Edward Schlosser says, “I’m a liberal professor, and my liberal students terrify me”. Strangely, he doesn’t give any evidence that he’s at all liberal, and the one personal incident he cites involves a conservative student.
The next week, I got called into my director’s office. I was shown an email, sender name redacted, alleging that I “possessed communistical [sic] sympathies and refused to tell more than one side of the story.” The story in question wasn’t described, but I suspect it had do to with whether or not the economic collapse was caused by poor black people.
That was it. That was the first, and so far only, formal complaint a student has ever filed against me,
he says. Further, this was the response of the administration:
My director rolled her eyes. She knew the complaint was silly bullshit. I wrote up a short description of the past week’s class work, noting that we had looked at several examples of effective writing in various media and that I always made a good faith effort to include conservative narratives along with the liberal ones.
Along with a carbon-copy form, my description was placed into a file that may or may not have existed. Then … nothing. It disappeared forever; no one cared about it beyond their contractual duties to document student concerns. I never heard another word of it again.
So then he scurries off to Vox and writes a long essay in which he complains that he’s terrified by liberal students. This makes no sense at all. There has to be more to his concerns than this. He makes a few vague efforts.
He cites an example he wrote about on his personal blog. That example begins this way:
I’ve been in academe for about a decade now, and the only professors I’ve known who have slept with or dated students were female.
Then he complains about how everyone is afraid to question the liberal orthodoxy
that teachers shouldn’t fuck their students. Honestly, I had no idea this was a politicized liberal position — I thought it was a matter of professional ethics that liberals and conservatives agreed on.
Back to the Vox article — he talks about several examples of adjuncts getting fired or their contracts not being renewed after teaching so-called ‘controversial’ material. I can believe it. I agree with him that the system that currently loads the staff of our universities with fungible faculty who can be fired and replaced on a whim is terrible, and the proliferation of temporary faculty positions is what terrifies me. But that’s a structural problem, that administrators (who don’t teach!) have the power to replace faculty of any political stripe who teach anything that annoys the customers…and that’s another issue, that universities do see students as people buying an education.
Why that situation would cause a liberal professor to be afraid of liberal students is a mystery to me. It’s political conservatives who have gutted university funding and made our jobs more fragile who are to blame.
He cites that embarrassingly bad article by Jonathan Chait, complaining about political correctness. As I wrote then, he ignored the fact that it’s not just liberals who get criticized, it’s conservatives, and that there are huge conservative forces being applied to the educational system — to complain about some kind of vague excess of liberalism when the real threat is well-monied, fanatical conservatives is absurd. Does anyone think creationists are liberals?
He also doesn’t like worrying that he might “trigger” someone.
He cites an anonymous professor who says that “she and her fellow faculty members are terrified of facing accusations of triggering trauma.” Internet liberals pooh-poohed this comment, likening the professor to one of Tom Friedman’s imaginary cab drivers. But I’ve seen what’s being described here. I’ve lived it. It’s real, and it affects liberal, socially conscious teachers much more than conservative ones.
No, he hasn’t lived it. That’s a lie. He said himself that he had exactly one student complaint, and it was clearly from a conservative student. Basically, he’s been hiding under the blankets out of fear of those vicious liberal students, and is citing the fact that he’s hiding in terror as evidence that the students are terrifying.
I’ve written about trigger warnings before, and they’re not a sign of the coming liberal apocalypse. They’re a tool in the teacher’s toolbox. They’re a way to teach that controversial material by warning students about what you’re introducing now, preparing them for difficult ideas. They’re also a way to respect your students, some of whom may have had real-world damaging experiences, which should not be dismissed by blithe academic disinterest.
But hey, let’s get right down to the really important stuff. Edward Schlosser is apparently a white man. He’s terribly concerned about the oppression visited upon us white men, as you might have guessed from that link to his blog post, where he was troubled that he was denied the right to date his students. We must protect the privileges of white male professors, even if it requires that we willfully misinterpret criticisms!
But we also destroy ourselves when identity becomes our sole focus. Consider that tweet I linked to earlier, from critic and artist Zahira Kelly, in which she implies that the whole of scientific inquiry is somehow invalid because it has been conducted mostly by white males.
most "scientific thought" as u know it isnt that scientific but shaped by white patriarchal bias of ppl who claimed authority on it.
— el cuco (@bad_dominicana) November 15, 2014
when ppl go off on evo psych, its always some shady colonizer white man theory that ignores nonwhite human history. but “science”. ok
most “scientific thought” as u know it isnt that scientific but shaped by white patriarchal bias of ppl who claimed authority on it.Kelly is intelligent. Her voice is important. She realizes, correctly, that evolutionary psychology is flawed, and that science has often been misused to legitimize racist and sexist beliefs. But why draw that out to the extreme of rejecting scientific inquiry as a whole? Can’t we see how it’s dangerous to reject centuries of established thought so blithely? Or how scary and extreme that makes us look to people who don’t already agree with us? And tactically, can’t we see how shortsighted it is to abandon a viable and respected manner of inquiry just because it’s associated with white males?
Pardon me, but did anyone out there see anything in which Kelly rejected scientific inquiry as a whole? Anyone?
She’s actually saying something that Professor Schlosser needs to learn: that science itself is not outside inquiry. That the institution of science is a social construct, and that it is shaped by society to certain ends. The process of science provides a method to test the validity of claims, but we are selective in how and where we apply it.
It is truer to the heart of good science to question centuries of established thought
than to expect students to simply accept what you tell them. As a teacher, you need to be prepared to address those questions, and explain why science has come to the conclusions it has, and sometimes, if your students are really good, they’ll wake you up to the fact that maybe some of your assumptions aren’t as well founded as you thought. That’s a good thing.
I think we see what this teacher is really afraid of: falling back on centuries of established thought
is demanding acceptance of dogma and orthodoxy in lieu of questioning. He’s afraid of being challenged in the classroom!
We’re always quick to say that the purpose of an education is to challenge our students with new ideas. It seems to me that a good education works both ways: teachers ought to be ready to learn and be challenged, too. Students don’t terrify me. But timid professors who want to be unquestioned dispensers of knowledge do.
