Fake Charity Nerd Girl

[snip]

Yeah. I would also have liked ideological diversity, if I could find any.
However, if the reasoning is that college admissions at schools at the level of quality you would have been ok with (Ivys and equivalents), we should expect at least some right-wing schools that snatch those students up. Catholic colleges, perhaps: No, Boston College doesn’t count, and it’s a perfectly lovely school that couldn’t compete with Stanford. I’m going to guess that Georgetown is no poster-child for conservatism either, not to the extent that we would expect if student quality for admissions officers was distributed evenly across the political spectrum, Is anyone on my dash familiar with it?
Duke is southern by the standards of top schools: The Ivies have a history bias, obviously, but I can’t think of a school at that level in the South aside from Duke, while, starting from the steps of MIT, I can draw a straightish line that goes through University of Michigan, UChicago, the best writer’s program in the country at the University of Iowa, and wind up on the other side of the country coming towards San Francisco, home to your UC Berkeley and a junior university you may have heard of. One could make the case that UT Austin should be on the list, but one can make a stronger case that Austin is in the South in the same way that Japan isn’t Protestant.
This suggests that geography plays a role. Some students don’t want to go too far from home. While I obviously don’t understand this inclination, I am willing to accept that it is part of the equation.
I think it’s quite plausible that for a variety of reasons, possibilities ranging from (conservatism = survive/thrive = less focus on education and planning for future) to (perception of being unwelcome in academia leads to negative affect towards education) to (the Southern education system is terrible, & in modern American politics conservatism is increasingly southernized) to (younger people are more liberal), top students will be disproportionately liberal.

Oh, I definitely think top students are disproportionately liberal. But I think there might also be anti-conservative (or more accurately anti-Red Tribe) discrimination going on; according to Espenshade and Radford (or at least some description of their work I read somewhere) a lower-class white student is much less likely to be admitted to any given college than an upper-class white student with the same academic qualifications, and Red Tribe extracurriculars like 4-H club and ROTC decrease your admissions chances.

I’d guess that top Red Tribe students are more spread out and a lot are at their state universities.

But all that, I think, is completely beside the point. I think that the level of free speech is a sacred value, and student preferences will have very little impact (marginally, mass protests are different) on what mixture of free speech/silencing of liberal speech/silencing of conservative speech colleges, by which we mostly mean self interested administrators and to some extent professors, will choose.

Yeah, universities are not for-profit and I think the incentives of the administrators are pretty much “mold the university in accordance with my personal values as long as no one important gets too mad at me”

response to Colleges Need Speech Codes Because Their Students Are Still Children

When I was fifteen my high school banned bake sales to fight obesity. I and my friends thought this was stupid and disrespectful of high school students, who were mature enough to make healthy decisions for themselves and who benefitted from the space to make those informed choices now rather than, once we were adults, be responsible for our own groceries while having been shielded our whole lives from the temptation of a cupcake. We did some reading and found that banning bake sales did not improve student health. It was also devastating to high school student groups, who depended on bake sales for revenue. We scraped together hundreds of petition signatures, we wrote up a clumsy summary supporting our claims that it wouldn’t improve health outcomes, and we spoke to the Board of Education, who listened but didn’t change anything.

So we started holding ‘napkin sales’, in which we’d sell napkins for $1 and give away free cupcakes and donuts with purchase of a napkin. 

I learned more from our failed campaign to overturn the bake-sale ban than I learned from all of the rest of high school.

This is the first of my many objections to Eric Posner’s appalling new article  defending bans on free speech on college campuses. Why? Because students, who are emotionally still children, don’t need open and free debate - they start out knowing nothing, and they really just need to be informed by people who know better. Lest you think I’m strawmanning:

They think universities are treating students like children. And they are right. But they have also not considered that the justification for these policies may lie hidden in plain sight: that students are children. Not in terms of age, but in terms of maturity. Even in college, they must be protected like children while being prepared to be adults.

“Protected”, here, means “forbidden from voicing opinions that I deem to be hateful”. If you’re wondering how it protects anyone to face academic sanctions unless you hide or lie about your beliefs, don’t read on, the article never returns to that. It also takes a while to return to the ‘students are too immature to have rights’ argument, instead throwing out various other justifications for banning free speech and repeatedly, aggressively conflating ‘hearing opposing views’ and ‘being a victim of violence’.

