
Professors can’t stay silent about this extremist moment on campuses - jseliger
https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/professors-like-me-cant-stay-silent-about-this-extremist-moment-on-campuses/2017/10/27/fd7aded2-b9b0-11e7-9e58-e6288544af98_story.html?tid=ss_tw&utm_term=.dbdd2eff7de6
======
jostmey
I worry about an increasing movement toward radicalization on all ends of the
political spectrum. I think Trump represented a shift to the _far_ -right. Now
I worry liberals might shift to the _far_ -left. The middle ground seems to be
disappearing

~~~
justinzollars
Having lived in Ohio, the far right is exactly the same as the far left here
in San Francisco. What is funny is they do not realize this. So I think its
more a personality type selection than actual thought process or belief.

The result of believing the other side is evil, is no one is willing to work
together so we all lose.

I think this could be a function of things we've built on the internet such as
the ability to "hide" or "block" \- even moderators are bad I, an elected DNC
delegate is banned from the DailyKos because I disagreed with the Democrats
proxy war policy on Syria.

We are in trouble.

~~~
DashRattlesnake
> So I think its more a personality type selection than actual thought process
> or belief.

Yep, I think that's an important insight. I know a few people who grew up in
very evangelical/conservative Christian communities who later dropped that
ideology for left-wing ones (e.g. feminism). Their attitudes and behaviors are
almost _exactly the same_ , except that the content of their ideas has been
swapped out.

~~~
harpiaharpyja
Why the downvotes? Seems like a relevant anecdote.

~~~
smasuch
because the idea that women should get to work and vote isn't a far-left idea

~~~
DashRattlesnake
That's a pretty disingenuous comment: First, your characterization is probably
accurate if restricted to the "first wave" feminism (of a century ago), but,
IIRC, I think we're on the "third wave" now. Second, in the American political
context, feminism is highly correlated with progressives/left-wing, and the
_specific people_ I was talking about are _very left-wing_. Thirdly, my
comment wasn't even about feminism at all, but about how people can change
beliefs without changing a lot of things one might naively assume would change
with them.

~~~
smasuch
You brought up the broad concept of 'feminism' as an example and your comment
was about people who go to either extreme, so I think I took your comment as
being more anti-feminism then you meant it (no ingenuous meant to be dis'ed).
I agree with your idea of how some people change beliefs but still keep the
same extreme attitude.

------
Invictus0
[http://reediesagainstracism.tumblr.com/demands](http://reediesagainstracism.tumblr.com/demands)

I'm all for equality, but increasingly, these BLM-emulative student movements
aren't egalitarian, but racist in the other direction. See #7 for example.
Many of those demands, like #24, aren't even possible let alone reasonable.
There are specific laws governing the employment of non-naturalized residents.

~~~
dominotw
whats AODs, SES, CSO, HCC, MRC, PMP, CAT, CRES ?

~~~
eesmith
These are Reed-specific acronyms that anyone relevant at Reed would
understand. I found almost all of them through a search like "PMP
site:reed.edu", such as
[https://duckduckgo.com/?q=PMP+site%3Areed.edu](https://duckduckgo.com/?q=PMP+site%3Areed.edu)
.

AOD = "Alcohol and Other Drugs" violation. They probably want to know if there
is a racial bias in who gets cited.

SES = "Socioeconomic Status"; poor people in general have a harder time
getting through college.

CSO = "Community Safety Officer", aka, campus police

HCC = Reed Health and Counseling Center

PMP = Peer Mentor Program

CRES = Comparative Race and Ethnic Studies program; think "comparative
religion" course but for race and ethnic studies.

CAT = "Each year, one quarter of the faculty is considered for reappointment,
tenure, promotion, or an increase in salary. This evaluation is conducted by
the faculty Committee on Advancement and Tenure (CAT), which makes
recommendations to the president." (This was the hardest to find. It took a
couple of minutes.)

------
anjc
Put any student that disrupts the activities of the organisation through
disciplinary procedures, ultimately expelling them if they can't behave. These
disruptions will stop instantly, and they'll learn to behave appropriately in
future.