Thanks to this article, Kelly is now receiving substantial online harassment. Needless to say, the target audience of the piece are bleating on about how brave the beleaguered college professors are, while utterly ignoring this harassment.
I had a lecturer a few weeks ago make a comment on an assignment we had coming up. He said, he wasn’t interested in what we knew, but in how we came to know what we know.
Remember how it turned out women have different symptoms than men when it came to heart attack, but for decades (centuries?) medicine has focused on men, assuming women would be just kinda the same anyway and who cares enough to check.
Yeah. That’s white male scientific thought.
Did you see a single example of Edward Schlosser being brave in this article?
there’s been a lot of this lately. see also this guy:
http://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2015/06/03/im_offended_126814.html
Once more, conservatives prove that psychological projection and self-unawareness are the strongest forces in the universe. In the process of complaining about their “fragile” students who ask for things like–gasp–respect, they reveal themselves to be the ultimate fragile crybabies.
I wasn’t in college very long (as a student) before I realized that just because someone has an advanced degree and a job as a professor doesn’t mean that they aren’t a complete twit.
#6: “Present company excepted”. YOU FORGOT TO SAY “PRESENT COMPANY EXCEPTED”.
Now I have to go crawl back into bed and cry.
Argument, disputation, disagreement, contention — this is what we do, it’s our job. That’s how we get closer to something approximating the truth, where there is such a thing, and it’s how we come to understand the differences in values and epistemology that we are really arguing over in situations where the truth per se is not out there. It’s a major reason why the academy exists. Why all of a sudden (it seems) people are terrified of what I have always thought is our reason for existence is quite puzzling.
“most “scientific thought” as u know it isnt that scientific but shaped by white patriarchal bias of ppl who claimed authority on it.”
I’m not convinced that this is a valid statement. It seems like hyperbole to me. If the word most were replaced with the word some, it would seem to invite discussion. I think that it is important to be critical of Schlosser, but I wouldn’t jump to the conclusion that Kelly’s tweets are advancing discussion of the gender and race bias we all know pervades all aspects of culture, including science.
That said, my greatest concern is that there are real abuses by a number of faculty members (e.g. Overt misogyny that excludes female voices from the classroom and disregards their potential). These abuses are rare, but real. Just as police must police other police, faculty must openly address such student abuses or students (regardless of politics) must take such professors to task. We can cause real harm. Some do. Open dialog on campus, and honest consideration of student complaints is necessary. Schlosser misses that entirely.
Generally I assume that if someone reaches for a label like “liberal” or “conservative” when trying to understand a position, they aren’t actually trying to explore both sides of an issue; they are trying to validate the label.
In other words, he’s not actually teaching about the topic, he’s teaching about how the topic divides into handy little buckets with labels on them. You cannot establish a nuanced understanding or opinion about anything that way.
Along with a carbon-copy form, my description was placed into a file that may or may not have existed.
So, this happened in 1970? Carbon paper! Ha!
While that is the prevailing narrative in the press, that example is not quite true. The difference is in so-called “typical” vs “atypical” MI. Typical MI is your classic substernal chest pressure that is worse with activity, improved with rest, and is frequently described as “an elephant sitting on my chest”. Atypical MI is anything else, including painless presentations, jaw pain, whatever.
For BOTH genders, the most common presentation is a “typical” one, hence the name. For men, it’s somewhere around 2/3 of MI presentations, and for women it’s somewhere around half. The studies vary in exact incidence because you have to pick your underlying population. Atypical MIs are also much more common in elderly people and in diabetics.
The thing is, atypical MIs are harder to pick up period. They have much more vague symptoms that are more easily confused with something else. They frequently happen in very old individuals who just come in and say “I’m weak” or “I’m fatigued”, which is the usual complaint for just about any insult to a frail person. Physicians as a whole work hard to pick up any MI, but the fact that the more difficult ones to catch are missed at a higher rate isn’t so much a sexist conspiracy as it is simply a fact of the pathophysiology.
There’s sexist stuff in women’s cardiac care, but I really don’t think the narrative cited above is really a decent example.
blergh, I just found about this article earlier when linked as an example in a comment complaining about the “whiners” who prompted Cameron Crowe’s apology for casting a white red-headed woman in a part-Asian role.
Schlosser’s article is a lengthy exercise in completely missing the point. The bits about handling of student complaints, low course evaluation scores, and job insecurity are all failures of the administration to administer well, not a problem with students lodging spurious complaints, which is always and forever a possibility. The tweets from Zahira Kelly he cites as problems don’t say what he’s reading (he reads charges of institutional bias as a claim that any association with White men makes something false – pure straw).
That was my conclusion, and it jives with why he’s more worried about Liberal – i.e. less-authoritarian – students: they are more likely to question than simply accept what they’re told. He’s afraid of losing his automatic, presumed authority (based on his position as a gatekeeper of the Official Narrative of Consensus Reality) as we more and more recognize that the solipsism problem can never be entirely overcome. I actually laughed out loud when he tried to claim this was a new phenomenon – it’s at least as old as Plato and his cave allegory.
From our own Deep Rifts to a decade of calling out sexist, racist hipsters and brogressives to people flipping out about students asking questions or demanding to be treated like actual people instead of easily-programmed androids with no concerns or lives outside of class, it’s becoming increasingly clear to me that a whole lot of people (and especially White cismen) who identify as “Liberal” are more what I would describe as “not that Conservative” than anything approaching Liberal, and that’s even accounting for the fact that I view Liberalism as a politically-centrist, too-individualist ideology and not especially Left-wing.
“I’m a liberal professor”
–
this is interesting…First of all, no he isn’t. Second, and tangential is the phenomenon of Blue Dog Democrats…Republicans who run as Democrats simply so that they can run against the guy who beat them to getting the republican nomination…Note this though: There is NO such thing as a Red Dog Republican…This form of ‘lying’ is EXCLUSIVELY a one sided game…Democrats NEVER pretend to be Republicans to advance the Democratic agenda…We certainly have weak Democrats and convictionless centrists but subterfuge on that level? no
John Horstman #14
And this, when put into context with his questioning of the (liberal?) idea that teachers shouldn’t fuck students is… what’s a kind word to use… telling.
