surveys can be misleading and paradoxical, because the stresses are like that: you're acutely aware of the freedom and security you have, but also have very little recourse if things go awry.
As jobs go there is a lot of flexibility in some ways as a tenured professor (time, schedule), but absolutely none in other ways. It's difficult to move (although not impossible) and if you do you have very little choice in terms of geography or location. If you have family, you might be asking them to make huge sacrifices for you if they have better opportunities elsewhere, or can't move to be near you. Increasingly you're at the whims of fads in the field and among students: if you step back from doing what everyone else is doing for a bit, you get labeled as decreasing in productivity (note that I'm not talking about doing nothing, just referring to the fact that it's easy to churn out more papers or grants on things that are currently part of a trend, and where you can share work and credit; as a result, if papers or grant counts are your products, you will necessarily be less productive if you try something off the beaten path); if you challenge students (as did the author of the piece did) you get pushback from them. Increasingly I felt like academics was/is becoming full of bullshit in a way that no one wants to admit. It's fine to work in a field full of bullshit; the problems are when people lie to themselves and the public about it. The incentives are not to produce good, solid, insightful, replicable work, it seems to be to attract attention and entertain the maximal number of students.
My sense as a senior professor was that people in the same field in the non-academic sector were making significantly more money, and had more flexibility. So although they had to worry more about losing their job, if a department starting falling apart, or other conflicts arose, it was much easier to leave and move on to somewhere else where they wanted to be. Tenure is great if you're at a good institution, or if it works out for your family. If you're at a bad institution, or things go sour, and it's not good for your family, it is horrible.
Great feedback. Can you tell us more about your decision to leave? Besides the family stuff, what kind of "administrative nightmares" were you dealing with?
A lot of the administration problems had to do with internal communication problems in the department and university, and severe budget shortfalls (in part due to state politics). You could say it was climate or culture as well, but to me the primary issues were communication problems, mostly due to personal, private interactions superceding formal, transparent, public processes and discussion, coupled with a failure of people in administrative positions to recognize what was happening and respond appropriately. Where I was at, the atmosphere went from one of mutual respect and encouragement when I started, to one where there was constant mutual hostility and distrust, fueled by these sorts of "shadow" power structures that don't communicate with one another. My experiences by the end were kind of similar to what was described in the piece that's the focus of this thread, but involving different groups of faculty rather than faculty and students, and with everything, not just teaching.
I think if family considerations had not entered the picture I still probably would have stayed, or at least would have stayed long enough to leave for another university, but with the ongoing problems in the university and department, it was sort of the straw that broke the camel's back.
Interesting. Corporate America has been a similar experience for me but it's obviously you're much less emotionally and personally invested in each corporate opportunity. Thanks for sharing.
Yeah I would never suggest human failings somehow are unique to academics, unfortunately. I guess in life there's no perfect solutions sometimes; there's the constant tension of security and flexibility.
Professors are often exactly the kind of person who loves to work night and day on a topic of their interest.
People also tend to judge the job for profs with tenure. The vast majority of professionals in academia are either pursuing PhDs, post Docs or untenured professors.
Doctors have great job satisfaction once they are established too. But similar to profs the road to get there is among the most grueling.
The whole idea of tenure, is that the university expects the professor to be self motivated enough to warrant zero supervision or threat of losing their job.
A professors job is great for someone who is suited for a professors job. The traditional person who values other things may not find it to be as nice.
>the problem here is there aren't many opportunities to teach at a prestigious university, at least not at anything resembling a living wage.
I’m not so sure about this. I went to a school that is not very well known outside my state/neighboring states. Even though it was the 2nd largest school in Georgia at the time.
The teacher teaching HTML/CSS in dreamweaver was making $95k. 2 professor getting PhDs in security were making $120k and likely much more after their PhD. The department head was making $150k and the old head was making much more until she got a million dollar grant. This was 6 years ago so they likely make a lot more now.
Higher ed was never a legit opportunity in the first place. It's all gate-keeping by the establishment.
In this professor's case, they seemed to mistake experience with value. Turns out, you can use a slave-laborer (grad student) to teach classes much more efficiently. The market value of a college professor is apparently 0.
I have read probably 4 or 5 of these articles, written by professors/teachers, claiming to have been punished for their speech.
2 common threads about them. The first is that they rarely discuss specifics about what positions or what opinions got them censured. The second is that the comments section is typically full of drive by commenters who aren't responding to the content of the post in particular but to the idea that a professor might be censured for [their view].
I think its fair to say that everyone believes that universities ought to be places where it's possible to explore radical ideas. But sometimes, things are just wrong. If a professor teaches a load of students that the Sun orbits the earth, they're going to be censured, and nobody would be surprised.
I can't say anything to respond to this particular post, because I have no idea what this guy in particular is even being censured for -- whether the idea itself has value enough to discuss. The fact that some students believe so is certainly not a high enough standard.
"Because of this, Professor Charney often takes on positions that are not his own in order to illustrate perspectives from across the spectrum. For example, in 2016 during the peak of the Allen building protests, he spent a whole class discussing the motivations and tactics of the protestors and challenging his students to argue cogently in favor of or against the movement. Though in some cases this put the burden on protesters in his class to justify their actions, it also exposed the unsavory and borderline racist opinions of others. His rationale is clear: without confronting new ideas, students go through Duke unchallenged and are unable to evaluate the merits of competing claims.
To be sure, Charney’s courses elicit a discomfort inherent to any situation that requires students to re-evaluate their most deeply held convictions. In presenting differing perspectives on sensitive topics, some are concerned that his class reproduces systems and structures of inequality involving notions of class, privilege and power. The concern here is that, in the name of “diversity of opinion,” the class becomes a staging ground for perspectives that reinforce the negative racial, class, and gender power dynamics that exist in society and on this campus. In recognition of this, he makes sincere and intentional efforts to reach out to students who might feel hurt or offended by the class discussions. In these cases, he seeks to address the offense and listens genuinely to recommended changes to the ways in which he teaches sensitive subject matter."
That second link doesn't flatter anyone at Duke. The former professor displays the unwavering certainty of the completely ignorant, but the whole process is capricious. If you want to administer a quiz, then administer a quiz. Duke can afford computer labs, or if not they can afford paper. ("Electronic Blue Book" salesmen wouldn't be kicking back those sweet bribes to administrators for paper quizzes, though...) This BS with hacking students' laptops so they theoretically can't search for answers using their browsers was certain to lead to a situation like that. Given the suspension rates described, it probably has done many times already. Presumably those students weren't wealthy enough to afford lawyers and multiple summer journeys to Duke in order to defend their innocence, so fuck them.
If you've read 4 or 5 articles already, maybe it signifies a trend?
Another common theme in these threads are comments attempting to dismiss and marginalize these victims because it doesn't align with one's political ideologies. I'm surprised you didn't mention that. If you've read these threads, I'm sure you've noticed the support for censorship and the sneaky attempts to justify censorship for political ideology.
Yes, you are right, if a professor teaches that the sun orbits the earth, that should be questioned. And if it was that blatant, then we would know about it already. But what if a professor teaches that biological sex exists? Should they be censured? What if a professor says there aren't anything such as biological sex? Should they be censured?
How many of these censorships are because a physics professors claimed that the sun orbits the earth? None. If you've really paid attention to this issue, you know that most of these censorship are due to political reasons - whether it is Evergreen professors or the CERN scientist and everyone in between.
