6 ms·

On Resigning from the Board of the University of Austin

32 points by sieste 4y ago

tptacek 4y ago
The last three years have revealed example after example of what could go wrong when credentialed authorities are blindly trusted, but the rot is far older than that. This is rich, considering the source. A simple Google search for [$author COVID19] will avail.
- the_third_wave 4y ago
  OK, go ahead and point out where they - Heying and Weinstein - were wrong on this subject. There are sure to be some things they missed or some claims which did not pan out but on the whole they were far more right than the push-fed drivel served by most official institutions, government and corporate media. I'd say she has some sensible things to say where it concerns redefining the concept of a university although she also - in my not so humble opinion - approaches the subject from a utopian standpoint stemming from the concept of the Evergreen State College as imagined by her and (seemingly to a lesser extent) Brett Weinstein. The "new university" as she imagines it would quickly fall prey to the next iteration of critical theorists intent on fomenting revolution just like Evergreen State College was taken over. As I see it the real problem lies with the concept of ideology - or the lack of it. The critical theory inspired "faculty yahoos" (Heying's words) who took over the faculty and spread a thick layer of "woke" over everything did so because they were - and are - driven by an ideology as surely as Scientologists or Jehovah's witnesses are driven by one, the former just leave out the concept of a supernatural being and replace it with prophets searching for some ephemeral "truth". While they do not have a supernatural being on top they do have a concept of an "adversary" like most other religions, this being the WEIRD [1] world in which they grew up. Whether driven by their image of a god or one pushed by revolutionary pamphlets, both groups have a strong drive to push their ideologies as far as they can go in as many places as they can. When universities were driven by their own ideology - usually in the form of the Christian religion [2] - they had a defence against other ideologies intent on taking over as the dominant factor but when they moved away from these they left themselves open for invasion by competing ideologies. What then is the solution? Should universities return to their religious foundations to once again become resilient against attacks from invading ideologies? Some would loudly call for this but I don't see this as a good solution for a number of reasons. The first reason is that religion and rationality don't mix all that well while the scientific method depends on rationality to function. The second is that the Christian religion itself is vulnerable to takeover by competing ideologies and has in some cases already been taken over, viz. Liberation theology [3] which is an amalgamation of Catholicism and Marxism. What, then, could guard institutes of learning and dissemination of knowledge from being invaded by these types of intellectual parasites without this defence wholly taking over the institutes? To me this is an open question waiting for a good answer. Until a good one is found and implemented it is probably a good idea for these institutions to take a step back and pick up some of the tenets of their own lost ideologies lest they be taken over entirely and with that, lost. Realise that this problem is mostly if not wholly confined to "the west", e.g. Chinese and Russian universities will continue on their own paths while their western counterparts get mired into the modern version of the search for how many angels can find a place to stand on a pinhead. [1] https://rationalwiki.org/wiki/WEIRD https://rationalwiki.org/wiki/WEIRD [2] e.g. Harvard (named after a Christian minister) and Yale (originally Puritan, started by clergymen) and Princeton (originally Presbyterian). Princeton’s crest still says “Dei sub numine viget” which is Latin for “Under God she flourishes.” In the UK Oxford University was established by various religious orders. Likewise, Cambridge University was established in 1209 by Christian leaders. Saint Andrews, Scotland’s oldest university, was founded principally for the teaching and study of theology. [3] https://www.academia.edu/38221258/Liberation_Theology_A_Critical_Analysis_pdf https://www.academia.edu/38221258/Liberation_Theology_A_Crit...
  - tptacek 4y ago
