12 ms·

How is it possible that professors with impeccable academic credentials get fired for jokes nearly instantly [1], yet this student's professor was allowed to ca

• rscho 5y ago
  Well... non-PC jokes are a liability risk for the institution at large. Dead students are not. We have an identical phenomenon in hospitals: there are huge campaigns against sexism and the like, while there are multiple young professionals committing suicide from burn-out every year and noone does as much as bat an eyelash. Contrary to victims of discrimination, dead people can't easily organize into coordinated legal action.
  • berndi 5y ago
    You would think that allegedly driving a PoC student to suicide would count for something in the PC twitter sphere…
    • the_lonely_road 5y ago
      Are Asians PoC? I thought they were not and that was literally the only reason the oft repeated phrase “black and other PoC” didn’t literally translate into “not white”.
      • berndi 5y ago
        Wikipedia says they are. However, the Supreme Twitter Council of Wokeness may have ruled otherwise at some point.
      • hackflip 5y ago
        Only when it is politically convenient
      • bronzeage 5y ago
        They can't be PoC because their higher than average success contradicts the narrative of victims.
      • root_axis 5y ago
        I have never heard the suggestion that Asian people aren't considered "PoC".
        • throwaway894345 5y ago
          Some woke people will argue that they are “white adjacent” when convenient (e.g., the Harvard admissions scandal) but also that they are people of color when convenient (e.g., the Atlanta spa killings).
        • deleted 5y ago
          [deleted]
        • faeriechangling 5y ago
          They are racial chimeras. Changing between majority and minority based on the speakers preferences.
        • andromeduck 5y ago
          According to Twitter we're "multiracial whites". BIPoC is also often used as a dogwhistle to exclude Asians and Latinos when convenient.
          • anchpop 5y ago
            Are Latinos not indigenous to the Americas? (genuinely asking)
            • csande17 5y ago
              My understanding is that the term "Latino" includes both people indigenous to Latin America and people whose ancestors were colonists from Spain. The latter group is generally the larger/more well-known one -- that's why "Latino", a Spanish word, is used to describe them.
      • wyager 5y ago
        They’ve recently started using the term “BIPOC” to clarify that Asians are excluded, and when they want to include Asians they’ll say “BIPOC and AAPI”.
        • tomjakubowski 5y ago
          No, by any good faith source that I have read, BIPOC does not at all exclude Asians. "The acronym BIPOC refers to black, indigenous, and other people of color and aims to emphasize the historic oppression of black and indigenous people." Incidentally, one of the co-founders of the "BIPOC Project" is an Asian-American woman. * https://www.thebipocproject.org/ https://www.thebipocproject.org/ * https://dbpedia.org/page/Person_of_color https://dbpedia.org/page/Person_of_color * https://www.verywellmind.com/what-is-bipoc-5025158 https://www.verywellmind.com/what-is-bipoc-5025158
          • wyager 5y ago
            From the BIPOC project website: “We use the term BIPOC to highlight the unique relationship to whiteness that Indigenous and Black (African Americans) people have” If it included Asians they would just keep using POC.
          • vimy 5y ago
            European activists have started using BIPOC as well. They don’t seem to realize that indigenous means white in Europe.
            • andromeduck 5y ago
              Isn't BAME the euro equivalent?
              • vimy 5y ago
                That’s the UK term. Other European countries are more focussed on the US so they use all the US terms.
      • PicassoCTs 5y ago
        So many different terms and abbreviations, for what is just humans..
        • curtainsforus 5y ago
          The most important thing about humans is which ones I'm allowed to attack.
    • throwaway894345 5y ago
      I get the distinct impression that the Twitter sphere isn’t genuinely concerned about people of color, or else they would express concern over, say, inner city violence. Instead they work hard to brand any such concern as “far-right”.
      • andromeduck 5y ago
        It's mostly just wingnuts & entitled folks trying to make a name for themselves.
        • throwaway894345 5y ago
          Probably, but IMO they have too much power and their behavior is destructive.
    • forgingahead 5y ago
      The "PC twitter sphere" as you describe them are only interested in one thing: doing what is easy and public for burnishing their own stature, and nothing else. No real problems will be solved by them, because they prefer having the public think they are solving them, rather than putting in the actual work and disciplined thinking to do it.
  • specialist 5y ago
    Said another way: Attention economy. There's no rhyme or reason for why any one particular outrage bubbles to the top and becomes today's cause célèbre.
• throwaway45209 5y ago
  At a lunch for female journalists and scientists, Hunt gave a speech... "It's strange that such a chauvinist monster like me has been asked to speak to women scientists. Let me tell you about my trouble with girls. Three things happen when they are in the lab: you fall in love with them, they fall in love with you, and when you criticise them they cry. Perhaps we should make separate labs for boys and girls? Now, seriously, I'm impressed by the economic development of Korea. And women scientists played, without a doubt, an important role in it. Science needs women, and you should do science, despite all the obstacles, and despite monsters like me." That is not a joke.