I can understand the support for censorship in the media, but I can't understand any support for it on a hacker news site. Even for ideological reasons.
No, there is nothing specific in linked docs. It seems administration decided to get rid of him, appointed two faculty members to form committee and didn't followed their own bylaws. The tiny glimpse in the doc is that there were some low student ranking in 2018 and few people had negative experience interacting with him - but nothing specific. As per the doc, no one has made any formal complaints.
It's however quite apparent that Prof Charney had issues with liberalism. He, for example, asks why people bowing down to "scientific authorities" are considered open-minded but people bowing down to religious authority are considered closed minded. I think it's a clever twist of the word "authority" in to forcing people to think that religion and science are the same thing. If this is his "research", I don't feel too bad for him.
> I think it's a clever twist of the word "authority"
There is overwhelming evidence that established science is correct, and the scientists are using objectively powerful techniques to establish truth.
However, the mechanisms society at large uses to test and assimilate that knowledge are exactly the same as those used for religious authority. The major difference is that rituals invoking science tend to correlate much more closely with getting the outcome we expect than rituals invoking the gods.
Picking on doctors as representatives of the scientific establishment, there isn't much difference from an average person's perspective going to a doctor or a faith healer. Person has a problem, they go to an authority figure, things they don't understand happen, and then hopefully they get a good outcome - no guarantee though. From the perspective of the patient's decision making process, there is no difference.
What is different is the advice from the social network will (hopefully) be 'don't see the faith healer; see the doctor'. That is the only difference in practice between the two decisions.
Monitoring and criticising how the underlying mechanisms work is a perfectly reasonable line of inquiry and place to dissent. There are interesting ethical questions here about who needs to do what to fulfill their ethical requirements between what the patient's responsibilities are given their limited understanding, the social network's responsibility given their third-party status and the authority figure's role in how to represent themselves.
Fully agree (I am a mathematician). People believe scientists based on authority arguments. The alternative would be to believe them because they validated their work. Even among scientists, this is a very hard thing to do. Among mathematicians is close to impossible. The solution agreed since some decades is peer review, but peer review != validation.
As an extreme example about what people believe based on authority arguments, consider the case of a deep mathematician (Dan Barbilian) who was also a great hermetic poet (pen name Ion Barbu). I used Google Translate :) (and some pondering) to turn one of his most famous poems into English.
The literary authority claims that the poem is about the poetic art, while a mathematician would think it is about a Fourier transform (noncommutative, see the "groups of water", SL(2)?).
Here is the translation of the poem Ion Barbu, Din ceas dedus:
I agree with the point you're trying to make, but perhaps doctors aren't the best representatives of the scientific establishment. Medical practice today is still as much art as science. There is a significant amount of underlying science but many areas are still poorly understood. So doctors rely heavily on customs, guesswork, and intuition in areas where no reliable scientific data exists.
And the situation in medicine is exposed to additional confounding factors - the placebo effect exists (for both faith healers and doctors) and (at least for doctors) has been getting stronger: https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/placebo-effect-gr...
So the effect of the ritual of seeing the doctor and undergoing treatment has increased in strength, possibly as people have grown to trust doctors more.
Science and religion are not comparable. A key difference is that science is stronger when people question its authority. Science does not require faith but scepticism. That is the whole point of the scientific method! Meanwhile religion requires faith.
This sounds like a good question that should promote a good discussion and would probably end with a cohort of people far better equipped to argue the case for science in a way that shows how the science vs religion debate is not even worth having rather than people who engage pointlessly in a a faith based discussion.
Of course they're comparable, and you just compared them.
Like all pairs of things, they have similarities and differences. You're claiming that they're very different, which is fine, but you're dressing it up in language that suggests it's not even possible to disagree, which is silly.
I guess I am saying that the intrinsic nature of the two topics are so different that arguing about them is a matter of deep philosophy rather than right vs wrong and point scoring.
He did not choose a good argument in that case, but, speaking as someone with liberal leanings, I think that overall he has a point here. I was taken aback by how the quoted questions from the Personality Inventory all take a nuanced issue and reduce it to a simple up/down score.
These questions were, of course, picked for discussion by the author himself, but as they are apparently 50% of the questions evaluating the Values facet of the Openness trait, I do not have to accept the author's claim, that the rest are like it, to think that at least this facet is not being well evaluated.
He was an ethics professor. I bet a good amount of money that the point he was making pertained to blindly trusting authority rather than doing your own research. Or in other words:
What matters is not the correctness of the information but the way people come to believe it.
If you’re some kind of dogmatic zealot who blindly believes scientists (because how could the scientists possibly be wrong), you’re as closed-minded as the deeply religious who cite the Bible as infallible truth
Actually, rather than having issue with liberalism, he seems to be defending it. His argument seems to be questioning the "bowing down" to "authority". All "authority" - scientific, religious, etc - should be questioned and we shouldn't be "bowing down" to them.
Religion and science are not the same thing ( thought social science is far closer to religion than science ), but authoritarianism and appeal to authority are the same thing.
After all, "scientific authority" was the basis of white supremacy and nazism ( social darwinism ). It was "settled science" not too long ago supported by every scientific authority that white people were superior and non-whites are inferior.
You should feel bad for anyone who is a victim of censorship. Being happy that someone is oppressed because they don't align with your political ideology isn't any better than enjoying seeing someone suffer because they aren't part of your race.
And if you are a true "liberal", then you should be against "bowing down" to any form of authority.
Can you perhaps be more specific about which document you think answers the question: what position or opinion caused Charney to be censured?
I've taken an admittedly brief look through them and, while I see some hints as to the general subject of discussion, I haven't yet found specific details about what got him in trouble.
In itself that seems to be one of Charney's complaints - that he had difficulty figuring out what the administrators didn't like. Very hard to defend yourself when nobody is quite sure what the attack is. And particularly in ethics where students really aren't learning anything unless they are a bit bothered and uncomfortable about having untested beliefs tested - although for a compulsory course the expectations are a bit different and that might not be appropriate.
Not being specific is a really nasty trick. All the more so because it makes it impossible to say if the problem is one of malicious intent or blinkered thinking from either of the two involved parties. But, critically, if the waters are muddy then the bureaucracy is going to win.
I share your observations and raise it with another one - has anybody noticed that these sorts of things only happen at elite institutions? I never hear about this sort of thing (about “chilled free speech”) at my alma mater
Bret Weinstein, who is as progressive as they come, was driven out of the university because he ventured to say that having a day where whites were to be excluded from attending school was a bad idea.
These sorts of things only happen at elite universities because they can drive headlines. As a graduate of a mid tier university over a decade ago, I assure you they were suppressing faculty speech even more and with a whole lot less fanfare.
Statement 1 of the "open to experience" section of a popular personality test is the following:
>1. I believe that we should look to our religious authorities for decisions on moral issues. (Agree: Openness score goes down)
He claimed this introduced a political bias, stating:
>Statement 1 reflects a liberal ideological bias against religion. Is reliance upon scientific authorities, for example, close-minded? Granted, the question concerns moral decisions (so let us assume that science cannot resolve questions of right and wrong). Why, then, is reliance upon religious authorities as opposed, for example, to philosophical or ethical authorities or, simply, moral experts, singled out as an instance of close-mindedness? Academics often rely upon authorities when making decisions on moral issues (e.g., the authority of John Rawls when considering matters of distributive justice), although they would likely be uncomfortable characterizing this as reliance upon an authority (even if it is)
This is how I interpret his statement “Statement 1 reflects a liberal ideological bias against religion. Is reliance upon scientific authorities, for example, close-minded?”
