One of the authors makes a living from taxpayer-funded endeavors (NIH, FDA). I imagine that if, eventually, he does enough to piss off people who pay him (say, Black taxpayers) to lose his funding, he'd whine about being cancelled so loudly, we won't need SETI.
"Not on my dime!” goes both ways, huh.
The other author is ungooglable, so they either work for the gov, or don't have to work at all.
Poking aside, the questions to ask are:
* Who are the people these two chaps see as being hurt by MIT's so-called "wokeness"? I.e., whom are they trying to help with their withdrawal of funds?
* Who are the people MIT sees as behind hurt by the people they stopped working with? I.e. whom is MIT trying to help with their options?
* Whom do the actions of MIT / people "canceled" by MIT actually hurt? What's the impact?
The answer to these questions is left as an exercise to the reader, and will tell everything about the situation at hand.
While I agree with the authors opinion, I actually agree with you too, and quite like how succinctly you pointed out their hypocrisy. I personally didn't see it immediately.
Regardless, allow me to answer your question to perhaps give you a different perspective on the matter.
>Who are the people these two chaps see as being hurt by MIT's so-called "wokeness"? I.e., whom are they trying to help with their withdrawal of funds?
They probably see minorities from the Asian community who are hurt terribly from what I can only describe as incredibly racist policies wielded against them by the university. Also, members from poor white communities who also suffer because of these policies.
Furthermore, I think most people would agree the great things Western civilization has achieved over the centuries mostly comes from our respect for free speech and free thought, and the universities have traditionally been the institutions that took the lead roll in this. What will happen when the universities stop being the leaders of free thought? What institutions will take their place? It is not so far fetched to say that everyone on the planet could suffer from this
>Who are the people MIT sees as behind hurt by the people they stopped working with? I.e. whom is MIT trying to help with their options?
I honestly don't know. They clearly aren't trying to help people from disadvantaged communities, because they actively refuse to take into account objective measures such as family income when choosing applicants. I made another comment about this which I will just link to to save space: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29135126.
Given that in the USA, Asians, Indians, and Nigerians all have a higher average family income that white people, it is clear that ones skin color has nothing to do with ones advantages: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_ethnic_groups_in_the_U.... What is clear is that ones background determines ones advantages. MIT is clearly making no effort to address these disadvantages, so what are they trying to do? My comment I linked to makes my opinion on that clear.
Thanks! The hypocrisy is what stands out to me; other than that — I'm not donating any money to MIT either.
The real issue here is where the educational institutions get their money from, and how they spend the money they get.
Undergraduate admission systems are so deeply flawed that changing admission criteria does nothing, I feel: there's always a way to fine-tune them to get or exclude any demographic. I feel like the first step to addressing the disparity is making higher education free to begin with.
I'm on board with the idea of taking background into account, I'm just too pessimistic about the universities not twisting anything we come up with.
I agree with what you are saying (though the conclusion that "skin color has nothing to do with advantages" is flawed; you should look at where white people with background comparable to those of Nigerian immigrants end up). It's a data science question, and "skin color" has a nonzero weight.
Rephrase it as "skin color alone doesn't determine advantages or disadvantages, and comes after socioeconomic status" — and I don't think you'll find much disagreement; the idea that poor black people and poor white people have much more in common than the poor and the rich is the reason why the rich have been fueling racial tensions hundreds of years ago (divide and conquer). But the consequences of such divisions last a while.
But it doesn't seem like that is really what the authors of the original post care about anyway.
Say, firing of the chaplain who felt the need to issue a piblic comment on a tragedy that made the entire institution look stupid.
If I start talking about how deeply the entire education system is flawed — including the admission criteria — I'll be here for a very, very long time. I got a PhD in math, left academia for a software job, and am currently trying to figure out how to teach without being a cog in the education complex. My partner left after getting on the tenure track.
The amount of structural problems in our education is so immense, that "wokeness" (the way they think it's a problem) in general — and whatever is going on at MIT in particular — is so, so insignificant in comparison that I don't even know where to start.
And the virtue signaling and hubris of the two nincompoops that feel they're influencing the system by withholding their donations (tsk tsk, they never say how big they were anywau) is as astounding as the noise they make is insignificant.
