Harvard privilege + NY Times centrism gets this kind of crap published: I Teach Computer Science, and That Is All. It’s an op-ed by a clueless Harvard professor explaining that while it’s deplorable that Trump is dismantling the educational system in the US, the fault lies with those professors who bring their politics to work.
Nothing justifies the unwarranted attacks by the Trump administration on universities as a whole and on my institution in particular. I am proud of Harvard’s leadership for resisting the impossible demands made of it. I also believe these attacks are enabled by the lack of popular support for universities. We academics should look at how we contributed to this erosion of trust by allowing the blurring of the lines between scholarship and activism.
In recent years the mantra of bringing your whole self to work has replaced the old notion that you should leave it all at the door. This movement has had some positive outcomes. Ensuring everyone feels included and has access to mentors and role models can be crucial to attracting and retaining talent.
Some have taken it too far, letting the personal and political overtake the professional, which has led to pressure on businesses to take positions in matters outside their domain. Makers of business software weighed in on elections. Google employees staged a sit-in over Gaza. Right-wing activists began a boycott of Bud Light after it was featured in a transgender influencer’s promotional social media post. The result is that people who disagree with one another find it hard to work at the same company or buy the same products, increasing the problem of polarization.
Oh, yeah, the real problem here isn’t Republican politics, it’s that Google employees thought genocide was bad and Budweiser briefly featured a trans person in an ad. That’s polarizing! We can’t can’t confront and conflict with terrible ideas and actions, that’s not the university’s job. (Except…it is.)
It wouldn’t be a NY Times op-ed without a healthy dose of both-siderism.
On the extreme right, the same idea has taken hold in government, where the very notion of a nonpartisan public servant is threatened, and those deemed insufficiently loyal have been fired. Both versions, on the left and the right, are toxic.
On the one hand, having a trans woman in an ad; on the other, boycotts, death threats, and Kid Rock shooting up beer cans with an assault rifle. Both equally evil! On one hand, Google employees peacefully protesting their employers’ policies; on the other, Israel bombing and killing civilians. We’re supposed to be confused about these two entirely equivalent actions. I have to conclude that any idiot can become a Harvard professor, and the NY Times will happily publish any waffle they shit out.
And this is how he teaches.
You might think I can avoid politics in the classroom only because I am a computer scientist. This is not the case. Faculty members who are determined enough can inject politics into any topic, and after all, computer science has brought huge and significant changes to society. The interaction of computer science and policy sometimes arises in my classes, and I make sure to present multiple perspectives. When I teach cryptography, a topic at the heart of the tension between privacy and security, I share with my students writings by former National Security Agency officials as well as “The Crypto Anarchist Manifesto.”
In fact, I believe that the lessons students learn from computer science (and science in general) can make them better citizens. Trying and failing to solve hard problems teaches students that there is such a thing as an objective truth and our first attempts to find it are often wrong.
Oh. So he’s the guy who has been teaching that imaginary pseudophilosophical claptrap about there being no such thing as truth. Now everyone can stop picking on post-modernism and go after the Harvard computer scientists instead. He teaches cryptography, a subject that he considers himself an expert in, but he can’t say anything about the dangers of crypto, because that would be political
, and professors shouldn’t have political opinions.
OK, I don’t know much about crypto, but then he gives examples I’m more familiar with.
All academics are experts on narrow topics. Even when they intersect with the real world, our expertise in the facts does not give us authority over politics. Scientific research shows that vaccines work and climate change is real, but it cannot dictate whether vaccines should be mandated or fossil fuels restricted. Those are decisions for the public, with the scientific evidence being one factor. When academics claim authority over policy, the result is not an increased effect on policy but decreased trust in academia.
That is insane. College professors do not have direct power, so the idea that they “dictate” anything is nonsensical — all we can do is inform and encourage people to use their knowledge wisely. Vaccines WORK, hell yes they do, and we can confront our students with the data and evidence and experiments that show that they are effective and save citizens’ lives, and further we can show that bad policy, like that perpetrated by that grand fraud, Robert F. Kennedy jr., will not work and will kill people, so for a biology professor to sit on their hands and refrain from stating the truth is a criminal neglect of their responsibilities. Hush now with that science and facts and history — it’ll make people distrust academia, because we keep saying that your misconceptions and errors are wrong.
But that is our job.
