Think Professors Are Liberal? Try School Administrators
nytimes.com
nytimes.com
Edit-Just to add a quote, the author describes the following as being liberally “lopsided.”
“The conference would touch on such progressive topics as liberation spaces on campus, Black Lives Matter and justice for women as well as for lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer, intersex, asexual and allied people.”
This has no place on HN, as it’s clearly political and not what this sites about.
For example, a conference for hardcore racists will claim to talk about the importance of “european heritage”, and hardcore sexists merely claim to want “traditional family values”.
“Slavery is wrong” is intensely political, even if mostly non-controversial.
That said, is this really a big issue? Employees, often public employees, at traditionally liberal institutions, many of whom are humanities PhDs themselves are liberal... Popes are often Catholic and wear funny hats... I'm not clear this is a huge threat to Western civilization.
People do go to college thinking that it will broaden their intellect, but at least when it comes to politics and culture that does not appear to be true.
The best way to reform college: competition.
Why not have a "free", government funded post secondary education that is online only and is standardized across the entire country. The standardized course content is created by the leading experts in all relevant subjects. Testing of students is on standardized exams only.
The cost of this system would be miniscule compared to the redundancy of multiple institutions, and to the physical footprint/costs of traditional schools. Especially in light of this article which shows huge resources spent on pet issues of liberal administrators.
When colleges need to compete on price with this free system, then colleges will reduce costs and cut this unneeded waste.
It's like monarchists in 1920's Europe clutching at every straw and demanding respect while deluding themselves that their time has not yet passed.
That's an interesting censorship tactic: if you don't like a topic or an idea, start a fight about it, the ruder and unproductive the better. Your disliked topic is thrown out like a baby with the bathwater, an objections to the censorship can be countered with the misdirection that the topic or idea isn't getting suppressed, just "fights."
That's why I think, in the interest of open, good-faith discussion, the flamers themselves need to be moderated, but not the topics that attract them.
But HN policy is (basically) to allow the veto to work as the lesser of two evils, on the theory that there are lots of other places to discuss this sort of stuff. I think that's a reasonable policy for a tech site.
I'd much rather go to a school where everyone looked the same but thought different, than a school where everyone looked different but thought the same.
Your line of reasoning is the perfect example of this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paradox_of_tolerance
"Why are you tolerant people so intolerant of my desire for a world without all this tolerance? I thought you hypocrites were tolerant!!"
The author of that comment does not want everybody to look the same, it was just a rhetorical device - the problem is not that people don't look the same, but that looks is everything that is considered. The opposite of "caring only about physical diversity" is not "demanding physical uniformity", it's "demanding diversity not only in genetic traits but also in other aspects". I am old enough to remember when the need for diversity was explained as "we need people of different background with different ways of thinking, because that would lead to greater intellectual outcomes as individual biases would be compensated and cancelled out". Now it's "we need people of different genetic background because if you don't agree with it than shut up, racist!". Somehow the old one was way more intellectually satisfying than the new one.
Regarding tolerance - you do not see conservatives trying to no-platform liberals, but I could get you 100 examples of college liberals trying to no-platform conservatives. Who exactly are the tolerant ones?
Did you see what happened to Bret Weinstein at Evergreen College? He is an ostensibly liberal guy, and what happened to him should send a shiver down the leg of anyone who is remotely interested in a free exchange of ideas.
Sounds like you went to the same fallacious economic school Elizabeth Warren did
You're proving my point. This is a fringe conservative position (conservatives are okay with taxes for critical infrastructure, national defense, some minimal social safety net, etc), but you're using that brush to paint all conservatives. Sadly, portraying moderates as extremists has become a goto debate tactic for the left wing, and it's frankly _boring_ never mind morally repugnant.
You seem to be willing to lump all conservatives together, but not willing to listen at all...
If someone's idea doesn't hold up to scrutiny, academically speaking, you should identify it as such.
The danger of labeling and avoiding ideas you don't like, in this case: conservatives, you're being intellectually dishonest and you're prone to basis.
1. Single payer healthcare is both more effective and cheaper than the for-profit model we have now. [1]
2. Climate change is both actually happening and is largely caused by human activity. [I really hope I don't need to cite this...]
3. Gun control tends to lower gun violence. [2]
[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2017/07/07/upshot/why-single-payer-h...
[2] https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2017/10/4/16418754/g...
