Professors can’t stay silent about this extremist moment on campuses | Hacker News Reader

Professors can’t stay silent about this extremist moment on campuses

washingtonpost.com

69 pointsjseliger65 comments

I worry about an increasing movement toward radicalization on all ends of the political spectrum. I think Trump represented a shift to the far-right. Now I worry liberals might shift to the far-left. The middle ground seems to be disappearing

Having lived in Ohio, the far right is exactly the same as the far left here in San Francisco. What is funny is they do not realize this. So I think its more a personality type selection than actual thought process or belief.

The result of believing the other side is evil, is no one is willing to work together so we all lose.

I think this could be a function of things we've built on the internet such as the ability to "hide" or "block" - even moderators are bad I, an elected DNC delegate is banned from the DailyKos because I disagreed with the Democrats proxy war policy on Syria.

We are in trouble.

> So I think its more a personality type selection than actual thought process or belief.

Yep, I think that's an important insight. I know a few people who grew up in very evangelical/conservative Christian communities who later dropped that ideology for left-wing ones (e.g. feminism). Their attitudes and behaviors are almost exactly the same, except that the content of their ideas has been swapped out.

Why the downvotes? Seems like a relevant anecdote.

because the idea that women should get to work and vote isn't a far-left idea

That's a pretty disingenuous comment: First, your characterization is probably accurate if restricted to the "first wave" feminism (of a century ago), but, IIRC, I think we're on the "third wave" now. Second, in the American political context, feminism is highly correlated with progressives/left-wing, and the specific people I was talking about are very left-wing. Thirdly, my comment wasn't even about feminism at all, but about how people can change beliefs without changing a lot of things one might naively assume would change with them.

You brought up the broad concept of 'feminism' as an example and your comment was about people who go to either extreme, so I think I took your comment as being more anti-feminism then you meant it (no ingenuous meant to be dis'ed). I agree with your idea of how some people change beliefs but still keep the same extreme attitude.

> Now I worry liberals might shift to the far-left

Yet Trump's election was in part about a reaction to far left movement from the viewpoint of supporters. You may not agree, but the reality is that real or not the perception is what drives outcomes.

The left no longer are strong supporters of free speech, no longer oppose imperialism and foreign interventions and are just as hawkish as the right only the rhetoric differs. The greatest irony here is that some portion of Trump's supporters did oppose these things when he was candidate Trump. Just as many of Obama's supporters opposed the wars, domestic spying while he was candidate, but not afterward.

Our greatest loss of liberty always comes from whoever wins no matter who they are or their side due to the team sport aspect of politics where most will no longer rationally criticize their own team once they are in power.

The 2016 election was a comedy of errors (I agree with you fully) in essence:

Hillary Clinton = The (corrupt) system is fine. Bernie Sanders = Let's fix the (corrupt) system. Donald Trump = Let's burn the (corrupt) system down.

Trump winning broke down the propaganda model in the US, which has degenerated from Manufactured Consent to some sort of continual moral panic ala "The True Believer." The harder the media pressed on Trump-- the more popular he became.

Perhaps calling your potential voters "deplorable" while accusing them of being sexists and racists, while undermining democracy itself (Bernie Sanders), was not a recipe for success. The Clinton's corruption is well known to the world.

I hate to say this, but Bill and Hillary's proven TREASON pales in comparison to the garden-variety sexism Trump was acused of.

The hysteria over Trump is just that-- hysteria. The fact is the Democratic party offered an objectively worse candidate. Both were "shit sandwiches."

In the US "far-left" is what, to most of Europe, is "center-right".

Free or low-cost college education, strong unions, strong consumer rights laws, inexpensive healthcare with transparent pricing, good public schools, legal cheap and easy access to abortions, subsidized parental leave and day care, etc.

This is the middle ground you are looking for, yes? It doesn't seem to be disappearing.

Or are those goals part of the far-left that you worry about?

I think it's called optimisation. Ad sponsored content is optimised to lock in the user and take him/her to the extremes.

