[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Online_shaming#Tim_Hunt_contro... [2] https://eu.gainesville.com/story/news/education/campus/2021/...
Contrary to victims of discrimination, dead people can't easily organize into coordinated legal action.
BIPoC is also often used as a dogwhistle to exclude Asians and Latinos when convenient.
Incidentally, one of the co-founders of the "BIPOC Project" is an Asian-American woman.
* https://www.thebipocproject.org/
If it included Asians they would just keep using POC.
Jokes can also be used the other way, for social control. Growing up, I heard a lot of racist and sexist jokes, the practical effect of which was to demean: to create a place and put disfavored people in it. I'm old enough that nerds were a similar group, and I remember being the butt of a lot of jokes. When that happens, you're just supposed to take it; any objection to being demeaned is met with, "Why so sensitive! It's just a joke!"
So in the case you cite, the problem wasn't him telling a joke. There are whole books full of jokes for speakers he could have used. It was him invoking rank sexist stereotypes and suggesting the solution to his inability to manage his feelings was to push women out of the labs that they've been working for decades to get equal access to. And indeed, are still working on. At my alma mater, just this week a CS professor was just pushed out after dozens of women complained about sexual harassment in recent years. [1] It took dozens because early complaints were dismissed. And there are far more stories of professors like that then there are of ones being booted for "joking" misogyny.
[1] https://www.michigandaily.com/news/walter-lasecki-resigns-ef...
I think you’re reading way too deeply into this. You’re referring to the Tim Hunt quote linked?
Everything is about control or manipulation - its implicit to the human condition.
I disagree that everything is "about" control or manipulation, but as status-oriented primates, humans certainly do inject it into everything. However, that's all the more reason we have to examine little things like "jokes" and be conscious of the effects we're having.
On the other hand it's completely fair that people feel pushed down by them.
HOWEVER - this entire social justice movement is being used to outsource getting into conflict, and standing up for yourself. My guess is 80-90% of the time if you told someone who made a sexist joke that you are hurt by it, they would apologise (sincerely), and probably not do it again. But for that people actually need to get into a conflict situation, which is hard.
But it would make life a lot easier if we just sorted out these issues at the source, with two people, explaining what hurts and why to someone.
This modern solution of going to HR or to Twitter is not constructive to society, it creates massive divides, it also creates cowardly behaviour rather than encouraging actual people to talk to each other.
1) gets you attacked for seeing everything as bigoted - especially when you make mistakes because you can't know why everyone is doing everything, just see statistically stuff is happening to you and people who look like you more than everyone else, and
2) alienates you from your co-workers, who would prefer that you act according to the stereotypes they have of people like you and laugh at the jokes they're making about you (and your parents, and your parents parents, who were indisputably shat on.) They don't want to hang out with you because they can't relax around you. You're not going to get promoted unless the word comes from so far up you're going to get resented for it, and
0) it's just another burden to constantly be explaining how and why you're miserable to people, even (especially) the ones who consider it self-improvement to listen to you.
The temptation is just to coon for people, say what they want you to say and do what they want you to do, and just silently hate them and hate yourself.
> But it would make life a lot easier if we just sorted out these issues at the source, with two people, explaining what hurts and why to someone.
This is problematic thinking. For example, black people are 15% of the US population. It isn't one-on-one, it's one-on-five-and-a-half at best. And really, if you're a middle class professional (let's say programmer) where there's a lower proportion of black people that would be indicated by relative populations, it's one-on-a-small-army-20%-of-them-heavily-redpilled-and-angry.
I prefer to leave it to the twitter mob, although some of their positions are crazy, and it being twitter the people who are going to be the most vocal are going to have severe personality disorders (usually borderline.) It's still nice sometimes to have them deflect the belligerent white dude from you.
I once had a Black intern come back to his desk and I could see he was unhappy, which was far from his norm. I asked him what was up and there was this long moment of consideration, clearly deciding whether it was worth even explaining it to a white guy.
