Stanford Law School Dean writes long letter supporting free speech and viewpoint neutrality, puts offending DEI administrator on leave

March 23, 2023 • 11:15 am

I’ve written previously about the shameful behavior of Stanford University Law School (SLS) with respect to a March 9 talk by conservative Appellate Court judge Kyle Duncan. The talk, about the relationship between Duncan’s court and the Supreme Court, was seriously disrupted by the law-school students, who shouted and put up posters and signs in the lecture room. (I consider signs a disruption, but others don’t.) The students had been egged on to protest by a pre-talk email from the Law School’s Associate Dean for Diversity, Equity and Inclusion, Tirien Steinbach, denouncing Duncan and saying how harmful his decisions have been.

When Duncan asked for an administrator to intervene to stop the disruption (four deans, including Steinbach, were sitting there silently), Dean Steinbach got up and read several minutes’ worth of further critique of Duncan’s “harmful” decisions, and while paying lip service to Stanford’s free speech policy, asked the students whether “the juice was worth the squeeze”, i.e., whether free speech was worth the offense and harm inflicted on the students. She also said that the demonstration had been the right thing to do. That pretty much ended the presentation save for some confrontational questions by students and some angry answers by Duncan.

Afterwards, SLC Dean Jenny Martinez sent a letter to the Stanford community apologizing for the demonstration, and then she and Stanford’s President sent a joint letter of apology to Judge Duncan. (Duncan’s behavior itself wasn’t optimal during the talk, either, for then and in interviews afterwards he called the students names, something that detracted from his gravitas. However, I can understand his anger even though I disagree strongly with his legal views.)

When Martinez taught her own SLS class a few days later, she herself was subject to a silent demonstration by her students, who wore black, and there were calls for her to rescind her apology and even to resign.

Yesterday Martinez sent out a very long (10-page) letter to the SLS community disclosing what Stanford had decided to do in light of the disruption, which had brought unfavorable national attention on the school. You can find that letter here, or by clicking on the screenshot below. It’s a pretty good letter that outlines strong reforms for SLS and Stanford in general.

The upshot:

1.) The only downside to the letter is that it begins by emphasizing the hate mail directed to Stanford’s administrators and students, as if they were the victims rather than free speech itself as well as Judge Duncan (I indent excerpts from Martinez’s letter):

As we consider the role of respectful treatment of members of our community, I want to be clear that the hate mail and appalling invective that have been directed at some of our students and law school administrators in the wake of March 9 are of great concern to me. All actionable threats that come to our attention will be investigated and addressed as the lawpermits.

It also continually emphasizes Stanford’s “diverse community” and respect for DEI, which isn’t too bad, but of course it was the DEI dean, the conflict between DEI principles and free speech—and the decision by Steinbach and the other attending deans to let “offense” trump free speech— that created this whole mess in the first place.

2.) Much of the letter reads like a court decision, citing all the relevant legal cases and decisions showing that schools like Stanford have free speech but disruption is not part of free speech. (Posters apparently are, though I think I’d be discombobulated if students in the front row were holding up banners and signs.) But it’s a clever way for Martinez to impress on the law students that, indeed, they had acted contrary to settled law.

3.) Glory of glories: Dean Steinbach was disciplined for fomenting the demonstration—something I hoped for but did not expect. She’s been put on leave and apparently being further investigated, so she might be fired. From Martinez’s letter (her emphasis), which also chastises the other deans for not quashing the disruption:

Enforcement of university policies against disruption of speakers is necessary to ensure the expression of a wide range of viewpoints. It also follows from this that when a disruption occurs and the speaker asks for an administrator to help restore order, the administrator who responds should not insert themselves into debate with their own criticism of the speaker’s views and the suggestion that the speaker reconsider whether what they plan to say is worth saying, for that imposes the kind of institutional orthodoxy and coercion that the policy on Academic Freedom precludes. For that reason, I stand by my statement in the apology letter that at the event on March 9, “staff members who should have enforced university policies failed to do so, and instead intervened in inappropriate ways that are not aligned with the university’s commitment to free speech.”

. . . First, Associate Dean Tirien Steinbach is currently on leave. Generally speaking, the university does not comment publicly on pending personnel matters, and so I will not do so at this time. I do want to express concern over the hateful and threatening messages she has received as a result of viral online and media attention and reiterate that actionable threats that come to our attention will be investigated and addressed as the law permits. Finally, it should be obvious from what I have stated above that at future events, the role of any administrators present will be to ensure that university rules on disruption of events will be followed, and all staff will receive additional training in that regard.

4.) Martinez cites the University of Chicago’s Kalven Report mandating institutional neutrality on political, ideological, and moral matters (except when they affect the University’s mission) to show why administrators should not chill the speech of students—as they did on March 9 with the students who wanted to hear Judge Duncan. I’m very pleased that Stanford (and, increasingly, other schools) are falling in line with the Kalven principles. From Martinez’s letter:

The 1967 Kalven Report of the University of Chicago is not formal policy at Stanford but helps explain why university administrators should avoid exercising their authority in ways that can chill speech. It states:

A university has a great and unique role to play in fostering the development of social and political values in a society. The role is defined by the distinctive mission of theuniversity and defined too by the distinctive characteristics of the university as a community. It is a role for the long term.

The mission of the university is the discovery, improvement, and dissemination of knowledge. Its domain of inquiry and scrutiny includes all aspects and all values of society. A university faithful to its mission will provide enduring challenges to social values, policies, practices, and institutions. By design and by effect, it is the institution which creates discontent with the existing social arrangements and proposes new ones. In brief, a good university, like Socrates, will be upsetting.

The instrument of dissent and criticism is the individual faculty member or the individual student. The university is the home and sponsor of critics; it is not itself the critic. It is, to go back once again to the classic phrase, a community of scholars. To perform its mission in the society, a university must sustain an extraordinary environment of freedom of inquiry and maintain an independence from political fashions, passions, and pressures. A university, if it is to be true to its faith in intellectual inquiry, must embrace, be hospitable to, and encourage the widest diversity of views within its own community.

5.) Stanford decided not to punish individual students for participating in the demonstration, but to give them some education in freedom of speech. This is fine with me, as the students apparently had not been given such education, because it would be hard to identify individual students who violated Stanford’s free-speech policy, and because the students were also told by Dean Steinbach that their actions were okay. But every college orientation in America needs a unit on freedom of speech:

Second, with respect to the students involved in the protest, several factors lead me to conclude that what is appropriate here is mandatory educational programming for our student body rather than referring specific students for disciplinary sanction (which at Stanford is administered by the central university’s Office of Community Standards and involves a deliberate process including fact-finding and hearings).

. . .Accordingly, as one first step the law school will be holding a mandatory half-day session in spring quarter for all students on the topic of freedom of speech and the norms of the legal profession. A faculty committee will plan the session and invite speakers representing a range of viewpoints. Needless to say, faculty and students are free to disagree with the material presented in these sessions or with the arguments I have presented in this memorandum – there will be no orthodoxy on this topic either. But I believe further discussion of these topics will both advance our educational mission and help us learn from the errors of the recent past.

6.) Finally, Stanford is going to examine and reform its protocol for dealing with disruption of speakers:

In addition, a more detailed and explicit policy with clear protocols for dealing with disruptions would better protect the rights of speakers and also those who wish to exercise their right to protest within permissible bounds, and is something we will seek to adopt and educate students and staff on going forward. Cf., e.g., UC Hastings [now UC College of the Law San Francisco] Event Policy: Student Organization Support Protocol; Permissible Forms of Protest (Adopted October 1, 2022), available at https://www.thefire.org/researchlearn/ uc-hastings-event-policy-adopted-october-1-2022. Doing so will bring greater clarity and certainty about future enforcement of the policy, including through disciplinary sanctions as appropriate.

All in all, this seems a satisfactory resolution to me. I think a nice touch would be to invite Judge Duncan back to give his planned talk; that would not only be gracious (though I doubt he’d agree to come!), but would also test whether the new rules are really in effect.

If you’re interested in the relevant law, or want to see a pretty good letter (which I’m sure Dean Martinez was compelled to write), do read the whole letter. This had to be done so that SLS wouldn’t become the laughing stock of law schools—or lose donor money. But I seriously doubt whether the renegade students will accept what Dean Martinez says. They may behave properly from now on, but the “I’m offended” trope is hard to root out.

ADDENDUM: FIRE has posted a laudatory commentary on Dean Martinez’s letter.

h/t: Dorian and several readers

Stanford Law School tries to succor Federalist Society by sending its members into the jaws of lions

March 13, 2023 • 12:00 pm

Get a load of this. Although Stanford University Law School is trying to make amends for the shameful display put on by its students last week, they continue to stick their feet deeper into the mud.

Yesterday I reported on the execrable deplatforming of Fifth Circuit federal appellate Judge Kyle Duncan during his scheduled talk at Stanford Law School (SLS). Students, outraged that a conservative judge should be given any platform, interrupted the Judge so persistently and loudly that he was forced to stop his speech. (His topic was the relationship between his court and the Supreme Court.)

The students had been egged on by Tirien Steinbach, the Law School’s Associate Dean for Diversity, Equity & Inclusion. Before Judge Duncan’s talk, she sent an email to the students explaining why Duncan was an oppressor And then when Duncan asked for faculty help in quelling the in-class demonstration, Steinbach stood up and read nine minutes of prepared remarks to Duncan explaining how awful and hurtful he was and how, perhaps, Stanford’s policy of free speech wasn’t so great after all because it caused “harm”. As she suggested, perhaps the “juice wasn’t worth the squeeze.” Steinbach’s method of promoting harmony apparently involves setting groups against each other.

