Posted on 01/17/2020 4:39:39 PM PST by Mrs. Don-o
It all started in June 2018, when Quillette published my article, “Why Women Don’t Code,” and things picked up steam when Jordan Peterson shared a link to the article on his Twitter account. A burst of outrage and press coverage followed which I discussed in a follow-up piece. The original article was one of the ten most read pieces published by Quillette in 2018, and continues to generate interest. A recent YouTube video about it has been viewed over 120,000 times, as of this writing:
In his tweet promoting my article, Peterson took issue with one of my claims. I had written that I thought I could survive at the Paul G. Allen School of Computer Science and Engineering where I work. Peterson disagreed:
As it turns out, Peterson was right. My position is not tenured and when my current three-year appointment came up for review in December, I was stripped of my primary teaching duties and given a highly unusual one-year probationary appointment. The administration insists this decision had nothing to do with the controversy generated by my article. But as I will explain, that seems highly unlikely. As one faculty colleague put it, an “angry mob” has been after me ever since my article came out.
The Intro Classes
In 2005, the University of Washington hired me to redesign their two introductory computer science classes. I developed two highly successful courses that have over 4,500 enrollments combined per year and are among the most highly rated 100-level courses at the University of Washington. In a recent internal survey, over 80 percent of the students agreed that the assignments increased their interest in computing and showed them how useful such knowledge can be. Teaching at this scale is a massive undertaking and for the last 15 years I have been responsible for overall management of the staff, instructors, and TAs who provide this service.
In response to my Quillette article, a group of graduate students in the Allen School filed a grievance against me with their union. The university agreed to several of their demands, including that, “A group of (mostly senior) faculty will review the introductory programming courses to ensure that they are inclusive of students from all backgrounds.” A working group was formed and it produced a set of recommendations. These included:
The report also recommends that courses incorporate inclusiveness best practices as
Most of these suggestions seem to rely on the notion that undergraduates are delicate. While I agree that we must be careful to ensure that all students feel welcome and respected, we should be helping our students to become antifragile. So I will continue to use the BMI example, I will maintain high standards for grading, and I will continue to pursue cheating cases vigorously. I will continue to say “you guys” and to make occasional cultural references. In the case of pronouns, I have always made an effort to accommodate requests from transgender students, but I refuse to use words that are not part of the English language.
It is the prerogative of the faculty to change the intro classes if they so choose. I understand that inclusive teaching is popular now, so it makes sense that others would want to move them in that direction. Even though this review was precipitated by my Quillette article, it is not in itself evidence that I am being treated differently on account of my political beliefs.
My Probation
What I find difficult to accept is that I was reappointed for just one year. The Allen School often hires adjunct and temporary lecturers for only one year, but that isn’t how it routinely treats lecturers with a regular appointment. In the 15 years I have been part of the school, I am the first regular lecturer to be offered less than a three-year extension.
The administration claims that my one-year reappointment is part of a more general change in the management of the intro classes, but that doesn’t make sense. They are perfectly within their rights to take management of intro away from me and even to forbid me from teaching intro classes. So why are they threatening my job security as well? I am able to teach a wide range of classes. I have mostly been teaching in intro recently because there have not been enough teaching cycles available for me to teach other things, but I have taught five different courses outside of intro. For each of the last seven years, the Allen School has been unable to hire enough lecturers to meet our needs, despite undertaking a nationwide search.
The one-year reappointment is also odd given my faculty rank. I was the first lecturer in the College of Engineering at UW to be promoted to the rank of principal lecturer. The faculty code indicates that the normal period for reappointment for a principal lecturer should be at least three years. The administration had to obtain special permission from the provost to make such a short appointment. It is also perhaps worth noting that I am the only current member of the faculty in the Allen School who has won the Distinguished Teaching Award, which is the highest award given for teaching at UW.