And in fact it’s a false dichotomy as the term “authority” in religious contexts (catholic and Protestant Christianity, non-orthodox Judaism, hinduism, Islam and Buddhism at least and likely others)has an assertive meaning utterly different from the same term used for scientists (not that such a term is particularly used in the sciences anyway)
I don’t know enough to say whether dropping his contract might be legit or not, I was simply answering the op question.
Given how conservative his employer is, there are quite likely more problems than he alluded to.
That is discussed in every philosophy department. Epistemology isn't a "settled topic" and open to debate and discussion. Claiming that religion is just epistemologically valid as physical science isn't controversial. No more than saying mathematics is just as epistemologically valid as physical science. Or art is just as epistemologically valid as physical science.
Why would anyone be dismissed from a tenure track for that? Pretty much every philosophy professors argues for that position.
He is claiming that this is a free speech issue. That doesn't make it true. He alludes to the complaints of a few students but we don't know what that complaint actually is. It could be free speech or it could be that he is an asshole. We don't know.
Actually discussing things that are wrong is just as important as discussing things that are right. Going through what's wrong is one of the ways to get to the what's right.
"It must be worth exploring" is the dangerous authoritarian ideology that is the basis of censorship. It's why free speech is a right. Not the "right to explore those worth exploring".
"What is worth exploring" is entirely subjective.
If we applied your logic, then things like LGBT rights, civil rights, physics, biology, etc are all left to the whims of authority. If people truly thought like you, then heliocentrism wouldn't have been explored because "it wasn't worth exploring" 500 years ago. Actually, it was blasphemy.
You do realize that "everything worth exploring" was pretty much banned, taboo or attacked throughout history? It's why the founders enshrined free speech into the constitution.
Things that are wrong are just as important to discuss as things that are right. It's part of the learning process and part of progress.
Before people learned that the geocentric model is wrong, how do you suppose they discuss, learn, and share ideas to arrive at the truth? How do they know what is “worth exploring” and who decides that?
Furthermore, once the facts are established, I personally believe it’s important for people to express their ideas even if it’s out of ignorance because then we can know to edify. Not everyone will be willing to listen, learn, and change but without free speech and exchange of ideas I find it hard to see how people will grow effectively.
Understanding that current is a convention because it doesn’t matter if you have positive or negative charge carriers in many applications is not wrong in any way. Given the nature of electric charge (not to mention specific applications like semiconductors) even if you align the direction of conventional current and flow of electrons, it will still be a convention. That’s the cost of having an abstraction for net change in electric charge (which is a useful and insightful abstraction). Don’t believe schools are teaching anything different than this.
Anecdotally, I was taught this in lower grades and taught that it was actually the opposite in higher grades. It wouldn't surprise me if people receiving a more basic education even in the same country would never be taught how it actually is.
Because his position is not one in which free speech is the aim. It is a means to an end, and that end is teaching. The specifics of what he said, and in which context he said it, allow discussion about the quality of his teaching - which is relevant to whether or not his contract should have been renewed.
I haven't figured out a good opinion on the controversies of trigger warnings and safe spaces. It might be a brief pendulum swing. I think that we all could stand to show more sensitivity to everyone else, and I don't know whether that would be enough.
But I've never met any 12th-grader who is so knowledgeable and wise that frosh year at a proper college shouldn't shake up their developing mind, and challenge much of what they thought they knew -- about the world, themselves, and even thinking itself.
(College is not a place to party and practice your whiteboarding theatre until you can get a FAANG job, knowing not much more than you did in high school.)
Whether it's in the humanities, social sciences, quantum physics, or even functional programming: if students are not surprised and uncomfortable at times, I'd think they're not learning enough.
Part of the thing about the safe space movement at universities is that it's happening at just about the same time that universities have just about completed their transition from educational institutions into corporations. If you think about them as any other corporation, they are just doing their best to keep the customers coming.
Would you want to pay money to faculty who challenges the consumer's assumptions, or do you want to build a strong lifestyle brand, which in turn drives future "donations", sports income. Every other corporation is giving us information tailored to our desires, so why would a university want to risk the corporate enterprise on antagonistic professors with differing opinions? That just devalues the brand.
Note that the OP has been a "professor" at Duke for 20 years, but has essentially no job security. He's basically an independent contractor in the gig economy. That's kinda common in the community college level, but it looks like it's finally made its way to the elite schools too. We used to have secretaries for professors, but now the colleges have secretaries for the deputy assistant administrators.
So to me the trigger warning, safe space culture wars are only a symptom of the problem that our universities have become mirrors of the large corporations.
I don't know about the particular case in the article, but I thought the tradition of tenure was partly to permit professors to pursue currently-unpopular ideas, like perhaps this person was doing at Duke. I didn't know a prominent university would have a non-tenure-track professor teaching for 20 years. What is that hefty tuition paying for?
I've talked with some tenured professors who hire adjuncts, and they feel bad about the situation, but those individual professors had no say over it. Perhaps if entire faculties came together and petitioned, at least at the wealthier places, universities might spring for all instructors being tenure-track professors (assisted by grad students).
Higher education has changed as students are now consumers who are investing large amounts of money in the form of debt. No one would want to be uncomfortable for that exchange, students these days ask for more value for money. They want a good exchange with little risk.
I believe HN has both right and left leaning individuals, but I wonder if most people would condemn the practice of professors being ousted from schools for daring to challenge their students' "safe space" notions and microagressing them?
This is not an isolated event and universities skew heavily in one direction politically. Is it universally agreeable that the end of healthy debate in college is a really, really bad thing?
Confronting controversial topics in the classroom is important, especially for a school of public policy. But I don't think it's good to assume that any debate being suppressed would have been healthy debate. in this particular case, the professor and the university are both being deliberately vague about what debate subjects were deemed to have been handled badly, and what kind of positions the professor advocated or endorsed, if any. With so little information, there's not enough evidence to rule out the possibility that the professor was bringing up important subjects but then fumbling the discussions in a way that gave some students a negative and unhelpful experience.
It's been my belief that many people get offended by opposing viewpoints because their beliefs--while perhaps correct--weren't firmly grounded in much evidence. A well formulated counterpoint forces us to refine our argument (or abandon it), and most people just don't seem very interested in doing that.
“He who knows only his own side of the case knows little of that. His reasons may be good, and no one may have been able to refute them. But if he is equally unable to refute the reasons on the opposite side, if he does not so much as know what they are, he has no ground for preferring either opinion... Nor is it enough that he should hear the opinions of adversaries from his own teachers, presented as they state them, and accompanied by what they offer as refutations. He must be able to hear them from persons who actually believe them...he must know them in their most plausible and persuasive form.” -- John Stuart Mill
I think there is a large amount of misunderstanding (and misinformation) about what safe spaces and trigger warnings are actually all about. They have also been subject to a certain amount of .. inflation? But the core ideas are important.