I just want to know why Ben Stein’s staring at me with a bullhorn.
I have seen a lot of articles lately about changes in academia, usually of ‘the left will eat itself’ bent. It’s usually either people not adhering absolutely to the perceived liberal line (http://jezebel.com/feminist-students-protest-feminist-prof-for-writing-abo-1707714321), or people saying that students inappropriately don’t want to be offended or made uncomfortable (the subtext being ‘but that’s what higher education is for!’) – ranging from trivial examples of trigger warnings (like on the Great Gatsby) or using ‘the t word’ in a discussion about why someone doesn’t use that word any more.
For those of you actually involved in higher education in the States: is this a real trend that you’ve perceived as well, or is it just a self-perpetuating meme (as in, this article generated a lot of views, let’s get another just like it)?
@AnatomyProf #9: That really depends on the intended audience, Kelly’s Twitter followers, as the claim hinges on scientific thought “as you know it”. Unless you’re somehow more familiar with Kelly’s audience than she is, you’re ‘splaining here (correcting someone who knows more about the subject than you do, possibly based on an unevidenced assumption of your own superior knowledge due to social identity/demographic hierarchies). Her claim may even be true for a majority of Americans and not just her audience. For example, Dana has been detailing exactly how bad and unscientific creationist “science” textbooks can be for years, and we know that Texas politicians inflict some of this terribleness on the national curriculum to a lesser extent by way of their influence over textbook publishers. The New Left has been criticizing the omissions and bias of the official narrative of US history since at least the 1960s, and recently the likes of Howard Zinn and James Loewen gained prominence for their particular contributions to that project.
If I had to guess, I’d say you’re probably thinking far too narrowly about your own personal experience within your own specific discipline and concluding that “scientific knowledge” generally is quite sound. You may be blind to particular ways in which your own scientific knowledge is indeed biased and does not accurately reflect reality due to a lack of exposure to conflicting viewpoints and experiences. You’re perhaps also forgetting that quite a lot of people think, say, Charles Murray or even David Barton are respectable scientists and not hacks. You are not necessarily the intended audience of those tweets – context matters a great deal here.
But..
“For BOTH genders, the most common presentation is a “typical” one, hence the name. For men, it’s somewhere around 2/3 of MI presentations, and for women it’s somewhere around half.”
But…
if something happens 50% of the time, why is one side of that utterly equal chance “atypical?”
Why isn’t it MI type A and MI type B?
Why is the MI more commonly found in men “normalized” while the MI that happens to women half the time “atypical?” That’s what I question.
Translation: there is no reality. There’s a conservative narrative and a liberal narrative, but neither a reality nor any evidence that would let us reconstruct it.
“Yahoo! Liberals. Yahoo! Liberals. Yahoo! Liberals. Yahoo! Liberals. Yahoo! Liberals.”
– Homer Simpson
Are there any of those left?
No, he doesn’t get to get away with that kind of insinuation. If he honestly thinks that his administration is covering up records of harassment, that is a HUGE HR issue and he is being unconscionably lax by not reporting it. If not, he is legitimately spreading lies about his university’s administration. If he simply worries about paperwork, send it in an email and bcc it to an outside email address, for christ’s sake.
I wrote a near-essay criticising Schlosser’s article when someone else shared it on Facebook, just yesterday (stayed up way too late to do it, too, when my original objective for the night was to stay up way too late playing Hearthstone).
So I’m glad to see this post today!
… I thought it was a matter of professional ethics that liberals and conservatives agreed on.
So silly – no TRUE conservative would agree with even one liberal about anything, especially ethics!
After reading that vox article, my bingo card crossed off every square. EVERY SQUARE.
I’m sure that’s exactly what happened. Adjuncts have such great job stability that student complaints are the only thing that could lead to a contract cancellation. Why, they practically have tenure! No need to ask any more questions about this claim!
I wonder if he no longer tells people that black people buying houses through F&F didn’t cause the housing collapse. You know, because he’s afraid of his students and all. Particularly the liberal ones.
And climate change! Those liberal students will get him for discussing climate change! From the blog post PZ linked:
What the actual fuck? Is the entire problem that he doesn’t know what the hell “liberal” means?
Professor wrings his hands and clutches his pearls about the younger generation which he believes to be soft and fucking everything up and by golly he would do things differently if he were younger!
Let me never lose sight of the world like so many people do as we age.
ashleybell #15
Having the “big tent” of the Democratic Party, which for decades has made room for corporatist aka “centrist” Democrats, they don’t need to pretend to be Republicans in order to capture and control resources and influence national and state-wide policies.
I think there are so many factors going into this than the author states, or even seems aware of. I’m happy to see PZ pulled out the first one that jumped out at me, and that is the culture of treating a college education as a commodity to be bought. From an administrative stand point, if this is a business and your customers are complaining then the easiest thing to do is take out the offensive staff and replace them with someone who won’t create as many waves. This might get them money in the short term, but it is harmful to the staff, the institution, and the student, as the real value of an education continues to dwindle.
But this is a much larger issue than that. This is not, as the writer would have you believe (contrary to his own examples) a liberal issues. Conservative students feel just as entitled to remain unchallenged and unoffended as liberals. Maybe it is a bias of the author, or simply a product of the campus he works on, but I’ve seen students try to shout teachers down for selecting readings for the class that they felt didn’t represent their personal religious beliefs in a positive enough light. I’ve heard advisers complain about faculty who are too liberal, because they don’t want to keep hearing from those students they advise about how the teacher “just won’t stop talking about how Alexander the Great was gay.”
But the other problem is the way public schools are treated. We see it in headline after headline, parents and students challenging schools on what should and should not be taught in schools. “That makes America looks bad,” “You’re trying to brainwash my child.” And far, far too many schools are caving to these demands. Students are going to college on the assumption they are still dealing with the same sort of system that will remove any material that does not conform to their own personal ideologies (liberal or conservative) and to an extent they are right.
