Academe is a hotbed of craven snitches

https://www.chronicle.com/article/academe-is-a-hotbed-of-craven-snitches

by pleaser • 4 years ago

44 66 4 years ago

pleaser2• 4 years ago

ars2• 4 years ago

Is this satire or something? Since when is being a snitch a bad thing? Isn't that what people complain about with cops, that they don't report each other?

So now what, we want the same thing with academia? That they can do whatever they want, secure in the knowledge no one will report them?

And isn't "craven snitch" an oxymoron? To be a snitch you need at least a bit of bravery, even if you are being anonymous, since there's always the chance you'll be found out.

scandox2• 4 years ago

First let us pause to consider our terms: Was Schlissel’s narc a “snitch” or a “whistle-blower”? Whistle-blowers are generally attempting to topple or thwart the powerful, and Schlissel was certainly powerful. But the reported offense was, in the words of a lawyer I spoke with, “a nothingburger.” Let us provisionally define snitching as turning someone in anonymously, for either minor or nonexistent offenses, or pretextually. Also: using institutional mechanisms to kneecap rivals, harass enemies, settle scores and grudges, or advantage oneself. Not to mention squealing on someone for social-media posts and joining online mobs to protest exercises of academic and intellectual freedom.

For those who bravely make it to the 3rd paragraph.

ars2• 4 years ago

So if it's a "nothingburger", then why is the administration not just ignoring it?

You can't have that kind of harassment without the assistance of those you are reporting to. Being how I'm not there, I'm going to defer to the administrators to decide what's important and what's not.

throwaway0a5e2• 4 years ago

It's a bad thing in this world where we've created so much bureaucracy, so many rules and so much enforcement discretion spread across so many levels that everyone is always doing something against the rules or could be considered to be at someone's discretion and processes of sorting these things out "fairly" is so onerous as to be something that can be used as a weapon (either by a snitch or by various parties in the enforcement processes) by itself.

EverywhereTrip• 4 years ago

Read the article. This isn't about breaking the law, it is about filing frivolous complaints about expressing opinions you disagree with or reporting people for things which aren't even against the rules. General harassment.

pengaru• 4 years ago

It's complicated. Obviously nobody likes a tattle-tale in childhood, even the teachers/authorities are annoyed. Part of participating in a healthy society is building strong connections and a surprising amount of that occurs surrounding shared shenanigans, keeping little secrets, not betraying your friends.

I'm not sure where to draw the line, perhaps it's never really clear.

drewcoo• 4 years ago

Blacklists are bad things. Whisper campaigns where people can't defend themselves are bad things. #metoo is a bad thing. The creeping realization that you're being surveilled by potentially any and certainly some of your peers is a bad thing. The incentive to snitch on others is a bad thing.

All of those exhibit cowardice because snitching is attacking someone without allowing that person confront the attacker.

seoaeu• 4 years ago

The whole premise of #metoo was that if victims had individually attempted to directly confront their abuser they'd have faced serious and potentially career ending retaliation. I have a hard time labeling someone cowardly for preferring an option that didn't have that consequence!

xhkkffbf2• 4 years ago

It's sad but true in my experience. My thesis advisor makes this a sport, apparently. I learned this after I graduated. One friend explained that my advisor would often call up colleagues at other universities and tell them not to hire particular people. He's apparently known for this habit. It's one thing to provide a recommendation when requested. It's another to routinely campaign against others and provide anti-recommendations.

But he's thrived himself. He's got a swish appointment just outside of Boston.

mistrial9• 4 years ago

yes, I got one like this too.. and, he wants stock in the companies of his "students" .. which he self-invites

raincom2• 4 years ago

Does he do it for those who haven’t asked for his recommendation letter? Or he does it for those who asks for his recommendation letter?

xhkkffbf2• 4 years ago

Both. Of course the letters are full of bogus, positive statements that he can defend if ever caught. But he badmouths people left and right because he thinks that anti-recommendations are just as important as positive ones.

a9h74j• 4 years ago

I once read that the academic social contract before the 1970s was that an advisor would not accept a graduate student unless they were sure they had a "place" for them lined up, i.e., in another institution. I don't know how that could have worked, but it speaks to the difference in social contract prior to when graduate students were treated as exploitable labor with no actual academic prospects.

