Authoritarianism and the GOP: One Example

This may or may not be a photo of Ron DeSantis 
responding to a question about how much he cares about
First Amendment guarantees.

This started as a comment, or to be more precise, a comment to a comment to a comment, on a post on Ethics Alarms. Curmie had taken issue with the idea, propounded in the original post, that no Democrat could legitimately call a Republican authoritarian. He was then challenged to support his position. Herewith, that argument, which has grown rather long for a blog post (even for Curmie), let alone for a comment. I’ll post the link to this post rather than clutter that page… and rather than writing a lengthy essay that doesn’t go on my own site. 

First point: let’s drop the nonsense about hearing about Republican authoritarianism “only by those who have no difficulty demanding that others bow to their desires.” I have no tolerance for slimy or authoritarian antics from the left, even if I (generally) agree with their goals. But arguing those shenanigans don’t also happen from the right suggests either willful blindness or mendacity. As I have suggested elsewhere, the tactics and targets are a little different; that’s all. 

Curmie could fill volumes with examples of Republican authoritarianism, but this is going to be long enough as it is; let’s choose one GOP pol and one topic: Ron DeSantis and education. 

We start with the decree a couple of years ago that all faculty and students at state universities must identify their political affiliation. Not only that, the forms were not anonymous. I could see some tortured logic by which tracking aggregate percentages of anonymous student responses might serve to prove “indoctrination” or whatever, but little could be less relevant than the political persuasions of faculty. 

I think in particular of two colleagues at the small midwestern college where I used to teach. A student couldn’t get a major in Political Science without taking at least a couple of courses apiece from the two of them. They were good friends who happened to disagree about which political party best represented the needs and desires of the citizenry. One was the county chair of the Republican party when I was there; the other ran for Congress as a Democrat a couple years after I left. Few students were unaware of their professors’ politics, but left-leaning and right-leaning students alike virtually unanimously sang the praises of both. That’s what is supposed to happen; more importantly, it’s what does happen far more often than not; it doesn’t make headlines because it is in fact so commonplace. 

Furthermore, as I wrote on my own blog, “Diversity of perspective doesn’t require hiring both liberals and conservatives; it requires faculty who know what the hell they’re doing. Curmie has taught plays that are very Catholic, very Jewish, very Buddhist, very Hindu, very atheist; he’s taught plays that advocate for monarchy, for democracy, for socialism, for capitalism, for anarchy. Do I really need to tell you, Gentle Reader, that I’m not an adherent to all of these philosophies?” 

Was this effort by DeSantis useless? Pretty much (but see below). Creepy? Absolutely. Authoritarian? Arguably, but not conclusively. 

So let’s move on to the “Don’t Say Gay” law. No, those words are never used in the bill. But the reality on the ground suggests serial repression. Literally every restriction of freedom of expression purports to be grounded in higher ideals. To some on the left, censorship is legitimized by resisting the spread of racism, homophobia, or sexism; to some on the right, it’s the need to promote American values or to protect children. 

To some degree, there’s validity in all of these points of view: those goals are admirable. There are, of course, places where certain kinds of dissent are inappropriate: think Fred Phelps protesting at military funerals, for example. But there is, and should be, a difference between that which is inappropriate and that which is illegal. 

More to the point: this particular legislation is (intentionally, I believe) so vague that virtually any action could be seen to be in violation. In the area of race, for example, Florida schools, inspired by DeSantis and his acolytes, have removed from school curricula or libraries books about Martin Luther King, Jr. and Rosa Parks, and a film about Ruby Bridges. It was enough that one (count ‘em, one!) mother complained that “It might suggest that white people hate black people.” (Guess what? They did.) Oh, also removed were books about baseball players Hank Aaron and Roberto Clemente. Make that make sense. (Yes, some of those books were subsequently restored to the shelves. That hardly legitimizes their initial removal.) 

A Florida teacher recently got into trouble for showing a Disney movie to her class. No one seems to dispute the fact that the actual plot of the film was relevant to what she was teaching. Ah, but the lead character appears to be gay. And according to the (il)logic of many on the right—some of whom have posted on Ethics Alarms—that makes it about sex, and we need to protect kids from the reality that gay people exist that. These folks may indeed truly believe that a romantic relationship between a man and a woman is based on love, but such a union between two men or two women is exclusively about sex. I don’t; indeed, I find it hypocritical at best, abhorrent at worst. 