But the sort of things that people are complaining about in this last round of ‘Oh why won’t the PC police just let me teach’ articles, are the very things that will fix the problem. Clear rules for professors and students about their relationships to each other. People who use trigger warnings the way PZ does – as a teaching tool that actively engages students with material, material that if they had come across without warning, may have resulted in shutting down, backing out.
Picking a personal gripe and acting like that is the soul cause of the problem is lazy and just has harmful as the entitlement attitude the students bring to the table. You don’t like being challenge? Learn how to defend your ideas, learn how to teach without acting like you are the supreme authority, and that is the only reason people should be listening to you. If your students have opinions so strong they are toxic to your class room, then learn how to get them to express those feelings in a way that might be constructive, in a way you could actually teach them something.
@dersk #17
I don’t actually work in the classroom, so my experience might not be as informative as others, but I work on a college campus and interact daily with students. From my experience this a mix of a real trend, and a self perpetuating meme. Yes, students are more willing than ever to challenge their instructors. I don’t think they are any less likely to believe what they hear, just more likely to speak up about it (though that is just a personal opinion).
The students’ culture is one fundamentally different from the one most of the instructors had when they were in school. The students are literally surrounded by news, data, information, opinions, to an extent not seen before. They can find, very easily, evidence to support almost any claim they want to make. That evidence may not be good, in may in fact be completely false, but they have it right there, confirming their biases. Some instructors, if you ask me, either due to a lack of being prepared for this type of environment, or a lack of rigorous knowledge of their subject, often don’t know how to react to this. Bad teachers, or even decent teachers who just get flummoxed, can treat this as a direct challenge to their authority in the classroom.
So they build a narrative – students as enemy. That a simple way to think about it that doesn’t require them to think any deeper about their teaching. To use an example from the this instructors author’s blog – he didn’t want to use a global warming article because one bad student trying to complain too much about what the article said would sink his lesson plan. Well, first of all, you’re class isn’t about global warming, is it? So why would you get in the debate at all? Wasn’t this just an example? Can’t you talk about knowledge in the abstract in such an environment without getting bogged down in the specific cultural baggage of the issue? If your students aren’t ready for that, then that means you didn’t prepare them enough to do this kind of analysis.
And now I’ve gotten a bit off topic, but I’ll just make one more point. I know it’s easy for me, who is not in a classroom (anymore) to say this stuff. Teaching well is really hard. But if teachers want to be good at it, they have to use the passion their students bring to the room, not avoid it.
Well, I have just been escorted out of the strange world of Sharon Hill. So I can say that being challenged isn’t just the exclusive fear of adjunct college professors. Apparently, plenty of skeptics have the heads up their asses as well. Not you PZ Meyers. The exception rule.
I’ll stop the digression after this post, but the reason for that is that while “typical” MI’s are all similar, atypical ones are not. The atypical designation is everything except a typical MI, and can present as jaw pain, arm pain, abdominal pain, painless, sweating, weakness, fatigue or anything else. The typical one is the one that is most common for both genders, while the atypical designation is just a hodgepodge that happens to be relatively more common in women, diabetics, and the elderly.
@Raryn, #12
…and, don’t.
Particularly with your arrogantly ignorant caps.
But even without them …don’t.
I’ve seen several people post Schlosser’s diatribe on Facebook, and I’ve been holding my tongue.
The idea that the universities are on big lefty hootenanny is an urban legend.
See the Powell Memo to see how the right wing has made the academy such a difficult place to work.
Just keep in mind that people 18-22 years of age are coming of age in a world where the job market is not good, the safety net is too porous, and the America Dream appears to be a fantasy. As they learn to use their brains, they are going to be questioning the system much more strongly then previous generations. As they should. This their future we’re talking about, and they have had nothing to do with the various foul-ups the Neoliberal Era.
So if a professor is that afraid of his progressive students, he should be thinking about why they are so challenging. They may not have a future if they are just milquetoast or sheep.
What was #29?
I agree that it’s not a particularly liberal/conservative issue, but I think there’s shockingly little consensus on that point of ethics. Lots of people from all over the political spectrum seem to believe that sex with students is just one of the perks of being a professor.
chigau @35:
Someone criticizing PZ for being on the “wrong side”.
@chigau: deleted when kirbmarcmei was banned or found to be a sock puppet or something, I think.
ah, thank you tony!, I knew that there had been a comment there, but I focussed on why it was gone, not what was there, because I didn’t want to guess at the content without reading it.
Tony!
Ohno!
PZ purged someone for disagreeing with him?
You know who else purged people?
Stalin.
Does that count as a kinda Godwin?
I think it’s different, but definitely scores the same on the good/evil-meter.
Call it a Godtie.
#29, either slyme or sockpuppet of banned slymer is my guess.
Conservatives will always want to “teach the controversy” when they can’t just outright lie. When they can’t shout you down with hostility they’ll whine for civility and “both sides” false equality.
Speaking truth to authority has never been easy. It’s a dangerous thing to do. Most authority is corrupt and relies on unquestioning compliance. I’m sure people like this are afraid of truth tellers. Liars always are.
Two issues stood out to me the most when I read this after gog posted it in the Lounge.
1) How society should think about the use of intense negative emotion directed at:
* beliefs
* behaviors
* social structures
* persons
“Persons” is a proxy for beliefs, behaviors and social structures since people are what have beliefs, engage in behaviors and create/maintain social structures. After all we can’t do anything about problematic beliefs, behaviors and structures without actually doing things about persons (Authorities are an important subgroup).
I could believe that students are displaying greater emotional sensitivity to subjects and emotional intensity in expression and feeling. I can believe that this is currently causing problems.
So fucking what? What emotion is it? Expressions of suffering and outrage are very different, are contextualized differently and involve different interaction. What substance comes with it? Is the substance altered by the emotion (I respect emotion absent of distorted reasoning)? What/who is it directed at? What is the relationship between the emotion and what it is directed at? Is the person a victim or privileged person whining? What are the social forces relating to the expression of the emotion and substance?
