MIT faculty adopts “Statement on Freedom of Expression and Academic Freedom”

I am not an American, but my own observation as a leftist of the situation there is that there's what I'd call the 'performative left' and the 'real/old school left' if you will with the second camp being mainly about economic issues, class solidarity, foreign policy, freedom of expression etc. (say Chomsky, Richard Wolf), but much smaller than the performative left, (student activists trying to deplatform etc.), which is the one the right loves because they give them so much material to work with.

That part of the right on the other hand claims to be pro free speech but ends up not behaving anything like it, aka Elon Musk.

It absolutely was a cornerstone value for American liberals in the past.

A documentary about the director of the ACLU, back before the ACLU abandoned it's principles, looks at how far the organization went to protect the speech of literal Nazis. The ACLU winning a Supreme Court case for their right to hold a public protest march was widely celebrated by those on the left.

>[The First] Amendment assures that even the most odious among us (with “odious” being the term that we apply to those we loathe, but who might view us as odious) the right to express themselves either orally, in writing, or by demonstrating or marching.

It was the freedom to march that caused a major flare-up back in the late 1970s, when members of the American Nazi Party, in uniform and bedecked with their decorative swastikas and stormtrooper boots, applied for a permit to march through the town of Skokie, Illinois...

To Glasser and the ACLU leadership, including David Goldberger, who headed the local Illinois chapter, freedom of speech is meaningless if it is not accorded across-the-board to all those along the ideological spectrum.

https://www.wgbh.org/news/commentary/2020/10/22/mighty-ira-a...

And currently it seems fairly clear.

I don't think most of the historical left should be equated with the modern left. To me it seems a different beast altogether. The modern left is mostly created or lead on by the upper classes, spreading divisiveness and authoritarianism in the ranks of the less fortunate, with the rather obvious goal to keep and expand power and control.

In my memory as a kid who grew up in the US south in the 80s, this was a cornerstone of the left. Maybe my perception was wrong back then, or maybe my memory of it is wrong, but that’s what I recall.

I suspect this is a pendulum. Maybe those who are in power devalue freedom of thought / expression and those who are out of power champion it. The incentives for such an effect are pretty clear.

Anyway, I tend to be libertarian (classical liberal) for this among other reasons. It’s not because it’s “the best” political philosophy, but rather because I dislike the holes in other philosophies more than the holes in this one.

I thought what you described is the perfect antidote to that argument, with “speech policing” at one end and “mob lynching” at the other, or even worse.

People will always get around speech rules by speaking in code. China has probably some of the richest history of speech suppression followed by very clever subversive speech. The most recent example being the use of empty white sheets of paper to get around censorship algorithms.

So the censors now must police coded speech as well, and this is where things get extremely dangerous. Because one can take great liberties in defining what contains encoded wrong speak. You already see this in the left's frequent accusation of something being a "dog whistle" for something else.

During the cultural revolution, people were persecuted by the metaphors supposedly hidden within their speech. A setting sun? That's code for the downfall of Mao, who was frequently compared to the sun.

> it boggles me that this is not a corner stone of the American Left

It is. Freedom of speech is not simple: When the powerful continually intimidate and harass the vulnerable into silence, the vulnerable do not have freedom of speech.

People like Musk advocate not freedom, but anarchy. Anarchy gives more power to the powerful, as protections of the vulnerable and their speech are removed. Look at Musk threatening people with online mobs, which are actively riled up and encouraged with these so-called votes, including calling people pedophiles.

Freedom of speech must be more than ten wolves and a sheep debating what's for dinner.

Well, popular opinion needs no protections.

Of course we disagree with our political opponents and feel that the policies they advocate are not optimal. It might be convenient to your politics if your opposition’s voice is dampened, but your opposition feels the same of your voice and does so for reasons no less sincere than your own.

That’s the fundamental bargain. You are neither obligated to hand anyone a megaphone, nor obligated to confiscate theirs.

Convenient that we're only doing that because "we have unpopular opinions". But did it ever occur to you that they're unpopular because we're not allowed to speak our minds fully and rationally convince others of our ideas' merits?

The megaphone analogy is limited in applicability. It only applies where the recipient never opted to hear the message, but it is forced upon them.