Plus, of course, there’s the utterly irresponsible and indeed slanderous suggestion that simply recognizing gay people as human is “grooming.” If you’re really concerned about grooming, come back when you’ve cleaned up the Catholic Church. But, more to the immediate point, the words of a popular meme resonate: “Teaching kids about frogs isn’t grooming them to be amphibians.” 

I’d note further that whatever one may think of the propriety of same-sex marriage or the ability for such couples to adopt, one thing is irrefutable: it’s not little Johnny’s fault that he has two dads. Abusing him or even excluding him from the group, which is what denying his lived reality does, is reprehensible. 

But, as they say in the late-night infomercials, wait! That’s not all! It may be a flimsy argument to say you’re protecting kids from fill-in-the-blank bogeyman, but at least it’s an argument. DeSantis, though, wants similar restrictions at the university level, where “protecting children” rings rather hollower as an excuse for censorship. There, the awful scourge on society is Critical Race Theory, which must not even be mentioned in passing.  Seriously? 

Oh, and DeSantis also tried to restrict state university faculty from testifying as expert witnesses in lawsuits or criminal trials. This is the proponent of diversity of opinion? Give me a break. 

Authoritarian? I think unquestionably. 

There is also DeSantis’s attack on tenure. He’s not alone in this pursuit, of course; a fair number of other GOP pols are similarly opposed to what is, after all, nothing more or less than a pledge on the part of a university to respect the academic freedom of faculty who have demonstrated sufficient excellence in teaching, research, and service to merit this consideration. (There are practical benefits to the university, too, of course, but few politicians from either party are either smart or curious enough to know this.) 

By the way, there are a host of reasons for which tenure can be revoked: gross incompetence, moral turpitude, financial exigency resulting in the retrenching of a program, and so on. Two points: 1). the burden of proof now rests with the university: they must prove their claim rather than the professors’ having to prove they should be retained, and 2). a professor’s legal (i.e., not libelous, seditious, violence-inciting, etc.) commentary is never a legitimate reason to revoke tenure. 

But I’m still not done. There was the takeover of New College, including firing trustees and replacing them with DeSantis minions whose first action was to fire the president. DeSantis wanted to turn the school into the “Hillsdale of the South.” Of course, that’s a marketing slogan rather than an actual desire. Indeed, he wants the anti-Hillsdale. Hillsdale is, first of all, a private college, which would mean that DeSantis couldn’t appoint its trustees. And he wants that ability more than Pooh wants honey. 

Hillsdale is also libertarian rather than conservative. Yes, in the current environment, there’s a fair amount of overlap, but if there’s one thing libertarians definitely don’t want, it’s to have a college or university controlled by the governor’s office. It’s pretty clear that DeSantis isn’t interested in diversity of ideas, but rather to have his views and only his views propagated, and he wants the state to underwrite the operation. He’s not yet Joe Stalin, but give him time to grow a mustache and we’ll see… 

The purge at New College is unprecedented to the best of my knowledge. Yes, it’s true that there is a recent trend towards governors’ appointing trustees (regents, councilors, whatever a particular institution calls them) based primarily on political affiliation, but I can recall no instances of firing existing trustees without cause. 

And the new trustees really are indeed nothing more than DeSantis minions. More ominously, they are exercising a level of interference in the day-to-day operation of the college that is also unprecedented. It is exceedingly rare to have any tenure recommendation coming from the school administration overturned—it might happen once or twice a year in the entire country. The case involving Nikole Hannah-Jones and the University of North Carolina made headlines for precisely this reason: that such events occur so infrequently. 

Even then, especially for existing faculty rather than new hires, it’s generally because there is not merely disagreement but profound disagreement among the various levels of input into the decision: department committee, department chair, college committee, dean, provost, president. It is quite rare that the de facto decision is made above the dean level. 

To have the majority of faculty recommended for tenure by the president denied by the trustees is outrageous. I started teaching (and reading The Chronicle of Higher Education) in 1979, and I’ve literally never heard of more than one tenure applicant recommended by the president of a college being denied by the trustees at any single college or university in a single year. New College this year: five. 

