[ajbt200128]

Read his essay again, past the first two paragraphs. Look at the social movements he describes as priggish, woke, politically correct etc.

> There was at this time a great backlash against sexual harassment; the mid 1980s were the point when the definition of sexual harassment was expanded from explicit sexual advances to creating a "hostile environment."

> In the first phase of political correctness there were really only three things people got accused of: sexism, racism, and homophobia

Going by the examples pg gives, anyone willing to support women, or LGBT, is a prig. Don't let his abstract theory cloud the rest of the essay. He says it in black and white, his problem is with minorities standing up for themselves.

[coderc]

I don't think that's a fair reading of it.

Consider, for example, expanding the definition of sexual harassment to also include creating a "hostile environment".

I think that pg's point is that this expansion to include a "hostile environment" makes it fall under the "eye of the beholder", which makes it a lot more vague and arbitrary. Something being vague and arbitrary is the perfect playground for a prig, because they can essentially invent new rules and enforce them. For one example: Microagressions. What are they? They could be anything, really.

"Supporting women" and "enforcing arbitrary rules" are not necessarily the same thing. One can claim that they're doing the former when they're really just doing the latter.

If you were to make up a new rule and say that men need to bow to every woman within a 10ft radius in order to show respect, is that really "supporting women"? Is that what women want? This is an intentionally ridiculous hypothetical (in certain cultures), but I think it demonstrates the issue that an arbitrary rule is not necessarily "support".

Remember Donglegate? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5398681

Did this joke create a hostile environment? Did the shaming of these people make anything better, or did it make things worse? Was this an example of "supporting women", or was this just an example of punishing people for not following arbitrary rules?

>He says it in black and white, his problem is with minorities standing up for themselves.

Someone who acts priggishly may not be a part of the minority that they are 'standing up' for.

[ajbt200128]

I agree with the definition pg gives in the first two paragraphs of what a prig with, which is why I suggested you reread past that section. As OP said, DEI initiatives are regularly hollow and performative. Re: dongle gate and the other hypotheticals, sure, not great, I agree enforcing arbitrary rules isn't good for society, and we really gain nothing.

Let's look at this essay critically, and let's not doing any legwork for PG. He has an opening statement about priggishness that, again I agree with, and then (eventually) dives into examples that we're discussing re: hostile environment. Does this example support his argument about what wokeness is?

You claim that the goal of this example is for PG to provide evidence

> that this expansion to include a "hostile environment" makes it fall under the "eye of the beholder", which makes it a lot more vague and arbitrary. ...

Which i agree is PGs point in introducing this example as he says so himself

>But the vagueness of this accusation allowed the radius of forbidden behavior to expand to include talking about heterodox ideas.

So we have this example, and we can clearly identify how PG /thinks/ it supports his argument. This is where I disagree, and like almost all of the examples in the essay, it does not support his argument.

Do you believe that, as PG says, in 1986 and the following few years, (not now, we'll save that for later, he specifically is talking about the 1980s) this title IX ruling that expanded the definition was misused in a priggish sense, to punish people arbitrarily, and that it did not support women? Talk to some women who were alive at that time, and you'll soon realize that yes, outside of direct sexual advances there are many things that professors would do or say to dehumanize female students. So by giving these students a mechanism to hold professor accountable for dehumanizing them, we are... supporting them!

Now maybe you believe that is the minority case, and that in general this was misused. Would you trust women in the 1980s to decide for themselves whether or not they were being sexually harassed by a professor in this expanded definition? Remember, the original definition was just when a professor/whoever would make a direct sexual advance. Ok, so say we trust women to know when they themselves are being sexually harassed. Do you think that men were going around in the 80s accusing professors of sexual harassment? Yea probably not. So who was misusing this? Basically no one. Who was benefiting from it? Women. So this is not priggish in any sense.

As far as today goes, I went to university within the past few years, at a very woke school even by my standards, and even with this expanded definition, I have not heard of any professors suffering from false accusations of sexual harassment. I have had quite literally dozens of friends tell me their experiences where professors dehumanized, belittled them, or have even blatantly asked for sexual favors or been assaulted by them. And of course these reports go through title IX, with this expanded definition, and even today rarely is a professor's career upended. So even today, not priggish.

