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Cancel culture & Wingate Hall

The decision is made by a host of people/institutions. It could be an employer, the media, even the public. We should encourage speaking honestly and thinking critically, but that’s not really compatible with safe spaces.

In this case, the institution is making the decision as to whether the statement was racist. I think Georgetown Law looks fucking stupid. I’m not sure how you can charge $60,000 to teach concepts like Due Process and then fire two professors for being upset at a thing they noticed, just because it isn’t smiles and rainbows. Like I said, I would have used different language, and I question why they apologized.

So who qualifies as the “mean woke” in this situation? Georgetown Law? Or the current and potential students who felt they wouldn’t be fairly judged by those professors?
 
Cancel culture & Wingate Hall

The accuser (Georgetown Law students) made a case and the judge/jury (Georgetown Law administrators) agreed with the accuser. So who determined this is “mean woke?”

The accusers (at least some of them):
———-

The Black Law Students Association had previously called for Sellers’s immediate termination after the video was made public on Wednesday, writing in a letter that Georgetown “must take swift and definitive action in the face of blatant and shameless racism.”
The association also called for a public apology from Batson for “his failure to adequately condemn Sellers’ statements,” for a review of the "current subjective grading system," including an audit of Sellers’ past grading and student evaluations, and for a commitment to hire more Black professors, “who will be better situated to fairly assess Black students in a non-biased manner.”
“Professor Sellers was speaking in reference to the only Black student in her class,” says the letter from the Black Law Students Association. “These racist statements reveal not only Sellers’ beliefs about Black students in her classes, but also how her racist thoughts have translated to racist actions. Professor Sellers’s bias has impacted the grades of Black students in her classes historically, in her own words.”
————

The judge/jury:

——-

Bill Treanor, dean of the law school, said in a statement Thursday that Sellers had been terminated and that Batson had been placed on administrative leave pending an investigation by the university's Office of Diversity, Equity and Affirmative Action.

“I am appalled that two members of our faculty engaged in a conversation that included reprehensible statements concerning the evaluation of Black students,” Treanor said in a written statement. He added that Baston "will have no further involvement with the course in which the incident arose" until after completion of the investigation. He also said the law school is “taking significant steps to ensure that all students in this class are fairly graded without the input of Professor Sellers or Professor Batson.”
———-

https://www.insidehighered.com/news...r-reprehensible-comments-about-black-students

You seem to be approaching this from the standpoint that a law professor is a casual observer of student performance instead of the one who actively determines student grades.

Which one is more likely for a professor with 20 years of teaching? Black students are the worst students in her class almost every semester? Or she gives Black students lower grades almost every semester?
 
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You seem to be approaching this from the standpoint that a law professor is a casual observer of student performance instead of the one who actively determines student grades.

Which one is more likely for a professor with 20 years of teaching? Black students are the worst students in her class almost every semester? Or she gives Black students lower grades almost every semester?

Most first year law school courses are based on a single final exam with blind grading by the professor. She's reading essays and putting a grade on them without knowing who wrote them.
 
Yeah I’m approaching this knowing how law school grading works.
 
Yeah I’m approaching this knowing how law school grading works.

And the Black Law Students Association and Dean of Georgetown Law don't? What do you know about this situation that they don't?
 
Yeah, I am saying that they are wrong.

That goes against what youve been discussing for the last few hours. The accusers made their case and it's "mean woke" because someone who presumably has nothing to do with the situation thinks the "judge/jury" is wrong.

So why do you think they're wrong? This was two adjunct professors evaluating a Black student. One professor who has been teaching this class since 2003 said Black students get the lowest grades almost every year. This is a class in which 25% of the grade is class participation, so it's clearly not "blind." Why do you think that's just a causal observation based on "how law school grading works?"



https://slate.com/news-and-politics...st-remarks-sandra-sellers-black-students.html

“Another third-year student pointed out that Sellers and Batson’s class ways a participation-based course, “making Black students particularly susceptible to biased grading” given Sellers’ racist views. A quarter of the final grade is based on “pure class participation,” a highly subjective criterion that gives professors broad latitude to inject their personal prejudices into the grading process. Alarmingly, Sellers made her statement while she and Batson were evaluating a Black student’s performance in class.”
 
At worst it’s a misunderstanding.

At best it's a misunderstanding. At worst, phdeac suggests, wakelaw13 doesn't believe racism is harmful.