Once again lest you think I’m strawmanning: 

If students want to learn biology and art history in an environment where they needn’t worry about being offended or raped, why shouldn’t they?

BECAUSE THOSE TWO THINGS ARE NOT REMOTELY EQUIVALENT AND BASICALLY NONE OF THE SAME CONSIDERATIONS APPLY WHAT THE HELL IS WRONG WITH YOU.

Read More

This is 60% contrarianism because you’er clever and I like debating with you, 20% “Richard Posner is brilliant and I suspect I have more respect for him than you because I like his other work,” and 20% actual disagreement. That said:

1. You completely fail to engage with his market argument: to be fair, I think his market argument is terrible, we probably have similar reasons for thinking it’s terrible, I could try to make it a competing access needs point (or how liberal do you think the University of Alabama, last in the news for all-white fraternities, is?) but that’s obviously not what actually happens, let’s move on.

2. You attack over reality what he defends in principle. Richard Posner is a judge (and, frankly, one who plenty on both sides of the aisle is more deserving than Thomas is or was, and the only reason he isn’t on the SCOTUS is that he’s too old)(OK, I”ll stop the fangirling now)( But comparativelysuperlative, you know where I’m coming from). He is writing to defend the position that schools should legally be allowed to act in loco parentis. So the argument that schools are censoring only one side, while true, seems somewhat orthogonal to what he is saying.

3. I would love to see a writeup of your high school misadventures and tangles with the bureaucracy some day. No, this has no relevance to anything else.

4.(This is running on raw contrarianism) There’s no age where we should protect children from saying what they believe. But it’s much more reasonable to say “given the number of students who need this and are harmed, on this campus you can’t make homophobic comments”. This relies on a belief that people can be harmed by speech, but I don’t think we disagree here. It seems that you think that the harm of enforcing the speech codes, and the bad lesson censorship teaches, outweighs the harm caused to students from the types of speech that are banned. I suspect typical mind might apply here: I suspect you have an unusually high desire to be able to find and understand truth. I wish to note that I acknowledge that this does in fact also argue against you being able to set up a GSA.

The article is actually by Eric Posner, Richard Posner’s son. I was disappointed because I read a good article by Richard Posner the other day but I guess his son did not turn out as well :(

On the market analogy, I think I actually considered ideological diversity at some point in my college decision. I came to the conclusion that at the level of academic quality I’d be okay with there was basically no difference. I’m not sure if I believe this but if I were being contrarian I’d say that there are no conservative students to put pressure on colleges to be more accomodating of conservative viewpoints because college admissions discriminates against conservative students.

You make defending this article hard, you know. :)

doing my best ^_^

response to Colleges Need Speech Codes Because Their Students Are Still Children

When I was fifteen my high school banned bake sales to fight obesity. I and my friends thought this was stupid and disrespectful of high school students, who were mature enough to make healthy decisions for themselves and who benefitted from the space to make those informed choices now rather than, once we were adults, be responsible for our own groceries while having been shielded our whole lives from the temptation of a cupcake. We did some reading and found that banning bake sales did not improve student health. It was also devastating to high school student groups, who depended on bake sales for revenue. We scraped together hundreds of petition signatures, we wrote up a clumsy summary supporting our claims that it wouldn’t improve health outcomes, and we spoke to the Board of Education, who listened but didn’t change anything.

So we started holding ‘napkin sales’, in which we’d sell napkins for $1 and give away free cupcakes and donuts with purchase of a napkin. 

I learned more from our failed campaign to overturn the bake-sale ban than I learned from all of the rest of high school.

This is the first of my many objections to Eric Posner’s appalling new article  defending bans on free speech on college campuses. Why? Because students, who are emotionally still children, don’t need open and free debate - they start out knowing nothing, and they really just need to be informed by people who know better. Lest you think I’m strawmanning:

They think universities are treating students like children. And they are right. But they have also not considered that the justification for these policies may lie hidden in plain sight: that students are children. Not in terms of age, but in terms of maturity. Even in college, they must be protected like children while being prepared to be adults.

