We have reached a point where it has been a mainstream position to view the idea of defending free speech as disagreeable, or even deeply offensive.
This statement is so weak that it is necessary to consider this climate to even understand how this can be published as a statement.
After explicitly saying that illegal speech is not free speech, it lists 6 exceptions for things that are not free speech either, including speech "that is otherwise directly incompatible with the functioning of the Institute". Which is even written twice, while being clearly a catch-all. And it mentions "In addition, MIT may reasonably regulate the time, place, and manner of expression to ensure that it does not disrupt the ordinary activities of the Institute." Why not have "free speech safe spaces", which would be small individual-sized sound-proof rooms where you are allowed to say what you think? If you also pad the walls, you could find many uses for these rooms.
With principles so weakly held, why have principles at all?
Having spent the last 8 years suing governmental entities, I promise you that this bullshit:
>After explicitly saying that illegal speech is not free speech, it lists 6 exceptions for things that are not free speech either, including speech "that is otherwise directly incompatible with the functioning of the Institute"
Is their future get-out clause for anything and everything.
These types of bullshit clauses are everywhere in the law.
Ask yourself "what part of this allows them to prevent rock concerts during exams in the exam halls", it's only the parts that you seem to wish they would remove. I think we can both agree, that MIT does need the power to prevent rock concerts during exams in the exam halls.
The exact scenario was inspired by a "prank" the engineers pull off on new students at the university I went to every year (more along the lines of a spontaneous musical than a rock concert, but same effect). The broader point was that there's tons of "expression" that you need time/place/manner restrictions against for completely content legitimate, the exact example wasn't important.
It's not a straw man at all... a straw man argument is arguing against something that someone else didn't said, I'm directly arguing that the terms the person I responded to suggested aren't needed, are in fact needed. It is sort of an argumentum ad absurdum, but that's a valid form of argument, and the absurdness of the example isn't necessary so it's only sort of one.
If you want less absurd examples, they need to be able to regulate the expression of telling people answers during tests (time/place), the expression of making loud noises all night in dorm rooms (place/manner), the "expression" of plagarizing someone else's paper and calling it your own (directly incompatible with...), etc.
MIT's equivalent was and may still be "freshman shower night," where students would be forcibly abducted from their dorm rooms and thrown into a running shower the night before the first mid-term exams were held for core math and physics courses.
That's the whole point. This is straight from the Ethics playbook. It's a set of vague guidelines that wouldn't pass the stricter bar of being tested in court (like the first amendment has). It's basically anyone with a sliver of power playing judge and legislator. The catch-all clause simply makes it possible for the ethics mob to shut every form of speech they don't deem acceptable (again, this wouldn't stand in a real court of law).
Keep in mind the point of ethics is to shame people or practices you don't like via some kind of cancel culture of peer pressure. You'll also see the same thing with Codes of Conducts that basically allow anyone to exclude anyone for vague or no reason at all.
Catch-alls are necessary so that clever rules lawyers can get dunked on. Without them, someone will find a loophole and then proceed to abuse it to be disruptive.
> There is a very vocal, very small minority that's ruining it for everyone else.
You're both right. Unfortunately, that very small minority is culturally dominant, so it is the case that:
1) >> We have reached a point where it has been a mainstream position to view the idea of defending free speech as disagreeable, or even deeply offensive. And;
2) > There is a very vocal, very small minority that's ruining it for everyone else.
In the same way a relatively small but well-organized group like the Taliban can control an entire country despite lacking enthusiastic support from the majority of the population, a small but well-organized subculture can dominate and dictate what is/is not acceptable in mainstream American culture.
Yes, that's my experience. Everyone in my circles is perfectly happy with the idea that everyone entitled to have opinions and express them politely. It's only a radical few that are pushing the cancel culture hard.
Did the West actually win the Cold War? The parallels with the Soviets are getting more real by the day. With those exceptions the commitments like that would be right at home in Putin's Russia and whatever is left of their universities.
There's no magic bullet for free speech thanks to the Paradox of Tolerance. Allowing all speech, completely unrestricted, is a recipe for creating a completely unworkable environment.
In the "Paradox of Tolerance" Popper argues that despite the apparent paradox, defending free speech and having a tolerant society is the only way to go. People use the paradox of tolerance argument often, but leave out the part where popper resolves the paradox.
Popper essentially takes the same position as Thomas Jefferson. Popper says: "I do not imply, for instance, that we should always suppress the utterance of intolerant philosophies; as long as we can counter them by rational argument and keep them in check by public opinion, suppression would certainly be unwise." Emphasis on the unwise -- for some unknown reason, there's this idea floating around that Popper thought it was wise to suppress intolerant philosophies. That's Marcuse's position, not Popper's (and Marcuse also is candid that his own position may be incompatible with democracy).
What Popper does agree is that societies should retain the right to act if civil discourse fails, which is again basically Jefferson's position.
More briefly: When the intolerant reach for a gun, the tolerant don't have to tolerate that. Not when the intolerant speak - when they proceed past speech into violence. Then the tolerant don't have to tolerate it (and, in fact, kind of have to not tolerate it.)
>Unlimited tolerance must lead to the disappearance of tolerance. If we extend unlimited tolerance even to those who are intolerant, if we are not prepared to defend a tolerant society against the onslaught of the intolerant, then the tolerant will be destroyed, and tolerance with them.—In this formulation, I do not imply, for instance, that we should always suppress the utterance of intolerant philosophies; as long as we can counter them by rational argument and keep them in check by public opinion, suppression would certainly be most unwise.