It turned out he'd left his badge at his desk and got trapped in the elevator lobby, something many people did going to and from the bathroom. When asking to be let in, a white guy gave him the third degree about who he was and whether he really belonged there. Nothing like that ever happened to me, even though my intern was a sharp dresser and I looked one notch up from a hobo.
After talking with my boss, I wrote this up for HR. At the intern's request, we never even named the interrogator. I explained that it was surely an unconscious bias incident and that I thought they'd want to keep track of things like that. In short order I get an email back from an HR lawyer denying, deflecting, defending. They did jack shit. So I also wrote the Black ERG heads. They jumped on it and raised it up to the level of the CEO, which I was very grateful for. It ended up being a reasonably positive experience for the intern on net; he felt heard and respected.
But it has always stuck with me how instantly this was dismissed by the normal power structure. They did not want to hear it, and no amount of me explaining "what hurts and why" would have made a lick of difference. And that was to a (white) manager with the backing of his (white) manager. I totally get why people targeted with this stuff just keep their heads down most of the time.
Your misunderstanding was believing HR is there to solve human interaction problems in the company. HR is there first and foremost to protect the company. In the case of legal, that’s even more the case.
But good on your for speaking up and trying to make the situation better. But I also believe your intern was smart to ask not to name the interlocutor. That would have only made enemies, and probably made things harder on him.
My take is that HR's first goal is to protect HR, and their second to protect the powerful people in the company. Protecting the actual company is low down on the list.
One book you might read here is, Bancroft's "Why Does He Do That? Inside the Minds of Angry and Controlling Men". It's written by a therapist who mainly dealt with men in court-mandated therapy programs related to domestic abuse. Few of the men ever saw themselves as bad actors. There was always a reason they were justified in their abuse. He goes into great detail examining how abuse worked well for them.
I also think you misunderstand the systemic nature of things like misogyny and racism. You are effectively saying it's the job of women to fix sexists. Putting the burden there acts to support sexism. That's true anywhere, but it's especially true when we're talking about academia. Look at that UMich CS professor: he had many opportunities to understand his behavior was wrong. He surely heard it from women. He certainly heard it in trainings; "don't grope the students" is something every professor knows by now. Ignorance is not the problem, and suggesting that women with little power should educate men who can ruin their careers only helps abusive men.
Ignorance can be the problem in specific cases, of course. But even there, individuals are responsible for their own behavior. If men would like to not be sexist, they should study the topic. For the HN crowd, I might suggest Manne's "Down Girl: The Logic of Misogyny" and the follow-on book "Entitled". Both are sharp, readable, and very analytical looks at the topic.
Assuming you followed the same Wikipedia link I did, it would seam you are guilty of cherry picking. Let's explore this mistake together:
> Let me tell you about my trouble with girls. Three things happen when they are in the lab: you fall in love with them, they fall in love with you, and when you criticise them they cry. Perhaps we should make separate labs for boys and girls?
So at a first glance, it seems to be as you say. That would indeed be disgusting. Wait a minute though. In your haste, it seems you failed to read the words that preceded:
> It's strange that such a chauvinist monster like me has been asked to speak to women scientists.
…as well as the words that followed:
> Now, seriously, I'm impressed by the economic development of Korea. And women scientists played, without a doubt, an important role in it. Science needs women, and you should do science, despite all the obstacles, and despite monsters like me.
So first, he tells his audience to take the words that will follow with a grain of salt: "Hey, I'm a monster, don't be surprised if I say monstrous things!". Then he says the thing (with less than ideal words, he could have said "me" instead of using the generic "you"). And finally he explicitly signals that the joke is over ("seriously"), and go on encouraging women to do science, and fight the very misogyny he just incarnated in his joke.
Did he actually used rank sexist stereotypes to suggest that women should be pushed out of men's labs? Of course not, and you know this.
