The commentary (both the quote of the original, and your own) seems to entirely dismiss the possibility of selective ways of looking at the issue, opting to only consider corrective approaches (which indeed are unlikely to work) and (in a rather one-sided way) structural approaches.
Would the selective approach in this case be something like “ignore the request and let them drop out if they can’t handle that”, or something else?
My own view is that the analysis given in the original source is extremely bad, and the approach described therein creates horrible incentives, in ways well understood. The world absolutely is worse because the student in question declares a need for accommodation, and gets it.
I agree that there are definite incentive problems to take into account. However in this specific case, where the cost of accommodation is basically zero (just using slightly different language), I don’t think they’re an issue.
Would the selective approach in this case be something like “ignore the request and let them drop out if they can’t handle that”, or something else?
Yep. (Of course “ignore” can be finessed, but you’ve certainly got the gist of it.)
(I will also note that the strategy is “ignore the request”; “let them drop out if they can’t handle that” sneaks in a model of the consequences. It is not an entirely unreasonable model, but it’s certainly not the only plausible one. We should be very wary of privileging one possibility in such cases.)
I agree that there are definite incentive problems to take into account. However in this specific case, where the cost of accommodation is basically zero (just using slightly different language), I don’t think they’re an issue.
I strongly disagree with your evaluation of the cost, and am surprised to see you make such a claim. Surely you must know that “just” using (“slightly”) different language is far from costless?
As for incentives, you pay lip service to them, but I don’t think you are taking them at all seriously. Assume the cost of one accommodation to be “basically zero”. It does not follow from this that the expected total cost of all requested accommodations, conditional on the policy of “grant requested accommodations” being instituted, will be “basically zero”, or even “less than astronomical”. (Indeed, we can observe that such an optimistic prediction turns out to be manifestly false.)
(Quite often, the second-order consequences, the effects of incentive gradients, etc., are the downsides of some proposed policy. Saying “but incentives aside…” is the equivalent of the proverbial “other than that, Mrs. Lincoln, how was the play?”.)
Yep. (Of course “ignore” can be finessed, but you’ve certainly got the gist of it.)
Okay. In that case I’m not sure why you say that my commentary is dismissing the selective ways of looking at the issue. When I wrote it, the two options I had in mind were “agree to the request” or “deny/ignore the request”. (I mean, I did “dismiss” the selective ways in the sense that I thought they’d be a bad way of dealing with the issue, but I interpret you to have meant “dismiss” in the sense of “not consider at all”.)
I strongly disagree with your evaluation of the cost, and am surprised to see you make such a claim. Surely you must know that “just” using (“slightly”) different language is far from costless?
In the general case it’s not necessarily costless. But in this particular case, at least her teacher seemed to think that it was, if not literally costless, then a very small cost. And if I was in his position, I think it would be a very negligible cost for me to implement. Remembering to use different language would take a little bit of effort at first, but then become automatic very quickly.
(I’m again assuming that the request can be incorporated while still delivering all of the teaching and grading etc. essentially unchanged. If it was the case that she couldn’t easily be corrected on mistakes in assignments or something similar, that would substantially change my position.)
Assume the cost of one accommodation to be “basically zero”. It does not follow from this that the expected total cost of all requested accommodations, conditional on the policy of “grant requested accommodations” being instituted, will be “basically zero”, or even “less than astronomical”. (Indeed, we can observe that such an optimistic prediction turns out to be manifestly false.)
I agree. I did not mean to argue for a blanket policy of granting all requested accommodations, nor did I interpret the original poster to be arguing for that.
Okay. In that case I’m not sure why you say that my commentary is dismissing the selective ways of looking at the issue. When I wrote it, the two options I had in mind were “agree to the request” or “deny/ignore the request”. (I mean, I did “dismiss” the selective ways in the sense that I thought they’d be a bad way of dealing with the issue, but I interpret you to have meant “dismiss” in the sense of “not consider at all”.)
Because you talk quite a bit about what will or will not fix this student’s problem, whether it is easy or hard for this student to “get over it”, how long it would take for this student to fix the problem, what this student’s experience is like, etc., etc. (Likewise the author of the quoted original post.)
These concerns all belong to a corrective view. From a selective view, all of them are irrelevant. What is relevant instead is questions like: supposing that we adopt a policy of granting such requests, what will the student body (likewise: the class, the results of the course, etc.) be like? If we adopt a policy of not granting such requests, what will said things be like? And so on.
So, you say that you thought that selective ways would be a bad way of dealing with the issue. Well, that’s a perfectly coherent view. But it needs to be argued for, not just left as a totally unstated background assumption.
But in this particular case, at least her teacher seemed to think that it was, if not literally costless, then a very small cost.
I would not conclude this from the quoted post. I would conclude only that this person found it prudent or desirable to make a Facebook post that claimed such things. While there is surely a correlation between these two things, it is not nearly strong enough to allow us to treat them as identical.
(And, in this particular case, the post is strongly performative in tone, further weakening said correlation.)
And if I was in his position, I think it would be a very negligible cost for me to implement. Remembering to use different language would take a little bit of effort at first, but then become automatic very quickly.
For one thing, cognitive costs of alterations like this vary across individuals. Some may find such adjustments as easy as you describe them being for you; others will not. Instituting a policy of making, and requiring, such adjustments, selects against the latter sort of individual. (There’s that selective view again!)
Some of my best teachers, instructors, professors, etc. have seemed very much like the latter sort. I find this unlikely to be coincidence.
For another thing, some obvious questions we could ask would be: ok, so you’re going to not ever tell this student that she’s wrong. Are you also not going to tell the other students that they’re wrong? What if they ask you “so, am I wrong about this?”, or “so, is this wrong?”? What if they ask you “so, what so-and-so just said—that’s wrong, isn’t it?” You might be tempted to describe various evasions which you could use, but now suppose that another student is (again, to take just one possible example) on the autism spectrum, and has a difficult time understanding euphemisms, indirection, etc.? Suppose that they’re not a native speaker? Suppose that they’re on the spectrum and they’re not a native speaker?
