“Why I'm Giving Up Tenure at UCLA” | Hacker News Reader

“Why I'm Giving Up Tenure at UCLA”

commonsense.news

47 pointsjseliger42 comments

According to his letter, the professor is resigning as a protest of how one of his colleague in anthropology was treated. The colleague (Jeff Brantingham) developed a predictive policing system, turned it into a company (PredPol), and started selling it to police departments. Brantingham was widely critiqued for PredPol, including by many computer scientists and statisticians. You can find many critiques of PredPol in ACM journals.

Here are the alleged acts of "thought policing" mentioned in the article:

  1. Graduate students signed a letter critiquing his work and calling for the UCLA administration to investigate the ethics of the project

  2. The anthro department has various sections. The sociocultural anthropology section of the anthro department decided to not allow him to list courses under sociocultural anthro. He continued to teach the class under a different anthro section.

  3. The anthro department held a public panel discussion about the state of the field with regards to issues of race, and during that panel, his research and business were criticized

  4. The anthro department did not issue any press releases publicizing his work

  5. He stopped going to faculty meetings

Other allegations of "thought crimes" at UCLA anthro are sprinkled in, but are more just examples of people expressing views the author disagrees with, including:

  1. Someone in the department used the word "Latinx" at a panel. There is no claim that anyone was sanctioned, punished, or even criticized for using Latina or Latino.

  2. The department is no longer requiring GRE scores.

  3. Candidates for jobs and promotions must include a statement discussing one's contributions to diversity.

  4. Statements were issued by various deparments critiquing Israel's actions

Seems to me like someone just doesn't like having to defend their low-quality work.

Except these criticisms aren't limited to UCLA. US Universities have created an alternate reality of offenses and priorities not shared by our adversaries, our competitors and many of our friends around the world. As a result our students are graduating with impossible expectations that cannot be met, and they will be flattened by others less idealistic and 'virtuous' to paraphrase Machiavelli. Think I'm wrong, well then give these a listen:

https://www.hoover.org/research/glenn-show https://www.hoover.org/research/free-speech-archipelago

And predictive policing will become increasingly important as fewer people have any interest in a profession as slandered and scrutinized as police work.

Ding ding ding.

7 years old, citing an even older study, but this bears repeating, as this is not a new phenomenon, only more visible now (and therefore, I would argue, much less insidious):

The authors also submitted different test studies to different peer-review boards. The methodology was identical, and the variable was that the purported findings either went for, or against, the liberal worldview (for example, one found evidence of discrimination against minority groups, and another found evidence of "reverse discrimination" against straight white males). Despite equal methodological strengths, the studies that went against the liberal worldview were criticized and rejected, and those that went with it were not.

https://theweek.com/articles/441474/how-academias-liberal-bi...

I would be very interested if any of the HN readers here are either students at UCLA, or were within the last three or four years, to be able to comment on whether this depiction of the intellectual attitude there is overwrought or not.

For that matter, anyone who's been in a public university in the last three or four years, PERSONALLY (not just telling me what you've read about, I've read those articles as well), either as student or professor, I would be interested.

I was a UCLA student. But being in the math department really insulated me against many of those cultural wars. My fellow students and my professors preferred to chat about topology and algebra, not wokeness or blackness or social justice.

There are pro and anti-Israel groups on campus, and students from all backgrounds and ethnicities make up the social sciences programs. Much like a normal college campus.

There is no anti-Jewish bias as an academic establishment from my perception

Quite the opposite. Many people feel there is a pro-Jewish bias. Universities openly limit the number of Asian students in the name of diversity, but when a school is around 40% Jewish, there doesn’t seem to be a problem. Many have a problem with that, hence the lawsuits.

In the introduction, is the "leopard" stuff related to the Adrian Bott quote: “‘I never thought leopards would eat MY face,’ sobs woman who voted for the Leopards Eating People’s Faces Party.”?

If so, either I am reading this incorrectly or the author of the introduction is using it in a new (to me) way. The phrase originally, as I understand it, refers to a result of some poorly thought through action committed by the 'victim' of the 'face eating'.