Whining about intensity and sensitivity is not enough. Society needs to learn how emotion works, what it represents, how to control it in oneself, how it relates to things and how to have a social conflict without dehumanizing people or letting emotion put blinders on oneself. Removing expression and feeling of intense emotion would handicap the ability of suffering people to solve that suffering. Learning how to deal with other people experiencing intense emotion can let us learn about deescalation, helping victims, how intense emotion relates to irrationality and illogic and more.
This could be a great educational opportunity.
2) Conflation of social support for harassment victims meant to counteract bias in society and government.
The bolded part makes no distinction between a social structure, and outside social elements meant to relate to that structure. No one is talking about immediately assuming that the other person is a harasser (or rapist since this involves similar issues) and dropping consequences onto them. What is being discussed is having a system in place to provide support for harassment accusers to ensure that victims are treated fairly.
Not all accusers are victims but the way they portray this pretty much pretends that so many are not that false accusations are worse than the status quo. Bullshit. The anonymous professor’s article (and the popehat post it references) seems to assume that the whole system must simply accept the accusation. But what is described is functionally identical to how a defense lawyer operates. The Justice system does not assume that an accused murderer is a murderer simply because of the accusation. But that system and society creates a structure to ensure fair treatment. You have to go through the motions of supporting someone who falsely accuses and have the whole structure designed to get to the bottom of the situation.
The role the rest of us play is to know what the current social problem looks like. Since harassment and rape are common and difficult to fight society puts extra effort into ensuring that the accuser is treated fairly so that victims are supported. There is nothing that I see when I follow the citation trail that is about preventing or eliminating investigation of the accusations by a conference or the government.
A friend posted the Schlosser article and after reading it I left a comment in which I referred him to you as the best example I knew of a liberal professor dealing effectively with patriotically correct Jesus mongers.
I should have known that all I had to do was wait a day, and you’d respond in person. I hope Schlosser learns something from this. No one likes a scaredy cat.
The American dream does not appear to be a fantasy. It is a fantasy.
@Crip Dyke #32
The caps were for emphasis. Didn’t realize they were an offense here one way or the other. I’d be happy to discuss the data if you’d like, but the largest available data sets regarding presenting symptoms support typical (chest pain) symptomatology being the most common for all people. Ex: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed?term=10866870 Other studies will show that women might have *more* symptoms in addition to just the chest pain, but still about half present with the characteristic chest pain. If that is ignorant, I’d love some additional information otherwise.
As I mentioned in the first post, there are other controversies in cardiology for women, such as slightly different types of plaques forming in different anatomic locations. Research is ongoing on those. But people more readily recognizing symptoms that are more characteristic of heart disease is not one of those issues.
Raryn @40:
I believe that Crip Dyke was referring to your “both genders” comment. Gender is not binary.
“kirbmarcmei” was just a formerly banned slymer bouncing back under a new pseudonym.
His fake email address consisted of an insult to me, too, which made him easy to spot.
Looks like one of the quoted paragraphs has been edited:
Old text:
New text:
Toned down, removed absolutist language. Still essentially trying to make the same point, though.
@ John Horstman #18
I think that your explanation assumes that her audience is uniform and that she is aware of the experience of the members of this uniform audience. I’m not convinced that I’m “‘splaining” as opposed to the tweet isn’t hyperbolic. I may be incorrect to interpret it as incorrectly asserting that most scientific thought is shaped by a white, patriarchal bias. I’m open to evidence suggesting that the statement is correct, or at least largely supportable. I however think that most science is, though often the product of white men, independent of white, patriarchal bias while science is sometimes both shaped and misinterpreted within such a bias. That is why I don’t think that the statement is false if it excludes the term most. For example, James Watson is sexist. The science of DNA structure and function is not shaped by a white, patriarchal bias to my knowledge, despite the bias in which Watson, Crick, and Wilkins operated. Again, I could be off the mark her, but it seems equally likely that Kelly was being hyperbolic and that, in my opinion, this dilutes a valid message..
Paraphrasing myself from a facebook comment when a friend posted a link to this: Notice that all the examples of “PC gone too far” are women asking that men not denigrate or ignore them. Just a little suggestion of nostalgia for the Good Old Days before women Messed Everything Up?
I wonder if this guy is the “get a male coauthor” reviewer?
I’ve been in academia since 2001, and I’ve never known professors to have slept with or dated students. Therefore, it does not happen at all.
AnatomyProf @53:
Those of us who live in the U.S. live in a society that was born from white supremacy and continues to exhibit bias in favor of white people. This same society is also a patriarchal one. Given that one cannot escape the influence of the culture one is raised in…given that one’s views and opinions are shaped by the culture one is raised in…do you believe that scientists have escaped such cultural influences? If so, how?
@ceesays #19
“if something happens 50% of the time, why is one side of that utterly equal chance “atypical?”
Why isn’t it MI type A and MI type B?”
Because the “atypical” side isn’t a single set of symptoms but a variety of different symptoms that happen to different people. It’s like saying that 50% ia A, while the other 50% is anything from B to Z; none of those other 23 things are as prominent as A.
Oops, I hadn’t refreshed this page in hours, and it was left at #19. Don’t mind me, disregard the above post…
@Tony! @ 56
Of course I don’t think that scientists have escaped cultural influences. However, this doesn’t lead me to believe that “most” scientific though that a person with either a high school or college education has been exposed to is shaped by white, patriarchal bias. Some of it is. Most of it is shaped by the competition of ideas to explain the available data either through experimental testing or exposure to additional observations that weren’t used to formulate the hypothesis. The science that most people have been exposed to in school has largely been well vetted by multiple scientists over time. Though most, but not all, science we teach in schools is the product of white men that doesn’t mean that the ideas themselves have been shaped by white, patriarchal bias. Please explain to me how our understanding of photosynthesis is shaped by white, patriarchal bias. How about the laws of motion or thermodynamics? I get that people think I’m missing something. Show me what I’m missing and I won’t be missing it any more. However, stating that scientists have bias (agreed) and that most science has been the product of white men (agreed) does not necessarily support the idea that most science is shaped by white, patriarchal bias. Science that has been shaped in such a manner can likely be refuted through experimentation or observation. Some has. What we have in our science textbooks at the K-12 and undergraduate levels (what most are familiar with, though this is perhaps an incorrect assumption on my part despite the 12+ years to which people are exposed to these ideas last some level) is not likely to be dominated by such ideas. I can’t be sure that this is true for history, as there is much more variation among those texts.