The author, Boaz Barak, is an Israeli, and serves on Harvard’s Presidential Task Force on Combating Antisemitism and Anti-Israeli Bias (he seems to avoid saying where he stands on anti-Palestinian bias) so he’s a hypocrite. He’s happy to denounce all those academic activists who are eroding the public’s trust in the universities by taking a stance on the politics he disagrees with, but he himself thinks that his politics are great and good, and that no one should be offended by them.
I might disagree with his politics, but I don’t think he should be fired for holding them. I think he should be fired for being a colossal hypocritical dumbass who can’t think his way out of a soggy paper bag.
The Bud Light thing was even worse. She wasn’t in an ad, they sent her a single can with her picture on it that she featured on a video that you had to already be watching to even see. It’s not like this was on any media that went out across the nation or even locally in one city. It was on her own video to however many viewers she had. And the bigots lost their shit over that.
What a doorknob. It can’t “dictate” it in that scientific research can’t tell you what to do, but it can certainly tell you if using government authority is the best way to ensure there is widespread enough vaccination rates to help make them effective or to nudge people towards electric or low emission vehicles. It’s like how parental authority is the best way to ensure that a child doesn’t eat nothing but birthday cake for every meal.
What this idiot is doing is blaming the victim.
Or in the case of the neo-Nazi GOP and Trump, the victims. There are many, almost everyone in the USA and many people in the rest of the world.
In his particular case, they would be the Universities in general, Harvard in particular, and Jews, a favorite target of much of the right wingnuts.
Just say NO.
And keep on saying no for as long as it takes.
Just about every sentence this guy wrote is wrong.
It would take pages to explain it and with this sort of trash, isn’t worth the time.
He is also a heartless killer of…Strawpeople.
The whole op-ed is a graveyard of dead Strawpeople.
To cite just the first few examples.
This isn’t even remotely true.
The colleges and universities in the USA are generally popular, respected, and well supported financially.
The attacks on the universities started a few months ago, when a 78 year old destructive guy of dubious sanity was elected president.
This never happened.
He is living in a fantasy world.
The vast majority of college professors in all fields aren’t activists at all.
What his op-ed lacks besides any engagement with the Real World is…data.
Where is the data for this assertion? It doesn’t exist.
More imaginary Strawpeople to slaughter.
I’ve never heard that anywhere.
He just Made It Up.
At this point, you realize you have a limited lifespan of at most a century and decide there are better uses of that time than reading nonsense like this.
Harvard isn’t the only university where any idiot can become a professor.
‘”…Trying and failing to solve hard problems teaches students that there is such a thing as an objective truth and our first attempts to find it are often wrong.”
Oh. So he’s the guy who has been teaching that imaginary pseudophilosophical claptrap about there being no such thing as truth.’
Am I missing something here? Isn’t that exactly the opposite of what he claims to be teaching?
He’s trying to have it both ways. Bad people are teaching diverse perspective, but he’s teaching the way to objective truth.
Will Boaz explain to us the objective difference between the bad kinds of anti-Semitism and the good kinds of anti-Semitism? Or is anti-semitism against Palestinians ok because they are somehow not Semites?
When he says “leave out the politics” he means “leave out the ethics and morality.”
This attitude is nothing new among techies, but we are now reaping the result with the ascendancy of an unethical, immoral technocracy.
On a somewhat brighter note Australia has just finished its federal election with the Labor Party (a.k.a. the Shit-lite Party) returned with an increased majority. Even better the leader of the opposition Shit Party lost his seat. His nicknames were Mr Potato Head in reference to his chrome dome and Il-Duce inspired by his baldness and his nasty policies.
He campaigned by channelling Trump, even engaging one of Trump’s campaign mangers to work on his party’s campaign. One of his candidates promised to “make Australia great again” while he promised to get rid of tens of thousands of “inefficient” public servants. he also promised to stop teachers from teaching “left wing” ideology.
The other bright spot is that the truly shitty parties who once fielded a candidate that mowed a swastika into his lawn did even worse. Sadly the Greens also took a pasting.
@9. I Really feel like being an Australian (or Canadian) right now.
Now I’m the one who is complaining more: I would like to object to the notion that all scientists exclusively study narrow fields. A logician, for instance, often studies notions and processes that are widely applicable. But even a logician is not forbidden to study history, say. And a scientific education should greatly enhance people’s ability to think logically and systematically, which is something politics could certainly profit from.
