Academic Freedom and Cancel Culture

[Puget]

From the article...

... allegations that he profited from campus construction projects...

That could be something, but no more mention of it in the article.

... and kept two goats on campus against city law.

There is more about the goats than the alleged graft.

Priorities, people?

As a former goat-owner, I'd like to hear more about the goats, please.
Otherwise it mostly sounds like petty whining by fraternity bros.

[apl68]

I didn't even know therapy goats were a thing.

Potential Posting Hall of Fame material?  What say the other posters?

[ciao_yall]

I didn't even know therapy goats were a thing.

Potential Posting Hall of Fame material?  What say the other posters?

If you think it's worthy, I agree!

[Wahoo Redux]

I didn't even know therapy goats were a thing.

Potential Posting Hall of Fame material?  What say the other posters?

If you think it's worthy, I agree!

HOF needs to be fed.

I think a goat would be very therapeutic.  Anybody know where I could get one?

[marshwiggle]

I didn't even know therapy goats were a thing.

Potential Posting Hall of Fame material?  What say the other posters?

If you think it's worthy, I agree!

HOF needs to be fed.

I think a goat would be very therapeutic.  Anybody know where I could get one?

From the article, I believe they were retired to a petting zoo. Maybe the zoo would part with them. After all, they're already trained and certified.

[Puget]

I didn't even know therapy goats were a thing.

Potential Posting Hall of Fame material?  What say the other posters?

If you think it's worthy, I agree!

HOF needs to be fed.

I think a goat would be very therapeutic.  Anybody know where I could get one?

From experience I will say that goats are sometimes therapeutic but always educational. I guess that means they are always therapeutic if we define therapy appropriately as teaching you something rather than just making you feel better temporarily.  Sometimes what you learn is that you can't make a goat do what the goat doesn't want to do. This is a lesson that should be learned by all and generalized widely to humans, so I'm all in favor of having goats on every campus.

Also, WHY ARE STUDENTS COMPLAINING ABOUT THERAPY ANIMALS- STUDENTS LOVE THERAPY ANIMALS! Either these are very strange students, the people complaining about the goats were actually groundskeepers who were expected to use the goats for weed control and didn't like it. In either case, all other complaints become suspect given the anti-goat bias in display in this petition.

[marshwiggle]

I didn't even know therapy goats were a thing.

Potential Posting Hall of Fame material?  What say the other posters?

If you think it's worthy, I agree!

HOF needs to be fed.

I think a goat would be very therapeutic.  Anybody know where I could get one?

From experience I will say that goats are sometimes therapeutic but always educational. I guess that means they are always therapeutic if we define therapy appropriately as teaching you something rather than just making you feel better temporarily.  Sometimes what you learn is that you can't make a goat do what the goat doesn't want to do. This is a lesson that should be learned by all and generalized widely to humans, so I'm all in favor of having goats on every campus.

Also, WHY ARE STUDENTS COMPLAINING ABOUT THERAPY ANIMALS- STUDENTS LOVE THERAPY ANIMALS! Either these are very strange students, the people complaining about the goats were actually groundskeepers who were expected to use the goats for weed control and didn't like it. In either case, all other complaints become suspect given the anti-goat bias in display in this petition.

Pretty clear evidence of systemic speciesism.

[jimbogumbo]

I think marshwiggle REALLY needs a goat yoga session.

[marshwiggle]

I think marshwiggle REALLY BAAAA-DLY needs a goat yoga session.

Fixed that.

[apl68]

I didn't even know therapy goats were a thing.

Potential Posting Hall of Fame material?  What say the other posters?

If you think it's worthy, I agree!

HOF needs to be fed.

I think a goat would be very therapeutic.  Anybody know where I could get one?

From experience I will say that goats are sometimes therapeutic but always educational.

Based on our family's experiences with keeping goats when I was...younger (Almost forgot myself there and said "When I was a kid") I would have to agree with you there.

[Langue_doc]

I didn't even know therapy goats were a thing.

"I think a goat would be very therapeutic.  Anybody know where I could get one?"
[/quote]

Look no further than Rego Park, Queens, where goats have taken to lounging in SUVs.
https://citizen.com/-Mk07TJpDHxaeo9x6_Le?media=mux:01G7L7Xlz6019ZRmvf800WIeBbLcdYqM6mIreN822hADpI
https://patch.com/new-york/foresthills/police-find-2-goats-car-response-crime-call-nypd-says

ETA: Please excuse the improper quote function--can't seem to get it right.