Most of the physical sciences have little room for white-male-patriarchal interpretations. The checking against reality removes those biases.
The problem, from what I glean from the snippets posted here, is more with anthropology, where some male anthropologists don’t believe there was matriarchal African societies. With anthropology, such white-male-patriarchal biases can override the evidence. Until less biased anthropologists come along, and read the evidence for what it is and corrects the record.
In my field of chemistry, one difference between men and women in publishing has been noted. The men tend to go for more, but shorter papers, to increase the weight of their list of publications. The women publish about the same amount of material in longer papers, so they don’t inflate their list of publications.
AnatomyProf @ 59,
Perhaps you should ask PZ to tell you his tales of trying to get his undergrads to name more than one woman scientist. Despite their many significant breakthroughs in the hard sciences, as in medicine and computing, it is perfectly possible for whole armies of very bright, very keen students to arrive at his university and many others entirely unaware of all the women who have been carefully written out of history.
Try these surnames on your students – Lovelace, Meitner, Gautier, Potter, Hopper, Bell Burnell, Franklin – before you give the collective mind a clean bill of health. Please.
AnatomyProf #59
What you’re missing is that the decisions about what questions to look into and what data to collect are, themselves, influenced by patriachal, white supremacist assumptions. For instance, the WEIRD problem in psychology, or, as Beatrice and others noted above, the way in which a great deal of medical research only looked at cis, mostly white, men, and assumed that that data would carry over (or, in some cases, arbitrarily decided that it wouldn’t; black men are often not given medical treatment for things like high blood pressure and respiratory ailments because there are separate diagnostic thresholds for black people than white people), etc. the list goes on.
Maurine Brian @61
I understand that. I’m currently working to increase undergrad exposure to the contributions of women and traditionally underrepresented ethnic groups, particularly where this overlaps student demographics. Franklin is discussed prominently in one of my courses both as a positive example of women in science and as an example of the sexism that defines the sciences historically and which we are only slowly overcoming today. This reality does not however validate Kelly’s statement. It is a statement that reaches past reality and potentially confirms the anti-science bias some people have. It is not helpful to the debate because it is a hyperbolic generalization that fails to address real, specific issues that deserve discussion. I don’t get while it is being defended as part of a deserved criticism of Schlosser.
Dalillama @ 62
I think that fits in with some. I disagree with the term most. I don’t think it is helpful to our understanding to claim most when it is inaccurate to do so. I do however appreciate your examples of areas where science can suffer a white and/or patriarchal bias as recognizing such examples is a necessary component of overcoming/overturning them.
Evolutionary biology as u know it isn’t that scientific but shaped by white patriarchal bias of ppl who claimed authority on it.
I ask you all to join me in jumping off a cliff. Gravity is a false product of the Anglo-patriarchal enlightenment.
And 2+2=5 as dictated by Ingsoc po-mo.
The patriarchal white bias in heart disease symptoms manifested most harmfully not in the conduct of the science itself, but in how people used and interpreted the data after it was established. In real life almost no one presents with only the pure textbook typical symptoms. Even those with the typical symptoms typically also have other, atypical, symptoms as well. It is the physicians’ job to apply judgement in deciding which of a patient’s many symptoms are the “pertinent positives and negatives” that matter to making the diagnosis, and which are the incidental random stochastic stuff that is not clinically significant. A man presenting with both typical and atypical symptoms was much more likely to have his typical symptoms noted and considered, and have heart disease included in the differential diagnosis. “He has chest pain. We’d better get the ECG and troponins checked to make sure it’s not an MI”. A woman presenting with the same combination of symptoms was far more likely have have the atypical symptoms noted and emphasized, and sent home with a diagnosis of a stereotypically female disorder, like anxiety or hysteria, and not even checked for MI.
One quibble I have with the “white-male-bias” is that it is often used by newagers to promote “other ways of knowing”, without properly defining those ways, and showing that they work as well as or better than science.
Dalillama @62:
What exactly do you think Anatomy Prof missed? What was written (my bolding);
I don’t think you or Maureen Brian are addressing what Anatomy Prof actually wrote.
Leaving aside the question of how accurate “Schlosser” may be about the current state of academia — a question I feel unqualified to address — I find the article quite interesting for what it reveals about the author’s character.
Boiling down his argument to the essential point, he claims that professors (at least, at some institutions) now have two choices. On the one hand, they can teach, challenging their students’ assumptions and trying to make them think; in which case, they may lose their jobs, thus being censored and ensuring that only non-challenging teaching happens.
On the other hand, they can pre-emptively censor themselves to avoid offending anyone. Same result, as far as the teaching goes; but in the latter case, at least they get to keep their jobs. They’re not actually earning their pay, by teaching what college professors should teach, but they still draw their paycheck.
Which did “Schlosser” choose? To censor himself. To surrender to what he thinks is wrong. And to continue to draw a paycheck.
Not exactly “Here I stand, I can do no other,” is it?
African Americans stood up to firehoses and police dogs and lynchings for their rights. Factory workers went on strike for weeks, went hungry, shivered in the bitter winter, for safer working conditions and fair pay. Gays rioted and marched and suffered at the hands of police and their employers and their landlords. Suffragists picketed the White House for the first time in history, were imprisoned, went on hunger strikes, and were force-fed.
What does “Schlosser” bravely do, in defense of the truth as he sees it?
He writes an article … under a pseudonym … on a site that doesn’t allow commenting.
Even if his analysis were spot-on, why should anyone bother to listen to him?
Well, I don’t know if me posting it in the lounge got it featured, but yay!
