This weekly roundup thread is intended for all culture war posts. 'Culture war' is vaguely defined, but it basically means controversial issues that fall along set tribal lines. Arguments over culture war issues generate a lot of heat and little light, and few deeply entrenched people ever change their minds. This thread is for voicing opinions and analyzing the state of the discussion while trying to optimize for light over heat.
Optimistically, we think that engaging with people you disagree with is worth your time, and so is being nice! Pessimistically, there are many dynamics that can lead discussions on Culture War topics to become unproductive. There's a human tendency to divide along tribal lines, praising your ingroup and vilifying your outgroup - and if you think you find it easy to criticize your ingroup, then it may be that your outgroup is not who you think it is. Extremists with opposing positions can feed off each other, highlighting each other's worst points to justify their own angry rhetoric, which becomes in turn a new example of bad behavior for the other side to highlight.
We would like to avoid these negative dynamics. Accordingly, we ask that you do not use this thread for waging the Culture War. Examples of waging the Culture War:
-
Shaming.
-
Attempting to 'build consensus' or enforce ideological conformity.
-
Making sweeping generalizations to vilify a group you dislike.
-
Recruiting for a cause.
-
Posting links that could be summarized as 'Boo outgroup!' Basically, if your content is 'Can you believe what Those People did this week?' then you should either refrain from posting, or do some very patient work to contextualize and/or steel-man the relevant viewpoint.
In general, you should argue to understand, not to win. This thread is not territory to be claimed by one group or another; indeed, the aim is to have many different viewpoints represented here. Thus, we also ask that you follow some guidelines:
-
Speak plainly. Avoid sarcasm and mockery. When disagreeing with someone, state your objections explicitly.
-
Be as precise and charitable as you can. Don't paraphrase unflatteringly.
-
Don't imply that someone said something they did not say, even if you think it follows from what they said.
-
Write like everyone is reading and you want them to be included in the discussion.
On an ad hoc basis, the mods will try to compile a list of the best posts/comments from the previous week, posted in Quality Contribution threads and archived at /r/TheThread. You may nominate a comment for this list by clicking on 'report' at the bottom of the post and typing 'Actually a quality contribution' as the report reason.
Jump in the discussion.
No email address required.
Notes -
If you have been even peripherally involved in higher education in the United States, then you've heard of Title IX. But if you haven't, here's the U.S. government's blurb:
Title IX is most famous for requiring equal athletic opportunities for men and women, without regard for whether this makes (among other things) any financial sense at all. But Title IX also imposes a variety of reporting requirements on college and university faculty and staff, such that essentially every campus has a Title IX Coordinator (or similar), and many campuses maintain entire offices of Title IX administrative staff. Do they do real, important work? I would argue virtually never--these are bullshit jobs par excellence--with one enormous caveat: they serve as a lightning rod for both civil liability and federal intervention.
(Well isn't that real and important, then? Yes, yes, it's a fair point. But I still think jobs that exist solely to push unnecessary government paperwork are inescapably bullshit jobs. Hiring government actors--executive and judicial--to punish universities for failing to meet politically-imposed quotas on social engineering goals, so that universities must hire administrators to give themselves cover, is the very picture of government stimulating the economy by paying one group of people to dig holes, and another group to follow behind them, filling the holes back up again. But this is not the point of my post.)
The Department of Education's Office of Civil Rights fields several thousand sex discrimination complaints every year. Less than 10,000, but close--the DoE's OCR fielded a record 9,498 complaints last year. But that's not the headline.
Here's the headline:
You probably read that right.* More than 77% of all sex discrimination complaints filed with the OCR are filed by a single person, at a rate of about 20 complaints per day--and this same individual was responsible for a similar number and percentage of complaints in 2016, and possibly other years as well. Of this person, the office says:
* I reserve the right to rapidly backtrack my commentary if it turns out that this "single person" being reported in their system is named "Anonymous" or "No Name Given" or something equally stupid. I am proceeding on the assumption that Catherine Lhamon is neither that stupid, nor being deliberately misleading, and that she did in fact say the things she is quoted here as saying. But I'm including this caveat because I still find it hard to believe that what is being reported is even possible. Part of me still thinks there must be some mistake.
On one hand, like... I'm kind of impressed? There's someone who has decided to make their mark on the world, clearly. That's some tenacity. On the other hand, what the fuck? Surely in any sane world someone would tell this person, "you are abusing the process, and we are going to change the rules to rate-limit your nonsense."
That is... well, not the plan, apparently:
In FY 1981 the office was still dealing with the fallout of the American government forcibly engineering feminist aims into higher education. At a current budget of $140 million (an average of $250,000 per employee), with very nearly half of its complaints (across all topics, not just sex discrimination) coming from a single individual, what is that additional $38 million supposed to accomplish?
It seems like no matter how dim my view of the federal government gets, there's always some new piece of information out there waiting to assure me that I've yet to grasp the depth of the graft, ineptitude, and corruption of Washington, D.C. I am skeptical that Title IX has accomplished anything of value that would not have been independently accomplished by market forces and social trends. But even if that's wrong, and the early days of Title IX were an important government intervention, I cannot imagine how this particular situation could possibly exist within a sane regulatory framework.
