A professor’s resignation highlights pressures within academia to conform
economist.com
economist.com
Boghossian is well known for his involvement in the "Grievance Studies Hoax", in which bogus papers (like a "dog park" study that claimed field researchers monitored the sexual habits of dogs in dog parks for 1000 hours) were ostensibly accepted for publication, Sokal-style.
The Hoaxers were incredibly deceptive in their presentation of what they accomplished. They wrote up lurid descriptions of insane papers, but didn't talk about how those papers were often rejected, and, when they were accepted, that acceptance was often in vanity journals. When they got papers accepted in real (albeit low-impact) journals, they weren't the ludicrous papers they'd written about. To boot, they faked field data, and coasted off the public's lack of understanding of the difference between refereeing papers and replicating them. One of their 7 accepted papers was published in "The Journal of Poetry Therapy", which isn't even an academic journal. Among their "in play" papers at the end of the hoax were several "reject-and-resubmits", which is journalese for "nice try but no", not journalese for "make a couple edits and we'll run it".
What makes me especially wary about all of this is that there's a playbook to follow, pivoting out of non-remunerative nth-tier academic positions (Boghossian was an assistant professor of philosophy at PSU) into social media stardom. We can probably come up with more than one example.
My wife is a professor. At her university, there is a contingent of people who insist up and down that they are simply fighting for free expression in the classroom. What they actually do is receive training from broader institutions on precisely where their writing is protected, deliberately enroll in courses taught by black, gay, and trans professors, and write hate speech in these channels. When they fail the course (because they aren't actually doing the work and obviously don't care to learn the material), they claim that they are being punished for their beliefs.
There is an organized campaign to attack institutions and create a narrative of "I've been attacked for using gendered pronouns" or whatever.
1. Goad professors into retaliating.
2. File lawsuits alleging said retaliation.
3. Win the lawsuits.
4a. Add ammunition to the culture war where conservatives feel under threat by "elites" and reject higher education.
4b. Force universities to exercise greater administrative control over what material is taught and funded, eliminating topics that are vaguely controversial to conservatives.
unless the end-game is "make money", i don't see what the goal of 3 is
it seems like 4a and 4b might be tactics than a goal
Step 3 is important because then they get to say that an impartial judge agrees that they are being treated unfairly. Without this, the broader bureaucratic institutions won't be as likely to take their whining seriously.
This aligns with other behavior like the 1776 Project or Governor DeSantis floating ideological surveys of college faculty, which clearly exists to influence curricula to match what conservatives deem more valuable.
That's all supposition, though. Ultimately, my complaint about Boghossian is that he's not an honest interlocutor. Why should I trust him about anything? I believe, based on what I've read, that he's colored the truth on other matters of less import than this.
I haven't done so again, but I seem to remember reading one of them when they were published, and indeed, while a bit of a funny premise, the actual report seemed to actually be interesting and actually deserved publication (assuming the data wasn't faked obviously).
I seem to remember that the more outlandish-sounding papers were the ones that weren't published, and the ones that were published were the more reasonable ones, too.
On the other hand, your critique is good because it attacks the right group, despite being based on the racist notion of truth.
Ironically, my personal takeaway from the grievance studies thing was "it turns out that niche social science journals have higher standards than I'd have thought."
E.g., yes, the nerve bundle of this particular snail actually is a way to easily study some reaction mechanisms.
Sometimes careers were damaged or research derailed because of this mocking.
Utterly horrific, why did he apologize?
edit: ok, I found some explanations here https://bariweiss.substack.com/p/med-schools-are-now-denying... ; only makes the matter worse
I’m supportive of all the inclusive language stuff, we actually need more of this assertive “that is not appropriate” attitude out in the world beyond university campuses to push back against socially accepted sexism and racism. However the phrase “biological sex” must be defended, the fact we have two primary (I’m aware there are more) chromosomal types XX and XY and these drive huge swaths of human biology both sexual and otherwise is critically important. Medicine is rooted in our fundamental biology, including countless aspects affected by our genetics and basic sexual development, and denial of any of these things brings only ignorance and lower quality healthcare.
I’m still struggling to understand how this has gotten as far as the stories that article is telling. I just I don’t know how to express how furious and saddened the notion of people acting this way makes me.
Like, I would consider myself a woman, but not female.
I'm not really interested in debating this; in my mouth, it's descriptive linguistics and anthropology, not an ontological claim.
I do however agree that the obsession my fellow progressives have with terminology belies a deeper fecklessness. Ultimately, it's a form of procrastination that distracts from deeper cultural transformation.