Free speech issues are about interfering with speech where there is a willing audience. Even in cases where someone is offended by a message, often it's not that they don't want to hear the message; it's that they don't want others to hear the message.

Universities are agency normalizing agents of government.

We’re not talking launching some professor from a cannon but doing as humans have done for years and updating colloquial language models. This is freaking out the establishment as it does and has, and of course the establishment labels it as anti-freedom to teach them anything, because of course it’s the establishment; it teaches us not the other way around!

MIT is like a rack of Twitter servers; we could unplug it and society will keep going because it’s not immutably reliant on society. Many thousands of workers are though and only “essential workers” have an obligation to output real results.

I think the university is trying to find a middle ground here: The university - as institution and administrative body - is acting as the entity that "gives free speech to them" here: They are permitting those arguments be made in public events, on flyers, posters, etc. Of course they can't force students to listen to that speech. So I'd imagine that calls to boycott certain classes still remain valid. However, what they do is forbidding people from blocking others from listening, e.g. by demanding that certain people don't speak at all, blocking entrances to lecture halls, etc. That seems like a reasonable approach to me.

More generally: I've seen the "free speech does not apply to private entities/free speech is no right to be listened to/free speech is not freedom from consequences" arguments online a lot - they seem to be the standard counter arguments of some groups - and I've always found them deeply problematic.

First of all, I think there are a lot of authoritarian states who would be more than happy to adopt the "public only" definition of free speech without any substantial loss of control: "Yes of course, dear dissident, you're perfectly in your legal rights to accuse me of human rights violations on your website. But I'm afraid, I won't be able to help you if the country's ISP makes a private decision to block your site, if your employer spontaneously exercises its right to fire you the next day and if a crowd of concerned private citizens with privately-owned baseball bats will gather in front of your house tonight. Consequences!"

Secondly, the arguments rely on a situation where most services that faciliate discussion in a society - i.e. the media sector - are provided by private companies and are not subject to democratic decision making. So basically they rely on a weak state. That's originally a right-libertarian vision of society and I don't think anyone who calls themselves "left" should be comfortable adopting that vision.

If this is the indeed the truth, then the trillions we currently invest in "reversing man made climate change" would be better invested in "preparing for the inevitable".

Even if powerful people rally for free speech in order to achieve an (maybe evil) political goal, THATS OBVIOUSLY BETTER THAN using censorship to achieve a (probably evil) political goal.

I find it unbelievable that this is such a hard concept to grasp.

If powerful people use free speech to spread nonsense, then just present your counter arguments, god damnit.

I know that it "takes more time to refute bullshit than to produce bullshit", sadly, that's just how it is. The bitcoin community has spent more than 12 years now to refute bullshit and people still fall for all the debunked FUD. This just means that we need a better tool to refute bullshit faster and more efficiently.

Wikipedia was a good first try, but of course since it succumbed to the woke mind virus, it is no longer viable.

There is a civilisation altering opportunity here to produce a new tool like it. I don't know how such a tool would look like.

Usually, I believe that undergrads are typically the source of protest and these sort of policies. These policies really just indicate whether the university will formalize student demands, but de jure doesn't really do much when you'll still have tenured faculty doing their own thing and students protesting regardless.

Additionally, I don't know if many students will share your convictions. Chicago has long had a free-speech policy, but even though they're probably the most academically serious/legitimate institution alongside Princeton and Caltech, I think their usnews ranking has done more for their applications than free speech.

Still a good thing, but I'd think it'd be more meaningful if MIT brought back stallman

https://www.thestar.com/entertainment/opinion/2022/12/21/sta...

My sense is that this MIT statement serves a similar purpose in that it panders to the sensibilities of parents paying the tuition bills. However, if their conviction is, in fact, sincere, I think there is one good way to demonstrate it --- officially sanction professors and students engaging in behavior contrary to the free expression of their peers. Has MIT ever done this? If not, I cannot think of this announcement as little more than an advertising stunt.

A few days ago Stanford published some guide on words you can't say like "American" and "grandfather", so it seems the universities are total opposites in their stances now.

I think any student or faculty member can invite a speaker. The policy is about when it’s acceptable for the university to step in and say that an event (or protest) can’t happen.

