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

I did read that piece, but I've seen some inconsistent reporting, because other sources seem to be saying that his pronunciation was not incorrect.

also it doesn't seem like the professor is trying to make himself a martyr over this? He's apologised repeatedly

_a professor has shot them down condescendingly in front of their peers_

this isn't in the article either...

_a professor has shot them down condescendingly in front of their peers_

this isn't in the article either...

Multiple things can be true at the same time: the Black-identifying students who wrote the letter had a repugnant shock or whatever they felt at hearing a homonym for a slur--and their feelings are valid. The whole thing probably also moved incredibly quickly, being (it seems?) one single lesson during a 3-week intensive class, which seems like an impossibly brief time to teach complex things. If they're ever going into international environments where Chinese is spoken, they will surely hear "neige" and have to find their own footing with hearing a near-slur, and how that feels, and some level of acceptance of a culture & language that's completely independent and owes them nothing in that sense.

Otoh it wouldn't take a lot of foresight on the professor's part to introduce the term with a warning/explanation, not because academia is being WOKE POLICED, but out of concern for students who experience that racial slur as violence, to protect them from that.

On the third hand, maybe he DID, or tried to, and it wasn't accepted? Idk, do we really need to parse the transcript to say that things are complicated and trauma is real?

xxxp again, as I said before, if there's a different pronunciation that's recognizable to Chinese speakers, it wasn't apparent to me as a non-Chinese speaker.

But also, my main suspicion of this story is it’s not, how shall I say, congruent with the world that exists, like since when have universities given a shit about black students in such disputes, especially over something as debatable as this? If he apologised then why fire him? That’s why I’m kind of like, there’s more to this than what out there.

They...didn't fire him, they just replaced him with another professor for this class? Which, there's no mention of who they replaced him with or whether the curriculum is being revised or anything actually useful in solving this problem for the long term. As we demand more from institutions, it's important that they actually GROW from that and not just spasm reflexively. There's no mention of that here--possibly it's not very complex reporting and possibly there's just a lot to consider that doesn't fit into one news article.

I like how we all get to write dogma-serving fan fiction about a few paragraphs of a news story

yah no kidding

btw Friedersdork got to this a couple weeks ago:

https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2020/09/fight-against-words-sound-like-are-not-slurs/616404/

One skeptic warned that the “ridiculous sounding story” seemed like a “fabricated Reddit meme.” Another was suspicious that it so neatly fit a narrative of “wacky campus leftists repressing free speech.”

The grievance letter went on, “To repeatedly use the word in each session and conveniently stop the Zoom recording right before saying the word, then resume the Zoom recording afterwards is puzzling to us, and makes it appear that his actions were calculated. In other words, he was aware of the grave and inappropriate nature of the example and purposefully chose to leave it out of his Zoom recording for the session.” (When a video recording of the controversial example from one of the classes was posted online, that allegation was proved factually wrong.)

Itt we're hung up on one news story but I have a professor friend who's terrified of being targeted by students for something she says in passing in a zoom lecture where she can't see people's faces and is talking into a void, awkwardly, with little feedback.

It's easy to say, "Well then maybe she should't SAY THAT THING" but it's not that simple. She's incredibly highly credentialed in her field of gender + literary theory, and has already experienced an undergrad student with no background in that scholarship attacking her during a zoom class over the phrasing of her invitation to share their preferred gender pronouns, if they have them.

Like...it's a weird world for teachers, is what I'm hearing from her + others.

we don't all have to fasttrack our opinions. still trying to fill in the gaps in the story, and tbh I feel like this is one where i'm better suited listening.

xxxxxxxxposts

xp
yes, I think the teaching-on-Zoom aspect is crucial. For one thing it's extremely difficult to lecture and keep an eye on chat comments and then, afaik, you can't retrieve chat comment logs once the meeting is gone and nor can you c&p them easily. But yeah beyond this one story, I'm not currently teaching (I'm a student in one online course) but know many who are and yes, it sucks ass afaiui

in orbit otm 3 or 4x itt

xpost virtual anything is a bitch. there are some classes where everybody prefers to respond in the chat rather than speak aloud, and I don't enforce "speech only" for answers as that shuts out an entire learning style (though of course if it's practice calls, they have no choice - can't 'type out' your customer service).

and the silences that result from that can be misleading. few times I've had dead silence after a question and nobody replying after multiple attempts and fearing that I did something to offend them only to find out a) the sound went out on my end and they can't hear me, b) they just don't know the answer, or c) they're not paying attention.