(It took me barely a minute to come up with this example. And it’s far from being unrealistic—I can tell you that from personal experience! How many other such “competing access needs” scenarios are induced by granting this one “almost costless” accommodation?)
What if one of the other students tells this student that she’s wrong? Must you now police the speech of your students for this particular linguistic landmine, in addition to your own speech?
What if someone of your students are (like the professors described earlier) the sorts of people who find it difficult to “adjust” their language in this manner?
In short, it is very easy to say that making some adjustment would be nearly costless. It is quite another thing to actually consider all the costs. This is doubly so because there are considerable incentives (!) to make such claims.
And I haven’t even gotten to the distortionary effect on your own cognition, from not just avoiding such straightforward constructions as “you’re wrong” (and similar), but automatically avoiding them! Perhaps one could make an argument that having your brain automatically flinch away from responding to a clearly wrong statement with “that’s wrong” is not as bad as it sounds… but that certainly wouldn’t be the way I’d bet.
(I’m again assuming that the request can be incorporated while still delivering all of the teaching and grading etc. essentially unchanged. If it was the case that she couldn’t easily be corrected on mistakes in assignments or something similar, that would substantially change my position.)
Well, that’s certainly an assumption, yes…
I agree. I did not mean to argue for a blanket policy of granting all requested accommodations, nor did I interpret the original poster to be arguing for that.
I believe that you did not mean to argue for such a blanket policy, but I do not believe for a moment that the original poster wasn’t.
o Because you talk quite a bit about what will or will not fix this student’s problem, whether it is easy or hard for this student to “get over it”, how long it would take for this student to fix the problem, what this student’s experience is like, etc., etc. (Likewise the author of the quoted original post.)
These concerns all belong to a corrective view. From a selective view, all of them are irrelevant. What is relevant instead is questions like: supposing that we adopt a policy of granting such requests, what will the student body (likewise: the class, the results of the course, etc.) be like? If we adopt a policy of not granting such requests, what will said things be like? And so on.
So, you say that you thought that selective ways would be a bad way of dealing with the issue. Well, that’s a perfectly coherent view. But it needs to be argued for, not just left as a totally unstated background assumption.
Fair enough, I’ll elaborate then.
You’re thinking about the selective view in a way that focuses on people who have the incentive to make these kinds of requests. Meanwhile I’m more focused on the people who wouldn’t have an incentive to make these kinds of requests, if not for the fact that their trauma makes it excessively costly for them to not have their requests accommodated. It’s not even the case that, as your link to the Vladimir_M comment implies, that they have developed this as an unconscious strategy for getting something that makes them better off. Having this problem just makes them worse off.
If such people make requests that are low-cost for us to grant, while very costly for them if we do not grant them, that has the consequence of making it significantly costlier and harder for them to graduate. And even if they do manage to graduate, it may make it significantly harder for them to overcome their problems later in life. So then one selective effect is that the school as a whole loses people who would otherwise have been good students. But also on a broader level, society as a whole suffers as these people become increasingly worse off and less capable of contributing, when a more accommodating policy could have allowed them to thrive.
(This is a somewhat personal topic for me, as I have a close relative who had to drop out of university due to mental health problems and ultimately ended up on an early disability pension when they would have preferred to be working. And things wouldn’t have needed to go very differently for something similar to happen to me.)
So my view is that it’s bad to take an “ignore/deny” type approach because the selective effects have an overall negative composition on both the student body of that particular school, as well as on the composition of society in general.
Instituting a policy of making, and requiring, such adjustments, selects against the latter sort of individual. (There’s that selective view again!)
Some of my best teachers, instructors, professors, etc. have seemed very much like the latter sort.
That’s true. Though if these people have difficulty making accommodations that would make some of their students significantly better off, then that seems to me like evidence that they’re not among the best teachers, and that it might be good to select against them.
Also this bit sounds like we are now talking about something like… what university-level policies should be like, and while that’s not an unreasonable direction to be going in, I was originally thinking of this just as a discussion of the choices of this particular teacher. It seems to me like one should first get on the same page about whether his specific decision was good or bad, before trying to consider possible policy implications. (Since it can be that a particular choice made individually is good or bad, but trying to create an institution-wide policy that everyone/no-one should make the same choice has unintended effects; but one can’t talk about the policy-level tradeoffs before first knowing what the effects on the individual level are.)
For another thing, some obvious questions we could ask would be: ok, so you’re going to not ever tell this student that she’s wrong. Are you also not going to tell the other students that they’re wrong? What if they ask you “so, am I wrong about this?”, or “so, is this wrong?”? What if they ask you “so, what so-and-so just said—that’s wrong, isn’t it?” You might be tempted to describe various evasions which you could use, but now suppose that another student is (again, to take just one possible example) on the autism spectrum, and has a difficult time understanding euphemisms, indirection, etc.? Suppose that they’re not a native speaker? Suppose that they’re on the spectrum and they’re not a native speaker?
It’s easy to generate lots of “what ifs”, but a long list of them doesn’t mean they’d be hard to answer in practice. Your first two questions in particular seem to me to have obvious answers—automatically extending the policy to all students only makes sense, but if someone explicitly wants to know if they are wrong or not, then they presumably won’t mind being told if they are.
On my Facebook wall where I originally shared this post, various people chimed in with their experiences from either teaching or work, and several mentioned that this wouldn’t really come up for them because they had never had a reason to tell anyone “you’re wrong” anyway. E.g. one person said:
I don’t have much experience of university teaching but I do have some, and I don’t recall ever having to tell a student “you are wrong”, or even words with similar meaning. That’s simply because no student has ever presented a claim that has simple yes or no truth value. The closest I have come to “you are wrong” is something like “it’s partially like you said, but also...” My academic field is history, if that matters.
