Free Speech and Creepy Liberalism

The way Canadian media has been covering this story has been driving me insane and really fits with the sort of discourse described in the OP. (That's one of the better ones.) Basically, a 22-year-old TA showed a clip of Jordan Peterson arguing against special pronouns for trans people in a tutorial on grammar and sparked a debate, which resulted in complaints. She secretly recorded a subsequent meeting with the prof and administration, where they used some OTT rhetoric and she cried. Their profoundly oppressive resolution to the situation was that the prof would see her lesson plans in advance and sit in on her tutorials and asked her not to play controversial stuff like that without contextualizing it. She went to the media with the recording; they managed to frame it as a free speech issue with pieces like "Thought police strike again" and "Inside Lindsay Shepherd's... Fight for Free Speech. The university and the professor ended up publicly apologizing to Shepherd (the TA) and she has become a celebrity for free speech warriors.

This gets at a lot of my issues: I'm a free speech libertarian but TAs have never had academic freedom, nor should they. Her job is to assist the professor with teaching his course. Reading over a TA's lesson plans, sitting in on his or her tutorials, and providing guidance on how to conduct them is not only normal and reasonable but generous and helpful. Literally no one's right to free speech has been compromised. If there is an academic freedom issue, it is that the professor has been made to publicly apologize and vilified by the media for doing his job.

That's one of the better ones

= the Star story in the first hyperlink is one of the less ridiculous takes from the MSM.

Well he accused the TA of violating Human Rights Codes right? Seems a bit hostile.

Also the video she played was of a round table discussion where Peterson was one of several participants. And he was arguing against laws requiring people to use preferred pronouns.

lol that information puts a different spin on this story

"Fortunately, in the history of religion, there is a term for occasions when what is called for is less the creation of new ideals than a recommitment to the ones we already are supposed to hold. A time when the tools of revolution look too crude and public, those of introspection too narrow and private. This is the time for reform—or, if the reform that is required is broad and sweeping enough, for reformation."

"reformation" was, of course, only ever a polite euphemism for "revolution".

i know this goes in gff's thread or the future-of-liberalism thread but i can never find them

http://jmrphy.net/blog/2017/04/11/on-turning-left-into-darkness/

― j

i hope i never start to enjoy arguing about politics that much

i disagree you can reform institutions but in revolutions you smash them xp

i guess you could say that the platonic forms of institutions exist even in the transition btwn pre-revolutionary / post-revolutionary states so it's only ever really a 'reform' (this seems like an exceptionally bleak analysis!) but i wouldn't say vice-versa that all reforms are really polite euphemism for revolution

i disagree you can reform institutions but in revolutions you smash them xp

― Mordy

to clarify "reformation" in the context of the Protestant Reformation (which is clearly the context in the piece quoted) was a polite euphemism for "revolution". (francis of assisi was a reformer, luther was a revolutionary.)

President Keyes, I agree that the rhetoric and reasoning given in the meeting was misguided and OTT, which is probably an academic labour and/or a pedagogy issue - but the actual conclusion still seems fair enough to me. I don't agree that there is a free speech issue here.

Also the video she played was of a round table discussion where Peterson was one of several participants. And he was arguing against laws requiring people to use preferred pronouns.

I've seen the video. We could debate whether Bill C-16 actually does what you describe and whether Peterson's objections were as limited as you say but, again, I don't see how Lindsay Shepherd's free speech was violated.

I dont really care if her free speech was violated or what that even means in Canada but yeah the prof was way ott and deserved to get aired out

In Shepherd’s recordings of her meeting with superiors, which she shared with The Canadian Press, she is heard arguing that she tried to present the situation neutrally in order to foster debate and discussion, and states that she herself does not support Peterson’s views on gender-neutral pronouns.

A defendable approach as long as it's construed as Socratic midwifery and if you own up to your responsibilities as an instructor once the students have said their piece. Otherwise it's just lazy relativism.

Distantly reminds me of 'teach the controversy' in some ways.

I dont really care if her free speech was violated or what that even means in Canada

The reason I'm talking about on a thread called "Free Speech and Creepy Liberalism" is that this is how it's being spun in the media, with conservative student groups organizing 'free speech rallies' in honour of her afterwards. Weirdly, even some of her opponents (and Rambukkan himself) seem to have accepted this framing, by discussing it in terms of whether she pushed free speech too far wrt Human Rights Codes or hate speech. I don't think it should have ever been regarded (even by the professor or the university) as anything other than a question of pedagogical efficacy and appropriate professor/TA management.