I do like MS Teams and how it does save comments for the duration of the class. so if I create a 14 day class in MS Teams, all 14 days worth of comments stay in there (which has come in handy for disciplinary issues or looking back to see if you missed anything in class)

imo if students tell you some inessential part of your presentation is offensive, you pull it from the presentation until you figure out the right direction. education isn’t a one-way street, it’s a negotiation between teachers and students to determine the best way to convey knowledge and skills while making sure the core curricula is learned

this isn’t a question of the curriculum’s integrity, it’s a one-off example he felt wasn’t speaking to the students about. if he had a decent rapport with his students he could ask if they’d be willing to talk to him about an alternate presentation or maybe framing it in a way that’d make it more acceptable to students who were half-tuned out in his boring lecture until he dropped what sounded like a racial slur

imo the issue is that this was more “the instructor is always right” mentality and if he couldn’t pause his anecdote for a day — presumably that wasn’t his only example — maybe he’s generally not very responsive as a teacher?

They also said they’d reached out to fellow Chinese students, who “confirmed that the pronunciation of this word is much different than what Professor Patton described in class. The word is most commonly used with a pause in between both syllables.”

This isn't a citation of Chinese students. It's a citation of anonymous letter-writers paraphrasing anonymous secondhand sources.

The letter was not signed by any individuals, but instead by "Black MBA candidates c/o 2022."
CNN obtained a copy of the letter, but could not find an official USC group by that name or reach the letter-writers for comment.

CNN link btw: https://www.cnn.com/2020/09/10/us/usc-chinese-professor-racism-intl-hnk-scli/index.html

Having said all of that, I actually agree that these are reasonable grounds to be suspicious of the story:

But also, my main suspicion of this story is it’s not, how shall I say, congruent with the world that exists, like since when have universities given a shit about black students in such disputes, especially over something as debatable as this? If he apologised then why fire him? That’s why I’m kind of like, there’s more to this than what out there.

If people would read the Atlantic article that would help imo.

Seems odd that Campus Reform seems to be hosting the only publicly available video of the incident but USC apparently confirms its authenticity:

I cannot believe this is real, but it is.

This USC Professor is on leave after students were offended that a Chinese word he used during a lecture on foreign languages sounded like an english racial slur.

Watch the video for yourself: pic.twitter.com/HkFPMEP5I2

— Cabot Phillips (@cabot_phillips) September 3, 2020

apparently he started using the example in his lectures 5 years in an effort to be more inclusive of foreign students

My baseline reaction to this story is that it's unfortunate but necessary to go through mishaps like this to hammer out exactly what existing in a diverse environment is going to be like for everyone involved and that things are a good bit more complex than White vs Black. I don't think anyone on either side of this really did anything wrong other than not listening to each other.

100% agreed, DJP.

A propos of nothing itt except the thread title, my (effective) father in law gave me a copy of The Closing of the American Mind last week and insisted forcefully that I read it because it's the greatest work of philosophy in a generation and explains everything that's happening in America today.

Surprisingly (ikr?), I will not be doing so.

Trevor Noah's and Ronny Chieng's discussion of the issue, referenced in the Atlantic article (Chieng didn't seem to take issue with the pronunciation and pronounces it himself): https://www.facebook.com/watch/?v=625020645075008

{tries to find a deep enough "second thoughts you had second thoughts about" thread where it's okay to quote Little Dum Dum Club jokes that Ronny enjoys about his own accent}

Journaliste van The Atlantic als perfecte metafoor voor een halve eeuw Amerika en het Midden-Oosten pic.twitter.com/tKFgFmi3wW

— Jan (@j_postma) November 27, 2020

Pulitzer Prize winner hangs herself on twitter and straightens the noose while at it.

