6 ms·

Why I’m Leaving the University

44 points by barry-cotter 4y ago

infocollector 4y ago
It will be interesting to see how Texas and Georgia removing tenure from their public universities will impact what they can retain and recruit, once the news really gets out.
- JohnDeHope 4y ago
  Is the idea that they're going to use the lack of tenure to get rid of the woke folks, or the non-woke?
- kxyvr 4y ago
  As far as I know, Texas has not removed tenure. In 2015, Wisconsin significantly weakened their system and Georgia did as well in 2021. There was a paper published last year that discusses the impact of the political decisions on Wisconsin's university system that can be found here: https://peer.asee.org/impacts-of-governmental-policy-actions-on-university-faculty-and-students-in-wisconsin https://peer.asee.org/impacts-of-governmental-policy-actions... This does discuss the impact of essentially removing tenure, but the impact is also intertwined with budget cuts enacted around the same time. As a side comment, the good faculty that I know would absolutely favor a tenured job over a non-tenured.
  - infocollector 4y ago
    From what I understand, a tenured faculty in TX can be fired for "a good reason" (which is very broad and undefined in TX), which is contradictory to what we understand when we utter the word a tenured faculty (In Europe or US in general). Here are the details: https://www.utsystem.edu/board-of-regents/rules/31008-termination-of-faculty-member https://www.utsystem.edu/board-of-regents/rules/31008-termin... - I did not know about Wisconsin. Thanks for that information!
lvass 4y ago
>But Why Not Stick Around for the Paycheck? A lot of people do this, they avoid getting political at all and just do their jobs as professors, often they do a great job and while they might want to express their opinions it's just no use when it could immediately be classified as wrong-think, not taken seriously at all except for reasoning on ostracization strategies. It's fine to stay, we're still far from definite proof of wokeness being required.
- jerrya 4y ago
  Professors at public schools with tenure have an intellectual duty to themselves, their students, the school and the taxpayer to defy forces that try to silence them.
  - lvass 4y ago
    That's too reductionist. If they stay, they might still be doing a great job. If they leave, the expected replacement may not be up to par, and their defiance would in all likelihood be completely useless, which means leaving may be a net loss for society, not to mention an eventual, actually meaningful resistance would likely benefit from them being inside the universities. This defiance looks sad unfortunately, no offense meant to the author here as I respect his attitude. He mentions blogging being in his plans for the future, but even here in HN this post already looks like it's shadow banned and the blogpost has one like. Not all defiance is made equal, this author has a huge uphill battle and I wish him the best.
  - TheChaplain 4y ago
    Most lecturers just want to teach, they don't want to deal with politics so most just shut up and try to be invisible enough to do what they love.
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
- the_biot 4y ago
  Didn't I read something a while back about faculty members, prior to being hired, needing to write an essay about some woke cause? It being clear that the essay not expressing a woke enough opinion, there would be no job offer.
drumhead 4y ago
He seems to be complaining that you can't say controversial things anymore, then promptly turns around and complains about people saying controversial things about Israel. "don't cancel me, cancel him!"
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- drcongo 4y ago
  Every single one of these oh-woe-is-me public resignations does the same.
- bjourne 4y ago
  Exactly. His gripe about anti-Zionist political activity undermines the point of his message. He complains about some faculty who was been hounded by student's associations, but the hounding of Abdulhadi goes unmentioned because she is an "antisemite". Are you "woke" for pointing out that while universities are now severing ties with Russian universities, the Israeli ties are still going strong? Noam Chomsky and other academics a few years ago published a declaration denouncing threats against academic freedom. Unlike this guy, they didn't make it into a "woke-left" vs "woke-right" issue and thus got signatories from "both" (all) sides.
- rayiner 4y ago
  What do you mean by “controversial?” His first example relates to research into the sociology of crime. The second example is about getting rid of standardized testing, and his second is about the label “LatinX.” None of this is “controversial.”
  - zozbot234 4y ago
    Sociology of crime is one thing that has been quite controversial for some time. In fact, it's where the whole CRT thing first got its start, to try and explain severely dysfunctional patterns in the policing of minority communities.
    - 4y ago
rayiner 4y ago