"Trigger" originally referred specifically to PTSD. There is a small number of students, such as women who have experienced sexual assault, for whom the subject is more than merely upsetting, it causes flashbacks and significant risk to short term mental health. They asked that they not be exposed to this material without warning. (Not that the material not be taught, nor even that it not be taught to them, but that they be informed in advance about the course content in order to mentally prepare for it)
> healthy debate
Healthy debate for whom? Do we need a debate about what constitutes a healthy and effective debate? Do we need to consider the validity of different modes of interaction? "Traditional" debate assumes a sort of weightlessness, that the issues involved are at a distance from the people having the debate. For things like sexual assault or abortion, or the racialisation of intelligence, it's people's actual experiences - well, for people other than the traditional professor class.
> microagressing them
Somehow I'm reminded of the debate over corporal punishment in schools, where pedagogical effectiveness takes a back seat to more primal ideas about punishment, conformity, and order. People used to be beaten for being left-handed, remember.
People with a bonafide disability are entitled to register their disability with school officials and receive reasonable accommodations. These accommodations are necessarily individualized, after all virtually anything could be a flashback trigger for some or other person with PTSD.
The hordes of people without PTSD that have appropriated the language and our collective sympathy for those that suffer from it to further their own ideological agendas ought to be ashamed of themselves.
> Somehow I'm reminded of the debate over corporal punishment in schools, where pedagogical effectiveness takes a back seat to more primal ideas about punishment, conformity, and order. People used to be beaten for being left-handed, remember.
Can you provide some context to justify comparing microagressions with beating people with sticks?
Difference between "agression" and "microagression" is one of scale - and they are at a very different scale, hence the "micro". But the intent to hurt is common.
We can see even in this thread people talking about the need to "toughen" up students.
Some people who think that any form of physical hurt would be completely unacceptable still seem to think that emotional hurt is completely fictional and it's totally OK to inflict arbitrary amounts of it on people, then refuse to believe their own accounts of the hurt.
I don't think I'd argue that emotional pain isn't "real." I have felt negative emotions before, I know that negative emotions actually make me feel bad. I also don't think it's some kind of good thing to make people feel bad. Sometimes it's just a matter of good manners -- respect people, avoid offending them, etc. You are positing that when microaggressions occur there was intent, however, and this is obviously false. In fact, it is exactly the lack of intent that is the focus of most of the conversation -- unconscious bias being the main explanation for why the aggressor commited the micro-act that led to the aggrieved's injury. There is a strong analogy to physical pain here, yes -- we're talking about the arena of ideas where unpleasant conversations and thoughts are inevitable if one is going to become and educated person. In a physical arena, say athletics, a similar situation would be where a coach makes everyone practice until they feel micro-pain, like maybe fatigue in their muscles and shortness of breath, or bumps and bruises from normal contact.
> Difference between "agression" and "microagression" is one of scale
No, you're comparing physical aggression with verbal aggression. Sure, the latter might hurt, but I think many (most?) people would agree that it's not just a difference "of scale".
> But the intent to hurt is common.
No, "microaggressions" are often accused even when there's no intent to hurt. E.g. asking a foreign-looking student "Where are you from?" - which is most often likely asked with genuine curiosity, and no ill intent whatsoever - even if you don't assume the person is a foreigner!
We teach our children that it's fine to be curious, but not to be rude. People we meet do not owe us any form of entertainment. If we get to know them and in the course of discussion they are inspired to share some details of their origins then we'll learn those details. If not we can just read a book.
I admit that society has been impoverished when rudeness is reframed as "microaggression", but that doesn't excuse the rudeness.
That has always been rude, but is especially so in today's political context. Immigrants of color know that lots of people in Western nations don't want them around. Random interrogations from random white people don't help them feel better about it.
Rudeness isn't the end of the world, but we should still try to avoid it. I don't get pissed off when adults ask me about or make stupid jokes in light of my obvious physical handicap, but I would still prefer that they not do that. Young children get a free pass, because I don't expect them to know any better.
The whole concept of "icebreaker" seems dubious. If you don't feel comfortable around strangers, that's your thing. It's silly to assume that anyone treasures your company enough that they want to become familiar.
Though it doesn't entirely answer your question, several philosophers of speech have identified no metaphysical difference between speech and non-speech, and some find the justifications for a law guaranteeing freedom of speech to be ultimately unfounded[0]. The issue for them is not whether speech causes harm (it does) but whether the harms are sufficient to allow some kind of regulation on speech; there is no evidence showing that speech "invariably causes less harm [than non-speech]". Several have argued this to be the case in the context of hate speech or pornography - it's conceivable their arguments may extend to widening current law (or college policy, since most discussion on the topic takes place in the context of universities[1]) to take into account microaggressions - which, as the researchers have noted, may not always be conscious[2].
> it's conceivable their arguments may extend to widening current law (or college policy, since most discussion on the topic takes place in the context of universities[1]) to take into account microaggressions
That's not true at all; threats, for instance, are not incitements to violence, yet they cause harm. Fraud can be speech, but it is harmful. One philosopher noted how in his profession, if someone broke his left leg, this would not even compare to the kind of harm he'd suffer if someone wrote an slanderous piece against him and published it in a big newspaper. "Whites only" signs can be said to cause harm.
Put it this way: if speech cannot cause any harm, then it would be almost pointless to have a law which guarantees freedom of speech.
Aside from all this, the first source I linked is a good paper that already goes over this distinction of harm which you've outlined and how baseless it is. As I have already said: there is no metaphysical difference between speech and non-speech actions:
>I argued that all speech is conduct, involving an agent, and all conduct, being intentional action, is expressive (of the motivating intention); that speech does not differ from other conduct in being context-dependent and subject to interpretation; that speech is a physical phenomenon, having physical effects on its listeners, effects which can be caused by the content of the speech; and that verbal assaults can be harmful in the same ways that assaults involving direct bodily contact are. For these (and other) reasons, I concluded that the attempt to assimilate freedom of speech to freedom of thought and in that way distinguish it from freedom of action fails.
Speech and violence are both expressive intentional action, therefore they are the same? This seems a very basic sort of logical error. (Perhaps affirming the consequent?)
No. You've misread the argument; she is only enumerating what she has deduced, and the first deduction is that speech and physical assault are both expressive intentional action. This premise was in doubt in the paper she was responding to. She never claims that speech and physical assault are at all the same, but rather, that speech does not merit a special category when differentiated from other actions.
"Special category"? This implies that all is forbidden unless specifically allowed. That is a recipe for an authoritarian hellscape. We don't live in that world. Violence is the special category, because some is allowed and some is not.
That's not the case; if speech is considered an action like any other, it can be regulated like any other action. The implication is not that actions are forbidden unless they are specifically allowed. You aren't specifically allowed to eat fries or post comments on HN - yet you do so anyway. And you would, rightly, resist a law which says you can't, just as you'd resist a law which contravenes a constitutional right to freedom of speech.
OK you finally confused me enough that I had to click through your link and read. I was somewhat disconcerted that the first thing I read was "please don't distribute this link publicly" (was that ironic?). Later on when discussing the crux of this thread (is there a significant difference between speech and other physical actions?), the author dropped an "[as] I’ve argued in previous work..." on us. There is reference to the mind-body problem, and there is some teasing about apparent contradictions perceived in random writings about speech, but no actual argument on this particular topic exists at this link.