Human reality aside, it's an interesting tension phenomenon; like stormy weather.. voltage difference grows and then thunder.

What impresses me more, in less than a decade we went from "ohhh web 2.0 and iphones" to "brexit, catalout, djt vs kju, nazi rallies". That's a quick and vast change.

The middle ground is being demonized.

Many of my left-leaning friends equate "radical centrists" with Germans who stayed silent during the Holocaust. This is not an exaggeration.

I've seen little evidence that these sorts of protests are broadly representative of what goes on at universities.

There are more than 15 million college students in the US, even dozens and dozens of absurd protests isn't evidence of much.

https://nces.ed.gov/fastfacts/display.asp?id=98

Agreed. Where is the modern equivalent of the Weather Underground and their bombing campaign? Or the Symbionese Liberation Army and their bank robberies, murders and kidnapping?

What modern actions are like the bombing of Sterling Hall?

And those weren't anywhere close to representative of the anti-war movement in the 1960/1970.

The shift has been taking hold for about a decade. Educators have been teaching these students these tactics. No surprise they're being used against them.

http://reediesagainstracism.tumblr.com/demands

I'm all for equality, but increasingly, these BLM-emulative student movements aren't egalitarian, but racist in the other direction. See #7 for example. Many of those demands, like #24, aren't even possible let alone reasonable. There are specific laws governing the employment of non-naturalized residents.

The demand that "CRES is to be taught by people of color" is also illegal.

whats AODs, SES, CSO, HCC, MRC, PMP, CAT, CRES ?

These are Reed-specific acronyms that anyone relevant at Reed would understand. I found almost all of them through a search like "PMP site:reed.edu", such as https://duckduckgo.com/?q=PMP+site%3Areed.edu .

AOD = "Alcohol and Other Drugs" violation. They probably want to know if there is a racial bias in who gets cited.

SES = "Socioeconomic Status"; poor people in general have a harder time getting through college.

CSO = "Community Safety Officer", aka, campus police

HCC = Reed Health and Counseling Center

PMP = Peer Mentor Program

CRES = Comparative Race and Ethnic Studies program; think "comparative religion" course but for race and ethnic studies.

CAT = "Each year, one quarter of the faculty is considered for reappointment, tenure, promotion, or an increase in salary. This evaluation is conducted by the faculty Committee on Advancement and Tenure (CAT), which makes recommendations to the president." (This was the hardest to find. It took a couple of minutes.)

Put any student that disrupts the activities of the organisation through disciplinary procedures, ultimately expelling them if they can't behave. These disruptions will stop instantly, and they'll learn to behave appropriately in future.

This article is about students protesting a humanities course at Reed College in Oregon. Why does it have a huge image depicting protesters against "Nazis in Berkeley"?

It's simple: when it becomes acceptable to violate standards of civility when addressing particularly ultra-bad ideas, soon enough, every idea you don't like becomes ultra-bad.

This is a good summary of the entire situation without the emotion of an op-ed:

https://www.insidehighered.com/news/2017/09/11/reed-college-...

With a link to their supplementary syllabus, I was curious about that:

https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/0Bw66lFPav-Gsa3prajMy...

Tim Wu, who coined the term “network neutrality”, wrote an excellent op-ed in the N.Y. Times yesterday. He said that now speech,l is a form of control and censorship, whereas 100 years ago limiting speech was a form of control / censorship. Interesting to see how the pendulum shifts...

You need to rewrite that whole paragraph. What?

Might as well read the op-ed: https://www.nytimes.com/2017/10/27/opinion/twitter-first-ame...

The prof should sue the students for harassment and tortuous interference. The student's are preventing the prof from doing her job and fulfilling her duties to the University.

Is this academic extremism something confined to the USA so far? I don't remember hearing about riots at European universities yet.

Is this academic extremism something confined to the USA so far? I don't remember hearing about riots at European universities yet.

