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my issues with sj let me show you them, ozy blog post, this is a prussian education system hateblog
When I was reading up on the University of Missouri protests, I noticed that their list of demands included mandatory ethnic studies classes for everyone. This is a mind-bogglingly bad idea and I can’t imagine why anyone would support it on the grounds of making the campus more welcoming for people of color.
I mean, there is the obvious fact that many people of color already know that racism exists, and don’t want to sit through an entire class in Did You Know That Everyone Hates You? It’s True! Perhaps they would rather study physics so that they don’t have to think about the structural racism that shapes every aspect of their daily lives.
But it gets worse.
When I was a gender studies student, I had several classes that debated whether nonbinary trans people existed, or whether we only thought we were trans because of internalized misogyny.
And this isn’t an isolated thing that only affects trans people. My classes also debated whether men being forced into PIV intercourse or being hit by their partners counted as rape or abuse. My classes debated whether mental illness is a real thing or just society pathologizing deviants. And we had a Maoist, which I can’t imagine would have been a great experience for people whose families had fled China during the Chinese Civil War.
I’m not talking here about abstract debates like “does male privilege exist?” or “are black women structurally oppressed?” I’m talking about things that would genuinely be hurtful for everyone: “am I really the gender I say I am?” “is the person who beat me actually the real victim?” “am I faking my problems?” “was the man who killed my relatives actually a great guy if you think about it?”
I don’t know what those debates specifically are in ethnic studies, because due to budget cuts my school didn’t have an ethnic studies professor until the year I graduated. But I promise you that there are debates like that. Any time you talk about oppression there are debates like that.
There are civility requirements in a classroom. In most environments, my response to the idea that nonbinary trans people have just internalized misogyny is “fuck off”. But in a classroom, you must be calm, you must be civil, you must carefully lay out evidence for the viewpoint that you are worthy of basic respect and human dignity, you must treat the opposing idea respectfully as a valid alternate opinion.
And the thing is… if you’re a student who’s generally privileged, you are in general not going to have this experience. Classrooms do not discuss whether cis men only feel that they’re men because of their internalized misogyny. If your family never had to flee a mass murdering dictator, the mass murdering dictator’s supporters are mostly funny.
To be clear, I’m not saying that this is something that should be changed. There is debate in the field of gender studies about whether nonbinary trans people actually exist, and one of the purposes of my classes was to familiarize me with active debates in the field. This is something I signed up for when I decided to major in gender studies.
And even if you tried to change it, how would it work? The whole reason those topics are up for debate is because people don’t agree which positions cause harm; if there was already an academic consensus on it, they would just teach that instead of hosting a debate about the subject. You certainly agree with me that forcing men into PIV is rape; but many of the professors are people who will say “well, obviously forcing men into PIV isn’t rape, and we shan’t debate it because of the tremendous harm it would cause to real rape survivors.”
Furthermore, debating issues is a lot of x studies education’s pedagogical method. None of my teachers were Maoists, but Maoist Student would still have made the classroom tremendously hurtful for many people, and it is unclear how to prevent this without simply stopping Maoist Student from talking (which is probably bad precedent, as much as I would have appreciated it at the time). Even worse, transphobic people voicing their transphobia is a necessary step to them having their transphobia challenged; if they aren’t allowed to speak it up, you’re not even accomplishing your goal of making people less bigoted.
So for multiple reasons gender studies classrooms have to be this way, and it is probably good that they are this way. What I am saying is that participating in this should be optional. It is inhumane to require trans people to civilly debate whether they should be misgendered as a condition of graduating college. And therefore no one should require gender studies courses.
X Studies classrooms are, of course, far from the only classrooms that have this problem. The personality disordered student taking abnormal psych may very well find herself debating whether she is inherently abusive; the developmentally disabled student in a philosophy class may have to write a paper about whether he should have been murdered at birth. However, as far as I am aware, no one is trying to make those classes required– and they’re definitely not trying to make them required in order to make schools more welcoming to disabled people. So I wish to express my fervent disapproval of this strategy.
Thing of Things 
I absolutely agree, but IMO the deeper objection is on the meta-level. These students require that academic institutions embrace their political ideology and transform into brainwashing machines. They are trying to create political litmus tests for teaching and studying in these institutions. This is exactly like mandatory Marxism-Leninism classes in the USSR.