Would it be too paranoid to wonder if that collection of political affiliations of faculty mentioned above had some hidden and nefarious intent? Much as I am loath to accuse even an ultra-partisan narcissist like Ron DeSantis of such a thing, I’m afraid I can’t rule out the possibility. 

It’s also important to realize that applying for tenure is almost always a one-time event: you either get it or you get a one-year terminal appointment. Those five professors, then, who demonstrated their legitimate claim to tenure to their colleagues and superiors, are now going to be out of work because a gaggle of political hacks decided that obeisance to Ron DeSantis was more important than the good of the university they were pledged to support. 

As a longtime professor and a free speech advocate, I believe DeSantis’s actions with respect to New College are an abomination. You’re free to disagree with that assessment, Gentle Reader; it is, after all, only an opinion. Perhaps you think he was simply righting a wrong. But to suggest that his power play was anything less than authoritarian means our discussion is over, as I will simply label you incorrigible and move on.

Community College Administrators Behave Unethically and Irresponsibly. Water Remains Wet.

When Curmie first read about this story, he sent a quick e-mail off to Jack Marshall at Ethics Alarms, suspecting (correctly, as it happens) that Jack would be both interested and more likely than Curmie to get a post up first. 

Jack, being a lawyer, is able to take a different tack than Curmie, and introduce (or at the very least better articulate) legal arguments Curmie couldn’t.  Jack also suggests that I might see nuances he doesn’t.  I’m not so sure about that, but let me see what I can make of this.  I start by mentioning that Curmie learned about the case from a post by FIRE (the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education), an organization that purports to be non-partisan and, at least to a very large extent, is, although it’s been branded right-wing by some on the left (just as the ACLU has been branded left-wing by some on the right).

Allow Curmie to repeat what he’s said not infrequently over the years: that although his own politics are probably to the left of 95% of the population, in the area of free speech he has more to fear from the remaining 5% than from the multitude to his right.  (You may check out a similar assertion from a decade ago here.)  I remember one incident from over 20 years ago, when I was called into the Dean’s office and reprimanded for something I’d said in class because it “made some students uncomfortable.”  Apparently, “good” was not the desired response to this admonition. 

Anyway, I described the passage I was referencing to the Dean and asked two questions: was my comment accurate, and was it relevant?  He agreed that the answer to both questions was “yes.”  I then asked if I had been accused of using inappropriate language (racial or sexist slurs, that sort of thing).  I had not.  I therefore told him the requested apology would not be forthcoming.  Occasionally making students uncomfortable, frankly, ought to be part of the job description.  (I didn’t articulate this last part.)

OK, enough of that; here’s the story: This February, Kaylyn Willis was enrolled as a nursing student at Umpqua Community College in Oregon.  She was taking a course called Chronic I, taught by Patrick Harris.  

Apparently one of the goals of the course was to get students to employ “critical imagining” to better understand the perspective of a patient suffering from a chronic disease or disorder.  A few weeks into the class, the assignment was “to reflect on the support systems of chronically ill individuals and how a person with a chronic illness might respond to the sudden and unexpected loss of a support system.”  (The quotation is from the FIRE story; it’s unclear whether this was the exact wording of the assignment.)

Ms. Willis submitted an imaginative story about an ALS sufferer who shoots and kills her husband, who was that support system.  It’s actually an intriguing take, looking at the possibility of self-inflicted damage caused as an indirect result of the affliction.  It’s inspired by a 2015 Wisconsin case in which a jury found an ALS victim not guilty of murdering his wife and sister-in-law because he suffered from a neurocognitive disorder.

Mr. Harris teaches nursing, not literature, and proceeds to prove it by, to use Jack Marshall’s phrase, “flip[ping] out.”  Without evidence, or any appearance of thought, he decided Ms. Willis’s post was a joke.  He gave it a zero.  He may be a good nursing teacher, but he is singularly unqualified in terms of both credentials and temperament to judge an assignment like this. 

He responded to an email from Willis with this: “Do you honestly think that your post on a nursing school assignment was appropriate?  Joking about killing your husband?  I’m really questioning your critical thinking if you think this was an appropriate discussion post.”  Actually: 1). Yes, it was appropriate, since it met all the criteria of the assignment.  2). It wasn’t a joke, as any sensitive reader would understand, or at the very least suspect.  3). I’m really questioning how anyone this oblivious could possibly presume to judge someone else’s “critical thinking.”

