Conclusive proof that the thing doesn’t exist.
A lot of this is frequently about shifting and then elevating the burden of proof.
Unless you’ve seen a lot of discipline actions s from that school, it’s not evidence of anything. My suspicion is that 100% of the disciplinary actions taken by staff against that school that you’re aware of are for rude emails.
I’m thinking there are probably a few professors every year that get in toruble for getting too familiar with their students.
Sure, maybe. The conclusions people are drawing here are absurd.
What conclusions are absurd?
I don’t know how much college has changed in the last 30 years but snarky comments from professors was never something that resulted in censure. Are kids really this fragile nowaday?
The only way this email really touches on the subject is that it if there was a rule against snarky communication with students (no matter what the student said) then this might be a case of selective enforcement motivated by a desire to seem racially sensitive.
Yeah, that’s apparent from your posts. Which is one reason it strikes me as odd that you’re constantly dismissing and devaluing the comments from, AFAICT, the one person in this conversation who’s reporting personal workplace experience of ways in which college has changed in the last 30 years.
Of course, you aren’t in any way obligated to believe that I have the personal experience I say I have or that I’m an actual college professor or anything else I say. But if you’re not just assuming that I’m lying about all that, then you might as well pay some attention to the information that I’m giving you.
In my experience, it’s the opposite: we’re expected not to be pampering “fragile kids” but to be dealing respectfully with fellow adults (although much younger and more inexperienced ones). The “Mean Nun” or “Monty Python schoolmaster” model of the hoity-toity sarcastic professor jumping all over a student’s occasional unreasonable or dumb or thoughtless comments with snarky put-downs is considered out of date.
Admittedly, many faculty still love playing that traditional role of sarcastic snarky schoolmaster (see also my above comments about the time-honored academic game of “Quibble and Sneer at Student’s Unpersuasive Request for Special Grading Leniency”). And many spectators of academic controversy, especially conservative ones, still adore seeing faculty playing the traditional role of sarcastic snarky schoolmaster to “pwn” so-called “liberal snowflake” students. But as professionals in the field, we’re generally just expected not to be that asshole.
One of the benefits of age is that I’ve come to recognize when a conversation, however satisfying it might be for my interlocutor, will prove, let’s say, unproductive. If you’re asking that question for real, I think I’ll let you seek the answer elsewhere. If that means you’ve gotta claim a victory, I hope you find the victory fulfilling.
And considering that professor’s often fail at this. What do you think is the reason this particular professor was disciplined over all others?
Victory? Is that YOUR goal here? If not then why do you assume it is mine?
It is far more likely that things you consider absurd are no such thing.
Cool! That’ll be my last word on that subject.
What do you mean, “over all others”? Are you under the impression that other professors never get disciplined for inappropriate remarks to students, or that this particular disciplinary action was out of line with the university’s standard faculty oversight policies?
Generally speaking, anything you do as a professor that causes widespread pushback and public controversy concerning your institution will get you automatically suspended while the administration investigates. This can happen if you encourage students to repeat a racial slur in your class, even with a well-intentioned pedagogical purpose, or if you hyperbolically wish COVID death on Trump supporters, or if you ask a student to “anglicize” her Asian-language given name because it reminds you of a cussword in English, or if you decline to write a recommendation letter for a student to a study-abroad program in Israel because you’re boycotting Israel over the issue of Palestinian rights.
It’s a standard trope of conservative grievance politics that only academics who upset “woke” liberals ever get disciplined, but it is not aligned with reality. Generally speaking, as I said, any action that results in any kind of public, campus-wide or even department-wide controversy automatically triggers a disciplinary assessment. That doesn’t mean that the institution has already automatically condemned whatever it was that you did.
If people want to convince others of the plausibility of the “UCLA has a content-neutral, apolitical stance against professors sending rude e-mails” hypothesis, then all they need to do is link to one single story showing a time other than this in which UCLA disciplined a professor for sending a rude e-mail. The hypothesis that “UCLA couldn’t care less about rude e-mails in general and disciplined a professor for questioning the notion that the George Floyd incident should be used to justify a wide-ranging program of special treatment for grade-grubbing students at an elite school who have no actual connection to George Floyd” is easily falsifiable. Just show me one time when this policy about rude e-mails ever existed at UCLA before or after summer 2020. If it’s such a common and ordinary thing then you should be able to do it.