>But we should claim the right to suppress them if necessary even by force; for it may easily turn out that they are not prepared to meet us on the level of rational argument, but begin by denouncing all argument; they may forbid their followers to listen to rational argument, because it is deceptive, and teach them to answer arguments by the use of their fists or pistols.
>We should therefore claim, in the name of tolerance, the right not to tolerate the intolerant. We should claim that any movement preaching intolerance places itself outside the law and we should consider incitement to intolerance and persecution as criminal, in the same way as we should consider incitement to murder, or to kidnapping, or to the revival of the slave trade, as criminal.
The one thing one may claim is that it is not immediately clear is what he means by intolerance or intolerant groups, yet he leaves little ambiguity in the second section above.
I'm going to assume that you've read the meme cartoon that goes around instead of actually reading Popper's actual words because that is not what Popper suggested at all.
It's only a couple of pages long, it's even free to read on archive.org.
This is never not been a mainstream position. I can't easily get news from the Chinese government or Iranian patriots, but the Falun Gong have three OTA TV stations in Chicago. The same people complaining about the woke mob are also fired up about "critical race theory."
If you care about people being fired for being canceled, work for labor rights. If you support at-will employment but also worry about people being fired for being canceled, work to make racists, sexists, and homophobes a protected employment class. If you've successfully passed special rights for racists, sexists, and homophobes, specifically protecting their employment, but you're still upset because people can still call you shitty, protest you and drown out your voice in public, and not invite you to their parties - add racists, sexists and homophobes to hate crime legislation, and start rounding up the people who are oppressing you by speaking.
Labor rights are a patchwork. If you believe in them you should probably engage with strange bedfellows to accomplish the most feasible. Then, maybe when you get to the harder issues you might have shown more people why expanding labor rights is an attractive political goal.
Right now you're just coming across as someone who's going to be miffed to find out what's in California Labor Code § 1101.
The whole idea of "free speech" is misleading and should be abolished. There is no such thing in practice. No government wants information that is damaging, whether the information is true or not, to be leaked out to the enemy, external or internal. Same applies to every organization. They will create whatever structures/laws to make sure that they limit this. They should be expected to.
There may be some value in telling people that they have free speech so as to identify people's intent and take them out if they speak against the establishment... but then the really smart ones (who are the actual threats to the establishment in question) will also most likely figure it out.
See, that's exactly why we need a right to free speech. The government doesn't like it. The next government won't, either. So we need the principle that the government cannot stop speech, and we need people to rigorously police that right, because the government will always try to encroach on it.
Some speech issues that come to mind which, I sometimes wonder, how they would have gone down today:
* The 6.001 porn
* The ghetto party
* The Reg Day porn (particularly Deep Throat, but many)
* The Visualizing Cultures display (with CSSA opposition)
* Some 10% of the day to day traffic on senior-house@, bexley-minus-fascists@, and ec-discuss@
Norms around speech have evolved a lot even as the fundamentals of ethics and laws on the electronic frontier have stayed the same. I often think that folks in the 80s and 90s enjoyed, for better or worse, considerable latitude in their speech which wouldn't fly today.
>The Reg Day porn (particularly Deep Throat, but many)
Today? Clearly not.
But you don't need to fast forward that far. They were discontinued in I think 1980 or 1981 when things went from "we don't think you should do this" to "this is no longer a polite request."
Prof. Abelson wanted to hammer home the point porn was a problem on the internet back in 1998 and thought putting up a porn site for the first slide of a lecture would make his point.
Was his flashing the room like that a free speech issue - or a thoughtless dickhead issue?
Independent of his legal "right" to conduct a class in that manner - it's basically kind of asinine to assume your students need to have their buttons expressly pushed in order to appreciate the basically obvious point he felt he needed to make. Or that if people object his resorting to such a stunt - that means they're "offended" by it.
> "The Institute may restrict expression that violates the law, that falsely defames a specific individual, that constitutes a genuine threat or harassment, that unjustifiably invades substantial privacy or confidentiality interests, or that is otherwise directly incompatible with the functioning of the Institute."
Which is vague enough that an enterprising and determined individual or group could use to stifle discussion about things like gender, race, etc (all the hot/touchy topics atm).
Those all sound like pretty reasonable caveats that clearly don't, in their spirit, stifle discussion. Could they be twisted by someone who doesn't actually believe in the spirit of this declaration? Sure, but it's not like the declaration itself is a legal document, so it doesn't make sense to overly lawyer the precise language.
The "violates the law" thing is a different story, but the South African law you linked to has no parallel in the United States, so I think we can give them the benefit of the doubt until such law exists.
Hm yeah, that last catchall slipped by my read. Whatever that's meant to refer to, it should have been enumerated specifically. It sounds like a catchall added to appease the "moderate" supporters of freedom of expression.
> an enterprising and determined individual or group could use to stifle discussion…
This is true.
Ultimately no manifesto or written commitment can constrain a people into freedom. The best we can do is strive to say what we intend, see reality clearly, change structures that stand in the way, and then trust ourselves to act with courage.
In the US, thanks to the first Amendment and its interpretation by SCOTUS, what is legal is very broad.
Thats why elites have outsourced the censorship to private entities. Ironically most universities, since they are public, violate the law when they deplatform someone they don't like and have lost numerous court cases.
Of course they keep doing it because litigation is an insignificant cost for rich non-profits, theres no personal risk for the administration and it makes them feel virtuous.