If we want to have some straight talk, we need to start with federal funding of K12 education (having it tied to local/property taxes is oprressive by design).
We need to have national standards (please support common core — it's the only thing happening that doesn't make me want to pull my hair off).
We need not just free higher education, we need stipends to support the students while they are studying (hard to study when you have nowhere to live and nothing to eat).
Then, after all of that, we can start looking into admission criteria.
Elite private colleges are pretty open about not having fair admission: your parents went there — you're favored; that's a criterion they consider without shame.
Such institutions may not receive any taxpayer money.
But our state-funded schools have completely opaque admission criteria too, and funding subject to the whims of boards that have nothing to do with education. Case in point: the university my partner taught in thought of shutting down their physics department, citing too few majors produced as the reason, even though the department brought more in tuition and research grants than was ever spent on it.
The real reason was that the board who appointed the decision makers in a red rural state didn't like eggheads who don't vote for them.
It was a huge scandal, but the staff was powerless.
The rabbit holes of who is actually in control of how, what, and whom we teach go so deep, that thinking that any single issue is going to doom (or un-doom) or education is naïve at best.
Which is why I'm so pissed with these two fools.
As someone who's spent years actually teaching, I find the audacity of them saying "goodbye" to anything — and people, for some reason, caring about it! — both sad and amusing.
>What will happen when the universities stop being the leaders of free thought?
The late 1980s.
It's kind of hard to truly destroy a system where at the bottom level, people actually care about free thought, and are willing to work for slave wages (i.e. adjunct salaries) to keep it going, but boy have we succeeded a lot in turning universities into glorified trade schools.
>most will agree the great things Western civilization has achieved over the centuries mostly comes from our respect for free speech and free thought
I think Giordano Bruno might have disagreed, but that's a whole another conversation :)
I agree with your identification of the problems, but not your solutions. You seem to point out again and again the problems with public school education. I know a few highly educated people in your position too who are trying to teach without being hampered from all sides by the government and the unions.
I just find it weird that despite all that you think more government, more regulation, is going to fix it. Private schools do not have any of these problems. Why not?
The solutions are simple and obvious. School choice. Let kids go to whatever school they want. Give monetary incentives to schools that attract more kids. Let the schools teach whatever and however they want, but with nation wide testing. The problem will fix itself.
If you are talking about colleges: it's not "regulations" that are the problem, it's that in a system where the students have to count every penny, there's no room for a diverse curriculum.
I haven't been hampered by either government or unions, and the situation is absolutely identical in private colleges.
When it comes to colleges, there is no school choice without free schools. People go where they can afford to go.
Having educational standards in place means more room for non-standard material.
Now, colleges vs. K12 have an entirely different set of problems.
If by "school choice" you mean not forcing K12 kids to be attached to a school district, sure (I went to a "magnet" school, which wasn't tied to home address).
But not everyone can go to school that's far away for whatever reasons. And having college-style admission systems in schools will lead to the same problems.
On top of that, little children shouldn't be expected to make these kind of choices, so basically we are screwing over kids whose parents aren't parenting them well. And since we want all kids to be in school, what's the "default" option if they don't make a choice?
Nationwide testing sounds an awful lot like regulation:D
Essentially, common core is doing just that: sets guidelines, while leaving a lot of freedom to the teachers. You can see how much of an uphill battle it is.
And as for "private schools don't have problems" — yeah, no. They absolutely do. And the best schools in NYC are all public (Stuyvesant, Brooklyn Tech, Bronx Science, etc.
And there's the problem of finding and retaining qualified teachers while paying them reasonable wages.
But I digress. What I can assure you of is that's there's no one single thing that will fix it. Many things need to change, and be done by many people.
They specifically brought up the example of Chaplain being fired as "canceling".
Also, your definition needs doesn't match common usage, or what happens. Here's a better one:
Canceling (n.): holding a public person accountable for their actions by withdrawing monetary support.
This can be done by not extending a contract; by termination of employment, contract, or the privilege of access to particular public platforms from which they profit, if the funding is provided on a contractual basis; and - wait for it -
