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This forum is very focused on a particular political left/right culture war. However, there are other, deeper culture wars running through society that I find a lot more fascinating.
I think you can see a particularly interesting example hiding in the recent updates to the Francesca Gino affair. If you haven't heard of this, the wiki summary is a good overview: Francesca Gino was a high-flying behavioral science professor at HBS with all the standard TED talk/pop-sci book deal-type accolades. However, there were some statistical issues in her papers that were investigated by a blog Data Colada (run by the researchers who invented the term "p-hacking"!). Data Colada eventually wrote a four-part series of posts arguing that these papers were based on falsified data and the resulting scandal led to Gino losing tenure at Harvard. In between these raw events, there was also some pretty crazy drama; for example, a graduate student being threatened and blacklisted for originally pointing out the inconsistencies.
The most telling piece of the extra drama was that at one point, Gino decided to sue Data Colada for libel instead of directly giving a refutation of their analysis---your interpretation might vary, but this really felt like running to another arena where she could win through discussions of procedure and legal games instead of being confident in her ability to get vindication on scientific merit.
Now for the hidden culture war: while the scientific community seemed pretty convinced that Data Colada's case was ironclad (if you have time to read the full blog posts, you can check this yourself too---the section "Excel files contain multitudes" seems particularly damning), Gino did have many defenders outside science. Like Gino's self-defense, the other defenses are fascinating and, to me, very revealing. As a older representatives, you can see the reporting in the MBA-focused newsletter Poets and Quants (example) or a series of podcasts by Lawrence Lessig. Much more recently, Bill Ackman (relevant to here as a major force behind the removal of ex-Harvard president Claudine Gay) made a long twitter post explaining why he believes Gino is innocent.
If you read these defenses, something strange immediately pops out---instead of actually refuting Data Colada's points about why the data was fraudulent, they're almost completely focused on the process by which Harvard punished Gino/how different it was from the way other behavioral scientists were treated. There's also something more to the off-vibe I feel reading them: see these quotes from Lessig's second podcast interviewing Gino:
The mindset seems to almost be "She was doing all the things she was supposed to do, working so hard playing the academic career game exactly right when suddenly people changed the rules out from under her. Look at how unfair this was!". Nowhere does there seem to be any realization that the point of science is not actually the career game---you're actually supposed to further the project of learning truths about the world. If you actively impede it instead, it doesn't matter how well you were following the game and you should be punished very exceptionally!
This is the deeper culture war I was talking about. To some people, the point of a career is to add value to world, to create something that benefits others, achieve some mission, etc. However, to others, the point is to play a game as best as you can and climb a ladder of credentials and accolades determined by some competitive rules and procedures society pre-decided. The Gino case suggests fitting archetypes for both sides: a research scientist purely interested in their field vs. a careerist MBA or lawyer. Obviously from how I'm framing this, I'm extremely partisan towards one side of this culture war---so much so that I actually feel much more strongly about it than the political one and can't write this post anywhere close to neutrally. The "lawyer"-side viewpoint feels alien and evil, completely incompatible with a thriving society that can actually technologically progress.
What's even more interesting is how this culture war intersects with the political one. For example, there was a post here recently about meritocracy that bothered me much more than what I normally see here. It seems to be exactly the same almost nihilism that I'm reading into the defenses of Gino. The mindset in the comment is so similar: that there's no actual point to the positions you give people, no actual value these positions produce that might vary based on who gets them. Really it's all solely a zero-sum way to assign people status. Just pick the game you're going to have people play to get assigned and then stick to it fairly.
The example post is at +25, so clearly there are a lot of people here who buy the "everything is solely a status game" viewpoint. I'm biased here to the point that I can't even imagine arguments why this viewpoint is at all reasonable, either in the Gino case or in comments like the example---does anyone want to explain? Or maybe I'm just reading too much into this?
This reads a lot like the defense of that Christian college student refuting pro-trans arguments. Here on the Motte there was lots of "Her arguments are bad but a score of zero? The teacher is treating her differently, more harshly."
