The University’s New Loyalty Oath | Hacker News Reader

The University’s New Loyalty Oath

wsj.com

29 pointsdeafcalculus23 comments

It’s not the job of faculty to enforce political will.

The university can have policies promoting one thing over another, but to encumber faculty members with that responsibility is a bit beside the point of being an educator.

The universities are trying to make it the faculty's job to enforce political will.

I agree, but it's so very interesting that when a similar sort of loyalty oath was used even when I was in grad school 25 years ago to enforce loyalty to the state government at Penn State University (as a condition for receiving my poverty-level grad student stipend), it was A-OK with the same sort of people complaining about this right now when it's focused on a more progressive ideology.

But I agree it's absolutely absurd no matter who's pushing these. And all it amounts to is ideological theatre on both sides of the fence. And I don't think that theatre is going to close during my lifetime.

Svetlana Jitomirskaya's letter [1] supporting Prof. Thompson is a worthwhile read. From that letter:

> "I think that the often present push to increase percentage of women beyond what is currently reasonably warranted by merit, only multiplies the biases, is very damaging for the community’s perception of women as a group, and thus is very harmful for the climate. As one example, I was recently on a committee to select the winner of an important prize. It went to a female mathematician. I am sure that most people who don't closely know her or her work, when learning the news, thought “of course, they wanted to select a woman”. Yet her gender had zero influence on our considerations, there was no push on the committee, and she was selected from all the applications purely on scientific merit according to the prize criteria. The value of this well-deserved prize is not at all the same for her as it would have been if she was a man."

[1]: Pages 21-22 of https://www.ams.org/journals/notices/202001/rnoti-o1.pdf

A copy of this article is available on professor Matthias Felleisen's website: https://felleisen.org/matthias/Articles/loyalty.pdf

Another way to bypass the paywall is by redirecting through Facebook (works without a Facebook account): https://facebook.com/l.php?u=https://www.wsj.com/articles/th...

Does it work for all articles from WSJ?

Interesting they dont allow Google users to access it from Search Engine but Facebook.

It should. You should also be able to access WSJ by faking the referer.

How this article can exist without a reference to Catch-22 re: "The Great Loyalty Oath Crusade"!

excerpt: https://epic-site.com/catch-22-loyalty-oaths/

So, in a twist of irony, now you now effectively have to sign that you are a member of the Communist Party.

I’m really struggling to understand the point of this article (except that it appears to hit one of the wsj’s hot buttons). He objects to his employer’s position on something based on free speech issues; he speaks out about it and some people agree with him and some don’t; and his employer supports his efforts to speak out against their own policy. Sounds like that’s how the system is supposed to work.

The fact is his employer is a corporation and it doesn’t want to reject swaths of prospective customers or employees. That all sounds pretty sensible to me. It also seems quite different from the anti-communist loyalty oaths of the 50s which he cites as precedent. In fact it’s rather the opposite, though he doesn’t object in those grounds (which I think would be a legitimate tack to take, despite my sympathy for these diversity programs)

I'm seriously confused by your comment. Are we reading the same article? Which "corporation" are you talking about?

The university of California Davis, though it would apply to any corporation, for profit or not.

I think you are stretching too hard. University is not any corporation. The core value of an university is to pursue truth and knowledge, so free expression and free thinking are essential to universities. At least that's how most people understand it. Maybe you have an alternative theory to redefine university ...

Universities are made of people and the politics* of people run things, no matter what is written on the wall. The people who run those institutions are motivated by the same human motivations as anyone else. And there is an academic hierarchy and an administrative hierarchy and the actors on the latter side tends to be far more hard nosed than those on the former, though there are plenty of hard nosed players on the academic side too. In some the President is a fig leaf from the academic side while the deans wield the real power; in others the president or chancellor is the straightforward CEO. There is innumerable literature on this matter both analytic and fiction (as in stories, not "fake news" science I mean -- think David Lodge). From aphorisms like "science advances one funeral at a time" to the continual travails of tenure, adjuncts, post docs etc this is all very well known.

You can see the attitude I described in my "I don't get it" comment in the US universities that pay so much money for their athletic programs. Doing so gets the "job" done.

This is not intended as any sort of cynical view -- I very much enjoyed my time in university setting both as a student and researcher. In fact it's the opposite: universities must operate this way to even exist. But behind the veneer it was little different from my time in corporate research. Well, more bureaucratic.

* I don't mean in the partisan sense, just in the "relations of people" sense.

1. The relevant distinction is that his employer is a government entity so the First Amendment applies.

2. The issue at hand with the diversity statement is it can be construed as compelled speech, violative of the First Amendment.

Well, she says that the university is supporting her free speech rights to publicly object to their policy. And from an ideological point of view I think the first amendment is excessively restricted.

Be all that as it may: the university, like any other corporation public and private, has good telelogical reason to pursue this course and what I don't get is that she doesn't acknowledge that. They could be right or wrong overall in implementation but by ignoring that I don't really think she has an argument.

He's the chair of the math department at UC Davis, a public university under the University of California system.

The only thing different about the "oath" he cites and the diversity statements coming out now is the ideology they want you to subscribe to. Ideological diversity is diversity too.

He is clear about where he works, though the only relevance of his position is that he says university is supporting his free speech rights, which a typical for profit corporation would not feel any compulsion to do.

Certainly other kinds of businesses can require you to sign on to any number of corporate creeds, ranging from NDAs to environmental issues (an oil company probably wants you to oppose carbon emissions restrictions) to, yes anti communism (more common the the 50s and 70s) and Christianity in some cases. The CEO of a large corporation like a university of California campus is certainly gaining to be concerned with positions that would negatively impact its operations, a big one of which is revenues. I really have a hard time understanding the problem. Especially when his counter argument is being supported.

The conventional term for a research institution which requires allegiance to specific ideologies is “think tank”. There’s nothing inherently wrong with think tanks, but they shouldn’t pretend to be research universities and they shouldn’t be sponsored by the government.

More importantly in this specific case, if the UC board wants to have a diversity oriented think tank, they need to build it on their own rather than subverting California’s research university system.

That's orthogonal to what I'm saying.

The university needs more students (cough customers) which means making sure it has policies that don't drive away certain segments of the population. This applies to attracting certain kinds of staff as well (a century ago the professor writing this article would have been unwelcome at most universities around the world and even if not subjected to much teasing, scorn etc).

You might well say "but that will send away certain others" and I can't disagree but the administrators have decided one pool is larger and more valuable than the other.

Separately I'm not completely sure how useful that "think tank" distinction really is; MIT doesn't have a divinity school while down the road Harvard does. That reflects a certain stance of what the institution is for (though MIT has a chapel and has some very religious students). Likewise MIT was institutionally very focused on policy and government research from the 1940s through the 1990s); the institute very specifically changed their orientation due to economic factors; certainly many faculty objected but that change happened. Really this is no different.

(FYI, the author, Abigail Thompson, is a woman.)

Ouch! Thank you for pointing out my shitty presumption.

I’ll leave my shame in place by not editing my comments. That will help me be more careful in future.

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