I would that we evaluate every speaker by the measure of their empathy.
When I was a PhD student in philosophy, we called this the 'principle of charity', and, like climate change, I feel its progressive loss with a deep sense of dread.
An ability to put oneself in the shoes of a very-different other is the hallmark of a wise person, and wisdom is retreating faster than glaciers.
If you are adult and it's genetically possible for you to form oocytes (doesn't mean physiologically since you can be sterile), then by biological definition you are a woman.
edit: there's adj female which just means belonging to a girl/woman in humans
I don’t like being stuck with inadequate terminology and like unnecessary imprecision even more. As a society we have reached a point where the simplistic “male”/“man” and “female”/“woman” are now clearly inadequate on several fronts. Up till now it seemed as though each field of human endeavour using these terms was making up their own meanings as was appropriate for that field, and each field was being pushed back on (rightfully so) by progressive people trying to make things better. But what scares me is this recent shift to considering such words inappropriate in of themselves.
My fear and opposition here specifically stems from the actions people appear to be taking that are preventing the education of a group of trained professionals from containing information about a fundamental aspect of the biological functioning of a human being. I’m no more attached to the current paradigm of medicine using “male”/“man” and “female”/“woman” than I am to calling the t-shirt I’m wearing “navy blue” or “dark blue”.
Your point about empathy is very important, in my mind we need to have more empathy when dealing with fields like medicine where it’s going to be hardest to separate their work from biological foundations. I also think that if the terms in use currently are inadequate then just as we have seen the growth of the term “cis-gender” we may just need new terms of a similar nature for medical professionals to talk about these important biological details. If this is necessary then let’s get it done and end the distraction over a field that has much bigger problems to focus on.
If we educate a generation of doctors with an inadequate understanding of human biology, I fear for the future. It’s a hard enough profession without being taught less (not wrong, just less) because of medical educators being concerned about offending their students. The terms used to teach a medical student will have infinitely less impact on them than what lies in the actual practice of medicine. the feel of a patients ribs breaking while performing CPR, patients that die from bleeding out, children in palliative care slowly dying of cancer. I have had the pleasure of knowing a few good doctors and I know I could never do their job, I struggle to imagine the sorts of people that might raise these complaints as students having the kind of charitable and empathetic personality that makes a good doctor.
> > “Biological sex, sexual orientation, and gender are all constructs. These are all constructs that we have created.”
> In other words, some of the country’s top medical students are being taught that humans are not, like other mammals, a species comprising two sexes. The notion of sex, they are learning, is just a man-made creation.
When people say that biological sex is a construct, they're not saying that humans are actually sexless beings like angels and physical differences between men and women are just a lie made up by the patriarchy -- no one seriously believes such a thing. They're just saying that the way that we classify biological sex is based on our socially constructed ideas about gender. For example, children who are born with features of both sexes are often given surgery to make their bodies fit with the norm for one gender or the other so that they can grow up as a "normal" boy or girl. In other words, the sex someone is deemed to be is based on how we expect them to live in our society. Similarly, when trans people go through medical transition, some of their sex features change and others don't. Whether you view them as having changed their biological sex is a "is it hot in Athens" sort of question, and it's probably going to be affected by your social views on trans people. You might not view issues like this as sufficient to call biological sex a "construct," but you should be able to understand how someone might come to that view without believing outrage-driven fantasies about medical students thinking that sex is imaginary.
Across all movements and institutions, a small minority of radicals ruin it for the entire community. For some reason, Academia loves to act as if their radicals are not representative of the institution, while using the same guilt-by-association to criticize and often ostracize every other group that crosses them the wrong way.
The exasperation in the tone of the above poster, is IMO, fully justified. Alarmism is always looked at badly, but alarms exist for a reason. Sometimes things are that bad and an alarmist response is commensurate. I think it is one of those times. Ofc, like every other precursor to disaster, these alarmists will be ignored. Then in a few decades time, someone will say, "How did we not see it coming?", and a few of us will roll in graves rather vigorously.
> makes me very scared for the next some years when this comes to real life
Me too mate. Me too.
Can you name a time when big companies didn't have those problems? To me the problem seems to be related to being big, not SJW.
And if the law changes? Or the culture becomes hostile? This libertarian fantasy that you can just leave is nice, but not always possible.
There was a South Park about it over 20 years ago (you may remember Lemmywinks)
I don't know what to do about it, but at the personal level you can just ignore it.