Like much contemporary philosophy, this whole thing misses the forest for the trees. Toward the end the author quoted Schauer thus:
The ache, it seems to me, is caused by the fact that although the answer to ‘Must speech be special?’ is probably ‘Yes’, the answer to ‘Is speech special?’ is probably ‘No’.”
Can we just accept this as a compromise? Truth is less important than practice. Authorities at every level seek constantly to police the acceptable boundaries of public thought. They do this for their own interest. The justice system is not and cannot be perfect, especially in defending the public from that policing. A special status for speech is an important bulwark against authoritarianism.
It was probably my mistake to link the paper despite it being the best resource I could remember reading, and a mistake on two fronts: firstly since it's aworkshop paper as you note, an secondly because the more forceful refutation of the speech as separate argument is in the other paper she mentions. That said, this one seemed more relevant to the legal aspects and the issue of free speech rather than only the metaphysical aspects of speech. At the very least, the paper (convincingly in my view) refutes or at least mentions refutations of the main arguments for a specific right to freedom of speech (such as the truth argument or the democracy argument).
Regarding the bulwark against authoritarianism, this is already hinted to - being particularly hazardous about policing speech doesn't make so much sense when we already legislate on many other issues which seem to have bigger effects - such as food safety regulation, or the law of murder, or laws against literal genocide. I feel similar to Schauer here, but I'm uncomfortable about taking the plunge and sticking to the unjustified status quo which already seems to produce unfavorable results without much going for it. Even under a system with no free speech law, we'd have no reason to think political speech would necessarily be repressed but good reason to think that various reasoned arguments against hate speech and pornography would be entertained - to me that's a good thing.
In that case you simply disagree with the Constitution and many free speech fundamentalists about how public discourse works, nowadays even more than centuries ago. That's fine, but there is no need to dress up a simple factual disagreement in all that philosophy. There isn't much contemporary controversy about whether murder and genocide should be illegal, although of course there are exceptions about which there is also not much argument.
In USA history, curtailing the Bill of Rights has always been a bad thing. Expanding it, e.g. through 14A incorporation, has always been good.
The author has attempted to show rationally that speech is not fundamentally different from physical conduct. You are simply asserting that it is. That's not very convincing.
If that was what the author was attempting then she totally failed at it and wasted everyone's time. Rationality doesn't get you anywhere when your starting assumptions are wrong or lack support from fundamental, universal principles. Garbage in / garbage out.
That is far too narrow a view. There are many ways a person can be harmed beyond just physical violence. Instead the question we have to tackle is how much harm are we OK with.
Again I disagree. Complete social ostracisation for example is every bit as harmful (and almost certainly worse) than a punch to the face. Being fired from your job and/or being denied employment or advancement are again also at least as bad as a punch to the face. I could go on.
Limiting "harm" to mean being the victim of physical violence is so narrow as to be utterly meaningless.
Ah, this would be the species of academic debate where a carefully referenced argument can be downvoted and rebutted with a flat unsourced statement of position?
The argument ultimately boiled down to just one person's opinion, nothing more. Adding a bunch of academic references doesn't make the author's opinion any more valid than mine. If you search around you can find just as many opposing references. So what. This isn't like actual science where anything can be verified or disproven.
Triggers in PTSD commonly involve things that causes stress rather than specific topics. Bright light, loud noises, and sudden movements. I have seen several times where Medical professionals that treat PTSD recommended bans against fireworks, as a very low bar in order to reduce such stressors.
A healthy debate around PTSD might include listening to professionals that treats PTSD and follow their recommendations.
First-hand experience gives you unique perspective that you can share with others, but doesn't make you a final authority on the matter. Once you shared your information with others (and assuming there's no trust issues involved), you're on equal grounds as to what to conclude from it.
1) "assuming there's no trust issues involved" is doing an awful lot of load-bearing there
2) One of the things that people keep starting "free speech controversies" over is the idea that some groups are intrinsically less intelligent or apt than others. When, as a member of such a minority group, you are confronted with this idea, what can you conclude from the suggestion that you are intrinsically less intelligent than your classmates?
- the instructor is right, and you should drop out?
- the instructor is prejudiced, so you will receive unfair marks?
- the instructor is wrong about this, and likely to be wrong about everything else?
Depends on how the group is defined. I've found myself in the group of people defined as "with IQ score below 140" and you can say, with high degree of certainty, that I'm less intelligent than group of people "with IQ score at or above 140", but I don't lose much sleep about it.
Also, what exactly "intrinsically less intelligent" means? For example, I'm statistically more likely to be less intelligent than people of some ethnic background, but this effect is slight enough so that every time I'm compared to a person from this group (and he has to be randomly chosen, and I have to have no other information about him/her other than his ethnicity for this whole premise to work, btw), it's like 55%/45% in his favour, not 100%/0% - not a reason to drop out either.
> some groups are intrinsically less intelligent or apt than others
Do you have any specific examples? I am aware of controversies about some groups being on average more or less intelligent or more or less apt, but that has little to do with a) whether the variance is intrinsic or b) the capacities of any particular individual.
If the instructor is right about variance between groups, why does it follow that an individual should drop out? I wouldn't drop out of school upon hearing that on average Jews and people of Asian-descent are more intelligent than members of my ethnic group -- it is both true and irrelevant to my academic abilities or status, or whether the instructor is bigoted (they may or may not be, but making a true statement isn't evidence either way).
I guess you should take a statistics class before taking this class so that you can understand that people are varied and different and not entirely defined by which groups they fit into.
EDIT:
NB In case it is not clear I personally don't think that there are meaningful e.g. IQ differences between the (in my opinion totally arbitrary) groups of humans that people divide other people into where those groups are based on external characteristics.
The primary good universities provide to most people is not education, but signaling.
It basically doesn't matter what most students are taught since they will never have an opportunity to use it, and even if they did, they would not remember what they were taught, and even if they remembered they probably wouldn't be able to apply it outside a classroom context.
A friend was let go from a teaching job at a prestigious college in my city because she was - in the words of the administration - harsh and hostile to students who had blatantly plagiarised their papers.
I guess when education becomes a business, you have to place the customers - the students - satisfaction over, you know, the education
"As to academic freedom, Professor Charney’s complaint argues that the criticisms of his classroom performance, and thus the decision not to renew his appointment, really had to do with his “radical free speech” approach, in which he forced his students to discuss controversial viewpoints on hotly contested issues of politics and public policy. The panel finds no evidence, however, that anyone at Sanford objected to Professor Charney’s raising of any particular issue, or expression of any particular viewpoint, in his classroom. Indeed, Professor Charney stressed that he intentionally introduces provocative views on all sides of issues and that students would have difficulty determining his personal views.
The issue was not what Professor Charney discussed but how he handled discussion of difficult and emotional issues with and among students. Professor Charney perhaps could have made more effort to learn to manage classroom discussion of difficult topics in a manner that would have left all students feeling fully heard and respected."[1]
In short, not everyone felt warm and fuzzy when discussing difficult issues - something which I believe to be a near impossibility - not when we live in a world where even presenting a dissenting opinion can be considered offensive -- indeed letting the discussion go where it may, would probably make many people feel uncomfortable.
It's hard to say for sure on this quote alone. On one hand, I could read it the way you did -- I have my own qualms about what often feels like an arms race about getting offended. On the other hand, though, if I'm trying to be calm about this, I could also read it as pretty mundane bureaucrat-ese for "look, this guy was just being an asshole and we don't want him back".