I can’t wrap my head around how freedom of speech became the enemy in social justice circles, an ideology with supposedly liberal roots. Freedom of speech is one the main barriers standing between free society and descent into tyranny, and it is incredible that a broad movement in modern Western society fails to understand it. If there are political ideas about which there is sufficiently broad consensus to teach them as facts in the academia, I would expect freedom of speech to be one of them. Even so, we shouldn’t force anyone to take classes on it.
Sometimes I think that the horrors of the past are in the past, at least as far as the Western world is concerned. Other times it seems like people learn nothing from history and we’re just lucky to live in a Golden Age of freedom.
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As per your first point….. I don’t actually see anything *wrong* with the idea of a university with explicitly leftist/sj-aligned values, which is dedicated to promoting them. Catholic schools are allowed to promote Catholicism and Catholic values (see: Georgetown University disinviting Paul Ryan because his budget was uncharitable, to name an example that made me giggle). The thing is, they should be honest about it (Georgetown University must *say* it’s a Jesuit school affiliated with the Catholic Church, not just claim that they’re promoting The Objectively Correct Ideals For Scholarship, Which Just Happen to Look a Lot Like Catholicism). And they shouldn’t be state schools. But the idea of SJU does not, in and of itself, seem like a problem to me.
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I agree, if someone wants to create an entirely private institution which combines teaching arbitrary subjects with political indoctrination, I don’t see a problem with it on the metalevel. However, even in a private institution students that attempt a political takeover by harassing and bullying faculty members are doing something wrong.
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The problem is that ALL universities, including Catholic ones are leftist. Harvard is probably the worst. But there is nothing that tells people looking for a school that Harvard will try to force students to become socialists, globalists, and feminists. Public Universities are also extremely left leaning. They did a study, and found that the average school has less then 2 percent faculty that identify as Republicans are conseravtives, and typically those are all in the fields of science, engineering or mathematics.
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People who call themselves liberals in the US seem much more like European social-democrats that classic liberals, and social justice movement is much closer to Marx than to Locke. The idea that “it is not the consciousness of men that determines their existence but their social existence that determines their consciousness” is a direct quite from Marx, and it seems entirely in line with modern liberal ideology, the whole idea that the society needs to be engineered in a way that results in desired outcomes rather than based on deontologically postulated rights, etc – all that stuff is quite in line with dialectic materialism. In fact, I quite often see people identifying as liberals saying that either communism isn’t that bad, it’s just the Soviets screwed it up, or that the USSR wasn’t really that bad.
And if we hypothesize that the reason why all communist countries looked alike wasn’t that they were all friends, but rather every attempt to build socialism or communism converges to the same failure mode, it’s not that surprising when people start replicating Soviet attributes.
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I think I don’t really understand the basic rationale behind this demand because I can’t see how it benefits anyone. Beyond these points that you make, do you think that requiring these classes would accomplish the protester’s goals? My guess is that if a person is opposed to the messages that X class teaches, then being required to take X would exacerbate that opposition. I could see it working much better for people who are more neutral about the subjects, but that’s still not obvious to me.
A separate issue is that a general requirement would surely decrease the quality of class X since more people with less interest always makes classes worse (especially when they’re discussion-heavy), which mostly harms the people most interested in X. I could even imagine that people who would have majored in X decide not to because their first class in it will probably be horrible if it’s a general requirement. I don’t know whether that’s offset by people who wouldn’t have majored but then get interested by their first class, but my experience teaching pre-med physics tells me probably not.
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This is (a better developed version of) my thoughts exactly. What’s the most clear-cut effective way to make people resent a certain subject or point of view? Make a point of forcing them to listen to it. Even a previously neutral person is probably more likely to be turned against it than for it.
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Well, it increases the jobs available for X Studies majors, at least.
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I expect that’s tongue-in-cheek and I got a chuckle out of it, but to treat it seriously anyway: no realistic expansion of the academic market can make academia a major career path. If the average graduating student / professor ratio at some college is only 1:1, then a professor who teaches for 30 years has trained 30 students to replace them. Only 3% of majors could get jobs this way.
I got curious about the student/professor ratio, and if I didn’t misunderstand the article below by skimming it quickly, it looks like there are about 1500 women’s studies majors per year and 500 faculty, making the student/professor ratio 3:1 per year. So I would simplistically project ~1% of majors would get academic jobs once the growth of women’s studies departments equilibrates.
