Free Speech and Creepy Liberalism

He frequently gets clowned by the crew at Lawyers, Guns & Money.

oh god and the whole kendzior bro argument. i had happily forgotten all that

ugh i don't even want to touch that one

he argues with other leftists and doesn't stop when they tell him to fuck off. at least, that's what i've seen with e.g. sady doyle and i think some of the TNI type people

― goole, Thursday, January 29, 2015 5:29 PM (42 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

right but it seems like i mainly see him giggled over by media types? i get the TNI-crew scorn (they're precisely the academic-radical-left axis i think chait is accidentally right to pinpoint) but he seems like the target of like blog-media-ppl derision too

anyway i liked what greenwald got down on this

https://firstlook.org/theintercept/2015/01/28/petulant-entitlement-syndrome-journalists/

he's got a combo of zero-irony anti-jokeman and true-leftist "more committed to your cause than you are, can't you see" about him. i don't think he's wrong, maybe on a parsing of this or that issue, sure, but generally he's just kind of a goober which does throw the cliquishness of a lot of discourse into relief i guess

All of that can create a disincentive for engaging on those topics: the purpose of it is to impose a psychic cost for doing so, and one is instinctively tempted to avoid that.

Of course, all of that can be unpleasant or – if one allows it to be – worse than unpleasant.

But that’s the price one pays for having a platform. And, on balance, it’s good that this price has to be paid. In fact, the larger and more influential platform one has, the more important it is that the person be subjected to aggressive, even harsh, criticisms. Few things are more dangerous than having someone with influence or power hear only praise or agreement. Having people devoted to attacking you – even in unfair, invalid or personal ways – is actually valuable for keeping one honest and self-reflective.

It would be wonderful on one level if all criticisms were expressed in the soft and respectful tones formalized in the U.S. Senate, but it’s good and necessary when people who wield power or influence are treated exactly like everyone else, which means that sometimes people say mean and unfair things about you in not-nice tones. Between erring on the side of people with power being treated with excess deference or excess criticisms, the latter is vastly preferable. The key enabling role of the government, media and other elites in the disasters and crimes of the post-9/11 era, by itself, leaves no doubt about this. It also proves that one of the best aspects of the internet is that it gives voice to people who are not credentialed – meaning not molded through the homogenizing grinder of establishment media outlets.

generally he's just kind of a goober which does throw the cliquishness of a lot of discourse into relief i guess

― goole, Thursday, January 29, 2015 6:19 PM (2 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

right especially put next to the cool kids at TNI--whom "utilize the language of social justice without particularly caring if your speech contributes to the cause" is totally a shot at--his earnest and serious stuff on actually building class power makes him look v much the stuffed shirt

I don't understand what Chait has supposedly added to the argument, it's a rehash of talking points. A rehashedhash.

Example: Jill Filipovic criticized trigger warnings far more substantively almost a year ago:

http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2014/mar/05/trigger-warnings-can-be-counterproductive

well and tellingly

https://twitter.com/JillFilipovic/status/560096208983953408

i like freddie a lot but he has an unfortunate tendency to boil all of his media criticism down to cool kids vs unpopular kids (of which he self-identifies as one). which is not wrong but also not right.

i mean, in the sense that if youre going to formulate yr media criticism around yr conception of the ny media social and work scene itd be helpful if you had an accurate one i guess

tbf max, he's not the only one to boil all mediac criticism down to cool kids vs unpopular kids ;)

i like freddie a lot but he has an unfortunate tendency to boil all of his media criticism down to cool kids vs unpopular kids (of which he self-identifies as one). which is not wrong but also not right.

― max, Thursday, January 29, 2015 7:03 PM (14 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

isn't his point about adopting social justice language without nearly as much regard for its actualization a more substantive crit of the TNI style though

i dont actually know what you're getting at mordy!

max, you're a Greenwald star

Ygelsias also good: http://www.vox.com/2015/1/29/7945119/all-politics-is-identity-politics

This is, I think, the problem with idea of "identity politics" as a shorthand for talking about feminism or anti-racism. The world of navel-gazing journalism is currently enmeshed in a couple of partially overlapping conversations, about "PC culture," diversity, social justice, technological change, and shifting business models. One thread of this is the (accurate) observation that social media distribution creates new incentives for publications to be attuned to feminist and minority rights perspectives in a way that was not necessarily the case in the past. But where some see a cynical play for readership, I see an extraordinarily useful shock to a media ecosystem that's too long been myopic in its range of concerns.

