The Coddling Of The American Mind (Trigger Warning Article In The Atlantic...)

The Covering of the American Ass

some of you have stared too long into the abyss.

^keep an eye on this one

one peaeye

In fact, critical statements and even the demeaning ridicule of individuals are largely protected by the Constitution; in this case, Yiannopoulos’s past words and deeds do not justify prior restraint on his freedom of expression or the cancellation of the event.

https://pbs.twimg.com/media/CQEvWJ_VEAEyDbx.png

http://www.dailycal.org/2017/02/07/violence-self-defense/

Last week, a violent protest erupted on campus, in response to a scheduled speaking event by Milo Yiannopoulos. Many people soon began to decry the protesters. Here are a few arguments in favor of the use of violence in protests.

quite a few

https://psmag.com/antifascists-have-become-the-most-reasonable-people-in-america-92525aceabd5#.4pzgrix22

The antifa banner features black and red flags, signifying an alliance between anarchists and communists. What unites these two groups (who have been known to kill one another from time to time) is a commitment to confront and defeat fascists and white supremacists by whatever means necessary. It’s a coalition that has existed for as long as fascism has; the Italian Arditi del Popolo (People’s Squads) rose to fight Mussolini in 1921, even when the Socialist and Communist Parties refused to support them. In 1924, anarchist lumberjacks allied with the Industrial Workers of the World waged a “drawn battle” with a Ku Klux Klan recruitment drive in Greenville, Maine. American anti-fascists have been fighting a mostly quiet conflict with domestic Nazis at punk rock venues and small white-nationalist gatherings for decades, but, as fascists have snuck their collective jackboot into the curved door of the Oval Office, the struggle has reached the mainstream.*

soooo, there have been anti-fascist sleeper cells in the u.s. since the 20's? talk about underground.

http://societyandspace.org/2017/02/14/the-discomfort-of-safety/

After trying to read that, I need a space safe from scare quotes! Sheesh...

Seen that Antifa are trying to get Marduk shows cancelled. They said that they have white supremacist ties.

feel kinda bad cos I just saw them. isn't that largely Magnuss "Devo's" fault anyway

https://m.facebook.com/story.php?story_fbid=1361348427256383&id=1136688033055758&__tn__=%2As

I don't know how antifa are organized or if you can blame them for pages like this
https://m.facebook.com/permalink.php?story_fbid=988567004597985&id=988558524598833
But is Pure Holocaust the only Immortal album not allowed. Summoning and Darkthrone? Seems badly researched.

http://www.metalblast.net/blog/the-blm-boycott-marduk/

metal band trying hard to be offensive offends the easily offendable, who would have thought

they have white supremacist ties

They're wearing Trump neckwear on stage?

what would we do baby
without Jews
sha la la la

The white supremacist ties thing is probably bullshit. Haven't found anything that backs it up.

The free speech thread is a clusterfuck so I thought I'd use this one to bring up the issue of Andrew Potter losing his position as Director of the Institute for the Study of Canada at McGill (but not his position as a prof) after writing an admittedly dopey column in Maclean's about the purported social malaise of Quebec. (The traffic fiasco does reveal some serious issues but I'm really not sure that 'social alienation' is one of them.) I'm not sure what I think about this situation: the uni tweeted something right after his piece was published, distancing themselves from his writing, which might be inappropriate. I'm not entirely clear on what his position at ISC entailed, tbh, but idk if writing a dumb column is reason to lose it (although it's not totally clear yet what happened). Hébert and Coyne take different positions.

This tweetstorm was a decent critique of Hébert, I thought.

imo the article was not a flagrant enough violation of academic standards and norms to justify his being fired but assuming he doesn't have tenure i think it's the institution's right to draw that line for themselves. i don't buy the now popular corey robin argument that all academics employed by the university should have their speech protected wrt their jobs except in cases where such a provision was explicitly drawn up in the contract.

McGill's statement.

