New Sidebar Link: New Discourses

 It brings me great pleasure to add New Discourses to the sidebar, a product of the merry pranksters Peter Boghossian, James Lindsay, and Helen Pluckrose. Particularly, I wanted to mention their social justice encyclopedia section, with an excellent definition of "good white":

...Social Justice Theory is particularly harsh on “white progressives” (that is, good whites), who it insists are the most complicit in causing and perpetuating racism. In plain language, this supports the hypothesis that the more woke one gets, the more intensely one will be criticized by the woke. This makes it very difficult to avoid concluding that critical whiteness studies done by white people are hardly more than the masochistic projections of the theorists engaging in it (and reveals a particularly sadistic component to the same when done by people of color).

 There simply isn't enough of this sort of thing in the world, and it needs praise at every turn.

Postgrad Survivor: Why Academics Won't Defend Academic Freedom

I have previously written about why the #SokalSquared hoax will go nowhere, mainly due to institutional incentives that all point the wrong way. More along this line comes today from James A. Lindsay, who asks, "Are Academics Cowards?" I incline to think his question is a tendentious way of expressing the underlying problem — and he explains, so does he. The thesis, basically, is that academics in the sciences (i.e., anything harder and more empirical than grievance studies) invest absurd amounts of their lives in very narrow areas. This extreme specialization makes them overqualified for work in the private sector (and much in government), while putting their careers increasingly at risk should they fail to advance toward a teaching spot, and more, to one with tenure.

Chances are, if you’re looking for academic jobs, especially in the sciences, you’re coming off a postdoc or two, so you’ve literally spent the last decade or more in training for the job you hope to get. You’ve made incredible sacrifices for it. You’ve invested more into getting past the first hurdle of a future career than almost anyone else. Just imagine training at double full time, paid less than minimum wage, for a decade for a job and then being able to think it’s worth risking the career you’re working for to make a political point, even a really important or necessary one.

 So, such people act rationally when confronted with a chiefly political threat: they ignore it as best they can, and defer to the extent necessary to continue their careers. The problem with this is obvious. "Social Justice approaches", Lindsay writes, "do not seek to further improve the objectivity of science. Instead, they aim to introduce opposing biases, which they see as effectively counteracting existing ones." That is, academia now is a game of Survivor. It takes the smallest offense to be voted off the island — even in the sciences. The Lysenkoist attack on these disciplines is an attack on civilization itself.

Self-Parodist Attacks U. Chicago "Safe Spaces" Letter, Pratfalls

Vox has a new essay by Kevin Gannon about that mean old letter from the University of Chicago from Dean of Students Jay Ellison rejecting outright "safe spaces" and other shibboleths adopted elsewhere in the country by other universities. "Safe spaces" and no-platforming being the opposite of free inquiry and free speech, they comprise a prima facie antithesis of what the university stands for. Gannon comes to tell us they are all wrong. This is really a power trip, you see:

I’ve been teaching on the college level for 18 years, and I also direct my university’s Teaching and Learning Center, so I’ve been following the debate over "trigger warnings," "safe spaces," and the purported scourge of "political correctness" for quite a while. Despite the apocalyptic tone that often accompanies screeds against supposedly coddled students and their trigger-free safe spaces, the issues involved strike me as far more complicated than the overheated rhetoric suggests.

As with any conversation about teaching and learning, context and nuance matter greatly — but they’re not present in most of the critics’ attempted takedowns of trigger warnings (better called "content advisories," in my estimation) or safe spaces.

"Nuance", of course, has nothing to do with shouting down or outright censoring dissenting views, thanks to Title IX rules engineered to suppress anything that stresses students. The man pays lip service to academic freedom (emboldening mine)...

Academic freedom is the sine qua non of higher education. Students ought to be challenged, even made uncomfortable, in order to learn in deep and meaningful ways. And, of course, collegiate education is where students must encounter perspectives different from their own. No one who genuinely believes in higher education is going to dispute any of that. And that’s what this dean and the anti-trigger-warnings, no-safe-spaces crowd are counting on — that the surface veneer of reasonableness in these admonitions to the class of 2020 will obscure the rotten pedagogy and logical fallacies that infest this entire screed.

