There's a difference between noticing and "noticing". By now, claims of "noticing oppression" are well past the point where they should be uniformly regarded as crude dog-whistling.
This is funny to me. "You saying that I enslaved you, barred you from education, and divided and slaughtered your family is actually a subtle dog whistle against white people"
Yes, indeed. What you just quoted is in fact the language of crude conspiracy theory, not even of the most cursory thinking about real-world systems and structures of oppression.
Many people don't believe that the truth or falsehood of a logical argument rests on the identity of the person making the argument.
If you want to convince them of something, it's best to point out flaws in the argument, not try to discredit the person making the argument by calling them names.
And yet I still don't see a refutation of the claim that this particular complaint usually comes from a particular demographic.
If an observation is true, then the observation is true, and is a valid data point to consider along with any others.
A logical argument can be perfectly true and still invalid if it is the result of motivated cherry picking and framing to support an agenda or incentive.
As a master logician lecturer, we can assume you already knew that, which makes this comment curious.
> A logical argument can be perfectly true and still invalid if it is the result of motivated cherry picking and framing to support an agenda or incentive.
The approach to take here, then, would be to critique the part of the letter that is invalid and cherry picked. Perhaps universities have a broader scope than education and research, and focusing on the pursuit of truth doesn't allow it to fulfill its broader responsibilities. If that's your point, make it, instead of saying that certain personal traits of an arguer inherently makes their argument wrong.
A world where arguments are primarily about which identities are good and bad is a world where you just have insults being thrown back and forth about who's a "white man reply guy" and who's an "autistic enby about to saw his genitals off." I'd prefer a different one.
I wrote a specific criticism (it's a mistake to believe the status quo is apolitical) AND I noticed who it is that this criticism usually applies to. Your brain got short circuited and you instead tried to make it personal against me and my approach to critique.
No, please tell us all how "true and yet still invalid" works. Because it's funny that you think that's actually a serious thing to say. Is this something from Foucault or what?
When talking of identity politics, the identity of the speaker is included with the content.
It definitely is a variant of an ad hominem logical fallacy (they are X demographic so they must know and represent all X). But critical thinking goes out the window with identity politics.
And if you identify as white (or others identify you as white), you're just wrong. There's even insults of that type: Karen, Chad, Josh. Doubly so if you are or identify as male.
You are confused. Your brain went fight or flight as soon as you heard someone talking about white men, and you didn't stop to think about whether any of this is responsive to what I wrote.
I didn't call anyone names.
I in fact did point out a flaw in the argument. The flaw is thinking that the status quo is apolitical. The people I talked about on my comment (a real, literal group of people who exist and whose behavior can be empirically observed and analyzed). I commented on them. I am not talking to them.
While this is, of course, a racist counterargument, it is also correct. Doing research without a activist agenda is now a political stance. The sooner neutrals realise this the better
Research is the process by which we uncover empirical truth. If the existence of objective, empirical truth is "political", then everything is political.
This reminds me of the article "Catechism Class at British Universities" about similar policies in the UK, and that title neatly sums up how, while this conflict is being presented as about politics, it is really about religion.
People in earlier eras wouldn't have all been surprised by the requirement for all teaching and research to happen within a particular moral framework, whose tenets were not drawn from rational study or considered open to debate, but simply held as self-evidently correct. They wouldn't be surprised about lecturers or students having to attend prayers or recite scripture.
And all societies undergo periodic revivalism, where there is a constriction of what is considered ethically acceptable behaviour, enforced through a mixture of social ostracism and state and institutional coercion. The fact that the current revivalist movement is a secular religion instead of a spiritual one is a minor difference. Otherwise, it's little different from equivalent Victorian campaigns against immoral behaviour. It just feels unusual because we've been through such a long period of liberalisation and religious decline and perhaps fooled ourselves into thinking it was a permanent state of affairs.
This is an excellent point from the comments, from one of the signatories:
> If you as a public university had no power against racism beyond the nobility of your intentions, your mission statement wouldn't matter a damn anyway. The public university's power against racism is the inherently anti-racist power of genuine knowledge.
And I think it actually refutes some of the more simplistic comments by other signatories about e.g. a desire to keep politics out of science or whether a university's goal should be truth or social justice. Such a phrasing implicitly claims that social justice (however one defines it) is a separable goal from truth. It reminds me a little of the "non-overlapping magisteria" non-solution to conflicting claims from science and religion, that either science determines truth and religion determines, I dunno, vibes, or alternatively that religion has real truth and science is limited to some subset of reality - it solves the problem by refusing to take either one or the other seriously.
