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Cancel culture IRL

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Chris_Halkides said:
It may be time for me to hit FIRE's tip jar again. Syracuse's overall record is poor, but for me one of the more astonishing incidents was when members of the engineering fraternity Theta Tau were punished for putting on a stupid skit for a private audience on their own property.
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As I mentioned, I am agnostic about it being racist or bigoted and would be happy to give the benefit of the doubt in this case. That said, it still smacks of blatant unprofessionalism and sounds like it has nothing to do with “academic freedom”. I would bet that he is not still writing syllabuses warning about the Chinese Communist Virus.
 
angrysoba said:
As I mentioned, I am agnostic about it being racist or bigoted and would be happy to give the benefit of the doubt in this case. That said, it still smacks of blatant unprofessionalism and sounds like it has nothing to do with “academic freedom”.
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What is your operational definition of academic freedom?
 
d4m10n said:
So what? Loads of scholarly ideas can be seen as ugly, wrong, and demeaning. A robust marketplace of ideas requires that they be allowed even when randos are offended on the internet.
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Tell that to the Administrators of the UMass Chan Medical School, here is the Foundation for Individual Rights In Education's summary of a letter I'll link to below their comments.


A recently-imposed policy at the University of Massachusetts Chan Medical School imposes tight new restrictions on what information faculty may share about capital punishment.

The “School of Medicine Statement Regarding Teaching Faculty and Capital Punishment,” sent to faculty over the summer, apologizes for the university’s prior failure “to actively oppose the current state of US [sic] capital punishment” and announces that teaching faculty will now be required to “acknowledge and abide by” the administration’s “position” on capital punishment moving forward.

The troubling statement also bans faculty from actions that “could” enable or “contribute” to the use of capital punishment, including “providing . . . information” to “governments engaged in execution by lethal injection.”

The First Amendment protects faculty members’ speech and writing, even if it leads to outcomes that administrators or the public believe to be immoral.

But the policy violates faculty’s constitutional rights by limiting a broad range of speech — for example, research that simply could be used by another to carry out capital punishment — and the university concedes that it reaches “even lawful activities.”
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https://www.thefire.org/umass-chan-...hat-faculty-can-say-about-capital-punishment/


And here is the 'blanket' statement issued on behalf of UMass Chan Medical School:


https://www.thefire.org/university-...-faculty-and-capital-punishment-july-21-2021/
 
d4m10n said:
What is your operational definition of academic freedom?
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Presumably freedom to study areas of interest relevant to your academic discipline.


If a chemistry teacher wants to explore some unusual or even controversial theories of the discipline, that would make sense presumably as long as they flag up the fact that what they are now teaching is non-standard or that there are reputable critiques of this idea.

However, the lecturer in question apparently put the references to "Wuhan flu" and "Chinese Communist Virus" in sections on student safety.

I may have to see the exact uses in context, but my baseline understanding here is that this is not related to academic freedom. Do you have a copy of the syllabus so that we can see the context in which it is used? I tried a few times to find it on the FIRE website but only found their letters.
 
So there is a little more context here. It shows the syllabus and how "Wuhan Flu" and "Chinese Communist Party Virus" appear in brakets under the Covid-19 safety measures for the class. He seems to have also sent out some messages to students about how the semester is "in the season of the CCP virus".

Link

As I say, it really has nothing to do with his teaching, so I can't see it being protected on grounds of academic freedom.

As an analogy, I doubt it would be acceptable for a lecturer in the mid-1980s to give out a helpline number for avoiding AIDS (Gay Plague or African Bum Disease), and then go all, "What?!? What?!? What about my academic freedom?! It does disproportionately affect homosexuals, it is a plague! It does come from Africa! It can be trasmitted through the anus! It is a disease! I am totally one hundred percent entitled to write this on my syllabus!"
 
angrysoba said:
So there is a little more context here. It shows the syllabus and how "Wuhan Flu" and "Chinese Communist Party Virus" appear in brakets under the Covid-19 safety measures for the class. He seems to have also sent out some messages to students about how the semester is "in the season of the CCP virus".