Personally, I agree with this one, if they're done right. (I think Germany is the best one in the western world) [One conservative view] This won't be done right in the context of the US given it's size and demand on it's people. (That also is where the anti-big gov arguement comes from as well) There is also a bit of FUD in reguards to it's change to the economy after implementation. [Higher taxes and a higher COL] (There are many other _good_ arguements against it.. such as the right to conduct business without government interference.. but see Ben Shapiro for that)
> 2. Climate change is both actually happening and is largely caused by human activity.
Most of the anti-climate change arguments that I've seen on this stem on weird twisting of data. I haven't seen a lot of solutions on the otherside. So that's equally weird and it just seems that people are yelling to convince some government body to "do something." (Whether it's effective or not.. that's a VERY big concern)
> 3. Gun control tends to lower gun violence.
It depends on context. There are many cases where this fails. (IL being one of those [it's easier to buy in IN].. since you can get and transport a firearm with different gun control requirements across the border). This goes for Canada, US, and Mexico. (Although if you enforce the borders strictly you can maintain gun control) The issue with this: Gun control is more restrictive on those who wish to legally use firearms, but barely does much to inhibit those who intend to use them illegally.
I would argue that professors should know better than the general public. In that case, we should want to see true beliefs over-represented and false ones under-represented. So-called liberal and conservative beliefs are often mutually exclusive. That means that at most one of them can be true. Wouldn't that suggest that, if academics are doing their job of finding the truth, they should be biased? If professors were half liberal and half conservative, that means that at least 50% of them are wrong.
If liberal beliefs are true, this bias might be what we want. If they're false, of course, then it clearly isn't.
Or maybe not. Professors and administrators are responsible for teaching. There is certainly an argument to be made that a diversity of viewpoints is useful. Informed and well-reasoned positions might be useful for education even if half of them are wrong. And a spirited debate among peers could help everyone learn and come closer to the truth.
If the bias were the other way, with 90% of administrators being conservatives, would this author be saying the same things? Would I be saying the same things? I think the answer to both is "probably not." Or, if we said the same things, we'd definitely feel differently about them.
Your assumption that one of the positions, either liberal or conservative, must be correct, is wrong.
Second, the assumption that professors know better than the general population in all cases is also incorrect. People in academia have a way of thinking that is sometimes divorced from reality and real world experience. Professors can be much more wrong than the general population in some cases.
This highlights the original point: viewpoint diversity and rigorous debate are the best tools for discovering truth. If your idea is so fragile it can’t exist outside of some protected ecosystem, the idea probably isn’t very good to begin with.
I didn't say that. I said that at most one is right.
I would also say that, even if both are wrong, one is probably wronger than the other.
>Second, the assumption that professors know better than the general population in all cases is also incorrect.
I didn't assume they do know better. But I think we should want them to. Which would imply they should be "biased."
It's a school. Why are these needed? To pad tuition?
Every dep at my college was horribly bloated.
When the fuck did equal rights for minorities, women, and GLBTQ become "politically lopsided". We're talking about human rights here. There is no legitimate "other side" to this argument, just hate.
This article is concern trolling 101.
I've read what conservatives write about BLM. Saying they call it a "broken movement" is the understatement and mischaracterization of the century. It's racism, pure and simple. If you are a racist, you're a scumbag, full stop.
The vast majority of people who criticize BLM or any other leftist issue are not racists. They are people who see problems with a movement that has good intentions and terrible execution. Thats pretty much the standard conservative criticism of liberal politics: Good intentions, horrible execution that lots of times backfires.
You need to realize that for the most part everyone wants the same things. We just disagree about how to get there.
The vast majority of right-wing criticism of BLM is grounded in (sometimes quite overt) racism, as is, frankly, much of the left-wing criticism of BLM.
It's true that criticism of certain things on the left is not dominantly grounded in racism; e.g., while capitalism certainly has racial impacts, the defense by the right of capitalism against socialism and other post-capitalist alternatives isn't grounded primarily in racism, nor is the right-wing assault on feminism grounded in racism.
That's not to say that the dominant basis of those right-wing positions isn't as bad as racism, but it's certainly different from racism.
> You need to realize that for the most part everyone wants the same things.
It may be that most everyone has similar values, but the thought leaders crafting and selling positions (on the right or the left or anywhere else) aren't a representative sample of the population, but a fairly narrow elite, and I guarantee you that the thought leaders of the right and left do not want the same things and differ only on means.