At some point there has to be trust in people to be reasonable in their interpretation. If that trust isn't possible, the only available strategy is to try and purge the entire administrative apparatus and replace it rather than attempting to play word games. Word games are there to be lost.
This statement is pretty clear that the intent is to allow speech that some people find offensive.
Problem is that there can be no trust since this statement is coming from a group that disinvited a lecturer on climate science because he opposed DEI initiatives https://www.insidehighered.com/news/2021/10/06/mit-controver.... Actions speak louder than words.
Purging and rebuilding the entire administrative apparatus of the US university system is actually a great idea, and for more reasons than just freedom of expression.
With all due respect, I think you are misreading the situation. Some people at MIT disinvited Prof. Abbot. The authors of the article are those who opposed this action and are trying to establish rules to prevent the situation from happening again.
You are free to trust whomever you want, of course. FWIW, I am on your side, I know some of the people who signed the doc, and I don't see anything nefarious going on.
I see here a climate scientist advocating for public education policy without seeming educated himself on the subject (advocating for trial runs of charter schools and voucher programs as if they haven’t already been tested and studies borne out). I don’t really see the canceling here, it sounds like his talk are moved from one audience to another audience still at MIT, his public advocacy in a field he doesn’t study was published in a national paper, and somehow he’s “cancelled”?
>The sponsoring department chair at MIT “called to tell me that they would be cancelling the Carlson lecture this year in order to avoid controversy.”
I think this is what's being referred to. Surely he wasn't made to retract his statements or fired but it does seem weird. After all said statements have little to do with his lecture. Also whilst i also disagree with the bits you mentioned i don't think they're what started this controversy or made up most of his standpoint to begin with.
No declaration, code or whatnot stands alone. We can always loophole or interpret our way around constitutions and things. Look at religion. Even an absolute, no exception statement doesn't guarantee anything absolutely. It needs more. Culture, history, a base of support, etc.
That said, declarations can be meaningful within a greater overall context.
I think it is mostly a reasonable constraint. But I think it needs to be said that it is prudent to err on the side of freedom. Not prosecution of twitter comments and youtube videos. Everyone that was part of that should be deeply ashamed.
In my (backward) country a disturbance of the public order is illegal. Some old vices are hard to get rid off.
"violates the law" in this context would naturally have to comply with 1st amendment US protections which would bar any "hate speech" laws like the ones you linked to since 1st amendment to the US Constitution prohibits hate speech laws of that type
Most responses to this will be positive, and they should be. Typically, the real evaluation is the market (will more students and professors be drawn to MIT?). However, there is already a tremendous demand for admission (from students) and competitive hiring processes (for professors).
So...how many other comparable institutions will follow suit? Will universities in California adopt, oppose, or ignore?
> Now clearly “diversity” here means “ethnic diversity”, but I don’t think they say that explicitly. But those applicants who propose to increase political viewpoint diversity by, say, trying to promote conservative values and accept more conservative students, are simply not going to be hired!
I never thought about that before but that is an interesting point. It is not truly diversive if you can't include certain philosophies and ideologies.
It is an ideology that is sustained through censorship, faith, loyalty tests, and suppression.
It is particularly amusing when it pretends to be a science and makes recommendations on how to manage your company, hiring, or engineering teams. Don't hire smart people or good engineers, they say.
Get any individual that appears to be a zealot of this religion publicly to meet privately, away from microphones, and they will typically acknowledge the absurdity of it all. People are often happy to brag, gloat, and acknowledge they are just gaming the system for maximum benefit. Their willingness to disclose this to you does require trust.
So, when does this end? How much damage will this do? Is this a strategy designed to divide the lower classes during a period of runaway neofuedalist inequality?
Typically in what sense? I don't think there's much history of success from consumer/student "action." Market discipline exists where and when it exists. It's not always, or even often, a major factor.
Last years experience tell us that the perception on Media is the driving factor not the market. No-one is waiting for market effects to be visible. They are just reacting to anything that makes enough noise.
Promotion and making venues available are unaddressed issues here. The power of the institution is not just that of 'hard' censorship but of the 'soft' censorship we experience so often in the online tech world. Freedom of the press belongs to those who own one.
Could be. I can attest that as of the late 1970s MIT and some of these professors did not care about free speech. My source on the state of the campus has since retired and is not looking back at all, but told me in the middle of the last decade the most rightward a student could be was libertarian, and I have to wonder if that's still allowed.
More likely these professors, having done their part to turn MIT into "an oasis of totalitarianism in a desert of freedom" are now worried the monster they helped create is going to cancel them. Which is how holiness spirals have worked throughout history.
sounds great! Does this mean that fuck-the-skull-of-jesus.mit.edu will, finally, be back? It was an important--I would say, constituent--part of the internet for many years.
Meanwhile, the University of California seems to have implemented a DEI litmus test on all applications for faculty positions and promotion. Does anyone know if this is actually true? Is this reasonable?
Damn, this is actually a lot worse than it sounds. Rather than requiring an arguably hollow oath like the infamous UC loyalty oath from the 50s, they actually grade each applicant against “DEI” rubrics and eliminate applicants based on that. You don’t get a job without demonstrating tangible contributions to DEI in the past (no, treating everyone equally doesn’t count) and plans to promote it in the future. According to UC Davis math chair Abigail Thompson:[0]
> Nearly all University of California campuses require that job applicants submit a “contributions to diversity” statement as a part of their application. The campuses evaluate such statements using rubrics, a detailed scoring system. Several UC programs have used these diversity statements to screen out candidates early in the search process.
