Free Speech and Creepy Liberalism

http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2015/jun/30/zandria-robinson-univ-of-memphis-professor-whitene/

she had already accepted another job a while back

the university reporting that she no longer works for them is not stating that she was fired

when this popped up on twitter yesterday and under the hashtag i saw loads of academic/twitter activists being all 'i am outraged' before they realized any of that, it put online-outrage-mongering in really sharp perspective

https://www.insidehighered.com/news/2015/07/01/twitter-explodes-false-reports-u-memphis-fired-professor-why?utm_content=buffer3f581&utm_medium=social&utm_source=twitter.com&utm_campaign=buffer

"we need a more nuanced intersectional reading of the thing," says the professor whose twitter condemnations lack all nuance

http://www.thenation.com/article/211337/professor-was-fired-saying-fuck-no-class#

this article mentions a lot of recent creepy-liberalism-in-academia events, going all the way back to patti adler's 'prostitution lecture', but it also contains different reporting about theresa buchanan

Recently, there’s been much discussion of what some say is a growing intellectual chill and sexual panic on campus. In the latest example, on June 19, Teresa Buchanan, a tenured associate professor of education at Louisiana State University, was fired from the school where she’d taught for twenty years for using off-color language. Her alleged offenses included saying, in class, “fuck no” and making a joke about sex declining in long-term relationships, as well as using the word “pussy” in an off-campus conversation with a teacher. Reached by phone, she says she had no memory of saying “pussy” to anyone, but said that, if she did, it likely would have been in a conversation about how teachers must learn to handle irate parents. “If a parent is very angry and says, ‘You need to do a better job, you little pussy,” you need to know how to react. I wasn’t calling anybody that word.”

From the Nation article:

The student, he learned, was threatening to bring him up on sexual harassment charges. “Oh, I felt unsafe,” he whines, imitating her. The director, he says, told him, “I know this is bullshit, you know this is total bullshit, since you’re gay, but you really don’t want to deal with this bullshit. Just give her the grade.”

Bizarre to leave uncriticized the claim that gay dudes are incapable of creating a toxic atmosphere for women.

that guy sounds like an A+ asshole

Honestly, being the kind of teacher who prides himself on his blunt truth-telling and likes to pull out the "whiny little girl" voice is positively correlated with running a classroom that's crap for women, though obviously I know nothing about this guy in particular.

I also think that "student programmed to hyperachieve will do anything to avoid a B+" has much more to do with this story than "political correctness gone mad."

yup

so many students seem completely crestfallen when they get anything lower than an A (or sometimes an A-) which is so weird to me

She also jokingly told some of her female students that that they shouldn’t expect their boyfriends to keep helping them out with their coursework after the sex gets stale.

Seems to me the faculty response to this is totally right: you don't get fired for this, but seriously, cut that shit out, it is unprofessional and gross.

A toxic combination of an increasing dependence on financial aid, overachieving, and obsessive parents, in my experience.

xpost

to be honest in my experience it's not the financial-aid kids who are the worst grade-grubbers

it's the UMC (or rich) kids who really want to make their parents happy (and/or get them off their backs, which is the same thing)

of course my experience is specific to big midwestern state flagship universities

people treat colleges like the DMV or frankly the justice system - vaguely wanting harsh 'rigor' for everyone else but a careful and supporting environment for themselves or their kids

i say this as a general observation; i have no sense of whether the charges against levinson are true

The argument I hear most is the student who needs the A- because h/she "might lose" the aid. My usual response: you don't just lose your aid thanks to one class -- are you failing the others AND did badly last semester?

well, yeah. the whole "I need an A in this class because..." "...because you did poorly in all your other classes? er, try working harder."

but I seldom hear "...because I'll lose my aid"

instead I hear "...because I can't get into the major I want"

nursing school

communication school

abolish grades imo

grading school

abolish school

grades are the worst. i love school, though.

http://nymag.com/thecut/2015/07/columbia-says-no-to-trigger-warnings.html

like it says, no trigger warnings to be added to columbia's required reading list

http://www.happytrailsforever.com/view/uploads/Triggerbook-byPando.jpg

phew, that book /will/ stay on columbia's Great Books core curriculum

kinda surprised professors are holding the line on this.

I wonder if the ways in which universities currently handle disabilities is going to be the end game for this. what's the term? "reasonable accommodation" or something?

isn't that what peeps are always hammerin neville chamberlain for

trigger warnings in our time

https://s-media-cache-ak0.pinimg.com/236x/0b/0a/04/0b0a04481630bff55a4ce4105b424dc2.jpg

it's a good sign i think

kinda surprised professors are holding the line on this.