> Asking a question following a public talk, a colleague conspicuously used the word “Latinx” even though the speaker had described both herself and her research subjects as “Latinas” As a minority, this is the part of the “woke” university system that I find most appalling. When universities run by overwhelmingly white faculties get involved in areas like cultural studies, they end up projecting white liberal values onto minority groups. Who is more likely to get hired at UCLA? A person of Hispanic background who is identifies as “Latinx” and writes about the importance of abortion for first generation immigrants, or someone who like 65% of first generation Hispanic immigrants, opposes abortion for reasons that are deeply intertwined with their culture? Or to use another example, they have almost uniformly adopted the consideration of race in admissions and hiring decisions, even though the majority of every minority group opposes that practice: https://www.insidehighered.com/admissions/article/2022/05/02/poll-finds-public-doesnt-favor-affirmative-action https://www.insidehighered.com/admissions/article/2022/05/02... https://www.pewresearch.org/social-trends/2019/05/08/americans-see-advantages-and-challenges-in-countrys-growing-racial-and-ethnic-diversity/ https://www.pewresearch.org/social-trends/2019/05/08/america... These are people who talk about “white supremacy” constantly, but don’t realize that they themselves are exercising white supremacy by taking such strong positions on race and culture issues. They engaged in Microsoft-style “embrace and extinguish” co-opting if minority culture and political movements.
- naravara 4y ago
  Getting a 404 error on your first Insidehighered link FYI. Fixed link, just had to remove the semicolon: https://www.insidehighered.com/admissions/article/2022/05/02/poll-finds-public-doesnt-favor-affirmative-action https://www.insidehighered.com/admissions/article/2022/05/02...
  - rayiner 4y ago
    Thanks.
- pen2l 4y ago
  > As a minority, this is the part of the “woke” university system that I find most appalling. I don't know, I think your frustration may be a little misplaced. This recent tide in American culture of being on tippy-toes (limited as it may be to the liberals and closed circles in academia), I don't find it appalling, I find it... silly, if not admirable, because I understand it's coming from a good place. Imagine you're talking to a little Latina girl, you wouldn't skip a beat if you had to say something like "And these latinos, they did x"? We're in the midst of working through some tough problems in our society, being encouraging to a little girl is not a thing I'd admonish someone for. The worst that happens when someone says Latinx is they might looks silly, a reasonable trade I'd say given the stakes. > Or to use another example, they have almost uniformly adopted the consideration of race in admissions and hiring decisions, even though the majority of every minority group opposes that practice I think you and I have been through this in the past, but: the jury is out on this one, folks of a certain race were systemically oppressed for generations and as a result they are at the bottom of the barrel in terms of house-ownership, savings, etc. To not make the slightest of effort to undo the actions of this extant government is a ludicrous idea. When I see an educated person argue against this, I see it as a mark on their morals.
gurumeditations 4y ago
Truly incredible how outright bigotry continually gets posted to a technology website. This post is a man who unironically cites pop-psych Jordan Peterson, and then links to this incredibly hateful anti-gay and anti-trans article which claims kids are being made gay or trans by sexual predators grooming them online or are choosing to be queer because of white guilt. Complaining about race, queers, liberals, and “Woke”. No tech discussion here! Just your typical hatemonger, who perhaps identifies an actual issue or two and uses it to justify their broader bigotry, and who is perpetuated by losers who cling to his complaints in order to blame their own inadequacies on these boogiemen.
- rayiner 4y ago
  Sorry, wokeness in academia isn’t about fighting “bigotry.” It’s outright “embrace and extinguish”-style co-opting of minority culture and politics by white elites. For example, how white academic elites have co-opted reform movements among Black and Hispanic people to advance radical approaches to police that those minorities oppose. Or how they have embraced race conscious admissions and hiring that minorities oppose. Or how they’re socializing young members of minority groups to see themselves as oppressed or to view American history in a negative light. You can’t sweep that under the rug and dismiss it as “bigotry.”
taylodl 4y ago
Jeff had developed simulation models of the geographic and temporal patterning of urban crime, and had created predictive software that he marketed to law enforcement agencies. Isn't this something the Sociology department should be running with? At the University I attended, the Anthropology department concerned itself with the study of human evolution and the study of modern primates. Is this not universal? Plus, at a university as big as UCLA you'd think they'd have a Criminology department that would work in conjunction with the Sociology department in creating such a model - ensuring it's been vetted and any unintentional biases have been scrubbed. As it is, it's being presented as "one guy" created this model, sold it to the police department, and now faces backlash. I wouldn't expect someone so tone deaf to be a professor at such a prestigious university. Maybe we don't have the full story, but as presented this is pretty bad.