> If a single faculty member wishes to invite a speaker, does that give that speaker the right to talk in an official capacity?

I think that currently a speaking event can be canceled on the basis that the speaker promotes harmful ideas. The signatories want to remove this from the list of acceptable reasons for cancelling an event that someone wants to happen.

How familiar are you with the students and the faculty of MIT? Are the students even pressuring faculty enough on any given issue that we could characterize this statement from MIT as capitulation?

What's the difference here? Different, better-connected students? A campaign that better aligns with the broader zeitgeist in our society? Something administration _wanted_ to capitulate over?

Contrast this "capitulation" to activism to, say, UC's lengthy reluctance to capitulate to the grad student union's wage demands. Even more instructive: compare it to UC Davis' outright refusal to allow a handful of students to camp out on a grassy area in front of the dining hall on a Friday.

Student activists barely have sufficient solidarity and numbers to successfully demand something as universally desired as a higher wages. And they didn't have sufficient leverage to even complete a successful sit-in at Davis (and similar "occupy" groups got easily shut down at other universities).

Yet in your assessment, there are enough students in lock-step against free speech to terrify the admin into working against its own professed principles. How did that organizing prowess happen-- seemingly without any struggle-- in the latter case but not in the former cases? This doesn't pass the smell test IMO.

Alternative explanation: an administration vastly prefers less chance of unpredictable controversy over a dissident speaker, less chance of run-ins between dissident students and law enforcement, less chance of lawsuits over a prof's material, etc. It's not capitulating-- rather, the admin would naturally support any student move that limits the kind of speech that could potentially cause problems for the university.

If it were my first day fresh out of college admin boot camp, that's the first thing I would do to try to rise up the ranks. It's a no-brainer.

"Recommendation 5: The chair of the MIT faculty should explore how to develop a faculty-governed resource for the MIT community when contested matters of speech arise. "

The faculty-governed aspect seems to be a counterpoint to the administrators. Though in this proposal they clarify that this would just be a resource and wouldn't have "adjudicatory responsibilities".

Link to the full report and all their recommendations is here: https://facultygovernance.mit.edu/sites/default/files/report...

I've noticed similar behavior at my own university over the years. There are always several emails from the university president and the mental health office promising assistance when anything even slightly likely to matter to some of the student body happens anywhere in the world. IIRC some time ago they sent out an email to the entire student body about something scrawled on the wall of a bathroom stall.

Yet it took a lot of protesting and boycotting to get fair action taken back when Covid was just getting started (IIRC they tried to kick everyone out of the dorms without refunds and without enough time to arrange for alternative housing, which was especially bad given the large international student body and lack of clarity on student visa handling at the time). Similarly, the graduate student union has been gradually dialing up its activism just to get the university to pay enough to keep up with local cost of living with no acknowledgement from the university.

If the students and their parents pay the administrators' salaries, they are in charge. These clashes between students and faculty tend to be much more maintainable in countries with free public education, because the students aren't customers.

These freedoms always seem to extend just far enough to protect the person who offends, but never the reaction to the offense. I guess being offended is too offensive?

If just saying “let’s kill xy” is not okay, then somebody already decides what is offensive. That somebody is for example the judges. The question always whether restricting something is beneficial to the population in general, or not.

Spreading distractions to real issues is absolutely not beneficial. This video, and comment does exactly that. The real problem is what we do with this non beneficial behaviour for example. The absolutist viewpoint of freedom of speech, thinks that everybody can decide on their own what’s good for them. That’s obviously not true, we know countless examples of that. We just need to restrict access to real information, which happens currently to most of the people everywhere. Fortunately, the general population is not stupid, but we don’t have enough time/attention to details (I think). So we just needs to be sure, that everybody can get the real stuff in their own limited time. The problem is, you cannot achieve this without control, and probably, restricting others freedom of speech, because otherwise they can fill that “limited time”. Another obvious problem is what is the “real stuff”.

One interesting idea is to restrict the amount of content which can be created per day, for example. The content still could be quite free. Obviously, these won’t be achieved in a free market, and I’m absolutely not sure that there won’t be new ways to break the system. What we can see today, is another idea, the context bubbles next to obvious lies, but this also have issues regarding deciding what’s true.