---
Now let's stop the cherry picking, and acknowledge that we have both false positives (people getting fired over misplaced outrage), and false negatives (people not getting prosecuted for serious offences). While I understand the need for getting fewer false negatives (rape prosecution rates for instance are appallingly low), the solution is not to move the cursor all the way to hair trigger sensitivity: you'd just end up with far too many false positives, and not enough attention left to solve the real issues.
Even taking it as entirely sincere and well meant, something I don't think women in science are obliged to do, his "solution" is apparently for women to just ignore the sexism, something that places the burden for men's sexism on women. That is also sexist. So again, this looks like a failure to me.
I therefore think your theory this is a false positive is incorrect. I think the most that you can claim is that the level of outrage is disproportionate to the particular offense. But that analysis ignores the extent to which sexism is utterly commonplace in a society that has oppressed women for centuries and is still working its way out of it. So you can argue that this wasn't perfectly fair to this one guy, but it's not disproportionate to the problem this guy was part of. And a) that rings of himpathy to me, b) that ignores the much, much greater degree of unfairness caused by sexism, and c) that focus itself helps protect sexism. If fairness is really what's motivating you, your time is better spent on the many early-career women continually being harmed and pushed out of the sciences, not one old white guy who is already back doing what he wants to.
That I can concede.
> If fairness is really what's motivating you, your time is better spent on the many early-career women continually being harmed and pushed out of the sciences, not one old white guy who is already back doing what he wants to.
Agreed. This cuts both ways, though. Attention directed at slandering the guy on Twitter is attention not devoted to actually help discriminated women.
My problem with this whole thing is that our attention is focused on the visible things, instead of the real things. Harassment to name one tends to happen quietly, subtly, often away from witnesses. There's also a good chance that sexist jokes in public speeches are a consequence of a sexist atmosphere more than they are a cause. While they should indeed be addressed, we should be wary of fixing the symptom (looking good on the internet or in front of journalists), without addressing the actual cause (toxic work environment).
I agree that his behavior was driven by the cultural artifacts of patriarchy, but the very best way to continue that culture is to have leaders who are comfortable with the those artifacts or are clueless about eliminating them.
I'm all for anything that fixes toxic work environments, of course. And there are many subtler approaches. But as the UMich situation shows, those approaches often fail. Existing systems are good at sweeping incidents under the rug. So I am also all for giant public reactions to failures that are so painful for the organizations involved that change actually happens.
As an example, consider Brock Turner's judge Aaron Persky. His prominent himpathy for a rapist made him an internationally known figure and cost him his judicial seat, the first CA judge to be recalled in 80 years. Was this fair? In one sense no, in that other judges were surely equally bad in going easy on rapists that they identified with. But on the other hand, he was part of an institution that had 170 years to get its act together on rape. So although I would have preferred that the CA legislative branch had fixed this problem at any time in the past, they hadn't. And you can bet that a lot of male judges who would have scoffed at, say, mandatory training have taken careful note of what happened to Persky.
If you think you can swing the creation of effective training programs or other more real interventions, definitely go for it. But if not, then I think you'll have to get comfortable with the big-failure-and-strong-reaction model. Because as a general rule, the people who have the power to drive systemic change are not doing much about America's endemic sexism and racism. Until that gets better, activists are going to keep using the powers they have, a big one of which is making big examples of visible problems.
> If you think you can swing the creation of effective training programs or other more real interventions
Actually, I'm totally for utterly destroying the reputation of an individual, or an institution. It just have to be done for the right reasons. Take for instance rape culture as was prominent 5 years ago in several French business schools (it's not over yet), that I've learned about just this week. I confess I seriously had no idea. So the problem had (still has) several facets. First there's the general mood, which is blatantly sexist and demeaning to female students. Then there are a shocking string of sexual assaults, as well as many rapes and rape attempts (like 10% of all female students being victims of attempted or actual rape during their stay at the school —possibly more, probably no less).
It would appear the only way this can change is external pressure. What happens needs to be publicly visible, so we can have a scandal and apply popular pressure. The problem is what exactly what we should be scandalised by, how much, what punishments we wish to exact. If we fire a student or a professor for making a sexist joke, there's going to be serious backlash, downplay, and objections —including from me, see this whole thread above.
