All sleazeballs are low quality people but not all low quality people are sleazeballs.
Hope this helps.
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“Do you think there would be no difference at all between the way that theory would be presented by a liberal prof as against a conservative prof?”
Well, there shouldn’t be.
Was there slavery? Yes.
Were there Jim Crow laws? Yes.
Have black Americans been discriminated against? Yes.
Were black Americans unable to be citizens of their own country? Yes.
Did the Selma March happen? Yes
Did it happen because the voting rights of black Americans were restricted? Yes.
Were there laws preventing blacks and white from marrying? Yes.
Has gerrymandering taken place to exclude black voters? Yes.
Plenty more where that came from. It all needs to be taught because it’s shameful and we never want it to happen again.
These are facts. A bit of someone’s personal perspective IS going to be present while teaching such material, but that is true of virtually everything in life. (But can people have personal views on math? I don’t understand math at all, but I am guessing no?)
We aren’t robots, and we don’t want our kids to be taught by robots. I’m okay with a small bit of bias in what my kids are taught because I think it’s impossible to totally avoid. If the prof teaching CRT is a conservative or liberal, no problem as long as he/she is keeping the facts in there.
This is a digression from the topic at hand so I’m leaving it here.
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@beebee3 , I understand CRT as holding that race has a central importance in nearly all human activities and explains almost everything in our history, the development of our institutions, our legal concepts and procedures, our cultural attitudes, our modes of reasoning, and even our scientific conclusions. The skeptics would see race as part of the analysis of at least some of these matters in some places and at some times, the proponents see it as omnipresent and explanatory of just about everything (“systemic racism”). In the practical form of anti-racism initiatives it involves imposing an array of behavioral attitudes and restrictions based on the concepts of “white fragility” and “white privilege.”
Sorry but no. It’s very hard to disentangle the effect of a single policy in the real world. How often do we have a “control group” where everything else was equal but the policy was not applied? And even then a lot of people will declare correlation is not causation. Look at the reaction to the analysis in Freakonomics that legal abortion supposedly reduces crime.
More prosaically, in terms of public policy, is rent control good (tenants aren’t forced out) or bad (less new building)? Is new building gentrification (bad) or economic development (good)? Are national minimum wages good or bad? We have good faith (and not so good faith) arguments on both sides.
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@marlowe1 Interesting because my understanding of CRT (Critical Race Theory) is that is a fairly niche legal (as in taught in law schools almost exclusively) theory. Not exactly sure where you got your definition, as niche legal theory is not usually so all encompassing as you seem to believe it to be.
“…Critical race theory was a movement that initially started at Harvard under Professor Derrick Bell in the 1980s. It evolved in reaction to critical legal studies, which came about in the 70s and dissected the idea that law was just and neutral. Over time, the movement grew among legal scholars, mostly of color, at law schools across the country, including at UCLA, where Crenshaw lectured on critical race theory, civil rights, and constitutional law, and later at Columbia, where she was appointed a full professor in 1995, alongside Williams, a former student, research assistant, and lifelong mentee of Bell’s, and who is now professor of law emerita…”
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(Off topic, but strictly speaking CRT is a law school course.
American history that doesn’t erase contributions from various groups at various times isn’t CRT, nor is a novel or event that isn’t positive. None of the books on the 800 book list that someone wants removed from TX schools have anything to do with CRT.
So I think we ought not to use CRT as shorthand for something else.
For instance, one may think having novels with gay characters is a problem, or that not having novels with gay characters is a problem… but it’s not CRT.
Speaking about slavery as a crime against humanity isn’t CRT. History texts that call slaves “workers” or that don’t show why slavery is considered a crime against humanity aren’t fighting for freedom of speech or against CRT, either. It’s just not-history.
History class may use Birth of a nation where we see happy slaves skipping along in pretty clothes at a picnic, but not treat it as a documentary. That’s neither CRT nor notCRT…
Do we need a word for this?)
@beebee3 : sorry, didn’t see your post.
@marlowe1 : your definition may well define something but it’s not CRT.
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Thanks for clarifying. I’m thinking of the context as a hot button topic in American high schools at the moment.
@Lindagaf I understand what you are saying but I think it is really important that the culture wars taking place aren’t able to appropriate a term like CRT to use as a proxy word without pushback instead of what they are actually fighting against.
If people want to fight against accurate historical representation of US history, ban/burn books, etc - then maybe just own those desires rather than call it fighting against CRT?
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During my morning walks I listen to a podcast by Lex Fridman a research scientist at MIT specializing in machine learning. Fridman, while still working for MIT recently moved to Austin TX where he is working on a new as of yet undisclosed startup. I’ve enjoyed his podcasts with so many people involved in machine learning and CS - he keeps me current.
Fridman interviews Niall Ferguson in last weeks episode #239 of his podcast. In it many of the questions raised here in CC are answered. One thing he mentions that caught my ear is that he feels like true academic discourse is stifled in universities today. He mentions that in his undergrad days at the University of Oxford is was not uncommon for true civil debate between communists and fascists in his classes - where no felt limited in what they could say, and were there were no recriminations.
It’s an interesting podcast and I encourage everyone to listen to it: Episode #239, Niall Ferguson - History of Money, Power, and Truth.
and BTW if you are interested in CS, AI, and machine learning his podcasts with the likes of Yann LeCun, Ian Goodfellow, and Pieter Abbeel are awesome…
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Yes, I understand.
(I even followed how that accronym came to be used with the wrong meaning, etc.)
But instead of an acronym that describes something else, I really we ought to have a word that actually describes what people mean and what want/reject.