But I also think that the idea that everyone for the most part wants the same things is, at best, inadequately supported and contrary to the readily available indications. There is every indication that there are, on many politically salient issues, fundamental conflicts of basic values and goals, not merely on optimal mechanisms for achieving shared goals.
Jonathan Haidt has done a lot of important work in this area, I recommend you check him out. Our moral foundations are based on: Harm/care, Fairness/reciprocity, Ingroup/loyalty, Authority/respect, and Purity/sanctity. Lefties really only care about the first two, conservatives care about all 5, and harm/care + fairness/reciprocity typically rank lower than the other values. Look at the FIRST comment on this thread. Then look at the list of values. It is really easy to see what our arguments are about once you know why people think the way they do.
I disagree strongly with your last point. Almost everyone wants to be happy, avoid suffering, have healthy and harmonious relationships, to live life as they choose, have a sense of purpose, etc. Our fights are typically about how to achieve that for every citizen. If you can find a LARGE population of people that does not want those things I will happily retract my statement.
This is less true when you get beyond platitudes to what each one of those means in substance.
There is a very significant disagreement over what “liberty”, for instance, means, and over what things are “basic human rights”, among people who agree that “liberty” and “basic human rights” are important goals.
> But beliefs are not the same as values.
Well, beliefs include both fact and value beliefs, but the ones you enumerate are, in fact, values.
> The divide comes in how we prioritize our values in achieving those goals.
Values are root goals, not means of achieving goals.
> I disagree strongly with your last point. Almost everyone wants to be happy, avoid suffering, have healthy and harmonious relationships, to live life as they choose, have a sense of purpose, etc.
Taking that as true, for the sake of argument, that's not wanting the same things, even if people might use the same words. It is a different thing for Alice to be happy, avoid suffering, have harmonious relationships, live as she chooses, and have a sense of purpose than it is for Bob to have those things; it may even—depending on, e.g., what makes Alice and Bob each happy—be mutually incompatible things.
I think you're sort of on the right track about values being root goals. Values come first, then we execute policy based on those values. One goal may come at the expense of another. And some lefties might not even recognize a trade off if statistically they don't value something that conservatives value very highly. Or vice versa.
Your last point is in alignment with everything I've said before. We have the same over arching goal (happiness), we just disagree about how to get there. The two paths to the goal are mutually incompatible, not the goal itself. The path is what is in question and conflict, not the goal. This is why it is so important that the path is discussed honestly and openly. Good intentions do not automatically lead to good outcomes, and if we as a society choose the wrong path we are f*. So to bring it full circle, this is EXACTLY why we need more conservatives on campus: to discuss the other paths and evaluate them objectively so that the best path may win.
No, I'm not.
> Substance can't be mapped onto reality without prioritizing values and deciding accordingly.
That is a syntactically-valid sentence but I have no clear idea what it is trying to communicate relevant to the discussion.
> The belief of individual liberty is shared throughout America
The idea that there is a thing called “individual liberty” that is to be valued is broadly shared. What that label actually means is not a product of such a broad consensus. This isn't a matter of “how to achieve individual liberty” being a matter of disagreement (that is true, too, but a different issue) but the fact of what it means to say “individual liberty” being a matter of disagreement, with mutually incompatible views as to what that means.
> Your last point is in alignment with everything I've said before
No, it's directly opposed to it.
> We have the same over arching goal (happiness), we just disagree about how to get there.
No, that's what you said. What I said is that Alice has the goal “Alice should be happy” and Bob has the goal “Bob should be happy”, and these are not the same goal, and may (depending on what actually concretely produces happiness for Alice and Bob, respectively) may be mutually incompatible goals. And when you scale up to hundreds of millions of people with goals of that style, absolutely are, in very many cases, mutually incompatible goals.
This is not at all a matter of dispute about ideal path to a shared goal, because the goal is not shared. The language Alice and Bob use to describe the goal might be shared (each might say “I want happiness”), but the actual goal is different, it's just the differences are elided in the casual description.
2. You can't define anything beyond a platitude without some sort of values prioritization. Real world definitions will inherently use a value hierarchy. This is where the conflation comes in.