The claims of politics and social justice are claims within the domain of truth, just as the claims of science are. Either climate change is happening and merits a response, or it isn't. Either diversity brings conflict or it doesn't. Either the implicit association test is good science or it isn't. Either social Darwinism is good science or it isn't.
The goal of the university should be to seek the truth because it helps humanity. This is why the research university publishes its research and the teaching university opens its doors to the public, after all. There are enough places (as we tech folks know!) where you can pursue the truth about many things for private gain.
Those of us who are on the side of "science" and "truth" must say that when the pursuit of truth has brought us somewhere, we need to do something with that conclusion. It might take us a long while and to false places on the way (as with social Darwinism), but once we've landed on the shores we sought, we need to build something there. And those of us who adhere to the cause of "social justice" as widely understood (and I certainly count myself as one) must believe that the claims it makes about the world we live in are in fact true, and that the pursuit of truth will keep us focused on what actually benefits the people or causes we support, and we need to not cede ground to the idea that our pursuit of truth is somehow a different thing from the ordinary pursuit of truth.
Politics and social justice contain claims in the domain of truth, but also contain claims in the domain of norms, i.e. end goals, which are inherently orthogonal to truth (or near enough). Whether a fact is true is different from whether it's good or bad, which is different again from whether you should do something about it. Confusing these leads to dangerous outcomes, I believe some of the "false places" you mentioned.
Physical truth is very different from socially constructed truth. It took me 25 years, great pain, and leaving my original Mormon faith to understand this.
Money, God, and What's Good are socially constructed truths, for example.
You can converge on understanding physical truth without necessarily converging on socially constructed truth.
> The claims of politics and social justice are claims within the domain of truth, just as the claims of science are. Either climate change is happening and merits a response, or it isn't. Either diversity brings conflict or it doesn't. Either the implicit association test is good science or it isn't. Either social Darwinism is good science or it isn't.
That's a rather black and white way of looking at things, and seems to imply that once "truth" is found, that further action no longer requires any relationship to it.
Why these things are happening and what is the best way to solve them seem to be more pertinent questions, and involve a much deeper search for the truth then merely establishing that they're occurring and something needs to be done.
> Those of us who are on the side of "science" and "truth" must say that when the pursuit of truth has brought us somewhere, we need to do something with that conclusion.
There are those of us who see this as pure hubris. Particularly that you're conflating scientific result with truth and ultimately with conclusivity. It suggests a path where solutions are no longer socially discussed and implemented collectively though compromise, but rather handed down by science and enforced by rote.
> However, we also believe that this outcome was likely accidental, and that it stemmed from the fact that the College of Science and Mathematics only has one representative on the committee despite being the second largest college on campus.
This is a very optimistic take, and surely the signers must know this. Is this move to allow for face-saving?
So, part of my job is to work with this sort of thing and, meh? Both sides have a few fair points?
I think the thing is; there's always a lot of play in these words and people perhaps frequently get too uptight when it comes to a current definition etc.
I'd say my only issue would be "anti-racist" (I'm black fwiw). I don't think that much belongs in a mission statement for roughly the same reason I don't much respect air-quotes "Atheism" -- being against a thing, or "not" a thing is just far weaker than being for something. While I actually do personally believe that racism is at least a plausible candidate for our worst problem right now, I still don't like it in a statement like this. It would be like if, instead of "spreading knowledge" there was a bit about "fighting ignorance." Mission statements aren't the place.
But I think e.g. "social justice" and "diversity" are terms that are loose enough to be appropriate, even if they carry certain connotations today. It's hard to not think that, again, taking these words at face value -- that "social justice" and "diversity" aren't well within the mission of a college/university.
People with a certain political agenda, seek to depict these situations as irreconcileable warfare - because the division and conflict are what they seek.
A mission statement could easily address everyone's concerns, which as usual are understandable.
I don’t think it’s an agenda so much as a desire to create a grand victim/hero narrative.
There seems to be some attitude present that they are fighting some grand battle. In reality this is the same type of stupid academic infighting that has existed since Monks ran the place hundreds of years ago.
I myself work at a university (had the pleasure to be in the working group that drafted our first code of conduct) and I can very much relate to this: that is both sides.