In this context it would imply that the coworkers in the cubicles did something stupid and are now facing the consequences of their own stupid actions.

I highly doubt this is what the author meant to convey, so I can't help but think I'm mistaken in how I read it. Is there an older/different version of the leopard-face-eating that I'm missing?

Have you ever heard the one about the missionary and the tiger?

> Also typical of elite U.S. universities, UCLA is awash in Jew-hatred thinly disguised as anti-Zionism. [...] More recently, the Asian-American Studies Department posted to its website a statement accusing Israel of settler colonialism, racial apartheid, and so on.

> I find myself thinking a lot lately about the deficit of imagination among people who consider themselves savvy and sophisticated.

Indeed.

I was expecting the crux of the issue to be over some indefensible action, but not something as horrid as marketing predictive urban crime software to city police.

I don't expect everyone to share the same moral values that I do, but if Professor Manson does not grasp the reason that so many people are horrified by such software and continues to blame it on "Woke" culture - I think it's better off that he doesn't teach any more students.

After all, we as a society have had decades of books, thought pieces and popular movies about exactly why this kind of thing is monstrous and inhumane.

Yeah, the intro went from "And let’s say you watch as a colleague, previously held up as a paragon of those values, is ostracized and smeared for a thought crime that was not considered a thought crime until about five minutes ago. Maybe he made a bad joke. Or maybe he used the phrase “guys” instead of folks. Or Hispanic instead of Latinx."

Not really what this is about.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PredPol

PredPol is legitimately pretty fucked up. I agree with your assessment that this isn't an issue of "Woke" culture. This is just a guy peddling pseudoscience with the trappings of academia. I would expect any rationalist to reject this on the simple basis that it does not work.

I’m biased, so I would give the most weight to what the computer science department says.

Predictive policing absolutely does work in some aspects. The opposite of predictive policing is to have all beat cops equidistant from each other in their jurisdiction. This is clearly wrong. The next step is to have cops near population centers, then around areas where there have been more reports, requests, etc. After that you move to time to day. Where you place cops during the day vs night is clearly different. Shops close, bars open. Places where young adults vs seniors gather will clearly have different coverage. Pretty much every study in the subject shows people age out of crime. This is used as supporting evidence against lifetime sentences and geriatric incarceration.

I have to assume only the most naive software will have an algorithm that uses secondary indicators / simplest predictive techniques would get such attention. For example “black neighborhoods” (that happen to be poor, with no other stats other than other departments say they have issues with black neighborhoods) and self fulfilling prophecies (we put most cops at location X and what a surprise, that location had the most arrests, w/o looking at the arrests themselves)

Also, making a big stink "giving up tenure" after decades of teaching there to become a professor emeritus who's receiving a full pension and launching your IDW blog seems like a good hustle.

I had the same experience... I ended up wanting to make sure my locale isn't using this software, and not sympathizing at all with this professor.

I think the problem here it is not obvious, on the surface, that predictive urban crime software is horrid and inhumane. Only after digging deeper and perhaps reading the books and popular movies you mention does it become apparent. You can't simply say, if it is not obvious to this person, then they are unfit for teaching. The "obvious" parts need to be spelled out in detail.

I should have worded my intention more clearly. I don't mean to say anyone unaware of this sentiment is unfit to teach, rather that someone working in cultural anthropology for as long as he has is unfit to teach if he didn't even take the time to uncover this point of contention before blaming it on the "Woke" crowd.

“Horrified” “monstrous” “inhumane”

The language the left uses to describe anything they disagree with is shrill and argumentative. Very tired of it.

Also crime prediction software isn’t making any alarm bells go off for me, especially if it is effective at reducing the murders and gun violence that happens all the time in my city.

> Also crime prediction software isn’t making any alarm bells go off for me

Do you see any similarities with redlining? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Redlining

Considering the criticism here is that it's racist, isn't it odd that black Americans want increased police presence in their communities when compared to whites?

> The share of Black adults who say police spending in their area should be decreased has fallen 19 percentage points since last year (from 42% to 23%), including a 13-point decline in the share who say funding should be decreased a lot (from 22% to 9%). The share of White and Hispanic adults who say funding for local police should be decreased also declined over this period, but not as much.

https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2021/10/26/growing-sha...

