Comment by tivert | Hacker News Reader

Comment by tivert | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

> I'm not defending anything (I called them clueless!), I was stating the actual scope of what we're talking about. It's true that subcommittees compose the whole organization, but at the same time, what happened was that the whole organization was judged as if it were the small subcommittee.

You kinda are. You seem to be trying to shift blame to a scapegoat, which is a pretty common defense tactic. If you shoot someone, you can't claim you're innocent because it was only your finger that pulled the trigger. Obviously things are a little blurrier with organizations, but certainly not totally disconnected.

>> I'd expect if someone stops by your office with a problem, you'd give them at least a few minutes of your time to help.

> And when your day ends up filled with spell checking documents when you have a Ph.D. in English, maybe you might rethink that open door policy.

That's an obvious mischaracterization of what they would have been asked to do, or what would have happened. People are usually pretty respectful of other people's time, especially in these kinds of situations.

If an IT department of a major organization has both the time and motivation to construct and publicize such a document, that speaks volumes of the incentive structure and cooperate priorities of their organization. The fact that they released such document in the public domain without first running it from the PR department speaks volumes to their incompetence. This was not some random internal IT document. This was an official, public Stanford policy, advertised as part of a specific PR strategy.

If you saw a chart of Stanford administrative overhead growth, you would be aghast.

All these useless busybody administrators sucking down $100k+/yr compete for visibility in order to grow their compensation and hire yet even more of their dipshit buddies.

They are a cancer.

Learning, teaching, and researching are entirely beside the point. Demonstrate moral superiority and hire your friends if you want to stick around.

This insular, spiraling, incenstuous dynamic produces artifacts that are tremendously embarrassing and discrediting when exposed to the outside world.

> This was not some random internal IT document. This was an official, public Stanford policy, advertised as part of a specific PR strategy.

You're just projecting that you don't really understand how universities are organized. Universities are towns more than corporations, and we share a lot of things in public because we are very open. Unlike corporations which use a veil of secrecy to hide their operations, universities operate more freely. This is a good thing.

That is of course until the public and provocateurs come in and start misrepresenting things, as was the case here. It was a policy proposed by a subcommittee of a department, and the document described itself as aspirational and a guideline. Was it a good idea? No. But it was misrepresented by outsiders as "official, public Stanford policy, advertised as part of a specific PR strategy." This is a flat mischaracterization of what that document was. It's a mischaracterization of the literal words on the document explaining what it was.

You may say that its nature on the Internet made it a defacto public PR strategy, but again that shows ignorance of how University PR works (lol, what's a "PR department"? That's corporate speak), but the subsequent hiding of the document behind the Stanford network should make clear it was never for you in the first place. The fact that you're still mischaracterizing the document today tells me you are intentionally pushing misinformation. I'm not sure why, but don't you think you should stop?

> speaks volumes to their incompetence.

Okay, and what was the fallout really? A bunch of conservatives and right wingers had a field day complaining about wokeness gone wild. And? Stanford continues to be a world-class institution producing cutting-edge research. The world continues turning. Stanford enrollment continues to grow.

> You kinda are. You seem to be trying to shift blame to a scapegoat, which is a pretty common defense tactic.

Placing the blame on the literal people who caused the problem instead of generalizing it to people who didn't cause the problem is the opposite of scapegoating. I can't think of the right term for what you're doing: taking something a small part of the whole did and using it to push an agenda against the larger organization.

Because what you're doing here definitely smells of agenda pushing, especially because you seem to have no relationship whatsoever to the Stanford community, yet you seem to have very strong opinions about what they should be doing. Correct me if I'm wrong, but what I'm getting from your posts is that you're from the outside looking in, and what you see inside makes you really mad (or I guess, amused?), but otherwise you have no real relationship to Sandford or academia whatsoever, is that true?

> That's an obvious mischaracterization of what they would have been asked to do, or what would have happened.

Not sure how one can mischaracterize a counterfactual. You imagine it would go one way, and I use my experience to note I think it would have gone another way. As a professor who didn't get to eat lunch until 4:00 yesterday because people were in my office until that time asking for random help, I can easily see how an English professor would not have time to do a grammar and spell checks for for the whole campus.

It seems you have very limited experience on college campuses and in academia in general, so maybe you could just admit that you opinion is based in ignorance instead of saying people are mischaracterizing the situation. What real experience do you have on the slack capacity of professors to manage the technical output of various campus departments? It's okay if the answer is "none" but we should just be clear about that.

> Because what you're doing here definitely smells of agenda pushing, especially because you seem to have no relationship whatsoever to the Stanford community, yet you seem to have very strong opinions about what they should be doing.

Yeah, I thought that list was really stupid (to the point of being amusing), and that's where it would have ended if you hadn't rushed in with the vigorous agenda pushing, defensiveness, projection, etc. I also get the impression you're probably also conflating me other others.

> Correct me if I'm wrong, but what I'm getting from your posts is that you're from the outside looking in, and what you see inside makes you really mad (or I guess, amused?), but otherwise you have no real relationship to Sandford or academia whatsoever, is that true?

I'm a literal dog on the internet.

Honestly, you seem to be the one who's "really mad." It feels a lot like a police apologist who insists it must be "just a few bad apples," and everyone must also understand it that way as well.

> As a professor who didn't get to eat lunch until 4:00 yesterday because people were in my office until that time asking for random help...

So, in other words, based on your example, there's a decent chance they'd be open to help, at least a little.

> I can easily see how an English professor would not have time to do a grammar and spell checks for for the whole campus.