Then, I would like to note that the quoted article explicitly describes the Gaza sit-ins as “going too far”. What is going too far are the death counts, the witnessing of which is bitter every day, as is the powerlessness to bring them down. If we let them die by the tens (and quite possibly hundreds) of thousands, what is our notion of the value of human life?
Finally, I can affirm that scientists who speak out are not eroding confidence in science; the exact opposite is the case.
garydargan — yes, but it’s an interesting kind of pasting. The Greens lost seats and may end up with none at all once the votes are finally tallied, but they had almost exactly the same vote share as the last election, so it’s not that they lost electoral support, it’s that the vagaries of our preferential voting system worked against them this time.
kitcarm@10 — This election is not exactly a vindication of progressive politics. As garydargan says, the Shit Lite party defeated the Shit Max party. But considering the state of the US, I understand your sentiment.
A lot of Americans aren’t interested in justice or equality, they just want quiet.
This asshole is one of them.
PZ@6– I think it’s the way your point was written in the OP. It took me a couple of read-throughs to work out what you meant.
Tabby@1– Absolutely right. Science can’t measure the moral basis for a policy, but it can certainly assess effectiveness and unintended consequences, both of which belong in the “should we?” question.
I’m reminded of a saying about gamers: there are only two races in video games – white, and ‘political’.
To people like the writer above, anything that disagrees with their own beliefs is ‘activism’ or ‘politics’, but whatever they happen to believe is simply objective and obvious truth. In the context of teaching, I have no doubt whatsoever that this person has attempted to instruct their students in their preferred, ‘correct’ ideas about many subjects not directly connected to computer science.
@ ^ snarkhuntr : I guess you already know – don’t we all – but the vast majority of humans are actually non-white and People of Colour can be &sometimes are also described as “People of the Global Majority’ so, in fact, it could be argued that including white people is the “political” or at least atypical option.
@16. chrislawson : “Tabby@1– Absolutely right. Science can’t measure the moral basis for a policy, but it can certainly assess effectiveness and unintended consequences, both of which belong in the “should we?” question.”
Truth. Quoted for that.
@9. garydargan : My preferred nicknames for Dutton – the Trumpist reichwing former opposition LNP Coalition “leader” who lost his seat and was overwhelmingly rejected by the entire nation last night – was the Getsapotato and more recently Duddon or the Dud. Among some others a few of which are pretty rude! So glad the election destroyed the LNP but had been hoping (and volunteering to try to help) the Greens would do better and get the balance of power with a minority ALP govt.
@
^ Gestapotato Dutton.
StevoR: “I guess you already know – don’t we all – but the vast majority of humans are actually non-white and People of Colour can be &sometimes are also described as “People of the Global Majority’ so, in fact, it could be argued that including white people is the “political” or at least atypical option.”
That does not suggest what you imagines it suggests; what it does is endorse the conceit that including a minority is “is the “political” or at least atypical option”.
(Think about it)
I think you’re being too generous, PZ. Barak should be fired for wilfully misleading his public. Everybody who says that politics should stay out of the classroom / sports / arts / whatever, has an agenda. Barak isn’t trying to have it both ways. That’s just a cover for having it his way. He doesn’t truly believe that politics should stay out of the classroom.
rietplum@21 —
Yep. Cryptography is a subject one could teach apolitically if one chose to. Concentrate solely on the math, the algorithms, the common weak points in cryptography, make it a purely technical course.
But (1) cryptography has huge social, cultural, and political implications and avoiding all that means not teaching the whole subject, like a driving instructor who refuses to discuss road rules, and (2) it becomes political even if you don’t want it to: many Western governments have been drafting legislation to force the IT industry to install cryptographic backdoors for police investigations; meanwhile security experts and cryptographers have been pointing out that is mathematically impossible to build backdoors that will only open for benign agents (and let’s put aside what counts as “benign”). Even technical proofs are political when governments don’t want to hear them.
A Zionist whines about orgs taking positions in matters outside of their domain. That’s rich.
He’s mostly right about how he teaches crypto, at least. My advice: stick to what you know, and stop writing opinion pieces for the newspaper.