IMHO CS professors, however, tend to become drama queens when it comes to any progressive political thinking. And they might have reason for this reflex.
An important aspect of this is that keeping things as they are in the scientific community is also very political. And what claims to be apolitical in the letter and purely research guided is often radical conservatism. I think one has to understand that the academic system at its current state still relies a very biased narrative of excellence that has promoted a certain type of academic. The reaction demonstrates IMHO that there might a bit of good reasoning behind the mission statement (which I still don't really like because it seems to not reflect other important values in science)
Part of the reason I left a faculty position at one of the tippity-top CS programs was my research was having trouble getting published and funded because I was basically invalidating 20 years of a certain type of approach.
I went to industry and I’m loving it. For all its faults, SV is way more oriented towards new ways of thinking that the academy is.
Why would you allow a paper to be published that put your giant NSF grant at risk? Why would you focus on making efficient and scalable systems that require less grants to fund? Saving money is literally career poison when the university feeds on big bloated budgets.
In industry I can make a case I can save $10M with a new technique and I get a shot at proving it. Try writing a grant that says you can do the same type of research with 1/10th of the funds!
What’s the point of having people outside the university sign the letter? Seems like another veiled attempt to litigate by mob action.
This is an internal organizational discussion and should remain that way. This is just inflaming the situation with no clear strategy to sensible resolution.
>We are a public urban university _dedicated_ to teaching, learning, and research _rooted_ in equity, environmental sustainability, social and racial justice, innovation, and expansive notions of excellence.
Swap these words above and your mission statement is not standing on its head.
This type of control over words and the nuanced replacement of priority is NewSpeak. Anyone dismissing the importance of this subtlety is either a proponent of the concept or ignorant of the far reaching consequences. Neither is acceptable.
I don't think you offered a genuine critique, you simply made an unsubstantiated (racist) accusation and claimed it as fact, then framed anyone who disagreed with your racism as being racist.
> It's usually white men who are used to seeing any action taken to further the interests of oppressed people as "political" and "ideological", but they do not see their own actions which implicitly require continuing said oppression as "political" or "ideological".
Just for the record. You could easily make the argument that the idea of academic objectivity is itself political without the added invective about white men and reply guys.
Just for the record, you omitted the critique in my comment. Seems like you also missed that I was saying. I face hostility simply for existing here with an alternate viewpoint and experiences with real, literally nameable people I have encountered. Nothing I said was an attack on white men, unless you believe that noticing white men is an attack.
> I am always wary of people who want to do world changing research and then call it "not political".
> It's usually white men who are used to seeing any action taken to further the interests of oppressed people as "political" and "ideological", but they do not see their own actions which implicitly require continuing said oppression as "political" or "ideological".
> Compute takes resources. Is there anything less political than massive resource use?
I interpret this as:
"It is usually white men seeking to do apolitical, world-changing research who are willing to ignore the consequences to the oppressed to maintain the status quo."
I think that is probably true of almost any demographic, given the opportunity.
What ad hominems? I looked through the comments and didn't see any. Also we don't even know who you are. It's hard to ad hominem an internet commenter.
One commenter did dig through their history and called them an autistic enby who wanted to saw his[sic] own genitals off, though thankfully it's been deaded. Plenty of personal attacks all around.
> This is most evident in the Vision Statement which discusses diversity, equity, expansive notions of excellence, wellness, an ethic of care, plural identities, climate justice, environmental justice, and racial justice, and then states that "We hold ourselves and each other accountable to ensure these values drive all decision-making in research, pedagogical innovations, resource allocation, and the development of policies and practices."
Heaven forfend that “excellence” and “wellness” and various sorts of justice should be primary drivers of various sorts of decisionmaking.
The mission statement doesn't say "excellence" should be a primary driver, it says "expansive notions of excellence" -- a jargon phrase with a different meaning:
> Expansive excellence recognizes a shift from the traditional (and often narrow) ways that excellence has been defined and measured to explore more comprehensive and relevant ways that excellence can be defined to promote equity and achieve inclusion. Holistic admission practices strive to broaden the criteria used to assess applicants.
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[ 3.2 ms ] story [ 142 ms ] threadIf you want to convince them of something, it's best to point out flaws in the argument, not try to discredit the person making the argument by calling them names.
If an observation is true, then the observation is true, and is a valid data point to consider along with any others.