Caitlin Flanagan wrote a piece a while ago about being diagnosed with a terminal illness, and ever since I've been mentally tapping my foot and looking at my watch every time I see her name.

I'm just going to leave this here, and you can think about whether wishing death on female journalists, regardless of their ignorance or abhorrent politics, is really the ~Free Speech Issue~ you wanna get behind.

https://theconversation.com/online-attacks-on-female-journalists-are-increasingly-spilling-into-the-real-world-new-research-150791

https://www.corneliustoday.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/07/Gorilla-yawn-13ot35s.jpg

teenage khameini on point with the revolutionary style

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/e/e6/Childhood_photo_of_Seyed_Ali_Khamenei.jpg

A NEW DISPATCH

https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2022/05/social-media-democracy-trust-babel/629369

needless to say i consider the general thesis here (social media is why things are happening) to be epiphenomenal distraction (if not scapegoating), like doing 10k words on a boil while refusing to discuss your plague; but, to the extent that this particular boil does exist and is suppurating, and to the extent that its effects do feed back into and worsen the plague itself, i was interested in seeing if the guy who thinks it's the entire disease could bring himself to recommend the minimum policy necessary to treat it (nationalization). here's what he came up with:

Perhaps the biggest single change that would reduce the toxicity of existing platforms would be user verification

and

One of the first orders of business should be compelling the platforms to share their data and their algorithms with academic researchers.

and

The most important change we can make to reduce the damaging effects of social media on children is to delay entry until they have passed through puberty.

good luck w your zits.

Social media as It's a Small World Fast Pass queue.

show your papers to goofy and three years later you get to be a datum in one of these articles

dlh otm about how pathetic the suggested remedies are

You guys have any better ideas? I'm genuinely interested.

The flood.

many decisions would remain to be taken about architecture and no doubt many would be bad, but until public ownership removes profit+growth as the central compulsions of social-media systems design, the systematic emotional terrorism these articles always complain about is not merely going to be incentivized but actually necessary.

Ok, so create a national free social network without the focus on maximizing engagement? I like that idea.

well no one will post on it if facebook is still there. you have to seize facebook first. then you've got facebook, so you might as well cancel your own project.

lest anyone think i think the state will be saving anybody, what we're actually gonna get instead of that is another one of our public-private partnerships, where everything about how upset you get every morning stays p much the same but the intelligence community has a little more say in exactly how.

First we take SnapChattan, then we take LinkdIn

Perhaps the youths are hopeless because they correctly read the room on where things are headed.

:/

Pareene had a description of Haidt years ago that said Haidt only hangs out with rich manhattanites which is why his very peculiar and particular ideas about liberal and conservative are the way they are.

It would also explain why the solutions are from the most milquetoast clueless rich person liberalism

This is pretty insane. So glad my kids didn't end up at that school.

It’s also been debunked previously.

As Title IX attorney Alexandra Brodsky wrote in her book, Sexual Justice: “No one, I think, wants to live in a world where the Shitty Media Men list or bathroom scrawling is plausibly a top choice.” Unfortunately, that’s often how things go, and then we end up in a place where a legacy publication devotes thousands of words to the victims of cancel culture, rather than, say, administrators who ignore revenge porn.

But Weil does not examine the context of the Bay Area’s protests or the allegations that led to their walkout — beyond noting that, again, “a group of students had been swapping nude images of female classmates.” This characterization makes it seem like the incidents are no big deal, just kid stuff that snowballed out of control — when, historically speaking, social ostracization is equally endemic to the American high school experience, and in this particular case, the students were mad that nude photos of them were being passed around like party flyers.

For a “look at the terrifying new world of cancel culture” story it seems like something that could have taken place 40 years ago - school response to an incident is totally inadequate, teenagers pass around a true story that gets exaggerated, someone gets ostracized and thinks it was unfair - the main difference is in the 80s it would likely have been the girl who would be the subject of exaggerated rumors and had her high school experience ruined.