Easy. Deal with it in exactly the same way the government does.

All of these edge cases, and situations, and "where is the line?" Are all questions that have been discussed for centuries, in well published court cases that have gone to the supreme court.

I think the supreme court has done a good job, over the decades, of deciding what the line is for acceptable speech or not.

As such, other groups/platforms/large organizations should aspire to limit themselves to the same limits and actions that the government does, even though they are not the government.

> absolute freedom of speech has never really been a thing

It's not, but the best guideline we have, are what the courts have decided, IMO.

If the speech is legal, then allow it.

If it's not, then disallow it.

Or if some currently legal speech is so horrible that you think it should be disallowed, then go through the normal legal process, of making a law, and subject it to the appeals process, constitutional review, and all the checks and balances that go along with making speech illegal.

2. You balance it by allowing free speech and encouraging robust debate rather than demanding loyalty tests or speech codes. Restricting speech or telling people that they "can't say that" is an excellent way to result in groupthink; encouraging free speech and especially a culture of free speech that respects differences is the best way to prevent one-sided groupthink. Such one-sidedness has many negative consequences, including (but not limited to) ineffective actions, alienating wider groups of people, supporting bad science, and limiting the scope of discovery and study.

Is that not the very definition of democracy? Majority rule easily and frequently overrides and marginalizes minorities. Its kinda the point.

Of course specific minorities have gained mind-share over the years with the majority, and thus become "in the majority". Usually this takes the form of a growing acceptance that others, although different, are still people.

Women have had the vote for barely 100 years. Civil rights. Gay rights. Marriage rights, and so on.

It seems like every era brings a new fight, a new minority to hate, fear, ignore, accept and embrace. The old-guard has a moral panic, wails about their "way of life", but alas they are the minority, so eventually get shouted down.

  > Repercussions for harmful or bigoted speech, as well as escalation of responses. For example what if a person or group is being bullied but it’s claimed under free expression?

> What happens when things escalate between parties beyond just words but physical harm?

I don't really understand why this is even a question? Physical assault is not only contrary to MIT's rules, it is a crime. This statement and principle is totally orthogonal to the principle of free expression.

EDIT: I suppose you could mean something more like incitement/inducement to physical harm. But, of course, that is also a crime.

> 2. Similarly how do they stop majority dominance and snowballing into group think? E.g if there are way more men or women in a program and they use their larger numbers to amplify their freedom of expression in a way that affects the others. That then risks reducing the number of the minority demographic as they slowly get pushed out, leading to largely heterogeneous programs.

This is a strange view to me. Is the underlying premise here that there are things that the majority believes, but that would be harmful to say? If so, how did we come to this conclusion and what strange things could be believed by the majority of students/faculty but are too dangerous to speak? Certainly we could point to historical examples of things people in say, the 1950s, believed that we might consider dangerous or harmful to say today. But people from the 1950s would never have chosen to ban those ideas.

In other words, nearly by definition, it is never the preferred expressions of the majority that are getting regulated. If it were a majority view, it wouldn't be considered harmful by the regulators. The viewpoints having their speech regulated are always going to be in the minority and unpopular. If it's not a majority that believes these things, then there should be no reason to be concerned about majority dominance.

The power to regulate expression is just that - power. If you are truly concerned about concentration of power and the protection of minority interests, there is no greater threat to that than the regulation of expression. Tautologically, it will always be those in power that write the speech codes.

2. 75% of teachers are women, 97% of coal miners are men - certain professional aspirations attract certain people. When people talk about equality of outcome, does it have to be 50-50 male-female, equally split amongst all demographics and income levels, and if so, what possible realistic path is there to achieve it? On the other hand, I am sure most people in the modern world (especially the young ones) support equal opportunity, so it seems like this is becoming less of an issue.

I see what you're saying though - for example, is Kanye responsible for people committing anti-Semitic hate crimes while yelling "Kanye 2024"? There are also obviously many current event and historical examples of speech escalating to violence, but in a place of learning there should be freedom to consider all ideas and freedom to distinguish good from bad ones.

Would you suggest that things like murder threats or libel should be legal? Otherwise you're advocating for conditional or contingent free expression too.