In a “mistakes-were-made” brand of email to the Stanford community, SLS Dean Jenny Martinez apologized for the incident without placing blame on anyone. But the next day, Martinez and Stanford President Marc Tessier-Lavigne sent a joint apology to Judge Duncan promising that an incident like this would never happen again. Here’s that email:

Dear Judge Duncan,

We write to apologize for the disruption of your recent speech at Stanford Law School. As has already been communicated to our community, what happened was inconsistent with our policies on free speech, and we are very sorry about the experience you had while visiting our campus.

We are very clear with our students that, given our commitment to free expression, if there are speakers they disagree with, they are welcome to exercise their right to protest but not to disrupt the proceedings. Our disruption policy states that students are not allowed to “prevent the effective carrying out” of a “public event” whether by heckling or other forms of interruption.

In addition, staff members who should have enforced university policies failed to do so, and instead intervened in inappropriate ways that are not aligned with the university’s commitment to free speech.

We are taking steps to ensure that something like this does not happen again. Freedom of speech is a bedrock principle for the law school, the university, and a democratic society, and we can and must do better to ensure that it continues even in polarized times.

With our sincerest apologies again,
Marc Tessier-Lavigne, Ph.D.[,] President and Bing Presidential Professor
Jenny Martinez[,] Richard E. Lang Professor of Law & Dean of Stanford Law School

In the penultimate paragraph, they clearly place some of the blame on diversity dean Steinbach for inciting the disruption. Will they discipline her, or at least tell her to lay off the incitement; and will Stanford discipline any of the disruptive students? I’d bet money they won’t. And, of course, a policy that isn’t enforced is not a policy at all.

If Stanford were real mensches, they would invite Duncan back to deliver the talk he prepared, and ensure that the event would be peaceful. That won’t happen, either.

But in a really hamhanded gesture, Jeanne Merino, the SLS Associate Acting Dean of Students, “reached out” to the Federalist Society, which had invited Duncan, and offered them University sources of succor. What’s unbelievable is that one of the sources suggested was Steinbach, the diversity dean who escalated the whole affair. They also offered help from the other two deans (and Merino herself), all of whom had been in the classroom and did nothing to stop the demonstration. You can read Merino’s email here.

Here’s part of it (second bolding is mine)

2. Connection with OSA, DEI, Levin Center: Please reach out to any of us here at SLS if you would like support or would like to process last week’s events: a. OSA (Jeanne Merino, jmerino@law.stanford.edu, Holly Parrish, hparrish@law.stanford.edu, John Dalton jwdalton@law.stanford.edu, and Megan Brown, mybrown@law.stanford.edu), b. DEI (Tirien Steinbach, tsteinbach@law.stanford.edu) c. Levin Center (Diane Chin, dchin@law.stanford.edu; Anna Wang, annawang@law.stanford.edu).

Apparently, besides Conflagator Steinbach herself, Merino, as well as Associate Director of Student Affairs Holly Parrish and Student Affairs Program Coordinator Megan Brown, were all in the room—and did nothing— as the demonstration unfolded. But to suggest that the Federalist Society should reach out to Dean Steinbach for comfort (not to mention to the other three as well) is like suggesting that the Roadrunner reach out for help to Wile E. Coyote.

Stanford has affirmed in writing that the juice (a climate conducive to learning) is indeed worth the squeeze (the school’s free-speech policy). The real question is whether the juice is worth the squeeze of having a diversity dean who’s out of control.

These days, Stanford Law School (and its East Coast counterpart Yale Law School) are like a pair of cross-country soap operas. But it’s important to see that this kind of thing is inevitable so long as you claim that DEI programs are in complete harmony with free speech policies. As Steely Dan sang, “Only a fool would say that.”

Entitled Stanford Law students, egged on by DEI dean, demolish the free speech of a visiting judge

March 12, 2023 • 9:45 am

A bunch of students at Stanford Law school, egged on by a DEI dean, managed to shut down a talk by Judge Kyle Duncan, who’s on the Court of Appeals of the Fifth Circuit. That’s one of the 13 appellate courts of last resort before the final one: the U.S. Supreme Court. The Fifth, headquartered in the southern United States, is known for the conservative tenor of its decisions, and nearly all its judges were appointed by Republicans.

Stanford Law School, on the other hand, is known as Left-wing, indeed, in many ways it’s woke. Ergo there was bound to be trouble when the student branch of the Federalist Society, a conservative legal organization, invited Kyle Duncan to speak on a topic one would think would interest SLS students: “The Fifth Circuit in Conversation with the Supreme Court: Covid, guns, and Twitter.” It’s not often law students get to hear an appellate court judge discuss interactions with the Supreme Court (justices tend to keep their views private), so this would be something I’d want to hear, too.

The SLS student didn’t. They are incurious about views contrary to their own, and showed it.

First, a poster appeared, produced by SLS students, showing all the officers of the school’s Federalist Society. It’s a way of doxing them, but it’s legal. Still, it was meant to intimidate them by urging other students to demonize them.

Below is another one indicting Judge Duncan (not all the accusations are accurate, and of course “fought” really means “ruled on the issue”). It is true, however, that he’s a conservative justice, and was appointed by Trump. That alone makes him anathema to most SLS students.

Finally, the talk was further attacked in advance in an email sent to the students by Tirien Steinbach, the Law School’s Associate Dean for Diversity, Equity & Inclusion. You can see that email, and a pretty balanced summary of all the issues and events around Duncan’s visit, in the Substack article below by David Lat, a legal journalist who also leans to the right. (He does, however, call out Judge Duncan for his own juvenile behavior during the Q&A session.)

Click to read:

Lat reproduces Steinbach’s email, which is too long to repeat here. It does, however, throw gasoline on the fire. At the same time she assures students that Stanford favors free speech, she also reminds them how odious Judge Duncan is:

While Judge Duncan is not expected to present on his views, advocacy or judicial decisions related directly to LGBTQ+ civil rights, this is an area of law for which he is well known. Numerous senators, advocacy groups, think tanks, and judicial accountability groups opposed Kyle Duncan’s nomination to the bench because of his legal advocacy (and public statements) regarding marriage equality, and transgender, voting, reproductive, and immigrants’ rights. However, he was confirmed in 2018. He has been invited to speak at SLS by the student chapter of the Federalist Society.

A coalition of SLS students have expressed their upset and outrage over Judge Duncan’s invitation to speak at SLS. For some members of our community, Judge Duncan, during his time as an attorney and judge, has “repeatedly and proudly threatened healthcare and basic rights for marginalized communities, including LGBTQ+ people, Native Americans, immigrants, prisoners, Black voters, and women,” and his presence on campus represents a significant hit to their sense of belonging.

And while she reminds students that SLS will not censor Judge Duncan, that’s exactly what happened. Far more students showed up to protest Duncan’s appearance than to listen to him. They held up signs and, as Duncan began to speak, repeatedly interrupted him and shouted him down.

Below: one tweet from Aaron Sibarium’s twitter thread, showing a protest sign (“Duncan can’t find the clit”, presumably referring to his stand on abortion) and some of the student reaction.

Each time Duncan began to speak, the protesters would heckle him with insults, shouting things like "scumbag!" and "you’re a liar!"

The din became so loud that Duncan asked for an administrator to keep order, according to video of the event.

— Aaron Sibarium (@aaronsibarium) March 11, 2023

Unfortunately, when Duncan asked the SLS administrators to restore order (three were in attendance), the one who stepped in was DEI dean Steinbach, who proceeded not to restore order, but to lecture Duncan for nine minutes about how he was causing “harm” to the students. She also questioned whether Stanford’s free-speech policy wasn’t itself harmful—whether “the juice was worth the squeeze”. Apparently Steinbach had prepared written remarks for such an occasion, anticipating that she’d get to chew out the Judge.

Steinbach’s patronizing lecture to Duncan can be seen below in the Twitter thread by legal writer Ed Whelan that begins here. See below, or you can watch Steinbach’s remarks on Vimeo.

Here's video of Stanford DEI dean Steinbach's remarks slamming Judge Duncan and setting forth university policy on free speech while calling its soundness into question and stating that it might need to be reconsidered. /8https://t.co/PrfovwmMYj

— Ed Whelan (@EdWhelanEPPC) March 10, 2023

As Lat recounts, Duncan’s talk ended without students being able to listen:

As you can see from the video, about half of the protestors eventually left at the direction of a student protest leader, with one of them charmingly calling the judge “scum” as she walked out. Yet the heckling continued, and still the administrators did nothing to intervene. Eventually, the student-relations representative tried to intervene once it had become clear that the event was out of control—but Judge Duncan then criticized him, telling him that he should have acted sooner.

Not getting traction trying to give a speech, Judge Duncan moved on to the question-and-answer session, and the protestors quieted down enough to ask a few questions. The questions—and answers—were generally contemptuous. As the judge put it to me, while he’s usually happy to answer questions when he speaks at law schools, the questions he received at Stanford were not asked in good faith; in his words, they were of the “how many people have you killed” or “how many times did you beat your wife last week” variety.

According to Lat, Duncan himself lost his cool and responded angrily to the students:

After around ten minutes of trying to give his remarks, Judge Duncan became angry, departed from his prepared remarks, and laced into the hecklers. He called the students “juvenile idiots” and said he couldn’t believe the “blatant disrespect” he was being shown after being invited to speak. He said that the “prisoners were now running the asylum,” which led to a loud round of boos. His pushback riled up the protesters even more.

I can understand Duncan’s anger, but a federal judge should be able to restrain his temper under fire.

Duncan has remained angry in later interviews, “saying that the protesters behaved like ‘dogs**t’ and that Dean Steinbach should be fired.” At the very least, I think Steinbach’s behavior was execrable—far, worse than the Judge’s, and she should be disciplined if not fired. She knew full well what her actions would cause, for she’d prepared remarks for that very occurrence.