You can rinse and repeat this for almost any example pg gives. His examples do not support his argument at all. So either his initial argument is wrong, or this essay is just plain bad. Either way it's worthless as a way to defend the argument we both agree on. OP explains why it's also harmful.

[coderc]

>Do you believe that, as PG says, in 1986 and the following few years, (not now, we'll save that for later, he specifically is talking about the 1980s) this title IX ruling that expanded the definition was misused in a priggish sense, to punish people arbitrarily, and that it did not support women? Talk to some women who were alive at that time, and you'll soon realize that yes, outside of direct sexual advances there are many things that professors would do or say to dehumanize female students. So by giving these students a mechanism to hold professor accountable for dehumanizing them, we are... supporting them!

I have no reason not to believe that Title IX in the 1980s was misused in a priggish sense, other than what you've told me just now.

He doesn't give any examples of how it was misused in the 1980s, but says "...but since for a professor merely being the subject of a sexual harassment complaint would be a disaster whether the complainant was reasonable or not..."

Did this mechanism support women? Perhaps. Was it also misused? Perhaps. Does it support his argument? I don't think I agree that he has an "argument", so much as he is merely telling a story that he believes to be true, and this bit of history is part of that story.

Even if this was never misused in the 1980s, it laid the groundwork for the future.

>Would you trust women in the 1980s to decide for themselves whether or not they were being sexually harassed by a professor in this expanded definition?

Well, I wouldn't trust anyone, in any time period, to have all the power of a judge, jury, and executioner. What I quoted above from footnote 5 indicates that. If there is any kind of accusation, it should be taken seriously, but it should also go through the proper procedure for determining guilt while presuming innocence.

Handing the female students of the 1980s virtually unlimited power to ruin the lives of others with just a word could be said to be "supporting" them, sure, but that comes at the cost of everyone else.

> So who was misusing this? Basically no one.

He gives no examples of this being misused in the 1980s, but he does give an example from the 21st century with Larry Summers.

> I have not heard of any professors suffering from false accusations of sexual harassment.

What can I say to your anecdotes, except... "Great!" Or perhaps it's not great that dozens of your friends have had such bad experiences with their professors.

[csa]

First, let me say that your comment is thoughtful and makes many good points, and it lacks so many of the strawman arguments that some others have laid out.

Thank you for that.

That said…

> Do you think that men were going around in the 80s accusing professors of sexual harassment?

Yes.

I will be sure to tell my roommate from college that you don’t think he exists.

> So who was misusing this? Basically no one. Who was benefiting from it? Women. So this is not priggish in any sense.

I’ve been involved directly or indirectly with the academic world since the 80s.

The best I can tell, you weren’t alive then. I’m not sure who you got your information from, but it seems to be selective. There have been more than a few abusers of the “expanded definition”.

First, some real articles:

https://www.mindingthecampus.org/2018/12/17/harvard-zealots-...

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Duke_lacrosse_rape_hoax

These provide some well-documented examples of questionable title ix implementation. There are many more examples if you look for them.

> I have had quite literally dozens of friends tell me their experiences where professors dehumanized, belittled them

I’m a straight, white male (allegedly a privileged class in these situations), and this has happened to me more than a few times, usually from professors (usually older) who were known to have a bad attitude.

I imagine that a lot of these cases are not related to being a woman — it’s just general shithead behavior from the professor that should probably be addressed by the administration, but not under the umbrella of title ix or sexual harassment.

Of course, crossing the line of asking for sexual favors does fall under that umbrella.

As for anecdata, I know of:

- a professor who was investigated for sexual harassment and inappropriate touching for… wait for it… tapping students on the shoulder to get their attention in a silent way. I was the observer. I saw what he did. When I asked the accuser if this was the behavior she was referring to, she said yes. It was a total nothingburger, but it put a massive stress on his life unnecessarily. An appropriate complaint/suggestion would have been to ask him to speak softly from a distance, which is what he did moving forward. There was no reason to put this under the umbrella of sexual harassment.

- a k-12 teacher who was accused of sexual harassment for engaging in standard classroom safety procedures. Lost his job. Later found not guilty on the criminal side, and won a civil lawsuit for wrongful termination (and other things). In this case, it was the administration weaponizing title ix against a teacher while putting minors (the students) into the middle of it.

