Free Speech and Creepy Liberalism

I think that of all places, an ethics + philosophy class needs to be a totally open space for ppl to express their opinions. Even offensive opinions.

I dunno I agree in theory but I'm less and less enamored with classrooms and higher education more generally being seen by students as an arena for the "expression of opinions."

http://crookedtimber.org/2015/02/10/response-to-freddie-deboer-just-like-i-done-promised-ye-of-little-faith/

Here is a real article someone could write about P.C. culture if this was actually what worried them. It would address young political activists, but also people on the internet. To these latter people it would say, ‘this isn’t a game. Your desire to feel righteous fury is outweighed by the need for justice.’ To the former it would say, ‘hey, something bad is coming out of a good place! Your economic privilege is blinding you to the ease with which you accessed the tools and language of activism. Other people with good intentions who would strengthen our movement with diversity weren’t so lucky. Feeling right isn’t as important as making allies. We need to reflect on how P.O.C. have been shut out of activist communities in the past and learn from that hard lesson. It isn’t one wrong word that makes someone an enemy. It is acts of hate.’

xp idk in general i agree that like yr average humanities class (let's say a lit class, or a sociology class, etc) are not the place to express yr opinions. but an ethics class should be able to directly handle any opinion - odious ones too - otherwise i don't get the point. is it just to teach ppl the right thing to believe, or is it about teaching students methods of thinking about controversies + ideas and subjecting them to close readings + the contexts of various ethical programs/ideologies? like i think the biggest issue here is that the teaching assistant didn't let ppl disagree or agree about whether this particular ethical principle justified gay marriage - which should've been a totally different conversation to whether gay marriage should be legal or not. some ethical systems may justify gay marriage while others (like some naturalism ethical systems) may not. if you're not able to discuss it you probably don't understand the precepts you're supposed to be discussing.

To me, the most chilling issue is the death threats. I must admit I get stuck on the fact that the graduate student got so many death threats she changed university.

like i think the biggest issue here is that the teaching assistant didn't let ppl disagree or agree about whether this particular ethical principle justified gay marriage - which should've been a totally different conversation to whether gay marriage should be legal or not.

yeah I agree with this. that's a skill a good teacher will have (keeping discussions "on topic")--or else an awful lot of classroom debates will turn into debates over, like, biblical inerrancy.

that seems like the least relevant bit to me? like surely the professor's blog is not responsible for her getting death threats? xp

I was upset about that McAdams thing when I read the Atlantic piece, but there is a lot of context there that Friedersdorf leaves out -- apparently he had repeatedly used the blog in the past to call out students by name for private behavior and bring down the wrath of Internet hate people on them. E.G. he found out the name of an undergraduate on the student paper who declined to run an anti-"morning after pill" ad and denounced her on his blog, eventually agreed to take the student's name down, was warned not to call out Marquette students by name, then did it again with another student, now this is the third time?

xp ryan, it reminds me a little of a tactic a lot of rabbis used when i was in yeshiva - when a student asked a [often stupid] question about the talmud section under discussion, they'd often do this thing where they'd say, "ok, i think what you're asking is..." and then ask a sometimes related, sometimes totally different, but always much better question than the one originally posed. and their reframing of the question would always be so much better than the original question that the student would 99% of the time just nod and be like "oh yes that's what i was trying to ask."

(sometimes the student would disagree that this was his question and the rabbi would perform this trick a few different times until he asked the student's question in such a way that it was both intelligible/incisive and that the student agreed accurately represented his pov)

Not meant to be responsive to this particular situation but.....most handwringing on higher ed for quite some time has been all about this offensive-speech-classrooms stuff. In all our teacher training sessions there was all this "what if somebody says something offensive" when the opposite - what if nobody talks at all? - is so much more likely.

(in part I don't blame them because they have been overcharged with developing and expressing instant opinions day after day about stuff they are just learning about)

that seems like the least relevant bit to me? like surely the professor's blog is not responsible for her getting death threats? xp

― Mordy, 10. februar 2015 17:49 (3 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

I'm not saying he is responsible, but I can't see how death threats can ever become irrelevant? I just find it chilling that you can get death threats for saying something dumb in a private conversation, at an American college.

we live in a country where gunfights have been known to break out over parking places

the biggest issue here is that the teaching assistant didn't let ppl disagree or agree about whether this particular ethical principle justified gay marriage - which should've been a totally different conversation to whether gay marriage should be legal or not. some ethical systems may justify gay marriage while others (like some naturalism ethical systems) may not.

That would be the biggest issue if we were discussing whether the TA should be fired, which we're not. If we were discussing whether the student should be expelled, the biggest issue would be what to do about taping people's private conversations without their knowledge. (It does seem like Wisconsin is one of the states where it's not illegal to do this.)

xps: ha yeah I've had some good professors do the same thing. one had an amazing ability to respond to a question by launching into a 20 min lecture and then somehow end with "and now to come back to your question..."

in any case I feel bad for this graduate assistant and wish humanities phd programs were more invested in training teachers to have those kinds of skills--teaching assistants are often in way over their heads and it really hurts everyone.

