What is your opinion of the allegedly anonymous letter from a UCB History prof?

[writingprof]

My take is that the writer misses that the purpose of these communications is performative, not deliberative.

Universities (and companies) love the sociological perspective of inequality. If we're all part of a racist/supremacist system, then none of us are at fault -- even the perpetrators! And not being at fault means you can't get sued. But broadly, this is the easiest one to (pretend to) address: send out emails validating some ideological positions and pledging to do something unspecified in the future. Perhaps organize a panel that will be staffed by people of color and women, burdening them with yet another non-promotable task. Costs pretty much nothing (nobody who values their time will attend). Probably won't even have an open bar reception after.

Recognizing individual-level factors gets tricky. At the level of "unconscious bias" it's again fine -- which is why unconscious bias training has taken off everywhere. If it's just a thing of human nature, you can't get sued over it. It's worse because you actually have to pay for it. But the latest round we've been mandated to do consists entirely of watching videos. I couldn't tell you what the videos are about, because everyone I've talked to just played them on mute in the background while doing actual work. But some consulting company is getting paid and so the annual email can announce that something was done. (And we can all act surprised when the climate surveys find no improvement! Despite all those efforts! I guess it's a systemic problem and we're helpless!)

Recognizing individual contributions? Pretty much out. We're comfortable discussing how POC college-graduates earn less than Whites and Asians, but we stay superficially at "racism." Selecting into different majors? Selecting into different industries (non-profit vs. finance, say)? That gets uncomfortably close to blaming the victim. And, more importantly, it might actually cost money to do something about why this self-selection occurs. What a shock(!) that inequality in educational resources starting from pre-K and persisting through K-12 end up affecting earnings after graduation!! (But let's not take money from our fancy suburban school district. And definitely let's not accept people from failing school districts into ours.)

The systemic white supremacism/racism narrative is somewhat undermined by the outcomes of Indians and East Asians. For similar reason, racial conflict between Black and Asian communities, for example, doesn't get much attention in the press. In fact, open discrimination against Asians is pretty socially acceptable. If the purpose of speech now were deliberative, all of this would be part of a broader conversation. But since the purpose is performative, it doesn't need to be: everyone's incentives are to keep the story simple and signal being on the "right" side of things. Complexity and ambiguity are bad, because without an obviously right side, you can't signal to everyone how you are on that right side.

Which is really just frustrating for two groups: those who want actual, real change and those who mistakenly believe the purpose is deliberative and who are worried because they don't see any deliberation. This writer may be the rare intersection of those two groups.

I may forward this to my college's president.  Love ya, tenure.

Of course, the crossed-out line will have to be deleted first, as Pigou is presumably being sarcastic and wants those awful-sounding policies to be instituted.  How strange.

[downer]

One interesting takeaway from my experience is that paradoxically, my progressive school is an elite school full of students from impressive cultural backgrounds, and my relaxed school is an ordinary (but good) school with mostly underprivileged young people working a full-time job while trying to maintain a 4.0 GPA whom the anti-racist movement is supposed to be about. If this kind of discursive dominance is not white supremacy, I don't know what is.

I'm not really sure what you mean, but I see you use the phrase "white supremacy" to describe the place you are in. Maybe you are a BLM advocate.

What do you want? If you want to be able to advocate for your views, get a tenure-track job and then get tenure. Or better, get a non-academic job where they don't care about your political views, and advocate as freely as you want. But you seem to want to be able to advocate for unpopular views right now, when you have zero job security. That just seems like wishful thinking.

Of course, you could just set up a blog under a pseudonym and then write whatever you want. Or you can post here.

What I meant was that ironically, an economically and culturally dominant group appropriating a movement supposedly serving the dominated groups further demonstrates white supremacy (despite the anti-white-supremacist assertion of the movement). I don't think my identifying white supremacy necessarily entails my position towards BLM. There have been many cultural positions against white supremacy. Some emerged long before the formation of BLM.