- a professor was accused of sexual harassment for… again… wait for it… sliding a handout across the table to a student in a small graduate seminar… after the student decided to sit as far as possible from everyone else in the seminar. This was her statement, and it was corroborated by other students, and the action was not seen as sexual or aggressive by anyone else. This student had accused every professor she had taken a class from with some sort of abuse, so the investigation was cursory. Again, why should someone like this be able to weaponize some of the powerful systems of title ix so frivolously?

Lest you believe that this is only a teacher/professor thing, similar examples exist in administration as well as the private sector. Often they aren’t spoken about publicly in order to avoid giving other bad actors ideas that they can work with.

I could go on, but I will spare you.

Let me be clear, I do believe that something needed to be done in the 80s to address callous behavior (both by educators and by the population at large), but I think that too many actions started to be categorized as sexual harassment that were probably better addressed in a different way (probably much lower key) and under a different label. Sexual harassment accusations end up being a scorched-earth approach to conflict resolution, and sometimes the best way to affect change of minor issues is with a deft touch.

Getting back to the original point, when I read pg’s essay, my experiences jibed with his interpretation of events during that time frame. It’s fine to disagree with him, but I hope that folks will at least take a charitable read of his interpretation of the zeitgeist of that time — at a minimum, it passes the sniff test for me.

[ajbt200128]

Thats a good call out, I was definitely being hyperbolic re: no one was misusing the expanded title IX definitions, and I appreciate the anecdata, since you're right that I was not alive back then and so don't have a grasp of exactly what it was like. I trust you that it happened back then, and I have also seen similar situations happen now.

> I imagine that a lot of these cases are not related to being a woman — it’s just general shithead behavior

I agree, a lot of these cases are just shithead behavior, but a lot of them are not, and were overtly sexual in nature (though not direct, but maybe thats up to interpretation), or just overtly sexist. E.g. discussing sexual fantasies or their ongoing sexual escapades, commenting on bodies in a sexual manner that may not be an advance but instead negative in nature etc. But I would agree even within that, title IX may sometimes be overkill, and I've said that to friends and peers myself.

But this exchange touches upon why I still think PGs essay is not worth a charitable read, and just overall more or less harmful. We both have anecdata about correct and incorrect uses of title IX, ways that title IX could be better, etc. How society should treat this and other issues relating to class and abuses of power is an important discussion to have and should be ongoing. What PG is doing is claiming that changes to title IX (along with his other examples of wokeness/priggishness) are in conflict with "truth":

>Surely if truth should prevail anywhere, it should be in universities; that's supposed to be their specialty; but for decades starting in the late 1980s the politically correct tried to pretend this conflict didn't exist.

Which, given your anecdata, is sometimes a fair assessment, and given mine, sometimes unfair. But PG does not allow this nuance in his arguments, and completely disregards the problems any of his examples were trying to treat in the first place. In fact he claims that the thought process that leads to these changes causes disaster, and need to be stopped.

So PG is not directly arguing whether or not the 1980s title IX change was effective in its goals, but instead arguing that the type of thought that lead to that change (and others) simply needs to be stopped entirely. There is no allowance in his argument to affect change, with a deft touch or otherwise, to these societal issues. The only change he suggests are ways to stop or tune out those trying to solve these issues.

Contrast that with Adrienne maree brown's essay https://adriennemareebrown.net/2018/05/10/we-will-not-cancel... Although a different type of writing for a different crowd, it also acknowledges that cancel culture (or wokeness, priggishness, whatever) is harmful and must come to an end, but acknowledges that the problems that have spawned it are real and still need to be fixed.

> We must all do our work. Be accountable and go heal, simultaneously, continuously. It’s never too late.

[csa]

All great points, and I think we more or less see eye to eye on most matters as they currently stand.

But getting back to pg’s essay and the zeitgeist of the late 80s and early 90s…

> But PG does not allow this nuance in his arguments, and completely disregards the problems any of his examples were trying to treat in the first place. In fact he claims that the thought process that leads to these changes causes disaster, and need to be stopped.

In the quote above my quote of you, pg was talking about how “political correctness” began to limit the ability to discuss heterodox ideas at universities. He was lamenting the fact that “the search for truth” had given way to “the search for ideas that generally do not offend” (my wording, not his).