  • AussieWog93 5y ago
    That quote is a textbook example of self-deprecating British humour.
    • throwaway45209 5y ago
      It's actually self-congratulating, while deprecating others.
      • deleted 5y ago
        [deleted]
      • hnuser123456 5y ago
        I can't see it that way. He is open about his own weaknesses as well. We don't have to look up to him for saying this, but that doesn't make it your typical one-sided bashing.
  • dwighttk 5y ago
    "Now, seriously..." it isn't a very good joke, but what makes you think that isn't a joke?
  • newswasboring 5y ago
    People keep bringing out that this can be a joke, but he said this two days later "I did mean the part about having trouble with girls. It is true that I have fallen in love with people in the lab, and that people in the lab have fallen in love with me, and it's very disruptive to the science. It's terribly important that, in the lab, people are on a level playing field. And I found these emotional entanglements made life very difficult. I mean, I'm really, really sorry that I caused any offence – that's awful. I certainly didn't mean – I just meant to be honest, actually." [1] He was given a chance to clarify, he doubled down. While I'm not saying a joke should cause people to be fired, but this is clearly more than a joke. [1] https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-33077107 https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-33077107
• TazeTSchnitzel 5y ago
  Not all targets and not all campaigns are created equal? If someone has a lot of power within the institution, and the campaign comes mainly from people the institution doesn't care about… you can fill in the gaps. I seriously doubt that exactly what someone has done is the major factor. People in weak positions can easily lose them over the tiniest of things; people in strong positions can get away with murder!
• hellbannedguy 5y ago
  Tenure I had a professor in a chemistry lab that was proud of the amount of complaints he received against him. He literally threw the two ring binder it at me while I was in his office. It must have been a hundred pages. He kept it on the wall like a trophy. I talked to a Counselor at the school, and before I could complete my sentance, he said Dr. Berzergian? (I don't remember the exact spelling of his name.). The Conselor said he, and the Dr., almost got into fisticuffs over his attitude. He told me to take the course at another college. I realized later all his "problem" students were young males. Yes--I truly believe this was his twisted way of hitting on people. A few years later, I was in a bar in San Francisco talking about this professor whom really gave me a bad time. By chance, he knew of the guy, and told me about him. This was in the nineties, but oh boy if he acted this way today, and I stole that stack of complaints---well who knows? This professor caused students to change majors, and even drop out.
  • zaphod12 5y ago
    I'm sorry to be this guy, but it's "tenure"
    • rscho 5y ago
      Getting tenure means (ideally) that the system considers you have proven yourself as a competent researcher and therefore accepts to release a bit of pressure on publishing to allow you to pursue more exploratory objectives. It does not mean you're allowed to behave badly and (officially) does not protect oneself from the consequences of such behaviour. Remove tenure and you remove the last bastion of real research we have left in our industrialized and quasi-corporate western research institutions. Removing tenure would completely trash western science and in practice yield total scientific leadership to eastern powers, who still have old style academic systems with strong tenure positions and less concern for academic mistreatment and "wokeness".
      • soco 5y ago
        Where do you draw the line for tenure? So hitting colleagues with a binder is acceptable, okay got it. How about hitting them with a baseball bat? How much tenure we need for that? Should Einstein be allowed to kill physicists because he's a genius? If we already agreed to make tenure an excuse for doing bad stuff, let's make it official and negotiate the legal borders.
• skystarman 5y ago
  Comparing these personnel decisions from not only different universities and entirely different incidents but also an entirely different country seems unwise to me.
• TrackerFF 5y ago
  Much easier to prove the case of terrible jokes or non-PC behavior. Twitter has streamlined that stuff for years now - and what's more, that kind of behavior is much more relevant for more people, rather than academic fraud which might be a very niche thing, only relevant to small circles of people. One could ask - why is it that petty theft can land some people behind bars for years, while wealthy people committing tax fraud only get fined, or at most a couple of months in a cushy white-collar crime facility? Well - for one, the former crime is much easier to prove, especially if you're caught red-handed. The latter crime tends to be incredibly complex, and will cost a ton of resources to prosecute. I guess the same goes for your questions. Professors incriminating themselves on twitter or youtube - easy as pie. Collusion rings with respectable professors, that probably use students for dirty work and plausible deniability, and resources enough to fight their employer in the courts: hard fight
• gjulianm 5y ago
  For one, you're cherry-picking two examples. Some professors don't get fired for jokes nearly instantly and others get immediately fired for abusing their students. Second, amplification plays a part. A story with "two sides" (such as the joke one) will draw far more public attention than another with only one side, just because there will be more debate and people using it to advance their agendas. In this case, it includes "PC Twitter" but also all of the people who scream "freedom of speech" whenever someone is criticized for saying something dumb or inappropriate.