Being the free speech guy / gal in charge of a classroom is a risky endeavor and requires the same amount of talent, calm, tact, neutrality, and wit that, say, a standup comic needs when trying to get people to laugh at a tough subject, and I can easily imagine an earnest but less than talented (in this specific way) educator losing their cool in a room full of jacked up and emotional undergrads debating Trump, abortion, I/P, pick your hot button issue.
"Could've made students feel more fully heard" could indeed be "sensitive undergrads whining", but it could also be "guy proclaims himself mischievous contrarian view-challenger but reveals himself to be pedantic narcissist / unhinged / aggressive / insert pretty unattractive trait or behavior here".
I see that emphasis on how he handled it and I wonder if if isn't the latter. Commanding a room is a difficult thing with way more art and god-given ability involved than people think, especially when the emotion in said room is running high. There's a reason diplomacy, marriage counseling, and the like aren't easy.
Like I said, who knows from the quote, but I've been in both kinds of room as a student. Neither would surprise me and I think we'd all do well to consider both possibilities.
This is the world we live in now. Doesn’t matter if you actually harmed someone. What matters now is whether someone feels you as doing harm. The word of the person who perceives harm is taken as fact and the accused has little to no recourse or defense.
Is this is a symptom of a very developed society in which abundance of wealth creates the possibility where certain individuals will always find a way to feel victimized?
> What matters now is whether someone feels you as doing harm
Can you briefly explain what you believe the differences between those statements are, as I can very easily imagine a position where I would say that those are arguably the same.
I'm not OP, but an example is people feeling "triggered" because they don't like what they're hearing, even if it is the truth and backed up by evidence, and they in return cannot back up their view.
I guess I have always failed to see the trouble with empathising with someone else, saying "I'm sorry to hear I made you feel that way" and moving on. It costs you nothing and if the response made you feel exasperated then you can opt to not continue the conversation. Isn't that the polite way to handle people you don't want to interact with? There does not, to me, seem to be a reason to feel strongly about it.
I think there is something to the notion that there should be schools which are inclusive to students who would struggle under teachers like this.
I just don't see why that school should be Duke University. I don't understand why the most elite schools seem to be among the most likely to decide that their students need protection from harm. Polarizing teachers seem like they should be right in an elite universities wheelhouse.
I believe some students who struggle with "being challenged" could do quite well at something like a trade school. I believe that higher education doesn't have to wholly be an intellectual battle of the minds where only the strongest survive. You can just teach somebody a trade so they can put food on the table. You can teach people to be better writers, better reseachers, how to study effectively, etc.
I believe higher education should be that PARTIALLY. However lots of students can get value from school without being put into a class which has difficult discussions about sensitive polarizing charged issues.
I'd like to agree, but then we'd have an even larger uneducated and willfully ignorant mass. Perhaps we could be more tactful, or find some way of easing people into sensitive discussions. Quarantining those people, enticing as it may seem, will just make things worse.
That's not what I'm suggesting at all, we shouldn't coddle anyone. I'm advocating for a system that can effectively handle pigheaded people so we don't end up with more anti-vaxxers.
Although you're more likely to change the mind of someone at university than anywhere else in the world, you're never going to change the mind of your professor. They've invested years if not decades in their opinions.
I think pulling out the dirtiest, most underhanded rhetorical tricks is fair game in college. It's up to me to pick apart the nonsense. (Thanks philosophy!)
I also think it's completely reasonable to say up front, these topics are off limits - for no reason whatsoever. It's hard to get a 17 year old to say, no discussion of X.
Another aspect is, the classic victorian phrase, "you have the advantage of me". Some key word or phrase to indicate, i'm not prepared to deal with this, and you can't hold it against me. Not just can't, but will be held in contempt by every person participating in the conversation if you press the issue.
It requires subtlety, taste and discretion. I don't think an arbitrary set of rules can actually capture the subtlety required. Can tact be a standard?
I think it’s the other way around - people at elite schools are the most likely to complain and be listened to by their fellow elites, and that goes for the Professor here too.
I didn’t hear about any incidents like this at my alma mater, which is 20 miles away from Duke, probably because the elites don’t care about what we have to say. It’s one of the many things that turns me off from the “campus war” meme.
You do realize that not everyone that attends Duke is an elite, right? Some of my best friends were as middle class as you can get and were super smart kids who earned their way in. Your view on society is rather jaded as well, probably too influenced by the media and their far-left/far-right biases. In the US, society is definitely somewhere in the middle of "everyone" and "the 1%".
I don't and furthermore it's possible I am biased simply because the media is unusually likely to report on when an elite school engages in schemes like this. Media reports are the root of my perception.
Catering to their fragility is probably more harmful. Sending a soft student into the professional world is cruel. Students should be properly fortified in higher ed.
You shouldn't just cast them aside though like the parent comment suggested.
Not at all. Catering to fragile students ruins the educational experience for everyone else. Some people aren't a good fit for liberal higher education, and would be better suited to other environments.
It seems like there’s a gap in the market for a hard-nosed, teaching-first university. A place full of passionate professors with high standards. A place where high school valedictorians work their ass off for a B. A place where you feel your best will never be good enough because the standards are impossible... until, one day, you get an A. And that grade MEANS something. And after four years, the students walk out into the wide world and kick ass up and down the street.
Somebody get $100M and start recruiting all these great professors academia can’t handle....
I went to a top school and my observations in hindsight:
1. brilliant professors and peers were inspirational and encouraged ambitious and creative thinking
2. >90% of education is self-education
3. very little of what I learned in class prepared me for the real world and among my classmates there has been relatively little correlation between academic success and real world success
I don't know how to say this without it sounding like a brag, but here goes anyway: this is University of Waterloo in a nutshell. I'm entering third year, studying math, and every single one of my friends has gone from high 90s in high school (multiple valedictorians) to struggling to keep an average in the 70s-80s range.
Anecdotally, one of my friends did a work term for the Dean of Science (and pure mathematics professor) at another university (which shall remain nameless) and she said the stuff we've been doing in first year isn't covered until 3rd/4th year at that school. Heck, her old high school AP calculus teacher couldn't do assignment 1 from our first year calc 1 course.
I only looked at a few of the assignments from your first link but they are much easier than the one I wrote [1]. Perhaps my term was an outlier. Have a look for yourself.
Aaaand you are shooting yourself in the foot. Those Harvard/Stanford/MIT graduates will have both higher GPA and prestige, which is all that matters in the beginning (and via networking) throughout your career. You might feel good about getting an A in some impossible class, but nevertheless you are already seriously disadvantaged when competing for high-end jobs comparing to grade-inflated schools. Nobody cares that only 2 persons in your class got A in a given semester and most happily accepted just some passing grade, or that half of the students had to retake a particular class.
Waterloo has 5 times the number of undergrads as Harvard. Heck, it has twice as many as Harvard, Stanford, and MIT combined. This, in a country with 1/10th the population of the United States, should give you some perspective. I doubt there are many, if any, at my school who turned down offers from Harvard/Stanford/MIT.
Anyone who can get into Harvard/Stanford/MIT is already in the tiniest elite of the elite in this hemisphere. That's all anyone that goes to those schools is signalling to their future employers.