The one thing that jumped out at me the most, and I’ll paraphrase a comment I made on Facebook about it:
This strikes me as somebody saying, in more words, that they want “reals before feels.” Who decides what constitutes an objective standpoint? Rebecca Reilly Cooper strikes me as a bit of an authoritarian at worst or privilege-blind at best. Also, why would she think that individual experience doesn’t form the basis of political action, just as long as enough people share common threads in the narrative and gather enough clout to influence the establishment? Then, in turn, the basis of objectivity shifts! The system kinda works as long as you have some privilege to assert…
As far as students elevating minor slights to protestable offenses: again, what constitutes a minor slight and a protestable offense? Reals before feels, indeed.
kirbmarc’s comment was quoting more from @bad_dominicana’s twitter conversation and saying how terrible it was that we were On Her Side. Because what she is saying is so obviously stupid and terrible, because of course.
And now we have ragdish mocking her too. Great fucking work.
The actual point she is making does not seem to be about rejecting science. It is about the way science is used and abused. The myriad biases of the sciences, the many ways evopsych in particular has a patriarchal and Eurocentric focus, and also some concern about scientific racism.
@bad_dominicana mentions the nice hypocrisy in the author of the original article, using a pseudonym supposedly for his own safety, doxxing @bad_dominicana with information about her identity that she explicitly did not have on her Twitter page or linked Tumblr page.
She has been receiving harassment, as mentioned previously in this thread. So have other people mentioned in the article in the OP. But guess what?
It was removed due to the death threats, but also because “some of the conclusions drawn in the article misrepresented her tweet”
Surprise fucking surprise.
This is just seems to always fucking happen whenever a feminist says something. There is always someone nearby to wring their hands and hand out a condescending criticism against the obviously foolish and stupid thing that the uppity feminist said….except that the criticism always seems to reveal that the person doing the criticism doesn’t actually really truly understand what the feminist was actually fucking saying.
It is like clockwork. Almost like those same feminists becoming a target of other, more aggressive idiots and getting bombarded with hate, harassment, and threats.
Also, PZ should probably remove the doxxed information that he has quoted in his original post, which is no longer on the Vox website. Just saying.
@Tualha #68
This is the other thing that bothered me a lot. If the system is so broken in the way that he says it is, then why isn’t he standing up and demanding that he be able to teach without fear of reprisal from petty offenses to students on the basis of academic freedom? Instead, post an article to Vox (a site which I’ve had ambivalent feelings about).
So little of it makes sense to me. But maybe that’s just the way I feel.
A quick correction.
“Why would she think that” should read more like “does she think that.”
AnatomyProf @ 63.
Good to hear it!
Amphiox @ 65,
Surely the truly scientific approach to all medicine would be to rule out or to diagnose at the earliest possible stage whichever potential final diagnosis would be most likely to kill the patient? In such a process reliance on “normal” symptoms – even when that’s barely half of all patients, as in the case of MI, might gradually be eliminated from the curriculum at Med School.
I say this as someone who lost her sister to ovarian cancer after she’d been treated for every other possibility for at least two years. Then, finally, she got a scan and major surgery + chemo at the stage when this was merely a postponement of death. All a bit arse-about-face, certainly to the lay person
Other Miscellaneous Bullshit in the Vox Article:
– The idea that “things” have changed dramatically since 2009.
– The consistent laying of blame on the student body for said “things” when most of the issue seems to be administrative.
– Saying that the kinds of complaints coming from liberal, social justice minded students are about “feelings” and are not able to be successfully rebutted, regardless of circumstances or contexts, by professors.
– The standard Dawkins/Coyne conflation: characterizing concern for emotional well-being as being unable to get students to think critically or approach “difficult concepts”.
– Flat out asserting that the people with social justice concerns are more concerned with appearing good than understanding issues or bringing about change.
-“Identity Politics”
– Insisting that social justice politics (or whatever he is yammering about) is entirely about feelings/personal experience and nothing else. He is quite forceful about this point.
– Inexplicably laments how people are talking more about Avengers 2 than abortion issues and then immediately mentioning how he is too afraid to bring up abortion issues in the classroom.
– To prove how similar to McCarthy the modern college campus has become, he quotes an article from the right-wing National Review. As if right-wingers haven’t been making the same accusations that Pseudonym is making now over the last few decades. The only difference is that now they are pretending that the complaints are novel so that they can dismiss an entire generation of liberal students and all social justice concerns in one fell swoop.
– Complains about backlash against Chait’s article immediately after whining about bad it is people refuse to engage and debate and analyze properly.
-In an article about dismissing the relevance of arguing based entirely on feelings and personal experience, he insists that liberals should dismiss the Terror of being accused of triggering students, because he has seen it, he has lived it, and it is real, because he has seen it and lived it and just trust him.
– His suggestion for a Good Alternative is do everything that he already describes as Bad, but also be” confident in ideas” and not petty or nihilist, deliberate, and requiring effort. Very practical advice.
– Handwringing about Tactics. (While doxxing someone)
– The idea that we should trust and not blame the victims is turned into the supposed belief that harassment victims should not have to ever give proof in order to make the harasser declared Guilty (the actual example given however is yet another story where the alleged harasser brought his accusers to court for defamation, so….)
– “Echo chamber”
And I will end with simply what I think might be the asinine and dishonest quote from the article.
About 5 years ago I was trying to devise a method of doing a woodcrafty type project and decided to use carbon paper for part of it.
Do you know how hard that crap is to find these days? I called every store I could find in the San Francisco Bay area with no luck (and a lot of time spent trying to explain what it was in the first place).
I finally ended up finding a place to order old stock of it online from some far off land that time forgot.
composer99 22: I wrote a near-post criticising Schlosser’s article when someone linked it on Twitter yesterday, and was going to finish it this morning when I saw this. As usual, PZ and the Horde nailed pretty much everything I was going to say and then some, especially anteprepro at 75. Thanks you guys for freeing up my morning!
PatrickG 24:
The title of my would-be post was: College professor claims he’s liberal, doesn’t understand what liberal means.
It began thusly:
And ended:
Jackie the social justice WIZZARD!!! 48:
I have it pegged as a nightmare. YMMV.
That… doesn’t even remotely follow. o_O
Christ, what an asshole.
Precisely because he has that fear (irrational as it is)? Precisely because he (ridiculously) believes the system is so broken that it’d cut him back down to size if he stood up?
I like that.
There really should be such a museum, for that exact reason.