There may be an argument that an academic freedom issue does arise once the Human Rights Code or the university's gender and sexual violence policy have been invoked as the reason against showing the video, since that same reason should apply just as much to professors who ostensibly have academic freedom. It happened to be the case that the person showing the video was a TA, and so she could have been forbidden from showing it simply on pedagogical grounds, but had it been her professor who showed the video instead, the human rights argument (that showing the video created a harmful or discriminatory environment) would apply to him as well. I can imagine full professors, not just TAs, looking at this story and concluding that they'd better not be showing Jordan Peterson videos in class. (I'm not saying that they should be showing Jordan Peterson videos, just that the issue may extend to academic freedom.)

i have not been following your story sund4r but

TAs have never had academic freedom, nor should they

seems questionable. if academic freedom extends to classroom speech, management of the classroom, etc., then why shouldn't TAs have it? in my experience TAs were given little explicit/restrictive guidance about what to say or do and were generally expected to come up with whatever they wished to make use of their own teaching time (for discussion meetings), and often were basically expected to determine all grades independently as well. that's not to say a lecturer would not have authority to overrule or dictate, but since the expectation is that TAs work largely at their own discretion, it seems they should have whatever freedom we expect attaches to the teaching role.

OK wow, that was not my experience as a TA (in the US) or supervising TAs (in Canada or the US). Otherwise, some good points, jmm and j, and I will consider them further when I am more sober.

OK, in the cold and sober light of day, I actually think jmm is right. (The episode of The Agenda from which Shepherd's clip came was actually great, imo, btw.) I was prob having a reaction to the way the National Post was running with the story but it's totally true that the way Shepherd was treated by authority figures was unjust and heavy-handed and would have setting a chilling precedent. I'm going to stand by my position on TAs and academic freedom, though. I've never had the expectation that my TAs can work at their own discretion, nor was I treated that way when I was a TA.

This is an interesting wrinkle - no student ever actually complained: https://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/national/education/wilfrid-laurier-university-exonerates-ta-lindsay-shepherd/article37377602/

The President is making the right call tbh: https://wlu.ca/news/spotlights/2017/dec/president-statement-re-independent-fact-finder-report.html

"As much as people criticize students for being snowflakes, it turns out it was the professors."

i mean no shit right where do we think the students are learning this from

creepy conservatism

https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/the-trolls-of-academe-making-safe-spaces-into-brave-spaces/#!

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/01/11/opinion/social-media-dumber-steven-pinker.html

who gives a shit about Steven Pinker

I guess I could've clicked first but Steven Pinker is still a bore

i read How the Mind Works in college and remember it being enlightening (and extremely long). i think The Better Angels of Our Nature was an important intervention into commonly held beliefs about the prevalence of violence. the problem is you view everything through the prism of the culture war.

I'm not posting it as a PZ Myers endorsement, although I think he's mostly OK, but here's his rebuttal:
https://freethoughtblogs.com/pharyngula/2018/01/12/steven-pinker-and-the-new-york-times-are-making-us-dumber/

I think Pinker probably just made a dumb argument and instead of acknowledging that, people are going out of their way to explain around the words he said to "add context"

also the main problem with the political correctness argument isn't that people outright deny statistics (the rate of homicide is higher among black men) it's that such statements on their own aren't useful, as Singal points out further down the piece without rebutting the idea that these twisted liberals aren't acknowledging real facts

Liberals DENY that BLACK MEN are MORE VIOLENT is a fun distortion of both the actual facts and the position of most people

the problem is you view everything through the prism of the culture war.

I think the key paragraph in that piece on pinker is this one: "That’s because the pernicious social dynamics of these online spaces hammer home the idea that anyone who disagrees with you on any controversial subject, even a little bit, is incorrigibly dumb or evil or suspect. On a wide and expanding range of issues, there’s no such thing as good-faith disagreement."

you can occasionally see that around these parts as well but I think more of that is because we get sick and tired of each other because ilx is a village of maybe 100 people tops (73 donated to the last fundraiser). Anyway on the "no such thing as a good-faith disagreement" tip, here's a guy I met one time who - oh, just read it

https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2018/01/engineer-says-he-quit-google-after-order-to-stop-pro-diversity-posts/

After posting a handful of additional posts about diversity issues, Altheide was summoned to an urgent meeting with Hölzle. Hölzle is one of Google's most senior managers, with thousands of engineers reporting to him, directly or indirectly. There were several layers of management between the two men, and Altheide says those middle managers weren't involved in the meeting.

Hölzle asked Altheide to explain why he had been making these postings. "I don't think anything I will say right now will be a sufficient answer for you," Altheide said. When Hölzle insisted, Altheide said he wanted to "point out that blanket assumptions of good faith in diversity topics aren't data driven, given that the data shows not everyone is acting from a position of good faith."

Altheide says Hölzle told him that "if the majority of your coworkers are Nazis, it is better if you don't know about it." Altheide adds: "This I remembered verbatim because I thought it was a savagely tactless analogy for a Swiss man to be making."

"From now on I request that you avoid posting on controversial topics," Hölzle wrote in a post-meeting email. "I believe your intention is to make Google better; nevertheless I ask you to refrain from such posts since they are prone to inciting others to comment in a way which violates our policies."

I think this is the key:

Mr. Pinker goes on to argue that when members of this group encounter, for the first time, ideas that he believes to be frowned upon or suppressed in liberal circles — that most suicide bombers are Muslim or that members of different racial groups commit crimes at different rates — they are “immediately infected with both the feeling of outrage that these truths are unsayable” and are provided with “no defense against taking them to what we might consider to be rather repellent conclusions.”