Which is why I believe it is best to punish the worst offences first: rape, attempted rape, failure to properly punish those, sexual assault… in roughly that order. Few will seriously object to a public scandal involving a strong presumption of rape. Few will seriously object to dissolving student organisations that routinely (or even just once) set up the conditions for repeated sexual assaults (to give one example: invite the girls first, give them free unlimited strong drinks for 2-3 hour, then let the boys in, all worked up and horny).
Once you get the ball rolling, it's easier to crack down on the sexist jokes. React with disgust, make them uncool, not fun any more, passé. And give a serious slap on the wrist if such happens at a public event (like a temporary suspension). Just focus on the rapes first, if only to gather sympathy.
"It's strange that such a chauvinist monster like me has been asked to speak to women scientists. Let me tell you about my trouble with girls. Three things happen when they are in the lab: you fall in love with them, they fall in love with you, and when you criticise them they cry. Perhaps we should make separate labs for boys and girls? Now, seriously, I'm impressed by the economic development of Korea. And women scientists played, without a doubt, an important role in it. Science needs women, and you should do science, despite all the obstacles, and despite monsters like me."
That is not a joke.
"I did mean the part about having trouble with girls. It is true that I have fallen in love with people in the lab, and that people in the lab have fallen in love with me, and it's very disruptive to the science. It's terribly important that, in the lab, people are on a level playing field. And I found these emotional entanglements made life very difficult. I mean, I'm really, really sorry that I caused any offence – that's awful. I certainly didn't mean – I just meant to be honest, actually." [1]
He was given a chance to clarify, he doubled down. While I'm not saying a joke should cause people to be fired, but this is clearly more than a joke.
Sorry, honest question. Being from a different culture, I honestly fail to get this kind of outrage. For me it's just a description of humans being human...
Precisely. There's some sort of "if you have authority you must be better than me" feeling and "better than me" admits no flaws or human variety at all, apparently. Some folks want perfect Gods to follow and keep failing to make them from people made of meat.
Since feelings are only a biological impulse, and we humans frequently suppress our impulses in the form of self control, it's much easier to look for that oxytocin fix in a more appropriate arena.
The military has been doing this for ages, forbidding officers from fraternizing with enlisted. And plenty of civilians abusing positions of power have proven the wisdom of such a policy.
Huh?
Where there's a power imbalance, it's easier to ban a class of abuses than to figure out the small percentage of cases where both parties are genuinely afflicted by mutual biological imperatives.
How would you, an outside party, determine whether the superior was really [infatuated, in love, whatever], and not simply taking advantage of their situation? Or how would a judge determine that? Is it worth it to the company to work through that process every time it happens? What about the people who really were victimized, but the evidence is circumstantial and the court says otherwise? Isn't it easier to exclude the small pool of people that are subordinates and tell the supervisor to find romance anywhere else?
He made a terribly misogynistic "joke" and paid the consequences for it.
You'd think someone with a Nobel prize wouldn't be so clueless
Do you think women in the lab, when criticized, are more likely, less likely, or equally likely to cry?
Is the scientist’s comment mean spirited, or sexist, or just an observation?
I think it’s important to consider what the intent behind these jokes are. The Wikipedia article calls out statements from 29 other scientists that note how women (and men) were advanced within his lab and outside his lab.
So if this person thinks that the women he’s worked with cry when criticized, so we not want him to say that? It seems more like the goal should be to not stigmatize crying as that seems pretty reasonable for all genders, rather than to stigmatize talking about crying.
It does not make everyone uncomfortable, obviously. I thought we were not supposed to resort to stereotypes.
Really solid defense!
That being said misogyny requires intent, right. It means someone who hates or dislikes women. So if you make a statement that every time you criticize a woman, she cries and don’t have ill intent toward women, then that isn’t a sign of misogyny.
I don’t think women are any more likely to cry than men, but if there’s research that shows it so, is that misogynistic?
