Please know that there are many people that support you and are sick of this hyper-sensitive, McCarthyism-like environment that is being fostered across the country."
My view on this is it's the culmination of years of anti free speech trends on campus. It's a sad day when universities which should be bastions of tolerance, exploration and ideas have their culture consistently chipped away at by people who get "triggered" so easily.
It's not confined to universities, either. This growing list of "forbidden words" is making its way into the corporate world, too. Coupled with spineless HR who don't know how to constructively deal with people who claim to be offended. My current company is undertaking a massive, probably thousand man-year (sorry, person-year), effort to scrub all its internal and external documentation and even source code of any forbidden words, replacing them with, for now, non-triggering words. Not one person, to my knowledge has even politely questioned publicly whether this was a good use of company funds. If I was a shareholder I'd be outraged.
A small, core group of people loudly make this a huge issue of great importance, while the rest of us just want to get our work done and stay silent so we don't get fired by the woke patrol.
Honestly I can't wait until retirement when I don't have to constantly be walking on eggshells at work. It's sad--I used to love working in tech but it's insufferable now.
That's honestly just poor leadership from scared management. Management should be clearly articulating the mission, goals, and "culture" (for lack of a better word) of the company. This gives management and other employees grounds to challenge well meaning but unnecessary social action by forcing proponents to explain how those social actions would align with / further the goals, mission, and culture of the org. Usually proponents of these woke policies are not capable of doing this.
I don't know if there is a word for it, but I see it as a type of social bikeshedding.
In regular bikeshedding we spend a lot of time arguing over minor factors because everyone feels like they can have meaningful input and contribute. Then we gloss over the complicated stuff because it's too hard to get into.
In this case, people feel like they can push hard on relatively minor issues like uses of words and phrases because they can make a noticeable impact. Precisely because they feel powerless to effect actual systemic change. Widespread protest doesn't seem to change much, but targeted complaints can sometimes get someone fired.
There may be an argument that it could work as a ground-up approach similar to NYC's broken window policing, but I personally doubt that. I think the backlash will be a net negative.
In my company, someone objected to the terms “male” and “female” adapter ports or connectors for physical hardware equipment in our data centers, stating it was both offensive to gender non-binary coworkers and also fostered an aggressive general sense of violation of female genitalia.
Several engineering leaders forced the Networks team to create an internal RFC on proposed naming convention changes for this, which was then circulated to a wider set of reviewers.
Once it reached the reviewers, someone with common sense stepped in and asked how many actual women engineers or gender non-binary engineers reviewed it, and did they actually think it represented some type of progress on problematic language.
So they formed a committee of female and gender non-binary coworkers to review it, and their conclusion was that this was harmless language clearly and obviously rooted in decades old technical standards that did not invite or inflame any type of comparison with genitalia or gender choices among people, and that instead of worrying about this kind of exceedingly trivial issue, attention would be better paid to more overt and damaging language problems, like harassment or microbehaviors that disadvantage women in group leadership situations.
On one hand I was very proud of the conclusion they reached, but on the other hand very terrified at the whole process, ranging from extreme reactionary forced changes with no basis in reality all the way to giving a committee of women and gender non-binary coworkers carte blanche to rule on whether or not the language had to be changed (as if the rest of us don’t have brains and can’t voice opinions that ought to carry equal weight about that).
All told it was a colossal waste of time and money that deeply compromised employee trust in company leadership.
> In my company, someone objected to the terms “male” and “female” adapter ports or connectors for physical hardware equipment in our data centers, stating it was both offensive to gender non-binary coworkers and also fostered an aggressive general sense of violation of female genitalia.
This reminds me of people hiding and covering table legs in the Victorian era.
Exactly. Or, say you're building some business logic and you need to make some exceptions for VIP partners. In times past, you would add these exceptions to a "whitelist" and have logic to check this list and apply the exception. Now, you need to be very careful to call this an "allowlist" lest the woke patrol pull you aside and warn you that your variable name is insensitive and non-inclusive. I wish I was joking.