@ ^ beholder : Your advice and work attacking Kamala Harris and de facto voting for Trump here helped impose Trump on the world as
POTUS againtyrant. You have metaphorical blood on your hands and NO ONE should listen to you or your “advice” ever again. You, beholder, should confront your own ethical and political strategic failings and reconsider your views before issuing any advice to anyone else you Trump enabling piece of shit.I know Boaz Barak and as a computer scientist I can tell you that most computer scientists are fucking idiots who make basic logic 101 errors when you take them out of the very narrow fields they are an expert in.
@20. John Morales : “That does not suggest what you imagines it suggests; what it does is endorse the conceit that including a minority is “is the “political” or at least atypical option”. (Think about it)”
Okay, I think I see what you mean although I was riffing off the first sentenc e in snarkhuntr’s comment #17.
Yes, I know, StevoR, due to your attribution.
“I’m reminded of a saying about gamers: there are only two races in video games – white, and ‘political’.
To people like the writer above, anything that disagrees with their own beliefs is ‘activism’ or ‘politics’ […]”
That compares gamers with people like the writer above, which would not be flattering to gamers were there any merit to the claim.
@24
I love you too, StevoR.
@ ^
He’s fucking obsessed. In StevoR’s bizzaro world the people responsible for Trump are, in this order:
a. People who refused to support Harris’s full throated support of genocide in Gaza.
b. People who couldn’t give a shit either way and didn’t vote.
c. People wearing MAGA hats who would vote for Trump if he ran on a platform of kicking puppies.
I’ve already thoroughly eviscerated the idiocy of Stevo’s position, so I see no need to do it again.
https://freethoughtblogs.com/pharyngula/2024/12/23/maga-means-imperialism/#comment-2248044
I have a high school friend who now writes about tech for the NYT. I had avoided giving any money to the NYT for the last 20+ years but I convinced myself to bend a principle and sign up for a year, if only so I could actually read his work, and it cost a pittance anyway.
He’s getting an earful now about this Harvard dweeb from me, believe me. Are these meretricious pieties what my money is going to, lol??
Btw, I take a certain amount of pride in being part of the ‘too good for Harvard’ club as I was admitted for grad school but ended up at Stanford instead. Of course, I take care not to take too much pride since Bill Gates and Mark Zuckerberg are also in that club, broadly defined. 😬
Well, they are not. And nor are Jews. In modern academically respectable discourse “Semite” is only used, if at all, to refer to ancient populations, not modern ones, and “Semitic” refers primarily to languages, secondarily, to ancient population groups that spoke thse languages. As for “anti-semitism”, the term was coined in the 19th century (and swiftly adopted by antisemites themselves, as part of their pseudo-scientific racist ideology – there had been plenty of anti-Jewish prejudice in earlier times, but it had been religiously rather than pseudo-scientifically motivated) to refer to anti-Jewish beliefs, actions or sentiments. It has never meant anything else; and like other forms of racsim, has its distinctive features, the main one being the belief in a “Jewish conspiracy”, whereby Trotsky and the Rothschilds could be believed to be in league. Anti-Arab and specifically anti-Palestinian racism are of course widespread, dangerous and vile, but have nothing to do with antisemitism*.
*The unhyphenated form is to be preferred, as it avoids implying the existence of “Semites” to be anti.
Real thinkers and scholars incorporate balance without thought. It’s a natural part of inquiry. Good teachers are balanced except where balance is itself bias.
Balance is generally thought to be a virtue, a universal positive. This is the FOX principle: ”fair and balanced” is in fact an argument to replace objectivity.
There are people who advocate for things which are wrong.
In some cases the wrong thing is embedded in our thinking–such as the moral superiority of religious people.
In other cases the wrong thing is an outlier looking to get in, such as pretty much everything RFKJR says.
People advocating for the former position despise balance because it activates ideas they prefer to suppress, such as the fact that antisemitism and criticism of the government of Israel are not the same thing.
People advocating for the latter position love balance because it allows them to get their foot in the door and it attracts the politician who sees opportunity in disruption. Donald Trump is such a thing taken to the extreme–a Star Trek villain, a non-human entity that cruises the galaxy using exotic sensing mechanisms to find and exploit disruption. At the nucleus of every whorl of disruption is a person with a motive. The most successful group of such persons is now the President’s staff and cabinet.
Thus every argument for balance in the public forum is a lie of one kind or the other.
