The Evergreen College Episode

[Pentagathus]

Yo yo yo.
So this is fairly old news, and I'm sure many of you have heard about it before. I've heard about it before, but I'd never heard this much of the detail. It is apparently a lot worse than I'd imagined.
I'll post a link to the article with Bret and Heathers side of the full story, but for those of you who haven't heard I'll briefly explain. If you are already familiar or you intend to read the article anyway then I'd recommend that you skip this wall of text.
Here's the article https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/bonfire-of-the-academies-two-professors-on-how-leftist-intolerance-is-killing-higher-education
 Bret Weinstein was a professor of evolutionary biology at evergreen state college, and despite being a very liberal left wing person he got into some trouble with evergreens New diversity and equity panel (full article explains this much better than me). This ended up hitting the news after Bret refused to take part in a day of absence, which traditionally had involved black students and staff voluntarily excluding themselves for a day to make a point about what it would be like if they weren't there. However on this year the group of students who organised the day of exclusion decided that white people should exclude themselves, and Bret (who is white if you hadn't guessed) felt that this was wrong so he emailed the organisers to let them know it and he did not comply with their demand that he exclude himself. Obviously he was accused of racism over this, but quite surprisingly he was also confronted with a mob of students who shouted at him, intimidated him and his students and demanded his resignation. This was recorded by members of the mob and uploaded onto YouTube, where it gained infamy as a display of disgusting behaviour by SJWs/crazy lefties/whatever. Anyway, instead of these students actually being reprimanded in any way they had their demands acquiesced to and were encouraged to continue by the staff members who had been teaching them to "protest" in this manner to start with. Things actually escalated, with Bret and his students being physically threatened and somehow the college administration even allowed students to patrol the campus with portugaling baseball bats. Anyhow, it ended up with Bret and Heather (his wife who is also an evolutionary biologist and who also taught at evergreen) having to resign as they were refused to take a sabbatical. They opened a law suit and eventually settled for half a million, but they are out of employment, currently out of careers that they love and their former students have lost phenomenal teachers. Plus the college administration has afaik not admitted to any wrongdoing, not attempted to reign in these "protesters" (on the contrary these students are still being indoctrinated into these armadilloty viewpoints) and of course the college is still being supported by US taxpayers.


Anyway, the reason I wanted to open this thread is that (according to Bret and Heather) this whole debacle was actually encouraged and potentially engineered by the college administration and faculty members, which begs the question of what should be done to prevent university administrators from acting this way. Should there be more legal responsibility placed upon them? Is there enough already, or even too much?
Personally my feeling is that academic freedom should be paramount (or as close to as reasonably possible), and I'd generally be very wary of the state dictating how individual universities should behave. However it doesn't seem to me that university administrators are primarily interested in academic freedom, and I don't see how to encourage them to prioritise it without state intervention.
I know that Jonathon Haidt has been promoting a new ranking of universities according to their diversity of political/philosophical opinion among teaching staff (heterodoxacademy if you're interested) but I'm not sure how accurate such rankings would be, or how effective when it comes to actually convincing prospective students to enrol into highly ranked universities.
My own feeling of UK universities is that administrators are generally more interested in maximising revenue (which currently would mean cramming in as many undergraduates into courses as possible without increasing the resources required to actually teach those courses properly) and increasing their own salaries than increasing the quality of their institutions, but that is not something I have much evidence for.


Also I'm sure we've had threads on university political leanings before but I did a very lazy search and I also think it goes beyond that. And Bret Weinstein and Heather Heying are pretty damn awesome.

[Jubal]

So, basically, my view is that the bad stuff at Evergreen sounds like a problem of harassment that should've been dealt with under harassment laws.

I think the "leftist intolerance is killing HE" title is generally bollocks, though. My sector has a lot of problems that are killing humanities in particular, and leftist agitators don't even make the top ten. As a humanities academic who'll be on the front line of teaching topics that involve race, ethnicity and culture, I'd be much, much more afraid of the state heavy-handedly trying to impose "viewpoint balance" on the sector in any way as a result of isolated cases like Evergreen. I'm very sceptical that you can actually rank things like political diversity, too. I mean, if a university hired me (a social liberal), for example, am I *more* different to a classical liberal like Jordan Peterson, or a Marxist? Do I get treated as being similar to, to take another academic in my sector, Cambridge Uni's Peter Sarris, who like me is broadly left-wing but unlike me is pro-Brexit and vehemently hates anyone who's not in the Labour party? Heterodox Academy uses very simplistic left/right scaling in its initial public "what's the problem" materials which I don't think is a workable starting point at all for looking at ideology (like, they us a "left/centre/right" graph which would presumably lump me in the same graph line as bloody tankies which is nonsensical). It's just far too simplistic to capture what's going on, and academic freedom is an area where simplistic is pretty dangerous.