And yet whatever the origin (I suspect nobody can seriously claim to definitely state the actual origin of such a term) its usage as such a list, not referring (necessarily, but indiscriminately so some might be!) to black people, dates back at least as far as the Restoration in 1660 England.
And there's generally no exception for old things. Like many products, ours almost never permits breaking API changes, but an exception was of course made (at significant cost) to strip out public facing fields named "whitelist".
I'm surprised master/slave's the hill you want to die on - it's the one instance where the old terminology really is just bizarre jargon that's being replaced with words that are a direct, common-language description of what they do.
I really don't want to die on this hill! It's an example of a behavior I'd engage in if the wokepatrol wasn't there. I don't even speak English at work, I speak French, and we commonly use the words "maître" and "esclave" in that instance.
Whenever any work-environment friction will arise, I'll stop using those words for sure, I value my job more than I value terminology.
I got into trouble any time I said “guys” as a generic term for “y’all”. Also, I got in trouble for saying ladies or girls or women. I’m honestly not sure how I was supposed to describe a group of women. But no matter what noun I used, a colleague got offended. I quit that job as fast as I could. The company is now defunct, but I’m sure that colleague is still a real pleasure to work with wherever he ended up.
Not the OP but I personally enjoy lewd humour and, at a previous job, would crack jokes at some of my female colleagues. At my current job that would be considered altogether inappropriate, Despite the fact that that I only make those jokes around people I specifically know to be like-minded and give as good as they get, and avoid doing it around (or even within earshot of) people who are not ok with it.
But why does the university cave in so easily? Why is the Dean himself crawling on the floor to apologize for basically nothing? Are they afraid of bad PR? or lawsuits? Why?
Deans, just like CEOs, are at the top of the leadership chain to protect the interests of the institution, and especially to maintain a long-term vision against short-term gains and speculation.
Most people cave in when it's time to make such decisions. A lot of folks would chose a cookie in the short term, while desiring to have a six-pack on the medium outlook.
In business or education, you fail as a leader every time you don't make that trade-off: every time when you take a quarterly one-time gain against the long-term interest or profits of the corporation, or when you fail to protect freedom of speech and the right of innovators to take risks just because the "safe path" is easier for now.
I think Paul Graham touches on this very well in his latest essay:
>> Why do the independent-minded need to be protected, though? Because they have all the new ideas. To be a successful scientist, for example, it's not enough just to be right. You have to be right when everyone else is wrong. Conventional-minded people can't do that. For similar reasons, all successful startup CEOs are not merely independent-minded, but aggressively so. So it's no coincidence that societies prosper only to the extent that they have customs for keeping the conventional-minded at bay. <<
>> For the last couple centuries at least, when the aggressively conventional-minded were on the rampage for whatever reason, universities were the safest places to be. That may not work this time though, due to the unfortunate fact that the latest wave of intolerance began in universities. perhaps the decline in the spirit of free inquiry within universities is as much the symptom of the departure of the independent-minded as the cause. People who would have become professors 50 years ago have other options now. Now they can become quants or start startups. You have to be independent-minded to succeed at either of those. If these people had been professors, they'd have put up a stiffer resistance on behalf of academic freedom. So perhaps the picture of the independent-minded fleeing declining universities is too gloomy. Perhaps the universities are declining because so many have already left <<
I would say that's the most likely explanation. Plus, we see very similar things happen in primary education, where the loudest craziest parents cause the biggest potential PR/legal kerfuffles, so the schools often bend to them instead of standing on educational principles.
The argument is sophisticated and hard to summarise, but essentially, the author argues that "enlightenment liberalism" (i.e. the sort of philosophy that dominates universities) has a flaw at its centre that both creates Marxists and causes "enlightenment liberals" to constantly give in to the demands of those Marxists. The cycle goes like this:
1. Liberals assert that henceforth all with be free and equal, and that these things are self-evidently desirable (i.e. using reason alone).
2. Some liberals observe that life is full of inequalities and lack of freedoms. Because everyone is supposed to have equal opportunities, and because liberalism is generally uninterested in historical or traditional justifications for things, unequal outcomes demand an explanation which they find in the assumption of oppressive hierarchies. These liberals become Marxists.