humanistbot4• 4 years ago

If you are the President of a university (or a company) that has an explicit official policy prohibiting romantic relationships between superiors and subordinates, and you have a semi-secret romantic relationship with a subordinate that many people know about, then someone in the know who is upset with one of your management decisions retaliates by telling the truth to HR, then I have zero sympathy for you. Are they a 'snitch'? Sure. But you chose to flagrantly violate the rules, thinking that you were special.

vvpan• 4 years ago

"Rules are meant to be broken" is a great maxim in my opinion. It's the expression of truly democratic attitude towards rules. Something that's "technically wrong" but taken by the majority as not an ethical issue deserves to live because it questions the legitimacy of the rule. How any progress happens.

beebmam• 4 years ago

The same argument could be made against laws, including plenty of laws that both you and I, and plenty of others, agree should never be broken.

So I'm not very persuaded by this argument.

humanistbot4• 4 years ago

But in practice, it is the people at the top who believe they can get away with it, like in this case. Rules for thee, but not me.

chrisco255• 4 years ago

It's a great way to breed corruption and decay. Turn the other way here and there and before long rules don't matter at all. Even a majority can be on the wrong side of right.

_0ffh• 4 years ago

The version I like most is Terry Pratchetts: "Rules are there so that you think before you break them".

AnimalMuppet• 4 years ago

Civil disobedience is one thing - breaking the rules in order to drive change. "Breaking the rules because I'm big and powerful so I can probably get away with it" does not deserve the nobility associated with the former.

And the rules against romantic relationships with subordinates are there to protect the less powerful against exploitation by the more powerful. That's a really bad area for you to be extolling the virtues of breaking the rules. That's not how progress happens.

yike321123• 4 years ago

In any situation where an individual has direct power over another can you really claim any form of relationship born from this is consensual? For many people who are not women it can be easy to shrug this aside for their own "personal interests" especially those in academia where most women tend to either leave the workforce or are left outside the pool of candidates for an individual. From an outsiders perspective looking in all I can say is no they cannot.

sobkas• 4 years ago

In the end how many rules you can break depend on how much money you have and/or how many friends in high places you have. Because in the end it's only illegal if you get caught and find someone willing to prosecute you. And if money is the only penalty, then the law is only against poor, rich will pay and nothing will change.

recuter5• 4 years ago

Zoot Allure. And what pray tell if these people fell in love? Is this not the plot of countless romance novels and movies for a reason?

Nobody is special. Must follow rules. You will be reported. Zero sympathy. No exceptions. Are we in East Germany?

Imagine if you were French. Or had a pulse. I swear, society is overrun with gross troglodytes.

Look, lets be real honest here. The snitch is usually an unattractive jealous busybody, regardless of "rule breakage".

jchw2• 4 years ago

And we’ve blown past Godwin’s law already. That was fast.

If the rule is so bad… shouldn’t they fix the rule? But it’s there for a reason, so they shouldn’t fix it. It’s not broken.

throwaway821909• 4 years ago

Normally I'd think "the President should follow the rules as well, so they have incentive to improve them". But maybe with tricky issues like this, the apparent self-interest in changing the rules would be seen just as badly as breaking them.

Also: if you could just as easily break vs. change a rule, want to do so, but still believe it's generally a good rule - is it better to just break it?

I guess this is what both sustains and dooms autocracies.

legalcorrection• 4 years ago

Those rules only exist because that same class of craven snitches becomes highly litigious when they feel scorned after getting pumped and dumped by a colleague.

pleaser2• 4 years ago

Most of the examples in the article are much crazier than that though. The chocolate muffin sexual harassment case, for example.

ceeplusplus• 4 years ago

This comment really ignores the rest of the stories presented in the article, all of which paint a damning picture of cancel culture and wokeism (regardless of whether you consider these things legitimate causes) being wielded as political weapons by unscrupulous actors in academia.

giraffe_lady2• 4 years ago

I'm having a serious "Gell-Mann Amnesia effect" moment on this one:

I don't think that representation of the Ewell paper is quite accurate, though admittedly it's been over a year since I read it.

Despite being Jewish (would have had different significance later than during his time!) Schenker was a proud german nationalist and in his own words considered his method one of the ways german people could assert their superiority over other cultures.

The Ewell paper is actually pretty clear that schenkerian analysis is technically valid and quite valuable for many purposes. But also that its origins were in an explicitly racist project, and that applying it without understanding that frame could get you racist results even if you didn't intend them.

It's easy to go after this paper because it sincerely uses "critical race theory" vocabulary, but it's a solid contribution to answering the question "why are some fields so incredibly white even if no one intends them to be that way?"