If you say “women are shorter than men” is that misogynistic?
I think it largely depends on intent as if someone is trying to demean women or does hate women, that’s a big difference. Saying women are shorter than men as part of some overall argument on inferiority is clearly misogynistic.
I've heard the most ridiculously hateful and racist things prefaced by "I'm not a racist but..."
Clearly in these people's own minds they aren't racist/misogynist, but when you are pushing plainly racist or misogynistic views it doesn't matter.
The statements are misogynistic. If you think you can convince your boss your intent wasn't to be bigoted so your bigoted comments aren't actually bigoted then be my guess. I am confident you are unlikely to succeed.
The definition of misogyny literally includes intent, perhaps you’re thinking of something other than misogyny.
Here’s the definition from Wikipedia [0]… “ Misogyny (/mɪˈsɒdʒɪni/) is the hatred of, contempt for, or prejudice against women or girls. It enforces sexism by punishing those who reject an inferior status for women and rewarding those who accept it.”
You also didn’t answer my question of what negative information you wouldn’t interpret as misogynistic. Is it possible to report anything negative based on biological sex or gender that you don’t interpret as misogynistic?
How can these differences be studied and discussed to learn more and overcome harm caused toward women?
If he was into men, and he said he didn't want men in the lab because he might fall in love with them, you can sort of see how absurd it is, and how unpleasant it is to be the object of romantic fantasy when you're just trying to get on with your job.
Ok, why would that not be the case? Laws? PC? Age difference? Love/biology doesn't care about social rules, and this has been shown time and again in every possible situation you could think of.
> you can sort of see how absurd it is
Huh, no I can't. What makes it different when you reverse the situation?
Because of professionalism. The root of term used for “professions” like law, medicine, engineering etc. is that one professes to a code of ethics. That code should overrule base desires.
We generally wouldn’t accept a doctor who views and treats patients primarily as an income stream despite greed being a near-universal human drive and we shouldn’t expect a professor to view subordinates as potential romantic partners. Acknowledging the drive exists isn’t a reason to condone it.
So, exactly what Hunt said in his speech.
I’m saying that claim is more an implication of the person saying it and their (lack of) professional ethics than an indictment of the subordinates. It’s very similar in my mind to the recent arguments about gender in military units
This is very clearly a case of the professor being unprofessional and exploitative of his position of power.
This is very clearly a professor acknowledging the problems that arise due to interindividual biology in work environments. Unlike PC supporters hiding the issue under the blanket of professionalism.
Somehow, most people manage to figure out that this kind of behavior isn't appropriate, and hide the issue under the blanket of being-a-decent-human-being.
I don't understand how dealing with sexual or romantic feelings is any different.
If someone is incapable of managing their feelings in a workplace then maybe they don't belong in one, and their colleagues should not be the ones who are punished for that.
I don't expect you to agree with me here.
Isn’t this the case with everything? I.e., if “everything is fine until it isn’t” it’s not really saying much of anything except he doesn’t think he can create a culture of professionalism within his lab. Does this “welp, we can’t do anything about our base desires” extend outside romantic relations? Would it be acceptable to claim “well, physical altercations are just going to happen because you know people will get mad at each other from time to time”?
I’m not hiding behind professionalism, I’m saying it’s reasonable to acknowledge those base desires while also expecting a higher standard of behavior.
Are you willing to punish people with jail time or worse for falling in love and adopting the behaviour that goes with it? This is the other extreme of your argument, and there are many places in the world where this is the social norm.
The PI can do everything he/she wants, love will happen and people will behave accordingly. The point is acknowledging that this is not a problem that arises at a single point in time allowing you to fire the offender, but that it happens along a continuum that will constantly decrease lab efficiency.
No, because one is a criminal offense and the other is a breach of ethics. From that standpoint, it was a bad analogy. But I would hold someone accountable for being unprofessional in the workplace. To be clear, I’m not saying to punish people for falling in love, I’m saying you can hold them accountable for letting it affect the workplace and creating an unprofessional environment.