Otherwise we talk at cross purpose.
@beebee3 and @MYOS1634 , yes, of course, it is a theory developed by legal scholars, but are you both contending that the concepts behind the theories haven’t escaped the law schools and entered into academic thinking in a range of fields? Wasn’t it Kimberle Crenshaw herself who developed the concept of “intersectionality”? That one has travelled everywhere, and not simply as an otherwise contestable theory but as a dogma. When a prof says, as one did recently, that a study of the Greeks or Romans can only be undertaken from a perspective that accounts for the oppression that history and culture perpetrated on the non-whites of the world - well, l am content to call this by another name than CRT but it is one instance of the way the dogma has penetrated other fields than law.
However, the accuracy of my definition wasn’t the question here. I brought it up as an example of how the treatment of that subject in a college classroom would likely be very different as between a conservative and a liberal prof. I was taking issue with the idea that the political orientation of the prof is irrelevant. Is it your belief that the subject would never come up in a college classroom? If it is, I can think of others that would.
Niall Ferguson has a slightly nostalgic/fanciful recollection of his undergraduate days: in the early 80s there were communists at Oxford, certainly, but they were a tiny, very distinct minority at Magdalen. As for fascists, I’m guessing their “polite discourse” involved respect between titled peers - at that time, the college heavily favored boys from target independent schools; it mostly didn’t involve anything as uncouth as having to discuss supremacist or fascist ideas with women (not allowed at Magdalen till after he graduated, and not without a fight) or Jews (although there were “reserved seats” for Jewish pupils at some of the target schools, Magdalen was unlikely to be their first choice and if faced with fascist discourse I doubt it remained civil in the face of one side advocating killing the other or restricting ways in which their “impure blood” could mix).
Fascists and communists were also known to fight physically.
I’m sure Niall Ferguson is hoping to emulate his ideal Magdalen experience, of course.
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Does this mean there are only As and Fs in your classes? Not mine.
If your question is: would intersectional issues be discussed differently depending on whether the professor is conservative or liberal, sure, and if they have a particular known ideology you’d have layers too (communists are very much against intersectionality since their primary lens is class/the class struggle, for instance.) That would part of college.
It seems to me most professors would be able to read a paper and see whether it’s good or bad.
I had a conservative student complain bitterly that he’d tried to write like his liberal professor and he’d gotten a bad grade anyway which was so unfair, so I looked at it and well, it really was really bad: sure, he said things a liberal would say and placed all the words his professor likely used, but it was just a bad, very bad, paper. If he’d defended fascist or racist ideas he’d have had a bad grade, too, simply because (and you’ll disagree, certainly) some things can’t be argued - he originally wanted to argue you could solve unemployment by reserving jobs to men, except for “care and children” positions (caring for others or teaching children being un-masculine, in his viewpoint). I had dissuaded him from using that idea, not on an ideological basis but because it wasn’t was a sociology paper but an op-ed, it didn’t stand economically since no country could function like this, and he couldn’t prove otherwise because he had zero reference to back him up. So he’d flipped and written something he thought was liberal except it was equally bad: the professor didn’t want a parrot splicing random concepts but actual research and thinking.
At the HS level though it all boils down to basics: on average, it’s better to be a rich guy than a poor woman, and even more so if you’re a rich white guy v. a poor Black woman. I’m sure it can be made super controversial from any extreme perspective.
I think he’s recalling the Marxist faculty members of that era, like Andrew Glyn (Andrew Glyn - Wikipedia). If it was anything like Cambridge the political debate wasn’t particularly active between undergraduates (the conservatives ran the Union debating society and the socialists ran the Students Union).
But you would be very likely to encounter tutors or lecturers who were openly Marxist and others who were more Thatcherite and debate your essays with both types during tutorials. He’s clearly hoping for a similar type of discussion between faculty members and students with different views.
Yes, I’m very curious about these undergraduate fascists at Oxford in the 1980s.
Poor wording on my part. Yes, the Hillsdale survey contains bias that is consistent with the school’s teaching. But bias “egregious” enough to warrant canceling the school based on a poll? Not in my opinion.
Should we also cancel Quinnipiac? Their surveys are, no doubt, “scientific.” Even though they miss political outcomes by 20 points with a +/- 3 point margin of error. LOL
They also perpetuate inaccurate representations of the issues they are polling about…
…Or sometimes just completely miss the boat…
https://www.imediaethics.org/quinnipiac-poll-asks-misleading-stand-your-ground-questions/
…and even engage in shady tactics to circumvent Title IX…
So many surveys are just garbage hiding behind a “scientific” label.
I have yet to see one poster deny the accuracy of each of these statements, which are historical fact. The acknowledgment of that to me is intellectual “freedom”, which is what this thread is about.
“Freedom of speech” has clear limitations such as fraud, consumer protection, defamation, torts, securities violations etc etc etc. Denying the clear historical facts above, and the further fact that both federal and state laws were/are the key ways of implementing them is not freedom of speech.
It’s just lying. And lying in the academic setting IS fraud.
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In that era, any Thatcherite would often be described as a “fascist” by people of the opposite political persuasion (eg Margaret Thatcher: imperialism personified – Liberation News).
Russian communist influence was pretty strong at the highest levels of British politics (eg MI6 believed former Labour leader Foot 'was KGB agent' - BBC News) and it was usual to some to frame the debate as between socialism and fascism.
So it was just the term du jour in the same way as today some might characterize all Trump voters as “racist”.
Or that “some” Trump voters refer to a “Democrat” as a “socialist”, “communist”, “antifa”, etc? Funny how it works both ways, innit?
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