I thought this forum is about "perspectives relating to the state of higher education." I am discussing the orthodoxy in the academia partly resulted from the current academic employment systems (of adjunctification, hiring, promotion, etc.) (I'm sorry if it isn't clear; sometimes to circle down what I really want to say, it takes others' intelligent feedback, for which I'm very thankful.) Is it wishful thinking to discuss a systemic issue without personally being in an authoritative position to overcome it? Systematic issues are issues only resolvable by a lot of people. The idea of overcoming a systematic issue by an isolated participant sounds like an oxymoron.

I find your posts rather confusing. Maybe it's me.

You can discuss the orthodoxy to your heart's content here. Just go for it.

It seemed that you were lamenting that you could not do it at the place(s) you teach. You seemed to overestimate how much anyone else cares what you do in the classroom. Did you have some vision of a dialog with the other faculty at the places you teach about your ideas? If as you say, one of them is very PC, and you also want to accuse them of not allowing dissent from their orthodoxy, then you should be ready to piss someone off and risk your employment.

[mahagonny]

One interesting takeaway from my experience is that paradoxically, my progressive school is an elite school full of students from impressive cultural backgrounds, and my relaxed school is an ordinary (but good) school with mostly underprivileged young people working a full-time job while trying to maintain a 4.0 GPA whom the anti-racist movement is supposed to be about. If this kind of discursive dominance is not white supremacy, I don't know what is.

I'm not really sure what you mean, but I see you use the phrase "white supremacy" to describe the place you are in. Maybe you are a BLM advocate.

What do you want? If you want to be able to advocate for your views, get a tenure-track job and then get tenure. Or better, get a non-academic job where they don't care about your political views, and advocate as freely as you want. But you seem to want to be able to advocate for unpopular views right now, when you have zero job security. That just seems like wishful thinking.

Of course, you could just set up a blog under a pseudonym and then write whatever you want. Or you can post here.

What I meant was that ironically, an economically and culturally dominant group appropriating a movement supposedly serving the dominated groups further demonstrates white supremacy (despite the anti-white-supremacist assertion of the movement). I don't think my identifying white supremacy necessarily entails my position towards BLM. There have been many cultural positions against white supremacy. Some emerged long before the formation of BLM.

I thought this forum is about "perspectives relating to the state of higher education." I am discussing the orthodoxy in the academia partly resulted from the current academic employment systems (of adjunctification, hiring, promotion, etc.) (I'm sorry if it isn't clear; sometimes to circle down what I really want to say, it takes others' intelligent feedback, for which I'm very thankful.) Is it wishful thinking to discuss a systemic issue without personally being in an authoritative position to overcome it? Systematic issues are issues only resolvable by a lot of people. The idea of overcoming a systematic issue by an isolated participant sounds like an oxymoron.

Not only that, it's already obvious that tenure decreases the total amount of academic freedom enjoyed by college faculty, since there are more people without tenure than with it, and the people who rehire the people without tenure are the ones with tenure, and they don't have to give reasons. The present arrangement is intentional. It's not the number of people involved the counts. It's the structure of the hiring.

[Wahoo Redux]

I also have trouble following the OP's additional comments.  It's a syntactical issue.

The original letter from Scared Adjunct is too prolix, too well written, and too vocabulary-laden for an agitprop aimed at a general audience (am I exercising classism here?).

SC, you know that there is a ready audience for your opinions if you dumbed down the rhetoric.  Certainly there is some truth to your observations, but only "some truth."  You've fallen into the very human tendency toward dialectic thinking in which you perceive that only one side of the argument can be true.  And you've further done the very human thing and assumed that anyone who does not agree with you is suppressing the truth. 

The matrix is too complicated to be adequately represented by your letter.

Nevertheless, I understand your paranoia.  There are certain subjects which turn some of us fanatical.  American racism is so deeply rooted and so tremendously ugly, and now bound by a minority of violent headline-generating racist zealots and equally headline-generating everyday people whose racism surfaces at the least possibility of a stereotype, that there will be no worthwhile dialogue during our lifetimes.

I'd just drop the subject.  On balance, BLM will do a great deal more good than it will harm. 

[marshwiggle]

What I meant was that ironically, an economically and culturally dominant group appropriating a movement supposedly serving the dominated groups further demonstrates white supremacy (despite the anti-white-supremacist assertion of the movement). I don't think my identifying white supremacy necessarily entails my position towards BLM. There have been many cultural positions against white supremacy. Some emerged long before the formation of BLM.