But ignoring it gets you canceled.
that’s kind of the motto of the SJW, my interpretation of the parent is that they actually don’t have to do better, there are no consequences for ignoring such demands
(Lol and my comment was modded down as quickly as I could submit it, keep refreshing buddy you dont want to miss anything)
> Imagine all the people
> Living life in peace...
What do they even do? Why do you need multiple per department?
To employ their friends who graduated with a humanities degree but couldn't find work.
That makes sense that people would look to academia to learn about unfamiliar minority groups. But as a result, the discourse about and within those groups is heavily distorted by the intellectual homogeneity of academia. Because, of course, you can't get tenure as a professor of Islamic Studies at an Ivy League University espousing beliefs that virtually all Muslims worldwide hold.
Having strong views/beliefs that aren't aligned with the progressive agenda would pretty much keep you from any job at an Ivy league school no a days.
Enumerating is specifying one after the other; creating a list. The comment you're replying to is a list of things. If that isn't what you meant, you might reword your comment so others may address it as you would like.
enumerating the beliefs of tenured Islamic studies professors at Ivy league universities
If they are tenured Ivy league professors and have cartoon Muslim beliefs, then I win the argument…
What's ridiculous is asking for a thing, receiving that thing, then proceeding to lament the thing you asked for isn't what you wanted.
>I win the argument…
You win nothing.
Of course being a professor is different than being an imam. But the political climate in American universities—under which you have to take many of the beliefs of most of the world’s 1.8 billion Muslims as per se bigotry—means you get a lot of articles focused on how Americans are racist against Muslims and relatively little work delving into Islam itself on its own merits.
In the context of racial minorities, you see a huge distortion as well. The religiosity and social conservatism of Black people tends to be totally excluded from academic conversations about structural racism. Raj Chetty (a British Indian economist) has been doing studies showing that the two factors that most strongly affect upward mobility for Black kids is rates of single parenthood in the community as a whole, and levels of white racism. The latter is covered at length in academic treatments, but the former is virtually ignored.
These distortions exist with respect to other groups, but have less impact there because academia has far less impact. Harvard’s new lead chaplain is an atheist, but who care because academia has very little influence on the public discourse surrounding Christianity. Nobody looks to academia to explain what Irish Americans are thinking.
Lots of things which are "common sense" are not at all true.
What is different today is that one of the major political factions is absent. If your message is often anti-university and anti-education, your supporters will have a hard time maintaining credibility if they try to spread your message as students or employees of the university. At best, they can align with the student-as-such camp that claims that political and social issues have no place on campus. Because they have to remain silent, other factions appear stronger than they are.
>> I would like to call this man’s bluff: he was not fired or censured by the university. He found it uncomfy and left. His crusade to publish 20 fake papers to prove a point about what journals will accept shows a pre-existing contempt.
That's right, he never claimed he was fired - he quit. He does find it uncomfy and absolutely seems to have contempt for what "education" has become. That's not a bluff - you're trying to call him out on something, but there's nothing to call out. You're claim of what's really going on is pretty much what he said.
(Economics is rather noted for hostility to heterodoxy, though more typically enforced by right-establishment rather than left-opposition.)
If your point is that professional truth-seekers (what scientists and academics are supposed to be) avoid the Republican party in its current state, I'd say it should be pretty obvious why that is.
As someone who was a chemistry professor with great reviews for the majority of a decade, and left after being told by the dean of science that "it's not advantageous that you are a white scientist" and "you came from a well educated family right?" (I didn't). This came after years of increasing discomfort with the state of college education.
I wasn't and still am not a republican - I see myself much more comfortable as critical of the left. The political left in college environments is now super unhealthy since it's the vast majority of the professorate - to the point that ideas that can be associated with the right are simply wrong if not morally repugnant.
Do you agree that any disparity is evidence of racism, and that policies either increase disparity (and are racist) or decrease disparity (and therefore anti-racist)? That was the current discussion when I left the field. For example I'll pull from the nytimes discussion (not a right leaning news source) https://www.nytimes.com/2021/08/12/nyregion/covid-vaccine-bl... https://www.nytimes.com/2021/08/05/world/boston-mayor-janey-... Are new york vaccine mandates racist since they disproportionately effect BIPOC? This type of discussion was so far removed from science and so deeply held that anything other than full acceptance of that was career suicide.
At the college I worked at, the 80%+ of the faculty I worked at was female, 80%+ of the department heads were female, 80%+ of the deans were female, 80%+ of the VPs were female, the college president was female, and the majority of the students were female. Female was considered diverse in hiring and diversity was considered very important.