I'm not entirely sure that these two passages can be reconciled:

The scholarly members of the university have the freedom to pursue research and artistic creation and to disseminate their results, without being constrained by political or disciplinary orthodoxies, monetary incentives or punitive measures as a result of their academic pursuits. They may exercise this freedom in the service of both the university and the wider society. When scholarly members of the university participate in public forums and debates, they should represent their views as their own.

The mission of MISC is to promote a better understanding of Canada through the study of our heritage and to support the study of Canada across the country and internationally. Professor Potter recognized that he had failed to uphold this mission and that the “credibility of the Institute would be best served by his resignation”.

The only way I might be able to see the uni's perspective is if Potter failed to represent his views as his own because of the tagline at the end of his column: "Andrew Potter is the Director of the McGill Institute for the Study of Canada." I doubt that really violates this clause, though.

don't buy the now popular corey robin argument that all academics employed by the university should have their speech protected wrt their jobs except in cases where such a provision was explicitly drawn up in the contract.

Why not?

bc institutions should have the latitude to hire and fire employees that it feels are doing a good or bad job fulfilling the institution's mission. when you represent your institution poorly that is grounds for dismissal. u might argue that non-job related speech shouldn't have a bearing on employment however that explanation disappears when it comes to the university (as opposed to some other industry profession) where there really is no easy way to distinguish between political speech that is within the purvey of the professor and that which is just his private opinion.

'institutes' are afaik pretty outward-facing units of universities anyway, where it's expected that scholarship will put on some kind of public face, so the demand for politico-institutional decorum is higher and there are probably few choices open to the containing institution to signal their intellectual or cultural bona fides to the surrounding political community, other than hiring and firing (anything else would be too fussy/inconsequential, and amount to a kind of political-sphere commitment in what is essentially a position for bureaucratic-academic functionaries skilled at drawing in donors and enhancing university prestige).

i think this is crazy. that article was not bigoted in any manner and it wasn't even necessarily disrespectful toward quebec. complaining about the city you live in, especially in hyperbolic terms, is a sign of affection.

it's a dumb decision from the university but maybe my expectations for our institutions of higher education are v low

Mordy do you ever reconcile your spiritual bent with your ideas about labor and consumer choice and think about where some of those things might converge? NB the fact that you would never proselytize might mean that this doesn't occur to you.

i think one informs the other. i want institutions to have broad latitude to organize themselves and their composition bc i want my religious institutions to have that freedom. generally speaking i err on the side of putting eggs in multiple baskets so i prefer a lot of distinct communities/models of social organization to one monolithic model, and that's before getting into the major concerns i have about the shared sociocultural space in the US. my opinion to this is afaict consistent with my opinions on freedom of speech as well - i want my speech to be protected so i take an expansive view towards allowing as much speech as possible.

Yeah but if institutions can fire people based on speech... ok

so i see the argument that your non-job related speech - say on facebook or in a newspaper - should have no bearing on your employment as better than the same argument applied to ppl who are professional speech generators (professors, media figures) since often the lines between private speech and public are completely obscured and certainly shouldn't include a newspaper article. but like if you're a religious figure employed by a religious institution and you start talking to people about how you no longer believe in god, even if it's not even posted on facebook or in a newspaper, i think that's pertinent to whether you're still able to carry out the mission of the institution - that seems intuitive to me.

Breadcrumbs back to Galileo

My advice is to always consider the existence of high school cafeteria levels of personal pettiness and cruelty, and crusades levels of zealotry when espousing any position on how people should be hired, fired and potentially punished for speech

someone is always going to be making the decisions. since no one at any level of social organization is immune to pettiness, cruelty and zealotry, it's better to have many smaller communities making their own decisions than one federalized decision maker.

So there should be no supreme judiciary authority to decide on whether or not to protect speech?

to protect it against state intervention for sure

i don't think policing discrete institutional decisions around speech + employment are even within the remit of the gov?

i find it v easy to imagine speech terrible enough that even if said outside the workplace would be sufficient to determine you didn't want this person working for you (and make that firing decision morally just). like if i went to a bar with an employee and he started talking about how in an ideal world we would commit genocide against various different ethnic/racial groups i wouldn't be like "this is disgusting and i don't want this person working with me any more but hate speech is protected free speech and he didn't say it at work so i shouldn't do anything about it."

