“Why I'm Giving Up Tenure at UCLA”

https://www.commonsense.news/p/why-im-giving-up-tenure-at-ucla

by jseliger • 4 years ago

47 38 4 years ago

devmor7• 4 years ago

I was expecting the crux of the issue to be over some indefensible action, but not something as horrid as marketing predictive urban crime software to city police.

I don't expect everyone to share the same moral values that I do, but if Professor Manson does not grasp the reason that so many people are horrified by such software and continues to blame it on "Woke" culture - I think it's better off that he doesn't teach any more students.

After all, we as a society have had decades of books, thought pieces and popular movies about exactly why this kind of thing is monstrous and inhumane.

seibelj5• 4 years ago

“Horrified” “monstrous” “inhumane”

The language the left uses to describe anything they disagree with is shrill and argumentative. Very tired of it.

Also crime prediction software isn’t making any alarm bells go off for me, especially if it is effective at reducing the murders and gun violence that happens all the time in my city.

dataflow3• 4 years ago

Also crime prediction software isn’t making any alarm bells go off for me

Do you see any similarities with redlining? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Redlining

devmor7• 4 years ago

"The left" is far from the only section of society that criticizes this issue. It's been pretty universally panned by all corners of society - save for those on the far, far right obsessed with an imaginative idea of social purity that can somehow be enforced by a hard line drawn in the sand.

mikeyouse• 4 years ago

Also, making a big stink "giving up tenure" after decades of teaching there to become a professor emeritus who's receiving a full pension and launching your IDW blog seems like a good hustle.

Imnimo• 4 years ago

Yeah, the intro went from "And let’s say you watch as a colleague, previously held up as a paragon of those values, is ostracized and smeared for a thought crime that was not considered a thought crime until about five minutes ago. Maybe he made a bad joke. Or maybe he used the phrase “guys” instead of folks. Or Hispanic instead of Latinx."

Not really what this is about.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PredPol

PredPol is legitimately pretty fucked up. I agree with your assessment that this isn't an issue of "Woke" culture. This is just a guy peddling pseudoscience with the trappings of academia. I would expect any rationalist to reject this on the simple basis that it does not work.

david382• 4 years ago

I’m biased, so I would give the most weight to what the computer science department says.

Predictive policing absolutely does work in some aspects. The opposite of predictive policing is to have all beat cops equidistant from each other in their jurisdiction. This is clearly wrong. The next step is to have cops near population centers, then around areas where there have been more reports, requests, etc. After that you move to time to day. Where you place cops during the day vs night is clearly different. Shops close, bars open. Places where young adults vs seniors gather will clearly have different coverage. Pretty much every study in the subject shows people age out of crime. This is used as supporting evidence against lifetime sentences and geriatric incarceration.

I have to assume only the most naive software will have an algorithm that uses secondary indicators / simplest predictive techniques would get such attention. For example “black neighborhoods” (that happen to be poor, with no other stats other than other departments say they have issues with black neighborhoods) and self fulfilling prophecies (we put most cops at location X and what a surprise, that location had the most arrests, w/o looking at the arrests themselves)

francisofascii• 4 years ago

I think the problem here it is not obvious, on the surface, that predictive urban crime software is horrid and inhumane. Only after digging deeper and perhaps reading the books and popular movies you mention does it become apparent. You can't simply say, if it is not obvious to this person, then they are unfit for teaching. The "obvious" parts need to be spelled out in detail.

devmor7• 4 years ago

I should have worded my intention more clearly. I don't mean to say anyone unaware of this sentiment is unfit to teach, rather that someone working in cultural anthropology for as long as he has is unfit to teach if he didn't even take the time to uncover this point of contention before blaming it on the "Woke" crowd.

UniverseHacker• 4 years ago

I had the same experience... I ended up wanting to make sure my locale isn't using this software, and not sympathizing at all with this professor.

car_analogy• 4 years ago

7 years old, citing an even older study, but this bears repeating, as this is not a new phenomenon, only more visible now (and therefore, I would argue, much less insidious):

The authors also submitted different test studies to different peer-review boards. The methodology was identical, and the variable was that the purported findings either went for, or against, the liberal worldview (for example, one found evidence of discrimination against minority groups, and another found evidence of "reverse discrimination" against straight white males). Despite equal methodological strengths, the studies that went against the liberal worldview were criticized and rejected, and those that went with it were not.

https://theweek.com/articles/441474/how-academias-liberal-bi...

the_only_law2• 4 years ago

Also typical of elite U.S. universities, UCLA is awash in Jew-hatred thinly disguised as anti-Zionism. [...] More recently, the Asian-American Studies Department posted to its website a statement accusing Israel of settler colonialism, racial apartheid, and so on.
I find myself thinking a lot lately about the deficit of imagination among people who consider themselves savvy and sophisticated.