I'm not sure I understand your point, but if you mean white people have sort of "taken over" things like BLM, it's not a surprise when the messaging includes things like

"Silence is not an option"
"Own your privilege"

and so on.
In other words, by trying to force people to state their allegiance, it ensures that weak and/or unprincipled people will do so, but will not surprisingly often fail to follow through in any meaningful way.

tl;dr If you make it profitable to virtue-signal, lots of people will do it. Just don't count on it being evidence of any great conviction.

[ScaredAdjunct]

One interesting takeaway from my experience is that paradoxically, my progressive school is an elite school full of students from impressive cultural backgrounds, and my relaxed school is an ordinary (but good) school with mostly underprivileged young people working a full-time job while trying to maintain a 4.0 GPA whom the anti-racist movement is supposed to be about. If this kind of discursive dominance is not white supremacy, I don't know what is.

One interesting takeaway from my experience is that paradoxically, my progressive school is an elite school full of students from impressive cultural backgrounds, and my relaxed school is an ordinary (but good) school with mostly underprivileged young people working a full-time job while trying to maintain a 4.0 GPA whom the anti-racist movement is supposed to be about. If this kind of discursive dominance is not white supremacy, I don't know what is.

I'm not really sure what you mean, but I see you use the phrase "white supremacy" to describe the place you are in. Maybe you are a BLM advocate.

What do you want? If you want to be able to advocate for your views, get a tenure-track job and then get tenure. Or better, get a non-academic job where they don't care about your political views, and advocate as freely as you want. But you seem to want to be able to advocate for unpopular views right now, when you have zero job security. That just seems like wishful thinking.

Of course, you could just set up a blog under a pseudonym and then write whatever you want. Or you can post here.

What I meant was that ironically, an economically and culturally dominant group appropriating a movement supposedly serving the dominated groups further demonstrates white supremacy (despite the anti-white-supremacist assertion of the movement). I don't think my identifying white supremacy necessarily entails my position towards BLM. There have been many cultural positions against white supremacy. Some emerged long before the formation of BLM.

I thought this forum is about "perspectives relating to the state of higher education." I am discussing the orthodoxy in the academia partly resulted from the current academic employment systems (of adjunctification, hiring, promotion, etc.) (I'm sorry if it isn't clear; sometimes to circle down what I really want to say, it takes others' intelligent feedback, for which I'm very thankful.) Is it wishful thinking to discuss a systemic issue without personally being in an authoritative position to overcome it? Systematic issues are issues only resolvable by a lot of people. The idea of overcoming a systematic issue by an isolated participant sounds like an oxymoron.

I find your posts rather confusing. Maybe it's me.

You can discuss the orthodoxy to your heart's content here. Just go for it.

It seemed that you were lamenting that you could not do it at the place(s) you teach. You seemed to overestimate how much anyone else cares what you do in the classroom. Did you have some vision of a dialog with the other faculty at the places you teach about your ideas? If as you say, one of them is very PC, and you also want to accuse them of not allowing dissent from their orthodoxy, then you should be ready to piss someone off and risk your employment.

I was hired by the tenured faculty to teach in the named school specifically because of my expertise on the subject, so obviously, I was expected to deliver what they want me to do in the classroom. Your speculation sounds a little strange. Why would you suspect my employer doesn't care what I do in the classroom? Doesn't your employer care what you do in the classroom too? Don't all employers have some expectations of what we do?

I did not say the faculty is very PC. I said today the students are orthodox. I did not accuse the faculty of not allowing dissent from their orthodoxy. As mahagonny puts it, I am calling the employment (or hiring) structure limiting academic freedom/not allowing dissent into question. The issue in hand is not (inter)personal; it's structural.

[Hibush]

In other words, by trying to force people to state their allegiance, it ensures that weak and/or unprincipled people will do so, but will not surprisingly often fail to follow through in any meaningful way.

tl;dr If you make it profitable to virtue-signal, lots of people will do it. Just don't count on it being evidence of any great conviction.