Here’s the thing.  A faculty member is ethically obligated to apply what amounts to an “innocent until proven guilty” approach to dealing with student motives.  You think a student plagiarized?  Without proof, it’s just another paper.  You think a student isn’t taking a project seriously?  What you think doesn’t matter.  What can you prove? 

Eliminate all other options before making a decision.  Sure, call that student in and ask some hard questions.  Curmie has done that dozens of times over his career, and he’s developed something of a reputation for catching and punishing cheaters.  But intent matters.  If a student didn’t know s/he was breaking the rules, it’s time for a teaching moment, but not (necessarily, at least) for penalties.  Curmie isn’t a mind-reader, and Harris is even less of one.

Harris did the exact opposite of the ethical response, scurrying off to punish Willis even further, and the student was promptly removed from the program (!).  Seriously? 

Completely apart from the 1^st Amendment issues described by FIRE and on Ethics Alarms, this is some really hasty and frankly sloppy decision-making.  And let’s be real: violations of a handbook prohibition against “[a]cts which are dishonest, disrespectful, or disruptive” could be absolutely freaking anything.  Forbid the “dishonest,” absolutely.  But (insert B-movie gangster voice here) Curmie’s got your “disrespectful” and “disruptive” right heah. 

This kind of language is more common in high schools, where principals want absolute control and school boards are stupid enough to give it to them.  But the hierarchy of community colleges tends to work the same way: they believe their handbook came down from the mountaintop, and that its authors elbowed Moses and his tablets out of the way to get to the publisher first.  In fact, their little rulebook is seldom more than a thinly veiled declaration of absolutely not-to-be-questioned administrative authority.

Unsurprisingly, Ms. Willis appealed the inane decision, but the case was turned over to an anonymous (!) “grievance panel” which, shall we say, was not comprised of the brightest lights in the marquee. 

The panel highlighted a sentence in Willis’s inherently fictional response to a writing prompt as if… well, damned if Curmie can figure that part out, but it was very, very, very bad, whatever it was.  Willis, you see, in her post, “did not establish a caring relationship or create a positive environment.”  1).  Bullshit.  2).  Any such requirement for a class assignment is intrinsically flawed, and an instructor who either willfully misinterprets a students intentions or is too dim-witted to ascertain them truly has created an unhealthy environment.

She also “failed to take into account the culture of UCC by being insensitive to the October 1, 2015 event.”  1). Not her job.  2). Recreating the specific circumstances of that “event” (a student shot and killed a faculty member and eight students before killing himself) would indeed have been insensitive.  This wasn’t… or else literally any reference to any shooting anywhere under any circumstances would send the entire administration and professoriate diving under their desks like a bad parody of “duck and cover” drills.

The panel also accuses Willis of “[choosing] the wrong communication modality and technology.”  Stripped of the jargon, this means that Willis is deemed unfit as a student because she posted online, when that is what the assignment required.  Seriously, how can these people feed themselves?

Oh, and Willis also “described unethical and immoral behavior.”  Are you fucking kidding me?  First off, “described” (!).  Not “participated in” or “advocated,” mind you… “described.”  Of course, the panel seems to regard what Willis did as “unethical and immoral,” and here they are, describing it.  (Switch to Geico gecko voice now) Oh dear, oh dear.

Curmie is going to skip the rest of that incompetently thought-out document, instead merely citing Jack Marshall’s simple and direct statement that “The student didn’t have to justify her story for it to be fully protected speech.”  (Note here the parallel to the case of track star Brianna McNeal, who was similarly under no obligation to provide a reason why she missed a drug test, and to that of Courtni Webb, the high school student threatened with expulsion for writing a poem which sought to understand the motives of Newtown shooter Adam Lanza).

And then, of course, FIRE got into the act, and the college’s lawyers responded, and FIRE replied with this: “Willis may be in trouble for her fiction, but it’s UCC that can’t accept reality…. UCC is pretending that Willis’ rights don’t exist.  FIRE knows better.  We won’t close this chapter until Willis is reinstated and allowed to complete her program.”  Yeah, what they said.