> A typical rubric from UC Berkeley[1] specifies that a statement that “describes only activities that are already the expectation of Berkeley faculty (mentoring, treating all students the same regardless of background, etc)” (italics mine) merits a score of 1–2 out of a possible 5 (1 worst and 5 best) in the second section of the rubric, the “track record for advancing diversity” category.
> The diversity “score” is becoming central in the hiring process. Hiring committees are being urged to start the review process by using officially provided rubrics to score the required diversity statements and to eliminate applicants who don’t achieve a scoring cut-off.
> Edit: And I wonder if and when these will start to appear in PhD applications, as PhD students are employees in a sense and often need to teach, too.
I applied for CS PhDs last year and Stanford did indeed require a diversity statement.
I don't remember any of the other universities I applied to asking for this. MIT certainly did not.
> Stanford did indeed require a diversity statement.
If true (and similar to the “contributions to diversity” statements discussed here), that’s quite disappointing news about my alma mater. At least there was no such nonsense back when I applied to Stanford Physics, but that was ages ago.
What the hell happened to Die Luft der Freiheit weht?
> they actually grade each applicant against “DEI” rubrics and eliminate applicants based on that
Doesn't this explicitly incent applicants to lie by misrepresenting their views and past "contributions to DEI" as more pro-DEI than they actually are? I'm not sure how this requirement is compatible with rather basic norms of academic ethics.
Absolutely. Lying is always somewhat incentivized, but in most cases it doesn't work, because the candidate will be found out. If I interviewed at google, I could lie about my skills all I want, but I will be found out when asked to demonstrate them.
The DEI stuff really seems like as long as you say all the right words, you're fine. Which leads me to a scary thought - are we going to create some kind of "DEI social credit score" that employers can reference in the future?
Lying about one's identity is a social necessity. It's when people take the claims of others at face value to societal delusions can take hold from one bad actor.
It does but academia is already overrun with candidates lying about their past experiences to try and get in.
At some point PhDs issued after certain years are going to start being negatively attractive to employers, as they're going to be basically some sort of ideological purity awards rather than anything to do with merit. And you don't want people like that in an otherwise healthy organization, and more than you want to hire someone who has "20 years membership of the Lenin Appreciation Society" on their CV.
Why is this a bad thing? Part of a faculty’s job is to do community service and to manage a diverse classroom. Faculty who have a good handle on the issues that arise through teaching such a diverse classroom are better equipped to handle the job. It’s no different than judging them based on the their research or teaching experience, which are also part of the job. If an applicant doesn’t understand the salient DEI issues, they are literally unqualified.
Because they are supposed to be top researchers in their field. And I doubt you'll find a world-wide renowned scientist in biology who believes sex is merely a social construct. So these goals are at least partially incompatible. Universities should be about research, science, teaching and teaching students to educate themselves. Following the dogma of DEI is incompatible with teaching students to educate themselves.
I think you’ve misinterpreted the common meme. The common meme is that gender or race are social constructs. I haven’t heard the meme sex is a social construct.
Sex has multiple meanings, one of which is gender. I don't know if it's an American vs British English thing, but in many countries they use the word "sex" this way much more frequently than "gender".
The requirements are not limited to "understand[ing] the salient DEI issues" in an abstract, neutral sense; going by the scoring rubric, they're explicitly demanding a statement of ideological conformity-- as well as a personal commitment to an especially divisive, controversial, dubiously-effective approach to mitigating DEI challenges-- that goes further than what was previously "expected of all faculty". That's what makes it not OK.
Again, that's not about belief, that's about the reality that the student body is diverse, the school wants the student body to be diverse, and the classroom itself will accordingly be diverse. What specifically about the rubric is the most troubling to you?
By the way, as someone who hires faculty and reads many such statements (I have to ask, have you read any DEI statements? Do you have examples which you find especially troubling?), a discussion about how current efforts are dubiously effective would be welcome and would help your application at my institution. More often than not, what they are trying to do with these DEI statements is to weed-out applicants who have given no thought whatsoever to this part of the job. The most common failure here is to treat this job requirement as an afterthought and to focus 100% on the research portion. Someone who had genuine opinions about DEI education that run counter to the way things are done would be well received by the hiring committee at my institution.
> a discussion about how current efforts are dubiously effective would be a welcome and would help your application at my institution.
A required statement as part of applying for any faculty position or promotion is simply not the appropriate place for such a discussion. You're expecting what amounts to a serious research effort in social science. This kind of intervention in effective leverage points of a complex system (even if perhaps only a "system of oppression", as often described by those most concerned about DEI) is the stuff that research papers are made of, not short statements of conformity.
(Of course, this assumes that effective mitigation of DEI challenges is the actual goal of these requirements. It's not unreasonable to be rather skeptical about this, as the original professor who raised the issue - who is a social scientist - states in his blog post series.)
As a non-white male person who successfully navigated highly diverse top U.S. institutions as an international student without all the DEI bullshit a while back, I’d rather work with faculty and staff who don’t cater to my ethnicity, gender or whatever irrelevant traits, thanks.
DEI doesn't help you manage a diverse classroom. In fact it does the opposite by harping on racial divisions instead of just teaching the subject you're supposed to teach. No better way to foster animosity than to divide a group of people that is supposed to be equal and start enforcing different rules on the different groups.
> It is clear that they won’t hire anyone who doesn’t express beliefs identical to their own.