There is definitely a problem with Uni administration becoming disconnected from faculty and indeed often from the bulk of current students as well, as a result of the marketisation of HE. Certainly anecdotally in the UK and US I think your judgement on Uni administrators is correct, revenue maximisation is taking priority and research is suffering as a result. I think there are good solutions to this that could be implemented, essentially by moving towards more cooperative, public-interest functions for universities, putting faculty in democratic control of more decision-making and forcing more regular sanctioning of what management do by faculty and staff. That would IMO do rather a lot more for academic freedom - the things academics I know worry about are more the pressure from governments and higher-ups who control funding than pressure from militant students, which is really very rare - there have been a few extremely well publicised cases but I think that of the problems facing HE it's a lot more minor than the issues around marketisation, extremely low pay and high hours for junior faculty, building public engagement in C21st formats, etc.

[Pentagathus]

Yeah I'm not really sure why the actual real police weren't called in to evergreen, I'm under the impression that a lot of US colleges have something like their own legal jurisdiction, which really just seems odd.

As to claims that the far left are destroying academia, I've heard loads of academics in the US and Canada make these kind of claims based on anecdotes, but as they say "the plural of anecdote is not empirical data", and so far I've seen no empirical data to back them up. Actually the idea that students are being brainwashed by leftists is actually contradicted by surveys which show that students don't seem to change their political beliefs much at university.
I don't think I did a very good job of introducing heterodox academy (tbf I haven't read into it very much), as far as I can tell the way they have ranked universities is actually based on whether the universities have implemented policies aimed to promote free speech or policies aimed to limit what should be debated etc rather than being based on the politcal leanings of teaching staff. Obviously it's still an arbitrary ranking system but it seems reasonable on first glance at least.

Your last paragraph was really the area I wanted to discuss as I'm fairly confident that there is a genuine problem here. Would the kind of changes you suggest require legislation, and how would you go about implementing them?

[Jubal]

Yeah - I suspect that rankings on free speech policies have their own issues, though. Spiked magazine did some for the UK a while back which just ended up with really weird criteria, like a student union shop deciding not to stock particular newspapers would lead to the Uni being marked down which just seems silly IMO.

As to how to change university governance - I think some changes would require at least government incentives (possibly a funding incentive to change to a faculty-led model), I don't know if they'd need legislation per se, different universities are constituted differently and this would in large part be a change in those government arrangements. Take the Uni of Bristol, for example, whose trustees' governing board of 20 people only has 3 guaranteed spots on it for current faculty, and fifteen which are elected by University Court, a separate body of 650 members that includes Emeritus Professors (reasonable), people appointed by the University Chancellor (uh, bit circular), local MPs (not sure what they have to do with it), and members of the Society of Merchant Venturers (wat). I feel like in a reasonable world, having a body of 20 should mean at least 10-12 current faculty, 3-4 students, a couple of external members to ensure scrutiny, and the leadership team.

That's one part of it, at least - the other part would be to reduce the incentives towards running universities like competitive corporations, which is a more difficult area I think. Certainly the tendency has been to wrap working academics in paperwork which is then used a lot in competitive rankings to an extent that I think is unhelpful: how do you judge the "impact" of a paper on abstract mathematics versus one on building computer models of 12th century Georgia? The latter paper will likely have far fewer citations because the field is smaller, but might have more of a lasting legacy in its field because the field is smaller. And there are problems with things like "student satisfaction ratings", too - on the one hand, there's a heavy tendency towards grade inflation at universities, leading some universities to have to invent things above a first because other unis are now giving like half their students first-class degrees, and this is largely because academics feel like they're being judged on teaching outcomes which is clearly a stupid system. On the other hand, there still seem to be large & genuine problems with things like student mental health provision, but I think a better solution for that is to give students some more direct elected voice in university governance so they can make those cases (and maybe that would actually provide a more useful avenue for solving such problems than the often rather petty world of student union politics).