>The PI can do everything he/she wants, love will happen and people will behave accordingly.
This is probably where we disagree. I think the PI holds some responsibility for setting the tone of the work culture. You may not be able to control people’s feelings but you can make it clear that certain actions are not going to be tolerated. That’s especially necessary in cases of fraternization. It’s the PI’s job to maintain the professional standards of the lab.
The point is, any human can be a romantic partner to any other. Therefore, his argument should be that no pair of humans should work together ever for risk of romantic entanglements.
Except it doesn't work that way, because we're all really used to the idea that in the workplace, you treat your colleagues as colleagues, not as fantasy-future-partners.
This isn't PC. It's just basic common sense, that he's lost his grip on, because he sees women first as romantic partners or sex objects or whatever, and second as scientists.
--Katherine Hepburn, in The African Queen
A few of the good words to live by
What we should avoid is cramming people into functionary roles and instruct them they must act as would a machine. No longer can they be compelling or compelled but only impelled as would be a gear turning in the insurmountable forces of the engine that drives.
And, exactly how is this NOT overcoming human nature?
>> should avoid is cramming people into functionary roles and instruct them they must act as would a machine
What in that quote, or its context, ever suggested cramming people into functionary or mechanical roles?
You have got to suppress your naive survival instinct (or remain massively ignorant) to climb on top of a rocket with thousands of tons of explosive material...
What about men and women who aren't romantically attracted to (respectively) women and men? Are gay men relegated to the women's lab? But only one per batch, lest they fall in love with each other? (And bisexual people can only be trusted to do science on their own.)
In general don't we expect "professionalism" to include a level of managing your emotions? And this person is basically saying "I can't deal, therefore certain other people must be kept away so I don't get distracted". As well as tarring women in general as not being able to deal, which is unfair. I sure wouldn't want to work with this guy after hearing him say that.
Fundamentally, he is saying that since he has trouble keeping his emotions in check around women, the solution is to not allow women in the lab rather than developing his own managerial or social skills.
It's understandable why some would question the wisdom of having this person responsible for developing the skills of female scientists.
Should he have been fired? I don't know. Certainly not if tis joke was is only "offence", but I suspect there is a bit more history to the situation.
Hard to not assume malice when you accuse someone for implying something they explicitly said they don't want to imply.
I’m curious if you think any of his statements are untrue?
What makes you so certain?
> women have no extra tendency to do this.
The data say otherwise:
https://www.thecut.com/2015/01/why-do-women-cry-more-than-me...
In general, I try to follow the HN guideline: “Please respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of what someone says, not a weaker one that's easier to criticize. Assume good faith.”
The missing context is that many women he worked with defended him. That he has consistently worked with, hired, supported, and promoted women throughout his career. That he has done far more to benefit women in science and humanity generally than the whining Twitterati who denounced him ever will.
The balance of the problem here isn't this professor, who otherwise spent a large part of his own career helping many women (many of who defended him after his speech) with their own scientific careers. Instead the much more insidious problem is a hysterical social tendency of people with influence in their support for an increasingly dominant social norm then mobbing together under said social banners to destroy entire careers and lives at even minuscule transgressions of their ideas of correct thinking.
The point of these attacks often isn't even about genuine justice for marginalized people. Instead it's about establishing dominance while virtue signalling as aggressively and righteously as possible.
Second, amplification plays a part. A story with "two sides" (such as the joke one) will draw far more public attention than another with only one side, just because there will be more debate and people using it to advance their agendas. In this case, it includes "PC Twitter" but also all of the people who scream "freedom of speech" whenever someone is criticized for saying something dumb or inappropriate.
One could ask - why is it that petty theft can land some people behind bars for years, while wealthy people committing tax fraud only get fined, or at most a couple of months in a cushy white-collar crime facility? Well - for one, the former crime is much easier to prove, especially if you're caught red-handed. The latter crime tends to be incredibly complex, and will cost a ton of resources to prosecute.
