Publishing that article in Front Page Mag doesn’t take much courage, so far as I can see. It’s not as if many FPM readers are going to disagree with it. What would take courage would be a vigorous defence of “safe spaces” in FPM, or an article like James’s in a lefty magazine.
[EDITED to add:] For the avoidance of doubt, I’m not objecting to James’s article or saying that publishing it was an act of cowardice! Only that it doesn’t seem to require any unusual bravery.
Publishing that article in Front Page Mag doesn’t take much courage, so far as I can see. It’s not as if many FPM readers are going to disagree with it.
That’s not the point. There is a very active witchhunt going on at many US colleges. Mobs with torches and pitchforks are diligently searching for while males guilty of, and I quote
white supremacy, colonialism, anti-black racism, anti-Latinx racism, anti-Native American racism, anti-Native/ indigenous racism, anti-Asian racism, anti-Middle Eastern racism, heterosexism, cis-sexism, xenophobia, anti-Semitism, ableism, mental health stigma, and classism
Any published text or blog post or a tweet, etc. can be construed as evidence of wrongthink. It’s basically the Chinese Cultural Revolution, this time as a farce. Most people in academia keep their heads down—see e.g. this.
That’s not the point. There is a very active witchhunt going on at many US colleges. Mobs with torches and pitchforks are diligently searching for while males guilty of, and I quote
white supremacy, colonialism, anti-black racism, anti-Latinx racism, anti-Native American racism, anti-Native/ indigenous racism, anti-Asian racism, anti-Middle Eastern racism, heterosexism, cis-sexism, xenophobia, anti-Semitism, ableism, mental health stigma, and classism
Well… from my point of view, there’s a lot of that in the US. And I come from Italy, for Omega’s sake, we have news about the Pope every lunch and dinner. I cannot not imagine how the view from Denmark should be. With this, I don’t mean that witchhunting is the answer, just that it can possibly be understood as a transient overshoot, to which the proper response is a transient undershoot.
Note that the person on your last link, despite professing to be terrified of his students, seems to have been happy enough to publish that article with his real name on it. Note also that he links to a number of other pieces by other academics expressing similar opinions, all also apparently not so terrified as to avoid publishing such opinions with their names attached.
So far as I know, no academic has in fact got into any sort of trouble for expressing opinions like those, or like the (milder) ones expressed in James’s article.
People died in the Cultural Revolution. This is not in any useful sense “basically the Cultural Revolution”. Nor does it bear anything like the same resemblance to the Cultural Revolution as Louis Napoleon’s assumption of power did to his uncle’s. Calling someone courageous for daring to say openly that the idea of “safe spaces” may have gone too far is like calling someone courageous for daring to say “Merry Christmas”. Can we get a bit of perspective here?
Note that the person on your last link, despite professing to be terrified of his students, seems to have been happy enough to publish that article with his real name on it.
Vox: Edward Schlosser is a college professor, writing under a pseudonym.
Ha. I actually checked for that, but obviously not carefully enough. My apologies.
[EDITED to add:] OK, so I went back and searched the page, and it doesn’t say that anywhere. (Though buried in the middle of the article is a statement along the lines of “all controversial things I write, like this article, are anonymous or pseudonymous”, so I still should have known.) Perhaps it’s because I’m reading on a mobile device?
You get that line if you click on the author’s name.
The article starts by saying: I'm a professor at a midsize state school.
If you read between the lines that’s a decision against revealing the name of the school and thus a decision to protect anonymity.
In general the media likes to use pseudonyms when it can’t use the real name, so the fact that you have a name on the top is no good evidence that the article isn’t written anonymously or under a pseudonym.
That’s why I looked for a statement at the start or end that the name was pseudo. I think not finding such a thing genuinely was evidence of non-pseudonymity, though clearly not enough evidence was it turned out. I didn’t think of clicking on the name because I’m an idiot.
You link to three stories, but so far as I can see only the first of them is actually anything like an example of what we were talking about. Still, that’s one more than I knew of, so thank you.
The way many students at Yale responded to Christakis is shocking, for sure. But, again, this is a long long long way from the Cultural Revolution. She didn’t lose her life or even her job. And this is an unusually extreme case.
Karl Marx
I knew where the quotation comes from, and what it refers to, and what it means, as you could have worked out:
Nor does it bear anything like the same resemblance to the Cultural Revolution as Louis Napoleon’s assumption of power did to his uncle’s.
I’m almost certain that many Amherst students think the list of demands is dangerous and/or silly.
You could test this hypothesis by providing them a way to give you anonymous feedback. The provided method would have to avoid two things:
Despite anonymity, you have to prevent spamming, where one student would give you dozen answers, indistinguishable from dozen answers given by dozen students. This rules out methods like “send me an e-mail from a throwaway account”.
Not only the content of the feedback, but even the fact whether a student gave you feedback or not, must be kept secret. Otherwise it is easy for the majority to decide not to give you feedback, exposing every student giving you feedback as a likely traitor. This rules out methods like “here is a questionnaire, check the appropriate boxes and throw it into this basket”.