To your comment, I was trying to be a truth-seeker as a scientist and academic, and I left the academia because it stopped seeking truth in an honest way.
At the moment, in the US? Absolutely. Have you seen the kind of things that people on the right are saying? And not just some nutjobs (they always exist as part of any group), but their political leadership and political commentators. They have completely embraced lies as a point of policy.
That is of course a completely different issue from what's going on in American universities, and I'm not arguing that there's nothing wrong is wrong there. I'm just saying that this:
> it's not advantageous that you are a white scientist"
Is not a party line of the Democratic Party, it's not a traditionally left-wing position either. And excluding people for their skin colour is also not exactly a left-wing thing. Many, many people on the left will disagree with silencing professors for any reason, especially merely for being white.
> to the point that ideas that can be associated with the right are simply wrong if not morally repugnant.
It depends on what those ideas are. Racism? Yes, that is absolutely morally repugnant. Low taxes? Well, I think extreme economic inequality is harmful, but it's not something I'd call "morally repugnant".
> Do you agree that any disparity is evidence of racism
Obviously not. Though racism can obviously be an important cause of disparity, but it's one of many.
> and that policies either increase disparity (and are racist) or decrease disparity (and therefore anti-racist)?
If we're talking racial disparity, then knowingly enacting policies that increase that disparity would be racist. The policies themselves might be totally fine in a different context. Context matters a lot.
> Are new york vaccine mandates racist since they disproportionately effect BIPOC?
Not as long as vaccines are easily available to them. (What does "BIPOC" mean? I know PoC means people of colour.)
> Female was considered diverse in hiring and diversity was considered very important.
Not if 80% of the people are women. Then focusing on hiring more women is anti-diversity. Again, there's nothing left-wing about intentionally trying to exclude entire demographic groups, and I don't think trying to exclude men completely has ever been the party line of the Democratic Party, which is the specific claim I was addressing.
> To your comment, I was trying to be a truth-seeker as a scientist and academic, and I left the academia because it stopped seeking truth in an honest way.
And I applaud you for doing so. I'd probably have done the same in your situation. I'm just arguing that there's nothing traditionally left-wing about this. It's just archconservatism with the roles swapped.
I guess it's a form of extremism hijacking what were originally good ideas and taking them to unhealthy extremes. It's like the difference between real feminism that wants equality for men and women, versus the man-hating parody of feminism that wants to replace the patriarchy with an identical matriarchy and not actually solve anything (and I know those people exist, and they might well be a big part of the problem at your university).
BIPOC = Black, Indigenous, People of Color
Anyways, one final thought. What I presented above isn't a fringe and extremist thought on college campuses anymore. It's what has to be openly accepted as full truth. It's hard to communicate to people who aren't in the thick of it how crazy it has become. Admittedly, I'm in a more "progressive" city, but this is almost unbelievably pervasive at this point. The "good" liberals are often not aware the extent of how crazy this is and how much capture there is to this mindset in colleges.
If you have 1.5 minutes at 2x speed and are interested in some shock and awe around this discussion at harvard discussing the moral choses of whites, check out https://youtu.be/Ei-d83i5PNg?t=3433
Liberal faculty outnumber conservatives on average 10 to 1, and are openly hostile to them [1]. UC-Berkeley has an official requirement for job candidates to have specific plans on how to increase diversity [2], and won't hire anyone that won't champion diversity. But neither of that is purging Keynesians or making Christians denounce their faith, so you're safe in continuing to not pay attention.
[1] https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2017/02/study_liberalto...
[2] "eight different departments affiliated with the life sciences used a diversity rubric to weed out applicants for positions. This was the first step: In one example, of a pool of 894 candidates was narrowed down to 214 based solely on how convincing their plans to spread diversity were." - https://reason.com/2020/02/03/university-of-california-diver...
I can't defend all reactionaries, but there is no doubt that the logic of the idea behind inclusion is predicated on the very victim identity that an education is supposed to liberate students from. It's not intended to improve the lives of people in our respective nations, it's designed to subvert and dissolve our civilization and subordinate it to directed chaos, the same way it did to Cambodia, China, and Russia, among others. These countries did not have rules for denouncing faith before graduation, instead, people were "free" to visit churches that were watched by secret police, and they would be added to a list so that the bureaucracy could get back at them invisibly. Keynesians won't be purged because they are used to justify MMT, and so they are necessary to sustain the current narrative. They can be replaced with party members in the next purge anyway.