    These are a lot of words that don't touch the fact that Heying is one of the country's foremost vaccine skeptics, and perhaps the single foremost American advocate of prophylactic ivermectin. My point is that she's a bad scientist. I wouldn't want to touch her ideological arguments with a barge pole if I could avoid it.
    - the_third_wave 4y ago
      Heying is not a "vaccine skeptic" [1], she is just critical of the way the vaccines against SARS2 were developed and deployed. Prophylactic Ivermectin is a subject worth a discussion on its own since it is not clear at all [2] whether this a) worked for the first strains or if it did whether the efficacy remained for following strains. While a single data point doesn't prove nor disprove its efficacy I'll give it anyway: when everyone in my family - me (56yo male, 2 doses of Moderna), my wife (51yo, 2 doses of Moderna), my daughters of 10 and 17 - got SARS2 I was the only one who took Ivermectin. I had a light fever (38°C) for a day, the next day I was free of symptoms. My wife was ill for a week with fever, she was tired for more than 3 weeks. My 17yo daughter had a fever for about 2 days but was free from symptoms after that. My 10yo daughter had a slightly raised temperature for 5 days, no other symptoms and symptom-free after those 5 days. Was it the Ivermectin which helped me to beat all the others even though a) I'm a man and as such supposedly more vulnerable and b) the oldest which is supposed to be a factor? Who knows? I don't but I do know it did not hurt me, it being dirt-cheap and nearly free of side effects. I think you're blindsided by your adherence to the official narrative on SARS2 vaccines and as such unable - or unwilling - to see her arguments for what they are. The scientific method does not require adherence to any narrative, it requires rationality and inquisitiveness and a willingness to accept unexpected results whether those prove or disprove your thesis. You are of course free to express doubts about her ideological position but those doubts do not make her a bad scientist no more than anyone in a white lab coat following the required narrative is automatically a good scientist. [1] as you probably know if you've delved into the subject, both she as well as her husband (Brett Weinstein) are vaccinated against many things most people don't have to deal with given their occupations. They just don't trust the experimental vaccines against SARS2. [2] mostly because any research around the subject was deigned to be off-limits
isuckatcoding 4y ago
Indeed very cryptic. Not clear at all what the author is trying to say about the university aside from “wokeness” which is a very generalized term.
- kevinmchugh 4y ago
  As I read it, the author believes this project would only be successful if it completely reinvented ~all aspects of a university. The rest of the board would be happy with an antiwoke or unwoke institution which otherwise is recognizable as a university. I presume the intended audience has a shared understanding of "woke" and more particularly "scrape the woke off the top". There is probably more specific interpersonal drama - possibly she feels the politics of the rest of the board will be bad for this institution in some form.
- weakfortress 4y ago
  It would appear the author is expressing concern that the board is not focusing sufficiently on removing the actual blight on academia. Scraping the woke off the top is not enough. In this context, it likely means just getting rid of the usually University faire: bigoted admission policies, bigoted language from university leaders, racial preference, "diversity for diversity's sake", forcing gender studies classes on non-gender studies majors, etc. Getting rid of these blights would certainly make the university more liberal in the truest sense of the word. However, you have to go deeper and clean the rot from within. Once the top has been scraped clean you now need to go into academia itself and root out the same problems. Not just the problem of what can be called "militant diversity initiatives" but even more so the problems that exist in research, grant funding, choices for tenure, election procedures for positions of power, etc. Not only do these suffer from the same "surface wokeness" but they also give large amounts of money based on so-called diversity quotas. To be truly a liberal institution this must be stopped. Worse, that is just simply the start. It sounds like the current board liked the idea of scraping the wokeness off the surface but otherwise wanted to keep the same ole system in place. I tend to agree with the author. With the core rot left in place, the surface will become blighted again. Academia is basically a matryoshka of pseudo-intellectual progressive virtue signaling today. Academic politics resembles a twitter argument more than a meeting of the minds to advance humanity. To decompose this matryoshka it'll take more than just a wave of a wand.