3. Mostly agree, which is why I said real world execution will vary depending on the value system of the population in question. The vast majority of Americans have a fairly similar idea of individual liberty as a general idea/platitude. But again, the value system hierarchy will produce different real world definitions in different scenarios. In order to go from platitude to real world application you have to invoke your value system hierarchy. Which side of any given issue you fall on depends greatly on that hierarchy.
4. See below.
5. I think we're getting caught up in semantics and don't actually disagree on this point. What is shared by the two parties is they each have the same goal: Happiness for themselves. Bob's happiness may conflict with Alice's because of how they are trying to achieve it, but again, they need to talk and sort out why this is happening so that they can get on the optimal path. I think when you say "goal" you are including the means to achieve happiness. I am not. I am simply talking about the pure emotional state. Get more conservatives on campus and we can figure out more ways of achieving happiness that are mutually compatible.
Yes, you can. In fact, you can't have a value prioritization unless you can first define the things you are prioritizing, so this is precisely backwards.
And even if you were right, it wouldn't support—or even have any bearing on—your claim about confusing “values with real world policy execution”.
> Bob's happiness may conflict with Alice's because of how they are trying to achieve it
No. I mean, sure, that's possible, too, but beside the point.
The point is Bob’s happiness may inherently conflict with Alice’s; for an extreme example, Bob may derive happiness directly from Alice’s unhappiness. (More commonly, Bob’s happiness may defend on conditions which produce unhappiness for Alice.)
> I think when you say "goal" you are including the means to achieve happiness
No, I'm not. I'm talking about what in economics might be described as each individual’s personal utility function; the mapping from condition of the universe to the resulting happiness of the individual.
2. This is theoretically possible but not at all how most people in the real world function. Not a material impact here. If you believe many people’s happiness depends on many others unhappiness that is classic zero sum thinking.
3. Cool, so we weren’t talking about the same thing, hence the disagreement.
Regardless, colleges should deal with bad ideas by acknowledging and refuting them, not pretending they don't exist.
I have a theory that people born after about 1980 don't really understand bigotry they just know there are certain things they can't say and certain things they should say. That leaves them ignorant of the root causes and it can manifest in other forms and not be recognized as bigotry.
Much better to have open intellectual discussion than to pretend bad ideas don't exist.
Ah the decades-old conservative "political correctness" culture war strategy (successful I might add). You'd have to be a complete idiot to make it through school and not realize why these "certain things" are offensive - OR you could be making a disingenuous argument because you support bigotry (my vote is on the latter).
What would an "open intellectual discussion" about race/sex/religion/immigration, hosted by a conservative group look like exactly?
Liberal groups on the other hand, favor some sort of change, but the actual specifics vary from group to group. On something as simple as environmentalism, you will see a range between people who want laws to ensure pets are well treated, and people who think all animal domestication is slavery and every pet ought to be freed into the wild.
A conservative group on the other hand will trend to defend whatever law existed when they grew up. Sure it is not a very clever policy, but thats the essense of it.
So we need an intellectually-honest debate about what laws we want that we are actually willing to enforce.
Unenforced laws leaves many in a legal grey area which is not fair or just.
This is a perfect example of the problem, no intellectual capability to refute, resulting in a desperate resort to bigotry.
Instead, please follow the site guidelines, which include: "Comments should get more civil and substantive, not less, as a topic gets more divisive."
Here is one: the natural hair movement, good or bad?
A liberal view is on favor of it, as straightening ones hair can be seen as trying to ape European hair type, and popularizing it as glamarous demeans people with naturally kinky hair forcing them to change to an unnatural state.
A conservative view holds that hair straightening is ok, as that is the culture which we grew up in, and to throw it away turns our backs on the decades of tradition and shared culture around it.
A hostile liberal would say a conservative is an “uncle tom” at best, or at worst someone who was brainwashed by racists and is a danger to society.
The hostility prevents further discussion.
.........
I am sure this is not what you expected but I chose a light topic intentionally to show it is the hostility and not the base principles that are at fault.
Also I wanted to show that the conservative / liberal divide is not one of race. Many blacks have conservative views if you look outside of race issues (e.g. topics of religion trend conservative within the black community).
Personally, I think that universities should be a place of debate, and intellectual broadening without hostility. As a conservative, I am well aware that conservative universities exist, and are often extremely hostile to liberal viewpoints (e.g. try suggesting cohabitation is okay at Liberty University, and see how fast you are reprimanded).