Or maybe it’s because so many academics are bought and paid for. Like this asshole.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/climate-environment/2023/11/16/john-clauser-nobel-climate-denial/#
Sure dude, that Nobel for quantum physics totally renders you an expert on atmospheric physics and climate change. Please offer us your equally expert opinion on brain surgery next. /s
Also asshats like Bjorn Lombard & Richard Tol. Lombard isn’t even a scientist, he’s just the economist who likes to pretend that proximity to actual Nobel Prize winners renders him some sort of expert in the field. Tol is a professor of economics, again not an actual scientist. But they sure like to cosplay as climate change experts. Notably missing: Boaz Barak’s outrage that academics are using their academic credentials as cover for their bought-and-paid-for crapinions, which is the real source of erosion of trust in academia.
BTW, hope everyone has developed a liking for Flint water and air pollution.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/climate-environment/2025/05/01/senate-vote-epa-air-pollution/
But according to Boaz, we can’t possibly push back against the wholesale destruction of our planet, economy and nation because the really big bad is sowing distrust in academia, the supposed bastion of actual facts and knowledge. Best just to go along to get along. Clearly.
@ 14
Yeah, but they’re also the ones who haven’t worked out that the impending shitstorm will affect them too.
It’s never a problem until it’s a problem that affects them, personally.
The sheeple haven’t worked out that following the Judas goat into the slaughterhouse works out fine for the goat. For them, not so much.
Silentbob @#29
At least StevoR is obsessed about important things that have an effect on the whole world, rather than on a single commenter, the way you are obsessed with John Morales.
I probably should have said, above, that the quote about gamers and race was originally said in the context of Gamergate – where a particularly vocal and entitled subset of people who play videogames declared themselves to be the only true ‘gamers’ and demanded that an entire industry and culture should bend to their particular set of whims and preferences. They’re still banging on about it – some of them are in government now.
Obviously not all people who enjoy video games fit into the description above.
@29. Silentbob : “I’ve already thoroughly eviscerated the idiocy of Stevo’s position, so I see no need to do it again.”
Then a few comments later I eviscerated your suppsoed evisceration. See comment #66 to your #63
Source : https://freethoughtblogs.com/pharyngula/2024/12/23/maga-means-imperialism/#comment-2248203
I notice you completely ignored and refused to address that just as you keep refusing to answer other questions that show up your positions flaws and errrors just as you, SilentBob also keep refusing to answer the question of whether you would leave John Morales alone..
I can assure you I will continue to hold the Purity Disunity mob that helped inflict Trump as dictator upon the world accountable and remind them of what they did and the consequences they are responsible for causing.
Facts — objective truths — do not have a liberal bias. It’s simply that conservatives find the facts not in agreement with their wish fulfillment and so they make up their own “facts”. It used to be that they just spun the facts so they appeared more in line with their positions, but as their positions have become more and more un-sane they have to depart from the facts, and so they demand that all those who deal in facts be silenced or destroyed. vis JD Vance : “We have to honestly and aggressively attack the universities in this country. Professors are the enemy.”
@29. Silentbob
False Silentbob totally false.
I’m the one living in reality here whereas beholder, the former commenter Vicar here and it seems you too are living in a delusional world where doing anything OTHER than unifying behind, supporting and voting for Kamala was somehow not utterly counter-productive and in essence treason to the leftwing of politics and virtually all progressive causes because doing anything other than supporting and voting for Kamala means helping Trump become a fascist dictator.
That was what beholder, Vicar and the purity disunity mob did. They in fact helped install Trump as fascist tyrant and they must be reminded and held accountable for that..
In reality the people responsible for Trump are, in this order :
= 1a) People wearing MAGA hats who would vote for Trump if he ran on a platform of kicking puppies.
= 1b) People wearing Stein / West / etc.. Third Party Spoiler hats who know that Trump would be catastrophic for the planet but are happy to throw everything and everyone else in the world under the bus due to their dislike of and refusal to do the ethically as well as politically correct thing and unify behind support and vote for Kamala Harris thus de facto supporting Trump.
= 1c) Those people who deliberately refused to vote therefore condemning the rest of our shared pale blue dot to Trump as the fascist dictator of the USA.
I have never stated that “People who refused to support Harris’s full throated support of genocide in Gaza.” are responsible and will add that that is a false premise because Kamala Harris does NOT and made it clear that she did NOT support genocide in Gaza whilst OTOH, Trump and the Repugs have made it very clear that they did and do support the genocide in Gaza.