Chapter 6: How to Conquer a College (Part 3)
Continuing, here we get to parts that interest me because they are close to my own experiences.
First we discuss campus newspapers. Hey, I have written for a campus newspaper and even got threatened with a lawsuit once for it, so I know something about that. Certainly that people can get pretty mad at you, and I feel that sometimes there is a disconnect between aspiring journalists who want to apply journalistic best practices, and students who get involved in their local university politics but don't feel that this makes them public figures to be scrutinized in a newspaper. It's a problem, and I tend to take the newspaper side but can see the other. Anyways, the central incident discussed here is one in which the Harvard Crimson got criticized for reaching out to ICE for comment after an "abolish ICE rally". Urban makes it sound like the protesters got mad that people with other viewpoints got contacted, but the issue seems to have been that people were scared of facing deportation because ICE got informed about their activities. Now the latter still sounds like a bit of a leap to me, though I don't know what's going on with ICE in detail. It seems like Urban could have at least presented that side of the argument though. As far as I can tell, the newspaper didn't suffer any damage from this either.
There are some weak points (in my opinion) on stuff like "bias response teams" or something like that. Haven't looked into it, and I'm not sure what exactly the bad is that they do. I don't think anyone is mentioned to have been expelled because of bias, and it didn't get clear to me what bad stuff these are accused of precisely, other than existing. Urban complains that universitiesfight against racial and gender discrimination but not discrimination based on political views. There is of course a difference between discrimination based on innate characteristics and discrimination based on changable ones, so that doesn't bother me. (One might argue that religious discrimination is included even though that is also changable, and yes I would agree that that should probably be relegated to the lower tier of badness where political discrimination is.)
We get into Lawrence Summers, former president of Harvard. This is an incident of 2005, which feels like ancient history compared to the other stuff that we're discussing here. He gave a speech in which he said that he doesn't think gender discrimination is as big a problem as it's made out to be, and people got upset. One might question why he felt the need to speak on this topic at a research conference, it doesn't seem like he's an expert. The speech itself is lackluster, he gives three potential causes of underrepresentation of women in STEM and concludes that discrimination is the least important. ; it is not explored how discrimination might also be a factor that can explain the discrepancies in the other two causes, which is probably the weak point of the speech. Following that, he got removed as president (but he had also previously been embroiled in other controversies). Notable that according to Wikipedia, he still got majority support of the student body at time of removal, so I'm not convinced that you can label this a result of SJF culture.
Finally, we get to a math paper, yay! The paper is about the variability hypothesis also mentioned by Summers, and from the timeline the paper may have been in reaction to that incident. As a mathematician, I am already kind of surprised by this choice of topic, it doesn't really have much to do with math research. The paper got pulled after publication, and according to Urban that's bad, because publication means it's thoroughly peer-reviewed and should thus be accepted as truth. And then... he goes on to tell the tale about how some activists managed to get 7 bullshit papers published. And I have to wonder: Shouldn't Urban at this point notice a problem in his reasoning?
The underlying problem here as I see it is really publication culture in academia, not SJF culture.