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A professor’s resignation highlights pressures within academia to conform
- prudhvid 5y ago> In 2020 Norman Wang, a cardiologist at the University of Pittsburgh, was demoted for publishing a paper in the Journal of the American Heart Association that analysed and criticised diversity initiatives. The journal issued an apology and retracted it.
- carbocation 5y agoThe Economist really under-described this article in a way that seems deceptive. In the retraction notice[1], two examples of misrepresented quotations from Dr. Wang's article are displayed next to the primary source. Misrepresenting sources is not 'analysis'. 1 = https://www.ahajournals.org/doi/10.1161/JAHA.119.014602 https://www.ahajournals.org/doi/10.1161/JAHA.119.014602
- prudhvid 5y agohttps://web.archive.org/web/20210927014950/https://www.economist.com/united-states/2021/09/25/a-professors-resignation-highlights-pressures-within-academia-to-conform https://web.archive.org/web/20210927014950/https://www.econo... - link to internet archive
- imwillofficial 5y agoTurning? This has been happening for awhile. Regardless of where you are on the US political spectrum. Universities have been held strongly on one side of that spectrum for awhile now. If that’s good news or bad depends on where you stand on said political spectrum.
- dang 5y agoThe submitted title ("Universities Turning into Social Justice Factory?") broke the site guidelines about titles: "Please use the original title, unless it is misleading or linkbait; don't editorialize.". We've reverted it now. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
- prudhvid 5y agoThanks Dang!
- prudhvid 5y agoIndependent of political affiliation, silencing diversity of thought is not a good thing for the society
- worrycue 5y ago> If that’s good news or bad depends on where you stand on said political spectrum. I think objectively it’s bad for everyone when free inquiry is hobbled by dogma. I think people should have the right to be wrong in academia. I can think of no safer place to be wrong - there are real consequences when you are wrong in practice (e.g. as a politician) compared to being wrong in theory (e.g. as a professor not really in charge of anything)
- jimbob45 5y agoIs there anyone on here for which the headline holds true? Most of us are likely degree-holders here. Major-specific classes (at least for engineering) didn’t have time for any sort of indoctrination and non-major classes were jokes that you put as little effort into as possible in order to focus on the major courses.
- andrew_ 5y agoThere's likely a lot of us with some college that took a gig before graduation during or immediately after the dotcom boon. I wasn't exposed to this in the late 90s / early 2000s when I was in school for a CompSci degree. I took all kinds of sociology, English comp, and psych fillers and can't recall any kind of the post-modernist progressivism cited. They were interesting, fairly neutral courses.
- nixpulvis 5y agoSchools of thought are pronounced throughout engineering. Just look at metric vs imperial systems for a quick example. The difference is often that there are more objective measures for "correctness". But even still, context, history, and situational awareness matter immensely. A 2" screw might be just what you need. This of course all starts to break down at the language level itself. Complexity simply refuses to be wrangled.
- hemloc_io 5y agoAs a fairly recent grad I can share some anecdata. How much this applies to you pretty much relies on two things. 1. Where you went to school and 2. What your major was. I went to an engineering focused school and in my major classes most if not all of the profs had a neutral POV on these kinds of issues, and the class content was pretty much only CS stuff. Some non-major classes, particularly in the humanities like COM had this kind of focus where the prof/grad student had a liking to modern progressive topic and would bring them into the class one way or another. (Think sex vs gender, toxic masculinity etc in a COM class.) Generally speaking these would be filler classes taught by grad students/younger profs. Outside in extra curricular like clubs and fraternities DNI stuff mostly comes up in the context of some activity the university wants you to do to show you're not racist or will engage in sexual assault. I got the vibe that it was more of a BS metric for insurance or marketing an not actually meant to do anything. (There's a whole cottage industry of speakers who get paid way too much money for giving these trainings I should write a blog post about one day. ;) I had friends who went to a small liberal arts college where this was much more common, both in class and culturally. The students there were less HR DNI type stuff and more the "woke" side of things. Most if not all people there are true believers. Overall for students + faculty it's a cultural thing, where you go to school more or less determines the level and type of politics that come into your classes. For University admins it's an HR checkbox, similar to corporate diversity training. In more left leaning disciplines it's usually populated by true believers.
- asdfasgasdgasdg 5y agoHaven't universities been like this for ages? I seem to remember stuff about the hippies and vietnam protests and so on. To my understanding, social progress has been the province of the young for decades if not longer, as it has been the province of the not so young to wring their hands about it.
- prudhvid 5y agoYes, younger generations are more progressive, and is a good thing. However, silencing diversity of thought is really not a good scientific attitude
- Lamad123 5y agoUniversities (Western ones at least) have always been like this since the foundation of the University of Bologna in 1988 whose curriculum included a certain amount of "saracenic education" in a very anti-saracenic environment!!