That’s unfortunate, Mr. Pinker argues, because while someone might use these facts to support bigoted views, that needn’t be the case, because “for each one of these facts, there are very powerful counterarguments for why they don’t license racism and sexism and anarcho-capitalism and so on.”

and this goes directly to your comment, mh

since that seems to be literally your point ("it's that such statements on their own aren't useful") i think the context is probably extremely important in this case

I was concentrating more on "immediately infected with both the feeling of outrage that these truths are unsayable" in the first paragraph

it's not that they're unsayable, it's that (this is where I go rant on about context, in the same way someone might say one of those statements and then rant on about how context is key)

it's introducing the idea that people deny starting conversations with things that are useless without context, because people tune out when you go into context

it's creating a strawman of the liberal who actively suppresses facts, rather than people who avoid them as a starting point because they're an end result

i think it depends. you're right that some ppl are not receptive to contextualizing controversial facts but i think many people are.

I think Tom's right to link it to the idea of bad faith discussions -- if I want to talk about how violence in a demographic is a problem and I am speaking in good faith, I won't be shy about acknowledging it, but I'll start the discussion with my perception of why this is the case

People arguing in bad faith see such statements as ends in themselves. These people are violent because... these people are violent. They see that as a conclusion, not a data point. The solution is either facilitating a way to have a discussion in good faith, or if you're incapable of facilitating or moderation (hi google) just blacklisting the topic

I don't think that you are arguing in good faith for people arguing in bad faith

there are very powerful counterarguments for why they don’t license racism and sexism and anarcho-capitalism and so on.

This gets us right back to the core problem of how few people create mental maps of remote reality that allow adequate complexity and do not immediately lapse into binary thinking. People seem able to develop complex thoughts in regard to facts they encounter frequently in real life, but the more remote the subject becomes from their immediate reality, the more simplified their ideas become and the fewer shades of gray are allowed, until it is all stark black & white thinking.

iow, powerful counterarguments don't avail against binary thinking.

I was curious and decided to come at this from complete ignorance

Bad faith (Latin: mala fides) is double mindedness or double heartedness in duplicity, fraud, or deception. It may involve intentional deceit of others, or self-deception.

I think there's a case for people thinking they're making good faith arguments but aren't, and I'm willing to extend an olive branch only so far tbh

imho false consciousness arguments are bad faith. the least amount of faith you can lend your interlocutor is that they can represent themselves in an discussion.

haha i mean it's one thing to accuse your intelocutor of having false consciousness it's another to posit its existence or its position in a chain of causality

but this doesn't work either way. even if the chain of causality is "bad faith put this idea into the world / guy picks up on bad faith idea in good faith" you don't gain anything from "it's poison at the root so don't touch it" bc it means you're leaving good faith ppl believing the bad faith idea with no context or pushback. and this is ignoring the fact that a lot of these "bad faith ideas" are true or at least true to some extent (which is why they require the mitigating contextual information).

honestly, you get to a point where some people don't care about causality or w/e and why don't people in 2018 just make better lives for themselves. it's not my problem

even if the chain of causality is "bad faith put this idea into the world / guy picks up on bad faith idea in good faith" you don't gain anything from "it's poison at the root so don't touch it" bc it means you're leaving good faith ppl believing the bad faith idea with no context or pushback. and this is ignoring the fact that a lot of these "bad faith ideas" are true or at least true to some extent (which is why they require the mitigating contextual information).

― Mordy, Friday, January 12, 2018 8:32 PM (two hours ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

but again, you're talking about talking _to_ 'bad faith' people. i'm talking about talking _about_ them.

if i'm talking to somebody really committed to an incorrect idea then i go looking for a value we share, figure out why it matters to them, and then build on the shared value to a sense of communion at a final point

_arguing_ is so unpleasant

People arguing in bad faith see such statements as ends in themselves. These people are violent because... these people are violent. They see that as a conclusion, not a data point.

^ I think this is a good point

Like almost always when I've seen the FACT about homicide rates being higher among black men FACT it's been in internet postings that weren't looking for a reasoned response or discussion, by people who weren't really interested in facts, but liked the idea of rhetorically appending FACT after their statements

Obviously there's a kind of intellectual nobility to that work which take these FACTS and analyses them and digs deep into the context to get us readers of their thinkpiece or blog post a fuller, truer picture. Good on those who take up this work.

... but the difficulty of doing that work full-time, these days, is the difference between engaging constructively with opinions you don't agree with, as our better selves do in an idealised philosophical life, and engaging with an outpouring of sheer toxic sludge, as it often is in real life. We notice that, with the big contemporary right-wing positions - pro-Trump, pro-Brexit, things of that sort - very often, when you're out in the wild, and you meet someone who holds the position, you also meet someone who has a problem. Very often their position is really just an expression of their problem; making it a smoky, draining thing to engage with, and meanwhile, unless qualified, you'll struggle to help with their problem, and there it will sit, even if you 'win' about the position. People who have a problem are much easier to talk about than to. And sometimes it feels more useful, to talk about, rather than to them?

well put