Click to access NWSA_CensusonWSProgs.pdf
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(Epistemic status: Not actually endorsed, just following the argument where it leads.)
But the proposal is to make X Studies classes mandatory, so that most students taking the classes will not be inclined to replace the professor. If each year we have 1500 majors nationwide who go into academia and stay there for 30 years, then once equilibrium is reached we have 45,000 women’s studies professors. This might seem like too many, but if there are 900,000 students (5% of all US college students) taking a course with each one every semester, you would need that many just to keep class sizes down to a level reasonable for discussion-based courses. Of course, at that point you run the risk that more than 1 in 600 of those will become interested in the subject and start competing for academic jobs, so it’s probably best to ensure that the mandatory classes are as unpleasant as possible.
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When people say “Make X classes mandatory” they do it because they assume the classes will churn out people who hold the same position as the speaker on X (The speaker’s view being objectively correct, it will of course be the one validated by academia).
As an aside, though, I think Ozzy’s belief that Maoism as a political philosophy is chiefly characterised by discussions of Mao’s personal traits shows that perhaps zhe should have listened more in that class.
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It’s not just the “everybody hates you” aspect, though I’m working on undoing some of that at my end from just reading fat acceptance material, but there’s also a risk that the courses are likely do leave some people in privileged categories fearing and hating Social Justice.
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Mandatory English classes in college did not make me like English more. Mandatory STEM classes do not make everyone love STEM subjects. I can’t imagine that mandatory Oppression Studies classes would be particularly successful at brainwashing everybody (to use that term as neutrally as possible.)
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One of my friends (female, gay, and feminist) is taking a (required for her degree) feminist/gender/sexuality studies course this semester and her general response has been “this class is so stupid it makes me not want to be a feminist anymore.” Idk how common this response is, but it definitely happens.
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That sounds very educational. It’s important to learn that the name is not the thing.
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Lest all the comments come from people with negative experiences, I recall that my undergrad institution had a “world studies” requirement, out of an intent no doubt similar to that here of exposing people to alternative/minority viewpoints. I rather enjoyed, and think I benefitted from, the courses I took to satisfy that requirement (and I wouldn’t have taken them if I hadn’t needed to fulfill the requirement). I am thus inclined to think that this sort of thing can be done right, though as Ozy’s story and some of the other reports indicate, it can be done very, very wrong. I suppose one of the things that made the “world studies” requirement less onerous was that there was a relatively long list of classes which satisfied the requirement. The demands of the protesters does make it sound like they might want a specific class or specific classes to be required, rather than a list of options, and that seems to me to be one of the components that’s likely to lead to things going wrong.
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The experience of being told that you’re motivated by internalized misogyny in a context where you have to respond politely, or ideally accept what you’re being told, is a feature of mandatory [X] Studies courses, not a bug. That’s why they want the courses to be mandatory. They hold the rather standard social justice view that white males are full of internalized ‘isms, and they want the university to redpill them.
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>I’m talking about things that would genuinely be hurtful for everyone: “am I really the gender I say I am?”
You literally wrote the article on how this wouldn’t be hurtful for everyone.
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I do not support a mandatory racial awareness and inclusion curriculum. However, I do think the proposal introduces an interesting issue with the larger left-wing discourse. I’m fascinated with these campus (and broader leftist) debates for personal reasons. I’m a pretty centrist-ish Democrat guy, but I find I can’t follow what the protesters are saying! It’s like they’re speaking in a foreign language.
Sometimes it feels like you have to be steeped or deeply schooled in a certain set of buzzwords. Scott Alexander wrote about with respect to the term privilege. Freddie deBoer also wrote about this as a specific rhetorical weakness.
I think that I understand privilege in a basic sense, but here’s a non-exclusive list of terms that I don’t really understand used within the context of this debate: safe space, oppression, bias, diversity, and awareness. In some sense, I think this has a loose analogy with Marxists, where there’s almost a second vocabulary. I really try to learn and follow along (which is one reason why I read this website) but it seems very inaccessible to me.
Perhaps the proposal is an awkward, ineffective attempt geared toward closing this gap?
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Let’s see if I can get this right…
-Oppression is the easiest one to answer, It’s pretty much just anti-privilege.
