Campus Speech Issues: USC and Juanita College

[marshwiggle]

Their motivations may be OK, but their intentions aren't. Trying to get someone fired for saying something you don't like is bad for society. All kinds of extremist behaviour may be prompted by decent, or even noble, sentiments, but if the outcomes desired are out of proportion, then the intent is bad.

The problem with ordinary language is that it's not very precise, and we don't typically use its terms in especially regimented ways. An awful lot of this hair-splitting hangs on how we describe the actions in question. When I try to move my arm, for instance, I intend to move my arm. I don't explicitly intend to send an action potential through the nervous system to the motor neurons that innervate the relevant muscle fibre, although of course that's what I do. It's not wrong to say that I intentionally send an action potential... etc., although depending on our conversational purposes, it may be misleading to describe it that way.

In this case, I think that the charitable explanation of what's going on is not that they're trying to get someone fired for saying something they don't like; they're trying to get someone to stop using a racial slur, improve the classroom or university climate for Black people, or something to that effect. And they're wrong about it, and being wrong about it makes them culpable.


But let's suppose you don't buy any of what I just said. That's OK. Just remember that, by your own lights, the cops' motivation for shooting an unarmed Black man may be good, but their intent isn't, since "the outcome desired is out of proportion". Now, I know you don't accept that, but by parity of reasoning you should.

I can settle for either one--I don't need to quibble about the distinction you're trying to draw between motivation and intention. But consistency would be nice.

This is a very apt example, because their "intent" is an important issue. Are they trying to kill, or are they trying to incapacitate? Intent is about desired outcome, whereas motivation is about whatever emotion or reasoning was behind it.

That's what is making modern society so much more volatile; there is so much more push for some sort of results of expressions of dissatisfaction. There is no room for people to "agree to disagree"; some action must be taken to support the "right" side.

[Wahoo Redux]

Professor reinstated after being suspended for perceived slight.

People wouldn't need to be overly-sensitive and easily provoked if certain other people stopped thinking like bigots, Marshy.  One can still be paranoid even if they really are after you.  We have this knee-jerk reaction in culture because we have so many jerks who really do harbor the worst kind of thinking.  Higher ed just polices itself hysterically. This didn't come out of thin air.

If you don't think left-handed people have legitimate, long-standing grievances, you're a bigot. I invite anyone left-handed here to give examples of ways the world is unfair. They are legion.

The point is, being outraged about things is not productive, and accusing people of bad intent unjustly actually gets in the way of trying to improve the situation since the focus shifts from ways to make things better to whether animosity is the cause.

Sure. I believe left-handers have legitimate complaints about the way they are perceived-----did I indicate otherwise?  I doubt that these issues are on a par with POC  or queer or transgender experiences, but I believe in them.

My point was that there are certain people who hold irrational beliefs.  I think on another thread you made certain claims about science and transgender people and then promptly disappeared once people posted what the science actually says about sexuality, Marshy.  I was referring to that kind of thinking. 

If you want to "improve" the world, shed your bigotries. 

[tuxthepenguin]

Suspending a professor seems like the wrong response. However, I'm not sure the lesson here is really that hysterical, dumb students have taken over. If the student's version of events is true, the guy didn't handle this well at all. It wasn't simply that he used the phrase once. He seems to have said it again and again over multiple lectures. That seems more than a little clueless. Generally, I'd say it is good to avoid saying things over and over that sound like racial slurs. I've definitely used the word "niggardly" in class before without thinking about it. There's nothing terrible about that since it has no linguistic connection to the slur, but if it was my favorite adjective in class, it might be reasonable for some students to wonder if something was up, or if I was trying to make some kind of point.

If the students really told him that it sounded to them like he was using the slur, it isn't great that he kept saying it. If I was saying something in class and students came up to me afterwards to tell me it really sounded like a different offensive word I wasn't trying to say, I'd be pretty horrified. I certainly wouldn't just keep on saying it for my next class. Probably, there's a lot of misunderstandings at play here, and a competent dean would have brought everyone into his office separately, tried to figure out what the heck was happening and then brought the students and the teacher into a meeting where he could straighten things out.

No, that's not it at all. The students that complained are themselves borderline racists. They have no respect for other cultures and other people if they don't want the Chinese language spoken on campus.

Well, that's a bizarre take.

That someone would say this is a sad commentary on the culture of academia. "Americans get to censor the use of regular Chinese words" is a very sad state of affairs.

[Caracal]

I agree that they're problematic cases.

I don't think the first is an instance of 'left SJWing', however. We have no indications that the students in question are leftists (as business students, I doubt they're especially lefty) or motivated by concerns about social justice (which, incidentally, is not a bad word or thing). Instead, the evidence we have is that they're ignorant.

(That said, I can imagine situations where a prof's use of the Chinese word is actually problematic, such as one in which he's clearly using it as cover for the n word. But I see no indication that was the case.)

Edit: I see the detail now (which wasn't in other reports) that their letter mentioned Floyd and BLM. Fair enough. I still don't think this is indicative of anything more sinister than ignorance. And if you want to talk about censorship of speech, there's way more serious and pervasive stuff out there to worry about.

Probably ignorance, all right.  In recent years the perfectly respectable, but now obscure, word "niggardly" has gotten people into serious trouble due to similar ignorant misunderstandings.  I for one would not dare to use it now (Plus "stingy" works just as well). 