... but then proceeds to show he lacks even the slightest grasp of what logical fallacies might actually look like — because his essay is shot through with them. Indeed, it's a stew of politically-minded cant, name-calling in service of academic intellectual rigor mortis. Stealing from Facebook friend Pat Kambhampati, a few particulars, with additional editing and annotations of my own:

1. Question the messenger instead of the message.

   Even the timing of this missive raises questions. Why go full blast against this purported scourge of wimpy, touchy-feely educational malpractice right up front? Is there a safe-spaces petition percolating in the ranks of the first-years? Are the dean and the university worried that people will lose respect for the almighty maroon if they didn’t stake out the tough-guy intellectual turf from the beginning? Did they sit around and ask themselves what Milton Friedman would have done?

2. Dismiss the arguments because the other person lacks the correct Lived Experience.

   The greatest threat to genuine academic freedom comes from within. Coddled students who are used to getting trophies for everything don’t want to engage with stuff they don’t like, so they wrap themselves in entitlement and demand trigger warnings to protect their feelz. Or they want safe spaces to hide from the big, bad world. Or they want the university to cancel a lecture because the speaker is from the wrong demographic. And if universities don’t make a stand against this foolishness, Western Civilization itself will collapse.
   
   That’s a comforting narrative to the academic elite who feel like they’re faced with an existential crisis. Rather than seeing themselves as clinging to the last vestiges of the 1950s, they get to paint themselves as staunch advocates of all that is good and worthy. And there’s an audience for this fiction — people still read Allan Bloom. But as critiques of inequality have shown time and again, when you’re accustomed to privilege, equality feels like oppression.

   What this really amounts to is a total failure to address the arguments raised by the U. Chicago letter. Gannon here claims that so long as you're the right aggrieved group, it's perfectly acceptable to demand protection from foreign or even hostile ideas. Is the point of the university to teach critical thinking skills, or orthodoxy? Gannon knows which side he falls on.
3. Claim empathy for one group of people. Then any attacks are attacks upon a special group of people.

   If I’m teaching historical material that describes war crimes like mass rape, shouldn’t I disclose to my students what awaits them in these texts? If I have a student suffering from trauma due to a prior sexual assault, isn’t a timely caution the empathetic and humane thing for me to do?

   Sure, if the point is to infantilize them.
4. Donald Trump is the reason we can't have nice things:

   Sure, Charles Murray has a right to his views. But is it okay for us to use student fees paid in part by African-American students to bring him to campus, fête him, and give him a rostrum to tell those students they’re doomed by genetics to be inferior to whites? Well, he makes a strong argument and isn’t bound by conventional "niceties." Yes, that’s true. But that’s also the reason people claim to like Donald Trump, and I don’t see universities lining up to bring him in as a guest lecturer.

5. Because, virtue signaling:

   As a faculty member, I would be enormously dismayed if my dean sent this letter to my incoming students. Because now they’ll come into my class already having received a clear message about what my institution seems to value — and it isn’t them.
   
   The Chicago letter reeks of arrogance, of a sense of entitlement, of an exclusionary mindset — in other words, the very things it seeks to inveigh against. It’s not about academic freedom; it’s about power. Know your place, and acknowledge ours, it tells the students. We’ll be the judge of what you need to know and how you need to know it. And professors and students are thus handcuffed to a high-stakes ideological creed. Do it this way, in the name of all that is holy and true in the academy. There is no room here for empathy, for student agency, or for faculty discretion.

   Yes, the "entitlement" is, demanding faculty and students have or develop some grownup resilience instead of acting like spoiled children. What Gannon risibly mocks as "Do it this way" means, be willing to consider and even adopt new ideas, or even those you may find repulsive for whatever reason.
6. You misspelled "enraged":

   Ableism, misogyny, racism, elitism, and intellectual sloppiness deserve to be called out. That’s not a threat, that’s our students doing what they’re supposed to as engaged citizens of an academic community.

   Again, so long as you're one of the right complainers, censorship and ideological blinders are just dandy.

Summarizing, it strikes me likely that someone like Gannon hasn't gone through the full Laura Kipnis treatment, which is why he's so strident. He appears to me to be pretty young; give it time.