A faculty colleague told me he believes I am being fired for my political beliefs. He said it became clear during the meeting at which my reappointment was discussed that quite a few people wanted me to be summarily dismissed. Others said it was unacceptable to fire me outright. In the vote that was taken, faculty were asked to choose one of three options: no reappointment, a one-year reappointment, or a three-year reappointment. So the one-year appointment was the middle ground that allowed faculty to punish me without taking the most drastic available step just yet. I have the impression I am expected to feel grateful.
The students weighed in on the decision as well. A poster was plastered throughout the undergraduate labs and the student union encouraging students to visit a web address if they wished to express concern about my possible reappointment (reposted here). Critical student testimonies were collected in a letter to the dean urging her not to reappoint me.
Heterodox Teaching is Off Topic
Nor have my teaching evaluations slipped in recent years. I am, however, spending more time thinking about how to encourage viewpoint diversity. I have joined Heterodox Academy and have met with local members of the group. I attended the 2019 Heterodox Academy Conference and the 2018 faculty conference for the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (FIRE). As part of the reappointment process, I was asked to describe what I’ve done and where I see myself going. I mentioned that I would like to expand my work on heterodox teaching.
The faculty members who reviewed my reappointment materials reported that they were “surprised” that I would mention my work in this area. They said that I have a right as a citizen to do this, but they also pointed out that the Allen School leadership had felt the need to respond publicly to my Quillette article (presumably a negative). They announced that my work in this area was not related to my professional responsibilities and should therefore be considered “off topic” and irrelevant to a review of my work performance and my consideration for reappointment.
This was particularly disappointing because I am doing some of my best teaching in this area. In the fall of 2018 I assigned Haidt and Lukianoff’s The Coddling of the American Mind as part of a seminar for honors students. I received my highest scores ever for this seminar (an average of 5.0 on a 5-point scale). Here are two representative comments from the student evaluations:
We were asked to share our personal opinions and the reasoning behind them, without any fear of being shamed or irrationally responded to. This allowed for meaningful discussions to develop, and a level of vulnerability in answering questions and discussing various topics that I have experienced nowhere else in the university setting.
This class really made me think about the way we have learned to perceive the world, especially in regards to tolerance [of] conflicting viewpoints. It made me realize that although we sometimes advocate for diverse opinions, we often shut down a certain group of opinions, which is hypocritical and very dangerous. I think that in order to learn and grow, we have to hear viewpoints that we disagree with, which is unfortunately not something that happens often enough in our society."
I spent New Year’s Eve of my senior year of high school in a hospital because I almost succeeded in taking my own life with a bottle of rat poison. I was a young gay person who couldn’t face telling people I was a member of that hated group known as “homosexuals.” Although it was a dark period, that experience provided me with a source of strength later in life. If I was so unacceptable that I thought it was better to be dead than alive, then what was to be lost by telling people what I really think? By the time I got to Stanford as a graduate student in 1979, I was openly gay. Not many people were at the time. When I started teaching at the university, I found that many gay people wanted to talk to me but almost always in private. They would tell me that they couldn’t afford to be as open as I was.
But even I felt the pressure to conform. In 1982, I applied for my dream job. The Stanford Computer Science Department was hiring someone to manage the intro courses. I was doing the job on a temporary basis, but they were looking to appoint a permanent staff member. Unfortunately, their search concluded just after the Stanford Daily published a full-page article I had written entitled, “On Being Gay: Feelings and Perceptions.” The chair of the department told me that they wanted to offer me the job, but that they had been embarrassed by my article. They wanted me to promise never to publish such an article again. I had an opportunity to be brave and refuse his request, but I didn’t. I said that I couldn’t make that promise but that I didn’t feel the need to publish any more articles any time soon. That was enough to get me hired. And I didn’t write any articles for the next three years until we got a new chair who told me I could publish whatever I wanted.