• underseacables 5y ago
  The tenure system. It protects more bad professors than it retains good ones.
  • rscho 5y ago
    No tenure, no exploratory science and no moonshot. Newton was a dangerous asshole. Would you exchange differential calculus for squeaky-clean academia? I don't think so ...
    • iamadog3 5y ago
      There's a lot of questions that we need to address, cause and effect in the case of tenure and the general priorities of academia. First you implicitly assert that tenure effects the cause of emergent moonshots. How much evidence do we have to the contrary? Cursory research shows the modern application in the US dating to the vague "19th century" not a long timeframe. Tenure itself appears to have emerged in the same timeframe. The modern US application of tenure (secondary) was put in place in 1940. I'll grant you that we have seen a good deal of progress, but I don't know that you could make a robust argument that without tenure, that progress would be absent. I would assert that it falls into inconclusivity, and that to form an argument would require speculation and conjecture. All things are not made equal, and so finding a suitable control group to compare against would be impossible. We can look at history, though, and see that there was a plenitude of highly driven scientists publishing and advancing understanding prior to the advent of tenure. But to say that we can transpose that to the contemporary model itself is a conjecture. Simply, we do not know, and can not know. As to the priorities of academia, and tenured individuals, and the metrics that institutions use to enlighten themselves on the performance of individuals we seem to have come upon a system of perverse incentives. That is exactly everything, to me, it seems we had ought to avoid. Tenured academics can obviously be terminated, but not in frivolous contexts. They are expected to hold some degree of real responsibility. What tenure grants is their freedom of opinion, and the right to fail in their pursuit. As we know, science is the art of failing upwards in a controlled direction. "In all lines of academic investigation it is of the utmost importance that the investigator should be absolutely free to follow the indications of truth wherever they may lead. Whatever may be the limitations which trammel inquiry elsewhere we believe the great state University of Wisconsin should ever encourage that continual and fearless sifting and winnowing by which alone the truth can be found." --Theodore Herfurth, 1894 But the cutthroat competition, the model of "publish or perish" elimination, the perverted demand for conclusivity all stand to imperil the actual aims of science. This is all somewhat incentivized by the tenure system, by personal interest, and by the implicit obligation to "realized" progress - except this is of course not real progress. It isn't as concrete as the fundamentals, the traces are laid much finer these days and replication of research appears more often infrequent, while the quality of publications is increasingly called into question and an economy of debauchery contaminates data for capital and personal gain. And thus the bastion of humanity is corroded while evermore maintaining its authority outward. A real hazard if you ask me. I believe it all needs reform and serious reflection to build it back better.
• wpietri 5y ago
  I would encourage you to think more about the social use of "jokes". Once we get past the level of knock-knocks, jokes very often have social meaning. Look at people like George Carlin, for example. His "7 dirty words" routine was deeply political. It was a full-on assault on American government censorship and the cultural elements that demanded it. And looking at history, he's won. Humor can be very powerful. Jokes can also be used the other way, for social control. Growing up, I heard a lot of racist and sexist jokes, the practical effect of which was to demean: to create a place and put disfavored people in it. I'm old enough that nerds were a similar group, and I remember being the butt of a lot of jokes. When that happens, you're just supposed to take it; any objection to being demeaned is met with, "Why so sensitive! It's just a joke!" So in the case you cite, the problem wasn't him telling a joke. There are whole books full of jokes for speakers he could have used. It was him invoking rank sexist stereotypes and suggesting the solution to his inability to manage his feelings was to push women out of the labs that they've been working for decades to get equal access to. And indeed, are still working on. At my alma mater, just this week a CS professor was just pushed out after dozens of women complained about sexual harassment in recent years. [1] It took dozens because early complaints were dismissed. And there are far more stories of professors like that then there are of ones being booted for "joking" misogyny. [1] https://www.michigandaily.com/news/walter-lasecki-resigns-effective-august-30-amid-new-sexual-harassment-allegations/ https://www.michigandaily.com/news/walter-lasecki-resigns-ef...
  • meowkit 5y ago
    > for social control I think you’re reading way too deeply into this. You’re referring to the Tim Hunt quote linked? Everything is about control or manipulation - its implicit to the human condition.
    • wpietri 5y ago
      I am not particularly referring to Hunt's "joke" there. There's a whole genre of "jokes" used to denigrate women. I disagree that everything is "about" control or manipulation, but as status-oriented primates, humans certainly do inject it into everything. However, that's all the more reason we have to examine little things like "jokes" and be conscious of the effects we're having.
• skywhopper 5y ago
  Number one was a highly offensive “joke” minimizing a truly serious problem that was made to a number of journalists to whom it definitely wasn’t funny. Plenty of people are fired regularly for making complete fools out of themselves and the institutions they represent by offending important outsiders.