It's actually fairly uncommon; most people are normal and most schools are reasonable: https://jakeseliger.com/2017/04/24/ninety-five-percent-of-pe... . But bad things are happening at a small number of schools, and, unfortunately, many administrators in particular are enabling or tolerating them, so those things make the news.

There are some genuinely bad trends, but there's also some inflation of the state of reality on the ground.

The universities and high schools students in France frequently participates in protest organized by left-wing orgs, like against all the last reforms to the work code.

>We introduced ourselves and took our seats. But as we were about to begin, the protesters seized our microphones, stood in front of us and shut down the lecture.

I'm not sure who gave these people the idea the heckler's veto is a legitimate tactic on a college campus or why the administration puts up with it. Those students should be summarily expelled.

I agree with you, but... Apparently, this argument (against mandatory Western Civ) has been going on for years, and a few (3?) students went wild this year and disrupted class. There have been previous complaints and protests that did not disturb class. http://www.reed.edu/reed_magazine/march2017/articles/feature...

However, to use their own language against them (because I get to hear this stuff on Turkey-Day)... it reeks of privilege.

I question whether the protest leaders even know what discrimination is. Have they been alone where they were truly a minority (by skin color or politics) or outside of their parents cocoon? It seems not, because they don't know how to get along even with people who largely agree with them... privilege. That they were allowed by the appropriately outraged staff/faculty to continue says it again.

Still, based on my recent experiences, these are not the majority of students at any college. Even the hotbed schools of such pop-protest need something else to get a larger group of their undergrad students out... that's why it takes an actual march of Nazi's on campus (or take back the night, TA unionization, etc) to get student protests in Berkeley... the city is more activist than the students.

I agree, they should be expelled for deliberately disrupting a class like that (or at least be forced to drop it with an F on their transcript). I think the lack of an appropriate response like that is what "gave these people the idea the heckler's veto is a legitimate tactic on a college campus." They tried it, it worked, so they do it again but bigger.

This is not how we did things in the 90s we used to debate these speakers and knock down their ideas with rational discourse it's not that hard to deflate the arguments of the far right they're mostly based on a series of bad assumptions like assuming everyone has a deep fear of anyone who looks different than them. It's better to let them speak and then deflate their arguments to the bone in debate.

That's what we did back in the 1860's too. There were all these people who wanted to build an economy based around the idea that some humans didn't really have rights and so we deflated their arguments with rational discourse.

Obviously I'm not comparing teachers of Western history to slave owners. But i am trying to point out that rational discourse alone doesn't yield a more egalitarian world.

You hit the nail on the head: the use of rational discourse and the use of logical arguments to plead a case, demanding those arguments follow the ideas of logic. That idea BY ITSELF is one of the core ideas that very much are "Western Civilization" and were hard-fought ideas even inside the West (even in ancient Greece, just read the circle arguments in ancient Greece). Even the idea of a university itself is very much a Western tradition that is not exactly common.

But this rational discourse is quite a unique property of Western Christian civilization, and it's Greek philosophy heritage.

So when those students say that Plato, rational argument itself (and frankly the existence of the university concept itself in the first place) are against their religion/ideology ... they're probably right.

But let's also move one piece of total shite out of this world : there has never been any large scale human society that was egalitarian, and frankly most societies were FAR worse than the West has ever been. Especially islamic civilization is bad in that regard.

However when it comes to speakers advocating racism, race is not even real, there is only one human race with ethnic variations we don't allow people to come to medical schools to advocate using voodoo doll to cure cancer why should racists be speaking on college campuses?

The vast majority of the people accused of being racists aren't actually racists. But even if they were, it's not your place to decide who gets to speak and who doesn't.

Perhaps, but then you run into the problem of defining racism. It can be obvious, but you can also have situations like the one in yale where the english curriculum was "Colonized"[1] by the fact it had too many white male writers. Would someone who advocates for teaching the traditionally accepted cannon of english literature be racist. According to some definitions, yes. Further, some are willing to call the fundamentals of math racist[2]. Racism can be subtle as well as obvious, and to define the parameters of acceptable speech based on subjective understanding of that subtlety seems that it would likely lead to abuse.