I guess the same goes for your questions. Professors incriminating themselves on twitter or youtube - easy as pie.
Collusion rings with respectable professors, that probably use students for dirty work and plausible deniability, and resources enough to fight their employer in the courts: hard fight
I seriously doubt that exactly what someone has done is the major factor. People in weak positions can easily lose them over the tiniest of things; people in strong positions can get away with murder!
First you implicitly assert that tenure effects the cause of emergent moonshots. How much evidence do we have to the contrary? Cursory research shows the modern application in the US dating to the vague "19th century" not a long timeframe. Tenure itself appears to have emerged in the same timeframe. The modern US application of tenure (secondary) was put in place in 1940.
I'll grant you that we have seen a good deal of progress, but I don't know that you could make a robust argument that without tenure, that progress would be absent. I would assert that it falls into inconclusivity, and that to form an argument would require speculation and conjecture. All things are not made equal, and so finding a suitable control group to compare against would be impossible.
We can look at history, though, and see that there was a plenitude of highly driven scientists publishing and advancing understanding prior to the advent of tenure. But to say that we can transpose that to the contemporary model itself is a conjecture.
Simply, we do not know, and can not know.
As to the priorities of academia, and tenured individuals, and the metrics that institutions use to enlighten themselves on the performance of individuals we seem to have come upon a system of perverse incentives. That is exactly everything, to me, it seems we had ought to avoid. Tenured academics can obviously be terminated, but not in frivolous contexts. They are expected to hold some degree of real responsibility. What tenure grants is their freedom of opinion, and the right to fail in their pursuit. As we know, science is the art of failing upwards in a controlled direction.
"In all lines of academic investigation it is of the utmost importance that the investigator should be absolutely free to follow the indications of truth wherever they may lead. Whatever may be the limitations which trammel inquiry elsewhere we believe the great state University of Wisconsin should ever encourage that continual and fearless sifting and winnowing by which alone the truth can be found." --Theodore Herfurth, 1894
But the cutthroat competition, the model of "publish or perish" elimination, the perverted demand for conclusivity all stand to imperil the actual aims of science. This is all somewhat incentivized by the tenure system, by personal interest, and by the implicit obligation to "realized" progress - except this is of course not real progress. It isn't as concrete as the fundamentals, the traces are laid much finer these days and replication of research appears more often infrequent, while the quality of publications is increasingly called into question and an economy of debauchery contaminates data for capital and personal gain. And thus the bastion of humanity is corroded while evermore maintaining its authority outward. A real hazard if you ask me.
I believe it all needs reform and serious reflection to build it back better.
*Or some other work of art; I can't remember the original exactly.
I had a professor in a chemistry lab that was proud of the amount of complaints he received against him.
He literally threw the two ring binder it at me while I was in his office. It must have been a hundred pages. He kept it on the wall like a trophy.
I talked to a Counselor at the school, and before I could complete my sentance, he said Dr. Berzergian? (I don't remember the exact spelling of his name.). The Conselor said he, and the Dr., almost got into fisticuffs over his attitude. He told me to take the course at another college.
I realized later all his "problem" students were young males.
Yes--I truly believe this was his twisted way of hitting on people.
A few years later, I was in a bar in San Francisco talking about this professor whom really gave me a bad time. By chance, he knew of the guy, and told me about him.
This was in the nineties, but oh boy if he acted this way today, and I stole that stack of complaints---well who knows?
This professor caused students to change majors, and even drop out.
Removing tenure would completely trash western science and in practice yield total scientific leadership to eastern powers, who still have old style academic systems with strong tenure positions and less concern for academic mistreatment and "wokeness".
> we already agreed to make tenure an excuse for doing bad stuff
Re-read my above comment. Never said that. I said removing tenure entirely is a very bad idea for the health of western science.
Yeah, there are bad teachers and there's this.
Why this kinds of abuse is tolerated is anyone's guess. But school and college management are usually too coward to deal with those issues.