That said, even if a student made a clearly wrong statement, I would probably state my answer as something like, “an interesting point but it didn’t go quite like that”. I haven’t thought about this in any kind of “woke” scenario, for me it’s just simply a part of good manners that a teacher shouldn’t directly embarass a student.
And another said:
I don’t remember when was the last time at my job I told anyone they are wrong—and I don’t remember when anyone told me I’m wrong. And I work with a lot of people from many walks of life.
There have been plenty of cases where a person (me or someone else) says “here’s how I see it” and the other goes “Ooh, right”. Telling the other person they’re wrong is both useless and counter productive. [...]
Here’s how I see things happening in the places I go to for work. People skip the “that’s not right” or “that’s wrong”, because it does not add anything to the discussion.
Instead depending on the veracity of their own claim, they might say “This is how it is”, “Have you read this piece of research that shows A and B?”. There’s no need to rub the fact that one person was wrong on anybody’s face. It is especially bad form, if one tries to convince the other person to change their mind.
While not everyone agreed, many people seemed to have the position that avoiding “you’re wrong”-type language is just a net improvement and that they’ve never ran into a situation where one would need to use it (and I think at least some of those people do also work in fields with people on the spectrum). This also matches my own experience, and makes me skeptical of how likely it is for any of your scenarios to turn out to be a problem in practice.
If anything, the systematic effects seem positive, in that applying the same policy to all students would likely also make several others feel more comfortable.
Of course, it would be silly to argue that there could never be any costs associated with this. It’s certainly likely that trying to accommodate, if not this particular request, then some other request of vaguely the same type would eventually get us into a challenging scenario. But if that happens, one can figure out the best course of action when it happens, and then possibly re-evaluate the overall approach if it does turn out to be more costly.
In any case, it would seem bad to me if this teacher, in considering whether to grant the request, would conclude that he has to deny it because of some complicated hypothetical scenario that assumed other students reacted in very specific ways. Given that it’s also very plausible that none of that happens and everything goes just fine.
In short, it is very easy to say that making some adjustment would be nearly costless. It is quite another thing to actually consider all the costs.
Fair enough, so I’ll rephrase: there seem to be very small immediate costs for this particular teacher to accommodate the request. It is of course possible that some major unexpected cost comes up, but if that happens, he can consider them and then shift his approach accordingly.
And I haven’t even gotten to the distortionary effect on your own cognition, from not just avoiding such straightforward constructions as “you’re wrong” (and similar), but automatically avoiding them! Perhaps one could make an argument that having your brain automatically flinch away from responding to a clearly wrong statement with “that’s wrong” is not as bad as it sounds… but that certainly wouldn’t be the way I’d bet.
I have a hard time seeing this as particularly problematic, given the previously mentioned view that saying “you’re wrong” just doesn’t seem to be necessary in general. “Having your brain automatically flinch away from” something sounds bad if you phrase it like that, but part of the process of acquiring any skill is to learn to automatically flinch away from performing the skill in a bad way. Similarly, if there’s little reason to ever say “you’re wrong” while there are good reasons to avoid it, then I see this less as distorting cognition and more as optimizing it (or more specifically optimizing the skill of good communication).
(This is a somewhat personal topic for me, as I have a close relative who had to drop out of university due to mental health problems and ultimately ended up on an early disability pension when they would have preferred to be working. And things wouldn’t have needed to go very differently for something similar to happen to me.)
That’s unfortunate for your relative, of course, and they have my sympathies. But I don’t think anyone would call it implausible that this person would’ve benefited from being granted accommodations for their difficulties. The question is what this would cost their professors, the other students, society in general, etc.
You could in theory make several arguments here, and you seem to be making some of them—but it’s not clear which and when. You could say:
(a) It would cost the professors / other students / society so little to accommodate your relative that, on altruistic grounds, we should do this, because the benefit to the accommodated person is so great and the total cost is so low.
(b) The professors / other students may pay a non-trivial cost to accommodate your relative, but this is outweighed by the benefit to society from having this person be accommodated, so we should do it (which is to say, we should force any unwilling cost-bearers to bear the cost against their wishes, as a form of redistribution of resources).
(c) The professors, the other students, and society would all benefit from accommodating your relative, so we should obviously do it because it’s good for everyone.
(d) The professors / other students / society may pay a non-trivial cost to accommodate your relative, but we should do it anyway, because… something. (Social justice?)
Argument (d) seems hard to justify morally. Argument (c) is very implausible empirically. Argument (b) also seems hard to justify morally, but perhaps marginally less so than (d). Argument (a) also seems implausible empirically, as I’ve already discussed.
So my view is that it’s bad to take an “ignore/deny” type approach because the selective effects have an overall negative composition on both the student body of that particular school, as well as on the composition of society in general.
How can this be true? Why is it better to have the student body contain students who have this sort of mental disability, than to not have the student body contain such students?
I have described some of the costs and negative effects of such a thing. But here you seem to be saying not merely that the costs and negative effects are very low, but that actually there are benefits? What could they be…?
Meanwhile I’m more focused on the people who wouldn’t have an incentive to make these kinds of requests, if not for the fact that their trauma makes it excessively costly for them to not have their requests accommodated. It’s not even the case that, as your link to the Vladimir_M comment implies, that they have developed this as an unconscious strategy for getting something that makes them better off. Having this problem just makes them worse off.
I am not sure why you say this. Why do you say that such people can’t be getting something that makes them better off? If they successfully get their preferences (a.k.a. “needs”, etc.) acknowledged and accommodated, that is a distinct advantage relative to the base case where they are just a regular person with no special needs! This seems very obvious!