I prefer the generally-accepted definition of "harm physically", as I assume you do, but clearly some people try to generalize the idea in order to emphasize other types of harm.

It's a debatable topic, there might be a little bit to learn from hashing it out, but it's mostly fluff. It's better to explore if this illuminates any actual disagreement on some concrete issue.

This sort of taking umbrage about word definitions is a factor in pretty much all major political spats, and I don't think it's going away by arguing about each term. You just have to define the terms in some way for the purposes of mutual understanding for an individual discussion. If the debate ends up just being bikeshedding the definition, walk away and find a better conversation.

https://fox23maine.com/news/local/usm-students-reach-agreeme...

https://www.nytimes.com/2021/10/20/us/dorian-abbot-mit.html

People like the sister commentor (now flagged/dead) that think anyone with a view different than their own is a Nazi want to insert themselves into what should be free inquiry, and have devised all sorts of mental gymnastics to explain why constraining thought is actually a good thing. University administrators who only care about preserving their power and want to take the most risk adverse path get onboard, and faculty get held hostage by an entitled minority that thinks their agenda is more important than anything else. (When the agenda is really just power anyway, not the causes they use as wedge issues)

And so the faculty has symbolically signed a statement that shouldn't need to exist, saying their business is their business and they should be left unmolested to free enquiry. And a few culture warriors call it culture war bullshit to try and give it the usual smug dismissal treatment that's the only form of rhetoric they know because they don't actually have a point

Free speech is about time and place. They are saying that speech can be free, but going into a political rant in the middle of a class on calculus is not appropriate.

Free speech is about saying what you like, but in a context where others are free to leave. I can't leave my class without prejudicing my grade, but I didn't sign up for your diatribes on human diet.

So if you're a biology professor, and you dislike the government (or universities) climiate policies, you can't use your lessons as your soap-box.

Unless you can tie it to "faculty member’s expertise, relevant to the subject matter, and consistent with both sound pedagogical principles and the achievement of learning objectives."

This seems entirely reasonable - heck, it goes as far as allowing proffesors to expouse their own political views in classroom as long as they can establish it's relevant.

This “Nazis are everywhere” thing is a manifestation of busybody administrators and isn’t a real problem. Even if it were, it doesn’t require Byzantine declarations about approved speech.

People need to grow up and not get offended so easily.

If you're all for free speech, the "nazi at the bar" problem isn't a problem because free speech would allow you to battle it out in a propaganda (the neutral definition) war.

I don't think a whole lot of people are actually pro free speech, but I think a lot of people are afraid to admit that.

If they can build rockets—Paperclip, https://www.history.com/news/what-was-operation-paperclip

> 1,600 of these German scientists (along with their families) were brought to the United States to work on America’s behalf ... Von Braun later became director of NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center and the chief architect of the Saturn V launch vehicle, which eventually propelled two dozen American astronauts to the Moon.

Free speech in a bar, or any other business environment, though is out of place. Because the primary goal of a business is to make money, and creating disharmony and antagonism seldome leads to better business.

In other words free speech is useful, but there's a time and a place.

Bars for example like to attack a hermogenous crowd. Happy people drink more, break less. If 10% of the patrons start spouting off racism, or mysogeny, or whatever, then the rest won't fight it, they'll just leave. If it happens a couple more times they'll stop coming back.

So bars are typically quick to remove people, or ban people, with a history of strife. You don't have to go as far as Nazis, all you need is a few guys being obnoxious about, say, eating meat.

Free speech is not "saying whatever I want, wherever I want, to whomever I want." there's a time and a place. A university campus is a great place, and also (for typical college age people) a good time.

That's called "not actually being for free speech".

Yes, it does protect nazis. It is also our best bet against nazis, and a great many Minister-of-Truth-wannabes have a hard time understanding it.

To put it another way, the problem of Nazis is not a problem of free speech. It's a problem of people who are actively violating other people's boundaries.

Nazis love it when you make it about speech because then everyone starts arguing tautologies instead of investigating and prosecuting criminal behavior.