FIRE’s goal would be a step.  But a better outcome would be for Ms. Willis to transfer to an institution a little less recto-cranially inverted, one that has some basic respect for its students and/or the US Constitution (either one would have been sufficient in this case).  Perhaps Mr. Harris doesn’t deserve to be fired, but he should certainly be reprimanded and not allowed to teach this particular course again.  Ever.  The various administrative minions who carried out this little purge should be demoted or (ahem) encouraged to resign. 

One final thought: it is quite likely that Ms. Willis is “that student,” the one who doesn’t really fit but does just enough good things and just few enough bad things to remain in the program.  Curmie has seen dozens of them over the years, and the urge to find something, anything, to legitimize a removal from the program is powerful.  But that’s not how it works, and behaving unprofessionally to enforce silly and misapplied standards of pseudo-professionalism would seem to be especially contra-indicated. 

Another Set of Short Takes

1). From Canton, Ohio, the city which houses the Pro Football Hall of Fame, comes this football-related story: McKinley High School head football coach Marcus Wattley and six of his assistant coaches were fired recently for forcing a player to eat pork against his religious beliefs. 

Former Coach Marcus Wattley

On the face of it, this is the only possible outcome of an action that is stunning in its arrogance, cruelty, and prejudice. The player, who has not been named (although his father has been, so it’s not like it’s a secret), is a member of the Hebrew Israeli religious faith, and as such is strictly forbidden from eating pork, pork residue, or apparently even pork substitutes. The boy’s attorney argues that the coaching staff should have known that prior to the events in question, since the player had been present at previous player meals. 

What happened, according to the boy and his representatives, is that he was being punished for missing a voluntary strength and conditioning session. He was ordered in sit in the center of the gym and consume an entire pepperoni pizza; if he didn’t, his teammates would be required to do additional drills and he was threatened with the possibility that he couldn’t stay on the team. 

The school and district ran a “nearly weeklong investigation” into the allegations, including viewing surveillance videos before taking action. The account of precisely what happened is disputed by George Pattakos, Wattley’s attorney, and by five players who supported the coach at the board meeting which led to Wattley’s dismissal. They claim that the player was offered chicken nuggets instead of the pizza, but that he chose to pick off the pepperoni and eat the rest of the pizza. Of course, this would have left the “pork residue” mentioned above. 

They claim, further, that an assistant coach who wanted Wattley’s job had circulated an exaggerated and deceptive description of the events to school officials and the player’s family. Pattakos also accused the board of a “rushed” decision, and claimed the coach “was doing his best to teach an extraordinary athlete an important lesson.” 

Curmie doesn’t know what happened. He doubts Wattley’s description of the events but grants that there might be some validity to it. But should Wattley and his minions have been fired? Absolutely. Even assuming other options were offered, we still have a player subjected to the emotional distress of choosing between being humiliated in front of his teammates or risk being ostracized by them. It’s an old tactic employed by authoritarian jackasses to remind everyone that they’re in charge. As Curmie is wont to say, “if you have to tell me, it ain’t so.” 

But the real problem in Curmie’s mind is in a word that may have slipped past you at first read, Gentle Reader: voluntary. The boy was being punished for skipping a voluntary session. OK, we all know that these allegedly voluntary practices are in fact just as required as the mandatory ones; they’re only called voluntary so the football coach can dominate players’ time throughout the summer and still technically not violate the rules of the school or the athletic conference. 

It’s an absolute scam, and everybody knows it, but no one is willing to say anything because… football. But, and as they say in burlesque it’s a big but, the unwritten rule is that the only punishment a coach can levy against someone who skips one of these sessions is benching him—because who plays and who doesn’t is within the legitimate purview of the coach, even of an unethical one. Wattley overstepped even that line. He’s gone, and should be. 

2). Those of us whose Congresscritter is Loony Louie Gohmert have known this for a long time, but the wider world is now learning that he truly is dumber than dirt. His recent (I was going to say “most recent,” but his stupidity is prolific, and he’s probably moved on, already) escapade was asking a representative of the Department of Agriculture if, and I quote, “there [is] anything that the National Forest Service or BLM can do to change the course of the moon’s orbit or the Earth’s orbit around the sun?” in order to curb climate change. It’s probably worth mentioning that BLM here is the Bureau of Land Management, not the other BLM. 