That's not really what's going on here. First of all, you're not really understanding the faculty hiring process. The DEI aspect is just one of many considered, and the people who have most direct impact on the hiring process are the department and college dean, not the DEI office who produced this website.
Secondly, to the extent that DEI statements/rubrics are considered as part of the application, they are done so because they relate specifically to the job. It's a faculty's explicit purpose to teach and manage a diverse classroom. If you look at the rubric, the low scoring results would indicate an applicant has no working knowledge or experience in diversity. This is a job requirement because the student body is diverse. This is not a purity test or an ideological test. Notice the rubric says nothing about beliefs. This is about knowledge and experience.
Experienced teachers will be able to speak cogently about DEI issues, and they will pass this with no problem. Applicants who never taught anything, and who believe the job is to do research and treat teaching as an afterthought will not to well. That's just how it is. But it's not a litmus test or a purity test or an ideological filter. It's about ability to do the job as it's advertised.
The DEI aspect is "one of many considered", but the scoring rubric says that applicants who do not score above a cutoff on DEI issues will not be considered. It's in fact not scoring neutral "knowledge" of posited DEI issues but ideological belief in their relevance, and it scores "experience" in furthering DEI by matching the adherence of said 'experience' to an especially divisive and controversial approach, and demanding impact on teaching and research activities that ought to be protected from ideological bias per well-known academic norms of neutrality. The requirements are worded in a misleading manner that makes them appear like they're not demanding anything more than the status quo, but they absolutely are.
Like I said, "the scoring rubric" is not the arbiter of the faculty hiring process. Neither is the DEI office. It's not just one of many things considered, it's quite minimal when stacked next to research experience.
That said, a cutoff here is entirely appropriate. Look at what the lowest scoring entries are on the rubric. They are characterized statements of this caliber as as "vague", "little expressed knowledge", "little demonstrated awareness", "seems to be not aware", "no specifics", "brief descriptions" etc. Why would a department want to accept a faculty member who communicates vaguely, with no specifics, and seem unaware of the salient issues? This isn't about "They don't believe the right things". It's about "They don't believe anything".
And anyway, you're giving the rubric more rigidity than it deserves just because it's presented as a rubric. It explicitly states this:
These examples are offered as illustrative suggestions; they are neither exhaustive nor ironclad. They can be modified to fit the academic and disciplinary backgrounds of applicants in a particular search. Faculty members in individual units should use their disciplinary expertise to understand what examples are likely most appropriate for their particular department or search.
So really, this whole document is just a fancy way to frame a suggestion that you should really think hard about DEI issues on your application.
> So really, this whole document is just a fancy way to frame a suggestion that you should really think hard about DEI issues on your application.
This is exactly what we mean by an ideological test. Ideological tests are useful in certain circumstances, but dangerous in others. Churches want to hire people with faith, especially in leadership positions, and they certainly should ask their applicants about their faith. Should a non–religious public institution such as the University of California be using them to exclude all candidates that don’t follow a particular political movement?
It is especially ironic that they are using an ideological test that claims to test for belief in diversity in order to weed out all non–conforming beliefs, because it ensures that the University of California will never be a truly diverse place.
It most definitely is - in that it plainly assumes that candidates are racist / sexist / binarist / faithist / shapeist / ablist / everything-ist trolls; ignorant of social issues, and completely unable to treat others with elementary respect and decency -- until and unless they swear and affirm otherwise.
Again, as I stated in some other responses here (not necessarily to you), the rubric notes several times that it's a suggestion and a template, and that the various criteria are non-exhaustive and not "ironclad". I've never heard of an ideological test that opens itself up to multiple interpretations.
> until and unless they swear and affirm otherwise.
Have you been in a position to read many (or any) DEI statements? Many barely show awareness that community service is a job requirement of being a professor. The worst of the worst are just a series of vague platitudes strung together e.g. "I strive to treat all students with respect and decency"... okay. How? To what effect? How do you refine this process?
Many candidates can't speak with any specificity about their views on social issues that impact the classroom, and struggle to have a cogent discussion relating to the salient issues that arise in a classroom. These candidates are often newly minted Ph.D.s or post-docs with no teaching experience, who want a full time tenure-track job but regard the teaching aspect as a nuisance.
Have you been in a position to read many (or any) DEI statements?
Thanks heavens, no.
I totally agree that you don't want to hire people for instructor roles who regard teaching as an afterthought or a nuisance. That's always been a "given" (even though obviously not always adhered to, in practice). And yes, in general you want to avoid the mostly mono- and bisyllabic types, and hire people who answer important questions with more than a single sentence fragment.
But to be clear: the practice of mandating diversity statements (with highly refined, and in places, what can only be described as ideologically charged evaluation criteria) is completely orthogonal to the simple matter of needing to hire teachers who actually can teach and want to to.
Just as a side note. The link to this post was flagged after being submitted to HN yesterday within a very short time frame.
You might want to consider your karma points and preemptively remove it and pay your dues to the community by apologizing for not adhering to group speak.
I very much stand on the left side of the political spectrum, while the linked blogpost clearly comes from the liberal to right spectrum. But I still think that the old Rosa Luxemburg quote should apply:
> Freedom is always the freedom of the dissenter (Freiheit ist immer die Freiheit der Andersdenkenden)
I valued the posting yesterday as it provided differing views that made me think, evaluate and understand my own position better afterwards.
Edit:
Please excuse my sarcasm in the first paragraphs, but I was troubled yesterday that the link was flagged to death and that not a civil discussion was able to arise. I was only used to this way of dealing with dissenting opinions on other forums until then.