I understand that, I did my undergrad at a super demanding university that was always scoring high in ACM ICPC competitions, beating top 10 often, but average GPA was under 2.5 due to no grade inflation, super demanding classes (A grades were singularities, most grades clustered around the lowest passing ones), and that didn't do anyone any favor when applying to prestigious schools or jobs afterwards unless one had a gold medal from olympiad or similar (even when rocking FAANG interviews, the "unknown" factor was too strong). Then doing top 10 masters was much easier and much more rewarding job-wise. I know Waterloo is top 2 in Canada, but when top schools go through grade inflation, the hard, honest universities without grade inflation put their graduates at a disadvantage.
The math faculty at Waterloo has a number of crusaders against grade inflation. They track the high school of every person who applies and see how their grades correlate between high school and university. Schools that consistently show large drops get penalized in future applications.
I am learning a lot and enjoying the challenging course work so far. As I get closer to graduation, I'll see whether my GPA improves enough to consider grad school. Otherwise, I'll be relying on Waterloo's excellent co-op program to get my foot in the door with employers.
These places already exist outside of the US, and that type of repeated stunts from Duke, Brown, Reeds, etc, is probably a boon to them. I believe the current climate is a deterrent for foreign students, who in the US are caught between anti-immigrant sentiments on the right, and reactionary identity politics on the left (such as African and Indian students being called race traitors at Reeds). International students represent a significant source of income in higher ed and their enrollment has nose-dived in the US in the last few years. If this continues this will benefit non-US international universities who will manage to attract that population, not just in terms of revenue but also in standing.
So my guess is the places you describe already exist and they're about to be better known within a few years as trust in US universities erodes.
I’d recommend if only for the convenience and price!
Again I feel like a lot of people on HN are privileged by a childhood of high achievement..I didn’t have that and could never get into a Duke-like institution (or Duke either for that matter).
What do you think students do all day?
I went from working as a programmer to going to university because I wanted to. I've found the world of university far more taxing and difficult than I ever found working.
Many, many people on my course dropped out in the first year. Over half! I really do feel like it's 'hard-nosed', as you say. Not only that, but I feel like it's not even uncommon.
Some people have suggested, and it might be true, that this is related to studying STEM subjects at uni, with a much easier sense of right or wrong. However, anecdotally, I know many people who are spending many many late nights and long weeks working on art or writing reports in other subjects as well.
In universities, you are encouraged to take work home, to practically be working all the time. Leisure time of course exists, but fully expect to feel or be made to feel guilty for taking that friday evening off to enjoy yourself, even far from any important deadline.
This isn't to say that you're wrong, but "one day, you get an A. And that grade MEANS something. And after four years, the students walk out into the wide world and kick ass up and down the street."
seems like a pretty apt description of the way higher education works. I haven't seen anybody just cruising through life getting good grades in university in the way one might at high school, because unlike high school you literally don't get handed the majority of the learning required. You actually have to put in the hours for success, right now.
Williams, Harvey-Mudd, Reed...These places exist. But more people would like to go to Duke, Harvard, Berkeley,... Why is that, I am not sure but the market values the latter better.
...and after four years, the students walk out into the wide world and find that employers often think someone with A's from some random easy state college is better than someone with B's from the hard high standards school.
The "polytechnic" class of higher education institution?
The problem is that people seem to believe that research is osmotic: that students in the same institution as some research is happening will learn more. Hence the most prestigious universities are those with high-status research programmes.
Who is raising these kids to believe that hearing something they disagree is equivalent to "harm"? It must be my filter bubble, but I only ever hear about people decrying this practice and never anyone supporting it. Where is it coming from?
The final conclusion is he was fired on the basis that someone _said_ they were harmed.
It's interesting to discuss wither they were actually harmed and felt that way and what kind of upbringing or circumstances might lead to that. Or, that they saw an opportunity to get a ahead and exert power over someone by pretending they were harmed.
It can be a gray area as well. They might have felt uncomfortable say a 5 on a 1-10 scale. But then also realized they could turn it around and fire this person.
To make what conclusion? That some students believe that they are being harmed? That language exactly is what is used in the article. Why do you think it's not supported?
Because you're stating that the "harm" that was reported is just "hearing something they disagree with" when there's no evidence hinting at what the "harm" actually was.
What do we suppose it was? That he physically assaulted the students? That he was verbally abusive and screamed at and belittled them? Neither of those are consistent with him being a highly regarded professor for 20 years with overwhelmingly positive student reviews. Neither of those would make any sense in the context of one of the reviews from a student in the same class quoted in the article:
> As a woman of color, I write to bring attention to an aspect of Charney’s teaching that will be as missed as much as it is needed in today’s political climate…The climate at Duke reflects the polarization of the country at large. Conversations are halted before they can even begin. Instead of listening, instead of understanding or trying to understand, people on both sides are combative and dismissive…Charney taught us how to have those conversations, how to navigate race relations, how to empathize.
So, there is ample evidence suggesting that the students who complained merely heard something they found disagreeable and construed that as harm. Other definitions of harm are not consistent with the evidence available.
> there's no evidence hinting at what the "harm" actually was.
The article says it started from a "discussion" in a classroom settings
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First, the complaint of a handful of students concerning the events of a single class in which we discussed racism at Duke
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I guess it could have a been a visual display, a movie, soundbite? "Hearing" might not have been precise but not sure if splitting hairs helps the topic here. "Exposed to" maybe would be more general...
Also note that the harm was also "alleged" harm. They don't actually assert the student was harmed:
> Professor Charney’s tendency to provoke negative reactions, and perhaps harm, among some
But maybe that's enough. Overall I think it's a private school so they can have a lot of leeway in who they hire and fire. So barring some negative PR, which they can probably get around, they are free to fire him. Speaking of PR though, they probably learned a valuable lesson of not including the real reason for firing in any written form in the future. It should be something like "cultural incompatibility" or "restructuring".
I feel like I'm always a bit disappointed whenever I see discussion around topics like this. Whenever cases like this are brought up, I think they're usually presented in a very one sided manner that is intent or pushing a single perspective or agenda of sorts. So the subsequent discussion around the topic becomes equally distorted.
I am not saying the professor in this article wasnt wrongly fired, but I wish there was a bit more discretion in the comments because this article was a.) a multi party account written by one person and b.) written to push a perspective that puts him in a positive light. I think there may be more to the story here.
I think the way to read the response of the Faculty Comittee is this. He was an adjunct he hasn't earned the protection of academic freedom. He gets to keep his job if he fulfills what we feel like is necessary to be a member of our community. We feel like he's a negative experience for students and we don't think his addition is worthwhile. I'm all for not indulging the carebears but the message "You were allowed to stick around after you failed because we thought we could use you and felt sorry for you. But we don't like you and some of our students don't like you. Go find another job." That is not a carebear handling of things if he wanted to have academic freedom he had a right to get tenure. He's an adjunct he needs to act like it. This is very much like Augusta where the don't have formal rules some things are simply frowned upon and its your responsibility to understand the culture of the club. It was his responsibility to understand the culture of the faculty in his tenuous position. That is a very important lesson for him and for students by his example.
I think this is a difference of degree but not kind. Duke still has tenured faculty. He is clearly not afforded the rights of tenured faculty. For this matter functionally he's an adjunct because that's how they ruled on him.