If such people make requests that are low-cost for us to grant, while very costly for them if we do not grant them, that has the consequence of making it significantly costlier and harder for them to graduate. And even if they do manage to graduate, it may make it significantly harder for them to overcome their problems later in life. So then one selective effect is that the school as a whole loses people who would otherwise have been good students. But also on a broader level, society as a whole suffers as these people become increasingly worse off and less capable of contributing, when a more accommodating policy could have allowed them to thrive.
This seems to be making the assumption that such people (on average) “would otherwise have been good students”. I do not think that this is the least bit warranted.
Additionally, this perspective suffers from the problem of “the seen vs. the unseen”. The student who needs such an accommodation is taking the place of the student who doesn’t. Which of them is more likely to be a good student generally, and to contribute to society later? I think it’s clear that it’s the latter.
Casting such accommodations as improvements in the expected social benefit provided by the university is just not remotely plausible.
If they successfully get their preferences (a.k.a. “needs”, etc.) acknowledged and accommodated, that is a distinct advantage relative to the base case where they are just a regular person with no special needs! This seems very obvious!
I mean, yes, but having that preference gives them no special advantage relative to not having it.
Suppose that I have a gluten intolerance and need to have gluten-free food available. It’s of course true that getting to have gluten-free food is now a distinct advantage to me, compared to a scenario where I couldn’t get gluten-free food. But the fact that I have a gluten intolerance doesn’t make me better off overall. If I get accommodated, then at best I get to the same neutral level of “can eat food without getting terrible symptoms” that everyone else is at. And more realistically, I won’t even get to that zero level but rather will sometimes accidentally eat food with gluten, will miss out on tasty foods I’d enjoy, etc., so it’d be better for me to not have the intolerance.
Likewise, if someone gets terribly upset about being told “you’re wrong”, then if that’s accommodated, at best they get to the same zero level as everyone who doesn’t get terribly upset about it. And it’s more likely that they won’t get perfectly accommodated, so not only will they gain nothing, but will also need to endure discomfort they wouldn’t need to endure if they didn’t have that sensitivity. So if they don’t already have that pre-existing sensitivity, there’s no incentive for them to develop it.
I do not think that this is the least bit warranted.
Why not? I know plenty of otherwise intelligent, creative etc. people who also have serious mental health problems.
I mean, yes, but having that preference gives them no special advantage relative to not having it.
But of course it does! It grants them a reason to seek to have the preference satisfied, which is an advantage if (a) having the preference satisfied is a sufficiently superior state to not having the preference at all, and (b) conditional on having the preference, satisfaction is sufficiently likely.
(Basically all of this is explained in the previously-linked Vladimir_M comments, so I do encourage you to reread them if you haven’t done so.)
Suppose that I have a gluten intolerance and need to have gluten-free food available. It’s of course true that getting to have gluten-free food is now a distinct advantage to me, compared to a scenario where I couldn’t get gluten-free food. But the fact that I have a gluten intolerance doesn’t make me better off overall. If I get accommodated, then at best I get to the same neutral level of “can eat food without getting terrible symptoms” that everyone else is at. And more realistically, I won’t even get to that zero level but rather will sometimes accidentally eat food with gluten, will miss out on tasty foods I’d enjoy, etc., so it’d be better for me to not have the intolerance.
On the contrary, it is not only plausible but very easy to end up in a superior end state in this scenario. Suppose that having gluten-free food provided for you is costly and difficult, and that you can convince or otherwise cause others to expend their resources on providing you with gluten-free food. This is a signal of your social status, clearly visible to anyone who observes such behavioral interactions. And, in turn, there are many, many situations when an even relatively small advantage in social status is more important (by any relevant measure) than an even quite substantial loss in sensory pleasure from food. (I trust that no examples are needed to illustrate this general point.)
In such a case, it would indeed be better for you to have the gluten intolerance than not to have it.
Note that this logic predicts that we should see people who don’t actually have gluten intolerance, to pretend to do so (as any status signal will attract imitators/fakers). And indeed this is precisely what we do see.
Likewise, if someone gets terribly upset about being told “you’re wrong”, then if that’s accommodated, at best they get to the same zero level as everyone who doesn’t get terribly upset about it. And it’s more likely that they won’t get perfectly accommodated, so not only will they gain nothing, but will also need to endure discomfort they wouldn’t need to endure if they didn’t have that sensitivity. So if they don’t already have that pre-existing sensitivity, there’s no incentive for them to develop it.
The above logic applies here too. (And this is definitely, and very comprehensively, treated in the linked discussion thread…)
I do not think that this is the least bit warranted.
Why not? I know plenty of otherwise intelligent, creative etc. people who also have serious mental health problems.
That is not the correct question. The correct question is whether, on average, such people are equally good students to people without such serious mental problems (“such”, note; mental health problems, serious or no, are not monolithic, nor uniform in their effects on academic performance), or better, or worse. (And remember that we are not comparing to general population averages here, but to the population subsets selected for going to college!)
For your assumption to be warranted, it would have to be the case that someone who has a mental breakdown when told that they’re wrong would, if accommodated for that particular disability, be about as good a student on average as… well, the average student. This is highly implausible. (For one thing, remember that mental disorders are highly correlated with one another!)
You’re thinking about the selective view in a way that focuses on people who have the incentive to make these kinds of requests.
Sorry, but I think you’re somewhat misunderstanding me. The incentive to make such requests is one part of the selective view. But it’s not the only part. “What will the student body be like if we [ do / don’t ] adopt a policy of granting such accommodations” is a question that can coherently be asked (and which has a non-trivial answer) even if we totally set aside questions of incentives!
That’s true. Though if these people have difficulty making accommodations that would make some of their students significantly better off, then that seems to me like evidence that they’re not among the best teachers, and that it might be good to select against them.