You avoided my question.

Moreover I don't believe they're asking for software to make this decision for them. Rather, I would think they want to be able to decide how much police presence they get. Just because I'm fine with X outcome in the present, that doesn't imply I am fine with arbitrary software that happens to lead to X outcome in the present.

If some algorithm says crime is more likely to happen in neighborhoods ABC and XYZ, and therefore put more police there, doesn't seem like a problem. I would prefer more police everywhere given the crime rates. But I'm someone who likes to be safe, YMMV

> If some algorithm says crime is more likely to happen in neighborhoods ABC and XYZ, and therefore put more police there, doesn't seem like a problem.

Again, I must ask: do you see any similarities to redlining?

What exactly does this have to do with crime prediction software? Or do you just assume that the vauge concept of increased police presence expands to crime prediction software in their minds?

"The left" is far from the only section of society that criticizes this issue. It's been pretty universally panned by all corners of society - save for those on the far, far right obsessed with an imaginative idea of social purity that can somehow be enforced by a hard line drawn in the sand.

Ah yes - anyone who disagrees with you is "far, far right". Mm hmm

It has nothing to do with anyone's disagreement with anyone and everything to do with the fact that predictive criminology was the core "science" behind the entire Nazi movement.

If you want to defend the core of Nazi beliefs for use as a modern technology, you should expect some societal pushback don't you think?

Straight to calling people nazis! This must be parody

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Godwin%27s_law

My god, they didn't call you, or anyone, a Nazi. They stated a fact regarding Nazi's relationship to predictive policing.

The fact that you read that and somehow viewed it as being called a Nazi is something that might deserve some self-reflection.

Things got so bad in 1930s Germany that Hitler justified the killing of lawbreakers, Jews, Gypsies and other groups with an idea that they had a criminal biology. They believed that their hereditary factors could predict criminology. Of course there was no truth to that, but Nazi germany ate it up anyway.

Kinda sounds familiar, huh.

I did not call you a Nazi, I informed you that you are defending someone who championed something synonymous with Nazis and thus he should expect resistance.

And for the record, Godwin's law only applies when you are not literally defending Nazi beliefs.

> defending someone who championed something synonymous with Nazis

It’s probably a good time to note on here that the professor in his byline characterizes himself as an “unabashed Zionist”. Which I read to mean is likely Jewish and therefore likely quite familiar with the Nazis and able to determine dangerous ideas that may have been attributed to that regime. Also statistically at 62 years old probably knows direct victims of the Nazis, likely some from his own family. He also conveyed what he perceives to be anti-Semitic behavior on campus being a factor in his retirement.

So speaking for myself only on here, I am going to hold off on creating associations with this professor and give him the benefit of the doubt on this topic.

I don't want this to devolve into political posturing nonsense, but an absolutely huge majority of the alt-right that rail on and on about "woke" politics refer to themselves as "Zionists", call any support of Muslims and/or criticism of Israel "anti-semitic" and are not Jewish.

Making that assumption about him because he calls himself a Zionist is absolutely not a sound leap in logic.

Also, from a cursory look at his publicly available family history, his line has been in the US for at least 200+ years, so I would very seriously doubt anything you assumed was true.

Lastly, someone's heritage has very little bearing on their words and actions. While it may be worth considering when things are ambiguous, it doesn't really apply to a situation like this at all.

You are certainly entitled to your opinion. I just have a different one.

I provided a reasoned conclusion and spelled out the facts that brought me to that conclusion. There's no opinion involved.

If you say so…

> More recently, the Asian-American Studies Department posted to its website a statement accusing Israel of settler colonialism, racial apartheid, and so on.

So they're accusing Israel of the same thing multiple UN resolutions have condemned Israel for - its occupation of Palestine's West Bank, its colonial settlements etc. Manson (appropriate name) is who is on the fringe of world opinion, not those opposing Israel's racial apartheid, and the US taxpayer's financing of Israel's racial apartheid.

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