44 points by barry-cotter 4y ago

It will be interesting to see how Texas and Georgia removing tenure from their public universities will impact what they can retain and recruit, once the news really gets out.

JohnDeHope 4y ago
Is the idea that they're going to use the lack of tenure to get rid of the woke folks, or the non-woke?
kxyvr 4y ago
As far as I know, Texas has not removed tenure. In 2015, Wisconsin significantly weakened their system and Georgia did as well in 2021. There was a paper published last year that discusses the impact of the political decisions on Wisconsin's university system that can be found here: https://peer.asee.org/impacts-of-governmental-policy-actions-on-university-faculty-and-students-in-wisconsin https://peer.asee.org/impacts-of-governmental-policy-actions... This does discuss the impact of essentially removing tenure, but the impact is also intertwined with budget cuts enacted around the same time. As a side comment, the good faculty that I know would absolutely favor a tenured job over a non-tenured.
- infocollector 4y ago
  From what I understand, a tenured faculty in TX can be fired for "a good reason" (which is very broad and undefined in TX), which is contradictory to what we understand when we utter the word a tenured faculty (In Europe or US in general). Here are the details: https://www.utsystem.edu/board-of-regents/rules/31008-termination-of-faculty-member https://www.utsystem.edu/board-of-regents/rules/31008-termin... - I did not know about Wisconsin. Thanks for that information!

lvass 4y ago

>But Why Not Stick Around for the Paycheck? A lot of people do this, they avoid getting political at all and just do their jobs as professors, often they do a great job and while they might want to express their opinions it's just no use when it could immediately be classified as wrong-think, not taken seriously at all except for reasoning on ostracization strategies. It's fine to stay, we're still far from definite proof of wokeness being required.

jerrya 4y ago
Professors at public schools with tenure have an intellectual duty to themselves, their students, the school and the taxpayer to defy forces that try to silence them.
- lvass 4y ago
  That's too reductionist. If they stay, they might still be doing a great job. If they leave, the expected replacement may not be up to par, and their defiance would in all likelihood be completely useless, which means leaving may be a net loss for society, not to mention an eventual, actually meaningful resistance would likely benefit from them being inside the universities. This defiance looks sad unfortunately, no offense meant to the author here as I respect his attitude. He mentions blogging being in his plans for the future, but even here in HN this post already looks like it's shadow banned and the blogpost has one like. Not all defiance is made equal, this author has a huge uphill battle and I wish him the best.
- TheChaplain 4y ago
  Most lecturers just want to teach, they don't want to deal with politics so most just shut up and try to be invisible enough to do what they love.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
the_biot 4y ago
Didn't I read something a while back about faculty members, prior to being hired, needing to write an essay about some woke cause? It being clear that the essay not expressing a woke enough opinion, there would be no job offer.

drumhead 4y ago

He seems to be complaining that you can't say controversial things anymore, then promptly turns around and complains about people saying controversial things about Israel. "don't cancel me, cancel him!"

deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
drcongo 4y ago
Every single one of these oh-woe-is-me public resignations does the same.
bjourne 4y ago
Exactly. His gripe about anti-Zionist political activity undermines the point of his message. He complains about some faculty who was been hounded by student's associations, but the hounding of Abdulhadi goes unmentioned because she is an "antisemite". Are you "woke" for pointing out that while universities are now severing ties with Russian universities, the Israeli ties are still going strong? Noam Chomsky and other academics a few years ago published a declaration denouncing threats against academic freedom. Unlike this guy, they didn't make it into a "woke-left" vs "woke-right" issue and thus got signatories from "both" (all) sides.
rayiner 4y ago
What do you mean by “controversial?” His first example relates to research into the sociology of crime. The second example is about getting rid of standardized testing, and his second is about the label “LatinX.” None of this is “controversial.”
- zozbot234 4y ago
  Sociology of crime is one thing that has been quite controversial for some time. In fact, it's where the whole CRT thing first got its start, to try and explain severely dysfunctional patterns in the policing of minority communities.
  - 4y ago