A logical argument can be perfectly true and still invalid if it is the result of motivated cherry picking and framing to support an agenda or incentive.
As a master logician lecturer, we can assume you already knew that, which makes this comment curious.
The approach to take here, then, would be to critique the part of the letter that is invalid and cherry picked. Perhaps universities have a broader scope than education and research, and focusing on the pursuit of truth doesn't allow it to fulfill its broader responsibilities. If that's your point, make it, instead of saying that certain personal traits of an arguer inherently makes their argument wrong.
A world where arguments are primarily about which identities are good and bad is a world where you just have insults being thrown back and forth about who's a "white man reply guy" and who's an "autistic enby about to saw his genitals off." I'd prefer a different one.
LOL. In other words, it's only "valid" if it supports your POV? Because you just admitted that "true" isn't part of the criteria.
As for being 5: maybe if you were that age and didn't know who Foucault was, you should revert to that.
It definitely is a variant of an ad hominem logical fallacy (they are X demographic so they must know and represent all X). But critical thinking goes out the window with identity politics.
And if you identify as white (or others identify you as white), you're just wrong. There's even insults of that type: Karen, Chad, Josh. Doubly so if you are or identify as male.
I didn't call anyone names.
I in fact did point out a flaw in the argument. The flaw is thinking that the status quo is apolitical. The people I talked about on my comment (a real, literal group of people who exist and whose behavior can be empirically observed and analyzed). I commented on them. I am not talking to them.
People in earlier eras wouldn't have all been surprised by the requirement for all teaching and research to happen within a particular moral framework, whose tenets were not drawn from rational study or considered open to debate, but simply held as self-evidently correct. They wouldn't be surprised about lecturers or students having to attend prayers or recite scripture.
And all societies undergo periodic revivalism, where there is a constriction of what is considered ethically acceptable behaviour, enforced through a mixture of social ostracism and state and institutional coercion. The fact that the current revivalist movement is a secular religion instead of a spiritual one is a minor difference. Otherwise, it's little different from equivalent Victorian campaigns against immoral behaviour. It just feels unusual because we've been through such a long period of liberalisation and religious decline and perhaps fooled ourselves into thinking it was a permanent state of affairs.
In the modern Anglo-tradition, colleges and universities have played a major role in constructive dissent.
Non-public universities have historically had some kind of creed, but it was interpreted liberally enough to allow energetic debate.
> If you as a public university had no power against racism beyond the nobility of your intentions, your mission statement wouldn't matter a damn anyway. The public university's power against racism is the inherently anti-racist power of genuine knowledge.
And I think it actually refutes some of the more simplistic comments by other signatories about e.g. a desire to keep politics out of science or whether a university's goal should be truth or social justice. Such a phrasing implicitly claims that social justice (however one defines it) is a separable goal from truth. It reminds me a little of the "non-overlapping magisteria" non-solution to conflicting claims from science and religion, that either science determines truth and religion determines, I dunno, vibes, or alternatively that religion has real truth and science is limited to some subset of reality - it solves the problem by refusing to take either one or the other seriously.
The claims of politics and social justice are claims within the domain of truth, just as the claims of science are. Either climate change is happening and merits a response, or it isn't. Either diversity brings conflict or it doesn't. Either the implicit association test is good science or it isn't. Either social Darwinism is good science or it isn't.
The goal of the university should be to seek the truth because it helps humanity. This is why the research university publishes its research and the teaching university opens its doors to the public, after all. There are enough places (as we tech folks know!) where you can pursue the truth about many things for private gain.
Those of us who are on the side of "science" and "truth" must say that when the pursuit of truth has brought us somewhere, we need to do something with that conclusion. It might take us a long while and to false places on the way (as with social Darwinism), but once we've landed on the shores we sought, we need to build something there. And those of us who adhere to the cause of "social justice" as widely understood (and I certainly count myself as one) must believe that the claims it makes about the world we live in are in fact true, and that the pursuit of truth will keep us focused on what actually benefits the people or causes we support, and we need to not cede ground to the idea that our pursuit of truth is somehow a different thing from the ordinary pursuit of truth.
Money, God, and What's Good are socially constructed truths, for example.
You can converge on understanding physical truth without necessarily converging on socially constructed truth.
That's a rather black and white way of looking at things, and seems to imply that once "truth" is found, that further action no longer requires any relationship to it.