I think you're mistaking groupthink for people who are simply tired of seeing the same old culture war debate on HN repeated over and over again.
Plenty HN discussions about exactly this subject in the past have shown that:
1. Unlike some subjects, HN commenters have widely differing opinions here. The free speech hardliners and the anti disinformation/bigotry/*ism hardliners are both well represented, and many on both sides are capable of intelligent debate.
2. Nevertheless, the discussion never really gets anywhere. Nobody adds new information and nobody convinces anybody.
I might be projecting, but i can imagine that many people flagged it with a "here we go again" sigh and not with the "must suppress anti woke sentiments!!" thought you. I bet comparably inflammatory articles from the woke side of the debate are flagged equally much.
While I completely understand the need for why underrepresented groups should be given preference in certain application and hiring processes, I still carry a desire that this would not be necessary.
I do not judge people I interact with based on their gender, skin color, race, or such irrelevancies. I judge them by how they behave toward me. In the process, many stereotypical "old white men" come off very badly. Although I am almost an old white man myself.
I wish for a world where it doesn't matter what gender someone identifies by or what that person is doing in bed, on the couch, at the kitchen table, or anywhere else with anyone else.
And of course I know that this argument is misused to sweep systematic discrimination of social groups under the carpet. That's why I'm not in favor of judging members of such groups only on the basis of performance criteria that favor people who were born and raised in a privileged situation by a lucky coincidence.
Nevertheless, I find it important to deal with the argument that, in a better world, we should not judge anyone by such criteria. It should not play a role in an ideal world.
And I believe that with our ever increasing diversification we are playing into the hands of those who want a divided, disunited society/opposition.
Divide et impera has always been a very successful strategy and it has always been successful to play individual sub-groups off against each other, even though they have much more in common than what divides them.
So I personally consider it a gain to deal with dissenting opinions. And be it in the worst case only to sharpen and polish my own arguments.
I dont engage with others really to change the mind of the person I am engaging with. That is much to hard and a high bar.
No, I engage to ensure there is a dissenting view point read by observers to the debate, those people I can sway with my arguments, the people that simply read HN never commenting themselves. That is my target.
I want to ensure HN is not just an echo chamber of one political ideological take on a political topic
>>I bet comparably inflammatory articles from the woke side of the debate are flagged equally much.
That has not been my observation. HN is less Echo chambery than say Reddits political subs but there is still a clear political bent here
Absolutely not. This incentivises the worst characters and abuse of power. DIE is the most impotent advertising for social justice that I have ever seen. I support social justice in most cases, it a basic requirement for society and every society has some form of it implemented. But I also support humanism and enlightenment which DIE proponents very quickly leave behind.
DIE put me off of it pretty quickly. I believe California is selling entitlement instead of education here. And that entitlement firmly includes knowing better than anyone else and the justification is that they do it for the greater good. We had that countless times in human history and the result was always the same. If you want to see the result of underfunded education, it may very well be California. Maybe it should not be surprising to find it there since the contrast of wealth is pronounced.
It is hard not to become reactionary to DIE, they should just be ignored in the best case. It just behaves like religeous fundamentalism, they believe there are countless Nazis all around them and are themselves reactionaries.
DEI - the post is talking about the diversity, equity, and inclusion statement. Most departments (including at MIT) seem to be asking for one along with research and teaching statements these days, it’s not just the UC system.
Calling it a “litmus test” seems like a biased take though.
Is this really needed? I'm not trying to be obstinate. But in the north european country where I reside, while we have hate speech laws etc., my speech is protected by the law - both from the state and my employer (a university).
This commitment seems very bombastic for what feels like a work environment policy to me. Am I misunderstanding something cultural here?
EDIT: thx for the comments, it makes it more sense to me now.
At least in the US, there have always been two places where freedom of expression is taken to its most extreme: libraries and universities.
Libraries tend to take the view that even bad and hateful ideas are worth preserving simply to record how bad they are. The idea should live on in its horrific badness, an example to all of the idiocy of humanity. In my experience, you'll never meet anyone as dedicated to privacy and openness as a librarian.
Universities take the view that every idea should be up for debate. It's the only way, the argument goes, to suss out the bad ideas and to harden good ideas against poor arguments. After all, if your idea is right then it should not be such a burden to examine it. The best ideas are those that survive the strictest scrutiny, so all ideas should be subject to it.
In both cases, the ideal should trump the social norms of avoiding certain topics due to social pressure or how offensive they are. Not studying history, medicine, or science due to societal norms is a questionable choice on the academic search for truth, and institutions of learning and knowledge should be dedicated to that search for truth.
Both these institutions, then, tend towards the philosophical ideal of free expression, not the legal reality of protected speech. When they say "freedom of expression," they're more interested in John Stuart Mill than the Constitution. Places of ideals judge themselves by ideals.
It's one reason people get annoyed when there are those stories about professors expressing bad ideas and asking students to think about them critically, and students respond by attacking the professor or asking for their removal. Bad ideas are great practice for learning critical thinking skills.
That said, I'm sure there are cases where the professors are sanctimonious jerks, too.
I don’t mean this disrespectfully, but this is completely wrong and comically naïve. It is not representative of academic libraries at elite US universities. I work at an academic library at an Ivy League school, and am familiar enough with our peer institutions to provide some context. What you describe is a very rosy and idealistic view of libraries and especially librarians.