------
Tech-Noir
This article is about students protesting a humanities course at Reed College
in Oregon. Why does it have a huge image depicting protesters against "Nazis
in Berkeley"?

~~~
quotemstr
It's simple: when it becomes acceptable to violate standards of civility when
addressing particularly ultra-bad ideas, soon enough, every idea you don't
like becomes ultra-bad.

------
aslkdjaslkdj
This is a good summary of the entire situation without the emotion of an op-
ed:

[https://www.insidehighered.com/news/2017/09/11/reed-
college-...](https://www.insidehighered.com/news/2017/09/11/reed-college-
course-lectures-canceled-after-student-protesters-interrupt-class)

~~~
gooseus
With a link to their supplementary syllabus, I was curious about that:

[https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/0Bw66lFPav-
Gsa3prajMy...](https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/0Bw66lFPav-
Gsa3prajMyTDM2RXM)

------
Top19
Tim Wu, who coined the term “network neutrality”, wrote an excellent op-ed in
the N.Y. Times yesterday. He said that now speech,l is a form of control and
censorship, whereas 100 years ago limiting speech was a form of control /
censorship. Interesting to see how the pendulum shifts...

~~~
JungleGymSam
You need to rewrite that whole paragraph. What?

~~~
heurist
Might as well read the op-ed:
[https://www.nytimes.com/2017/10/27/opinion/twitter-first-
ame...](https://www.nytimes.com/2017/10/27/opinion/twitter-first-
amendment.html)

------
erdojo
The prof should sue the students for harassment and tortuous interference. The
student's are preventing the prof from doing her job and fulfilling her duties
to the University.

------
rhn_mk1
Is this academic extremism something confined to the USA so far? I don't
remember hearing about riots at European universities yet.

~~~
jseliger
_Is this academic extremism something confined to the USA so far? I don 't
remember hearing about riots at European universities yet._

It's actually fairly uncommon; most people are normal and most schools are
reasonable: [https://jakeseliger.com/2017/04/24/ninety-five-percent-of-
pe...](https://jakeseliger.com/2017/04/24/ninety-five-percent-of-people-are-
fine-but-its-that-last-five-percent) . But bad things are happening at a small
number of schools, and, unfortunately, many administrators in particular are
enabling or tolerating them, so those things make the news.

There are some genuinely bad trends, but there's also some inflation of the
state of reality on the ground.

------
gozur88
>We introduced ourselves and took our seats. But as we were about to begin,
the protesters seized our microphones, stood in front of us and shut down the
lecture.

I'm not sure who gave these people the idea the heckler's veto is a legitimate
tactic on a college campus or why the administration puts up with it. Those
students should be summarily expelled.

~~~
shams93
This is not how we did things in the 90s we used to debate these speakers and
knock down their ideas with rational discourse it's not that hard to deflate
the arguments of the far right they're mostly based on a series of bad
assumptions like assuming everyone has a deep fear of anyone who looks
different than them. It's better to let them speak and then deflate their
arguments to the bone in debate.

~~~
shams93
However when it comes to speakers advocating racism, race is not even real,
there is only one human race with ethnic variations we don't allow people to
come to medical schools to advocate using voodoo doll to cure cancer why
should racists be speaking on college campuses?

~~~
thrden
Perhaps, but then you run into the problem of defining racism. It can be
obvious, but you can also have situations like the one in yale where the
english curriculum was "Colonized"[1] by the fact it had too many white male
writers. Would someone who advocates for teaching the traditionally accepted
cannon of english literature be racist. According to some definitions, yes.
Further, some are willing to call the fundamentals of math racist[2]. Racism
can be subtle as well as obvious, and to define the parameters of acceptable
speech based on subjective understanding of that subtlety seems that it would
likely lead to abuse.

[1][http://college.usatoday.com/2016/06/10/yale-
undergraduates-a...](http://college.usatoday.com/2016/06/10/yale-
undergraduates-aim-to-decolonize-the-english-departments-curriculum/)

[2]www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-5018223/Professor-says-math-perpetuates-
white-privilege.html

~~~
brador
[1] is fake news. [2] is a single professor from a low-tier university with
the article intended to incite outrage and divide through inducing fear in the
reader, which is what you felt.

Please be more careful where you are sourcing your brain food.

------
mnglkhn2
I notice this submission is now flagged. Anybody has any idea as to why or in
which way is inappropriate?