The next day, Jenny Martinez, Dean of the SLS, wrote an email to the community saying, in effect, that “mistakes were made”, and that Judge Duncan should have been allowed to speak. But she made no mention of DEI Dean Steinbach’s role in the whole thing. Lat reproduces Martinez’s email in his Substack post,

I found Martinez’s “apology” okay but insufficient, and I emailed her directly (copying it to Stanford’s President), saying that at the very least Steinbach deserved a reprimand. It is not the purpose of a DEI dean to create even more division and disunity, and Steinbach, who should have behaved more professionally, acted like a frothing ideologue. “Harm” indeed! Can we replace this “harm” word for what it really means in these situations: “offense”?

FIRE also wrote a letter to Stanford’s President about the treatment of Duncan; here’s a bit:

In the video, Dean Steinbach—who ostensibly was brought into the event to restore calm, and arguably did so—repeatedly praised the hecklers and accused the speaker of “harm.” She also muses about whether, in regard to Stanford’s permissive free expression policies, the “juice is worth the squeeze.” She suggests the university “might need to reconsider these policies” to prevent speakers like Duncan from sharing their views on campus in the future because they may upset some students.

. . . When the university allows speakers like Judge Duncan to be silenced, it sends the message to all in the Stanford community that those who engage in unlawful, disruptive conduct have the power to dictate which voices and views may be heard on campus. If reports about last night’s disruption are accurate, Stanford must take immediate steps to reaffirm its commitment to expressive rights for all. Failure to do so quickly and clearly will be to Stanford’s lasting shame.

Yesterday, both Stanford’s President, Marc Tessier-Lavigne and SLS Dean Martinez personally apologized in a joint letter to Judge Duncan. Eugene Volokh posts those apologies here. It’s a good letter, and does refer indirectly to DEI Dean Steinbach. They also promise to do better. I’ll believe it when I see it. From the letter:

We are very clear with our students that, given our commitment to free expression, if there are speakers they disagree with, they are welcome to exercise their right to protest but not to disrupt the proceedings. Our disruption policy states that students are not allowed to “prevent the effective carrying out” of a “public event” whether by heckling or other forms of interruption.

In addition, staff members who should have enforced university policies failed to do so, and instead intervened in inappropriate ways that are not aligned with the university’s commitment to free speech.

The only person that last paragraph could refer to is Dean Steinbach.

So that’s the story, and it’s been all over the media—the Right-wing media, mostly, for it’s not in the Left-wing media’s interest to show bad behavior of those on its end of the ideological spectrum.

The Big Lesson: As Christopher Hitchens observed in his marvelous talk in Toronto on free speech, if people have an opinion that is grossly different from the “prevailing wisdom,” that makes it even more urgent to not only allow those persons to speak, but to listen to them. Judge Duncan should have been listened to quietly (I also don’t think signs should be allowed in the lecture room, as they are designed to discombobulate the speaker), and the post talk questions, if confrontational, should at least have been polite.

But it’s not just the fault of the Stanford Law students, for their school apparently failed to instill in them the meaning of the First Amendment and how it should be respected on a campus. I’d suggest to Dean Martinez that a first-year’s orientation at SLS should include a unit on freedom of speech.

***************

UPDATE: A new article in The Stanford Review, the university’s conservative newspaper. Click to read:

An excerpt:

Stanford’s apology to Duncan stated the obvious: this shouldn’t have happened. Judge Duncan graciously accepted the apology. In doing so, he reiterated that he never should have been shouted down in the first place and that staff members who should have enforced university policies failed to do so. He reiterated how poor the behavior of Steinbach was, stating that “the administrators’ behavior was completely at odds with the law school’s mission of training future members of the bench and bar.” The apology also said that Stanford would take steps to ensure this does not happen again. However, it is unclear what Stanford plans to do to prevent such disruption in the future. Firing Dean Steinbach is a good start.

The university’s apology will be completely meaningless unless concrete actions are taken to rid the administration of anti-speech zealots

They’re right: unless there is action, all we have is meaningless words. I am not a “cancel culture” advocate who normally calls for somebody who makes a misstep to be fired. But what Dean Steinbach did wasn’t a misstep: it was a deliberately planned and timed provocation to push back on Stanford’s free speech policy and prevent the students from hearing “offensive” speech like that proferred by Judge Duncan. This was not a misstep but sabotage of Stanford’s policies, and, upon reflection, I think they should give Dean Steinbach her walking papers.

Vanderbilt responds to the Michigan State shooting by sending its own community students a message written using ChatGPT

February 19, 2023 • 9:20 am

ChatGPT, the bot site that automatically produces prose, is back in the news again, but not in a humorous way and not as an example of students cheating. Rather, the University got the bot to write an official message from a university to its students.

As the Vanderbilt Hustler reports (the student newspaper of Vanderbilt University), the bot was used to write a message of consolation to the students after the Michigan State University shooting on February 13 that killed three. The robot message was then sent to students by the school’s EDI office (“Equity, Diversity, and Inclusion”).

“Peabody” is Vanderbilt’s College of Education and Human Development. Click below to read about the mistake—which I assume it was.

Here’s the entire email, which reveals the very source of its prose at the bottom, though it was said to be “paraphrased” (I’ve put a red box around the bot bit as well as the endless promotion of inclusivity and diversity as well as the call to examine our biases):

From the newspaper:

A note at the bottom of a Feb. 16 email from the Peabody Office of Equity, Diversity and Inclusion regarding the recent shooting at Michigan State University stated that the message had been written using ChatGPT, an AI text generator. [Note that the newspaper gives only the last paragraph of the full email.]

Associate Dean for Equity, Diversity and Inclusion Nicole Joseph sent a follow-up, apology email to the Peabody community on Feb. 17 at 6:30 p.m. CST. She stated using ChatGPT to write the initial email was “poor judgment.”

“While we believe in the message of inclusivity expressed in the email, using ChatGPT to generate communications on behalf of our community in a time of sorrow and in response to a tragedy contradicts the values that characterize Peabody College,” the follow-up email reads. “As with all new technologies that affect higher education, this moment gives us all an opportunity to reflect on what we know and what we still must learn about AI.”

The only justification for that email is that at least it cites sources, which of course college students are suppose to do. It even gives the ChatGPT message as a “personal communication,” though a “robotic communication” would have been more appropriate. The paper beefs that there was only one “incident” and not “multiple” shootings, though I can’t be bothered about that.

I suspect what happened is that some semi-literate functionary decided to produce a model email using ChatGPT rather than express his/her own sentiments. But then, god almighty, the functionary was honest enough to send it out saying where it came from.

The reaction of the students was typical, and similar to mine:

Laith Kayat, a senior, is from Michigan, and his younger sister attends MSU. He stated that the EDI Office’s use of ChatGPT in drafting its email is “disgusting.”

“There is a sick and twisted irony to making a computer write your message about community and togetherness because you can’t be bothered to reflect on it yourself,” Kayat said. “[Administrators] only care about perception and their institutional politics of saving face.”

That’s a good statement. Here’s another:

Senior Jackson Davis, a Peabody undergraduate, said he was disappointed that the EDI Office allegedly used ChatGPT to write its response to the shooting. He stated that doing so is in line with actions by university administrations nationwide.

“They release milquetoast, mealymouthed statements that really say nothing whenever an issue arises on or off campus with real political and moral stakes,” Davis said. “I consider this more of a mask-off moment than any sort of revelation about the disingenuous nature of academic bureaucracy.”

I’m not sure what “moral and political stakes” that Mr. Davis wanted highlighted here. A simple, humane message that expresses sorrow and empathy without politics would, I think, have been appropriate. And they should have left out all the “inclusivity and diversity” stuff, which strikes me as superfluous and off message. Statements about gun control and the like (an initiative that, as you know, I strongly approve of) are debatable statements that do not belong in official communiques, and you’d never see such a thing coming out of the University of Chicago, which maintains institutional neutrality on such issues, though against considerable pressure from faculty and students to make the college take sides on issues.

But to me, the most striking thing about the message above is that it seems to be using the tragedy as an excuse to flaunt the University’s virtue of promoting not only diversity, but “inclusivity”, mentioning that term, or “inclusive,” four times in a very short email. So beyond the heartlessness and lack of empathy involved in turning to ChatGPT, the email is doubly offensive because it’s touting DEI (or EDI) principles more than it is reaching out to people. And there’s not even a single word about showing empathy for the families and loved ones of those who were murdered.

I can ask only “what kind of tendentious mushbrains would put together a message like this?” They are taking advantage of a tragedy to promote a Social Justice agenda. This is the fruit of institutionalized DEI offices.

Chronicle: DEI erodes academic freedom

February 7, 2023 • 9:45 am

For a while I’ve been making the obvious point that free speech (or academic freedom) and “inclusivity” don’t always go hand in hand. In fact, that’s exactly what you should expect, for free speech and academic freedom guarantee that some people will be offended, and the offended are clearly not “included.” Likewise, the compelled speech inherent in today’s versions of DEI is incompatible with freedom of speech and with academic freedom. This is why the phrase “inclusive excellence”, which we see everywhere these days, is an oxymoron. “Excellence” is having academic freedom and freedom of speech.

Yet it’s taboo to mention this conflict, and universities and academics blithely float the notion of “inclusive excellence”. The recent incident at Hamline University, in which instructor Erika López Prater was fired for showing an ancient painting of Muhammad (with his face clearly in view) to her art history class, shows this tension clearly. López Prater was simply exercising her academic freedom, teaching what she thought was important in the history of Islamic art. Yet after Muslim students raised an uproar, saying that they had been “excluded” (as well as offended), the teacher was let go. López Prater jas filed a lawsuit, and she’ll either win that or will receive a generous settlement. Hamline has fallen into disrepute, a nationally notorious example of abrogating academic freedom; and the faculty has called for its president to resign.