Precisely this. I find it appalling that an associate professor was not given tenure, because that is normally a tenured position, particularly since he'd been there 20 years
I think he was an Associate Professor of the Practice -- it's not a tenured position, but more a longer-term teaching-type appointment. It generally offers more job security and benefits than an adjunct might receive, but at many universities such a position is not (and was never) on a tenure-track line.
My sister was one of the many students who signed multiple letters of defense. She leans very much to the left end of the ideological spectrum but still had nothing but amazing things to say. What a shame.
This "trigger warning" and "harm" thing.. I've been out of tertiary education too long to understand it. I'm sure it's not only American but it feels like an American crafted problem taken worldwide.
Future leaders in minority communities need to be able to defend themselves but learning to do it by firing academics on negative feedback feels like the wrong lesson. I'd rather they did it in a real ballot box, not in academia. The guy may be a complete dick, but I don't get the feeling he's David Duke or John Birch society stooge.
"I'd rather they did it in a real ballot box, not in academia"
You mentioned you're not american so please allow me as an american to educate you on how minorities and voting work. Minorities are systematically targeted in america to prevent voting. America, in fact, has a long and fairly recent history of attempting to prevent minories from voting or to make their votes literally worth less than others. The electoral college, for example, is a system that allows rural white communities to by and large have votes that are worth more than the votes of urbanites, which are often more diverse and have more people of color. Areas with significant people of color voting populations have historically had laws in place or new policies being pushed to make it more difficult to vote (see: voting is on a weekday, voting booths are hard to get to and lines are long due to lack of voting booth number, the disallowance of mail in voting or the outright throwing away of mail in votes.)
That is to say, this sentiment is all well and nice, and I agree with this sentiment. But in America it is unrealistic to say minorities should stop using what benefits they can and should continue operating under systems that devalue them.
yes, academic staff should not burden minorities with stuff that others are not burdened with in the academic environment and should remove obstacles to make playing field more level
The issue with treating college like a normal good is that there are positive externalities. So the customer (the student who is paying) doesn't capture all the good that is provided. There's value in having an educated populace and in inculcating common values. That value accrues to society as well as the student.
That means that we can't compare paying for college to paying for a normal good, say a car. If there was a way for drivers to give a car poor ratings and that affected the car company negatively, that's great! The market works. But college is about more than just skills transfer, and that's why having student feedback is important but can't trump other considerations. That's also why most universities have some state aid (either direct in terms of cash from the treasury, or indirect in terms of being a non profit).
The issue with treating a car like a normal good is that there are positive externalities. Sot he customer (the one buying the car) doesn't capture all the good that is provided. There's value in having electric cars, cars which have better MPG that pollute less, cars with safety features that prevent crashes (even a single vehicle crash in a populated area massively slows down traffic), cars with safety features that protect passengers who weren't the customer, cars that are less likely to injure people who will have to depend on government provided healthcare if injured.
I could apply this to a book, a video game, a tv, a computer, a smart phone, an internet connection, a bicycle, clothing, food, and even housing.
This whining conveniently omits his demotion ten years ago, as well as the fact that a faculty vote was held on the matter.
Exercising free speech is one thing. Challenging student views is fine. Using a required course as a trolling arena and being a pain in the ass to work with is, huge surprise, a great way not to get your contract renewed.
This is actually the most important point of this case in my opinion. Dont screw over students by going off topic in mandatory courses. Stick to the course material, your ego is not more important then putting an entire course of students at a disadvantage. Mandatory courses are mandatory for a reason, its so the students learn the basic foundation of their field of study. You dont get academic freedom on your mandatory lectures, as your day doesnt consist of only mandatory lectures. Create an elective course on the topic if its interessting to you. Profs who do this are the perfect example for why tenure is a problematic idea. Getting rid of a Professor who is sabotaging required courses is a monstrous task and generations of students have to suffer under the ego of one person.
There seems to be a tremendous opportunity in higher education right now. Costs are out of control, administrative positions like this will eventually result in lower quality education and likely less successful graduates. An institute that truly values and teaches critical thinking while minimizing costs could change the world.
To me, a much more disturbing trend in higher education is allowing wealthy donors to set the ideological agendas of universities. The James G. Martin Center, despite its “.Center “domain name is a far-right think tank funded by the ultra conservative Pope family of North Carolina. You may know them from their bankrolling of the disenfranchisement and gerrymandering efforts in that state.
You always hear from these folks how their ideas are being suppressed etc. But they have a very powerful platform.
> Unfortunately, a growing number of university students equate being made uncomfortable in the classroom with being “harmed.”
University is a place of learning as they say. An important thing to learn is how to exert power over those around you. One way of doing that is to leverage the irrationality of large institutions in your favor.
Large institutions, including whole countries, buy into different ideologies at different times. And so, to exert power over someone you just have to denounce them as not falling in line with the current ideology. You can then bet on the system "crushing" them so to speak without you lifting a finger.
In a communist totalitarian country, if you didn't like your neighbor's haircut, just tell the police they engaged in propaganda against the workers' party, and there is a good change their livelihood could get considerably worse. It just takes one phone call.
Want ruin someone's life in US today? Call child protective services and tell them you saw their kids playing unsupervised outside and you're "very worried" and hang up. Then watch them get house and work visits for quite a while.
Going back to the article at hand, I suspect there is a similar process happening in some of these cases. For every student actually feeling harmed by a professor like this, there is a student who realizes they can claim they are harmed, and then they can both eliminate the professor, and gain social standing points for "standing up" and "fighting against the system". Two birds with one stone so to speak. That is indeed a very important and valuable lesson to learn.
> Last April, I was informed that my contract would expire in one year—and was then assigned to teach two classes of the very same required Sanford course, one in the fall and one this spring, in which I supposedly had a tendency to harm students. If Sanford actually believed their own rhetoric, they would be guilty of knowingly endangering their students.
This is beautiful. Pure ideology at work. You can tell because of the ridiculous contradiction at play. Everyone in the game knows that the professor didn't harm anyone, otherwise why the heck would they ask him to teach another class. But they also know that they will suffer a similar fate if they don't fall in line.
I wonder if Mike Nifong's prodigy was one of the complaining students. Keep your head up Professor, there are plenty of us in your corner! Let's petition Coach K to speak up on your behalf and see if the school has the balls to fire him too...
We have a couple of generations that haven’t been exposed to the horrors of a dictatorship. History must repeat itself. In the meantime, Duke and other such institutions will loose their appeal to those with deep and independent curiosity and to the parents who guide their children down that path. History will not favor these institutions.
You're claiming schools like Harvard, Princeton and Duke will become less appealing to students? That's pretty crazy and not at all in sync with the where the money is going. Look at the endowments of these schools, do the billions of dollars make it look like they're less appealing.
Academia is full of cowards. It has been for decades, probably since private companies overtook them as the center of the research world back in the 70s.
This commentary is a subset of what is happening in the world. Free speech is not under attack as an alarmist might conclude, but is rather under review. Unfortunately , the review is being held and judged by mainstream media which tends to go the way that the author describes Sanford.
At the end of the day, our social norms will be pulled towards the most sensitive people rather than the intellectually challenging ones.
It will only lead to a greater chilling effect as time goes on, and whereas great universities once taught the ability to critically consider the available information, they are rapidly reaching the point where they only serve to push people towards grossly limited and increasingly dogmatic world views.
In an increasingly polarised society it terrifies me that both of the the left and the right seem to consider liberty an enemy.