I think that is wrong, even though society seems to feel that by going to a conservative university, that treatment is okay because you knew what you were getting.
We can do better, on both sides. Don’t you agree?
Congratulations, you failed the ideological Turing Test: https://medium.com/the-polymath-project/the-ideological-turi...
Feminism had a time when it wall called equality feminism with the goal of promote the legal status of women as equal and undifferentiated from that of men. It was during this time many countries abolished and changed laws that distinguished between men and women, such as spousal support, divorce laws and custody of children, and more. Here in Sweden practically all such laws was abolished during this time, but then the 1980s and 1990s brought about a new focus in popular feminism called difference feminism and the idea of the gender being undifferentiated was abandoned. The feminist movement stopped working to remove such laws and is now considering that laws that favor women to be important to balance power between the sexes.
The common dismissed and ridiculed mens right movement is usually on "the other side" of the feminism movement. A common mens right argument is that the choice in pro-choice and planned parenthood should be applied to both men and women. Consent to parenting does not start from conception they say, and request that the choice given to women is made into a human right as far as possible. The feminist movement generally disagree.
Taking a look at other equal rights movements, laws that give special treatment to minorities based on religion has often a "other side" arguing that special treatment should be applied as a human rights or not at all. Such laws are never made into human rights, and thus we have members of Missionary Church of Kopimism and Church of the Flying Spaghetti Monster trying to achieve this special status of equal rights among religions and rarely succeeding. As the side who is arguing for human rights they are sadly the "other side" to the more established equal rights for (popular) minority religions.
If you dislike the term "mens violence against women" and prefer to address the issue as domestic violence then you are sexist. Similar if you use the term "immigrants sexual violence against women" instead of talking about social economic status creating crime then you are a racist. They say that White Privilege is a good term while Black Crime is a bad term, and naturally this is what distinguish the correct political view and the wrong one.
Bring the laws and discussion back to be undifferentiated by gender, religion, race or ethnicity. Pure human rights. Such discussion should have no legitimate other side but for now most equal rights do not request this and thus the other side is very much legitimate.
1. Why aren't there very many conservative administrators? Are they not interested in these sorts of jobs, or is there discrimination/bias in the hiring process?
2. Why does having such events threaten the free and open exchange of ideas? Shouldn't it be quite the opposite? Incoming conservative students are being exposed to viewpoints they haven't heard before; isn't that a good thing?
3. Why aren't conservatives organizing similar events? The only group I can think of is Turning Point USA, which is hardly acting as a serious ideological advocate for conservative viewpoints.
4. The author calls "justice for women" a progressive cause. Does he believe conservatives are not interested in justice for women? Should conservatives run events about injustice for women to provide ideological balance, and if they do, is that good for society?
2. Yes, presence of liberal viewpoints is certainly beneficial for conservative students. Presence of 100% liberal viewpoints and nothing else - not so much. That's the whole point of diversity - or should be - 100% of the same perspective is not as good as the mix of different ones.
3. They do. But then there are protests, huge security fees, demands to fire whatever administrator allowed the unperson to speak on campus, death threats, speakers cancelling out of fear for their physical security, property damage, hostile environment complaints against organizers, etc. etc. Swimming downstream is a lot easier than swimming upstream.
4. That depends on what you call "justice for women". As it happens in politics, people choose very appealing brands for their ideas, but the underlying reality may or may not be appealing. If "justice for women" means a woman accusing a man in sexual harassment leads to automatic expulsion of the accused man, on her words alone, no due process - is that something that the man would get behind? If "justice for women" means that since women have been discriminated in hiring in the past, now men should be discriminated instead, to achieve summarily just outcome - that would be a very controversial opinion. A lot of things can be called "justice for women", it all depends what is under the brand name.
4. By the literal meanings of the words, justice for women is progressive, not conservative. Giving women civil rights wss please.
4. Ok, then, is it not a moral imperative for those of us who agree with progress to silence conservatives, and vice versa? Who is the author appealing to by extolling the virtues of an open and well-represented conversation?
I guess to people that still think that a functioning civil society, composed of diverse viewpoint engaged in productive policy debate, is better than a zero-sum tribal civil war.
How is this lopsided? If you want a space with opposing views, visit anything or anywhere else in all of Western society, where everything and everyone caters to the "ideal" person: a white male aged 18-49.