Over the course of my life, it has been astonishing to watch anti-gay sentiment reverse. Today, the people on campus who need to worry about expressing their ideas are conservatives and religious people. Now it is gays doing the punishing of anyone who opposes gay marriage, gay adoption, hate speech codes, and civil rights protection for gays. Everything old is new again. I’m once again having private conversations behind closed doors in my office with closeted individuals, but this time they are students, faculty, staff, and alumni who oppose the equity agenda. They are deeply concerned about the university’s direction, but they are also afraid of jeopardizing their current or future job prospects. They also worry about losing friendships and professional relationships. One faculty colleague described it as “mob rule.”
Stanley Fish describes this situation well in his recent book The First:
These students, often a minority, but a minority with a loud voice, tend to be wholly persuaded of the rightness of their views; they don’t see why they should be forced to listen to, or even be in the presence of, views they know to be false. They wish to institute what I would call a “virtue regime,” where people who say the right kind of thing get to speak or teach and those who are on the wrong side of history (as they see it) don’t.
As a result, I can’t bring myself to look down on the closeted individuals who offer me support behind closed doors. The threat is real, just as it was when I compromised my principles to get a job nearly 40 years ago.
I am concerned that people believe free speech is improving on college campuses when in fact things are getting worse. We have fewer overt examples of speakers being shouted down and disinvited, but now the censorship is going underground. Those who talk to me behind closed doors censor themselves because they know the consequences of speaking up. As the economist Timur Kuran has explained, this preference falsification is extremely dangerous because it prevents us from having the meaningful conversations necessary to find practical solutions to problems.
So I understand why many people will choose to stay silent. I did it myself aged 23 when I stopped writing articles about being gay so that I could be hired into my dream job. But I’m older now and although I don’t have what people call “fuck you money,” I have enough saved that I can afford to speak my mind. For the rest of you, remember Jordan Peterson’s admonition: “Watch what you say. Or else.”
Stuart Reges is a Principal Lecturer at the Paul G. Allen School of Computer Science & Engineering at the University of Washington. You can find out more about him at stuartreges.com and he can be contacted at sreges@gmail.com.
This one has a wonderful twist at the end. Read it all, but if you don't have time, read the first half and then the last section starting at "The New Closet".
A courageous educator fighting back against rampant, viciously punitive intellectual Maoism on campus.
Duplicate of http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-bloggers/3807934/posts .
Rosie O’Donnell?
Why aren’t women fighting to become Sanitation Engineers?
“few women are coal miners.” This is a racist, sexist, homophobic remark. In the name of tolerance you should be fired from your job and possibly put in a reeducation came. That is if you are lucky,
The PC culture that lowers standards for the sake of “diversity” is what caused Boeing’s 737 MAX engineering catastrophe.
The only reason the guy wasn’t out on his ear immediately was because he is slightly higher on the intersectionality scale. What GWMs are now finding out is that GWM is now getting pushed down to SWM levels of acceptance. I.E. It is no longer offering any status.
Yes, I think you’re right. GWM, SWM, SWW, and GWW (Lesbians), even, are so mainstream they get no traction anymore as victims-— as far as Woke Culture is concerned. It’s that Whiteness, I guess. If you’re White, you just can’t be right.
That subhead ("The New Closet") introduces the paragraph that starts, "I spent New Year's Eave of my senior year of High School in a hospital..."
I know a guy like this.
Yes, thanks pointing that out. I will note, however, that I included way more info in my excerpt about what this courageous man was actually doing in openly confronting his tormentors. And of course a lot of readers never follow the link.
Very good article, and if you go far down into the first-page comments, there is a very good one by “DCL” who has been an adjunct instructor at an Ivy League school and adds additional insights. Thanks for posting.
True. But here are the post times:
Yours: 7:48:07
This: 7:39:39
This one beat yours by nine minutes. Search still works.
Would a good lawyer and a new school help him, or is he just stuck there until he conforms or gets fired?
It must be awful, being ruled by self serving, sanctioned nonsense at every turn.
You’re right.
They expect you to give up your rationl mind. “It’s price we’re willing to pay!”
What???