Well, I agree that is absurd for someone to actually get in trouble for using "niggardly." That said, that sort of thing happens with language all the kind. A word that actually has no etymological connection to another word, but sounds like that word ends up actually acquiring some of the meanings of the other word. It isn't really that weird that as the N word becomes increasingly taboo in many contexts, a word that sounds like it would be used less and less.

If I'm trying to convey that some sort of action was ungenerous or stingy, I certainly don't want anyone to come away with the impression that I just used a racial slur, because that would mean the actual meaning and purpose of what I was saying would be lost entirely. Even if people don't regard it as a slur, the similarity to a taboo word makes it distracting. This being English, there are plenty of other words that get across the same meaning without using a potentially distracting word.

[Caracal]

Suspending a professor seems like the wrong response. However, I'm not sure the lesson here is really that hysterical, dumb students have taken over. If the student's version of events is true, the guy didn't handle this well at all. It wasn't simply that he used the phrase once. He seems to have said it again and again over multiple lectures. That seems more than a little clueless. Generally, I'd say it is good to avoid saying things over and over that sound like racial slurs. I've definitely used the word "niggardly" in class before without thinking about it. There's nothing terrible about that since it has no linguistic connection to the slur, but if it was my favorite adjective in class, it might be reasonable for some students to wonder if something was up, or if I was trying to make some kind of point.

If the students really told him that it sounded to them like he was using the slur, it isn't great that he kept saying it. If I was saying something in class and students came up to me afterwards to tell me it really sounded like a different offensive word I wasn't trying to say, I'd be pretty horrified. I certainly wouldn't just keep on saying it for my next class. Probably, there's a lot of misunderstandings at play here, and a competent dean would have brought everyone into his office separately, tried to figure out what the heck was happening and then brought the students and the teacher into a meeting where he could straighten things out.

No, that's not it at all. The students that complained are themselves borderline racists. They have no respect for other cultures and other people if they don't want the Chinese language spoken on campus.

Well, that's a bizarre take.

That someone would say this is a sad commentary on the culture of academia. "Americans get to censor the use of regular Chinese words" is a very sad state of affairs.

Just writing something silly and incendiary doesn't actually make it true.

[Wahoo Redux]

The issue is that the prof in question did not use a racial slur.  For whatever reason he used a Chinese phrase that sounded like a racial slur, and that was enough to get him yanked from the class.

That is ridiculous hypersensitivity on the part of the students and hysteria on the part of the admin, and we should recognize that.

I understand that administrators do not want footage of protesters in front of their buildings, nor do they want protests to devolve into confrontations with the police and conservative organizations (which are sure to show up), and they certainly don't want broken windows and arrests of students. 

But this sort of zealotry does not help.

The other links I and others have posted are the same thing.

[Caracal]

The issue is that the prof in question did not use a racial slur.  For whatever reason he used a Chinese phrase that sounded like a racial slur, and that was enough to get him yanked from the class.

That is ridiculous hypersensitivity on the part of the students and hysteria on the part of the admin, and we should recognize that.

I understand that administrators do not want footage of protesters in front of their buildings, nor do they want protests to devolve into confrontations with the police and conservative organizations (which are sure to show up), and they certainly don't want broken windows and arrests of students. 

But this sort of zealotry does not help.

The other links I and others have posted are the same thing.

I agree about the administration. I'm inclined to be more charitable towards the students. Students are students, which means that they tend to miss the nuance and take the most extreme option. However, if they really tried to discuss this with the professor and he, for whatever reason, didn't manage to convey that he wasn't doing what they thought he was doing, I can understand why they got upset.

Would it have been better for them to ask to meet with the professor and clear things up? Or to just go see the dean and lay out their concerns? Sure, but I think they reacted the way they did because they felt powerless and upset. The professor pretty clearly had no ill intent. My guess is that when he was approached by students, he either didn't understand what they were saying, or got flustered and wasn't very clear in his explanation and the students thought he was  ignoring or dismissing them.

The administrators in charge bungled badly. This is something that just needed to be mediated. There was no reason to suspend this guy. Just get him and the students together, let everyone say their piece, make their apologies for misunderstandings and it would have been fine.

[Durchlässigkeitsbeiwert]

...I'm inclined to be more charitable towards the students. ...
...Sure, but I think they reacted the way they did because they felt powerless and upset. ...

I could have understood such attitude towards community college undegrads.
But these are "M.B.A. Candidates" (as per article) paying $90k per year in tuition and fees.
Such people can be expected to be well aware of different grievance resolution mechanisms (let alone to have an ability to appreciate existence of homophones).

[marshwiggle]

The administrators in charge bungled badly. This is something that just needed to be mediated. There was no reason to suspend this guy. Just get him and the students together, let everyone say their piece, make their apologies for misunderstandings and it would have been fine.

I have serious doubts about whether the students would ever feel a need to apologize. Or that the administration would suggest as much.

[spork]

If I were running a company, USC MBA grads would be permanently off my interview list.

[Wahoo Redux]

Again, the first point is that the USC professor did nothing wrong.  He may have been clueless.  But he was not doing what he was accused of doing.  It still costing him.

The second point is that this is not an isolated incident.  We have a witch-hunt attitude.

The third is that these incidents sometimes, not always, but oftentimes occur outside the work environment. 

People want to justify corporations, particularly schools, censoring their employees with hyperbole ("What if you have a professor flying a Nazi flag on his front porch?  Would students be comfortable with that?") but these cases are seldom so fraught.  Usually they are matters of opinion, expressed privately, which we should be free to express.  And yeah, if we are big enough di**heads to fly Nazi flags, that's our right.  Are our students delicate "snowflakes"?