On the contrary, it is nothing of the sort. The best teachers are those who are best at teaching, period. Making accommodations for mental illness is, at best, orthogonal to this. If one teacher is better at teaching than another, that’s that.
Also this bit sounds like we are now talking about something like… what university-level policies should be like, and while that’s not an unreasonable direction to be going in, I was originally thinking of this just as a discussion of the choices of this particular teacher. It seems to me like one should first get on the same page about whether his specific decision was good or bad, before trying to consider possible policy implications. (Since it can be that a particular choice made individually is good or bad, but trying to create an institution-wide policy that everyone/no-one should make the same choice has unintended effects; but one can’t talk about the policy-level tradeoffs before first knowing what the effects on the individual level are.)
Sorry, but I do not find this plausible. The quoted original post is very clearly advocating for people to do as he describes himself doing.
What’s more, in such a case, the choices of any particular teacher are, in fact, effectively part of the university’s policies, if they affect other students. We do not know for a fact whether that’s so, but my examples show, I think, that it’s hard for them to avoid doing so.
It’s easy to generate lots of “what ifs”, but a long list of them doesn’t mean they’d be hard to answer in practice. Your first two questions in particular seem to me to have obvious answers—automatically extending the policy to all students only makes sense, but if someone explicitly wants to know if they are wrong or not, then they presumably won’t mind being told if they are.
Ah, and so you demonstrate the point I just made. Now we’ve got a situation where the accommodations granted to one student immediately and substantially degrade the clarity of communication to all the other students. Having made what is allegedly just a personal choice on one teacher’s part, we’ve barely started exploring the consequences and we’re already into “making the learning environment worse for everyone” territory!
On my Facebook wall where I originally shared this post, various people chimed in with their experiences from either teaching or work, and several mentioned that this wouldn’t really come up for them because they had never had a reason to tell anyone “you’re wrong” anyway.
I’m not surprised that it’s easy to find any number of anecdotes like this. (Although I was particularly amused by “My academic field is history, if that matters”—oh, I’d say it matters quite a bit!) But what is the use of such things? I can recall plenty of times where my teachers have said “that’s wrong” or “you’re wrong”, where my college professors have said such things, my coworkers to me or to each other, my bosses to me or to my coworkers, and of course I to various people… but what does any of this prove? Only that people’s experience is different…
While not everyone agreed, many people seemed to have the position that avoiding “you’re wrong”-type language is just a net improvement and that they’ve never ran into a situation where one would need to use it (and I think at least some of those people do also work in fields with people on the spectrum). This also matches my own experience, and makes me skeptical of how likely it is for any of your scenarios to turn out to be a problem in practice.
I find this position to be wildly implausible. A net improvement, really? I’m sorry, but this does not pass the smell test… and as I said, I have encountered scenarios similar to those which I have described, many times.
… applying the same policy to all students would likely also make several others feel more comfortable.
This is possible. Does it outweigh the downsides? It seems to me that it can’t even plausibly begin to do so.
In any case, it would seem bad to me if this teacher, in considering whether to grant the request, would conclude that he has to deny it because of some complicated hypothetical scenario that assumed other students reacted in very specific ways. Given that it’s also very plausible that none of that happens and everything goes just fine.
Indeed, the teacher should not deny the request for such a reason. He should deny the request on far more general principles than that, namely that (a) that there are many possible ways for other students to react that would impose serious costs and cause detrimental effects, (b) the very predictable (and not at all hypothetical) effects of granting the request would be bad even aside from any specific reactions on the part of any specific students, and (c) the incentives created by granting the request would be far-reaching and almost universally bad.
(There is also an even more general principle, which is that the default response to any requests that one change one’s behavior in order to mitigate some supposed problem that someone else is having, should be “no”. Of course, in this particular case we have many more specific reasons to respond in the negative, but still this is a solid default, and well worth keeping in mind, because the aforementioned specific reasons exhibit patterns which recur in many other circumstances.)
It is of course possible that some major unexpected cost comes up, but if that happens, he can consider them and then shift his approach accordingly.
Can he? One of the effects of having such requests granted is the creation of precedent, and the shifting of the Overton window. In other words, decisions like this exhibit hysteresis. This is yet another of the many dangers and downsides of granting requests like this: you limit your ability to say “no” in the future, and restrict not only your own future choices, but those of your colleagues, etc.
Grant such a request once, and you will find very quickly that you have incurred an obligation.
(Of course, I am quite sure that the author of the quoted original post is well aware of this, and indeed that this is his explicit goal. But that just gives us another reason to resist such advocacy!)
I have a hard time seeing this as particularly problematic, given the previously mentioned view that saying “you’re wrong” just doesn’t seem to be necessary in general. “Having your brain automatically flinch away from” something sounds bad if you phrase it like that, but part of the process of acquiring any skill is to learn to automatically flinch away from performing the skill in a bad way. Similarly, if there’s little reason to ever say “you’re wrong” while there are good reasons to avoid it, then I see this less as distorting cognition and more as optimizing it (or more specifically optimizing the skill of good communication).
I’m sorry, but this reads to me like naked Dark Arts. Having your brain flinch away from thinking “that’s wrong” when you hear something that is wrong is disastrous—the worst kind of cognitive distortion. We should be doing everything in our power to identify and root out such flinches, not encouraging them!
Would the selective approach in this case be something like “ignore the request and let them drop out if they can’t handle that”, or something else?
I agree that there are definite incentive problems to take into account. However in this specific case, where the cost of accommodation is basically zero (just using slightly different language), I don’t think they’re an issue.
Yep. (Of course “ignore” can be finessed, but you’ve certainly got the gist of it.)
(I will also note that the strategy is “ignore the request”; “let them drop out if they can’t handle that” sneaks in a model of the consequences. It is not an entirely unreasonable model, but it’s certainly not the only plausible one. We should be very wary of privileging one possibility in such cases.)