"Heh, I compare two incidents that have superficially similar argumentations around one another and so once again I accuse the chuds of hypocrisy, gotcha!"
Go directly to Reddit. Do not pass go, do not collect 200$. There is a world apart between making rhetorically weak arguments and fabricating evidence whole cloth. You know this. But here you are, saying something incredibly foolish, to attempt to reignite a past argument that you had failed to persuade in.
You are shameless, that much I know, but you can try to at least not be stupid at the same time. Now, having bitten into this bait, I will spit it out and go on my way.
There is also a world apart between a zero on a single assignment which is 10% of a single course grade and firing a tenured academic in disgrace. Both would be the appropriate punishments in a sane academia for the respective crimes, but are enforced far too rarely.
In both cases, the argument being made is of the form "A fundamentally righteous but rarely-enforced rule was enforced against an obviously-guilty member of a protected group - and discrimination by selective enforcement is worse than the underlying crime" (and the scissor is "Given the history of malign discrimination and current underrepresentation, should conservatives in academia be a protected group?"). The structure is symmetric, even if the relative severity is not.
This is the similarity you're failing to show between the cases. As per the other thread the grading criteria for the assignment do not warrant a 0. Yes, it's a bad essay, but the criteria provided by the professor explicitly allows bad essays. Please show how there were similar rules that actually allow for the penalized conduct in this case.
The essay deserved an F (that is 0 at some schools including this one and, bizarrely, 50 at others). Some of us think that grading rubrics giving F-quality work D and C grades in order to avoid giving earned Fs to protected groups are precisely what's gone wrong with higher education. When the F student isn't politically sympathetic, most Motteposters do.
The rule being selectively enforced here is "Undergraduates should be able to do undergraduate-level work". It isn't the specific rubric.
Your argument about this paper deserving an F is sufficient in a vacuum. However, this did not occur in a vacuum. It was one of many papers, and all prior papers written by this person were graded very generously. Once that pattern is established, a sudden zero requires justification beyond “this paper was bad.” There could've been some plausible deniability had the trans TA given a high F and kept the criticism solely about the paper not adhering to the rubric. The trans TA didn't do that. They gave the paper the lowest grade possible, then wrote a lengthy redditor debate style response directly to Fulnecky denying her appeal, which included how they were offended. That diminishes plausible deniability quite substantially.
Even if that essay did deserve an F per the rubric, then what should be done with all other generously graded essays in that course under said rubric? Fulnecky received full credit on all prior essays in that series of assignments. I'd be willing to bet that her writing quality on this controversial paper was not exceptionally worse than her other papers, or even other papers written by other students in that class. The university's own internal review seems to support that, and the lack of consistency is the most damning bit of evidence that the TA cannot account for.
Fundamentally, I don't care about Fulnecky's cause as much as I do about the culture establishing a counter balance to progressive overreach. This TA receiving a punishment of this severity is worth it in that regard. Not because their crime was severe, but because similar crimes of this nature occur everyday on nearly every campus in the country. I do not want progressive thumbs tipping the scales without fear of repercussion any longer.
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What's bizarre about it? <=50% points is a failing grade in every European country I've been in.
Not according to the grading criteria for the assignment. And if yes, just barely.
What's the evidence that this rule even exists? I can probably pull out a specific rule for the school that prohibits academic fraud, if you admit there isn't one here, you're admitting the cases aren't analogous.
Most motteposters are in favor of high standards. Failing a particular student a teacher doesn't like, but otherwise keeping the low standards isn't particularly popular.
I don't think it's crazy to think that there is a very meaningful distinction between "your rules" and "your rules, applied fairly". Fairness is probably the most important claimed value of both sides of the culture war anyway, there is just disagreement on its interpretation.
I can also entertain the separate thought that standards should be more rigorous, but my elitist sensibilities there there would probably nix a decent chunk of the psychology department's courses as a whole: reading between the likes here suggests to me that "lifespan development" was broadly seen as an easy class and I'd bet half the essays are worse but scored well still.
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