When I came across this Vox article from “Edward Schlosser” this morning, I was all primed to agree.
A friend whose politics I trust recommendeded it. It appears on a site that generally I generally enjoy. And if you know anything about me at all, you know my disdain for the American education system, so a post about how the system is broken certainly fits into the weltenschauung, if you will, of own personal agenda.
As I read, though, I began to realize this wasn’t at all about education. It’s not about fear. Instead, this is just another white male worried that his iron grip on the world is loosening because of women and minorities.
There is not a single part of this piece of writing that doesn’t simply drip with the bullshit of half baked argument and overreaction. From the photo at the top of a white male with his mouth taped shut — you know, the primordial white male as victim — to the premise that white males are under attack to the anonymous author who leaves us unable to verify his claims, let’s just say, I have issues.
Schlosser begins with the classic straw man argument. He seems to believe that professors cannot express opinions that potentially make students uncomfortable without the threat of dismissal. He cites an example from 2009 of a student who accused Schlosser of representing only one side of the story, the liberal side. A student in one of his classes, you see, blamed the housing collapse on all those black people who want houses. Schlosser tells him it’s not that simple. End of discussion until the director calls Schlosser to her office to manage a complaint of being too liberal.
The real agenda
This argument seems legit until you realize that it’s not actually clear that the same student filed the complaint.
Oh, and by the way, here’s a handy dandy little booklet that will help you hash your way through the thicket of straw men, logical fallacies and all the other things wrong with this. Besides, you know, cute badger eyes.
It’s additionally troubling that a student’s concerns would be summarily dismissed in such a fashion.
“Then … nothing. It disappeared forever; no one cared about it beyond their contractual duties to document student concerns.”
Teacher and director roll their eyes. There’s even a little dig in there about said students use of “communistical.” Before you look it up like I did, no, it’s not a word. Not really.
Professor Schlosser spends the next few paragraphs discussing how fearful he is of expressing his opinions or including any text that could potentially cause disagreement. Edward Said. Upton Sinclair. Mark Twain. Maureen Tkacik. Entirely divergent thinkers and writers whose opinions vary so greatly we are left to guess why they would be removed from syllabi. Nonetheless, all are casualties of student over-sensitivity. You can’t mention anything that might be a point of discord. Except, once again, we must take anonymous Schlosser on his word.
“I am frightened sometimes by the thought that a student would complain again like he did in 2009. Only this time it would be a student accusing me not of saying something too ideologically extreme — be it communism or racism or whatever — but of not being sensitive enough toward his feelings, of some simple act of indelicacy that’s considered tantamount to physical assault,” he says.
But wait? What? Isn’t this really about Schlosser’s feelings? He has to be careful not to bring up arguments that might offend students, and by the way he presents it, no student could possibly have a valid reason to be offended by subjects brought up in class. He feels under attack, unheard, like he has to curtail his beliefs and opinions in order to fit the needs of another group of people. And let’s be honest, he hasn’t made much of a case to warrant the truth of his claims.
Add to that, the 2009 complaint said nothing of feelings. It said Professor Schlosser “refused to tell more than one side of the story.” There’s still no way to know if the student’s complaint is valid, but it’s a far cry from accusing him of emotional insensitivity. Still, Schlosser seems to believe this is good enough reason to assert that while that complaint was easily dismissed in 2009, now, in 2015, it would be cause for dismissal.
There are no examples of this happening. There are no cause-and-effect class discussions that show student feelings lead to punishing professors by job loss or any other censure. We only have an anonymous professor’s word and a few tweets from other people in unrelated circumstances.
This is not to say I entirely disagree.
At least, I don’t disagree with the original educational premise. I have seen first-hand how students influence hiring of professors. The last time I taught university, back in 2004, I saw how educational institutions curtailed their syllabi, usually in the form of work load, in order to quell student complaints. In fact, after the first day of the first university class I ever taught, my students went to the dean on my department to report me for assigning too many books to read
How did the dean handle it? She called me in, and without asking a single question, she told me she agreed with the students.
I have enough friends who still work in academics to know how tenuous the field is now. Educators’ experience takes a back seat to the business of running a university, and when the students — customers — fail or complain, the administration too often blames professors. Yes, I will wholeheartedly agree that universities feel pressure from students (and let’s be honest, their parents whose money pays university payrolls).
But Professor Anonymous’ article was never about that anyway. This is merely a jumping off point for his real agenda. As he shifts into a haze of identity politics that touches on many different points without actually completing a cogent argument, I began to realize that this isn’t about classroom politics at all. Really, the point of this entire article is to show that liberals, specifically, feminists and anti-racists, want to shut down free speech by silencing white males. “Focusing on identity allows us to interrogate the process through which white males have their opinions taken at face value, while women, people of color, and non-normatively gendered people struggle to have their voices heard.”
Because, you know, science!
His examples of how this happens are as weak as his proof for the breakdown of the classroom.
“Critic and artist Zahira Kelly… implies that the whole of scientific inquiry is somehow invalid because it has been conducted mostly by white males.” Then he links to this tweet.
most “scientific thought” as u know it isnt that scientific but shaped by white patriarchal bias of ppl who claimed authority on it.