Of course, an overly complicated feedback method would be a trivial inconvenience, so less people would respond. Also, a complicated method would make them question whether it is really anonymous.
Great idea. If I’m ever asked to speak at Amherst I could give out forms to be immediately filled out. To protect people against being discovered I could first say “Everyone think of a number between 1 and 10. OK if you thought of the number 3 give false answers on this form.”
I just published an article in the conservative FrontPageMag on college safe spaces. It uses a bit of LW like reasoning.
Congrats on the courage to pick this fight.
Thanks.
Publishing that article in Front Page Mag doesn’t take much courage, so far as I can see. It’s not as if many FPM readers are going to disagree with it. What would take courage would be a vigorous defence of “safe spaces” in FPM, or an article like James’s in a lefty magazine.
[EDITED to add:] For the avoidance of doubt, I’m not objecting to James’s article or saying that publishing it was an act of cowardice! Only that it doesn’t seem to require any unusual bravery.
That’s not the point. There is a very active witchhunt going on at many US colleges. Mobs with torches and pitchforks are diligently searching for while males guilty of, and I quote
Any published text or blog post or a tweet, etc. can be construed as evidence of wrongthink. It’s basically the Chinese Cultural Revolution, this time as a farce. Most people in academia keep their heads down—see e.g. this.
Well… from my point of view, there’s a lot of that in the US. And I come from Italy, for Omega’s sake, we have news about the Pope every lunch and dinner. I cannot not imagine how the view from Denmark should be.
With this, I don’t mean that witchhunting is the answer, just that it can possibly be understood as a transient overshoot, to which the proper response is a transient undershoot.
I would venture a guess that your estimate has a lot to do with what kind of media you read and a fair amount to do with what your baseline is :-/
Note that the person on your last link, despite professing to be terrified of his students, seems to have been happy enough to publish that article with his real name on it. Note also that he links to a number of other pieces by other academics expressing similar opinions, all also apparently not so terrified as to avoid publishing such opinions with their names attached.
So far as I know, no academic has in fact got into any sort of trouble for expressing opinions like those, or like the (milder) ones expressed in James’s article.
People died in the Cultural Revolution. This is not in any useful sense “basically the Cultural Revolution”. Nor does it bear anything like the same resemblance to the Cultural Revolution as Louis Napoleon’s assumption of power did to his uncle’s. Calling someone courageous for daring to say openly that the idea of “safe spaces” may have gone too far is like calling someone courageous for daring to say “Merry Christmas”. Can we get a bit of perspective here?
Vox:
Edward Schlosser is a college professor, writing under a pseudonym.Ha. I actually checked for that, but obviously not carefully enough. My apologies.
[EDITED to add:] OK, so I went back and searched the page, and it doesn’t say that anywhere. (Though buried in the middle of the article is a statement along the lines of “all controversial things I write, like this article, are anonymous or pseudonymous”, so I still should have known.) Perhaps it’s because I’m reading on a mobile device?
You get that line if you click on the author’s name.
The article starts by saying:
I'm a professor at a midsize state school.If you read between the lines that’s a decision against revealing the name of the school and thus a decision to protect anonymity.In general the media likes to use pseudonyms when it can’t use the real name, so the fact that you have a name on the top is no good evidence that the article isn’t written anonymously or under a pseudonym.
That’s why I looked for a statement at the start or end that the name was pseudo. I think not finding such a thing genuinely was evidence of non-pseudonymity, though clearly not enough evidence was it turned out. I didn’t think of clicking on the name because I’m an idiot.
Let me enhance your knowledge.
“History repeats itself, first as tragedy, second as farce.”—Karl Marx
You link to three stories, but so far as I can see only the first of them is actually anything like an example of what we were talking about. Still, that’s one more than I knew of, so thank you.
The way many students at Yale responded to Christakis is shocking, for sure. But, again, this is a long long long way from the Cultural Revolution. She didn’t lose her life or even her job. And this is an unusually extreme case.
I knew where the quotation comes from, and what it refers to, and what it means, as you could have worked out:
There days everybody can share a link to an article and students in James Miller’s college can pass around an article written by their prof.
You could test this hypothesis by providing them a way to give you anonymous feedback. The provided method would have to avoid two things:
Despite anonymity, you have to prevent spamming, where one student would give you dozen answers, indistinguishable from dozen answers given by dozen students. This rules out methods like “send me an e-mail from a throwaway account”.
Not only the content of the feedback, but even the fact whether a student gave you feedback or not, must be kept secret. Otherwise it is easy for the majority to decide not to give you feedback, exposing every student giving you feedback as a likely traitor. This rules out methods like “here is a questionnaire, check the appropriate boxes and throw it into this basket”.
Of course, an overly complicated feedback method would be a trivial inconvenience, so less people would respond. Also, a complicated method would make them question whether it is really anonymous.
Great idea. If I’m ever asked to speak at Amherst I could give out forms to be immediately filled out. To protect people against being discovered I could first say “Everyone think of a number between 1 and 10. OK if you thought of the number 3 give false answers on this form.”