[1]http://college.usatoday.com/2016/06/10/yale-undergraduates-a...

[2]www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-5018223/Professor-says-math-perpetuates-white-privilege.html

[1] is fake news. [2] is a single professor from a low-tier university with the article intended to incite outrage and divide through inducing fear in the reader, which is what you felt.

Please be more careful where you are sourcing your brain food.

My view on the freedom of expression is well known, so I'll try to avoid being verbose.

Does the institution receive funding from the government?

If so, can it legally prohibit lawful speech?

SCOTUS has pretty much decided that it can not. In time, this will be a more settled matter. America is still young, comparatively speaking. We will be okay so long as we remember it's a constant effort and not a final state.

Race is real. It's obvious when you look around. The major continental races show up on any k-clustered human genomic analysis. And any competent forensic anthropologist can identity race from skeletal remains.

We should treat people with equal dignity. Race should not be a factor in individual decisions. Left doesn't stop there, though. They go further, insisting that race is not only irrelevant, but unreal. They step beyond fairness and into propaganda and lies. It's why the left is now on the retreat in every institution of power.

I'm not the only one who's sick of having to parrot lies. By alienating people like me, people who would ordinarily be sympathetic to the left's causes, the left is guaranteeing a conservative backlash of biblical scope.

I notice this submission is now flagged. Anybody has any idea as to why or in which way is inappropriate?

Likely because discussions on this topic generally generate much more heat than light. That's not to say the issue isn't important or worth discussing; some forums (virtual and otherwise) are better suited for constructive discussions on a given topic than others. HN members often flag such submissions even when they agree with the premise for just this reason.

To be clear, as I understand it, submissions receive a "[flagged]" tag when enough community members have flagged it: it's not a moderator action.

Thank you for the answer. I figured that it had to do with "keeping the peace."

>Oh dear, these left wing protestors taking a microphone sure is comparable to fascists actually killing people.

Give me a break.

Would you please stop using HN for political/ideological battle? You've done it quite a bit and it's not what this site is for.

Similarly, would you please not post unsubstantive comments here?

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Every comment in this thread is ideologically driven. It seems that if you don't want people commenting with political opinions, there shouldn't be political submissions.

As far as substance goes, how is my comment less substantive than the top comment (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15575704) on the thread? I said that it was foolish to consider protesting fascism to be worse than fascism, and that commenter said that protesters should be expelled. They're equally substantive comments that express opposing views on the issue in from the article.

A certain amount of politics is inevitable, but more than that turns HN into a war zone, which destroys the things the site exists for: intellectual curiosity and thoughtful conversation. So it's a tricky problem. We do two things to address it (see https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html):

1. Accounts that use HN primarily for political/ideological battle are obviously not using the site as intended, so we ban them.

2. Commenters are asked to avoid the inflammatory style of political argument. Comments need to get more civil and substantive, not less, as a topic gets more divisive.

Unfortunately it looks like you've been running afoul of both of these. You need to fix that if you want to keep commenting here.

The "what about that other comment" argument, a.k.a. "the other person started it", a.k.a. "they did worse", doesn't really count as a defense because we can't possibly see everything that gets posted here. Not every driver who is speeding gets pulled over for a ticket. I agree with you that that comment was a bad one, but it doesn't mean yours were ok.

whole lotta people on this "hacker news" website that love to say authority shouldn't be questioned

It's a variant of Chesterton's fence: question an authority when you've learned how that authority works and what motivates it. For god's sake, if you want to be a contrarian, be intelligent about it.

Some freshman with a copy of Derrida and a bullshit social justice grievance does not know enough to question 4,000 years of civilization.

Do you? Anyone can question anything. That's how a free and fair society works.