(That's why it is rhetorical. Even if phdeac doesn't believe it, the association itself serves to discredit wakelaw's argument)
 
This is obviously a very complex decision but I like it and i like that it will most likely spur more discussion about it in future generations. The fact that it upsets Reff and sailor is just a star on top that proves it was a good idea.

Please link to a post I made that shows that I disagreed with the decision to rename the building, or that I am "upset" by it. Looks like your ideology is interfering with your ability to read and comprehend.
 
This was not a professor saying she does not like black students or they do not belong. This was two professors expressing dismay over the phenomenon, which they are not the first to discover. The only answer for why this occurs is not “racist professors.” So unlike the mean woke mob, I’m willing to engage in a discussion about it in good faith.

These professors were fired and their reputations forever tarnished because of this zoom conversation. This conversation was not racist, it was actually the opposite. That’s why the mean woke mob is wrong.
 
This was not a professor saying she does not like black students or they do not belong. This was two professors expressing dismay over the phenomenon, which they are not the first to discover. The only answer for why this occurs is not “racist professors.” So unlike the mean woke mob, I’m willing to engage in a discussion about it in good faith.

These professors were fired and their reputations forever tarnished because of this zoom conversation. This conversation was not racist, it was actually the opposite. That’s why the mean woke mob is wrong.

Exactly.

Unfortunately, if you are not a member of the mean woke mob, it is not your place to determine what is racism and what is not. The mean woke mob will tell you, and you will obey. Otherwise, they will consider you a racist, by their definition, of course.

Just as Joseph Goebbels took it upon himself to determine who was a Jew, and who was not a Jew, the mean woke mob take it on themselves to determine who is racist and who is not racist, and what is racism, and what is not racism.
 
Yeah I’m approaching this knowing how law school grading works.

This is a class in which 25% of the grade is class participation, so it's clearly not "blind." Why do you think that's just a causal observation based on "how law school grading works?"



https://slate.com/news-and-politics...st-remarks-sandra-sellers-black-students.html

“Another third-year student pointed out that Sellers and Batson’s class ways a participation-based course, “making Black students particularly susceptible to biased grading” given Sellers’ racist views. A quarter of the final grade is based on “pure class participation,” a highly subjective criterion that gives professors broad latitude to inject their personal prejudices into the grading process. Alarmingly, Sellers made her statement while she and Batson were evaluating a Black student’s performance in class.”

Lol.
 
Cancel culture & Wingate Hall

You’re not operating in good faith. We spent a whole evening in which you defined “mean woke” one way and then completely redefined it around a situation that didn’t fit your definition. You aren’t addressing my questions, points, or information. You’re completely set in your opinion which is ironically something isn’t racist unless a party can be convinced it’s racist. You didn’t even offer a “point still stands” when shown you were wrong about the grading scheme of the class.

This professor said on camera during an evaluation of a Black student that Black students typically get worse evaluations in her class. She’s not a passive observer. It’s more likely her evaluations are biased than Black students are just the worst students in her class almost every year for 18 years.
 
Dude 25% participation doesn’t mean there isn’t a blindly graded exam at the end like literally every single exam I ever took in law school. On top of that, I’m listening to the words they actually said.
 
My understanding is that the comments weren’t about any exams. The comments seemed to be about the evaluations that the professors were conducting at the time.

So am I correct that you find it more plausible that Black students had the lowest grades every year than that the professors were biased in their grading?
 
We should also not pretend that adjunct professors are some sacred status in the academic world that are normally treated with the utmost respect and that the university dispensed with norms in letting these people go without due process and irrefutable proof. Adjuncts typically are treated like shit, teaching class that other full faculty don't want to teach, and only get single semester contracts. It was far easier for the university to let these people go than anything else because they were going to let them go within in the next two years anyway when they started asking for more money. The financial hit that the law school would take from a diminished reputation would be far greater than paying out the remainder of the contracts, firing the people, and finding someone else to teach the class. The reality of an increasingly anti-racist generation, is that whether or not it's illegal or specifically causes targeted harm for a specific individuals, institutions and businesses are going to weigh the potential loss in reputation due to tolerating or harboring (or the perception of tolerating) even possibly (no hard proof!) racist employees against the benefit of keeping those people on staff because of loyalty to employees or some undefined standard of proof.
 
What ultimately ended the nihilist Soviet system?

Was it not that Russians finally tired of the Kremlin’s lies and hypocrisies that permeated every facet of their falsified lives?

Here are 10 symptoms of Sovietism. Ask yourself whether we are headed down this same road to perdition.

There was no escape from ideological indoctrination – anywhere.

