Why I’m Leaving the University
josephhmanson.com
josephhmanson.com
A lot of people do this, they avoid getting political at all and just do their jobs as professors, often they do a great job and while they might want to express their opinions it's just no use when it could immediately be classified as wrong-think, not taken seriously at all except for reasoning on ostracization strategies. It's fine to stay, we're still far from definite proof of wokeness being required.
This defiance looks sad unfortunately, no offense meant to the author here as I respect his attitude. He mentions blogging being in his plans for the future, but even here in HN this post already looks like it's shadow banned and the blogpost has one like. Not all defiance is made equal, this author has a huge uphill battle and I wish him the best.
Noam Chomsky and other academics a few years ago published a declaration denouncing threats against academic freedom. Unlike this guy, they didn't make it into a "woke-left" vs "woke-right" issue and thus got signatories from "both" (all) sides.
It's that second part, predicting where crime will occur and selling that to the police, that's controversial. It doesn't take a lot of imagination to see where this is going.
I'm not a woke type, but that is some horrible stuff, and I'm not surprised he got pushback for this.
Note that I don't agree with many points of the article or the many bad uses of that technology, but for a second, let's imagine you are in charge of organizing and scheduling police patrol routes. Remember you are trying your optimistically best, because you want to truly prevent crime, and the simulation is good and provides meaninful information. Wouldn't that information be useful to you? Would you at least consider it?
Otherwise, what other information would you use to plan police patrols? Statistics probably, but how reliable or updated could they be? Would statistics give the information you are looking for?
I have no idea what the optimal way to plan police patrols is, but algorithms predicting crime used to guide patrol planning? That's just dystopian.
And I wouldn't mind. I've been stopped so many times I can't even remember. If I live in high crime area, I'd want the police to patrol often. Wouldn't you?
And high crime areas are already known by police. But it could be interesting to have a model to predict when (other than where) crime will happen. This might optimize the available resources.
Isn't this something the Sociology department should be running with? At the University I attended, the Anthropology department concerned itself with the study of human evolution and the study of modern primates. Is this not universal? Plus, at a university as big as UCLA you'd think they'd have a Criminology department that would work in conjunction with the Sociology department in creating such a model - ensuring it's been vetted and any unintentional biases have been scrubbed.
As it is, it's being presented as "one guy" created this model, sold it to the police department, and now faces backlash. I wouldn't expect someone so tone deaf to be a professor at such a prestigious university. Maybe we don't have the full story, but as presented this is pretty bad.
https://peer.asee.org/impacts-of-governmental-policy-actions...
This does discuss the impact of essentially removing tenure, but the impact is also intertwined with budget cuts enacted around the same time. As a side comment, the good faculty that I know would absolutely favor a tenured job over a non-tenured.
As a minority, this is the part of the “woke” university system that I find most appalling. When universities run by overwhelmingly white faculties get involved in areas like cultural studies, they end up projecting white liberal values onto minority groups.
Who is more likely to get hired at UCLA? A person of Hispanic background who is identifies as “Latinx” and writes about the importance of abortion for first generation immigrants, or someone who like 65% of first generation Hispanic immigrants, opposes abortion for reasons that are deeply intertwined with their culture?
Or to use another example, they have almost uniformly adopted the consideration of race in admissions and hiring decisions, even though the majority of every minority group opposes that practice: https://www.insidehighered.com/admissions/article/2022/05/02... https://www.pewresearch.org/social-trends/2019/05/08/america...
These are people who talk about “white supremacy” constantly, but don’t realize that they themselves are exercising white supremacy by taking such strong positions on race and culture issues. They engaged in Microsoft-style “embrace and extinguish” co-opting if minority culture and political movements.
Fixed link, just had to remove the semicolon: https://www.insidehighered.com/admissions/article/2022/05/02...
I don't know, I think your frustration may be a little misplaced. This recent tide in American culture of being on tippy-toes (limited as it may be to the liberals and closed circles in academia), I don't find it appalling, I find it... silly, if not admirable, because I understand it's coming from a good place. Imagine you're talking to a little Latina girl, you wouldn't skip a beat if you had to say something like "And these latinos, they did x"? We're in the midst of working through some tough problems in our society, being encouraging to a little girl is not a thing I'd admonish someone for. The worst that happens when someone says Latinx is they might looks silly, a reasonable trade I'd say given the stakes.
> Or to use another example, they have almost uniformly adopted the consideration of race in admissions and hiring decisions, even though the majority of every minority group opposes that practice
I think you and I have been through this in the past, but: the jury is out on this one, folks of a certain race were systemically oppressed for generations and as a result they are at the bottom of the barrel in terms of house-ownership, savings, etc. To not make the slightest of effort to undo the actions of this extant government is a ludicrous idea. When I see an educated person argue against this, I see it as a mark on their morals.
> When I see an educated person argue against this, I see it as a mark on their morals.
You think the majority of minorities are either uneducated or morally flawed?
The ones who don't, IME, tend to at least sympathize with the point of view to some degree.
The question below is much closer to the what Rayiner mentioned "consideration of race in admissions and hiring decisions.
https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2019/02/25/most-americ...
Indeed, the term was coined by JFK to mean the exact opposite context of race-conscious policies. Executive Order 10925 requires government contractors to “take affirmative action to ensure that applicants are employed and that employees are treated during employment without regard to their race, creed, color, or national origin.”
The majority of minorities oppose explicit consideration of race both for college admissions (https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2019/02/25/most-americ...) and hiring (https://www.pewresearch.org/social-trends/2019/05/08/america...).
Both practices have become common in academia because it’s run by white liberals, who do like those policies.
Also note that California’s Prop 16, which would have allowed racial discrimination in public sector hiring, was defeated in every single majority Hispanic county.