- greendave 5y agoErr.. that’d be 1088. Saracenic education in 1988 would’ve been quite something, I’ll wager!
- Jensson 5y agoDifference is that those hippies now grew up and run the universities.
- kragen 5y agoSocial progress is the opposite of censorship; that about-face is what the article is about.
- PerkinWarwick 5y ago>Haven't universities been like this for ages? I can honestly say that when I went to college people were essentially apolitical. I don't remember anything you might view as a campus protest and the biggest fuss on the main mall were students arguing with a rather obnoxious Pentecostal preacher who showed up every year. (in case you all aren't familiar with him: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brother_Jed https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brother_Jed )
- danial 5y agohttps://archive.is/dGSqV https://archive.is/dGSqV
- type0 5y ago> A professor at a University of California medical school was recently recorded apologising in an endocrinology lecture for using the term ‘pregnant women’. Utterly horrific, why did he apologize? edit: ok, I found some explanations here https://bariweiss.substack.com/p/med-schools-are-now-denying-biological https://bariweiss.substack.com/p/med-schools-are-now-denying... ; only makes the matter worse
- da_big_ghey 5y agoEvery year i think these people found now the greatest level of stuipid, then they create a new level in the next one... i am wondering with trepidation what they are deciding next. Always it start in the university then filter out to other places, makes me very scared for the next some years when this comes to real life.
- version_five 5y agoI'm assuming you're talking broadly about social justice types. I don't want to put words on anyone's mouth, but it seems to me there is some extreme group that is basically pranking everyone, intentionally escalating how silly their demands are, and people are to scared to push back, so they keep trying more outrageous things. There was a South Park about it over 20 years ago (you may remember Lemmywinks) I don't know what to do about it, but at the personal level you can just ignore it.
- josephcsible 5y ago> at the personal level you can just ignore it But ignoring it gets you canceled.
- oyashirochama 5y agoImagine caring, and keeping a link to your real life and online personas enough to cause real life consequences.
- exo-pla-net 5y agoThe resigning professor, Peter Boghossian, was one of the architects of the Grievance Studies Affair. [1] [1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grievance_studies_affair https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grievance_studies_affair
- Nicksil 5y agohttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grievance_studies_affair https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grievance_studies_affair
- gruez 5y ago>In 2018, Mark Perry of the University of Michigan revealed that his university had nearly 80 diversity officers at a total annual payroll cost of $10.6m. What do they even do? Why do you need multiple per department?
- vgeek 5y agoHaving worked in academia as part of one of the bloated administrative staffs, they probably do little to nothing. Maybe spend 6 weeks making Powerpoints that <15 people will see, then lots of pointless meetings. Everything takes 5x longer than estimated since you have to solicit and incorporate immaterial feedback from dozens of people for the sake of inclusion. Need a 5 page WP site spun up? 4 months. Implement some simple analytics tags? Best case of 2 weeks. Custom dashboards? 2 months is the benchmark. College tuition just keeps getting more and more outlandish to feed the beast-- yet when you look at associate/non-tenured professor (those creating actual value) pay at most colleges, it is laughable relative to the admin overhead and fat salaries for senior leadership.
- jazzyjackson 5y agoits a shame that multiple generations went into debt for this
- zzbzq 5y agoI'm the first to point out the absurd levels of gross bureaucracy in any large institution, but my first instinct is to question whether "Diversity Officer" is a distinct job title or just an additional committee that something like a professor can be a member of, since it sounds more like the latter, despite the quote implying the former.
- Jensson 5y ago> Why do you need multiple per department? To employ their friends who graduated with a humanities degree but couldn't find work.
- nixpulvis 5y agoNothing is safe, nothing is sacred. Welcome to the desert.
- reilly3000 5y agoI would like to call this man’s bluff: he was not fired or censured by the university. He found it uncomfy and left. His crusade to publish 20 fake papers to prove a point about what journals will accept shows a pre-existing contempt. His prominent media tour, and subsequent complaints about lack of coverage by ‘liberal media’ continues that provocateur ethos. Let him make his points, but I refuse to believe in the stereotype that ideological homogeneity is some kind of crisis in academia. I’ll pay attention when they start purging the Keynesian economics professors and disallowing Christians from matriculation without denouncing their faith. I’ll fight back when those professors who disagree with Inclusion culture are fired for their beliefs. Until then this feels much like the rest of the conservative persecution tropes and I’m just not biting.