He gives an example of Larry Summers discussing a theory of Darwin’s. Whether that theory is right or wrong is irrelevant — the mere discussion of it cost him his very high profile job because it made some people feel uncomfortable. Note that Larry Summers continued to have great jobs after being ousted as Harvard’s president (including remaining a professor at Harvard), so it’s not like anyone that mattered actually thought he did anything particularly heinous, it was just a forced and capricious move in the performative art of “social justice”.

This happened in many other lower profile examples, and it produced (and has continued to produce) a chilling effect on the discussion of ideas that might be offensive to certain groups (mainly the folks that pg is referring to in his essay — call them whatever you want).

So why is this important?

1. When ideas, especially controversial ones, can’t be discussed, then research areas tend to end up at local maxima. This is incredibly regressive and limiting for research fields. Note that this already exists by way of not being able to challenge the ideas of certain researchers while they are still active/alive, and limiting this by not being able to challenge ideas that certain groups might find offensive (even if backed up by data) is even more restrictive. I’m guessing this is one reason why pg regularly takes shots at the socials sciences — the discussion of ideas is often to limited to that which is fashionable/acceptable to a small group, and progress in the field languishes and is limited because of that.

2. Ideas that are important but controversial end up either being shelved or (at best) discussed behind closed doors rather than openly. As a simple example, when scientists realized that challenging certain aspects of the efficacy of covid vaccines (a completely normal and relatively banal topic in public health circles) was grounds for getting canceled, they just had to do it in secret. By limiting the pool of people who can discuss a matter, the ideas are either less finely honed or take longer to hone. In the case of Covid, this literally cost lives. There are many ideas out there that fall into this category, and what is happening is that these researchers are either researching in relative silence (loss for the world, imho) or they are just leaving academia and either going to the private sector (where research is sometimes not shared for competitive reasons) or just leave academia completely (thereby thinning the pool of talent, also a loss for the world and the search for truth, imho). As a former academic myself, I can just say… I have stories, and they sadden me.

To summarize, the chilling effect I mentioned has made a mockery of certain areas of academics and university life.

Are the benefits better than the losses. I think that’s an interesting discussion that is beyond the scope of a forum like this, but I would say that, as a whole, they are not. Many/most of the benefits that came out of the PC movement and the “woke” movement (as defined by pg) could have been accomplished without the massive amounts of collateral damage that they caused in other areas due to casting an unnecessarily wide net.

[edit: I think this is the crux of the issue. The pc/woke folks seem to take an approach of “at any cost”, while more moderate folks who support many of the same ideas of fairness and equality care deeply about potential collateral damage. IMHO, the pc/woke folks would gain much more support if they were willing to negotiate on this aspect rather than completely ignore it.]

I think that we will find an equilibrium at some point [1], but I think that the “woke” folks are going to find that some of their sacred cows get absolutely destroyed on the way there. Again, it will be an unnecessary over-correction to an unnecessarily extreme intervention. It didn’t have to be this way.

[1] Note that some of the best practitioners have pretty much already found this equilibrium, but much of their best work is (again) only discussed in limited circles. One of the most amazing people I’ve ever met was the head of dei (or some title like that) at a widely known gaming company. We discussed all of the hot-button topics in her field, and she gave answers that I think would be widely acknowledged (e.g., by both “liberals” and “conservatives”) as being actionable and incredibly reasonable. She was a prime example of knowing when to use the deft touch (e.g., someone just wasn’t socialized well) versus using the scorched earth approach (e.g., someone had deep-seated issues that made them a danger to those around them). I think that the “woke” community would win massive kudos from large swathes of the general population if they rallied behind folks like this woman, but the “behavior police” and the “ragers” (my term) would then have no cause celebre, so I doubt it will happen.

Again, thank you for your thoughtful and interesting comments. This exchange has caused me to exercise some rhetorical muscles that I haven’t had to use in a while.

Please continue your search for truth with passion and vigor — I’m certain that you will wield that knowledge and power constructively.

[mixmastamyk]

As it frequently happens, such interpretation says more about your own mindset than the piece itself, and sounds embattled.

That is, if you can’t consider complaints against folks who share your position but but took things too far.