I’ve TAed for about 10 cumulative years, as a grad student at two different state universities. My partner TAed for several years at one, and took courses at another. We each have two bachelor’s degrees plus a higher degree, because we’re terrible at deciding what to do with our lives–math, biology, psychology, medicine. We’ve seen a lot of college teaching in the last two decades is what I’m saying.
Neither of us has ever witnessed, or heard from a colleague who’s experienced, liberal students threatening an instructor for teaching offensive material. I’m sure it happens. It must happen sometimes. But it didn’t happen to us, even when teaching topics that could be expected to trouble a liberal kid, like adaptive infanticide or male/female reproductive skew or evo psych. Some students didn’t pay attention; some students asked questions or disagreed and argued, like they’re supposed to do. Nobody said “Hey! This is all from a white male perspective so I’m complaining about you to the Dean.” Nobody verbally attacked us, or an instructor we were familiar with.
You know who kinda did do that? Conservative students. Not all, not most, but a few–mostly white, majority male. They asked for permission to skip exams with evo-bio content because they didn’t believe in evolution. They blogged false accounts of how their biology professor (incredibly mild-mannered guy, couldn’t insult a fruit fly to its face) suddenly started ranting about how stupid Christians were. They wrote letters to their community nursing instructor asking for no more discussion of trans* issues because we’ve discussed those people SOOO many (1) times already.
And that was it. The conservative students weren’t a big threat to our teaching evaluations either; most of them approved or didn’t care, a few of them criticized us (often constructively) and the departments said “uh-huh, noted.” Most students of any political persuasion were a pleasure to teach, and nobody terrified us. Students aren’t terrifying.
*steal* :-)
I’ve been tracking Alexandra Erin’s blog mostly for her sometimes brilliant satires of the Sad/Rabid Puppies as portrayed in book reviews (if you’re not familiar with Vox Day’s pompousness or the general anti-liberal paranoia of certain SF writers, or the bizarre vituperative proxlity vomited by certain other SF writers, it might be hard to see how they’re satires).
But she’s also been seriously pointing out the problems with the essay from the OP, and as she says:
1) Edward Schlosser is a liberal professor, and his students terrify him.
2) I figured out how to sum up the Edward Schlosser thing….
3) Edward Schlosser Part III: The Disgusting Assumption
OT @76: Next time head to a fabric store and ask for transfer paper. Still used, for the same reason you wanted it.
transfer paper!!!
I couldn’t remember what it’s called.
Neither is this liberal adjunct professor whose take-down of the Schlosser piece is brilliant.
http://www.vox.com/2015/6/5/8736591/liberal-professor-identity
Owlmirror @81
Thanks so much for the pointer to Alexandra Erin and her awesome blog!
I went to a liberal arts college renowned for its politically progressive atmosphere. Sometimes even I find the students to be a little bit “much.” But I’ve seen a grand total of one outburst in class, and it was from a conservative.
But there’s something in particular I’d like to comment on, and it’s the pattern of male professors using pseudo-feminist excuses to justify their own creepy behavior toward female students.
My liberal arts college also only banned professor-student sexual relationships the end of last year. The science department had (and probably still has) rampant sexual harassment and exploitative relationships between professors and students. There were many male professors, particularly in the STEM department, who were notorious (even among faculty) for giving preferential treatment in grades, lab positions, etc. to the students who performed “favors” for them. Coincidentally, when the debate to ban these relationships was raging, the only dissenting voices were certain male STEM professors, particularly the ones who were already known for this kind of behavior. Female STEM faculty, the administration, and pretty much everyone in the humanities and social sciences departments were unanimously outraged. But the male STEM professors trotted out the same arguments Schlosser does in his blog post and article – namely, that penalizing these relationship would be “infantilizing,” that the relationships are harmless or even beneficial to the learning environment, and that a ban would intrude upon his personal freedom of expression.
All these male professors also liked to call themselves “liberals.” They acted open about sex in the hopes of deceiving female students into seeing them as progressive and harmless, even feminist, and used this facade to shame other students and faculty who were uncomfortable with their behavior. “If you get worked up about me hitting on you during office hours, you’re a prude being repressed by what I consider the patriarchy.” “If you disapprove of me having sex with this student, you’re just a man-hating Puritan who hates freedom.” or “My students can fully consent to these relationships because I respect them, unlike you” (while blithely ignoring the inherent power differential).
Although there may be a small number of relationships between professors and students that turn out OK (that is, with no negative repercussions for the professor, student, or any third parties) the fact is that the majority do not. They are extremely detrimental to the learning environment, particularly to female students.
Let’s say I’m a female STEM student who has just learned that one of my male professors is sleeping with another female student in my class. If I had two brain cells to rub together, I would be very worried. What if my professor makes sexual advances against me? How can I reject him when he holds my grade (and more) in his hands, and how can I prove it if he retaliates against me for saying no? What if this student he is having sex with is in competition with me for a lab position? How can I be sure that we will both be given fair consideration? Can I trust any of my other male professors in the first place? How do I know they are evaluating me as a student and not as a potential sexual partner? Do I feel comfortable reaching out to this professor for help, going to office hours, or otherwise meeting behind closed doors? What if I am too good of a student, and he targets me because good students tend to want to please their teachers? What if I am a marginal or poor student, and he targets me because he knows I want to improve my grade? If a professor praises me, how do I know that he is praising me for my ability and not just trying to get into my pants? What if a professor misinterprets my ordinary friendliness as sexual interest?
These aren’t hypothetical scenarios. I know of women who have dropped out of graduate STEM programs entirely, simply because they could not stand the atmosphere engendered by supervising professors sleeping with other students. It is an endemic problem and sadly one that is often left out of discussions on misogyny in academia, probably because we have eroticized it so much as a culture. It’s a relic of an age when the effects this would have on a woman’s career didn’t matter, because women weren’t supposed to have careers anyway.
Consider my mind blown.
“Always two there are – a master, an apprentice.”
…the ex-pression of blood out of the rest of the system and into the corpora callosa…? It really doesn’t make sense otherwise.
Schlosser is giving Citizens United a run for its money.