rayiner 4y ago

> Asking a question following a public talk, a colleague conspicuously used the word “Latinx” even though the speaker had described both herself and her research subjects as “Latinas” As a minority, this is the part of the “woke” university system that I find most appalling. When universities run by overwhelmingly white faculties get involved in areas like cultural studies, they end up projecting white liberal values onto minority groups. Who is more likely to get hired at UCLA? A person of Hispanic background who is identifies as “Latinx” and writes about the importance of abortion for first generation immigrants, or someone who like 65% of first generation Hispanic immigrants, opposes abortion for reasons that are deeply intertwined with their culture? Or to use another example, they have almost uniformly adopted the consideration of race in admissions and hiring decisions, even though the majority of every minority group opposes that practice: https://www.insidehighered.com/admissions/article/2022/05/02/poll-finds-public-doesnt-favor-affirmative-action https://www.insidehighered.com/admissions/article/2022/05/02... https://www.pewresearch.org/social-trends/2019/05/08/americans-see-advantages-and-challenges-in-countrys-growing-racial-and-ethnic-diversity/ https://www.pewresearch.org/social-trends/2019/05/08/america... These are people who talk about “white supremacy” constantly, but don’t realize that they themselves are exercising white supremacy by taking such strong positions on race and culture issues. They engaged in Microsoft-style “embrace and extinguish” co-opting if minority culture and political movements.

naravara 4y ago
Getting a 404 error on your first Insidehighered link FYI. Fixed link, just had to remove the semicolon: https://www.insidehighered.com/admissions/article/2022/05/02/poll-finds-public-doesnt-favor-affirmative-action https://www.insidehighered.com/admissions/article/2022/05/02...
- rayiner 4y ago
  Thanks.
pen2l 4y ago
> As a minority, this is the part of the “woke” university system that I find most appalling. I don't know, I think your frustration may be a little misplaced. This recent tide in American culture of being on tippy-toes (limited as it may be to the liberals and closed circles in academia), I don't find it appalling, I find it... silly, if not admirable, because I understand it's coming from a good place. Imagine you're talking to a little Latina girl, you wouldn't skip a beat if you had to say something like "And these latinos, they did x"? We're in the midst of working through some tough problems in our society, being encouraging to a little girl is not a thing I'd admonish someone for. The worst that happens when someone says Latinx is they might looks silly, a reasonable trade I'd say given the stakes. > Or to use another example, they have almost uniformly adopted the consideration of race in admissions and hiring decisions, even though the majority of every minority group opposes that practice I think you and I have been through this in the past, but: the jury is out on this one, folks of a certain race were systemically oppressed for generations and as a result they are at the bottom of the barrel in terms of house-ownership, savings, etc. To not make the slightest of effort to undo the actions of this extant government is a ludicrous idea. When I see an educated person argue against this, I see it as a mark on their morals.

gurumeditations 4y ago

Truly incredible how outright bigotry continually gets posted to a technology website. This post is a man who unironically cites pop-psych Jordan Peterson, and then links to this incredibly hateful anti-gay and anti-trans article which claims kids are being made gay or trans by sexual predators grooming them online or are choosing to be queer because of white guilt. Complaining about race, queers, liberals, and “Woke”. No tech discussion here! Just your typical hatemonger, who perhaps identifies an actual issue or two and uses it to justify their broader bigotry, and who is perpetuated by losers who cling to his complaints in order to blame their own inadequacies on these boogiemen.

rayiner 4y ago
Sorry, wokeness in academia isn’t about fighting “bigotry.” It’s outright “embrace and extinguish”-style co-opting of minority culture and politics by white elites. For example, how white academic elites have co-opted reform movements among Black and Hispanic people to advance radical approaches to police that those minorities oppose. Or how they have embraced race conscious admissions and hiring that minorities oppose. Or how they’re socializing young members of minority groups to see themselves as oppressed or to view American history in a negative light. You can’t sweep that under the rug and dismiss it as “bigotry.”

taylodl 4y ago

Jeff had developed simulation models of the geographic and temporal patterning of urban crime, and had created predictive software that he marketed to law enforcement agencies. Isn't this something the Sociology department should be running with? At the University I attended, the Anthropology department concerned itself with the study of human evolution and the study of modern primates. Is this not universal? Plus, at a university as big as UCLA you'd think they'd have a Criminology department that would work in conjunction with the Sociology department in creating such a model - ensuring it's been vetted and any unintentional biases have been scrubbed. As it is, it's being presented as "one guy" created this model, sold it to the police department, and now faces backlash. I wouldn't expect someone so tone deaf to be a professor at such a prestigious university. Maybe we don't have the full story, but as presented this is pretty bad.