Indeed.

rossdavidh• 4 years ago

I would be very interested if any of the HN readers here are either students at UCLA, or were within the last three or four years, to be able to comment on whether this depiction of the intellectual attitude there is overwrought or not.

For that matter, anyone who's been in a public university in the last three or four years, PERSONALLY (not just telling me what you've read about, I've read those articles as well), either as student or professor, I would be interested.

kccqzy• 4 years ago

I was a UCLA student. But being in the math department really insulated me against many of those cultural wars. My fellow students and my professors preferred to chat about topology and algebra, not wokeness or blackness or social justice.

yamanawabi3• 4 years ago

There are pro and anti-Israel groups on campus, and students from all backgrounds and ethnicities make up the social sciences programs. Much like a normal college campus.

There is no anti-Jewish bias as an academic establishment from my perception

humanistbot• 4 years ago

According to his letter, the professor is resigning as a protest of how one of his colleague in anthropology was treated. The colleague (Jeff Brantingham) developed a predictive policing system, turned it into a company (PredPol), and started selling it to police departments. Brantingham was widely critiqued for PredPol, including by many computer scientists and statisticians. You can find many critiques of PredPol in ACM journals.

Here are the alleged acts of "thought policing" mentioned in the article:

  1. Graduate students signed a letter critiquing his work and calling for the UCLA administration to investigate the ethics of the project

  2. The anthro department has various sections. The sociocultural anthropology section of the anthro department decided to not allow him to list courses under sociocultural anthro. He continued to teach the class under a different anthro section.

  3. The anthro department held a public panel discussion about the state of the field with regards to issues of race, and during that panel, his research and business were criticized

  4. The anthro department did not issue any press releases publicizing his work

  5. He stopped going to faculty meetings

Other allegations of "thought crimes" at UCLA anthro are sprinkled in, but are more just examples of people expressing views the author disagrees with, including:

  1. Someone in the department used the word "Latinx" at a panel. There is no claim that anyone was sanctioned, punished, or even criticized for using Latina or Latino.

  2. The department is no longer requiring GRE scores.

  3. Candidates for jobs and promotions must include a statement discussing one's contributions to diversity.

  4. Statements were issued by various deparments critiquing Israel's actions

Seems to me like someone just doesn't like having to defend their low-quality work.

yamanawabi3• 4 years ago

Ding ding ding.

howmayiannoyyou• 4 years ago

Except these criticisms aren't limited to UCLA. US Universities have created an alternate reality of offenses and priorities not shared by our adversaries, our competitors and many of our friends around the world. As a result our students are graduating with impossible expectations that cannot be met, and they will be flattened by others less idealistic and 'virtuous' to paraphrase Machiavelli. Think I'm wrong, well then give these a listen:

https://www.hoover.org/research/glenn-show https://www.hoover.org/research/free-speech-archipelago

And predictive policing will become increasingly important as fewer people have any interest in a profession as slandered and scrutinized as police work.

VictorPath• 4 years ago

More recently, the Asian-American Studies Department posted to its website a statement accusing Israel of settler colonialism, racial apartheid, and so on.

So they're accusing Israel of the same thing multiple UN resolutions have condemned Israel for - its occupation of Palestine's West Bank, its colonial settlements etc. Manson (appropriate name) is who is on the fringe of world opinion, not those opposing Israel's racial apartheid, and the US taxpayer's financing of Israel's racial apartheid.

ziddoap2• 4 years ago

In the introduction, is the "leopard" stuff related to the Adrian Bott quote: “‘I never thought leopards would eat MY face,’ sobs woman who voted for the Leopards Eating People’s Faces Party.”?

If so, either I am reading this incorrectly or the author of the introduction is using it in a new (to me) way. The phrase originally, as I understand it, refers to a result of some poorly thought through action committed by the 'victim' of the 'face eating'.

In this context it would imply that the coworkers in the cubicles did something stupid and are now facing the consequences of their own stupid actions.

I highly doubt this is what the author meant to convey, so I can't help but think I'm mistaken in how I read it. Is there an older/different version of the leopard-face-eating that I'm missing?

thrown321• 4 years ago

Have you ever heard the one about the missionary and the tiger?

“Why I'm Giving Up Tenure at UCLA”

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