You’re missing the point. I’m not talking about white people being helpful or “encouraging.” I’m talking about white people claiming the power to decide what is good for minorities and who gets to define the identity of those minorities and how they relate to society as a whole? To use a specific example: It’s not about whether calling Hispanics “Latinx” is a good idea or not. It’s about “who gets to decide what we call Hispanics?”
And on that front, university wokeness is not “coming from a good place.” “Latinx” happened because white liberals used their institutional power to adopt a label for Latinos that reflected the intersectional value system of liberal whites. They co-opted the power of the community to decide for themselves even the simple question of how they are identified.
Musa Al-Gharbi’s analysis hits the nail on the head: “White elites —who play an outsized role in defining racism in academia, the media, and the broader culture — instead seem to define ‘racism’ in ways that are congenial to their own preferences and priorities. Rather than actually dismantling white supremacy or meaningfully empowering people of color, efforts often seem to be oriented towards consolidating social and cultural capital in the hands of the ‘good’ whites.” (See: https://contexts.org/blog/who-gets-to-define-whats-racist/)
You see this on issue after issue: policing, gender norms, religion, etc.
> The worst that happens when someone says Latinx is they might looks silly, a reasonable trade I'd say given the stakes.
Wrong. When someone says Latinx, they are imposing white liberal notions of Latino identity on Latinos.
> I think you and I have been through this in the past, but: the jury is out on this one, folks of a certain race were systemically oppressed for generations and as a result they are at the bottom of the barrel in terms of house-ownership, savings, etc. To not make the slightest of effort to undo the actions of this extant government is a ludicrous idea.
Respectfully, who cares what you think? I’m not saying that to be glib, but to get to the fundamental question: who gets to decide what’s good for minorities?
Any effort to address the consequences of discrimination has trade offs. White liberals don’t have to live with the social and economic consequences of those policies. It’s completely indefensible to argue that white elites should be able to overrule the views of minorities themselves on those questions.
> When I see an educated person argue against this, I see it as a mark on their morals.
When I see a person argue in favor of white elites choosing how society should relate to a minority group—against the majority opinion of people in that minority group—I consider it a mark on their morals. Such people consider minorities as mere subjects on which to apply their own ideological notions, and that’s morally wrong.
Progressive white elites.
I'm only half joking, hear me out: support for same-sex marriage shot up from being a minority position to a majority position only recently in our lifetime: https://datawrapper.dwcdn.net/PyDKd/3/ Even Obama wouldn't give a straight answer on this early on in his presidency until Biden forced his hand on it. So there was a lot of debate, a lot of wrangling, I think it's even fair to say that the progressive hetero white elites were at the forefront and leading the charge on this issue, and they ended up convincing society that same-sex couples should have a right to marry and now this right is here to stay (well, maybe), with an overwhelming majority support from Americans. You and I both come from a place where same-sex marriage still isn't legal. There may be few lone progressive voices in Pakistan and Bangladesh that are going against the grain, and one hopes that overtime they succeed in making a dent and a readjustment of values is made in due time. If it was a question of values, the white elites had better values on that one. But application of values on the issue of languages being made gender-neutral is not as clear-cut an issue as same-sex marriage and the stakes are not as high, and frankly I'm not extremely resolute in the position I take of preferring gender-neutrality in everyday language.
I want to draw your attention to the paragraph above the one you pasted in which Musa Al-Gharbi says:
> [whites] neglect to actually listen to ordinary black or brown folk about what they find offensive, or what their racial priorities are.
You're a brown person like me. I don't know if you're still hanging out with brown people in America, but you probably know how incredibly pervasive racism against blacks and hispanics is in this crowd behind closed doors, hell half the lot of them are still clinging to their caste systems so no thank you, I rather prefer to not hear the racial priorities of brown people, I don't want that trojan horse snuck inside America.
While some ideas are still in incubation, like the one about gender-neutrality in languages, you are as right as I am at this point; I think our society hasn't settled on the issue. But wouldn't you agree that it shouldn't _just_ be the latinoes and latinas that get to decide on this issue because we're talking about gender-neutrality in American English, others get to have a say in this too because to some degree all immigrants are obliged to integrate to American values and customs.
I'm often right there with you when you decry loss of religion and community in American culture, and I put the rampant homelessness in Seattle and San Francisco (indeed some of the most liberal places) squarely on the feet of elite liberals and the housing policies they mainly get to control, so it's not like I'm totally succumbing the floor to progressive liberals and their every whim. But still I posit that western progressivism has a little bit of a leg up on the questions of values, they lead the way with the Enlightenment, there was great nuance in what they offered and they were open to listening to reasoned disagreement, they lead the way with interracial marriage, same-sex marriage, and while the jury is not out on gender-neutral language, I mostly like what they have to say.
> Any effort to address the consequences of discrimination has trade offs. White liberals don’t have to live with the social and economic consequences of those policies. It’s completely indefensible to argue that white elites should be able to overrule the views of minorities themselves on those questions.
I think we're conflating categories. Broadly speaking, the white academics I think are in the green and their motives are probably fine. White elites, for example in tech, are not on the same side as white academics on the more important and decisive issues like housing -- they are the ones screwing things up for everyone.
Complaining about race, queers, liberals, and “Woke”. No tech discussion here! Just your typical hatemonger, who perhaps identifies an actual issue or two and uses it to justify their broader bigotry, and who is perpetuated by losers who cling to his complaints in order to blame their own inadequacies on these boogiemen.
For example, how white academic elites have co-opted reform movements among Black and Hispanic people to advance radical approaches to police that those minorities oppose. Or how they have embraced race conscious admissions and hiring that minorities oppose. Or how they’re socializing young members of minority groups to see themselves as oppressed or to view American history in a negative light. You can’t sweep that under the rug and dismiss it as “bigotry.”