When Curmie first read this, he thought this had to be Andy Borowitz or the Onion. Nope: there’s video. Of course, this plays to liberal opinion of Gohmert, and we need to be cautious of going too far down that path. And to be fair, there’s a follow-up that suggests that Gohmert might, might have been joking. He reacts to a befuddled response to his earlier question with “Yeah, well, if you figure out a way that you in the Forest Service can make that change, I’d like to know.” 

If Gohmert’s question was sarcasm, then we have discovered the best dead-pan artist since Buster Keaton. But we also have something a little more problematic than simply a single moronic Congresscritter, as it would suggest a strategy to identify all attempts at mitigating climate change are either useless or illusory. Certainly a little conservation, the use of solar or other “green” energies, tax incentives associated with purchasing fuel-efficient vehicles (or disincentives to buy gas-guzzlers), restrictions on air pollutants: all these are to be abandoned. I think I’d rather go with “stupid.” 

3. One of Curmie’s Facebook friends posted a meme recently that suggests it’s an “American History Quiz.” There’s a series of questions with two possible answers: “A. Black lives” and “B. All lives.” Among the questions: “Brought to America on chains at the bottom of ships,” “Counted as 3/5 human in America,” etc. You get the idea. 

Curmiphiles who’ve been following this blog or the Facebook page for any length of time know that one thing that really annoys me is when an otherwise useful point is undercut by intellectual sloppiness or laziness. Let’s leave aside the more complex arguments and look specifically at one of those question prompts: “Enslaved in America for over 400 years.” Um… none of the above is the correct answer. 

Exactly when the first slaves in the New World arrived is unclear, but the earliest date I’ve seen is 1526, although a revolt ended that colony in a matter of months. Other historians would argue that slavery probably followed soon after the first permanent white settlement in 1565. (The 1619 project chooses their eponymous date because it was the first date of slaves in Virginia. Don’t ask me why.) The Emancipation Proclamation was 1863; the end of the Civil War was 1865. 

So… choosing the earliest date for slavery starting and the latest date for slavery ending, and we get (wait for it) 339 years. On Curmie’s planet, 339 is less than 400. You want to say “over 300 years,” fine. “Suffered prejudice,” yep. “Enslaved for over 400 years,” no. And an objective error of that magnitude renders the rest of the argument, which is valid, less persuasive. 

4. <Mumblemumble> years ago, when Curmie was a graduate student at the University of Birmingham in England, he did his banking at the local branch of Lloyd’s Bank. The choice was, to be honest, one of convenience rather than considered choice, as it was located en route between my bed-sit and the university. 

Nadia Begum and Clifford Weedon 

If he could go back in time, he might make a different choice, as the bank fired a branch manager because she helped an elderly, visually impaired customer, open his mail. Yes, Gentle Reader, you read that correctly. She assisted a customer, and the banking conglomerate sacked her for her efforts. 

Surely there’s more to this than that, right? If so, Curmie can’t find it or imagine it. Nadia Begum developed a friendship with Clifford Weedon and helped him out. But that, apparently, is against the rules, which, to be sure, descended from the mountaintop, elbowing Moses and the 10 Commandments out of the way. 

Even in the torrent of negative press Lloyd’s suffered when the BBC told the story, they continued to sniff that “we have a colleague code of responsibility in place to safeguard both our colleagues and customers…. In this instance our standards were not met.” Curmie doesn’t know which they need more: a brain or a box of laxative. 

The good news is that Ms. Begum was headhunted by Octopus Energy, whose CEO specifically wanted “Nadia’s warmth and humanity.” The other good news is that Curmie will never again have to deal with Lloyd’s Bank. 

5. Curmie isn’t sure how this case made it as far as federal court, but at least the 3rd Circuit Court of Appeals got it right. Seven years ago, Emma Semler and her friend Jenny Werstler shot up heroin in the bathroom of a West Philadelphia KFC. Werstler, who was celebrating (if that’s the word) her 20th birthday, wanted a second shot, whereupon she overdosed, and died. Semler had fled the scene, leaving her friend to her fate instead of calling for help, so she’s no angel. 