We have other examples of professors fired for giving offense, but you can consult FIRE to read about them.

Now there are some construals of DEI that aren’t in potential conflict with academic freedom and free speech, but those aren’t the ones that universities are pushing. If “diversity” means “diversity of ideas”, if the “E” stood for “equality of treatment” rather than “equity” (proportional representation), and if “inclusion” meant “a university and workspace free from personal harassment,” then DEI would be okay, and wouldn’t conflict with any other freedoms. But of course that’s not what universities mean by DEI, as the authors note below.

But I digress: here’s an article by Anna Khalid (“an associate professor of history at Carleton College and host of the podcast Banished“) and Jeffrey Snyder (” associate professor in the department of educational studies at Carleton College”), who decided to say what nobody else dare. What surprises me is that it’s in The Chronicle of Higher Education. Click to read:

In fact, the authors use the Hamline case, which I’ve discussed in detail, to outline the incompatibility of DEI and academic freedom.

Here’s the authors’ evidence for the ubiquity of the false claim that DEI and lack of offense are totally compatible:

The assertion that inclusion and academic freedom are not in tension is an article of faith for many of those dedicated to promoting campus inclusion. In 2018, the Harvard University Task Force on Inclusion and Belonging released an 82-page report stating that the “values of academic freedom and inclusion and belonging provide each other with synergistic and mutual reinforcement.” According to this report, the two should not be conceived of as “distinct values that must be accommodated to each other” or, worse still, as “antagonistic goals.” This view is central to the frameworks advanced in books such as Ulrich Baer’s What Snowflakes Get Right: Free Speech, Truth, and Equality on Campus, John Palfrey’s Safe Spaces, Brave Spaces: Diversity and Free Expression in Education andSigal Ben-Porath’s Cancel Wars: How Universities Can Foster Free Speech, Promote Inclusion, and Renew Democracy.

And here’s the going version of DEI, which the authors call “DEI Inc.”:

DEI Inc. is a logic, a lingo, and a set of administrative policies and practices. The logic is as follows: Education is a product, students are consumers, and campus diversity is a customer -service issue that needs to be administered from the top down. (“Chief diversity officers,” according to an article in Diversity Officer Magazine,“are best defined as ‘change-management specialists.’”) DEI Inc. purveys asafety-and-security model of learning that is highly attuned to harm and that conflates respect for minority students with unwavering affirmation and validation.

Lived experience, the intent-impact gap, microaggressions, trigger warnings, inclusive excellence. You know the language of DEI Inc. when you hear it. It’s a combination of management-consultant buzzwords, social justice slogans, and “therapy speak.” The standard package of DEI Inc. administrative “initiatives” should be familiar too, from antiracism trainings to bias -response teamsand mandatory diversity statements for hiring and promotion.

You can see that saying anything that contradicts this notion, for example criticizing Kendi’s claim that what is not “antiracist” is supporting racism, will cause offense.

Here’s how Hamline stated explicitly that academic freedom could cause “harm”—harm because it violated the rules of DEI Inc.

In December, President Miller and David Everett [Associate Vice President for Inclusive Excellence] sent an open letter to the campus asserting that “appreciation of religious and other differences should supersede when we know that what we teach will cause harm,”and in particular “respect for the observant Muslim students in that classroom should have superseded academic freedom.” After the news made national and international headlines, Miller doubled down, explaining that her decisions were guided by “prioritizing the well-being of our students,” especially by“minimizing harm.”

Miller’s comments at least had the virtue of offering an honest diagnosis of the tension between academic freedom and inclusion. This tension has only ratcheted up in recent years, as colleges make grand promises to create “environments in which any individual or group feels welcomed, respected, supported, and valued.” With institutions promoting such an expansive definition of “inclusion,” we shouldn’t be surprised when they become ensnared in their own rhetoric and policies. How will DEI administrators respond when a Chinese national complains that a political-science discussion about the persecution of Uyghurs is “harmful anti-Chinese propaganda”?Or when a Christian evangelical says her faith was insulted in a contemporary art class after seeing a Robert Mapplethorpe photograph of two men kissing? The permutations are endless and, for professors who teach sensitive or controversial material, alarming.

There’s the old trope of “harm” again, which really means “offense”. And can you imagine this fracas occurring if, say, López Prater offended fundamentalist Jews (perhaps by showing a meal containing dairy and meat) or Christians (perhaps by showing Andres Serrano’s “Piss Christ“)? I can’t. It’s Muslims who have the leverage to get a professor fired, for, unlike Christians and Jews, they are perceived as victims because they’re also perceived as people of color. DEI is not meant for Christians and Jews. But that’s really irrelevant: the point is that if your legitimate teaching in the classroom offends students, then it’s too bad for them. Art, of course, is particularly prone to this because a lot of art is designed to shock, offend, or shake people out of their complacency.

Firing someone for violating academic freedom abrogates a number of university regulations in schools that avow academic freedom, and can violate the law in government-funded schools and state schools. The AAUP states this explicitly:

The American Association of University Professors clearly states that students do not have the right to shield even their “most cherished beliefs” from challenge or scrutiny:

Ideas that are germane to a subject under discussion in a classroom cannot be censored because a student with particular religious or political beliefs might be offended. Instruction cannot proceed in the atmosphere of fear that would be produced were a teacher to become subject to administrative sanction based upon the idiosyncratic reaction of one or more students. This would create a classroom environment inimical to the free and vigorous exchange of ideas necessary for teaching and learning in higher education.

Khalid and Snyder also point out that it’s not just the Woke who try to overturn academic freedom because it causes offense. “Anti-CRT laws”, now being passed by right-wingers throughout the South, restrict a teacher’s right to teach about race and gender if that teaching makes “any individual. . . feel discomfort, guilt, anguish, or any other form of psychological distress on account of his or her race or sex.” That’s a recipe for disaster, and I oppose such laws.

But let’s be clear. A teacher doesn’t have the right to teach anything in their classroom, especially in secondary schools. You can’t teach creationism, for instance, as it violates the First Amendment. And you can’t just go nuts and teach crazy stuff, for schools have prescribed lesson plans and material that must be covered. But if what you’re teaching fits well into your curriculum, and isn’t just a political or ideological harangue with no didactic purpose, they should leave you alone.

At the end, the authors call for a vigorous defense of academic freedom (that also goes for freedom of speech, which is not identical but related) and bring up the University of Chicago:

When institutions proclaim that academic freedom and inclusion coexist in a kind of synergistic harmony, they are trafficking in PR-driven wishful thinking. In the hardest cases, there is no way of upholding an “all are welcome here” brand of inclusion while simultaneously defending academic freedom. Instead, we should turn to the wise words of Hanna Holborn Gray, former president of the University of Chicago: “Education should not be intended to make people comfortable, it is meant to make them think.”

I should put that as the tagline on all of my emails!

Here’s “Piss Christ” (1987) a photo of a crucifix submerged in a beaker of the photographer’s urine. For many it’s a highly regarded work of art, for others an egregious and blasphemous offense.

Pamela Paul’s funny (and trenchant) op-ed on campus free speech (trigger warning: many harmful words!)

February 3, 2023 • 9:30 am

Although the word “woke” and its derivatives seem to trigger some readers, I still can’t find a good substitute. I just read Andrew Doyle’s new book, The New Puritans: How the Religion of Social Justice Captured the Western World, and I see that that Doyle doesn’t much like “woke” either. (His book is a good complement to John McWhorter’s book Woke Racism.) At any rate, I tried to find a replacement in Doyle’s critique, but the best replacement I could come up with for the pejorative “woke” is “illiberal Left”, which is a mouthful. And it becomes “anti-illiberal Left” (a bigger mouthful) when characterizing people like Doyle or McWhorter. So I’ll perhaps use both terms. (Remember that Doyle is the creator of Titania McGrath, who hasn’t been tweeting much lately.)

But I digress. Pamela Paul, who used to be the Sunday Book Review editor for the New York Times, now writes a weekly column for the paper. Not only is she a good and clever writer, but she appears to be ~~anti-woke~~ anti-illiberal Left. That makes at least two good NYT columnists of that ideological stripe: Paul and McWhorter.

Her piece this week (click below to read, and I see it’s been archived here) is about the woke Language Police at Stanford, and about the chilling of speech in general on American campuses. The amusing bit is that her piece uses over a quarter of the words that the Stanford University IT group recommended be changed, and she’s put them in bold. Her intro (I added the link to the list, now archived):

The following is a celebration of the cancellation of the Elimination of Harmful Language Initiative, an attempt by a committee of IT leaders at Stanford University to ban 161 common words and phrases. Of those 161 phrases, I have taken pains to use 45 of them here. Read at your own risk.

Click to read, but you may incur much harm. Her message, though, has hopeful bits.

Note that even “Hip Hip Hooray!” in the title was deemed harmful by the guide:

Paul uses 20 “harmful” words in the first three paragraphs alone:

Is the media addicted to bad news? It’s not a dumb question, nor are you crazy to ask. After all, we follow tragedy like hounds on the chase, whether it’s stories about teenagers who commit suicide, victims of domestic violence or survivors of accidents in which someone winds up quadriplegic, crippled for life or confined to a wheelchair.We report on the hurdles former convicts face after incarceration, hostile attitudes toward immigrants and the plight of prostitutes and the homeless. Given the perilous state of the planet, you might consider this barrage of ill tidings to be tone-deaf.