The truth is, academic libraries are extremely politicized institutions which censor information they view as ideologically inappropriate ALL THE TIME, both explicitly by culling books and implicitly through social coercion and other political maneuvers (setting up ideologically slanted committees which must approve new book purchases, etc). The examples are endless.
The idea that librarians are dedicated to “privacy” and “openness” — I’m still not sure what that means tbh — is absurd. Some are, but the vast majority of PL’s are highly ideological and rigid in their thinking, will absolutely not tolerate certain views on certain subjects (fairly mainstream views, btw), and depending on the political context, have varying commitments to anything resembling privacy or openness.
I’m happy to answer any questions or provide more detailed examples if anyone is interested. And this is specific to the Ivy League + schools in its orbit (Williams, Amherst Swarthmore, etc.)
The way the profession presents itself and the way librarians actually act are very at odds.
Academic librarians are in full on social justice mode, to the point where I wouldn't be comfortable writing the paper I wrote in 2015 on the ethics of archival neutrality today because my rejection of post-modernism archival theory just wouldn't be acceptable now. I've also been chased out of a library discussion group because in discussing the lack of POC who get MLISes, I mentioned we should also check the socio-economic status of the white students to determine if it was racism or classism keeping POC out of the programs (since many groups of POC are more likely to be poor, if poor people don't get MLISes, then yeah, you'll see fewer POC). This was unacceptable.
The public libraries are full of people with, honestly, a white savior complex who are convinced it's their job to let the poor, belabored proles have access to some crumbs of (properly selected) educational material or to act as heroes on behalf of the marginalized. You can find this out really quickly if you ask questions like, "What if someone needed INSERT BAD BOOK because they're studying the rhetoric of evil?" The idea that their public patrons might have equal (or even superior) intellectual needs to their own is completely anathema to them.
The profession is very credentialist and elitist. Very off-putting, personally, as someone from a complicated class background. I'd also use a throwaway, but I got MS as I finished my MLIS and so I'm useless to the profession and don't care.
Agreed. I admire your candor and wish I could speak as freely as you, but like you said, this field is an ideological minefield where publicly voicing a dissenting opinion can cost you your job, or at the very least your social credibility.
The most difficult part is watching people you know and respect say things that you know they don’t believe to appease a group of people who are salivating for any opportunity to absolutely destroy them if they slip up.
You’re right about the class dynamics as well. I have coworkers who are descendants of multi-millionaire families yet have a palpable contempt for the working class while simultaneously claiming to speak in its interests.
Yeah, one of the few benefits to getting MS is like... what are they going to do, ruin my library career? My body did that when it decided to chew holes in my nervous system.
It's very hard, sometimes I kind of feel like I'm watching my former classmates be brainwashed. I try to only speak to people privately, unless they're being bold and expressing an unorthodox opinion, in which case I usually give public encouragement.
Oh man, I could go ON about the class dynamics. If you want the real dirt, talk to library staff. I was staff for over a decade before getting my MLIS.
In context, post-modern archival theory makes sense. You just have to read it in context (that of the archival profession wrestling with their moral complicity in supporting some terrible governments in the mid 20th century) and contrast it with other views. Too many people don't do that.
It's more insidious than people going into the field hoping to censor. There's a large cohort that enters the field because they like helping people (as opposed to liking to organize information); those are the ones that end up here. They think they're helping or protecting people. They're also the loudest because the librarians working on things like open source repository tools prefer to bury their heads and ignore politics. Librarians are also really passive-aggressive and conflict-averse. It produces weird dynamics.
That may be your experience, but it does not reflect mine. My personal experience on the subject is working about a year at a modest municipal public library around 2005-2006 as their part-time IT administrator. It was around the time those librarians from New England sued the FBI over the PATRIOT Act, because that story broke while I was there. I'm basing my claim on my interactions on how those librarians tried to operate, and on how the other librarians at the nearby colleges seemed to operate. They were very concerned with privacy and openness exhibited by the Ranganathan laws of library science. Honestly, if you're confused by what I meant by privacy and openness I kind of question your claim. They had that "every book a reader/every reader a book" stuff up everywhere. Maybe there's been a generational shift.
The neighboring libraries they worked with were mostly community colleges or small regional universities, so I imagine they were likely not nearly as concerned with the prestige of their archives as an Ivy would be. My limited interactions with them didn't seem much different. It wouldn't surprise me if the more prestigious libraries were more politicized, however.
The point, however, was to discuss the ideals, and not the reality. I should think that was obvious given that MIT's commitment is similarly about ideals.
There's been a huge culture shift since 05-06. I started working in libraries in 2004, and what you're describing is more or less accurate until the mid-10s. That's when things started to shift. There's still a cohort that adheres to those ideals, but it's difficult to openly wade into contentious areas with that position unless one has the status to not be fired over it. A lot of it is that librarians, especially academic ones, are, as a group, very insecure because they often lack the credentials of other faculty, so they like to glom onto whatever the 'in' views in academia are in order to validate their presence in the academy.
Small, less prestigious libraries can go either way. On one hand, you're more likely to run into heterodox viewpoints, but on the other, a lot of progressives use those small libraries as career stepping stones and they're terrible about it. I still remember when the director of the community college library I worked in told me she was surprised I was a first-generation college graduate because I didn't seem like 'one of those people'. (Aka our students - this was in Flint, MI).
In the US, your speech is largely protected by law from the state. But while there's a strong tradition of free speech in a university environment--arguably eroded in recent years, hence this letter--that is certainly not the case in most companies, especially if it's public speech.