MontyCarloHall 4y ago
As far as I know, UATX is still an entirely theoretical academic entity. What, then, does it even mean to resign from its board? Seems akin to leaving a committee tasked with planning another committee.
dieselgate 4y ago
Was confused on this a bit, the University of Austin is/was intended to be a wholly separate institution from University of Texas at Austin
- tptacek 4y ago
  There is no relationship at all.
- csours 4y ago
  Context: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/University_of_Austin https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/University_of_Austin I barely remember hearing about this
InvaderFizz 4y ago
This is not very useful for consumption by the general public, who is not the target of this. I was unfamiliar with UATX, which is not University of Texas - Austin. Apparently it was founded in 2021 to be a more conservative/free speech oriented institution. Heather Heying is the spouse of Brett Weinstein, of Evergreen College infamy. The two of them are evolutionary biologists and have a podcast called Darkhorse Podcast. They have been highly critical of the COVID regime of the past three years. I am familiar with their work in general as I consume their podcast on a regular basis. What I gather from reading the letter and the context I am familiar with. The "wokeness" is something that Heather would be vehemently against. My guess is that the University has policies that specifically target wokeness and other left-leaning ideologies directly and not through a first principles derived ruleset. The danger there would be that the ruleset become reactionary, capricious, and subject to the whims of right leaning ideology instead of a coherent structure that is much more difficult to corrupt in either direction. Additionally, in the same vein, Heather is advocating for teaching students how to reason from first principles, how to independently acquire skills and knowledge, and generally be resilient to the pressure of others. That said, all my assumptions about the shortcomings of UATX are just that, assumptions.
- starkd 4y ago
  I doubt very much the concern is that it may become a reactionary institution, although that would be a chief concern. There are other people on the board who are very qualified, and she gives her respects to them. From the letter, and their podcasts, I think their chief concern is probably more that UATX is going to be structured along the lines of a traditional university system and merely continue some of the same flaws. I tend to agree with her, but it may be that too fundamental changes might not attract the same prestige and fundraising that such an institution needs.
- tptacek 4y ago
  It might be helpful not to beat around the bush: Heying and Weinstein are principally famous, these last few years, for opposing vaccination and advocating ivermectin --- they continued to advocate it well into this year, and for all I know they still do.
humanistbot 4y ago
So an "anti-woke" activist is resigning in protest from an anti-woke university* for not being the right kind of anti-woke? Sounds like cancel culture to me! /s * Or more accurately, a university administration role playing game
- kranke155 4y ago
  No she’s resigning because the university is being defined by its anti-wokeness and not by its attempt to truly redefine what a university can do and should be. Her words not mine.
kogus 4y ago
Sounds like he feels UA is not going far enough. The UAT list of "forbidden courses" is pretty tame: https://web.archive.org/web/20221224074124/https://www.uaustin.org/forbidden-courses https://web.archive.org/web/20221224074124/https://www.uaust... I also found this opinion piece to be interesting, if a bit fawning: https://web.archive.org/web/20221223134933/https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2022/12/16/university-of-austin-intellectual-diversity/ https://web.archive.org/web/20221223134933/https://www.washi...
laidoffamazon 4y ago
This entire exercise is pure navel gazing that has helped nobody - a perfect mirror of the woke administrators in the institutions these people came from.