Well, I’m happy to report good news for a change. You might call it a corrective, or a sanity check, but whatever you call it — and what you can call things here is key — there have been several positive developments on American campuses. The chilling effects of censorship and shaming that have trapped students between the competing diktats of “silence is violence” and “speech is violence” — the Scylla and Charybdis of campus speech — may finally be showing some cracks.

Matters looked especially grim in December, when the internet discovered the 13-page dystopicallly titled “Elimination of Harmful Language Initiative. A kind of white paper on contemporary illiberalism, it listed 161 verboten expressions, divided into categories of transgression, including “person-first,” “institutionalized racism” and the blissfully unironic “imprecise language.” The document offered preferred substitutions, many of which required feats of linguistic limbo to avoid simple terms like “insane,” “mentally ill” and — not to beat a dead horse,but I’ll add one more — “rule of thumb.” Naturally, it tore its way across the internet to widespread mockery despite a “content warning” in bold type: “This website contains language that is offensive or harmful. Please engage with this website at your own pace.”

By using those words, Paul of course emphasizes the inanity of claiming that they’re “harmful.” She does add that the Stanford list has been taken down (the link above is to a WSJ copy), and considers this good news—part of a salubrious trend that she sees in American education. But she can’t resist using perhaps the dumbest “harmful word” on the list (save “American”):

Could this be a seminal moment for academic freedom? Consider other bright spots: Harvard recently went ahead with its fellowship offer to Kenneth Roth, the former head of Human Rights Watch, which was earlier rejected, allegedly owing to his critical views on Israel. M.I.T.’s faculty voted to embrace a “Statement on Freedom of Expression and Academic Freedom.” At Yale Law School, which has been roiled by repeated attempts to suppress speech, a conservative lawyer was allowed to appear on a panel with a former president of the A.C.L.U. after protests disrupted her visit the year before. And Hamline University, which had refused to renew an art history professor’s contract because she showed an artwork that some Muslim students may have found offensive, walked back its characterization of her as “Islamophobic.”

Finally, when an office within the School of Social Work at the University of Southern California banned the terms “fieldwork” and “in the field” to describe research projects because their “anti-Black” associations might offend some descendants of American slavery, U.S.C.’s interim provost issued a statement that “The university does not maintain a list of banned or discouraged words.”

And here is a form of linguistic conflict that I hadn’t noticed:

The chilling effects of censorship and shaming that have trapped students between the competing diktats of “silence is violence” and “speech is violence” — the Scylla and Charybdis of campus speech — may finally be showing some cracks.

From the guide (not the column):

She continues, causing a lot more harm but making a point at the same time:

But we do know two things: First, college students are suffering from anxiety and other mental health issues more than ever before, and second, fewer feel comfortable expressing disagreement lest their peers go on the warpath. It would be a ballsy move to risk being denounced, expelled from their tribe, become a black sheep. No one can blame any teenager who has been under a social media pile-on for feeling like a basket case. Why take the chance.

Yet when in life is it more appropriate for people to take risks than in college — to test out ideas and encounter other points of view? College students should be encouraged to use their voices and colleges to let them be heard. It’s nearly impossible to do this while mastering speech codes, especially when the master lists employ a kind of tribal knowledge known only to their guru creators. A normal person of any age may have trouble submitting, let alone remembering that “African American” is not just discouraged but verboten, that he or she can’t refer to a professor’s “walk-in” hours or call for a brown bag lunch, powwow or stand-up meeting with their peers.

Now that you know woke language guidelines, you’ll be able to figure out why the Puritans see all the words in bold as harmful. (Having trouble with “African American? Go here.)

Paul then gives the worrying statistics about the drop over time in the proportion of students who think that free speech rights are secure and notes the frightening 2/3 of students who think that college climates prevent people from expressing views that could be seen as offensive.

In the last two paragraphs she drops the use of “harmful words” and makes her serious point:

It is reasonable to wonder whether any conceivable harm to a few on hearing the occasional upsetting term outweighs the harm to everyone in suppressing speech. Or whether overcoming the relatively minor discomforts of an unintentional, insensitive or inept comment might help students develop the resilience necessary to surmount life’s considerably greater challenges — challenges that will not likely be mediated by college administrators after they graduate.

Rather than muzzle students, we should allow them to hear and be heard. Opportunities to engage and respond. It’s worth remembering how children once responded to schoolyard epithets: “Sticks and stones may break my bones, but names will never harm me.” Narrow restrictions on putatively harmful speech leave young people distracted from and ill-prepared for the actual violence they’ll encounter in the real world.

And this type of bowdlerization is performative. In the end, it accomplishes nothing. The people who promulgate these changes are the Entitled Woke, and the tut-tutting directed at people who will continue to use the old argot. The changes are made for one reason: to flaunt one’s virtue.

FIRE’s choice of America’s ten worst colleges for free speech

February 2, 2023 • 9:35 am

It’s that time of year again: the time when the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE) nominates its ten worst colleges of the year for free speech. (Their list of the best colleges is here, with the University of Chicago back up to #1.)

But today we get an honor roll of shame. Before giving that list, which is not ranked but contains ten miscreant colleges, I’ll show you the précis that came with their email. Note that Georgetown University in Washington, D.C., after appearing on this list for four years, has made the “lifetime censorship list.”:

Every year, FIRE names and shames the worst colleges in the United States for free speech. The new list is out, so please dig in. Frankly, there are some amazing entries this year. (Spoiler alert: art history professor fired for teaching art history, highly “sus” conduct around the airing of a documentary on … free speech, and a college that learned when you play games with faculty speech on FIRE’s watch, you get burned — and much, much more.)Many people get that we have fun with this list every year — guilty as charged. But on the inside? We’re just trying not to give in to despair. After all, it gets frustrating to have to repeatedly tell college and university administrators to stop violating student and faculty rights.Happily, we are making progress on that front, and sharing this list contributes to that progress. Every year, more and more people see the annual “10 Worst” list. More alumni leverage it to fight for change in their schools. Prospective students consider it when deciding where to spend their time and money. And, very often, a school that makes an appearance on the list does not make another one. Unfortunately, a few schools, like Yale University, DePaul University, Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, and Syracuse University, make the list so often they merit special recognition, in the form of FIRE’s Lifetime Censorship Award. This year, Georgetown University’s breathtaking 112-day investigation into an incoming lecturer’s 45-word tweet earned it that infamous distinction. (By the way, we’ve made it easy for you to tell Georgetown’s president what you think — just click here.)

Click below to read: I’ll show the ten losers and give a few words (FIRE’s are indented, mine flush left):

Again, the order is random as FIRE doesn’t give a ranking. I’ve added links to the school names.

1.) Hamline University (Saint Paul, Minnesota)

Art history professor punished, called “Islamophobic” for showing 14th century painting depicting prophet Muhammad in art history class.

Hamline University, a Minnesota liberal arts college, made international headlines for illiberal art censorship after it punished a professor who dared to show historic Islamic art during a lesson on Islamic art history.

We’ve read about this several times on this site, and the faculty recently gave a big “no confidence” vote to Fayneese Miller, the school’s president. She will, I suspect, soon be gone, and Hamline is the butt of everyone’s jokes.

2.) Pennsylvania State University, State College, Pennsylvania.

Nittany Lion or Cowardly Lion? Penn State cancels student group’s event after initially defending its right to proceed.

On October 24, Uncensored America was set to host Proud Boys founder Gavin McInnes and conservative comedian Alex Stein for a comedy show on campus. A planned protest formed outside the venue. But, amid reports that a few in that crowd of hundreds were involved in skirmishes, Penn State canceled the event before it even began. The university also told protesters to disperse, citing “the threat of escalating violence.” Critically, the two violent incidents, one involving spitting, the other pepper spray, were caught on video showing police standing by doing nothing while students and a speaker were assaulted.

. . . One thing is clear: Penn State may defend free expression with words, but when actions are necessary, the university is all-too-willing to turn tail, fleeing from its First Amendment obligations and letting disruptors win.

Penn State didn’t come clean about the threats that supposedly led it to cancel the event, but simply said that it was a “safety risk” (FIRE had asked it to reveal the specific threats that led to the cancellation).

3.) Collin College (McKinney, Texas)

The lesson Collin College can’t seem to learn: When you play games with faculty speech on FIRE’s watch, you get burned.

Given that Collin College has earned a reputation as the “epicenter of censorship in Texas,” it is no surprise that the college makes its third straight appearance on our infamous list.

What did they do? Several things. They warned a history professor about her tweets about the Mike Pence-Kamala Harris debate (and lost a $70,000 lawsuit about that); it fired two professors, apparently for being officers in a non-bargaining faculty union (they’d also criticized the school’s handling of Covid-19), and for that lost another lawsuit and reinstated one professor; and it fired a history professor “for advocating for the removal of Confederate statues and criticizing the college’s COVID-19 policies” (that lawsuit is proceeding). FIRE has sued Collin College three times for violating faculty rights.

4.) Texas A&M (College Station, Texas)

Texas A&M forgets the First Amendment, repeatedly ignores student groups’ rights.

Journalists, fish, and drag queens: Oh my! In 2022, Texas A&M University stepped on the rights of all kinds of student groups, from the university’s preeminent student paper, to several LGBTQ rights organizations, to a freshman orientation club.

The University violated the rights of several student organizations, all in a singe year.

5.) University of Pennsylvania (Philadelphia, Pennsylvania)

Penn Law dean pressured to “do something” about controversial professor, opts to abandon academic freedom.

Penn Law is willfully ignoring its commitment to free speech and academic freedom in an effort to oust Amy Wax, the tenured professor whose controversial comments on race and immigration have come to define her academic career.

