
The University’s New Loyalty Oath - deafcalculus
https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-universitys-new-loyalty-oath-11576799749
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mc32
It’s not the job of faculty to enforce political will.

The university can have policies promoting one thing over another, but to
encumber faculty members with that responsibility is a bit beside the point of
being an educator.

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scottlegrand2
I agree, but it's so very interesting that when a similar sort of loyalty oath
was used even when I was in grad school 25 years ago to enforce loyalty to the
state government at Penn State University (as a condition for receiving my
poverty-level grad student stipend), it was A-OK with the same sort of people
complaining about this right now when it's focused on a more progressive
ideology.

But I agree it's absolutely absurd no matter who's pushing these. And all it
amounts to is ideological theatre on both sides of the fence. And I don't
think that theatre is going to close during my lifetime.

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b215826
Svetlana Jitomirskaya's letter [1] supporting Prof. Thompson is a worthwhile
read. From that letter:

> _" I think that the often present push to increase percentage of women
> beyond what is currently reasonably warranted by merit, only multiplies the
> biases, is very damaging for the community’s perception of women as a group,
> and thus is very harmful for the climate. As one example, I was recently on
> a committee to select the winner of an important prize. It went to a female
> mathematician. I am sure that most people who don't closely know her or her
> work, when learning the news, thought “of course, they wanted to select a
> woman”. Yet her gender had zero influence on our considerations, there was
> no push on the committee, and she was selected from all the applications
> purely on scientific merit according to the prize criteria. The value of
> this well-deserved prize is not at all the same for her as it would have
> been if she was a man."_

[1]: Pages 21-22 of
[https://www.ams.org/journals/notices/202001/rnoti-o1.pdf](https://www.ams.org/journals/notices/202001/rnoti-o1.pdf)

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TheAsprngHacker
A copy of this article is available on professor Matthias Felleisen's website:
[https://felleisen.org/matthias/Articles/loyalty.pdf](https://felleisen.org/matthias/Articles/loyalty.pdf)

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b215826
Another way to bypass the paywall is by redirecting through Facebook (works
without a Facebook account):
[https://facebook.com/l.php?u=https://www.wsj.com/articles/th...](https://facebook.com/l.php?u=https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-
universitys-new-loyalty-oath-11576799749)

~~~
ksec
Does it work for all articles from WSJ?

Interesting they dont allow Google users to access it from Search Engine but
Facebook.

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b215826
It should. You should also be able to access WSJ by faking the referer.

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xkcd-sucks
How this article can exist without a reference to Catch-22 re: "The Great
Loyalty Oath Crusade"!

excerpt: [https://epic-site.com/catch-22-loyalty-oaths/](https://epic-
site.com/catch-22-loyalty-oaths/)

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kazinator
So, in a twist of irony, now you now effectively have to sign that you _are_ a
member of the Communist Party.

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gumby
I’m really struggling to understand the point of this article (except that it
appears to hit one of the wsj’s hot buttons). He objects to his employer’s
position on something based on free speech issues; he speaks out about it and
some people agree with him and some don’t; and his employer supports his
efforts to speak out against their own policy. Sounds like that’s how the
system is supposed to work.

The fact is his employer is a corporation and it doesn’t want to reject swaths
of prospective customers or employees. That all sounds pretty sensible to me.
It also seems quite different from the anti-communist loyalty oaths of the 50s
which he cites as precedent. In fact it’s rather the opposite, though he
doesn’t object in those grounds (which I think would be a legitimate tack to
take, despite my sympathy for these diversity programs)

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TheAsprngHacker
(FYI, the author, Abigail Thompson, is a woman.)

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gumby
Ouch! Thank you for pointing out my shitty presumption.

I’ll leave my shame in place by not editing my comments. That will help me be
more careful in future.