~~~
grzm
Likely because discussions on this topic generally generate much more heat
than light. That's not to say the issue isn't important or worth discussing;
some forums (virtual and otherwise) are better suited for constructive
discussions on a given topic than others. HN members often flag such
submissions even when they agree with the premise for just this reason.

To be clear, as I understand it, submissions receive a "[flagged]" tag when
enough community members have flagged it: it's not a moderator action.

------
IslaDeEncanta
>Oh dear, these left wing protestors taking a microphone sure is comparable to
fascists actually killing people.

Give me a break.

~~~
dang
Would you please stop using HN for political/ideological battle? You've done
it quite a bit and it's not what this site is for.

Similarly, would you please not post unsubstantive comments here?

[https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html](https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html)

~~~
IslaDeEncanta
Every comment in this thread is ideologically driven. It seems that if you
don't want people commenting with political opinions, there shouldn't be
political submissions.

As far as substance goes, how is my comment less substantive than the top
comment
([https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15575704](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15575704))
on the thread? I said that it was foolish to consider protesting fascism to be
worse than fascism, and that commenter said that protesters should be
expelled. They're equally substantive comments that express opposing views on
the issue in from the article.

~~~
dang
A certain amount of politics is inevitable, but more than that turns HN into a
war zone, which destroys the things the site exists for: intellectual
curiosity and thoughtful conversation. So it's a tricky problem. We do two
things to address it (see
[https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html](https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html)):

1\. Accounts that use HN primarily for political/ideological battle are
obviously not using the site as intended, so we ban them.

2\. Commenters are asked to avoid the inflammatory style of political
argument. Comments need to get more civil and substantive, not less, as a
topic gets more divisive.

Unfortunately it looks like you've been running afoul of both of these. You
need to fix that if you want to keep commenting here.

The "what about that other comment" argument, a.k.a. "the other person started
it", doesn't really count as a defense because we can't possibly see
everything that gets posted here. Not everyone who speeds gets pulled over for
a ticket either. I agree with you that that comment was a bad one, but it
doesn't mean yours were ok.

------
smasuch
whole lotta people on this "hacker news" website that love to say authority
shouldn't be questioned

~~~
quotemstr
It's a variant of Chesterton's fence: question an authority when you've
learned how that authority works and what motivates it. For god's sake, if you
want to be a contrarian, be intelligent about it.

Some freshman with a copy of Derrida and a bullshit social justice grievance
does not know enough to question 4,000 years of civilization.

~~~
omgitzwowzie
Do you? Anyone can question anything. That's how a free and fair society
works.

The professor has a lot of detailed knowledge on the topics they cover, but
maybe not a radical critique of the underlying assumptions of what they teach.

I'm not super familiar with this case, but glancing over the student's
demands, many looked reasonable.

~~~
quotemstr
Of course we have a right to question anything. But pragmatism demands that we
don't spend an arbitrarily large amount of time indulging arbitrarily unlikely
scenarios. These protesters are attempting to use brute force to give their
horrible ideas more salience than they'd get in a fair intellectual forum, and
that's not fair to people who actually want to learn about the far more well-
established ideas that we've honed over thousands of years.

------
evanlivingston
The author is referring to students protesting the mandatory freshman lecture
on Western Civilization, which has a history of being protested at Reed.

There's a list of demands as well.
[http://reediesagainstracism.tumblr.com/demands](http://reediesagainstracism.tumblr.com/demands)

Students typically have an incredibly small say in shaping the institutions
that shape their future.

If protesting wasn't uncomfortable, it wouldn't be effective.

~~~
drjackyll
Students shouldn’t have any say in shaping institutions they attend to gain
knowledge. They are not smarter than their professors. Or if they disagree,
they should attend another university and vite with their
wallet/loan/whatever.

~~~
slaymaker1907
This post is poisonous to knowledge. I've politely corrected professors who I
respect on multiple occasions. Just because you are informed about a
particular subject does not mean that you are never wrong about that subject.
I've noticed that STEM professors tend to be more willing to accept that they
are wrong about something than in the humanities which I suspect is because it
is much easier to prove that someone is incorrect about something in STEM.

~~~
DashRattlesnake
I think students should definitely be able to offer polite feedback to their
professors, like you describe. However, students definitely shouldn't be in a
position to dictate the curriculum, which I think is more what the grandparent
was talking about.