I strongly disagree with your evaluation of the cost, and am surprised to see you make such a claim. Surely you must know that “just” using (“slightly”) different language is far from costless?
As for incentives, you pay lip service to them, but I don’t think you are taking them at all seriously. Assume the cost of one accommodation to be “basically zero”. It does not follow from this that the expected total cost of all requested accommodations, conditional on the policy of “grant requested accommodations” being instituted, will be “basically zero”, or even “less than astronomical”. (Indeed, we can observe that such an optimistic prediction turns out to be manifestly false.)
(Quite often, the second-order consequences, the effects of incentive gradients, etc., are the downsides of some proposed policy. Saying “but incentives aside…” is the equivalent of the proverbial “other than that, Mrs. Lincoln, how was the play?”.)
Okay. In that case I’m not sure why you say that my commentary is dismissing the selective ways of looking at the issue. When I wrote it, the two options I had in mind were “agree to the request” or “deny/ignore the request”. (I mean, I did “dismiss” the selective ways in the sense that I thought they’d be a bad way of dealing with the issue, but I interpret you to have meant “dismiss” in the sense of “not consider at all”.)
In the general case it’s not necessarily costless. But in this particular case, at least her teacher seemed to think that it was, if not literally costless, then a very small cost. And if I was in his position, I think it would be a very negligible cost for me to implement. Remembering to use different language would take a little bit of effort at first, but then become automatic very quickly.
(I’m again assuming that the request can be incorporated while still delivering all of the teaching and grading etc. essentially unchanged. If it was the case that she couldn’t easily be corrected on mistakes in assignments or something similar, that would substantially change my position.)
I agree. I did not mean to argue for a blanket policy of granting all requested accommodations, nor did I interpret the original poster to be arguing for that.
Because you talk quite a bit about what will or will not fix this student’s problem, whether it is easy or hard for this student to “get over it”, how long it would take for this student to fix the problem, what this student’s experience is like, etc., etc. (Likewise the author of the quoted original post.)
These concerns all belong to a corrective view. From a selective view, all of them are irrelevant. What is relevant instead is questions like: supposing that we adopt a policy of granting such requests, what will the student body (likewise: the class, the results of the course, etc.) be like? If we adopt a policy of not granting such requests, what will said things be like? And so on.
So, you say that you thought that selective ways would be a bad way of dealing with the issue. Well, that’s a perfectly coherent view. But it needs to be argued for, not just left as a totally unstated background assumption.
I would not conclude this from the quoted post. I would conclude only that this person found it prudent or desirable to make a Facebook post that claimed such things. While there is surely a correlation between these two things, it is not nearly strong enough to allow us to treat them as identical.
(And, in this particular case, the post is strongly performative in tone, further weakening said correlation.)
For one thing, cognitive costs of alterations like this vary across individuals. Some may find such adjustments as easy as you describe them being for you; others will not. Instituting a policy of making, and requiring, such adjustments, selects against the latter sort of individual. (There’s that selective view again!)
Some of my best teachers, instructors, professors, etc. have seemed very much like the latter sort. I find this unlikely to be coincidence.
For another thing, some obvious questions we could ask would be: ok, so you’re going to not ever tell this student that she’s wrong. Are you also not going to tell the other students that they’re wrong? What if they ask you “so, am I wrong about this?”, or “so, is this wrong?”? What if they ask you “so, what so-and-so just said—that’s wrong, isn’t it?” You might be tempted to describe various evasions which you could use, but now suppose that another student is (again, to take just one possible example) on the autism spectrum, and has a difficult time understanding euphemisms, indirection, etc.? Suppose that they’re not a native speaker? Suppose that they’re on the spectrum and they’re not a native speaker?
(It took me barely a minute to come up with this example. And it’s far from being unrealistic—I can tell you that from personal experience! How many other such “competing access needs” scenarios are induced by granting this one “almost costless” accommodation?)
What if one of the other students tells this student that she’s wrong? Must you now police the speech of your students for this particular linguistic landmine, in addition to your own speech?
What if someone of your students are (like the professors described earlier) the sorts of people who find it difficult to “adjust” their language in this manner?
In short, it is very easy to say that making some adjustment would be nearly costless. It is quite another thing to actually consider all the costs. This is doubly so because there are considerable incentives (!) to make such claims.
And I haven’t even gotten to the distortionary effect on your own cognition, from not just avoiding such straightforward constructions as “you’re wrong” (and similar), but automatically avoiding them! Perhaps one could make an argument that having your brain automatically flinch away from responding to a clearly wrong statement with “that’s wrong” is not as bad as it sounds… but that certainly wouldn’t be the way I’d bet.
Well, that’s certainly an assumption, yes…
I believe that you did not mean to argue for such a blanket policy, but I do not believe for a moment that the original poster wasn’t.
Fair enough, I’ll elaborate then.
You’re thinking about the selective view in a way that focuses on people who have the incentive to make these kinds of requests. Meanwhile I’m more focused on the people who wouldn’t have an incentive to make these kinds of requests, if not for the fact that their trauma makes it excessively costly for them to not have their requests accommodated. It’s not even the case that, as your link to the Vladimir_M comment implies, that they have developed this as an unconscious strategy for getting something that makes them better off. Having this problem just makes them worse off.
If such people make requests that are low-cost for us to grant, while very costly for them if we do not grant them, that has the consequence of making it significantly costlier and harder for them to graduate. And even if they do manage to graduate, it may make it significantly harder for them to overcome their problems later in life. So then one selective effect is that the school as a whole loses people who would otherwise have been good students. But also on a broader level, society as a whole suffers as these people become increasingly worse off and less capable of contributing, when a more accommodating policy could have allowed them to thrive.