- phkahler 5y agoYou've twisted it all up: >> I would like to call this man’s bluff: he was not fired or censured by the university. He found it uncomfy and left. His crusade to publish 20 fake papers to prove a point about what journals will accept shows a pre-existing contempt. That's right, he never claimed he was fired - he quit. He does find it uncomfy and absolutely seems to have contempt for what "education" has become. That's not a bluff - you're trying to call him out on something, but there's nothing to call out. You're claim of what's really going on is pretty much what he said.
- jtbayly 5y agoI know a tenured, well-published economics professor struggling to keep his job for not towing the party line at a major state university.
- dredmorbius 5y agoWhich party line is that, exactly? (Economics is rather noted for hostility to heterodoxy, though more typically enforced by right-establishment rather than left-opposition.)
- anoxor 5y ago
- bregma 5y agoIt was better decades ago when I was a student. We were all white middle- or high-income straight white Judeo-Christian (mostly) able-bodied men. There was absolutely no pressure to conform.
- screye 5y agoThis is bait, but I'll bite. A bunch of my uncles and senior team members are Indians who went to grad school in the US. All of them found it to be an amazing, welcoming and energizing experience. They have many stories of committing social faux-pas of levels that you'd imagine christians would crucify you for. Contrary to expectation, their mistakes were quickly forgotten after everyone had a hearty laugh. The left loves to pretend that the US an utmost racist place that suddenly got better once the proto-woke took over. However, demographic changes of such levels do not happen overnight or over decades. The people of the US have issues, but they are orders of magnitude more multicultural than most other nations, developed or otherwise. (Govt/Policy level bias is a whole nother issue, I'm talking more about the day-2-day)
- esyir 5y agoI'll add this in. I don't have to watch my language around the right associated sacred cows. I can talk shit about religion, attack anti abortion activism and still be fine. But man, do anything with the left's cows and you'd eat a ban or worse.
- itronitron 5y agoDecades ago, as an earnest freshman in college I participated in the 'multicultural awareness group' ... during one of the meetings I recall one young woman taking the floor and complaining, in a rather exasperated tone, about how she was sick and tired of people making all kinds of stereotypical assumptions about her background and interests due to her being Jewish, and finished by saying that what made this even more outrageous for her was that she wasn't Jewish. Decades later, two points that I'd like to make are that 2) teaching people about the perspectives of others is important and valuable to the people being taught and 1) while privileged groups do exist not everyone that could be sloppily assigned to that group is in fact privileged (there are many people that have been and will be disadvantaged despite being born 'white').
- Jensson 5y agoThis is simple game theory, when some professors do science and other professors do politics the professors who do politics will win and push the others out. Ultimately we will end up with mostly professors doing politics except in the fields where facts are hard enough to resist opinions (ie hard fields).
- anoxor 5y agoEven the hard fields are falling. Your racist if your grad students diversity isn't as diverse as the surrounding population, which is pretty much every grad school given factors of history and current distribution of capital.
- rayiner 5y agoAn alarming aspect of this lack of intellectual diversity, for me, is how academia has become a major (if not the major) platform for discussion of issues relating to racial and religious minorities. Being an Asian from a Muslim country, I've been quite surprised to see how often college professors are brought onto, e.g., news programs to weigh in on issues affecting those groups. (E.g. after the Atlanta message spa shootings.) That makes sense that people would look to academia to learn about unfamiliar minority groups. But as a result, the discourse about and within those groups is heavily distorted by the intellectual homogeneity of academia. Because, of course, you can't get tenure as a professor of Islamic Studies at an Ivy League University espousing beliefs that virtually all Muslims worldwide hold.
- maxerickson 5y agoHave you gone through the exercise of enumerating the beliefs of tenured Islamic studies professors at Ivy league universities, or are we just enjoying your speculation?
- DamnYuppie 5y agoA few off the top of my head: 1.) Homosexuality is forbidden in Islam and is generally looked down upon. 2.) Not necessarily based off the Quran but their stance on Israel is generally not aligned with the western countries. 3.) Women's rights Having strong views/beliefs that aren't aligned with the progressive agenda would pretty much keep you from any job at an Ivy league school no a days.
- maxerickson 5y ago"Enumerating" means identifying the specific beliefs of each individual in question, not waving your hands in the air and declaring what you think Ivy league professors are required to believe.
- Nicksil 5y ago> "Enumerating" means identifying the specific beliefs of each individual in question, not waving your hands in the air and declaring what you think Ivy league professors are required to believe. Enumerating is specifying one after the other; creating a list. The comment you're replying to is a list of things. If that isn't what you meant, you might reword your comment so others may address it as you would like.