32 points by sieste 4y ago

The last three years have revealed example after example of what could go wrong when credentialed authorities are blindly trusted, but the rot is far older than that. This is rich, considering the source. A simple Google search for [$author COVID19] will avail.

the_third_wave 4y ago
OK, go ahead and point out where they - Heying and Weinstein - were wrong on this subject. There are sure to be some things they missed or some claims which did not pan out but on the whole they were far more right than the push-fed drivel served by most official institutions, government and corporate media. I'd say she has some sensible things to say where it concerns redefining the concept of a university although she also - in my not so humble opinion - approaches the subject from a utopian standpoint stemming from the concept of the Evergreen State College as imagined by her and (seemingly to a lesser extent) Brett Weinstein. The "new university" as she imagines it would quickly fall prey to the next iteration of critical theorists intent on fomenting revolution just like Evergreen State College was taken over. As I see it the real problem lies with the concept of ideology - or the lack of it. The critical theory inspired "faculty yahoos" (Heying's words) who took over the faculty and spread a thick layer of "woke" over everything did so because they were - and are - driven by an ideology as surely as Scientologists or Jehovah's witnesses are driven by one, the former just leave out the concept of a supernatural being and replace it with prophets searching for some ephemeral "truth". While they do not have a supernatural being on top they do have a concept of an "adversary" like most other religions, this being the WEIRD [1] world in which they grew up. Whether driven by their image of a god or one pushed by revolutionary pamphlets, both groups have a strong drive to push their ideologies as far as they can go in as many places as they can. When universities were driven by their own ideology - usually in the form of the Christian religion [2] - they had a defence against other ideologies intent on taking over as the dominant factor but when they moved away from these they left themselves open for invasion by competing ideologies. What then is the solution? Should universities return to their religious foundations to once again become resilient against attacks from invading ideologies? Some would loudly call for this but I don't see this as a good solution for a number of reasons. The first reason is that religion and rationality don't mix all that well while the scientific method depends on rationality to function. The second is that the Christian religion itself is vulnerable to takeover by competing ideologies and has in some cases already been taken over, viz. Liberation theology [3] which is an amalgamation of Catholicism and Marxism. What, then, could guard institutes of learning and dissemination of knowledge from being invaded by these types of intellectual parasites without this defence wholly taking over the institutes? To me this is an open question waiting for a good answer. Until a good one is found and implemented it is probably a good idea for these institutions to take a step back and pick up some of the tenets of their own lost ideologies lest they be taken over entirely and with that, lost. Realise that this problem is mostly if not wholly confined to "the west", e.g. Chinese and Russian universities will continue on their own paths while their western counterparts get mired into the modern version of the search for how many angels can find a place to stand on a pinhead. [1] https://rationalwiki.org/wiki/WEIRD https://rationalwiki.org/wiki/WEIRD [2] e.g. Harvard (named after a Christian minister) and Yale (originally Puritan, started by clergymen) and Princeton (originally Presbyterian). Princeton’s crest still says “Dei sub numine viget” which is Latin for “Under God she flourishes.” In the UK Oxford University was established by various religious orders. Likewise, Cambridge University was established in 1209 by Christian leaders. Saint Andrews, Scotland’s oldest university, was founded principally for the teaching and study of theology. [3] https://www.academia.edu/38221258/Liberation_Theology_A_Critical_Analysis_pdf https://www.academia.edu/38221258/Liberation_Theology_A_Crit...
- tptacek 4y ago
  These are a lot of words that don't touch the fact that Heying is one of the country's foremost vaccine skeptics, and perhaps the single foremost American advocate of prophylactic ivermectin. My point is that she's a bad scientist. I wouldn't want to touch her ideological arguments with a barge pole if I could avoid it.
  - the_third_wave 4y ago
    Heying is not a "vaccine skeptic" [1], she is just critical of the way the vaccines against SARS2 were developed and deployed. Prophylactic Ivermectin is a subject worth a discussion on its own since it is not clear at all [2] whether this a) worked for the first strains or if it did whether the efficacy remained for following strains. While a single data point doesn't prove nor disprove its efficacy I'll give it anyway: when everyone in my family - me (56yo male, 2 doses of Moderna), my wife (51yo, 2 doses of Moderna), my daughters of 10 and 17 - got SARS2 I was the only one who took Ivermectin. I had a light fever (38°C) for a day, the next day I was free of symptoms. My wife was ill for a week with fever, she was tired for more than 3 weeks. My 17yo daughter had a fever for about 2 days but was free from symptoms after that. My 10yo daughter had a slightly raised temperature for 5 days, no other symptoms and symptom-free after those 5 days. Was it the Ivermectin which helped me to beat all the others even though a) I'm a man and as such supposedly more vulnerable and b) the oldest which is supposed to be a factor? Who knows? I don't but I do know it did not hurt me, it being dirt-cheap and nearly free of side effects. I think you're blindsided by your adherence to the official narrative on SARS2 vaccines and as such unable - or unwilling - to see her arguments for what they are. The scientific method does not require adherence to any narrative, it requires rationality and inquisitiveness and a willingness to accept unexpected results whether those prove or disprove your thesis. You are of course free to express doubts about her ideological position but those doubts do not make her a bad scientist no more than anyone in a white lab coat following the required narrative is automatically a good scientist. [1] as you probably know if you've delved into the subject, both she as well as her husband (Brett Weinstein) are vaccinated against many things most people don't have to deal with given their occupations. They just don't trust the experimental vaccines against SARS2. [2] mostly because any research around the subject was deigned to be off-limits

isuckatcoding 4y ago

Indeed very cryptic. Not clear at all what the author is trying to say about the university aside from “wokeness” which is a very generalized term.