I wish this had been a reported piece because I'm sure there's stuff, like eephus! says, that isn't mentioned and would help to explain the situation. You need all the info to weigh up a case like this.

i should've said "biggest issue to me" since it's the one that most closely tracks w/ my concerns (about whether practices around moderating "offensive speech" are cutting into the development of critical thinking skills + suppressing debate). i'm not so invested in the tenure debate, tho obv it overlaps w/ another interest of mine that ppl are far slower to express outrage for this professor losing his job than they were for the whole salaita thing.

The comparison occurred to me, too. But if Salaita had tweeted a list of "10 UIUC undergraduates most complicit with zionist murder" do you think people would have batted an eye about him being fired?

Not to make it a rhetorical question: I think, no, everyone would have recognized that as self-evidently beyond the pale.

probably fewer but i'd wager many of his defenders would've still claimed that he was being suppressed by the ziofascist cabal.

I'm sure there's stuff, like eephus! says, that isn't mentioned and would help to explain the situation.

It's all in the termination letter from the dean, with Friedersdorf does link to in his piece. It's just a question of reading that letter and seeing if you find it convincing.

let's take a real mirror example - salaita blogs about a particular assistant teacher in a class and claims that student was defending zionist murder, and then the student gets death threats. i'm pretty sure corey robin would be taking up his banner in that case?

Well, all I can say is that I'm among Salaita's "defenders" even though he would no doubt consider me complicit in Zionist murder, and I sure as hell wouldn't be if he'd gone after students in his university by name (let alone if he'd done so repeatedly, or done so using information his confederates had secretly taped in private conversations...) I can't speak for Corey Robin but I can't deny that he might take up a Friedersdorfist line in this scenario.

It's actually a pretty interesting thought experiment, because I can't deny it's possible someone like Salaita might do something like this, thinking of himself as defending the rights of a Palestinian student in an unacceptably hostile pedagogical situation. Didn't actually happen, so is irrelevant to the actual case, but it's a good way of putting some pressure on the ways I've decided It think about this.

it would be interesting if robin ahem 'weighed in', since it's hard to know what to make of the tenure/academic freedom issue now that marquette has decided to spank mcadams. aside from his history, it seems to me personally like he did something really dishonorable, let alone harmful (in terms of the onslaught of garbage the t.a. faced, the necessity of switching schools). to take that kind of hostile and ill-considered attitude toward a student of your own school, in public, strikes me as unhinged. so my usual inclination to look unkindly on institutional authority cracking down on faculty is… not so much in effect.

the t.a. has lots of defenders in my discipline (as well as lots of hostile adversaries, basically catholic anti-modernists, ha ha), but i'm not sure she completely did herself / her side any favors by not finessing the student as well as she might have. if she wasn't just dogmatically coming down on him for 'expressing offensive opinions'—i would reckon she had sized the student up well beforehand and was concerned about his ~being~ offensive, just for teacherly reasons, more than she was trying to proscribe bounds for acceptable debate positions?—then she might have recognized that she had a problem student on her hands and that challenging him in haste would not be received well.

I agree the TA didn't behave appropriately in this situation, btw! But, you know, if a student cheats on my final exam, and I punch him out, I still get fired, even though the student definitely did something wrong.

I don't think he should lose his job at this point. The issue imo is procedural. According to the allegations in the dean's letter, this is at least the third instance of this prof's writing negatively about a Marquette student on social media, using the student's name. Evidently he was "asked, advised, and warned" not to do so again. But what procedure was put in place for addressing future failures to heed these warnings? None is mentioned. If job loss was among the threats of continuing the "unadvised" behavior it should have been made explicit (clearing the requisite administrative hurdles of course). Given the high legal stakes of this letter one ought to infer that it was not explicit. Thus he should not lose his job at this point.

I think that of all places, an ethics + philosophy class needs to be a totally open space for ppl to express their opinions. Even offensive opinions.

― Mordy, Tuesday, February 10, 2015 10:24 AM (1 hour ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

I dunno I agree in theory but I'm less and less enamored with classrooms and higher education more generally being seen by students as an arena for the "expression of opinions."

― ryan, Tuesday, February 10, 2015 10:37 AM (1 hour ago)

the difficulty is that they have to in order to humanistic studies to be humanistic, but often they start out with such lamely held opinions, and such attitude over their entitlement to hold opinions for virtually no reasons at all, that it's not very effectual to try to engage with them when they do express their opinions

I agree with Euler that procedural issues are critical here. But I expect the dean of the college knows what those procedural issues are! The letter doesn't say "clean out your desk and be gone by Monday morning," it says they're starting a process. If there are steps you have to go through and a series of warnings that you have to put in writing in order to fire a tenured professor, my guess is that either a) that those steps have been taken and those warnings done; or b) this is the first of those steps, starting the way towards an eventual termination.