Is this just bullshit jobs or is it just that you disagree with the thrust of the work being done? After all they aren't, in fact, just digging up and filling in holes, they are presumably collecting real data which is checked, setting up grievance procedures which can actually be used etc. and even if you think it's in pursuit of a pointless or harmful goal it is actual things being done and work produced. Indeed in one sense this is no different to say all of the legal/regulatory work a food company must do to ensures that all of its products comply with the regulations of all the relevant agencies, it just so happens that whereas in latter case the goal of the regulations is relatively uncontroversial in the former it isn't.
More the former than the latter, though I am less certain than you seem to be that these are meaningfully different things. I regard most administrative positions in higher education, as well as most federal regulatory positions, as bullshit jobs--specifically, "box tickers" and "taskmasters." When you say "actual things being done and work produced," you're assuming something for which I see no evidence. You can say "those administrators are not just filling holes" but that's very nearly all I ever see them doing--filling out paperwork no one ever likely read, just in case someone else files a lawsuit that will make no substantial difference to anyone except, maybe, a successful plaintiff in search of an easy payday. If it is your position that the litigiousness of American society, and its attendant bloated insurance market, is actually a good thing, then sure--we have a real, substantive value disagreement. But if that's not your position, then your argument here is ill-aimed.
(The "bullshit" part is also substantially demonstrated by 77% of the complaints being made by a single person. I have no idea who that person might be. Charitably: a top-notch attorney at an important law firm in Washington, D.C., who is capturing most of the "Title IX complaint" market, maybe? The right intake process could probably make this happen. I just have a hard time seeing it actually playing out this way; unless their "sometimes founded" complaints turn into outrageously large payouts on a pretty regular basis, it would be very difficult to fund such a venture. Part of the mystery of averaging 20 complaints a day is, who is funding that?)
I'm not settling on either side here, but this seems a little uncharitable. For one, in one sense even if no-one ever reads most of the stuff produced, and if (and I accept this may not be the case but nevertheless, if) lawsuits filed are on relatively substantive grounds rather than trivial procedural matters then the work is still important. Because, presumably, if a Title IX coordinator felt that a particular aspect of college administration did not comply the college would be anxious to make the appropriate changes, which if one agrees with the thrust of Title IX is a good thing.
This is a bit of a cumbersome explanation so here's a instance of a Title IX lawsuit that came up in a cursory google search. James Haidak was a student who recently sued his university for having a biased procedure when it expelled him following accusations by his ex-girlfriend, and on appeal he won on the grounds that he was never given a chance to defend himself in any kind of hearing etc., and now presumably it is the role of Title IX coordinators to ensure the their own universities have adequate procedures in this regard so they don't get hit by similar suits. So even if all their work now sits in a drawer forever they were actually doing something.
The key question of course is whether that many of the lawsuits they spend their time protecting against are substantial, or mostly trivial. Now this seems very hard to assess given that presumably the ones covered in the media are selected for the most interesting and meaningful ones, but a cursory search does throw up lots of cases that do seem at least somewhat worthwhile. Plenty of cases on the need for a fair shake to be given to accused students prior to expulsion, one about a kid who died from alcohol poising following an initiation (the parents demanding tighter restrictions on such) and yes lots of cases about women's athletics. Not, I appreciate, a life or death issue but a 'real' thing in the sense that Title IX cases etc. did actually increases access to college sport for women, which seems to indicate that more than box-ticking is being done, even if in some instances the work is over something that one could consider rather trivial in the grand scheme of things.
This is a great example, which very much supports my position over yours. Why the hell was Haidak kicked out in the first place? Because Title IX has been interpreted to require universities to referee adolescent relationships! Title IX created the problem (via campus administration), and Title IX "fixed" the problem (via the judiciary)--an exceptionally clear case of digging a hole, then filling it in.
No. The key question is whether the benefits of Title IX outweigh the costs.
In a hypothetical world where there was no such thing as Title IX, how do you think college sports would look today? Universities have undergone all sorts of changes in response to cultural revolutions and the realities of supply and demand. Did Title IX just make obligatory something that would have happened organically? Did it hasten an ongoing process? If so, then the regulatory cost was onerous and the fact that we're still paying it is stupid. Did Title IX instead fundamentally re-engineer a piece of American society, forcing a change to which Americans would have otherwise never consented? If so, then the price was even more onerous, paid in liberty instead of dollars. As far as I can tell, Title IX itself can only either have been unnecessary (in which case: it spawned mostly bullshit jobs), or necessary, in which case it is seriously objectionable on other grounds.
Worse: the requirement was codified by a now-rescinded Dear Colleague letter from the Obama administration requiring schools adopt these policies.
Doesn’t that just require schools to consider rape and other sexual violence, even if it happened off-campus? I think it’s fair to say a frat-house rape is potentially part of the school environment even if said house is not school property.
The problem arises when schools engage with more nebulous definitions of harassment and hostile environments. I’m not seeing where that comes from this letter.
(Though it does predate A Rape on Campus by several years. I wonder when it was rescinded?)
It was rescinded by Betsy DeVos in 2017.
IIRC the controversial "refereeing of adolescent relationships" portion was driven by a requirement to review sexual harassment and sexual assault allegations with a preponderance of evidence (civil) standard, which put school administrators in a position of having to establish parallel judicial systems because an act that didn't meet "beyond a reasonable doubt" in criminal court can absolutely meet a preponderance of evidence.
IMO punishing students with things like expulsion needs higher than a 51% standard of evidence.
That’s a good point. What you’re saying also matches the conversation I remember from my time in school. Preponderance of evidence definitely came up.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link