- downWidOutaFite 5y agoIt's so sad that HN is becoming more and more part of the right-wing outrage amplification media network. When Nikole Hannah-Jones got cancelled at UNC by right-wing donors the story was blacklisted on HN.
- Nicksil 5y ago>It's so sad that HN is becoming more and more part of the right-wing outrage amplification media network. What do you mean by this?
- downWidOutaFite 5y agoBeen seeing a lot of the right-wing media's daily outrage and victimization stories showing up on HN. Edit: I don't want to answer the question below because then I'll get another -4 hit on the karma from the outraged crowd here.
- Nicksil 5y ago>Been seeing a lot of the right-wing media's daily outrage and victimization stories showing up on HN. What in this article do you disagree with?
- dredmorbius 5y agotptacek's take is pretty good: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28689323 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28689323
- mariusor 5y agoI haven't read much by Boghossian but from the bits that are floating on the internet he seemed to hold a decently balanced perspective on things. Somehow reducing him and his decade of activity as a critical thinking professor as just "a troll" based on a half-failed publicity stunt seems a little drastic.
- tptacek 5y agoConcerns about illiberalism on campuses are probably well-founded (there's ample anecdotal evidence from a diversity of sources). But Boghossian isn't a good source; rather, my take is that he's essentially a troll. Boghossian is well known for his involvement in the "Grievance Studies Hoax", in which bogus papers (like a "dog park" study that claimed field researchers monitored the sexual habits of dogs in dog parks for 1000 hours) were ostensibly accepted for publication, Sokal-style. The Hoaxers were incredibly deceptive in their presentation of what they accomplished. They wrote up lurid descriptions of insane papers, but didn't talk about how those papers were often rejected, and, when they were accepted, that acceptance was often in vanity journals. When they got papers accepted in real (albeit low-impact) journals, they weren't the ludicrous papers they'd written about. To boot, they faked field data, and coasted off the public's lack of understanding of the difference between refereeing papers and replicating them. One of their 7 accepted papers was published in "The Journal of Poetry Therapy", which isn't even an academic journal. Among their "in play" papers at the end of the hoax were several "reject-and-resubmits", which is journalese for "nice try but no", not journalese for "make a couple edits and we'll run it". What makes me especially wary about all of this is that there's a playbook to follow, pivoting out of non-remunerative nth-tier academic positions (Boghossian was an assistant professor of philosophy at PSU) into social media stardom. We can probably come up with more than one example.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- UncleMeat 5y agoThis has been the game forever. My wife is a professor. At her university, there is a contingent of people who insist up and down that they are simply fighting for free expression in the classroom. What they actually do is receive training from broader institutions on precisely where their writing is protected, deliberately enroll in courses taught by black, gay, and trans professors, and write hate speech in these channels. When they fail the course (because they aren't actually doing the work and obviously don't care to learn the material), they claim that they are being punished for their beliefs. There is an organized campaign to attack institutions and create a narrative of "I've been attacked for using gendered pronouns" or whatever.
- jltsiren 5y agoUniversities have always been hotbeds of activism (and sources of an occasional revolution). Compared to the 20th century, the current level of activism is still pretty mild. No major faction, for example, is advocating for a violent revolution or recruiting for an enemy state. What is different today is that one of the major political factions is absent. If your message is often anti-university and anti-education, your supporters will have a hard time maintaining credibility if they try to spread your message as students or employees of the university. At best, they can align with the student-as-such camp that claims that political and social issues have no place on campus. Because they have to remain silent, other factions appear stronger than they are.
- TrispusAttucks 5y agoThere is arguably too much ideological astronauting going on in much of higher education. We need to come back down to earth.
- seoulmetro 5y agoI think we've reached terminal velocity with a lot of ideas and thought processes the world now considers toxic, but normal. It's a damn shame too since it replaced all the good-on-the-outside, toxic-on-the-inside stuff too. Now it's just toxic throughout.
- mcphage 5y agoEvery week there’s a new article about this same guy, and it’s never any more compelling than it was the week before.
- systemvoltage 5y agoWe shouldn't be hurling ad-hominem attacks at the author, there is more to it in the article.
- mcphage 5y agoThis isn't an attack on the author, it's the fact that we're seeing a lot of this kind of article on HN, but it's almost always about the exact same person.
- gandalfian 5y agoEver read "The History Man"? He starts a false university rumor that a controversial speaker has been banned so everyone then feels obliged to invite him causing protests and chaos. This was set in the early 1970's. We have not invented fuss and perhaps could do with more of a sense of history before getting upset. It was ever thus.
- sinuhe69 5y agoThe leftists in Germany had a hotly debate about this kind of politics. I remember the term coined by the ex-president of the German Linke party: lifestyle leftist. I find it poignantly accurate.