3. They demand affirmative actions be taken in order to rectify these supposed oppressions. Embarrassed by the existence of inequality and lack of freedoms after declaring that their society is meant to have neither, liberals agree to these demands.
4. Realising they got what they wanted with little resistance, and that inequalities and lack of freedoms still exist, Marxists return to step 1.
In this framework the cause is nothing as simple or skin-deep as bad PR or lawsuits. Perhaps fear of those does play a role, but the author argues that the core reason is that the university is staffed by people who are genuinely embarrassed and upset by Marxist critique. Lacking intellectual ammo or a coherent philosophy of inequality, they invariably cave in when faced with outspoken demands that appear to align with their own agenda of equality.
I'm not necessarily against this but I don't think it goes deep enough. I think a better societal/psychological explanation can be found in the first third of Industrial Society and its Future. [0]
Thanks. I've never read that document before. The first third is indeed thought provoking.
What's awkward is I've now read at least three apparently compelling and logical explanations for the left/right divide, but some of them contradict each other in various ways.
A nice example of "Everything I dislike is Marxism".
Marx was extra specific in which his historical analysis was about economic classes. The framework he cites with the opossing groups is not exclusive to marxism, but hey, I guess it wouldn't be scary enough to the casual reader calling it Hegelianism for example.
Weird enough, the article gets a lot right, the critique of liberalism is on point IMO, but I don't really see the point of bringing this to the table. Radical liberalism is self-defeating as the framework fails to acknowledge the power relationships, thus is not surprising that liberal principles can result on illiberal consequences when tried to being pursued. Marxism was not even a thing when the french revolution became a bloodbath, and you can even say taking this event in account, Marxism is more descriptive on the outcomes of revolution than prescriptive.
On my perspective, on the recent events, I see only liberalism eating itself, and certainly I see little Marxist relationship with clear marxist tenants like workers taking control of their economic results. That's unless you're a liberal writing on a liberal magazine, doing mental gymnastics to avoid seeing the failures of liberalism, then you can loosely define Marxism and blame it all on it.
The first part of the essay does go into the question of whether what's happening can be truly called Marxism. I believe he argues convincingly that it can be, although indeed, everyone accepts that the "neo-Marxists" or whatever you want to call them don't call themselves that (BLM leadership excepted!), and they have moved on from an arbitrary notion of two economic classes to slightly less arbitrary notion of two races (white vs BIPOC/minorities/whatever it is today). A few other bits of jargon have been renamed, but otherwise the belief framework is intact.
Marx is by far the most famous proponent of this kind of dual class oppression/revolution based framework. Someone really deep into the history of that stuff might prefer the term Hegelianism, but it's hardly more useful for communication. There's a large population at least roughly familiar with what Marx believed and far more importantly, what happened everywhere his followers took power. The essay does acknowledge that the underlying worldview pre-dates Marx, and the term Marxism is thus merely a useful handle to describe that bundle of worldviews. It's not saying he invented the whole thing from scratch.
BTW: Quillette is not a liberal magazine and Hazony is a highly conservative Jewish nationalist.
It's pretty convincing when you read third party accounts of Marxism by right wing spokesman who have a lot to gain to equating what they don't like to Marxism. When you read either Marxists (plenty of others besides BLM) or the ones who you call Neo-Marxists, you find Marxists sighing when not Marxism is called Marxism, and the so called "Neo-Marxists" criticizing Marx.
>arbitrary notion of two economic classes to slightly less arbitrary notion of two races.
Every classification is arbitrary, although you can argue about it's usefulness or consistency.
>A few other bits of jargon have been renamed, but otherwise the belief framework is intact.
Except the most essential part which makes the framework consistent. But hey, if you squint hard enough even a dog can be a cat.
>Marx is by far the most famous proponent of this kind of dual class oppression/revolution based framework. Someone really deep into the history of that stuff might prefer the term Hegelianism, but it's hardly more useful for communication.