(This is a somewhat personal topic for me, as I have a close relative who had to drop out of university due to mental health problems and ultimately ended up on an early disability pension when they would have preferred to be working. And things wouldn’t have needed to go very differently for something similar to happen to me.)
So my view is that it’s bad to take an “ignore/deny” type approach because the selective effects have an overall negative composition on both the student body of that particular school, as well as on the composition of society in general.
That’s true. Though if these people have difficulty making accommodations that would make some of their students significantly better off, then that seems to me like evidence that they’re not among the best teachers, and that it might be good to select against them.
Also this bit sounds like we are now talking about something like… what university-level policies should be like, and while that’s not an unreasonable direction to be going in, I was originally thinking of this just as a discussion of the choices of this particular teacher. It seems to me like one should first get on the same page about whether his specific decision was good or bad, before trying to consider possible policy implications. (Since it can be that a particular choice made individually is good or bad, but trying to create an institution-wide policy that everyone/no-one should make the same choice has unintended effects; but one can’t talk about the policy-level tradeoffs before first knowing what the effects on the individual level are.)
It’s easy to generate lots of “what ifs”, but a long list of them doesn’t mean they’d be hard to answer in practice. Your first two questions in particular seem to me to have obvious answers—automatically extending the policy to all students only makes sense, but if someone explicitly wants to know if they are wrong or not, then they presumably won’t mind being told if they are.
On my Facebook wall where I originally shared this post, various people chimed in with their experiences from either teaching or work, and several mentioned that this wouldn’t really come up for them because they had never had a reason to tell anyone “you’re wrong” anyway. E.g. one person said:
And another said:
While not everyone agreed, many people seemed to have the position that avoiding “you’re wrong”-type language is just a net improvement and that they’ve never ran into a situation where one would need to use it (and I think at least some of those people do also work in fields with people on the spectrum). This also matches my own experience, and makes me skeptical of how likely it is for any of your scenarios to turn out to be a problem in practice.
If anything, the systematic effects seem positive, in that applying the same policy to all students would likely also make several others feel more comfortable.
Of course, it would be silly to argue that there could never be any costs associated with this. It’s certainly likely that trying to accommodate, if not this particular request, then some other request of vaguely the same type would eventually get us into a challenging scenario. But if that happens, one can figure out the best course of action when it happens, and then possibly re-evaluate the overall approach if it does turn out to be more costly.
In any case, it would seem bad to me if this teacher, in considering whether to grant the request, would conclude that he has to deny it because of some complicated hypothetical scenario that assumed other students reacted in very specific ways. Given that it’s also very plausible that none of that happens and everything goes just fine.
Fair enough, so I’ll rephrase: there seem to be very small immediate costs for this particular teacher to accommodate the request. It is of course possible that some major unexpected cost comes up, but if that happens, he can consider them and then shift his approach accordingly.
I have a hard time seeing this as particularly problematic, given the previously mentioned view that saying “you’re wrong” just doesn’t seem to be necessary in general. “Having your brain automatically flinch away from” something sounds bad if you phrase it like that, but part of the process of acquiring any skill is to learn to automatically flinch away from performing the skill in a bad way. Similarly, if there’s little reason to ever say “you’re wrong” while there are good reasons to avoid it, then I see this less as distorting cognition and more as optimizing it (or more specifically optimizing the skill of good communication).
That’s unfortunate for your relative, of course, and they have my sympathies. But I don’t think anyone would call it implausible that this person would’ve benefited from being granted accommodations for their difficulties. The question is what this would cost their professors, the other students, society in general, etc.
You could in theory make several arguments here, and you seem to be making some of them—but it’s not clear which and when. You could say:
(a) It would cost the professors / other students / society so little to accommodate your relative that, on altruistic grounds, we should do this, because the benefit to the accommodated person is so great and the total cost is so low.
(b) The professors / other students may pay a non-trivial cost to accommodate your relative, but this is outweighed by the benefit to society from having this person be accommodated, so we should do it (which is to say, we should force any unwilling cost-bearers to bear the cost against their wishes, as a form of redistribution of resources).
(c) The professors, the other students, and society would all benefit from accommodating your relative, so we should obviously do it because it’s good for everyone.
(d) The professors / other students / society may pay a non-trivial cost to accommodate your relative, but we should do it anyway, because… something. (Social justice?)
Argument (d) seems hard to justify morally. Argument (c) is very implausible empirically. Argument (b) also seems hard to justify morally, but perhaps marginally less so than (d). Argument (a) also seems implausible empirically, as I’ve already discussed.
How can this be true? Why is it better to have the student body contain students who have this sort of mental disability, than to not have the student body contain such students?
I have described some of the costs and negative effects of such a thing. But here you seem to be saying not merely that the costs and negative effects are very low, but that actually there are benefits? What could they be…?
I am not sure why you say this. Why do you say that such people can’t be getting something that makes them better off? If they successfully get their preferences (a.k.a. “needs”, etc.) acknowledged and accommodated, that is a distinct advantage relative to the base case where they are just a regular person with no special needs! This seems very obvious!
This seems to be making the assumption that such people (on average) “would otherwise have been good students”. I do not think that this is the least bit warranted.
Additionally, this perspective suffers from the problem of “the seen vs. the unseen”. The student who needs such an accommodation is taking the place of the student who doesn’t. Which of them is more likely to be a good student generally, and to contribute to society later? I think it’s clear that it’s the latter.
Casting such accommodations as improvements in the expected social benefit provided by the university is just not remotely plausible.
I mean, yes, but having that preference gives them no special advantage relative to not having it.
Suppose that I have a gluten intolerance and need to have gluten-free food available. It’s of course true that getting to have gluten-free food is now a distinct advantage to me, compared to a scenario where I couldn’t get gluten-free food. But the fact that I have a gluten intolerance doesn’t make me better off overall. If I get accommodated, then at best I get to the same neutral level of “can eat food without getting terrible symptoms” that everyone else is at. And more realistically, I won’t even get to that zero level but rather will sometimes accidentally eat food with gluten, will miss out on tasty foods I’d enjoy, etc., so it’d be better for me to not have the intolerance.