Why these things are happening and what is the best way to solve them seem to be more pertinent questions, and involve a much deeper search for the truth then merely establishing that they're occurring and something needs to be done.
> Those of us who are on the side of "science" and "truth" must say that when the pursuit of truth has brought us somewhere, we need to do something with that conclusion.
There are those of us who see this as pure hubris. Particularly that you're conflating scientific result with truth and ultimately with conclusivity. It suggests a path where solutions are no longer socially discussed and implemented collectively though compromise, but rather handed down by science and enforced by rote.
This is a very optimistic take, and surely the signers must know this. Is this move to allow for face-saving?
This is how this type of self governance works: you have to show up.
I think the thing is; there's always a lot of play in these words and people perhaps frequently get too uptight when it comes to a current definition etc.
I'd say my only issue would be "anti-racist" (I'm black fwiw). I don't think that much belongs in a mission statement for roughly the same reason I don't much respect air-quotes "Atheism" -- being against a thing, or "not" a thing is just far weaker than being for something. While I actually do personally believe that racism is at least a plausible candidate for our worst problem right now, I still don't like it in a statement like this. It would be like if, instead of "spreading knowledge" there was a bit about "fighting ignorance." Mission statements aren't the place.
But I think e.g. "social justice" and "diversity" are terms that are loose enough to be appropriate, even if they carry certain connotations today. It's hard to not think that, again, taking these words at face value -- that "social justice" and "diversity" aren't well within the mission of a college/university.
Get these people in a room and hash it out.
That is the key and it's not that big a deal.
People with a certain political agenda, seek to depict these situations as irreconcileable warfare - because the division and conflict are what they seek.
A mission statement could easily address everyone's concerns, which as usual are understandable.
There seems to be some attitude present that they are fighting some grand battle. In reality this is the same type of stupid academic infighting that has existed since Monks ran the place hundreds of years ago.
IMHO CS professors, however, tend to become drama queens when it comes to any progressive political thinking. And they might have reason for this reflex.
An important aspect of this is that keeping things as they are in the scientific community is also very political. And what claims to be apolitical in the letter and purely research guided is often radical conservatism. I think one has to understand that the academic system at its current state still relies a very biased narrative of excellence that has promoted a certain type of academic. The reaction demonstrates IMHO that there might a bit of good reasoning behind the mission statement (which I still don't really like because it seems to not reflect other important values in science)
I went to industry and I’m loving it. For all its faults, SV is way more oriented towards new ways of thinking that the academy is.
Why would you allow a paper to be published that put your giant NSF grant at risk? Why would you focus on making efficient and scalable systems that require less grants to fund? Saving money is literally career poison when the university feeds on big bloated budgets.
In industry I can make a case I can save $10M with a new technique and I get a shot at proving it. Try writing a grant that says you can do the same type of research with 1/10th of the funds!
Other than that, they’re pretty similar.
This is an internal organizational discussion and should remain that way. This is just inflaming the situation with no clear strategy to sensible resolution.
Why should people outside the organization contribute funds but not opinions?
No, absolutely not.
Swap these words above and your mission statement is not standing on its head.
This type of control over words and the nuanced replacement of priority is NewSpeak. Anyone dismissing the importance of this subtlety is either a proponent of the concept or ignorant of the far reaching consequences. Neither is acceptable.
Just for the record. You could easily make the argument that the idea of academic objectivity is itself political without the added invective about white men and reply guys.
> I am always wary of people who want to do world changing research and then call it "not political".
> It's usually white men who are used to seeing any action taken to further the interests of oppressed people as "political" and "ideological", but they do not see their own actions which implicitly require continuing said oppression as "political" or "ideological".
> Compute takes resources. Is there anything less political than massive resource use?
I interpret this as:
"It is usually white men seeking to do apolitical, world-changing research who are willing to ignore the consequences to the oppressed to maintain the status quo."
I think that is probably true of almost any demographic, given the opportunity.
Heaven forfend that “excellence” and “wellness” and various sorts of justice should be primary drivers of various sorts of decisionmaking.
> Expansive excellence recognizes a shift from the traditional (and often narrow) ways that excellence has been defined and measured to explore more comprehensive and relevant ways that excellence can be defined to promote equity and achieve inclusion. Holistic admission practices strive to broaden the criteria used to assess applicants.
(source: https://journals.lww.com/jopte/Fulltext/2021/09000/Editorial...)