It becomes a contest. The cost to outdo others is pretty small, except perhaps to your principles if you have any, so the enthusiasm really builds.
Among those who want to take action, there are two factions: the self-flagellators and those who want to change the social structure by using their power. The former get more validation from the group.

Within an institution, it is an interesting time to keep an eye on who is doing what. The old fogeys are often the ones who were socially aware during the free-speech, civil rights, or antiwar movements of the 1960s and are the most eager for genuine change. But they may be perceived as the conservatives who don't want to jump on the virtue signalling train.

Watch out for this guy.

[marshwiggle]

In other words, by trying to force people to state their allegiance, it ensures that weak and/or unprincipled people will do so, but will not surprisingly often fail to follow through in any meaningful way.

tl;dr If you make it profitable to virtue-signal, lots of people will do it. Just don't count on it being evidence of any great conviction.

It becomes a contest. The cost to outdo others is pretty small, except perhaps to your principles if you have any, so the enthusiasm really builds.
Among those who want to take action, there are two factions: the self-flagellators and those who want to change the social structure by using their power. The former get more validation from the group.

Within an institution, it is an interesting time to keep an eye on who is doing what. The old fogeys are often the ones who were socially aware during the free-speech, civil rights, or antiwar movements of the 1960s and are the most eager for genuine change. But they may be perceived as the conservatives who don't want to jump on the virtue signalling train.

Watch out for this guy.

This is incredibly timeless. (I especially love the status of moderates.)

[ScaredAdjunct]

Nevertheless, I understand your paranoia.  There are certain subjects which turn some of us fanatical.  American racism is so deeply rooted and so tremendously ugly, and now bound by a minority of violent headline-generating racist zealots and equally headline-generating everyday people whose racism surfaces at the least possibility of a stereotype, that there will be no worthwhile dialogue during our lifetimes.

I'd just drop the subject.  On balance, BLM will do a great deal more good than it will harm.

Thank you for trying to understand my paranoia, but isn't dropping the subject a form of the-end-justifies-the-means—a very old moral issue causing most police corruption? I don't know. I feel most people today are making a consequentialist decision to ignore the current orthodoxy (with high hopes of the success of the movement). I don't know if it's right or wrong, but in philosophy, there has always been a battle between this kind of moral decision (that concerns the outcome) and deontology (that concerns the virtue of our actions). Sometimes they don't align with each other.

[mahagonny]

I did not say the faculty is very PC. I said today the students are orthodox. I did not accuse the faculty of not allowing dissent from their orthodoxy. As mahagonny puts it, I am calling the employment (or hiring) structure limiting academic freedom/not allowing dissent into question. The issue in hand is not (inter)personal; it's structural.

In that case, expect the mob to call you qualifications and scholarship into question. The weapon of choice against reform. (In fact, not even reform, just the mention of it, or the inference there is something to be reformed.)

[Wahoo Redux]

Thank you for trying to understand my paranoia, but isn't dropping the subject a form of the-end-justifies-the-means—a very old moral issue causing most police corruption? I don't know. I feel most people today are making a consequentialist decision to ignore the current orthodoxy (with high hopes of the success of the movement). I don't know if it's right or wrong, but in philosophy, there has always been a battle between this kind of moral decision (that concerns the outcome) and deontology (that concerns the virtue of our actions). Sometimes they don't align with each other.

Again, I am not entirely sure what you are trying to say.

I don't follow how my advice to drop the subject ends in corruption, police or otherwise, unless you are suggesting that not criticizing or critiquing or challenging BLM will somehow end in a corrupt system of...something, I'm not sure what.  I don't think I buy that.  I don't see that BLM has any motive except ending police brutality against minorities, for which there is legitimate evidence (even if there is also police brutality against majority individuals too, which is not as evident right now).

I am suggesting that no real dialogue is going to develop with the current state of affairs. 

Perhaps you are worried that we will end up with a racial dynamic which favors minorities?  Or perhaps you believe that BLM's motives are not virtuous enough?  Whatever, I suspect your approach here will do little good.

[Hibush]

This is incredibly timeless. (I especially love the status of moderates.)

If Cleese developed a new MOOC university, we might all be in trouble. He has done lots of training videos.