In France we do limit free speech legally, especially around anti semitism and walk a fine line. For instance a man said "Islam is the stupidest religion on Earth" and was found innocent in court: he can insult a religion or a God, as long as he didnt call for people to be hung. But another said "Heil Israel" in a comedy piece to mock, in his view, how Israel was behaving like its former oppressor. He was censored and it started a long list of sentences in court as he persevered on that line of thought. He's considered by his supporters as a victim of political correctness.

It's hard to decide what to do: on one hand, it's interesting to express views that challenge common acceptance, on the other, it's not a big cost to shut up and move on when society decides the cost of letting you speak is too great a threat considering our history.

To avoid that Nazi at the bar "problem", first decide what the problem is: that people speak or that people listen. If you cant accept they speak, you must define limits to speech (that s the French model and we are clear some things simply cant be said, period, so shut up and move on). If you can, then you must educate your population so that merely listening to hate speech doesnt trigger hate. That's been the american model, and we never believed it can actually work: after all, you elected a man who was against elections, for instance.

If I were writing the statement, I probably would've added "intimidation" in that sentence. Then I'd kick the nazi out if they're using slurs, or if they self-identify as a nazi (e.g. wearing a swastika).

It gets tricky though, because if you add "intimidation" then someone can say "people who disagree with me are intimidating me". (I suppose they can also say "people who disagree with me are harassing me" with the current policy.)

My basic approach for dealing with this problem would be to utilize the fact/value distinction. Free expression of fact statements is much more important than free expression of value statements, because knowing the truth is important.

The threshold for censoring a value statement, like "The lives of <X people> don't matter" or "<X people> should be enslaved", should generally be lower. If someone claims that such a statement intimidates or harasses them, their claim will often be credible.

But for a fact statement, if someone's notion of "harassment" is so broad as to make it impossible to express a particular factual claim without engaging in "harassment", I'd say they're not complaining in good faith.

It's OK to argue that a particular delivery of a factual claim constitutes harassment (e.g. if the delivery is peppered with slurs). But the complainer should always be able to re-express the factual claim in a way that makes it no longer "harassment" to them.

> "A much-anticipated report on MIT’s actions in relation to the case of Aaron Swartz, a young computer programmer and Internet activist who committed suicide in January, finds no wrongdoing on MIT’s part."

https://news.mit.edu/2013/mit-releases-swartz-report-0730

Lindzen doesn't raise any. He's retired, and speaks only for himself. He's an embarrassment, but there are no issues there.

Ito? No attempt has been made to silence him.

Stallman isn't a speech matter either. His behavior was off putting enough that women were choosing to change their careers to avoid having to deal with him, so now he and his FSF have to do their thing off campus.

As eloquent as she is, JKR isn't just talk - she recently founded an Edinburgh-based centre to help women who have been sexually assaulted, giving them a safe, female-only space for support in a crisis. It's heroic work, and alongside her many other charitable contributions, I'm glad she's doing such good in the world.

The proper left wing still doesn't exist in american academia or society

... Citing black authors would be much easier if historically black academics were allowed to become academics, write papers, etc. These are forcing functions against prior suck.

There is a bit of a paradox here, because you could argue that cancelling a professor for having an unfashionable opinion is itself an exercise of student free speech.

The statement says "MIT does not protect direct threats, harassment, plagiarism, or other speech that falls outside the boundaries of the First Amendment." It seems to me that certain forms of cancellation could be argued to constitute "harassment" and therefore violate the policy.

Those are indeed some extreme policy proposals. Perhaps you could argue against them anonymously on the MIT subreddit or something like that? (Posting through Tor/VPN on a burner account)

>If, though, I am wrong in my assessment and most academics and students, rather than a dominant minority, wholly believe that offensive utterances must be punished and unsavory research banned, I think there isn't much left to do. Any official action, let alone the posted public statement, will only galvanize people to seek out more aggressive policies and oust those that oppose them.

This suggests an alternative measure: Instead of focusing on freedom of expression, focus on providing a means by which students/faculty/etc. can be polled on these proposals in a way that is robustly anonymous. Sounds like you believe that if the poll favors the extreme measures, there's nothing to be done anyways.

>[1] For clarity, these two relate to first-hand examples of professors making statements solely out of fear of not being able to attract students their labs/departments.

I'm surprised that professors at MIT of all places need to grovel this way to attract students?