-A safe space for group X is a place where group X can safely assume they will not be oppressed, and that they will not be forced to deal with issues that cause them distress (though dealing with such may be presented as an option). Sometimes there is a neutral space between privilege and oppression, in which case a group need not be privileged in a safe space for them. Sometimes this isn’t the case.
-Bias, in this context, might mean normal cognitive biases, but it also might mean institutional, historical, or environmental factors bias something, even if the people involved do not.
-Diversity has its usual meaning, I think. I’d need an example to tell you what you’re missing. Remember that diversity happens on many levels and axes.
-“Raising awareness” means telling people about SJ issues. Sometimes this is a real thing that needs to be done, sometimes awareness-raising claims are evidence of an echo chamber,
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Ooh, me! I think cis men only feel that they’re men because of internalized misogyny!
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I kind of feel where you’re coming from, but could you please elaborate for the rest of the class, Ran?
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I think that in a society without gender roles, like Ozy’s Silphium, it’s unlikely that gender identity per se would exist (indeed, it’s hard to imagine what the idea of having a gender identity in such a society could possibly even mean). I also think that misogyny is pretty much inextricable from gender roles as they currently exist in modern-day North America. So in that sense, *everybody* only feels that they’re [insert gender here] because of internalized misogyny; if we completely eliminated misogyny from society, we’d find that we had also eliminated gender roles and thus gender identity (or at least made them so different as to be nearly unrecognizable).
Additionally, it’s often noted that AFAB people seem considerably more likely to identify as nonbinary than AMAB people, and anecdotally I suspect that cis women are also much more likely to really be cis-by-default than cis men are. If that’s true, then I think internalized misogyny is likely to play some kind of role in why cis men tend to feel more strongly connected to their gender identity than cis women do.
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When you discuss if something is rape, do you discuss based on a given definition of rape or is it just everybody expressing their personal opinion on the question?
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So is there an accepted term for *not* using that format/pedagogical approach? Where the instructor *would* just say ‘yes nonbinary trans people exist’ and such like? (Like, regardless of whether one thinks that would be good or whether one thinks that would be possible, it’s easier to talk about stuff if people aren’t thinking of different things while using the same term).
Also, does anyone remember the term for the manifestation of oppression etc that is this “you must treat the opposing idea respectfully as a valid alternate opinion” thing? Where ‘I will ‘reasonably’ say you should die’ is considered civil or whatever, but saying ‘fuck off’ isn’t? I know I’ve seen it talked about a lot, I just don’t remember if there’s a word.
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I think it would be classed as a kind of respectability politics, itself a subset/alternate name of tone policing.
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Wait, what? No, it isn’t. Respectability politics includes things like “it’s homophobic to get drunk and kiss girls at parties, because you’re making people think homosexuality is something people fake for attention.” Tone policing is about saying that people shouldn’t use rude, angry, or hateful language.
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Sorry, my comment was meant to be in response to code16, above, answering the questions in their second paragraph. (Minimally, ‘avoid telling people to fuck off’ is a kind of tone policing; I’d argue it’s also a kind of respectability politics) But yeah, I was totally off base calling respectability politics a subset of tone policing. I do think they’re related, but it’s more complicated than a simple subset relation.
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Ok the reply thing reformats the thread in a confusing way.
I don’t see how “saying ‘fuck off’ isn’t [considered civil]” doesn’t fall under the umbrella of “saying that people shouldn’t use rude, angry, or hateful language”. It’s not respectability politics in the sense you bring up, but anger related tone policing in general reminds me of “black people should avoid looking dangerous” style respectability politics.
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“So is there an accepted term for *not* using that format/pedagogical approach? Where the instructor *would* just say ‘yes nonbinary trans people exist’ and such like?”
The thing is, most undergrad classes are not really so much about imparting a certain set of facts as they are about teaching students how to engage with very complicated ideas. If a teacher just told their students “This is the way it is, deal with it”, they’d not be doing their job, even if what they were saying was 100% correct.
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That was not my experience of undergrad classes!
And, regardless of experience, it could still be useful to have a word for it – we can have words for stuff we’re not doing or stuff we think it’s a bad idea to do, too.