Wax, who spoke at the Stanford Academic Freedom Conference, has made quite a few controversial remarks, and I consider some of them to be offensive and borderline racist. But the university, which should have left her alone, instituted disciplinary charges, including causing “harm.” It is these hard cases where free speech must be defended most vigorously. Although Penn is a private school, it has a strong open expression code that “supports and cherishes the concepts of freedom of thought, inquiry, speech, and lawful assembly.”

6.) Emerson (Boston, Massachusetts)

Emerson still “kinda sus,” prevents student group from advertising a documentary about — drumroll please — free speech.

First, they were guilty of “suspending and investigating” Turning Point USA for distributing stickers on campus reading “China Kinda Sus,” clearly meaning “China Kinda Sucks”. The admin then put a formal warning on the group’s record. Sorry, but that’s free speech. But that still wasn’t enough: they continued to overturn free speech:

. . . college administrators denied TPUSA’s request to screen a CBS News documentary about free speech on campus because of alleged factual inaccuracies in the promotional material. Then, it denied approval to post promotional materials for another documentary because the advertisements would provoke “negative responses.”

As I recall, this isn’t Emerson’s first brush with restricting speech.

7.) Emporia State (Emporia, Kansas)

Emporia State seizes opportunity to axe both tenure protections and 33 faculty members.

Last fall, Emporia State University seized the opportunity to spurn academic freedom and effectively end tenure protections. Under a newly adopted policy, it fired more than 30 faculty members — including one whose newspaper op-ed criticizing the school’s then-impending decision opened with: “I may be fired for writing this.”

They then instituted a policy that allowed them to fire faculty, including tenured faculty, for all kinds of wonky and unjustifiable reasons—and with 30 days notice!

8.) Tennessee Tech (Cookeville, Tennessee)

FIRE dresses down Tennessee Tech for punishing student groups over drag show.

Oldham canceled all campus events of the Lambda Gay-Straight Alliance and the Tech Players student groups after a video of their August 2022 drag show surfaced online. Speaking to the entire campus community, Oldham proclaimed that he was “disturbed,” “dismayed,” and “offended by” the show’s apparent “disparaging mockery toward any religious group.” He banned the students from hosting campus events “pending a review,” which is still ongoing. No disciplinary charges, no hearing, no chance to contest this clearly unlawful prior restraint, just five months (and counting) of censorship for wounding Oldham’s delicate sensibilities.

This is a state school and the censorship above violates the First Amendment. FIRE has complained, but there appear to be no results yet.

9.) The University of Oregon (Eugene, Oregon)

University of Oregon puts words in teachers’ mouths, requires faculty to submit DEI statements to be eligible for hiring, promotion, and tenure.

Are you surprised? The U of O requires all current and prospective faculty to submit DEI statements to be eligible for hiring, promotion, or tenure. This is the first time I’ve seen FIRE go after these statements, which are ubiquitous in America, and are ripe for a lawsuit based on compelled speech. All that’s needed is one person with “standing”: a faculty member who hasn’t been promoted or given tenure because of insufficient DEI statements, or someone not hired on the grounds of a flawed DEI statement (the last one would be hard to prove). But this will happen, and DEI statements will become banned in all state schools or those receiving federal funds. From FIRE:

Oregon. . . directed faculty search committees to use a rubric when evaluating DEI statements, which are intended to further UO’s goals of “becoming an institution committed to antiracism and other forms of anti-oppression.” The rubric gives low scores to an applicant who, for example, says “it’s better not to have outreach or affinity groups aimed at underrepresented individuals because it keeps them separate from everyone else, or will make them feel less valued,” or describes “only activities that are already the expectation of faculty (mentoring, treating all students the same regardless of background, etc.).”

On the other hand, applicants who discuss DEI as a “core [value] that every faculty member should actively contribute to advancing,” and applicants or faculty members who intend to be “strong advocate[s]” for DEI, will earn high scores. This ideological litmus test applies to tenure-track faculty, faculty seeking promotion or tenure, faculty undergoing tenure review, and prospective faculty. Basically, if you want to work at UO, you have to pledge allegiance to and promote administrators’ DEI vision.

These requirements violate faculty’s freedom of expression and academic freedom, as we told the university. Just imagine if a public university bound by the First Amendment (as the University of Oregon is) evaluated faculty based on their commitment to patriotism or color-blindness or socialism.

Berkeley and other state schools use rubrics as well. In my view they are unconstitutional and thus illegal, and I’d love to see somebody file a lawsuit. Fortunately, we don’t use them at the University of Chicago, for they are implicitly forbidden by our Shils Report.

10.) Loyola University New Orleans (New Orleans, Louisiana).

LOYNO sanctions professor, stifles student’s protected speech.

Loyola University New Orleans spent the last two-and-a-half years subjecting professor Walter Block to investigations and sanctions for his protected speech. Despite its strong promises of free speech and academic freedom, the university targeted Block for everything from his teaching of particular economic theories to his classroom discussions of Gandhi and Hitler.

After a June 2020 student-created petition calling for Block’s termination began circulating, LOYNO defended Block’s classroom speech. But it didn’t have his back for long. In 2021, Loyola determined that some of Block’s teachings on the gender wage gap and the economics of slavery created a “hostile learning environment.” It forced Block to undergo mandatory diversity, equity, and inclusion training.

After this, Block’s speech received more complaints and he had to take yet more training. Loyola is a private Jesuit university, so Block’s speech may not be protected, but all colleges should adhere to First-Amendment principles. I’m not sure what he said about Gandhi and Hitler, as not all classroom “speech” is protected. Loyola, however, makes strong promises of free speech. Further, the administration “cracked down on a student promoting a pro-choice march.”

You can read the details for each University by going to the site, and also see the lifetime raspberry that Georgetown University got:

Because this is the fourth time Georgetown appeared on this list (last year it suspended a faculty member for critical tweets about the new Supreme Court justice nominee), it makes the lifetime censorship list. And there’s more:

For years, the university refused to recognize the pro-choice student group H*yas for Choice. It argued that doing so would conflict with its Catholic and Jesuit mission. But the university’s speech and expression policy explicitly states that only “time, place and manner” considerations can govern “the expression of ideas and sharing of information that is the very life of the university.” What’s more, H*yas for Choice was denied recognition despite the existence of recognized groups of Muslim and Jewish students who, by their nature, explicitly reject Catholic beliefs.

Let’s also not forget that Georgetown stopped students from tabling for Bernie Sanders’ 2016 presidential campaign — an action so censorial it drew the attention of Congress. There was also the time its satellite campus in Qatar shut down a debate about whether God should be portrayed as a woman. It’s no surprise then, that Georgetown ranks near the very bottom of FIRE’s annual College Free Speech Rankings.

For these reasons, Georgetown joins Yale University, DePaul University, Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, and Syracuse University as a recipient of FIRE’s infamous Lifetime Censorship Award.

Raspberries to these schools!

Princeton students call for dismantling the student honor code because it “mirrors the criminal justice system”

January 31, 2023 • 10:15 am

Like all universities, Princeton has an Honor Code to reinforce academic integrity by preventing cheating, plagiarism, and other practices that allow students to claim credit for someone else’s work. This code is laid out at an online site that gives not only its stipulations, but the procedure to be followed if a student violates the code, and then the University’s punishments if a student is found guilty. Here’s the essence of Princeton’s code:

Article II. Violations

1. 1. The Honor Pledge
    1. The Honor Pledge is as follows: “I pledge my honor that I have not violated the Honor Code during this examination.” This must at all times be written in full on the examination paper and signed by the student on the examination. Any undergraduate who fails to write and sign the pledge on the examination paper will be reminded to do so by the instructor. If the instructor or the Committee cannot promptly obtain the written and signed pledge, the student will be reported to the Committee for investigation. Unwillingness to sign the pledge following notification by the instructor or the Committee will be prima facie evidence of a violation of the Honor Code.
  2. Violations
    1. Violations of the Honor Code consist of:
      1. Any attempt to gain an unfair advantage in regard to an examination, both inside and outside the examination room.
      2. Any attempt to give assistance, both inside and outside the examination room, whether the student attempting to give assistance has completed their own work or not.
    2. Specific violations include, but are not limited to:
      1. Tampering with a graded exam;
      2. Claiming another’s work to be one’s own; and
      3. Obtaining or attempting to obtain, previous to any examinations, copies of the examination papers or examination questions, or any illegal knowledge of these questions.
      4. Other actions in violation of the policies set forth by the professor.
  3. Dishonesty
    1. Committing dishonesty, defined as lying to or purposely misleading the Committee, is also a violation of the Honor Code. It will not be considered dishonesty for a student to maintain their own innocence.
  4. Findings of Responsibility
    1. A student will be found responsible if the Committee finds overwhelmingly convincing evidence that the student ought reasonably to have understood that their actions were in violation of the Honor Code.
  5. Reporting Suspected Violations
    1. Every student is obligated to report to the Honor Committee any suspected violation of the Honor Code that they have observed. The Committee will make every attempt to ensure the anonymity of reporting students. Students may make reports by emailing honor@princeton.edu, contacting the chair directly, or any member of the committee.

And there are two committees that adjudicite the various types of cheating that can occur:

All written examinations, tests, and quizzes that take place in class are conducted under the honor system. All violations of the honor system are the concern of the Undergraduate Honor Committee. Violations of rules and regulations pertaining to all other academic work, including essays, term papers, laboratory reports, and take-home examinations fall under the jurisdiction of the Faculty-Student Committee on Discipline.

The process of reporting and then judging violations given at the site seem to me eminently fair to the accused—far fairer than, say, Biden and Obama’s procedure for judging violations of Title IX. But you can read about Princeton’s procedures at the site.