Seems like a distraction: a minority of Americans want to ban abortion, yet, abortion remains illegal for a huge portions of Americans. A majority of Americans want weed legalized, yet, many thousands are in prison for using weed.

Maybe some people changed their twitter bios, to me that doesn't mean "a minority has extracted obedience from a majority" at all.

I'm deeply suspicious of your tone here. I try to take HN claims at good faith, but frankly your 5 points of evidence come across to me as ludicrous. The best good faith I can muster here is that this isn't completely made up fear-mongering but rather some ungenerous interpretation of events you've witnessed in academia. The writing style red flagged me:

> Penalize (during peer review) research that doesn't cite black authors.

This makes it sound like there's some kind of policy requirement for citing black authors that people are being penalized for not meeting, a sort of citation affirmative action. What we're missing is, is that true? Is there a policy? What does it say? What does "penalize" mean? What was the research? Was it geophysical research into fracking outcomes? Was the reviewer wondering why a specific piece of research by a black author that indicated that negative effects from fracking were being experienced by poorer neighborhoods wasn't included? What kind of context are we not getting here?

> Implement diversity boards that have final say in hiring and tenure decisions. (They need not have field expertise.)

Is this true? final say? If a diversity board rejected a candidate for being "white," there'd be no consequences? Really? Your parenthetical inclusion is pointing to the blatant fear. So, your geophysics department hires a prominent Vietnamese architect that knows nothing about geophysical sciences, and that's a realistic thing that could happen, is what you're implying. Huh.

> Ban white researchers from conducting genetic research in populations in non-white countries.

I have an extremely hard time believing that MIT has a rule somewhere that defines what a white researcher is, empowers some kind of authority to determine that when reviewing research grants, and then also goes to define what a "white" or "non-white" country is.

I'm so suspicious of your affected-detachment writing style that I had to delve into the comment history.

Something that jumped out at me is this "disaffected" comment on affirmative action: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30526006

> This is an oversimplification. It started out as: all things being equal, pick the black one. It applied to cases where one was torn between two equal candidates, and the idea was that a nudge toward hiring more blacks would help fix the disparities that arose from years of segregation and racial prejudice. The issue was that the standard for success of this program was racial proportions being equal to that of the general (or local) population.

> As years passed and the standard for success was not reached, affirmative action policies became more and more aggressive. This coincided with civil rights legislation that put pressure on companies and institutions to hire more blacks (expanded to include other racial minorities and women). The consequence is the system we have now, where people, if not explicitly using racial quotas, are creating racially oriented jobs (e.g. diversity staff in large companies / universities) or searching for racially loaded standards (e.g. personality scores for Asians in Harvard admissions) in order to engineer an overall impression of meeting racial proportioning criteria.

Can I ask about your casual way of talking about the race of people? Very rarely do I find someone that says "black ones," "more blacks," etc, that doesn't have distasteful beliefs about race. You're careful to capitalize "Asian," and you have a lot of comments dancing around genetic basis for race. I only delve so deep and analyze so carefully because it seems to me you are wicked smart, and somewhat careful, and my conclusion is that you have deeply unpopular ideas about races and that you are smart enough to know not to share explicitly but also want to warn about so as to avoid negative racial consequences, whatever those are (I'm guessing something smarter than vague "great replacement.") Basically, I think you have racist beliefs, and are carefully trying to discuss them here, or fear monger about them. Do you? Or perhaps, beliefs you think society "unfairly characterizes as racist?"

pre-post edit: (i forgot to hit reply and found this on my computer later)

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30411553

> Some kids are more capable and more driven than others for reasons part cultural and part genetic, and the perceived quality of a school will reflect that of its students. ... Though this notion is distasteful to some, it must be addressed because otherwise, schools and teachers are going to be put on the hook for conditions that are simply outside their control.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30523203&p=2#30524494

> When I was in high school, one student's parents (one doctor and one lawyer --- very financially well-off) took off work for one year just so they could claim having no income on the FAFSA documentation. She got accepted everywhere, winning across the places she applied over $300,000 in scholarships. The upper-middle class and wealthy can easily game this.

> Edit: I should also add that the student and both parents were black. This probably played a large role in the offers.