Also, I think there’s more gradations here than the two. Like, I took a class on the Gulag. And sure, someone could have been like ‘well maybe it was actually necessary to do that and was net good for the country’ (I don’t think anyone did). But it was very clear that the course did not hold that position, and the instructor was not instructing from that perspective, and all of our readings were selected accordingly, etc.
(I think the next part of my comment sounds abrasive and such like, so to be clear, my ire is at bad courses and such like and not at the replier above).
Meanwhile, while of course there are classes that do this well, “teaching students how to engage with very complicated ideas” is one of those things people will often say their class is doing when if fact it’s either not being taught at all or taught awfully, and is one of those areas where people seem to think learning will just magically happen, when they would never, for instance, think it made sense to teach math by putting students in a room with math problems.
And, quite frankly, if the instructor is sitting around going ‘ladida look a debate’ while students reproduce cliche systemic oppressive ideas (sorry, this is not good phrasing, I can’t think of how to phrase it well), I don’t think they’re effectively teaching how to engage with very complicated ideas, at all. And ‘reproducing cliche systemic oppressive ideas’ and ‘failing theory of mind and being insensitive to people with problems you don’t have because you don’t stop to think’ are not in any way good ways to engage with complicated ideas.
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I’m at the stage now where I think “racism” is becoming a meaningless concept. It’s being used as a shibboleth; people have been educated/trained that Racism Is Bad and so they throw it around as an accusation when they feel they are being denied their rights (it’s getting to the same stage as calling someone/something “fascist”).
Example of what I mean: I’m not American. I work associated with local government, in the provision of social housing (I am a very lowly minion in the great bureaucracy). There are certain questions every applicant gets asked when interviewed about their need for social housing.
We have had people accusing us of racism and prejudice against them when we haven’t immediately handed over a house to them. These are white English people, oftentimes from Irish families, who have come back to Ireland to live.
“Racism” in this instance is just a means of parroting “You are oppressing me!” when they are not immediately getting everything they think they are entitled to get, as and when they want it.
That’s part of why it strikes me that demands for mandatory classes in Such-and-Such studies are not going to be about “Let us debate both sides of the question”, it’s a demand for inculcating The Only Correct Approach And Response into people, so that after such classes you press the button and “Racism! Racism!” comes out.
(Yes, I’m damn cynical about human nature and the more I see of it, the more cynical I get).
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And even if you tried to change it, how would it work? The whole reason those topics are up for debate is because people don’t agree which positions cause harm; if there was already an academic consensus on it, they would just teach that instead of hosting a debate about the subject.
Er, surely the reason they’re up for debate is because people don’t agree which positions are true?
(Also: Holy crap debate-based classes sound awful but I guess you’ve already written about that.)
Anyway what I’m gathering from this is that — other concerns aside, including Liskantope’s about this getting people to resent the subject — this would appear to be a horrible way to accomplish the protestor’s presumed goal of indoctrination, if the classes don’t do so much actual teaching as just debating it.
(Except of course in reality you have the factor that you’d better agree with the SJ answers or you’ll be subject to the usual “You’re not a misogynist, are you?” and other threats of Meidung. But obviously that depends on how SJ the surrounding environment is, as well as how Blue you personally are. So I guess it fails as a tool for truly indoctrinating people, but it could work quite well as a tool for scaring into line those who are just a little outside. Which might be all that many of them want, honestly; given their generally anti-free-speech attitude, why should we believe that most of them actually want to convince people rather than scare them into line? If they’re even making a distinction. University of Missouri, however, doesn’t seem like the best place to get that to work.)
Fits with the “I took gender studies classes to finally learn the seemingly-missing foundations of feminism and still didn’t learn anything about them!” stories I’ve heard, I suppose. [Note: Whenever I say “foundations” in this context, I don’t mean it in the same sense we mean it in math. Don’t think set theory and logic. Think, I don’t know, point-set topology or something.] Surely there’s a better way to teach this, though? Do professors do this because they actually like it or find it effective, or because somebody up the chain thought it sounded good and required it of them? (Or because it reduces their workload, perhaps?) Arguing with the professor when they get something wrong or fail to justify something happens in lecture classes, after all, often with productive results, or at least an honest “I don’t know”.
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Would “set the class in an auditorium with hundreds of people and don’t let anyone really argue at all” be viable? You can still have non-mandatory classes for people who want to actually debate the issues, but the big one can serve the purpose of making people aware of basic facts.
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