The mistake I think he made was believing the system he came out of still had any integrity or was rules based. The universities have been converted into a single party system of rule without accountability, and they have diminishingly little to do with education at all. This is what he didn't get, and what everyone tacitly acknowledges, and it appears he thought they still sent memos about when the rules were nullified.
I don't know if calling it a foreign-initiated conspiracy theory is going too far, but I'm sure China and friends are laughing at the slow wokeness-driven self-destruction of the West. It's sad to see for sure.
[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grievance_studies_affair
Major-specific classes (at least for engineering) didn’t have time for any sort of indoctrination and non-major classes were jokes that you put as little effort into as possible in order to focus on the major courses.
How much this applies to you pretty much relies on two things. 1. Where you went to school and 2. What your major was.
I went to an engineering focused school and in my major classes most if not all of the profs had a neutral POV on these kinds of issues, and the class content was pretty much only CS stuff.
Some non-major classes, particularly in the humanities like COM had this kind of focus where the prof/grad student had a liking to modern progressive topic and would bring them into the class one way or another. (Think sex vs gender, toxic masculinity etc in a COM class.) Generally speaking these would be filler classes taught by grad students/younger profs.
Outside in extra curricular like clubs and fraternities DNI stuff mostly comes up in the context of some activity the university wants you to do to show you're not racist or will engage in sexual assault. I got the vibe that it was more of a BS metric for insurance or marketing an not actually meant to do anything.
(There's a whole cottage industry of speakers who get paid way too much money for giving these trainings I should write a blog post about one day. ;)
I had friends who went to a small liberal arts college where this was much more common, both in class and culturally. The students there were less HR DNI type stuff and more the "woke" side of things. Most if not all people there are true believers.
Overall for students + faculty it's a cultural thing, where you go to school more or less determines the level and type of politics that come into your classes. For University admins it's an HR checkbox, similar to corporate diversity training. In more left leaning disciplines it's usually populated by true believers.
This of course all starts to break down at the language level itself. Complexity simply refuses to be wrangled.
When I hear the woke talk about "cultural appropriation", "colonialism","white privilege", etc., it all sounds very familiar. Only now cultural criticism turned into full-blown cultural indoctrination.
Regardless of where you are on the US political spectrum. Universities have been held strongly on one side of that spectrum for awhile now.
If that’s good news or bad depends on where you stand on said political spectrum.
I think objectively it’s bad for everyone when free inquiry is hobbled by dogma.
I think people should have the right to be wrong in academia. I can think of no safer place to be wrong - there are real consequences when you are wrong in practice (e.g. as a politician) compared to being wrong in theory (e.g. as a professor not really in charge of anything)
I can honestly say that when I went to college people were essentially apolitical. I don't remember anything you might view as a campus protest and the biggest fuss on the main mall were students arguing with a rather obnoxious Pentecostal preacher who showed up every year.
(in case you all aren't familiar with him: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brother_Jed )
The difference is whether you are just going to class or getting your news through articles filtered through social media and link aggregators.
An interesting experiment would be to compare English Department reading lists in the 1970's vs. now.
My bet is that you'd see quite a difference.
It's not that the College Marxist Club had it's meetings in the basement at any particular time, but that politicization and social movements of the day have been normalized into daily life.
I will stick to my guns in saying that there were 0 (zero) demonstrations of a political nature during my stay. For all I know, it was a low point in such activities (which likely gives me a short temper on the modern world). Frank Zappa played there every year though.
...hah, now that's an interesting angle I hadn't thought of. I went hunting for reading lists for the graduate students. A course on the '19th century English novel' has, wait for it, 7 female authors and 2 male. And one of the two men wrote 'Portrait of a Lady'. That's a pretty interesting way to shift the conversation.
Do you find yourself being just as concerned when the reading list is 7 male authors and 2 female authors? Or only in this direction?
If this counts as political, then boy howdy were curricula in the humanities political in the 1970s when there was basically zero time spent on the voices of women.
Not at all, it just stuck out at me while I was browsing through their program. Women represent barely a blip in the world of the 19th C. novel, you might as well teach military history as a series of female leaders. Novels of that era represent a core teaching (or should) in English departments, not an opportunity to boost underserved demographics. Save that for a specialty class.
I don't give a damn about fairness so much as teaching the truth, and the truth includes relative values of things.
And military history should involve the voices of women. There is more to the subject than just who marched where and who gave orders when.