Link

As I say, it really has nothing to do with his teaching, so I can't see it being protected on grounds of academic freedom.

As an analogy, I doubt it would be acceptable for a lecturer in the mid-1980s to give out a helpline number for avoiding AIDS (Gay Plague or African Bum Disease), and then go all, "What?!? What?!? What about my academic freedom?! It does disproportionately affect homosexuals, it is a plague! It does come from Africa! It can be trasmitted through the anus! It is a disease! I am totally one hundred percent entitled to write this on my syllabus!"
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Calling it "Gay Plague" would be homophobic, and calling it "African Bum Disease" is every bit as racist and bigoted as calling Covid "Wuhan Flu".

It is too much to expect academics and better educated people to set a good example? Probably!
 
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Should be some more fodder for this thread soon.

Epik, the internet provider of last resort for white supremacists and other odious reprobates, has suffered a massive hack thanks to their completely amateurish security systems.

A lot of reactionary freaks are likely to be outed in the near future. Sucks to suck

Epik, the domain registrar known for hosting far-right websites and social media services, was recently hacked, according to a release from someone claiming to be associated with the online collective known as Anonymous.

“This dataset is all that’s needed to trace actual ownership and management of the fascist side of the Internet.”
As first reported Monday by journalist Steven Monacelli, the hacker claims that “a decade’s worth of data from the company” has been obtained, including all domain purchases, domain transfers, and unredacted website registration data that could shed light on individuals and groups behind extremist or hate sites.

“This dataset is all that’s needed to trace actual ownership and management of the fascist side of the Internet that has eluded researchers, activists, and, well, just about everybody,” the hacker boasted in announcing the attack.
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https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2021/09/epik-hack-anonymous-gab-parler/
 
angrysoba said:
Presumably freedom to study areas of interest relevant to your academic discipline.
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Zubieta has published in at least one journal "at the interface of chemistry, biology and medicine." Seems likely to me that he may have academically informed opinions on the open question of whether the novel coronavirus originated in a Wuhan laboratory, presumably as a result of CCP negligence.
 
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d4m10n said:
Zubieta has published in at least one journal "at the interface of chemistry, biology and medicine." Seems likely to me that he may have academically informed opinions on the open question of whether the novel coronavirus originated in a Wuhan laboratory, presumably as a result of CCP negligence.
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Nope.

Really, this is getting silly. If you cannot understand why writing that on your syllabus under what should be a simple explanation of safety regulations, then I can't help you. It's not the place to be floating fringe theories, certainly not presenting them as facts, which he has no business doing.
 
angrysoba said:
If you cannot understand why writing that on your syllabus under what should be a simple explanation of safety regulations, then I can't help you.
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If you cannot understand why Syracuse committed to allowing professors to have academic freedom within their fields, I cannot help you. The only question left here is whether chemists who've done research in biochemistry can reasonably claim viral gain-of-function research to be within their remit.

It's not the place to be floating fringe theories...
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Didn't click the BBC link, eh?
 
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d4m10n said:
If you cannot understand why Syracuse committed to allowing professors to have academic freedom within their fields, I cannot help you.
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?????

I think there is a fundamental misunderstanding here. The Wuhan Flu and Communist Chinese Party Virus stuff does NOT relate to anything the professor is teaching. It is not written in the course contents area, there is no lesson in which they are discussing this. He is simply baldly referring to the virus as those terms in the bit that talks about Covid-19 mitigation for the classroom. It is a completely inappropriate comment which is irrelevant to academic freedom.