[apl68]

At the old Fora somebody share an upserd student misspelling in reference to an "escape goat."  One poster wondered whether an escape goat would be a goat specially trained to help you get out of emergencies.

[marshwiggle]

At the old Fora somebody share an upserd student misspelling in reference to an "escape goat."  One poster wondered whether an escape goat would be a goat specially trained to help you get out of emergencies.

Actually, my recollection is that the origin of the phrase is related to a goat escaping. (The goat which doesn't get sacrificed but is allowed to go free, carrying peoples' sins with it.) Anyone able to confirm or deny?

[mamselle]

Two different things, I  think.

I semi-recall the Old Fora saying, and I think it was a Spoonerism-like play on words or unintended pun.

The ritual release of the scapegoat is discussed here;

   https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scapegoat

...based in part on Lev 16:22.

It's also called, in Christianized terms, "the Judas goat," at abbatoirs where a leader/alpha animal is used to guide the others towards the fatal chute: it's released at the gate and led back to start the process over again with the next victims.

M.

[Parasaurolophus]

This excellent review of Anne Applebaum's new book is worth the read. It has something for everyone.

Indeed, the empirical weaknesses of the essay are quite egregious. There are 21 references to cases that can be publicly confirmed. There are then 19 references to unnamed individuals who spoke to Applebaum directly, the details of which are left out "because they are involved in complicated legal or tenure battles and do not want to speak on the record, or because they fear another wave of social-media attacks." The number of unique individuals contained in these 19 references is not clear. Nearly all are professors or journalists at institutions like Yale or the New York Times, many quite prominent within those prestigious institutions. One could be forgiven for thinking that Applebaum began by speaking to people within her social circle and then simply expanded it outward from there—but just far enough to get "more than a dozen individuals."

Employers were always sensitive to media scandals centering on their employees, whether this was fair to those employees or not. The difference is that the total number of people who could put a story in front of the public at large was a vanishingly small fraction of the population. Most of the time institutional leadership could side with some privileged member of their ranks or some rising star even when they had done something plainly wrong, and correctly calculated that the story would not reach very far.

And of course, this calculation is precisely what has had to change. Between phone cameras, the stored and shareable nature of digital communication, and the Internet, everyone can now put a story out into the public view. Few may gain a proper public, but all individually hold some small chance of doing so, and that dramatically increases the overall odds that a media scandal will originate from within an institution.

High-status people occupying prestigious positions have also always been targets for media scandals, because they are precisely the people for whom a scandal will sell papers. Stories about relatively unknown persons who were made to stand in for a type were relatively common too, and so people lower in the social status hierarchy were not exactly safe from the gaze of journalists either. But typological hit pieces don't sell like celebrity tabloids, and so the latter and more respectable variants soaked up much more of the attention of a media class that was, as I have said, relatively small.

I have tried quite hard to find hard data on this matter. FIRE, an organization I consider fairly credible in its consistency regardless of the partisan valence of particular incidents, has documented 426 "targeting incidents involving scholars at public and private American institutions of higher education," and 477 "disinvitations" (Joe and Hunter Biden being the first and second most recent incidents at the time of this writing). Canceled People, an organization dedicated entirely to tracking cases of this kind, documents 217 cases of "cancellation." The National Association of Scholars documents 185 cases of "cancellation" in academia. The first FIRE database goes back to 2015, the second goes back as far as 1998. The Canceled People list includes a case from 1991. The NAS list has a case from 1975, one from 1988, and one from 2004, growing considerably more recent after that.

I have not bothered to deduplicate these lists; even if they are all unique cases, the total is very small relative to both the size of the populations they are drawn from and the time period over which they occur. If any other problem in social life was occurring at this frequency and at this scale, we would consider it effectively solved.

Allow me to offer an alternative possibility: colleges do not, in fact, teach students "that it is wise to keep their mouths shut." Instead, they induct students into a peer group, a peer group that has both grown much larger over time as a greater percentage of Americans have obtained a college degree, and has grown more nationally integrated, as the Internet has made rapid communication from any part of the country a reality. A large, integrated peer group, which has become trivially easy to make a public statement in front of, is a recipe for peer pressure. Because it is large, it does not take a large percentage of the group to have an appetite for punitiveness for there to be a large number of individuals in absolute terms who do.

Even mahagonny:

As to what can be done, that is clearer. If you don't like the power of the "secretive bureaucracies" at large employers, then consider promoting laws more favorable to the development of unions and alternatives to at-will employment.