This whole situation has gotten so twisty and confused that I authentically have no idea what stance you mean when you say "holding the line"

referring to this link by j
http://nymag.com/thecut/2015/07/columbia-says-no-to-trigger-warnings.html

Though students have asked for trigger warnings at schools like U.C. Santa Barbara and Oberlin, professors have largely opposed them: A 2014 report drafted by the American Association of University Professors argues that making trigger warnings university policy poses a threat to their academic freedom and is "counterproductive to the educational experience."

do people here have opinions about this case?

http://torontoist.com/2012/11/online-harassment-is-more-prevalent-and-taken-more-seriously-than-ever/

http://news.nationalpost.com/full-comment/christie-blatchford-ruling-in-twitter-harassment-trial-could-have-enormous-fallout-for-free-speech

https://nationalpostcom.files.wordpress.com/2014/01/twitter-trail.jpg?w=620&h=465

take him away boys

that guy is creep & asshole
but criminalizing that kind of internet trolling?
(nb no allegation of irl threatening)
NO
seriously opposed to this

lol stop

What if someone showed up everywhere you went and interrupted everything you said? It would take, idk, maybe 3-5 appearances until most ppl called the police or threatened legal action, and that's if the stalker didn't make any literal threats.

Neither of those articles, or the other articles that came up when I googled his name, provide the content of the tweets in question as far as I can tell. Really no idea what is going on here.

i don't think 'what if someone showed up everywhere you went and interrupted everything you said' is an apt comparison, though none of the ones that seem apt to me obviously translate over unchanged

isn't it more like, what if you were a public speaker and (the same) someone always came and asked a question from the audience?

or what if you were a public figure and a tabloid reporter always followed you around in public goading you for a reaction?

Hm maybe, but on twitter EVERYONE is a "public speaker" so it ceases to be notable as such. That doesn't make it private, but I think in terms of what it means for someone to relentlessly interact with you when you've discouraged them from doing so, it's closer to violating someone's personal space than it is to just coincidentally being at the same public event, metaphorically speaking.

my problem is, criminalization
in absence of irl threat, criterion here seems completely arbitrary
& (esp since we’re talking criminal law here) imo threat to free speech
nb this isn't even case of 'hate speech'
not opposed to org/corps/platforms (twitter, reddit, ilx) implementing certain mechanisms to deal with this kind of thing, to weed out certain forms of online harassment
but i don’t think internet trolls (who don’t represent any irl threat) should be arrested & go to jail

xp i think 'public speaker' is still a relevant distinction because it tracks the way that a person on twitter has opted for public visibility/audiblity/accessability. like, you give a lecture, there are gonna be people there talking back, even annoyingly so. you can keep them out of your house; if they follow you around when you're going to the supermarket, you can shut that down. but 'talking at the places and times i'm talking in public'? when someone tweets at you, in reply to your public tweets, where is the personal space?

like, i don't think it's useful to automatically equate personal existence (of the sort that can be threatened, stalked, etc.) with online presence. it may be that it is appropriate to treat them as analogous for these purposes, but at first glance, it seems to get a lot of the weirdnesses of the internet wrong.

Neither of those articles, or the other articles that came up when I googled his name, provide the content of the tweets in question as far as I can tell. Really no idea what is going on here.

― how's life, Thursday, July 16, 2015 2:50 PM (24 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

as far as I can tell the content was him criticising and mocking Guthrie's politics, I think Guthrie's position is that the volume of the messages is what was threatening, not the content

xp e.g. i think some distinction pertaining to choice of and control over 'social distance' might be relevant. any old creep can ask a question from an audience after a public lecture, but not any old creep can do so in a neighborhood meeting, or a departmental colloquium. if you're a 'public figure' even in some minimal way, you add some slack to the degree of social distance from you within which interactions are acceptable: it's no longer required just to be friends or family or to live on the same side of town or be the same race, there's also an additional presumption that because of your visibility, others are entitled to at least begin interactions (even if you're not obliged to continue them, or even if it's on them to try to make the interactions good ones if they have any antagonistic intent).

but when you're tweeting out into the void… aren't you entering into a space in which there are virtually no checks on 'social distance' of that sort?

Accepting "there are no checks on social distance" as a condition of twitter or "the internets" (or really any space) has the condition of ending up with an environment where only the strongest and most relentless will occupy space, will "win" and be able to choose their terms of engagement with others. I think this is pretty obviously unacceptable to everyone except the most blinkered self-described Libertarians or w/e. What to do about it exactly idk but I'm pretty sure the answer is not "wait until someone gets physically menaced by their stalker to say that it's unacceptable."

yeah well we could just mob up, no problems there thankfully

We certainly don't need more people in jail.

I think platforms should institute some kinds of restraining order type mechanisms that go beyond blocking. Or maybe moderators should have the ability to fine people for misconduct. They could put something in the user agreement about that.

Admittedly, i think some online harrassment should be a criminal issue, like those adults who relentlessly cyberbully children or whatever. Idk the specifics of this Canadian case but apparently there were no direct threats or anything so it would be really hard to define how, legally, this behavior was different from ordinary obnoxiousness.

couldn't someone just find this guy and kick the crap out of him