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

As in it never happened or…?

Yeah I’m kinda bothered by the fact that master’s candidates don’t understand the definition of synonym

― sound of scampo talk to me (El Tomboto), Monday, October 12, 2020 10:00 AM (fifty minutes ago) bookmarkflaglink

Seriously. Maybe learn how your own language works before you start throwing shade on other tongues, my friends.

I don’t think the students are “policing other languages,” they’re policing the professor’s choice of an example.

Same thing as far as I'm concerned. If it's not an English word, you don't treat it like English, period. Why should you leave out one of the most spoken languages in the world from the pool of relevant examples in the context of a Communications class?

As in it never happened or…?

It has been reported by BBC and CNN.

"There are over 10,000 characters in the Chinese written language"

Is the suggestion here that any other Chinese word would have been an equally suitable example?

Yes, just like you can readily replace 'like' with 'sesquipedalian'.

It's reasonable to think, based on this report, that the black students were kind of silly for taking offence - while at the same time thinking that this white "communications expert" was a dickhead for ignoring them, and that the students of that class deserve to have someone else teach them who isn't going to minimize, belittle, or ignore them, or even indeed call them navel-gazing anglo-imperialists.

No, it isn't reasonable, it's racist towards Chinese people.

still mostly bothered that students at one of the top 20 business schools in the world are taking a graduate level communications course and can’t use “synonym” correctly in a letter that apparently several of them all read and agreed on

Where are you getting the idea he minimized or belittled the students? The timeline is very unclear from the article, but given how short the course was, it seems like they went this route pretty quickly:

"So they wrote a letter to the dean of the Marshall School of Business, Geoffrey Garrett, among others, describing Patton as insensitive and incapable of teaching the three-week intensive communications course."

I expect we'll see more of this kind of miscommunication/misunderstanding escalating rapidly up the upper admin with universities being online. Or at least I'd like to think this wouldn't have happened in the exact same way if the students were with in the classroom with the professor. It feels like some of the paranoia and distrust of being online leaking into new formats (e.g., the "edited lectures" speculation).

Patton said he emailed the entire program to apologize and apologized again the next morning.

Too many (Western) native English speakers don't quite understand how overbearing their linguistic and cultural domination can be sometimes, which I suppose is normal. I'm just gonna bail out of this conversation.

Pom, to be fair, the homophone in question has an incredibly awful history, especially in the US, where the class was being taught.

It's reasonable to think, based on this report, that the black students were kind of silly for taking offence - while at the same time thinking that this white "communications expert" was a dickhead for ignoring them, and that the students of that class deserve to have someone else teach them who isn't going to minimize, belittle, or ignore them, or even indeed call them navel-gazing anglo-imperialists.

Have you ever been to China? It is startling how much they say ne ga all the time in conversation.

please pretend they don't

From the CNN report fwiw:

"All I can say is, the professor's pronunciation of the Chinese phrase "neige" was accurate, and his use of it as an example of filler language was linguistically appropriate. It's a *very* common phrase," tweeted Yale law professor Taisu Zhang, who has previously taught in Hong Kong and China.

The Black China Caucus, an American organization that describes itself as "amplifying Black voices in the China space," also defended Patton on Twitter.
"The BCC is shocked by how USC mishandled this situation," the organization posted. "Not only would a quick Mandarin lesson reveal that "nèi ge" is a common pronoun, but USC's reaction cheapens and degrades substantive conversations surrounding real (diversity, equity and inclusion) challenges on college campuses!"

A petition sent to Dean Garrett and other USC leadership, which was shared with CNN, was signed by nearly 100 alumni of USC Marshall expressing support for Patton -- the majority of whom are from mainland China, Hong Kong, Taiwan and other Chinese-speaking regions.
"We represent more than a dozen nationalities and ethnicities and support the global inclusiveness Professor Patton brings to the classroom," said the alumni petition.
"Most of us are Chinese, some ethnically, some by nationality, and many others have spent extensive time in China. Most of us live in China. We unanimously recognize Prof Patton's use of 'na ge' as an accurate rendition of common Chinese use, and an entirely appropriate and quite effective illustration of the use of pauses."

tbh I think my main issue here is tactical as this story is what the wet dreams of extremely selective right-wing free speech warriors are made of, while in the meantime this pitched effort to protect and encourage racism moves forward: https://www.insidehighered.com/news/2020/10/07/colleges-cancel-diversity-programs-response-trump-order

Everyone giggling about this and showing themselves really didn’t read the original piece now did they?

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.”

The Yale law professor in article Sund4r shared disputes that it was pronounced wrong, though I don't know if he or the others cited actually heard him speak or is basing it on how it was written in the article.

a professor has shot them down condescendingly in front of their peers

this isn't in the article either...

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.