The professor has a lot of detailed knowledge on the topics they cover, but maybe not a radical critique of the underlying assumptions of what they teach.

I'm not super familiar with this case, but glancing over the student's demands, many looked reasonable.

Of course we have a right to question anything. But pragmatism demands that we don't spend an arbitrarily large amount of time indulging arbitrarily unlikely scenarios. These protesters are attempting to use brute force to give their horrible ideas more salience than they'd get in a fair intellectual forum, and that's not fair to people who actually want to learn about the far more well-established ideas that we've honed over thousands of years.

I'll keep that in mind next time an non-economist posts something here about bitcoin

The author is referring to students protesting the mandatory freshman lecture on Western Civilization, which has a history of being protested at Reed.

There's a list of demands as well. http://reediesagainstracism.tumblr.com/demands

Students typically have an incredibly small say in shaping the institutions that shape their future.

If protesting wasn't uncomfortable, it wouldn't be effective.

None of the demands seem to have much to do with the teaching of this particular course.

It is also the case that the professors have very little control over meeting these demands.

Finally, presumably there are some people who want to take that class.

This is like yelling at the Starbucks barista because you don't like the flavors they're using in the cake, even though other customers want that flavor.

My sympathy is with the barista.

> None of the demands seem to have much to do with the teaching of this particular course

Demand #13 is specifically about that course.

I didn't catch that. I stand corrected.

It should be said that is Reed is anything like other small liberal arts schools then I am surprised that this isn't already happening:

"There should be an articulated understanding that “foundational texts” are subjective and that the importance of the course is to foster student’s abilities to read, write, and listen/respond. Before this is accomplished, Hum 110 should be conscious of the power it gives to already privileged ideas and welcome critique of that use of power."

Students shouldn’t have any say in shaping institutions they attend to gain knowledge. They are not smarter than their professors. Or if they disagree, they should attend another university and vite with their wallet/loan/whatever.

Taken to that extreme, the only way to resolve issues with an university that "the university" (which seldom is a blob with one opinion) doesn't recognize itself would be by economic destruction of said university. That's horrendously inefficient when you have tools of diplomacy available. (Similar to how we do not resolve issues with governments by revolution, unless absolutely necessary)

Also, there are clear legal limits to that approach.

This post is poisonous to knowledge. I've politely corrected professors who I respect on multiple occasions. Just because you are informed about a particular subject does not mean that you are never wrong about that subject. I've noticed that STEM professors tend to be more willing to accept that they are wrong about something than in the humanities which I suspect is because it is much easier to prove that someone is incorrect about something in STEM.

I think students should definitely be able to offer polite feedback to their professors, like you describe. However, students definitely shouldn't be in a position to dictate the curriculum, which I think is more what the grandparent was talking about.

* The institutions they are attending

* The ability to shape their own future by choosing which institutions to attend

* The idea that they should have any say in shaping institutions that shape ones future

Aren't these all privileges of being able to attend university in a country born of western Civilization? Wouldn't these all be things they would learn to appreciate more from this class?

> 13. The required freshman course should be reformed to represent the voices of people of color. Lecturers should structure delivery and analysis of content that is sensitive to and proactive for inclusive practices. There should be an articulated understanding that “foundational texts” are subjective and that the importance of the course is to foster student’s abilities to read, write, and listen/respond. Before this is accomplished, Hum 110 should be conscious of the power it gives to already privileged ideas and welcome critique of that use of power. This could be done by 1) allowing alternative readings that critique texts on the current syllabus, 2) making Hum 110 non-mandatory until reform happens or 3) alternate options for Hum lecture.

I'm super curious about these alternate texts... but of those 25 demands, almost all of them should be directed toward the proper administrative offices or the board of trustees. If they can't sway them, then they should probably transfer to a less oppressive college or go start their own.

Attacking educators for doing their job and reducing their effectiveness to teach those students that do want to learn is pretty weak and ineffective. I can only hope one day that they'll come to their senses and be ashamed of themselves.

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