The essay both-sides it, but Ewell's paper is researched and professional even with its flaws, while in context Jackson's response was fairly nasty and defensive, basically just accusing Ewell of black antisemitism.

I've been following this particular one for years (grew up on schenkerian analysis, in a musical family) and I am definitely not neutral on it. Ewell's moral rigidity on this is unpalatable sometimes and I think you could fairly call him a hothead. But the author's description of the conflict is a lot more "balanced" than the conflict itself really deserves. This is essentially an academic raising a painful point within a field that he clearly loves, and others trying to shut it down because of the embarrassment they feel it exposes them all to.

Seeing how the author misrepresents this issue to make their point makes me not really trust the rest of it. I just happen to be somewhat informed on this one.

oh_sigh3• 4 years ago

Do you view anything hierarchical as racist via associated Whiteness? I'm confused how the origins were an "explicitly racist project". Was Schenker promoting a race that he didn't even belong to? Is it possible to think American culture is superior over other cultures, without thinking that white people are superior to black people?

BlueTemplar2• 4 years ago

It's probably because German Nationalism (especially of that time) was "Ethnic" Nationalism ? Which I have gotten the impression has been distinctly racist even long before the Nazis ?

giraffe_lady2• 4 years ago

So first off I'm familiar with schenkerian analysis but I am not an expert on schenker the person, though I did at one point read some of his writings in translation to verify Ewell's claims. Nor am I trying to argue, right now, that his works are inherently racist. If you're looking for those things you should just read Ewell, who is a Schenker expert, and is making that argument.

Was Schenker promoting a race that he didn't even belong to?

I think this is an error, trying to map our understanding of race onto the past like this. I don't know what race Schenker thought of himself as. He was Jewish, and he consistently asserted the natural superiority of german people and culture. That doesn't cleanly reconcile with any conception of race that I've come across, which indicates to me that those conceptions are not a useful lens here.

My goal wasn't to start up the is-schenkerian-analysis-racist-or-not quagmire here. It was to point out that I believe the author of this essay has misunderstood or misrepresented a more nuanced conflict for their own purposes.

zozbot2344• 4 years ago

Schenkerian analysis is literally the idea of taking out all the "hierarchically inferior" black notes from a piece of music and showing only a handful of hierarchically dominant, big, important "white notes". Of course this basic idea has nothing to do with modern notions of race, but it turns out that the visual contrast of "colors" describes the idea quite precisely. So I'm quite OK with conceding that one point to Ewell.

(It's worth noting the flip side of that argument, too - we literally have historical sources telling us "when you see a composition made of big, white notes, that will sound a lot better if the performer improvises on them melodically on the spot, keeping the overall meter of the white note" (Lorenzo Penna, Li primi albori musicali). And of course, on-the-spot improvisation has been mastered to an unprecedented degree in the modern day by the "black" tradition of Jazz!)

zozbot2344• 4 years ago

Schenker was a music critic/journalist of his day who routinely used exaggerated rhetoric to inflate his claims towards his largely non-professional audience. The basics of his analysis method are genuinely remarkably well-founded in historical practice (far more so than the "harmony" practice that's taught in music-theory introductory courses nowadays), but they are also much better described and contextualized by fully considering historical sources, as opposed to a narrow focus on Schenker himself. For instance, melodic reduction (undoing diminution and teasing out long-range prolongational relations) was integral already to the Italian Solfeggio of the 18th century, as recently discovered by music scholar Nicholas Baragwanath https://global.oup.com/academic/product/the-solfeggio-tradit... . Schenker is getting a lot of bad rhetoric thrown at him these days, but he started that game in the first place.

lbarrow2• 4 years ago

Kipnis clearly doesn't think much of the Ewell paper, but I don't think her point centers on its contents; it's more that someone collected and published scholarly responses to the paper, and the social media pushback against these responses led to a grad student narcing on his professor and the professor losing funding, the journal, etc. That, to me, is not a healthy dynamic for a university to run on.

edit: Actually let me go a step further and agree with you a bit - I think Kipnis's point would be more clearly made if she didn't make her own perspective on the merits of the Ewell paper such a big part of that section of the article.

zozbot2344• 4 years ago

AIUI, a lot of the pushback on those responses was due to how they were collected and published. The call for responses was mostly circulated privately among pro-Schenkerian scholars, and the broader profession only got to know about it at the last minute. And the author of the original paper was given no opportunity to provide a rejoinder.