There's no way that speech could be religiously motivated

institutions should have the latitude to hire and fire employees that it feels are doing a good or bad job fulfilling the institution's mission..

there are probably few choices open to the containing institution to signal their intellectual or cultural bona fides to the surrounding political community, other than hiring and firing (anything else would be too fussy/inconsequential, and amount to a kind of political-sphere commitment in what is essentially a position for bureaucratic-academic functionaries skilled at drawing in donors and enhancing university prestige).

i don't think policing discrete institutional decisions around speech + employment are even within the remit of the gov?

if you're a religious figure employed by a religious institution and you start talking to people about how you no longer believe in god, even if it's not even posted on facebook or in a newspaper, i think that's pertinent to whether you're still able to carry out the mission of the institution - that seems intuitive to me.

All of these are probably valid points but this also means that we can have an opinion about, and even take action in response to, the university's/Potter's decisions in a case like this, especially if it is an issue that could concern us, wrt those of us who work in academic institutions. If anything, it was made clear that his resignation itself was motivated by negative reactions from influential people, including the Premier. Maybe academic freedom is not, or should not be, absolute but, in the end, I tend to agree with Treeship (and Mordy) that the content of the column does not justify someone losing a directorship, and, if someone can lose his post for publicly expressing an opinion, supported by data, about the existence of social problems in a province that nearly everyone agrees has its share of problems, that does seem a bit chilling.

Like, I don't think that should be seen as fundamentally contrary to the mission of someone in charge of the "Institute for the Study of Canada", and, if it is, that seems like a problem.

Anyway, McGill principal Suzanne Fortier pretty much explicitly agrees with j.'s point:

It is anybody’s judgment if after an article like that, politicians would be happy to come to an event,” Dr. Fortier said. “That’s not pressure, that’s just reality.”

http://activehistory.ca/2017/03/shes-hot-female-sessional-instructors-gender-bias-and-student-evaluations/

this is not coddling related per se, but I guess this is the best thread for it? was thinking that some of the factors ppl have identified as causes of the polarising behavior discussed itt could also be factors here as well (treating students more like consumers with corresponding "the customer is always right" attitudes etc)

One of the rolling academia threads would be the best place for that but, yeah, there's a mountain of literature on the uselessness of student evaluations, the factor discussed in that article being but one of the reasons. I'm just thankful that I now teach under Program Chairs who agree.

A useful archive of some of the literature: http://studentevaluationsareworthless.blogspot.com/2008/05/why-student-evaluations-of-teachers-are.html

I guess I don't think they're useless/worthless, since they can provide very valuable feedback. However, they can make or break your career when you are sessional, since departments sometimes use them as the sole measure of someone's teaching, which is a highly inappropriate use for them.

I can't find the rolling academia thread either so: I'm not sure that that Vimy Ridge incident couldn't have happened to a male professor tbh. As a (non-white and at-the-time young-looking) male instructor, I will note that in my first 2.5 years of teaching, I received plenty of challenges to my authority, ranging from students openly chatting throughout every class, no matter how many times I asked them not to; students who obviously plagiarized telling me aggressively "I'm not taking a zero" before slamming the door; a student asking repeatedly "where are you getting this information? Is it just from the Internet?" to the point where I started including bibliographies with my Powerpoint presentations; students refusing to leave my office after fighting a grade (for frankly worthless work) for 20-30 minutes...

Rolling higher education into the shitbin thread

Ah, thx

i work at a university. before getting my permanent job i was in the temp pool. one of my assignments was doing data entry on a batch of student evaluations for the linguistics department. some of the shit students would write would be crazy, in terms of being extremely negative about instructors who were broadly popular. was also strangely common for both male and female instructors to get comments about how cute or hot they were

Moved the discussion to the shitbin thread.