kevinmchugh 4y ago
As I read it, the author believes this project would only be successful if it completely reinvented ~all aspects of a university. The rest of the board would be happy with an antiwoke or unwoke institution which otherwise is recognizable as a university. I presume the intended audience has a shared understanding of "woke" and more particularly "scrape the woke off the top". There is probably more specific interpersonal drama - possibly she feels the politics of the rest of the board will be bad for this institution in some form.
weakfortress 4y ago
It would appear the author is expressing concern that the board is not focusing sufficiently on removing the actual blight on academia. Scraping the woke off the top is not enough. In this context, it likely means just getting rid of the usually University faire: bigoted admission policies, bigoted language from university leaders, racial preference, "diversity for diversity's sake", forcing gender studies classes on non-gender studies majors, etc. Getting rid of these blights would certainly make the university more liberal in the truest sense of the word. However, you have to go deeper and clean the rot from within. Once the top has been scraped clean you now need to go into academia itself and root out the same problems. Not just the problem of what can be called "militant diversity initiatives" but even more so the problems that exist in research, grant funding, choices for tenure, election procedures for positions of power, etc. Not only do these suffer from the same "surface wokeness" but they also give large amounts of money based on so-called diversity quotas. To be truly a liberal institution this must be stopped. Worse, that is just simply the start. It sounds like the current board liked the idea of scraping the wokeness off the surface but otherwise wanted to keep the same ole system in place. I tend to agree with the author. With the core rot left in place, the surface will become blighted again. Academia is basically a matryoshka of pseudo-intellectual progressive virtue signaling today. Academic politics resembles a twitter argument more than a meeting of the minds to advance humanity. To decompose this matryoshka it'll take more than just a wave of a wand.

MontyCarloHall 4y ago

As far as I know, UATX is still an entirely theoretical academic entity. What, then, does it even mean to resign from its board? Seems akin to leaving a committee tasked with planning another committee.

dieselgate 4y ago

Was confused on this a bit, the University of Austin is/was intended to be a wholly separate institution from University of Texas at Austin

tptacek 4y ago
There is no relationship at all.
csours 4y ago
Context: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/University_of_Austin https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/University_of_Austin I barely remember hearing about this

InvaderFizz 4y ago

This is not very useful for consumption by the general public, who is not the target of this. I was unfamiliar with UATX, which is not University of Texas - Austin. Apparently it was founded in 2021 to be a more conservative/free speech oriented institution. Heather Heying is the spouse of Brett Weinstein, of Evergreen College infamy. The two of them are evolutionary biologists and have a podcast called Darkhorse Podcast. They have been highly critical of the COVID regime of the past three years. I am familiar with their work in general as I consume their podcast on a regular basis. What I gather from reading the letter and the context I am familiar with. The "wokeness" is something that Heather would be vehemently against. My guess is that the University has policies that specifically target wokeness and other left-leaning ideologies directly and not through a first principles derived ruleset. The danger there would be that the ruleset become reactionary, capricious, and subject to the whims of right leaning ideology instead of a coherent structure that is much more difficult to corrupt in either direction. Additionally, in the same vein, Heather is advocating for teaching students how to reason from first principles, how to independently acquire skills and knowledge, and generally be resilient to the pressure of others. That said, all my assumptions about the shortcomings of UATX are just that, assumptions.

starkd 4y ago
I doubt very much the concern is that it may become a reactionary institution, although that would be a chief concern. There are other people on the board who are very qualified, and she gives her respects to them. From the letter, and their podcasts, I think their chief concern is probably more that UATX is going to be structured along the lines of a traditional university system and merely continue some of the same flaws. I tend to agree with her, but it may be that too fundamental changes might not attract the same prestige and fundraising that such an institution needs.
tptacek 4y ago
It might be helpful not to beat around the bush: Heying and Weinstein are principally famous, these last few years, for opposing vaccination and advocating ivermectin --- they continued to advocate it well into this year, and for all I know they still do.

humanistbot 4y ago

So an "anti-woke" activist is resigning in protest from an anti-woke university* for not being the right kind of anti-woke? Sounds like cancel culture to me! /s * Or more accurately, a university administration role playing game

kranke155 4y ago
No she’s resigning because the university is being defined by its anti-wokeness and not by its attempt to truly redefine what a university can do and should be. Her words not mine.

kogus 4y ago

Sounds like he feels UA is not going far enough. The UAT list of "forbidden courses" is pretty tame: https://web.archive.org/web/20221224074124/https://www.uaustin.org/forbidden-courses https://web.archive.org/web/20221224074124/https://www.uaust... I also found this opinion piece to be interesting, if a bit fawning: https://web.archive.org/web/20221223134933/https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2022/12/16/university-of-austin-intellectual-diversity/ https://web.archive.org/web/20221223134933/https://www.washi...

laidoffamazon 4y ago

This entire exercise is pure navel gazing that has helped nobody - a perfect mirror of the woke administrators in the institutions these people came from.