A job in the bureaucracy or a military assignment hinged not so much on merit, expertise or past achievement. What mattered was loud enthusiasm for the Soviet system.

Wokeness is becoming our new Soviet-like state religion. Careerists assert that America was always and still is a systemically racist country, without ever producing proof or a sustained argument.

The Soviets fused their press with the government.

Pravda, or "Truth," was the official megaphone of state-sanctioned lies. Journalists simply regurgitated the talking points of their Communist Party partners.

In 2017, a Harvard study found that over 90% of the major TV news networks’ coverage of the Trump administration’s first 100 days was negative.

The Soviet surveillance state enlisted apparatchiks and lackeys to ferret out ideological dissidents.

Recently, we learned that the Department of Defense is reviewing its rosters to spot extremist sentiments. The U.S. Postal Service recently admitted it uses tracking programs to monitor the social media postings of Americans.

CNN recently alleged that the Biden administration’s Department of Homeland Security is considering partnering with private surveillance firms to get around government prohibitions on scrutinizing Americans’ online activity.

The Soviet educational system sought not to enlighten but to indoctrinate young minds in proper government-approved thought.

Currently, cash-strapped universities nationwide are hiring thousands of diversity, equity and inclusion staffers and administrators. Their chief task is to scan the admissions, hiring, curriculum and administration at universities. Like good commissars, our diversity czars oversee compliance with the official narrative that a flawed America must confess, apologize for and renounce its evil foundations.

In America, where and for what reason you riot determines whether you face any legal consequences.

The Soviet Union was run by a pampered elite, exempt from the ramifications of their own radical ideologies.

Now, woke Silicon Valley billionaires talk socialistically but live royally. Coke and Delta Airlines CEOs who hector Americans about their illiberality make millions of dollars a year.

What unites current woke activists such as Oprah Winfrey, LeBron James, Mark Zuckerberg and the Obamas are their huge estates and their multimillion-dollar wealth. Just as the select few of the old Soviet nomenklatura had their Black Sea dachas, America’s loudest top-down revolutionaries prefer living in Martha’s Vineyard, Beverly Hills, Montecito and Malibu.

The Soviets mastered Trotskyization, or the rewriting and airbrushing away of history to fabricate present reality.

Are Americans any different when they indulge in a frenzy of name-changing, statue-toppling, monument-defacing, book-banning and cancel-culturing?

The Soviets created a climate of fear and rewarded stool pigeons for rooting out all potential enemies of the people.

Since when did Americans encourage co-workers to turn in others for an ill-considered word in a private conversation? Why do thousands now scour the internet to find any past incorrect expression of a rival? Why are there now new thought criminals supposedly guilty of climate racism, immigration racism or vaccination racism?

Soviet prosecutors and courts were weaponized according to ideology.

In America, where and for what reason you riot determines whether you face any legal consequences. Politically correct sanctuary cities defy the law with impunity. Jury members are terrified of being doxxed and hunted down for an incorrect verdict. The CIA and FBI are becoming as ideological as the old KGB.

The Soviets doled out prizes on the basis of correct Soviet thought.

In modern America, the Pulitzer Prizes and the Emmys, Grammys, Tonys and Oscars don’t necessarily reflect the year’s best work, but often the most politically correct work from the most woke.

The Soviets offered no apologies for extinguishing freedom.

Instead, they boasted that they were advocates for equity, champions of the underclass, enemies of privilege — and therefore could terminate anyone or anything they pleased.

Our wokists are similarly defending their thought-control efforts, forced re-education sessions, scripted confessionals, mandatory apologies and cancel culture on the pretense that we need long-overdue "fundamental transformation."

So if they destroy people in the name of equity, their nihilism is justified.

https://www.foxnews.com/opinion/americans-becoming-sovietized-10-warning-signs-victor-davis-hanson
 
You’re not operating in good faith. We spent a whole evening in which you defined “mean woke” one way and then completely redefined it around a situation that didn’t fit your definition. You aren’t addressing my questions, points, or information. You’re completely set in your opinion which is ironically something isn’t racist unless a party can be convinced it’s racist. You didn’t even offer a “point still stands” when shown you were wrong about the grading scheme of the class.

This professor said on camera during an evaluation of a Black student that Black students typically get worse evaluations in her class. She’s not a passive observer. It’s more likely her evaluations are biased than Black students are just the worst students in her class almost every year for 18 years.

I don't see any evidence that wakelaw13 is operating in bad faith during your interactions with him in the past 2 days. I don't necessarily agree with his position, but he appears to be discussing it with you in good faith.
 
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