Wednesday Links

• Leading off with the fantastic news that bioethicist Alice Dreger has resigned from Northwestern under charges that the university refuses to grant her the academic freedom they supposedly support. Her resignation letter (PDF) details the complaint that dean Eric Neilsen demanded editorial control of her work on Atrium, and even formed a "censorship committee" to oversee future issues:
  

  The plain and simple fact is that Dean Neilson acted impulsively and wrongly in this situation. We all make mistakes, but this was a profound mistake that cut to the very heart of academic freedom. It should have been acknowledged and corrected immediately. That is most definitely not what happened. Instead, what happened was denial, avoidance, blame -­‐ shifting, and evasion. To this day, the university has not admitted its mistake, and it has not affirmed its commitment to academic freedom in a way that makes clear that similar incidents will not occur in the future. This failure should be embarrassing to an otherwise great university.

  Also, a high five for her exit tweet:

  I will not miss being asked to teach medical ethics in a room named after the drug company that paid for it.

  — Alice Dreger (@AliceDreger) August 25, 2015

• LAist recently ran a story on driving for Uber or Lyft as a woman. Surprise! It's actually mostly pretty good:
  

  [Ashley] Moon said, "I've only had one awkward situation with a man I picked up in Culver City while driving for Lyft. He was making really sexual and inappropriate comments about my body, his body, and his girlfriend's body who we were on our way to pick up. But I didn't feel like I was in danger, mostly because he was SO drunk that he was completely slumped over in my front seat and heavily slurring his words. I thought he might have alcohol poisoning."

  One anonymous driver reported "Truthfully, I dealt with more inappropriate behavior when I was a bartender." Lyft in particular allows drivers to drop passengers before their destination if the driver feels endangered (something Uber doesn't), so they're a little better. But it's interesting to read these anecdotes, which include drivers giving relationship advice, picking up weird passengers, and more.
• Remember Laurie Penny? I guess she's still out flogging her rage-tome, Unspeakable Things, which, according to those not part of her hallelujah chorus, draws from her Guardian (UK) and other online columns so much it's indistinguishable from them. Well, good news, fellas: feminism needs to find room for men!

  As Penny herself says, "women are only allowed to be experts on gendered things and nothing else, whereas that's the one thing men aren't supposed to talk about.

  Of course, men aren't allowed to have any actual differing opinions about intersex relations, because
  

  Men are our fifth column in all male spaces. Particularly when so many boardrooms and political meetings are all-male spaces, men can be very useful fighting in that arena.

  So nice to know men's only purpose as far as Penny's concerned is to shut up and parrot the party line! Also, reeducating your fellow knuckle-dragging males! Thank you, I'm here all night.
  
• Lesbian tendencies appear to go hand-in-hand with masculinization, which apparently means changes to facial features can also predict sexual orientation, which sounds awfully like phrenology. This gives rise to the theory that female sexuality conforms to opportunity to some extent. (H/t @facerealitynow.)

"Feminism Devouring Itself": Laura Kipnis' Bizarre Title IX Case

File under "When You've Lost Jezebel" Dep't, Laura Kipnis describes her Title IX persecution for a piece she wrote in February about instructors being forbidden to date students, borne of a "feminism hijacked by melodrama". The subsequent reaction ended up in the hands of the Title IX coordinator; after much back-and-forth, and no indication whatsoever of what the "charges" were she faced:

Apparently the idea was that they’d tell me the charges, and then, while I was collecting my wits, interrogate me about them. The term "kangaroo court" came to mind. I wrote to ask for the charges in writing. The coordinator wrote back thanking me for my thoughtful questions.

What I very much wanted to know, though there was apparently no way of finding it out, was whether this was the first instance of Title IX charges filed over a publication. Was this a test case? From my vantage point, it seemed to pit a federally mandated program against my constitutional rights, though I admit my understanding of those rights was vague.

Kipnis notes that, "a Title IX charge can now be brought against a professor over a tweet. Also that my tweets were apparently being monitored." It's hard to look at this and think it is anything other than an administrative structure engineered to pursue witch hunts, i.e. it has no value other than as a sort of jobs program for a certain class of otherwise unemployables.

Oh, it gets better; during her examination by the telephone sanitizers:

My Midwestern Torquemadas were perfectly pleasant at our on-campus meeting — they’d indeed flown to town to meet in person — so pleasant that I relaxed and became overvoluble, stupidly gratified by their interest and attentions. There I was, expounding on my views about power and feminism; soon I was delivering a mini-seminar on the work of Michel Foucault. Later, replaying the two-and-a-half-hour session in my mind, I thought, "You chump," realizing that I’d probably dug a hundred new holes for myself.

Well, yes. You expected otherwise?