“Protected”, here, means “forbidden from voicing opinions that I deem to be hateful”. If you’re wondering how it protects anyone to face academic sanctions unless you hide or lie about your beliefs, don’t read on, the article never returns to that. It also takes a while to return to the ‘students are too immature to have rights’ argument, instead throwing out various other justifications for banning free speech and repeatedly, aggressively conflating ‘hearing opposing views’ and ‘being a victim of violence’.

Once again lest you think I’m strawmanning: 

If students want to learn biology and art history in an environment where they needn’t worry about being offended or raped, why shouldn’t they?

BECAUSE THOSE TWO THINGS ARE NOT REMOTELY EQUIVALENT AND BASICALLY NONE OF THE SAME CONSIDERATIONS APPLY WHAT THE HELL IS WRONG WITH YOU.

Read More

So gratified you wrote this because I read this article a couple days ago and was really annoyed especially by the charming “offended or raped” line ^_^

But Posner also doesn’t even mention the best part of the Marquette incident, which is that the reason anyone heard about the TA telling the student not to argue against same-sex marriage was that a professor wrote a blog post criticizing the TA’s actions, for which he was stripped of tenure.

hey, people

when you’re reblogging something to disagree with it and there are, like, twenty notes

check that fifteen of them aren’t someone shouting about how OP is terrible

I like arguing too, but being dogpiled is really unpleasant and it silences dissent and new ideas within our communities; if there are already a lot of people disagreeing, the point has probably been made and you’re just giving someone a hard time

I’ve been bad about this in the past and I will be trying to get better

Agree with the conclusion but not the reasoning. If 15 people have already said why something is wrong, you’re probably wasting your breath responding, and may be contributing to giving a bad idea more exposure than it deserves.

But the meme that criticism can be silencing needs to die–even if a bunch of people are criticizing you. It provides a lazy justification for internet self-righteousness: notice a bunch of people are criticizing you, then conclude they’re trying to silence you and therefore you must be the good guy.

(Or at least, that’s how things used to go in the online atheism community. Things may play out differently in your community.

A bunch of people disagreeing with you doesn’t make you right. I’m using “silence” in its most literal sense: like, there are times I’ve thought “man, if I say this sixteen people will yell at me, and I don’t want to deal with that” when I probably would have said it if two or three people would yell at me. And I would prefer, on balance, that people with unpopular opinions say them. 

Except I don’t think that is the most literal sense of “silence.” Being quiet because you don’t want a bunch of people criticizing you is not the same thing as being forced to be quiet. That’s something that the rhetoric of “if you criticize people under certain conditions you’re silencing them” tends to ignore.

It’s unfortunate if people with worthwhile things to say stay quiet for fear of criticism, but there’s a limit to how much we can do about that. Talking about controversial subjects on the internet requires a certain amount of thick skin, or at least the ability to have a minor freakout but then say, “wait, no, I’m being irrational about this, and I can’t insist everybody else alter their behavior to keep me from having irrational freakouts.” We should insist people not be jerks unnecessarily, but I don’t think we’re going to change the fundamental dynamic.

And yes, while I won’t name names, I can think of specific people who I don’t think are really cut out for the “well-known controversial blogger” gig, because they don’t handle criticism well, and it isn’t reasonable to expect other people to cater to their inability to handle criticism well. In an ideal world you’d never have to make that kind of judgement, but obvs. we don’t live in an ideal world.

“Being quiet because you don’t want a bunch of people criticizing you is not the same thing as being forced to be quiet.” no it’s definitely not, but at least when I say “silencing” I mean it as the opposite of “mind-changing,” which is what we should be aiming for. If the worst that happens when you post something is that a few people disagree with you nicely, you’ll go ahead and post it and if the people disagreeing with you are persuasive you might change your mind, or at least be a little less confident in your position. But if you’re afraid of hundreds of people reblogging your post with “wow this is so wrong I can’t even” you won’t say anything at all and then you’ll keep believing whatever it is you believe and quietly resenting the ~evil lynch mob who has decided your opinion is too politically incorrect to speak out loud~.

“I don’t think we’re going to change the fundamental dynamic.” yeah okay probably not. I’ll keep hoping though.