Marx is known for a lot of things, to be honest I don't be surprised if some isolated community believes that Marx had babies for breakfast, this is an effect of being an ideological boogeyman. Regardless of what you think of communism, it should be hard to deny the depth of his philosophical and historical points, if not that it's a regular POV. With that in mind, adding more legends to the Marxist black legend should be considered the opposite of useful communication.
>The essay does acknowledge that the underlying worldview pre-dates Marx, and the term Marxism is thus merely a useful handle to describe that bundle of worldviews.
Yes, as mentioned this is exactly my main problem with the essay, the author even spells out my main point, but still framing this as a external factor "corrupting" liberalism.
>BTW: Quillette is not a liberal magazine and Hazony is a highly conservative Jewish nationalist.
I was not familiar with the writer, and mixed the liberal term with the more American Libertarian. My mistake.
I have said this before and will continue to say this: to put an end to this, liberals in the United States need to openly repudiate identity politics progressivism and cancel culture. Former-President Obama has ( https://www.nytimes.com/2019/10/31/us/politics/obama-woke-ca... ); we should too.
Please speak up and, more importantly, please vote for old-school liberals instead of progressives.
Politics isn't going to solve this. You could elect an anti-PC theorist like Donald Trump, or an old school liberal like Nancy Pelosi, and this sort of thing would keep happening.
The real solution is just awareness. As people see more examples of this sort of thing going wrong they will be more careful about it.
I wish I believed that, but it seems more like a prisoner's dilemma. People get turned by making their self-interest the opposite of the group's interests after being individually targeted with high-pressure tactics.
Anyone who thinks this is all purely organic hasn't been paying much attention.
I'm okay with Obama rejecting identity politics if that's what he's doing, but it seems to me more like he's been spending his time post-presidency advocating for a certain style of incremental reform: just make small fixes right now to make things a little bit better, and as he likes to say: "the arc of history is long, but it bends towards justice".
The problem I have with that, is that for some problems you can't just fix it with incremental reform, you have to rip the bandaid off, and if you reject any reforms that aren't small incremental fixes to what we have, you end up fixing the small problems and leaving the big structural problems. Opinions will reasonably differ on how to deal with the problems facing society, but Obama's approach seems to me to be a little bit like vacuuming your living room while the house is on fire.
On the other hand, you have someone like Bernie Sanders, who isn't at all shy about advocating for significant structural reforms (similar in scope to the New Deal) and is about as progressive as anyone can be in American politics, yet at the same time he doesn't put any stock in identity politics either. I haven't listened to as much from AOC, but I get the impression she's the same way. In fact, I don't know of any major political leader who fits the mold of the "social justice warrior" or "political-correctness police" stereotype. I haven't run into very many of those people in my day-to-day life either, but my impression is that they're largely people without any great deal of power except maybe on University campuses.
Tl;dr: don't be afraid to vote for progressives in general with the aim of thwarting identity politics. A lot of prominent progressives aren't really fans of it either.
The Constitution is setup to make sure both sides are radical, but usually at equal enough power that changes they make are agreed upon by both radical factions. Strong ideologies are good. Things go to shit when everyone is a mealy-mouthed, middle of the road moderate, or when one side gets too much power.
Lost that thread somewhat post FDR with the expansion of the executive "rule making" bullshit though.
The irony of the new anti free speech movement is that much of it sprung up on Berkeley’s campus (and nearby SF), which is also host to the famous Free Speech Cafe.
That's a vast overstatement. To the point of being ridiculous. This kind of thing happens more than it used to but is still extremely rare. And in this case represents a misunderstanding. McCarthyism was also a government initiative. Private universities can do whatever they want. Someplace like Liberty University actively censors and punishes liberal views, but people are less likely to get upset because it's expected.
At the end of the day, students vote with their wallet.
The decision of the dean chooses to protect an environment of low-risk social-compliant low-EQ classroom, which will act as a deterrent on the university's prestige moving forward (e.g. you don't see those traits associated with MIT or Harvard).
At the end of the day the dean might get fired for his actions. To use an analogy, "nobody gets fired for choosing IBM, but if for years you're left beyond Amazon"... one might need to eventually take a hard look at the university leadership and make the needed changes.