That’s an amazing standard of proof that completely ignores the right-wing outrage machine’s influence over news coverage in the last thirty years. Do you think that most disciplinary actions get news coverage? If not, why do you think this one did?
This, however, is trivially easy to do.
You and others have submitted the hypothesis that the student’s behavior meant that respect for the student was unwarranted. That would be a violation of the Faculty Code of Conduct.
It may be tempting for you to rationalize the prof’s behavior as respectful using a “IN TEH REAL WORLD” argument. I urge you to resist that temptation.
I disagree that “show me just one time this has ever happened” is an “amazing standard of proof” for the proposition that something happens routinely.
Given that nobody said it happens routinely, and given that you asked for news coverage of disciplinary events, your latest post bears no relevance to the thread.
This would be a good time for you to admit your mistake.
We both know that there is no policy and the tone of the e-mail isn’t what the professor was abortively disciplined for.
I’m humoring your denial of this thing that we both know by giving you an opportunity to show me not even that “UCLA professors being disciplined for the tone of e-mails” is something that routinely happens, but something that has ever happened, even once. That’s all I’m asking. I think I’ve gone well beyond any obligation to you by setting out an easily falsifiable proposition and clear conditions for debunking it, which is a great deal more than you’re doing.
You on the other hand have gone from the extremely wrong but understandably widespread bit of bumper-sticker philosophy “absence of evidence is not evidence of absence” to the wildly untenable notion that the total absence of evidence for the e-mail policy is somehow completely irrelevant to your repeated assertion that the e-mail policy actually exists.
I mean, I linked and quoted the fuckin policy, but you do you.
Wait, he is presenting a falsifiable premise. It is not difficult to falsify if his premise is false. Can you provide the evidence or not? If not, then why is there no evidence that could falsify his premise?
Can you show where this was ever enforced before summer 2020?
In the real world, an email like that would receive more than a little sarcasm.
So you can’t provide a minimal standard of proof and you want to declare victory? Sure, I guess you can do that.
A policy that has apparently only been enforced once in the history of UCLA. That’s not a policy. That’s a trap for the unwary.
If the language in the code of conduct about professors’ “respect for students” was ever interpreted or enforced as meaning that curt e-mails are a violation of the code of conduct, then you should be able to show me one example, ever of a professor being sanctioned for sending a curt e-mail under the code of conduct.
The fact that they could easily point to this language as the basis for such an action, and STILL no action has ever taken place, is only more evidence that no one at UCLA has ever considered curt e-mails to violate “respect for students” or be otherwise actionable.
And just to be clear, noone is applauding the professor (or at least I don’t think so), he could just as easily have sent back a “no” and that would have been that. The reaction to this email is meant to demonstrate (I think) the environment in which we live. This email drew censure that as far as we can tell, had never happened before. Why was that?
The suspicion here is that it was the professor’s inability to read the room that led to this. If this request had been made earlier in the blm movement (say after the aqcuital of zimmerman), would it have drawn censure? Or was the university reacting to the political climate?
Overall, I don’t think this is a good hill for anyone to die on.
But it is an answer to the question in the thread title. What is critical race theory? It is, among other things, an absolute insistence that nothing at all can be explained except as a conspiracy of white people to harm black people, or black people’s justified response to that conspiracy. This two-way racial conflict is the ultimate reason for all actions in politics, society, and individual life.
CRT says: It’s impossible that a black student could have engaged in the type of grade-grubbing that typifies students at elite schools such as UCLA - the only possible explanation that will be accepted for why the e-mail was sent is that he or she was genuinely feeling “trauma” over something that happened to a stranger 2000 miles away. No further evidence or analysis will be brooked over this claim because white vs. black conflict is the only possible reason that anything happens.
CRT says: It’s impossible that a university could act out of public relations motives and make a hasty decision to try to distance itself from a professor who didn’t read the political winds properly before replying to an e-mail; the university was defending the victimized black student from the evil white professor in accordance with a “policy” that we must accept exists even though it has never been used before or since. No further evidence or analysis will be brooked over this claim because white vs. black conflict is the only possible reason that anything happens.
The sort of obstinate insistence on denying reality for seemingly no stakes that we’re seeing here is a great answer to the question, “what is critical race theory?” In CRT, everything is always about race war, so not only are there no other explanations for human behavior, there is no such thing as an unimportant issue or a trivial concession to common sense.