Likewise, if someone gets terribly upset about being told “you’re wrong”, then if that’s accommodated, at best they get to the same zero level as everyone who doesn’t get terribly upset about it. And it’s more likely that they won’t get perfectly accommodated, so not only will they gain nothing, but will also need to endure discomfort they wouldn’t need to endure if they didn’t have that sensitivity. So if they don’t already have that pre-existing sensitivity, there’s no incentive for them to develop it.
Why not? I know plenty of otherwise intelligent, creative etc. people who also have serious mental health problems.
But of course it does! It grants them a reason to seek to have the preference satisfied, which is an advantage if (a) having the preference satisfied is a sufficiently superior state to not having the preference at all, and (b) conditional on having the preference, satisfaction is sufficiently likely.
(Basically all of this is explained in the previously-linked Vladimir_M comments, so I do encourage you to reread them if you haven’t done so.)
On the contrary, it is not only plausible but very easy to end up in a superior end state in this scenario. Suppose that having gluten-free food provided for you is costly and difficult, and that you can convince or otherwise cause others to expend their resources on providing you with gluten-free food. This is a signal of your social status, clearly visible to anyone who observes such behavioral interactions. And, in turn, there are many, many situations when an even relatively small advantage in social status is more important (by any relevant measure) than an even quite substantial loss in sensory pleasure from food. (I trust that no examples are needed to illustrate this general point.)
In such a case, it would indeed be better for you to have the gluten intolerance than not to have it.
Note that this logic predicts that we should see people who don’t actually have gluten intolerance, to pretend to do so (as any status signal will attract imitators/fakers). And indeed this is precisely what we do see.
The above logic applies here too. (And this is definitely, and very comprehensively, treated in the linked discussion thread…)
That is not the correct question. The correct question is whether, on average, such people are equally good students to people without such serious mental problems (“such”, note; mental health problems, serious or no, are not monolithic, nor uniform in their effects on academic performance), or better, or worse. (And remember that we are not comparing to general population averages here, but to the population subsets selected for going to college!)
For your assumption to be warranted, it would have to be the case that someone who has a mental breakdown when told that they’re wrong would, if accommodated for that particular disability, be about as good a student on average as… well, the average student. This is highly implausible. (For one thing, remember that mental disorders are highly correlated with one another!)
Sorry, but I think you’re somewhat misunderstanding me. The incentive to make such requests is one part of the selective view. But it’s not the only part. “What will the student body be like if we [ do / don’t ] adopt a policy of granting such accommodations” is a question that can coherently be asked (and which has a non-trivial answer) even if we totally set aside questions of incentives!
On the contrary, it is nothing of the sort. The best teachers are those who are best at teaching, period. Making accommodations for mental illness is, at best, orthogonal to this. If one teacher is better at teaching than another, that’s that.
Sorry, but I do not find this plausible. The quoted original post is very clearly advocating for people to do as he describes himself doing.
What’s more, in such a case, the choices of any particular teacher are, in fact, effectively part of the university’s policies, if they affect other students. We do not know for a fact whether that’s so, but my examples show, I think, that it’s hard for them to avoid doing so.
Ah, and so you demonstrate the point I just made. Now we’ve got a situation where the accommodations granted to one student immediately and substantially degrade the clarity of communication to all the other students. Having made what is allegedly just a personal choice on one teacher’s part, we’ve barely started exploring the consequences and we’re already into “making the learning environment worse for everyone” territory!
I’m not surprised that it’s easy to find any number of anecdotes like this. (Although I was particularly amused by “My academic field is history, if that matters”—oh, I’d say it matters quite a bit!) But what is the use of such things? I can recall plenty of times where my teachers have said “that’s wrong” or “you’re wrong”, where my college professors have said such things, my coworkers to me or to each other, my bosses to me or to my coworkers, and of course I to various people… but what does any of this prove? Only that people’s experience is different…
I find this position to be wildly implausible. A net improvement, really? I’m sorry, but this does not pass the smell test… and as I said, I have encountered scenarios similar to those which I have described, many times.
This is possible. Does it outweigh the downsides? It seems to me that it can’t even plausibly begin to do so.
Indeed, the teacher should not deny the request for such a reason. He should deny the request on far more general principles than that, namely that (a) that there are many possible ways for other students to react that would impose serious costs and cause detrimental effects, (b) the very predictable (and not at all hypothetical) effects of granting the request would be bad even aside from any specific reactions on the part of any specific students, and (c) the incentives created by granting the request would be far-reaching and almost universally bad.
(There is also an even more general principle, which is that the default response to any requests that one change one’s behavior in order to mitigate some supposed problem that someone else is having, should be “no”. Of course, in this particular case we have many more specific reasons to respond in the negative, but still this is a solid default, and well worth keeping in mind, because the aforementioned specific reasons exhibit patterns which recur in many other circumstances.)
Can he? One of the effects of having such requests granted is the creation of precedent, and the shifting of the Overton window. In other words, decisions like this exhibit hysteresis. This is yet another of the many dangers and downsides of granting requests like this: you limit your ability to say “no” in the future, and restrict not only your own future choices, but those of your colleagues, etc.
Grant such a request once, and you will find very quickly that you have incurred an obligation.
(Of course, I am quite sure that the author of the quoted original post is well aware of this, and indeed that this is his explicit goal. But that just gives us another reason to resist such advocacy!)
I’m sorry, but this reads to me like naked Dark Arts. Having your brain flinch away from thinking “that’s wrong” when you hear something that is wrong is disastrous—the worst kind of cognitive distortion. We should be doing everything in our power to identify and root out such flinches, not encouraging them!