> An alarming 25.5 percent of survey respondents said it would be appropriate to “create an obstruction, such that a campus speaker endorsing this idea could not address an audience.” This authoritarian view was held by about 19 percent of self-identifying liberals, 3 percent of moderates, and 3 percent of conservatives.
> Among students who self-identify as liberals, some 10 percent said they hear “disrespectful, inappropriate, or offensive comments” about foreign students at least several times a semester, 14 percent said they hear disparaging comments about Muslims, 20 percent said they hear such comments about African Americans, 20 percent said they hear such comments about Christians, 21 percent said they hear such comments about LGBTQ individuals, and 57 percent said they hear such comments about conservatives. Among moderates, 68 percent said that they hear “disrespectful, inappropriate, or offensive comments” about conservatives at least several times a semester.
> Roughly 92 percent of conservatives said they would be friends with a liberal, and just 3 percent said that they would not have a liberal friend. Among liberals, however, almost a quarter said they would not have a conservative friend.
https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2020/02/evidence-c...
> In Compromising Scholarship, a 2011 book by sociologist George Yancey, some 30% of sociologists acknowledged that they would be less likely to hire a job applicant if they knew he was a Republican. Yancey further discovered that 15% of political scientists and 24% of philosophy professors would discriminate against Republican job applicants, and at least 30% of professors in all disciplines surveyed would discriminate against members of the NRA.
> Other research suggests that liberal professors sometimes act on these biases. Stanley Rothman and Robert Lichter found in 2009's The Politically Correct University that socially conservative professors tend to work at lower-ranked institutions than their publication records would suggest. More recently, a 2016 study of elite law schools in the Harvard Journal of Law and Public Policy found that libertarian and conservative professors publish more than their peers, which suggests that right-leaning law professors must outshine liberals to reach the summits of their profession.
> These findings are especially striking given that other research shows it is more difficult for scholars to publish work that reflects conservative interests and perspectives. A 1985 study in the American Psychologist, for example, assessed the outcomes of research proposals submitted to human subject committees... The study found that the proposals on reverse discrimination were the hardest to get approved, often because their research designs were scrutinized more thoroughly. In some cases, though, the reviewers raised explicitly political concerns.
https://nationalaffairs.com/publications/detail/the-disappea...
Welcome to the desert.
What do you mean by this?
Edit: I don't want to answer the question below because then I'll get another -4 hit on the karma from the outraged crowd here.
Diversity is of course important, but not the primary goal of universities. Diversity is important because it serves the primary goal: combining inputs from all different perspectives, analysing then rationally, and making the results available to everybody. People who want to exclude people based on their race, gender, religion, cultural background or whatever should not be allowed to succeed at doing so, because that would hurt the university. But obviously this goes both ways: you can't tolerate racists who want to marginalise black students, but you also can't tolerate groups who want to push out people who don't toe their specific ideology.
In any case, it's certainly not true that HN is mostly right-wing; many people here support basic income, universal health care, equality of various kinds, etc. Diversity is supported by many, it just shouldn't be weaponised to exclude people, unless they are actively hurting others. There are of course many different viewpoints here, and there are absolutely people on the right, but if I'd have to guess, I'd say most here tend towards the libertarian left.
I've talked to a bunch of people and apparently this is everyone's experience. I recently started watching for the giggles, Fox News (oh my, which I would have never ever done it before) and surprisingly, lot of it makes sense for the first time ever. Some of it is still dubious but it's hilarious what's going on in the world at the moment.
What in this article do you disagree with?
Somehow reducing him and his decade of activity as a critical thinking professor as just "a troll" based on a half-failed publicity stunt seems a little drastic.
A bunch of my uncles and senior team members are Indians who went to grad school in the US. All of them found it to be an amazing, welcoming and energizing experience.
They have many stories of committing social faux-pas of levels that you'd imagine christians would crucify you for. Contrary to expectation, their mistakes were quickly forgotten after everyone had a hearty laugh.
The left loves to pretend that the US an utmost racist place that suddenly got better once the proto-woke took over. However, demographic changes of such levels do not happen overnight or over decades.
The people of the US have issues, but they are orders of magnitude more multicultural than most other nations, developed or otherwise. (Govt/Policy level bias is a whole nother issue, I'm talking more about the day-2-day)
Decades later, two points that I'd like to make are that 2) teaching people about the perspectives of others is important and valuable to the people being taught and 1) while privileged groups do exist not everyone that could be sloppily assigned to that group is in fact privileged (there are many people that have been and will be disadvantaged despite being born 'white').