That's a weird bit of black and white thinking, and seems to be based on the assumption that one must be totally closed to outside requests for help or open to helping literally anyone with any trivial thing.

> Honestly, you seem to be the one who's "really mad."

Yes, if you haven't noticed, other people on this thread are saying dehumanizing things like "administrators are a cancer" and "PhD is little more than a UBI program for people unable to integrate into the workforce" and "American universities have become extravagant nurseries for overgrown babies".

I mean, talk about projection. But if people were saying this about you and yours, I think you'd be a little mad too. Do you casually describe people as cancer? When you think of an "administrator", does that person have a blurry face, or does that person have the face of someone you know and love?

I'm not going to say that everything is perfect here, but this kind of vitriol feels qualitatively different, and I'm sorry you can't see that, but you're also not the target of these kinds of attacks. We can all express our opinions here without calling the other side cancer or a child. What's said here is kind of mild (unless you browse with show dead), but go read the comments about "Stanford" and other Universities on different outlets, and people are calling for the death of college administrators and professors. Even students.

Like... that's the level of discourse in this thread, and that's not my doing. I didn't cause those people to say those things. That's just the level of discourse that the word "Stanford" attracts on HN. I wonder why? You think I'm the one pushing an agenda? Look around, the agenda is being pushed by a lot of people, and I'm not one of them. But insofar as you think I am, what agenda is that? That Universities are good things and are helpful in society? That we shouldn't use the actions of a few to cast blame on the many? What exactly am I saying here that's objectionable?

> I also get the impression you're probably also conflating me other others.

I think I've responded to you directly to your points in this thread. If I've mistaken a point someone else made for one you made, please point that out and I'll reformulate my response with apologies.

> So, in other words, based on your example, there's a decent chance they'd be open to help, at least a little.

Yes, a far cry from where we started, which was that subcommittees should have their work approved by linguistics experts before publication, which is unreasonable. The much more reasonable stance is that subcommittees could leverage expertise available on campus from time to time, but we shouldn't have the expectation that linguistics experts should be on call to vet these kinds of things, and that they don't should rise to the level of incompetence. Because literally no one is held to that standard.

> That's a weird bit of black and white thinking, and seems to be based on the assumption that one must be totally closed to outside requests for help or open to helping literally anyone with any trivial thing.

No, it's thinking from the experience that 100% of the day is filled with other work. So it's not that one must be totally close to outside requests, it's that one does not have the bandwidth to open up for even trivial things outside of one's job description. Any work beyond that is in the "favor" realm of collegiality. It's not within the expected duties of tenured English professors to vet university comms, just like it's not within the expected duties of the business college to help with university accounting, just like it's not my job as a CS professor to even handle the IT in my own department, let alone the college or university.

Although the amusing thing to me here if we are to take your proposal seriously, then the correct course of action would be to create a department tasked with specifically being experts through which communications would be filtered. This department would require administrators, and I'm sure you know what the people here would say about this department.

Damned if you do, damned if you don't. If your comms are unprofessional, then you're an incompetent university. If you have a process for vetting comms so that they're professional, then you're bloated with administrators, therefore you're an incompetent university.

> If your comms are unprofessional ...

By unprofessional, I think you mean laughably absurd... let's be honest here. I agree with your point that it wasn't an official university opinion. But it is troubling how no one in a department had the common sense and courage to call this out before it was released.

> Do you casually describe people as cancer? When you think of an "administrator", does that person have a blurry face, or does that person have the face of someone you know and love?

> I'm not going to say that everything is perfect here, but this kind of vitriol feels qualitatively different, and I'm sorry you can't see that, but you're also not the target of these kinds of attacks.

I do not describe people as "cancer."

As an aside, there seem to be some interesting parallels to the dynamic of police critics/police apologists here.

>> I also get the impression you're probably also conflating me other others.

> I think I've responded to you directly to your points in this thread. If I've mistaken a point someone else made for one you made, please point that out and I'll reformulate my response with apologies....

You repeatedly characterized me as angry about this ("bent out of shame", "mad"), even after I corrected you. The whole first part of your recent comment kinda confirms to me that you are probably at least partially responding to me as a stereotype of "university critics" that you've created.

>> So, in other words, based on your example, there's a decent chance they'd be open to help, at least a little.

> Yes, a far cry from where we started, which was that subcommittees should have their work approved by linguistics experts before publication, which is unreasonable.

That's not where "we" started, that's where you started. I think you were always projecting a more formalized, rigid, bureaucratized process onto what I said than I ever imagined.

> The much more reasonable stance is that subcommittees could leverage expertise available on campus from time to time, but we shouldn't have the expectation that linguistics experts should be on call to vet these kinds of things, and that they don't should rise to the level of incompetence. Because literally no one is held to that standard.

I think the reasonable stance is that you shouldn't be creating language policies like the one I quoted if you lack access to the competence to do so. It rises to the level of incompetence if you don't double-check using widely-available reference material and a little common sense and you fail consult experts who could catch your mistakes.

Organizationally, someone in an oversight capacity should have been paying attention to catch the problems. Which were glaring, since I, a dog on the internet, found one in about 30 seconds.

> Although the amusing thing to me here if we are to take your proposal seriously, then the correct course of action would be to create a department tasked with specifically being experts through which communications would be filtered. This department would require administrators, and I'm sure you know what the people here would say about this department.

Doesn't Standford have an organizational communications department? One would think they'd have some competence in crafting communications policy that the IT department may lack. Alternatively, if administrative overhead is a concern, a totally valid course of action is to play it safe and either avoid creating such policies in the first place or creating ones that are don't stray from areas were there isn't an clear consensus.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com