The implication of this usage (which is widespread, and by no means limited to people who agree with Chait) is that somehow an identity is something only women or African-Americans or perhaps LGBT people have. White men just have ideas about politics that spring from a realm of pure reason, with concerns that are by definition universal.

You see something similar in Noam Scheiber's argument that New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio went astray by emphasizing an "identity group agenda" of police reform at the expense of a (presumably identity-free) agenda of populist economics. For starters, it is actually inevitable that a New York City mayor would end up spending more time on his police department management agenda (something that is actually under the mayor's control) than on tax policy, which is set by the State Legislature in Albany.

But beyond that, not addressing a racially discriminatory status quo in policing is itself a choice. Indeed, it's a kind of identity group appeal — to white people, whose preferred means of striking the balance between liberty and security, in many contexts, is that security should be achieved by depriving other people of their civil liberties.

This is where the at-times tiresome concept of privilege becomes very useful. The truth is that almost all politics is, on some level, about identity. But those with the right identities have the privilege of simply calling it politics while labeling other people's agendas "identity."

damn thats a pleasant surprise from him imo

http://emutalk.org/2015/01/talking-back-to-the-emu-aaup-about-yik-yak/

haven't seen a link to the main story yet, as it's behind a chronicle of higher ed paywall

yeah I wanted to read that story too, should probably just ask on yik yak about it right?

don't see what the tech angle adds to this though, unless it's this: social media today engenders meanness and in particular meanness toward women and minorities, in some way that past gossiping did not.

http://emutalk.org/2015/01/a-new-faculty-challenge-fending-off-abuse-on-yik-yak/

bit more

i think the tech angle is that the power to speak has been substantially redistributed relative to many old arrangements. i saw one comment, seemingly from a student, about how perhaps this was just a way of compensating for a felt lack of voice in courses, with student evaluations at the end of the semester not being enough. but with e.g. live-tweeting of media events, with comment boxes on newspaper sites, with those crazy kinds of presentations where the presenters project real-time audience comments behind them while sessions are in progress… the standard lecture hall experience is one that can create lots of discontent that would otherwise be suppressed, expressed elsewhere, or whatever. having an avenue for its backchannel expression simultaneously with the event causing it is… pretty unprecedented, in education (where ways of dealing with authority are pretty old and slow-moving).

i'm still reading through these posts, but this:

Harassment– particularly sexual harassment– involves a power relationship. It is clearly possible for a professor to sexually harass a student– heck, that’s one of the clear ways that a tenured professor can get fired. Is it possible for a student to sexually harass a professor? And can that happen anonymously? Honestly, I don’t think so because professors have all the power.

strikes me as way way off, esp in light of the technology involved

http://www.theatlantic.com/education/archive/2015/02/stripping-a-professor-of-tenure-over-a-blog-post/385280/

In my view, McAdams' blog post offered one valuable criticism of the graduate instructor: her after-class suggestion that gay marriage opponents should keep quite in the classroom to avoid the possibility of offending gay classmates was wrongheaded (and especially absurd at an avowedly Catholic university). She ought to be met with forceful, intelligent, polite counterarguments—and to reflect on the fact that gay marriage is blessedly legal in so many states right now thanks in large part to the success advocates have had persuading so many opponents to change their minds. If the subject is taboo, a far greater number of freshmen who enter college opposing gay marriage will graduate four years later never having been forced to defend their views. It's social conservatives who ought to hope opponents keep quiet in philosophy class—they're losing most of the arguments that are conducted on the merits!

There are all sorts of valid criticisms of McAdams' blog post that could be made. "He should instead have reacted to the undergrad student’s story by approaching the philosophy department chairman, or the director of graduate studies, or the teaching assistant’s mentor if known to him, or (very gently) the teaching assistant herself," Matthew J. Franck argues at First Things. "The point is to make poor teachers better ones, not to throw others on the defensive about matters they feel strongly about. If the urge to blog about the incident was irresistible, McAdams should have left her name out of it, which was unnecessary to his point."

But even assuming that he erred there, got some of the facts wrong, and that the post could've been written more charitably, his sins were hardly beyond the pale of behavior commonly exhibited by college faculty, =and falls far short of what ought to be required to terminate a tenured faculty member with decades of contributions. As the reasoning set forth by Holtz shows, the precedents created in this case could be used to terminate basically any professor, tenure or not.

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.