— el cuco (@bad_dominicana) November 15, 2014
Ok, at this point, my head is about to explode, because it’s becoming difficult to parse all the ways this makes no sense. First, I thought we were talking about identity politics in liberal arts. Zahira Kelly is talking about science and evolutionary biology. Second, it’s a tweet. You cannot infer a person’s entire politics by one tweet. Third, he interprets her meaning via what he assumes she implies. We don’t actually know what she thinks on the topic.
I’d like to add that the original article was amended when Zahira Kelly herself noted that her quotes were taken out of context.
Going back to the idea that you shouldn’t dismiss an entire line of thinking simply because it originates in bias: we do this all the time. The Greeks and Romans once believed the sunrise occurred when their god rode a chariot across the sky. Then, that was science. Now it’s just myth. We laugh to each other and think we know better.
Today in hard science, if we find we’ve omitted a variable or that one of the calculations on which a premise is founded turns out to be incorrect, yes, we very much throw out the entire thing and start over. I mean, would you want to work in a skyscraper that was based on a flawed premise?
But we’re not talking about the hard sciences here anyway. We’re talking about social sciences. We’re talking about politics, identity and sociology where the waters are even muddier. Let me be clear, no one said we should entirely dismiss all of the books and thinking of the entire liberal arts field. It is, perhaps, not a bad idea to recognize that the white males whose voices have dominated the field for centuries do not tell the whole story. We need to make room for the feminists and anti-racists, too.
Jonathan Chait, again!
To further illustrate his point, The Anonymous Schlosser enjoins us to follow him to Jonathan Chait and his January 2015 piece from The New Yorker. Good lord. This is when he reveals his real argument. To avoid reinventing the wheel, I’ll point you to Anne Theriault’s take down of the piece from last year – it did a fantastic job, and I need not repeat.
My main issue with Chait’s piece is his mention of the Binders Full of Women Writers group in which he took screenshots of Facebook conversations that were never intended for public consumption, then presented them out of context to fit his argument. He focused on the back biting and discord. He even specifically quoted women whom I Facebook-know and reframed them in such a way that the actual point of those discussions completely disappeared under the weight of his white male authority. He presented the Binders as an angry group of women who were so intent on shutting down the white straight patriarchy that they lost all sight of reason, logic or nuance.
There are two problems with this. Those discussions were taken wholly out of context. Want to know what they’re about? They’re not dissimilar to what I said above. Feminism is problematic if it isn’t intersectional. If the feminist conversation only relates to straight white women and doesn’t in any way make room for the wide experience of women across the world, then it has failed. Oh, and you can’t ask white women if their feminism is fair while ignoring the complaints of women of color and queer women who continue to say, “Hey, that’s not quite right. You’re not really listening.” If feminism only includes the views of white women, it is as faulty as Ancient Greek science.
For further reading, check out A Short History of Nearly Everything by Billy Bryson, which quickly shows you that even hard science is horribly flawed, is deeply effected by politics and often falls to the vagaries of fashion.
Chait’s misrepresentation of the initial (and need I repeat private) discussion of intersectional feminism leads me to entirely dismiss his entire point of view as misguided and based wholly on an agenda that is not logical or rational. It’s a false argument; fruit of a poison pen, if you will. Add that to additional proof of his argument from further anonymous sources, and I lose faith in the rest of his argument.
No one at any point has said we should entirely dismiss every method of inquiry simply because it originated with white males. It is important to keep in mind, though, that when one group dominates a discussion, it is likely that that groups biases will infect their conclusions. For more on that, read Stephen Jay Gould’s The Mismeasure of Man.
This book, by the way, should be required reading for any undergrad. Gould combs through centuries of experiments and scientific and social thinking to show the myriad of ways that bias creates false conclusions about race, class and gender.
Of course, Schlosser might not agree because he has reductively labeled anyone who isn’t a white male (or anyone who disagrees with his white male perspective) as either a feminist or anti-racist. There are countless thinkers who are either women or not-white whose writing and thinking fall outside the narrow realm of people who are against liberal white men and seek to shut them up and down.
Of course, if Schlosser treats women and people of color the way he does his students, he’s unlikely to take anything we say that deviates from his ideology very seriously.
Professor Anonymous extends this very argument to say how this kind of false reliance on emotions leads to harassment victims being able to leverage complaints against perpetrators without any proof. What world does this guy live in, where the victims of harassment and other forms of abuse are believed wholly at the expense of the perpetrator? According to RAINN, 98% of rapes go unreported and 71 percent of women never report harassment.
While the one case Professor Anonymous cites points to women who believe that the aggressor should be called out and the accusers believed without proof, real life does not bear that out. In truth, victims of sexual harassment and assault should be believed. Women need a safe space in which they can talk about and report their experiences without further victimization. The legal system does not allow for this, and clearly public sentiment, led by white males, shuts women down. Of course, it makes sense that women will create a forum where women will be believed without question, but simply giving women a voice will not suddenly create a slew of false accusations against men who will then erroneously end up in jail. Our system simply doesn’t work that way.
And finally, going back to Edward Schlosser. I simply cannot get past the fact that he has published this thing anonymously. There is no way to verify or to see what else he’s said and done. How can we possibly trust a debate on identity politics with a person who won’t share his idenity? We must simply take him on his word. And of course, he has it covered that he can’t share his identity, ahem, because he’s frightened it might cost him his job even though there’s really been nothing in this piece to show that his fear is realistic. A job, I might add, for which he was likely more easily hired and paid more highly, because he is male.
