[carrionpigeon]

I think the main strength of this activist movement in academia is that it operates through fear. In an environment where much depends on word of mouth and personal reputation, people could lose their entire careers for violating new, rapidly transforming cultural mores. So, they self-censor, and some voice support for the activists to avoid becoming a target themselves. (Cue the 60-year-old professors who have never used Twitter putting pronouns in their email signatures and adding '#BLM' messages on their personal websites.[1]) The overall effect is that a minority can extract the obedience of a majority.

Public statements like this will have little effect unless they are actively enforced. This means that violators must be officially sanctioned by administrators, who are often their peers. It's clear to me that most academics (including myself, I'm ashamed to admit) are cowards who will bend their public positions, even on academic matters, in favor of whoever wields the greatest power. Not until activists are met with stern opposition and loss of prestige will people stop currying favor with them.

If, though, I am wrong in my assessment and most academics and students, rather than a dominant minority, wholly believe that offensive utterances must be punished and unsavory research banned, I think there isn't much left to do. Any official action, let alone the posted public statement, will only galvanize people to seek out more aggressive policies and oust those that oppose them.

There are real stakes in this conflict, and right now, activists in academia (hard sciences) are pushing in my view really significant policy proposals.

From MIT geophysical sciences department:

1. Penalize (during peer review) research that doesn't cite black authors.

2. Implement diversity boards that have final say in hiring and tenure decisions. (They need not have field expertise.)

From several Broad Institute faculty and post-docs:

1. Restrict publication of genetic research in white populations until genetic sampling of other populations around the world reach parity.

2. Ban white researchers from conducting genetic research in populations in non-white countries.

3. Ban genetic research that can be stigmatizing to designated vulnerable populations (e.g. genetic component of educational attainment, the genetic architecture of autism, etc.).

[1] For clarity, these two relate to first-hand examples of professors making statements solely out of fear of not being able to attract students their labs/departments.

[ShredKazoo]

>This means that violators must be officially sanctioned by administrators, who are often their peers.

There is a bit of a paradox here, because you could argue that cancelling a professor for having an unfashionable opinion is itself an exercise of student free speech.

The statement says "MIT does not protect direct threats, harassment, plagiarism, or other speech that falls outside the boundaries of the First Amendment." It seems to me that certain forms of cancellation could be argued to constitute "harassment" and therefore violate the policy.

Those are indeed some extreme policy proposals. Perhaps you could argue against them anonymously on the MIT subreddit or something like that? (Posting through Tor/VPN on a burner account)

>If, though, I am wrong in my assessment and most academics and students, rather than a dominant minority, wholly believe that offensive utterances must be punished and unsavory research banned, I think there isn't much left to do. Any official action, let alone the posted public statement, will only galvanize people to seek out more aggressive policies and oust those that oppose them.

This suggests an alternative measure: Instead of focusing on freedom of expression, focus on providing a means by which students/faculty/etc. can be polled on these proposals in a way that is robustly anonymous. Sounds like you believe that if the poll favors the extreme measures, there's nothing to be done anyways.

>[1] For clarity, these two relate to first-hand examples of professors making statements solely out of fear of not being able to attract students their labs/departments.

I'm surprised that professors at MIT of all places need to grovel this way to attract students?

[Manuel_D]

> There is a bit of a paradox here, because you could argue that cancelling a professor for having an unfashionable opinion is itself an exercise of student free speech.

No, it's curbing the professors speech. If students allowed the professor to speak, but held their own counter speech or protest march then that would be an exercise of free speech. Preventing another person from speaking is disruption, not counter protest.

[ShredKazoo]

Counterspeech was what I meant by "cancellation", e.g. dragging them on Twitter with millions of views, making it so no one wants to hire them for their next gig.

[8note]

These don't seem like particularly new restrictions, vs past ones around communists.

The proper left wing still doesn't exist in american academia or society

... Citing black authors would be much easier if historically black academics were allowed to become academics, write papers, etc. These are forcing functions against prior suck.

[ShredKazoo]

>... Citing black authors would be much easier if historically black academics were allowed to become academics, write papers, etc. These are forcing functions against prior suck.

Historically blacks weren't allowed to play sports either. When the color barrier fell, they flooded into sports like basketball and baseball. No affirmative action was needed to achieve representation.

When the US supreme court upheld affirmative action decades ago, they stated it was a temporary measure which would probably be rendered unnecessary as time passed. That hasn't happened -- in fact, just the opposite. Affirmative action students tend to major in "culture studies" type disciplines, then get diversity/equity/inclusion type jobs. At those jobs they are basically paid to advocate for further affirmative action in one form or another.