I'm not even sure that the actual written paper had even been published at that time: the basic arguments of the paper were first summarized in a conference presentation, and of course it is terrible form to publish a purported critique of something that hasn't even been fully presented in full detail! The whole thing has really reflected pretty badly on the authors of these 'critiques', for very good reasons overall.

bjourne• 4 years ago

Thanks for telling us. Do you know if Kipnis characterization of the backlash Jackson suffered is correct? "All hell broke loose on social media. ... The university swiftly announced that an ad hoc committee would be convened to investigate. Its members found Jackson guilty of bullying the grad-student editor into publishing views he disagreed with, and the journal guilty of editorial mismanagement (although, Jackson said, the editorial practices followed were the same as they’d always been). Jackson was removed from the journal, and its funding was cut." Some writers have a way of magnifying things. 3-4 people complaining is enough for "all hell broke loose" according to some.

MattGaiser2• 4 years ago

for either minor or nonexistent offenses

On the one hand, society institutes these rules and we supposedly claim to be rule following people.

On the other hand, people who try to have the rules enforced are labelled as "snitches."

Your answer to why tragedies occur but even when people knew, nobody did anything.

Do the rules matter or not?

msgilligan• 4 years ago

If the rules are regularly applied to persecute people over nonexistent offenses, they will very soon cease to matter.

MattGaiser2• 4 years ago

It was severe enough an offense that it cost him his job when found out.

oh_sigh3• 4 years ago

Right...if the institutions are over-zealous, then they are at fault. But to complain that someone pointed out to the authorities that they think someone was breaking the rules is a bit silly. I have a hard time taking seriously anyone who uses the word "snitch". I suspect OP is just a little bit salty because of their Title IX complaints and that their partner got reported for making a classless racial joke about children.

michaelt• 4 years ago

Do the rules matter or not?

Go to the cops and try to turn yourself in for that time you ticked a "I have read the terms and conditions" checkbox dishonestly. I suspect you'll find some rules matter more than others.

otterley• 4 years ago

It’s not that black and white. Even rules themselves are subject to interpretation. Rules can matter, but first there needs to be agreement on what they mean: what precise conduct they proscribe — and, equally important — what they don’t.

throwanem• 4 years ago

On 20 December 1973, the Wall Street Journal quoted Sayre as: "Academic politics is the most vicious and bitter form of politics, because the stakes are so low."

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sayre%27s_law

archhn• 4 years ago

Any bureaucratic environment turns people into antisocial psychopaths. Too many rules and too much competition. Every single thing, no matter how small, like a policy about removing Keurig pods from the machine after using it, becomes fodder for institutional politics.

bdcravens• 4 years ago

Can't help but wonder what my ancestors did to earn this last name.

SpicyLemonZest• 4 years ago

I think this is a clear story where conceptual clarity is both necessary and sorely lacking. It's unfortunate when academic disagreements degrade into accusations of racism, or when social awkwardness gets amped up into harassment charges, or when people file fake complaints in retaliation for writing articles they don't like. But beyond the emotional compulsion of the term "snitch", is there any reason to think that these are all facets of the same problem or that the same strategies would effectively handle all of them?

vector_spaces• 4 years ago

It might be helpful to know that the author, Laura Kipnis, has made a career out of critiquing sexual harassment policies on American university campuses and the broader #MeToo movement. Her 2017 book titled "Unwanted Advances: Sexual Paranoia Comes to Campus" compared the Title IX process against philosopher Peter Ludlow a "witch trial". The book also offers an anecdote of an undergraduate student woke up next to a male student after blacking out, and then laughing off any suggestions that what happened amounted to rape -- Kipnis frames this as how female students should ideally react in such situations, and argues against the idea that men alone are responsible for rape when it happens, arguing that modern feminism "enables stupidity".

Personally, I find these arguments objectionable for various reasons I don't care to get into, but either way I think it's probably a good idea to be aware of where people are coming from when engaging with pieces like this

lbarrow2• 4 years ago

Kipnis was also subject to several rounds of retaliatory Title IX investigations simply for publicly objecting to Ludlow's treatment, all of which eventually exonerated her. It's hard to think of someone more qualified to critique the issues with Title IX and the culture of campus inquisitions.

manicdee• 4 years ago

Surely the issue there is not Title IX but vexatious litigants?

Academe is a hotbed of craven snitches

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