Now, however, an op-ed at the Daily Princetonian, the student newspaper, says that code must be “dismantled”, and for two reasons. First, the Honor Code mirrors the procedures of a criminal justice system that, says author Emilly Santos, disproportionately hurts African-Americans and impecunious Americans. Second, at Princeton the Code disproportionately affects first-generation low-income students (FLI), “students who often also belong to racial minorities.

The explicit message of Santos’s article is that the Honor Code should be ditched. But she never really follows that up, suggesting at the end just two changes that actually leave most of the code in place. This is deeply confusing.

Santos is identified as “a prospective physics major in the class of 2025, also pursuing certificates in Gender & Sexuality Studies and Portuguese Language & Cultures.

Click below to read her piece:

The accusation: (“CJS” stands for America’s criminal justice system). Note that she calls for dismantling the code (bolding is mine).

Princeton’s Honor Code, tasked with holding students accountable and honest in academic settings, mirrors the criminal justice system in its rules and effects. It is harmful to the entirety of the Princeton community: the fear it instills in students fosters an environment of academic hostility. But it is often most damaging for first-generation low-income (FLI) students — students who also often belong to racial minorities.

Princeton, as an institution that aims to educate world leaders and brands itself with social justice discourse, must first address the existing parallels between the CJS and these smaller-scale systems we subscribe to. Specifically, we must re-examine the role of the Honor Code and Honor Committee in our community. The University should lead by example by dismantling the Honor Code system, which acts as a barrier to social mobility and a more equitable society. Only once such internal injustices are addressed can we make real-world changes.

. . . The process of reporting and investigating an Honor Code breach parallels the criminal justice system by mimicking processes of questioning, evidence gathering, witness depositions, and an eventual move to trial, or hearing. In the same way a criminal record haunts previous convicts, any Honor Code violation for which a student is found responsible follows them in their transcript, overshadowing the accomplishments of attaining a Princeton degree and making it difficult for students to find employment opportunities.

Pity, pity: Santos apparently wants no permanent record if you are found guilty of cheating. Does she favor abolishing criminal records as well? (Some already get expunged under rare circumstances.)

If you don’t cheat, you needn’t fear. This code no more instills fear in students than the criminal justice system instills fear in law-abiding citizens. And any system that punishes those who cheat will instill fear in those who want to cheat. Of course, students have to know the Code exists to understand what conduct is prohibited, but I’m pretty sure they learn about it during orientation and on syllabi for courses.

Now, Santos’s accusation that the Code causes inequities:

Previous reporting on the Honor Code has shown the negative effects of the Honor Code process on FLI students. There can be financial, social, and academic repercussions. When caught up in the Honor Code system, FLI students may not have the institutional knowledge on how to navigate such a process in the same way their white and wealthier counterparts might.

The severe punishments, ranging from a reprimand to expulsion, meted out to students accused of Honor Code violations negatively affect all students, but are especially harmful to FLI students. One common punishment for violating the Honor Code is suspension from school for a semester or more. However, the subset of suspended students who have to repeat semesters because of disciplinary action are not eligible for financial aid during their repeated term. This contingency makes the Honor Code a monumental threat to FLI students, who, without financial aid, would find themselves thousands of dollars in debt as a result of student loans, which are suggested as an alternative way of funding study at Princeton. These effects of the Honor Code can have devastating impacts on FLI students — students who rely on a Princeton education for the chance of upward mobility but instead find themselves deep in debt.

If you look at the two links in the first sentence, you’ll find no evidence that the negative effects of the Honor Code on FLI students are worse than their effects on non-FLI students, except in the financial hit that it causes. The second link (“has shown”) gives opinions and anecdotes but no evidence of disproportional harm to FLI students. The first link (“reporting”) simply makes an assertion based on financial burdens, and it’s from the Daily Princetonian as well:

Disproportionate impact on FLI students

One of the strongest criticisms leveraged against the Honor Code over the years points to how the system appears to put low-income students at a unique disadvantage. Leo said that, in his own experience, it felt as though the system “disproportionately affects students of color and FLI students.”

“Latinx and FLI students I’ve spoken with who have been called before the Committee discussed the extensive anxiety induced by the Committee’s initial phone call,” Soraya Morales Nuñez ’18 wrote in 2017 in a guest opinion piece for the ‘Prince.’ “Others who have testified before this Committee told me about experiencing severe intimidation as well as unnecessary mental and emotional distress at the hands of peers that walk the same halls as us.”

Yes, but any student accused of cheating and up for a hearing will be scared. Where’s the evidence that “Latinx” and FLI students have more anxiety? It goes on

Students receiving financial aid who are found responsible for an Honor Code violation also experience an added financial burden compared to students who pay full tuition.

“If you are required to repeat a semester for disciplinary reasons,” the University’s financial aid award terms state, “you will not be eligible for a University grant for the repeated term. Student loans may be requested to cover your need in this situation.”

This financial disadvantage may be true, but seems to me irrelevant to whether a student has committed an Honor Code violation and what the punishment should be. If you get financial aid and cheat and are suspended, it would be deeply weird if you’re paid for the semester during which you’re suspended. The aid is for attending college, not sitting out a semester because you transgressed. But Santos wants subsidized cheating breaks (see below).

Finally, there’s supposedly a disproportionate penalty in “loss of respect”:

FLI students, like many students, are often afraid of disappointing family and friends. A lack of community support in these situations also puts FLI students at a disadvantage compared to their wealthier peers, whose communities often include people who are college-educated and have been exposed to academic integrity systems similar to Princeton’s Honor Code, and may understand the process better.

This makes little sense to me. Your friends and family should be disappointed if you’re found guilty of cheating, and the claim about “support networks” helping wealthier students more is mere speculation without evidence. As for FLI students not “understanding the process”, I noted above that I’m pretty sure that the students are told about the rules from the outset. Princeton students, you now, are not dummies, even the FLI ones, as the soft bigotry of this accusation implies.

After calling for dismantling the Honor code, Santos appears to become timorous toward the end and makes just two recommendations that, far from dismantling the Code, just tweak it a bit:

The University can, and should, take tangible steps towards making the Honor Code a more equitable aspect of Princeton. The University should make financial aid continually available to students who must repeat a term because of disciplinary punishment, as the punishment unfairly targets FLI students, who are unable to complete their Princeton education without access to financial aid.

Secondly, students convicted of Honor Code violations should have an option to attach a letter from a faculty member to their transcript, in which a faculty member can attest to their development since the violation. Finally, the University should offer sessions aimed at educating students on how the Honor Code works. These approaches can begin to limit the injustices FLI students face on campus and can better prepare every student to fight injustice outside the Orange Bubble.

I disagree with the first suggestion because people who cheat are not entitled to financial rewards during the period of punishment (when a person goes to jail, their salary isn’t paid while they’re in stir—except for Palestinians who are jailed for killing or wounding Israelis and are part of the “pay for slay” system). I’m not sure about the letter from a faculty member, which has the potential of being abused by a student choosing a sympathetic faculty member rather than an objective assessor.

I doagree with the last recommendaton: there should be at least some orientation about how the Honor Code works and where to look it up. If that guidance doesn’t exist, it should. But remember that students learn from the beginning of elementary or middle school that cheating is wrong, and the Honor Code is in the student handbook. Again, Princeton students are the elite, entitled, and the smart. One can presume that they know that cheating is wrong, and if they have any questions it’s easy to get them answered.

h/t: Ginger

“Protected identity harm” report filed with Stanford University administration after student photographed for reading “Mein Kampf”

January 29, 2023 • 1:20 pm

What we have here is one or two Stanford students being reported to the University administration after a photo was circulated online of one student reading Hitler’s Mein Kampf. There are two reports of the incident, the first from FIRE and the second from the student newspaper The Stanford Daily. They’re in order below, and you can read them by clicking on the headlines.

First, the report was made to the Stanford bias reporting site designed to collect reports of incidents that might harm “protected groups”:

The Protected Identity Harm Reporting process is the University’s process to address incidents where a community member experiences harm because of who they are and how they show up in the world.

They add:

Specifically, a PIH incident is conduct or an incident that adversely and unfairly targets an individual or group on the basis of one or more of these actual or perceived characteristics: race, color, national or ethnic origin, sex, age, disability, religion, sexual orientation, gender identity or expression, veteran status, marital status or any other characteristic protected by applicable law.

The Protected Identity Harm (PIH) Reporting process, intakes information via a reporting mechanism to 1) help students who have been affected by these incidents and 2) collect data. It is not a judicial or investigative process* though we do hope to provide a path to resolution for the affected individuals or communities who need to heal.

But it is certainly an investigative process, and a quasi-judicial one as well. (In this case the protected group was Jewish people.) And the students involved in the photo have been called to account by the administration and are certainly preparing their formal apology—if they want to stay at Stanford.

Read on:

From FIRE (my bolding):

Reading a book on a college campus should not prompt formal administrative intervention. But that’s what’s reportedly happening at Stanford University this week, after a photo of a student reading Adolf Hitler’s autobiography, “Mein Kampf,” circulated on campus last Friday.

The Stanford Daily said over the weekend that administrators were working “swiftly” with the students involved to “address” the incident. Two campus rabbis emailed Jewish students saying administrators “are in ongoing conversation with the individuals involved, who are committed to and actively engaged in a process of reckoning and sincere repair.”

Stanford was reportedly alerted to the book-reading via its Protected Identity Harm reporting system. Effectively a bias response system, Stanford says PIH reports help the university “address incidents where a community member experiences harm because of who they are and how they show up in the world.”