True, this is just the start of the procedure.

I expect the prof to win.

Social media has really been a mess for universities, which have housed blowhards since Plato but only now does their blowhardness get an audience outside of campus. Though I've read some hilariously mean reviews in philo journals over the years...

the difficulty is that they have to in order to humanistic studies to be humanistic, but often they start out with such lamely held opinions, and such attitude over their entitlement to hold opinions for virtually no reasons at all, that it's not very effectual to try to engage with them when they do express their opinions

― j., Tuesday, February 10, 2015 12:57 PM (30 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

this was my experience at a liberal arts college. i wanted to hear what the professor had to say but instead was often treated to discussions of whether freud "went too far" or if there is any "point" to faulkner

treesh, reminds me of this classic morgenbesser

you know, though, that everything in pedagogy has been encouraging these developments for decades now right? Supposedly having professors lecture is retrograde, creates passivity, etc., add cliche of your choice .... compared to the awesomeness of student verbal exploration while the teacher 'facilitates discussion'

my pedagogical bias was heavily formed by attending yeshiva where the model of learning was primarily done in pairs of students preparing material, and then lectures with a lot of give-and-take between the students and teacher.

Sounds good. Mine was formed by being a history major in the 80s, where there was a lot of lecturing but still, I don't think we felt like passive recipients and the give and take between teachers and students was pretty involved.

I'm trying not to go all good-old-days here, but I think the pendulum has gone so far to one side that we shouldn't be surprised that we get treeship's description of having to listen to kind of lame student takes on material they hadn't really absorbed yet. I'm all for student input, just give them more to have an input on first!

http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sokal_affair

caek posted an excellent yin to the sokal affair's yang a while back about computer generated articles making it into science journals

the misuse of the language of trauma has invaded my home in a very challenging way

when you drink directly from the soy milk receptacle and then put it back in the refrigerator, that's, like, triggering to me?

Hoos are you still living in a collective?

so yes i am still living in said space

essentially there are interpersonal conflicts that are being cloaked in the language of critical theory and trauma recovery. we were recently asked to house an eastern european asylum seeker while her legal status was sorted out. this is the kind of thing we've done many times in the past 4 decades of the house.

one housemate is going through an impossibly difficult few weeks as acts of prejudice and racism are taking her life to pieces. in the matter of just a couple of weeks she's suffered from a lost job (where prior to her early contract release the boss told her "as a white person i feel oppressed by your presence"), a sibling being slapped with an absurd "deterrence" jail sentence, and the collapse of an art project she spent the last two months on.

into this mileu comes the asylum seeker. her request to stay is universally accepted by all except the aforementioned housemate, on the grounds that SHE is currently in need of asylum from the trauma of racism, and she has "had bad experiences with eastern europeans being racist before," and so having an eastern european in the house at this time would make her feel emotionally unsafe. she is NOT sorry if this makes everyone else uncomfortable, because she is tired of "privileging white comfort over black safety, and as Lorde tells us, ' 'Caring for myself is not self-indulgence, it is self-preservation, and that is an act of political warfare'!"

this is said, its worth noting, in response to a housemate who is eastern european--its understood that in fact disagreements between these two is precisely what's being referred to by "eastern europeans having been racist towards me before."

to circle back more explicitly to the thread subject, she has also ~expressly forbidden~ that housemates discuss matters of race when she is present because those discussions may trigger her. to ignore this injunction, we've been told explicitly, is to be racist. this is difficult, given that the house is an important node in activism in a primarily black city, but we'd like to support her well being. that desire remains in place, but its become more difficult to know how to do this in light of all of the above.

where prior to her early contract release the boss told her "as a white person i feel oppressed by your presence"

this seems like a crazy thing for a boss to tell an employee. was there a context for the remark - like maybe yr roommate was doing some of these things in the workplace, possibly acting/speaking hostilely towards the white ppl she works w/?

lol mordy cmon. what is the point of calling that story into question in this context?

Do you have any associates that can act as, like, PoC/BW mediators?

Seems like you might need someone who can help yr roommate prioritize/perspective-ize who can do that from a couple of intersections?

we're going into mediation (for the second time in 9 months, hooray!) in a few weeks.

Sigh.

oh, you meant that Lorde.

hah.

lol mordy cmon. what is the point of calling that story into question in this context? just curiosity. she sounds like she's hostile among friends/colleagues in the co-opt. she might be bringing that attitude into work too.

like i have no doubt there's tons of racism in the workplace but it probably doesn't generally get expressed as: "as a white person i feel oppressed by your presence"