Now, if he was teaching about "Where did Covid-19 come from?" and wants to explore the possibility of fringe theories about the origins, such as how it may have come from a lab in Wuhan after gain of function research, or if it was a bioweapon developed by the Chinese Communist government, or whether Zhengli Shi was bitten by a bat or whether it was extracted from miners in a Monjiang cave and serially passaged through humanized mice, or whether Ralph Baric, Peter Daszak and Tony Fauci secretly funded bat research from within the BSL-4 labs or let it spill out of a hybridized virus in a BSL-2 lab or sold infected monkeys to a market in Wuhan, or the millions of other unsubstantiated fringe theories, then hey, go right ahead and let him teach his controversy.

d4m10n said:
...The only question left here is whether chemists who've done research in biochemistry can reasonably claim viral gain-of-function research to be within their remit.

Didn't click the BBC link, eh?
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Nope. Enlighten me. Let me guess BBC says a fringe theory is not a fringe theory. Who cares? There are probably history teachers still looking into "wHo kiLleD keNnedy?" and setting Oliver Stone's film as required viewing. That's fine, but responsible academics need to flag up their fringe theories and not just baldly state fringe speculation as facts.
 
d4m10n said:
Zubieta has published in at least one journal "at the interface of chemistry, biology and medicine." Seems likely to me that he may have academically informed opinions on the open question of whether the novel coronavirus originated in a Wuhan laboratory, presumably as a result of CCP negligence.
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FFS, this is getting ridiculous. This was a ******* CHEMISTRY SYLLABUS, and what he wrote had nothing to do with the subject of the syllabus.

It was the class safely and infection mitigation protocols. No teacher, professor or syllabus writer has any business writing racially biased and/or politically charged messaging in such protocols. Being an "academic" does not give him cover do doing so!
 
smartcooky said:
This was a ******* CHEMISTRY SYLLABUS, and what he wrote had nothing to do with the subject of the syllabus.
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angrysoba said:
The Wuhan Flu and Communist Chinese Party Virus stuff does NOT relate to anything the professor is teaching.
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Syracuse has committed to "freedom in the classroom in discussing their subject" and I would assume that "their subject" must include the research for which the professor is professionally known.

We cannot evaluate the lab leak hypothesis without some understanding of biomolecular chemistry, which is well within Zubieta's wheelhouse judging by his publication history.

Your eagerness to punish a professor for bringing up a topic which might well provoke stimulating classroom discussion is entirely beyond me. Didn't your profs ever do that for you?
 
d4m10n said:
Wuhan isn't a race, including place names isn't a racial slur. Calm down.
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Oh stop with the bloody pretence!!

You know perfectly well that referring to Coronavirus as the "Wuhan Flu" and the "China Virus" is a ******* racist slur on the Chinese? If you don't, then its time you caught up and paid attention to what is happening in the real world.

Trump referred to African countries, Haiti and El Salvador as "****-hole countries. Racist or not racist?
(I expect you will have no trouble justifying it to yourself by pretending its just a coincidence that most of the people living in those countries are black or brown)
 
d4m10n said:
Syracuse has committed to "freedom in the classroom in discussing their subject" and I would assume that "their subject" must include the research for which the professor is professionally known.

We cannot evaluate the lab leak hypothesis without some understanding of biomolecular chemistry, which is well within Zubieta's wheelhouse judging by his publication history.

Your eagerness to punish a professor for bringing up a topic which might well provoke stimulating classroom discussion is entirely beyond me. Didn't your profs ever do that for you?
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What are you not understanding about this? He is not "bringing up a topic for classroom discussion".

I've already said I am happy for topics of discussion to be brought up. But he seems utterly unprofessional if this is his idea of provoking classroom discussion.

Also, at this point I have to ask if these arguments you are putting forward actual arguments that he made?

Did he say anything to the effect of "I decided to place under the Protocols for Covid-19 mitigation the provocative names of Wuhan Flu and Chinese Communist Party Virus" to provoke classroom discussion?

Apparently not. Apparently it is only you making this argument.

As I have said, I am in favour of a university disciplining their instructors for being unprofessional, and that's what they did, from what I can see. He was suspended and asked to do some professional development, then reinstated. Maybe the suspension was heavy-handed, but telling him to write proper Covid-19 protocols is perfectly okay for me.
 
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