For sure it is needed, and you know it. You won't be protected by law from being "canceled" if you say something against what is understood as the "norm". Specially in the university world, we were reaching a situation where we couldn't scientifically study/discuss any controversial theme.
There's some concern in some circles in the United States that universities have gotten into the habit of stifling speech on controversial topics.
The reality is a bit more complicated, but MIT is choosing to go out of its way to confirm that such stifling is not part of its principles.
The proof will be in the pudding... At the end of the day, a declaration of this sort only has value in so much as it shapes what the school practically chooses to do when one group on campus hosts a speaker and another group sets up a picket line to shut them down.
> Thats my point. Even with hate speech laws the protection is apparently still better than in the US.
Free speech protection from government sanction is as strong as ever, but the culture of free speech is losing force in the US. Partisans seem unable to understand how it benefits them to allow speech that they find reprehensible. There have been many, many incidences of college administrators caving to complaints and sanctioning and threatening teachers and students over the past several years; not to mention de-platforming even of invited speakers.
> my speech is protected by the law - both from the state and my employer (a university).
Can you elaborate what it means that your speech is protected by your employer? Because that seems like something that doesn't happen here in the US - you can lose work over disagreeing with political ideologies, especially at universities.
If I made public speech and I was terminated over that (or even if it could be proven that it possibly had an influence) that termination would be unlawful.
> you can lose work over disagreeing with political ideologies, especially at universities.
Admittedly, it's been a while since I was enrolled in a college. Are there examples of this happening? Are people losing their jobs because they e.g. go to church or advocate for fewer ecological regulations or believe in lower taxes or the like?
The media then twisted that into "Famed Computer Scientist Richard Stallman Described Epstein Victims As 'Entirely Willing'" [0], which is not something that RMS claimed in that email. To this day there has been no redactin, apology or anything else to atone for this deliberate character assasination - but sure, keep blaming the victim.
If you read what RMS actually wrote, it's kind of hard to disagree with the line of argument:
"It is morally absurd to define 'rape' in a way that depends on minor details such as which country it was in or whether the victim was 18 years old or 17".
Of course, it was incredibly tone deaf to write this out in a thread about Epstein no less, and promptly got twisted into "RMS advocates raping little children".
What he was really guilty of was sharing his opinions on a dangerous subject when he really had nothing interesting or original to add. He might as well complain about the speed limit on a particular road being 65 instead of 75. We set standards and conventions to keep order.
And while I completely approve of RMS, that argument works just as well for 10 year olds and has often been made. Listen to screaming Gajdusek about his right (or even duty) to have sex with consenting children at the end of The Genius and the Boys.[0] Maybe when RMS said it, he set an age in his mind of some precocious post-pubescent teenager. Whatever his mental imagery was, it was just as arbitrary as the law.
We set a standard to give kids a bit of runway before they are a legitimate object of the desires and efforts of adult men (and women.) 18 is fine, it gives them a little time. 17 would probably be fine, too. I don't see any reason why it couldn't be 19. But it is what it is.
> Maybe when RMS said it, he set an age in his mind of some precocious post-pubescent teenager.
As somebody who recently had to go back and reread a lot of rms related discourse after several years not thinking about him, I think it's also worth pointing out that he was, in fact, echoing what precocious post-pubescent teenagers were saying and that those are both a.) the only children rms is likely to have encountered routinely and b.) they are edge cases that rms is (due to his own history) likely to over-identify with.
I was one of those kids, and it was actually highly uncomfortable to read his words years later and recognize arguments I made online as a child/teenager.
I will also say that, from my end, most of those conversations were less about my wanting to engage in sexual activity with adults as a teenager (or vice versa), and it was more about sex being the default example of why it was okay to shut children out of certain activities. As the web became monetized + part of the legal world (COPPA), people and projects were less willing to work with minors/allow minors to contribute. This produced tension with some of the minors who had been around for a while, and one of the groups that was the kindest to the kids (in the sense of letting us stick around in chats/etc. and contribute as long as we comported ourselves appropriately) were the FOSS/libre software + piracy communities since they already had a 'eh, whatever' attitude towards the law.
When we would argue that we had the knowledge, history, and agency to participate, forbidding sex was often the go-to counter-example of preventing children from doing what they wanted to do with adults for their own good. So being motivated, spiteful, intelligent children, we argued back and some adults (like apparently rms) agreed with us.
I only mention it because there is a difference between bringing up those arguments/statements unprompted and weighing in on an already on-going argument.
A fair number of people also had significant issues with RMS behavior going back a long time. So when he indelicately stuck himself into the radioactive Epstein situation it was just the last straw for many.
This is the same institution that railroaded Aaron Swartz and accepted donations from Jeffrey Epstein on behalf of Bill Gates (pedophile arrested at Gates' house). Anyone looking to these self serving institutes for morality or upholding the Constitution is in for a rude awakening.
After explicitly saying that illegal speech is not free speech, it lists 6 exceptions for things that are not free speech either, including speech "that is otherwise directly incompatible with the functioning of the Institute". Which is even written twice, while being clearly a catch-all. And it mentions "In addition, MIT may reasonably regulate the time, place, and manner of expression to ensure that it does not disrupt the ordinary activities of the Institute." Why not have "free speech safe spaces", which would be small individual-sized sound-proof rooms where you are allowed to say what you think? If you also pad the walls, you could find many uses for these rooms.
With principles so weakly held, why have principles at all?