This is sad. It used to be the case at the university that you could say things with your real name, especially on internal forums. That was useful. This really

This is sad. It used to be the case at the university that you could say things with your real name, especially on internal forums. That was useful. This really helped with making carefully thought out judgements and getting the feel of what a bigger community thought on a certain subject. That's over and done with, and ended with a similar event. People deleting their internal posts, or even demanding useful internal fora being taken down entirely. Problem is that there are a number of controversial/racist ... but fact ... well, facts (and of course some of these fora contained cartoons from the 80s that are ... more than a little bit sexist, for example. In some cases posted by what are now important professors or administrators). And you simply cannot risk "being seen" saying them. Especially not have a published source for something like that with your name prominently next to it. Now we're supposed to point out papers that point out the problematic facts and expect people to read them (and then finding that you can't say anything about them). We have a few anonymous forums, and a few private forums. Even there, you have the problem that some people might use these statements against you outside of these forums, but at least it can't be some random student, or worse an outside journalist (that's worse because firstly outside journalists, frankly, almost always don't know what they're talking about, and their works are widely read and can even affect the university as a whole). We actually dedicate 2-3 lessons to warning students about racial sensitivities, to push them to check their work and make sure it doesn't point out racial, or god forbid, cultural, differences. But the sometimes violent opposition to facts are the truly bad parts. Facts that don't fit (this year's flavor of) the social justice narrative can destroy careers. In some cases literally statements from particularly "caring" students made a few years back come back to bite them now (one instance was a (long) comment made a few years back about "white trash" middle Americans being victims of capitalism. Now these people are perceived to have elected trump ... they're still poor and need help, but now they're evil) Hell, someone got reprimanded for saying people with black skin really are more difficult to see at night. He meant, of course, in the context of getting a neural net to do it automatically (and let's be fair here: they are). And we have a problem: there are massive differences in performance between white and black students, and we both must ... and can't ... discuss that. That difference, especially that one is not going away no matter what we do, and everyone in that meeting knows that everyone is just going to blame us (and we're already letting some people cheat more than a bit). Privately I've checked, assuming the name points to the religion, you can classify people into their religions based on their grades 96% correctly. So there's big differences in academic achievement "based on religion" (I would say attitudes finding their origin in religions influence academic outcomes more than a little bit). Let me just say it here: different races ... are different. Different cultures ... are different. Unfortunately not just in skin color.