So in an Intro to Computing course, the syllabus should point out that Indians used to live here?
That we stole their land?
That Columbus didn't discover anything, because Indians were already here?
DCL
I’m very sorry the author is going through this. That said, I have two observations:
(1) I’m so tired of “heterodox” professors blaming students for this neo-Maoism. The students are pawns, and they are a very small minority of actual students, despite the impression via screaming deranged students or students who Tweet. They only have power because of a) a few far-more-deranged professors and b) venal administrators and leadership.
If the leadership didn’t roll over or - more commonly - send strong signals of support, or lend outright support for these extremest, nasty students who get joy out of others’ misery and joy out of deranged revenge, the students would have no power.
That is, the students’ power is entirely dependent on powerful adults. They have no power on their own. Without the administration supporting them or professors inculcating them with the ‘correct’ viewpoints, and without the Pravda-like media bolstering them, they would fade away.
My own children have all gone to ‘elite’ colleges, and I’ve taught in one (adjunct, nothing fancy I should add!)–on the ground, the view is quite different. There is a sizable portion of students who actively disagree with the insanity but who can’t say anything for fear of either getting a low grade from deranged professors or for fear of having an unhinged fellow student ‘report’ them.
Then there is the largest portion who are bystanders, not having any strong view but simply wanting to party, get an education, get a girl/boyfriend, and so on. Then there is the very small group of students, I’d say no more than 10%, who actively participate.
The views come from the top–The classroom or the President her/himself. In one of the schools my kids have gone to, the President regularly sent out messages to parents/students/faculty about sanctuary cities, migrant rights, equity, etc. (The President lives in a mansion supplied by the college, with ten foot high walls, but I digress.)
There are multiple examples of professors going to protests, encouraging students. In my own kids’ cases, dozens of classes you would never think have anything to do with the New Left Ideology, are indoctrination classes.
Just to give one example among many, one of my kids was told in his foreign language class - he is ostensibly learning the language - that he was “not allowed” to use the phrase “illegal immigrants” on any essay, since “no person is illegal.” Every week they talked in the foreign language about the ‘resistance’ and so on. The oral test was about Greta Thunberg (not joking) and it was obvious what you were expected to say. In the foreign language of course.
The other day a Yale psychiatry professor Bandy Lee diagnosed half the country as shared psychotics because they were Trump supporters. She is so certain of her deranged beliefs she is willing to Tweet this publicly. My point is that one of her Tweets stated confidently that there were very few Trump supporter students at Yale anymore, ‘thankfully.’ How did she know? Is she a mind reader? Are the students required to register with her? She simply imagines that since she is superior in intelligence and Yale students are too (in her mind) they therefore must not be Trump supporters. She knows because she knows. And this is a professor at Yale.
At any event, this is the sort of person who is allowing the insanity, not the students.
(2) I’m sorry, but to be surprised this is going on is naive. This has been building forever. Back in the 1980s when I was considering whether to get my PhD in English, I decided against it precisely because I saw a bunch of bitter, nasty people writing about things literally no one would read, following each others’ views like lemmings, stabbing each other in the back just to scrabble to a slightly higher position in the petty hierarchy of sub-specialties. I saw brilliant people ditch their potential and instead spend literally their entire lives on, say, two female poets in the early 1800s. Such warping of intelligence, such groupthink and subjectivity in advancement is going to produce a cadre of warped people. It is self-selecting.
There is no place anymore in academia for vision and greatness. As Einstein said, “Great spirits have always encountered opposition from mediocre minds. The mediocre mind is incapable of understanding the man who refuses to bow blindly to conventional prejudices and chooses instead to express his opinions courageously and honestly.”
Universities have become rigid gatekeepers to the most suffocating mediocrity. Those who aren’t mediocre are punished.
“True. But here are the post times:
Yours: 7:48:07
This: 7:39:39”
That is deeply elitist and timeist of you. I’m going to report you to Reddit. :)
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