Now it’s not clear how many individuals were responsible for this incident, or who reported it. Presumably the “guilty party” was the person reading the book, and perhaps an accomplice who photographed that, though it’s not clear that the photo wasn’t taken surreptitiously. The “students involved” implies more than one, but this could include the student who reported the incident. I can’t find the photograph.

The Stanford Daily adds this, implying that two students collaborated on this (my bolding again):

The photo of the student reading the book was posted to another student’s Snapchat story Friday evening, according to a screenshot of the image obtained by The Daily.

University spokesperson Dee Mostofi confirmed that the Office of Student Affairs and the Office of Religious and Spiritual Life (ORL) became aware of this incident on Saturday. Mostofi added that the two offices, along with Stanford’s Hillel chapter, are working with the leaders of the residence that the students belong to address the social media post and its impact on the community.

“Swift action was taken by the leadership in the residential community where both the individuals who posted and the one pictured are members,” Kirschner and Hahn Tapper wrote. Student Affairs and ORL are actively working with students involved to address the issue and mend relationships in the community.

The FIRE article notes that the students have already been notified that they’re in trouble, and are “actively involved in reckoning and sincere repair.” Isn’t that punitive and judicial?

FIRE adds this:

Because college students should not have to report to university authorities for merely reading a book — one, by the way, that has been required reading in at least one recent Stanford humanities class and is available to borrow from the university library — FIRE asked Stanford today to provide additional clarity about the way it handles these kinds of “harm” reports on campus.

FIRE also notes that this picture doesn’t seem to violate the freedom of expression that Stanford promises to its students. Because there is an investigation and presumably the student who read the book and the picture taker are being investigated, FIRE wrote a letter to the President of Stanford,

Part of FIRE’s letter, sent to President Marc Tessier-Lavigne on January 25:

Reading a book on a college campus should not prompt formal administrative intervention.

Despite Stanford’s insistence that its PIH Reporting process “is not a judicial or investigative process” and participation in a resolution is voluntary, it is unacceptably punitive and chills expressive activity. Being “invited” by administrators with institutional disciplinary authority to engage in a formal reconciliation process to atone for reading a book—one that has been previously assigned as required reading for a Stanford class6 and is available to check out at Stanford’s library —is not conducive to the campus free speech culture. Stanford deems central to the university’s functions. Nor is it consistent with California’s “Leonard Law,” which requires Stanford to provide free expression.

Despite these obligations, Stanford chills student speech when the response to a PIH report involves notifying an accused student that they may have caused “harm” by merely exercising their rights.

The PIH system’s “resolution” mechanisms also raise compelled speech and thought reform concerns. Stanford “invites” accused students to meet with their accuser to engage in, for
example, “restorative justice, [a] healing circle, [or] mediation to help move towards resolution.” Stanford’s “goal” is for students to:

[I]mmediately focus on the resolution practices, but also account
for:
• Acknowledgement of Harm (and History)
• Accountability and steps taken towards change (to the
extent possible)
• Healing/Harm Reduction (if desired)

This presupposes that students must acknowledge their expression as “harmful” and commit not to cause “harm” in the future. In this case, students will understand that certain protected speech is nonetheless off limits, and they will self-censor.

Here’s what FIRE suggested:

If Stanford wants to provide both this PIH reporting system and promote a culture of free expression, it should undertake a cursory review of PIH complaints and first determine whether the conduct alleged constitutes protected expression. In such cases, Stanford can offer support to the complainant without notifying or involving the accused student.

And they asked for a response from Stanford by February 1.

Now it’s entirely possible that this was designed as an anti-Semitic stunt to scare Jews. In that case, it’s reprehensible but still not a violation of free speech. (Needless to say, if the student really was reading the book out of interest, or had been assigned it, and it wasn’t a scare tactic, Stanford should stay well away from the reader and photographer.) But in either case FIRE is right: the students who read the book, and perhaps the one who took and posted the photo, were exercising their rights of free speech, which Stanford supposedly guarantees. Getting them involved in a bias reporting investigation solves nothing, but serves only to chill speech in general. (Remember, if speech is protected, offensive speech must be protected, and that includes “hate speech”.)

As a (secular) Jew, I’m very sensitive to the rise of anti-Semitism on American campuses and among the American Left. It worries me, as does the seeming embrace of “anti-Zionism” on campus. And if Jewish students say they were harmed by seeing this photo, well, it’s perfectly fine for Stanford to offer them counseling and tons of support. I would hope, though, that Jewish students would develop a hide thick enough to withstand a photograph like this without being traumatized. (I realize that this may be part of a campus pattern, which would make it extra bothersome.)

But Stanford should leave the students involved in the incident alone (there were probably two, since they live in the same dorm). Otherwise the “perps” are being not only investigated, but punished, for of course a note from the administration that you’re being investigated, followed by a process of “restoration” are by chilling your speech, forms of punishment. You’re being punished for saying what is legal.

h/t: Ginger K.

A bizarre Cornell course about black holes that conflates astronomy and ideology

January 19, 2023 • 11:00 am

I get notices of weird courses like this every day, but this one is special for two reasons. First, it sounds completely off the wall, combining black holes and race. Second, a colleague of mine, Luana Maroja at Williams College, asked an AI bot what the connection between the two areas was, and the bot produced an amusing response.

First, below is the class at the renowned Cornell University, whose description was sent to me by a colleague. It appears to be cross-listed in both COML (comparative literature) and ASTRO (astronomy), though I’m not sure where your course credits go, whether they can apply to the majors, and so on. The distribution requirements below (LA-AS, ALC-AS, PHS-AS) imply that you can get credit for it in Literature and the Arts, Physical Sciences, and Arts, Literature, and Culture—all in the College of Arts and Sciences. I’m not sure if it really does fulfill a science requirement, but it looks like it.

Realize that I’m not familiar with Cornell’s curriculum requirements for an undergraduate degree, and maybe this course isn’t as bizarre as the description. But remember that course descriptions tend to be fairly accurate, and are written to attract students. Click on the course title to go to the page (the descriptions are identical; it’s just that the course satisfies two different distributions requirements).

And the same course cross-listed in Astronomy

Here’s the course description and details from the online catalogue:

Black Holes: Race and the Cosmos

Course information provided by the Courses of Study 2020-2021.

Conventional wisdom would have it that the “black” in black holes has nothing to do with race. Surely there can be no connection between the cosmos and the idea of racial blackness. Can there? Contemporary Black Studies theorists, artists, fiction writers implicitly and explicitly posit just such a connection. Theorists use astronomy concepts like “black holes” and “event horizons” to interpret the history of race in creative ways, while artists and musicians conjure blackness through cosmological themes and images. Co-taught by professors in Comparative Literature and Astronomy, this course will introduce students to the fundamentals of astronomy concepts through readings in Black Studies. Texts may include works by theorists like Michelle Wright and Denise Ferreira da Silva, authors like Octavia Butler and Nalo Hopkinson, music by Sun Ra, Outkast and Janelle Monáe. Astronomy concepts will include the electromagnetic spectrum, stellar evolution, and general relativity.

When Offered: Spring.

Distribution Category (LA-AS, ALC-AS, PHS-AS)

Syllabi: none

Regular Academic Session. Combined with: ASTRO 2034

3 Credits Stdnt Opt

19548 LEC 001

M11:25am – 12:40pm Online Meeting

Feb 8 – May 14, 2021

Battaglia, N., Vaziri, P.

W11:25am – 12:40pm ILR Conference Center 423

Feb 8 – May 14, 2021

Battaglia, N. Vaziri, P.

Instruction Mode: Hybrid-Online and In Person
This course has two required meeting days.
Enrollment limited to students who are able to attend in-person classes in the Ithaca area.

In this case the conventional wisdom is right: they’re called “black holes” because they appear black—no light can escape their terrific gravity. So surely there is no connection between this and race except for the word “black,” but you know that’s enough to drag race into the mixture. This course is clearly part of an attempt to racialize everything, and it sounds like a disaster. Since there’s nothing but a semantic connection between the two areas, it’s probably a poor welding of physics and Black Studies, livened up with the tunes of Sun Ra and Janell Monáe.

It sounds exactly what we used to call a “gut course”, or, in the case of science, “football physics”—a course meant for those who don’t particularly want to learn anything rigorous, but want to have fun and perhaps get an easy “A.” Now of course some offended Cornell person is going to write in and tell me how rigorous the course is, or that I’ve completely misconstrued the contents. To the first beef I’d say, “No it’s not: you’re combining two wholly different and unconnected areas that should not be taught as a single course. You’re also trying to be trendy without rigor.” To the second I’d say, “Well, all I have is the course description, and if I were a student at Cornell who wanted to learn science, I’d run away from this course as fast as I could.” But we always have people to defend any course, no matter how weird it is.

At any rate, Luana decided to ask the ChatGPT about the connection. This is, you know, the AI bot site that students can use to get their essay written by AI. (See here for a NYT article about the bot and the problems it’s causing.) ChatGPT at the link is down at the moment: I’m not sure if it’s active only in the afternoons and evenings, which I’ve heard, or if it’s in abeyance (there are rumors of a lawsuit against it).

At any rate, the question Luana asked is in bold and ChatGPT’s answer is indented below that:

What are black holes and what is the relationship to race

Black holes are extremely dense regions of space that have extremely strong gravitational fields. They are formed when very massive stars die and collapse under the force of their own gravity. Nothing, including light, can escape from inside a black hole’s event horizon, the point of no return.

There is no relationship between black holes and race. Black holes are a scientific concept that is based on the laws of physics, and race is a social construct with no scientific basis. They are not related to each other in any way.

This would seem to make the Cornell course superfluous, wouldn’t it? It also tells us that ChatGPT is somewhat misinformed about “race”, which is not entirely a social construct (see here and here).

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