It's not a forcing function against "prior suck" -- the past can't be changed. It's a forcing function to further grow the ideological snowball.

[komali2]

> The overall effect is that a minority can extract the obedience of a majority.

Seems like a distraction: a minority of Americans want to ban abortion, yet, abortion remains illegal for a huge portions of Americans. A majority of Americans want weed legalized, yet, many thousands are in prison for using weed.

Maybe some people changed their twitter bios, to me that doesn't mean "a minority has extracted obedience from a majority" at all.

I'm deeply suspicious of your tone here. I try to take HN claims at good faith, but frankly your 5 points of evidence come across to me as ludicrous. The best good faith I can muster here is that this isn't completely made up fear-mongering but rather some ungenerous interpretation of events you've witnessed in academia. The writing style red flagged me:

> Penalize (during peer review) research that doesn't cite black authors.

This makes it sound like there's some kind of policy requirement for citing black authors that people are being penalized for not meeting, a sort of citation affirmative action. What we're missing is, is that true? Is there a policy? What does it say? What does "penalize" mean? What was the research? Was it geophysical research into fracking outcomes? Was the reviewer wondering why a specific piece of research by a black author that indicated that negative effects from fracking were being experienced by poorer neighborhoods wasn't included? What kind of context are we not getting here?

> Implement diversity boards that have final say in hiring and tenure decisions. (They need not have field expertise.)

Is this true? final say? If a diversity board rejected a candidate for being "white," there'd be no consequences? Really? Your parenthetical inclusion is pointing to the blatant fear. So, your geophysics department hires a prominent Vietnamese architect that knows nothing about geophysical sciences, and that's a realistic thing that could happen, is what you're implying. Huh.

> Ban white researchers from conducting genetic research in populations in non-white countries.

I have an extremely hard time believing that MIT has a rule somewhere that defines what a white researcher is, empowers some kind of authority to determine that when reviewing research grants, and then also goes to define what a "white" or "non-white" country is.

I'm so suspicious of your affected-detachment writing style that I had to delve into the comment history.

Something that jumped out at me is this "disaffected" comment on affirmative action: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30526006

> This is an oversimplification. It started out as: all things being equal, pick the black one. It applied to cases where one was torn between two equal candidates, and the idea was that a nudge toward hiring more blacks would help fix the disparities that arose from years of segregation and racial prejudice. The issue was that the standard for success of this program was racial proportions being equal to that of the general (or local) population.

> As years passed and the standard for success was not reached, affirmative action policies became more and more aggressive. This coincided with civil rights legislation that put pressure on companies and institutions to hire more blacks (expanded to include other racial minorities and women). The consequence is the system we have now, where people, if not explicitly using racial quotas, are creating racially oriented jobs (e.g. diversity staff in large companies / universities) or searching for racially loaded standards (e.g. personality scores for Asians in Harvard admissions) in order to engineer an overall impression of meeting racial proportioning criteria.

Can I ask about your casual way of talking about the race of people? Very rarely do I find someone that says "black ones," "more blacks," etc, that doesn't have distasteful beliefs about race. You're careful to capitalize "Asian," and you have a lot of comments dancing around genetic basis for race. I only delve so deep and analyze so carefully because it seems to me you are wicked smart, and somewhat careful, and my conclusion is that you have deeply unpopular ideas about races and that you are smart enough to know not to share explicitly but also want to warn about so as to avoid negative racial consequences, whatever those are (I'm guessing something smarter than vague "great replacement.") Basically, I think you have racist beliefs, and are carefully trying to discuss them here, or fear monger about them. Do you? Or perhaps, beliefs you think society "unfairly characterizes as racist?"

pre-post edit: (i forgot to hit reply and found this on my computer later)

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30411553

> Some kids are more capable and more driven than others for reasons part cultural and part genetic, and the perceived quality of a school will reflect that of its students. ... Though this notion is distasteful to some, it must be addressed because otherwise, schools and teachers are going to be put on the hook for conditions that are simply outside their control.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30523203&p=2#30524494

> When I was in high school, one student's parents (one doctor and one lawyer --- very financially well-off) took off work for one year just so they could claim having no income on the FAFSA documentation. She got accepted everywhere, winning across the places she applied over $300,000 in scholarships. The upper-middle class and wealthy can easily game this.

> Edit: I should also add that the student and both parents were black. This probably played a large role in the offers.