But prosecutors decided that because Semler physically passed Werstler the drugs, she was guilty of “distribution,” which carries a minimum 20-year sentence. Five years after the event, she was convicted of that presumed offense. OK, anyone with an IQ over room temperature knows that law was intended to go after dealers and pushers, not addicts. 

But some crusading DA or ADA wanted to make a name for him/herself, and so the case found its way to the appeals court, which found, quite reasonably, in the words of Judge Jane Richards Roth:

The government would have us believe that if two drug addicts jointly and simultaneously purchase methamphetamine and return home to smoke it together, a ‘distribution’ has occurred each time the addicts pass the pipe back and forth to each other. Such an interpretation diverts punishment from traffickers to addicts, who contribute to the drug trade only as end users and who already suffer disproportionally from its dangerous effects.

Semler, who seems to have cleaned herself up after the death of her friend, was certainly a contributor to Werstler’s demise, but she was hardly a “distributor.” 

Whoever brought these charges and the judge who allowed the case to go forward and even prescribed a harsher sentence than the one required by law for distribution should be fired, disbarred, and probably arrested; every juror who went along with this charade needs to be wupped up ‘side the head with a 2x4. 

6. As it happens, Curmie has a Comment of the Day on Ethics Alarms, this one on the hype surrounding the casting of black actress Jodie Turner-Smith as Anne Boleyn in a new TV mini-series currently airing on the UK’s Channel 5. You can see Jack Marshall’s original post on the subject here.

A half dozen short takes...

A series of short takes… not topics I want to spend my usual 1000 or more words on, but worthy of comment. 

1. Students will know my politics. 

A Facebook friend I’ve known for roughly half a century recently posted a meme stating that “If your students know your political affiliation, you have failed as a teacher. Teachers are there to help students think for themselves, not think like you.” The second sentence is true… sort of. The first sentence is utter crap. 

Let’s start with the latter idea: if “think like you” means “agree with your conclusions,” then I wholeheartedly agree. I always want students who will argue, politely but emphatically, with each other or with me. We’ll get nowhere, either in the classroom or in society, if everyone agrees all the time: we would be reduced to choosing policies based on who speaks first rather than on what’s the best idea. 

If, however, “think like you” means that a teacher should model logical thinking, a pursuit of truth, a skepticism about likely partisan sources… well, in that case, I very much do want my students to “think like [I do].” 

But that first sentence is amazing in its over-simplified arrogance. In my current summer-school class, I have two (that I know of) non-binary students. If I respect them enough to use their chosen names instead of the “dead names” that show up on my role sheet, if I refer to them by their chosen pronouns instead of those applicable to someone else with their physical characteristics, those students—and the others—will know my politics. 

If, given the fact that in 1847 over ten shiploads of food a day were exported from Ireland to England, I refer to the mid-1840s in Ireland as “the Great Hunger,” as my Irish friends do, rather than “the Great Famine,” as many of the textbooks would have it, students will know my politics. 

If, in a different class, I make sure to point out that Congressman Joe Starnes famously asked Hallie Flanagan, the head of the Federal Theatre Project, if Marlowe and Euripides were communists, students will know my politics. 

If, in that same class, I suggest that Anatoly Lunacharsky may have had the coolest job title in history—Komisar of Education and Enlightenment—but one of the worst-ever jobs—serving as liaison between Josef Stalin and the Russian arts community—students will know my politics. 

If, in still a different class, I discuss the process of choosing a theatre season and emphasize the importance of having enough good roles for women and for people of color, students will know my politics. 

Most importantly, when I am honest enough to tell students my political opinions so they can factor that information into their decision as to whether or not to agree with my conclusions, rather than pretending to an objectivity that is ultimately impossible to achieve, students will know my politics. If that’s failing as a teacher, so be it. 

2. Taiwan is a country. 

Curmie is old enough to remember when then-President Gerald Ford proclaimed in a debate with Democratic challenger Jimmy Carter that “There is no Soviet domination of Eastern Europe and there never will be under a Ford administration.” It’s probable that he misspoke, that he meant to argue that despite the USSR’s military and economic domination, the people of, say, Poland, proudly maintained their national identity. But that’s not what he said, and he was portrayed, not unreasonably, with failing to recognize the political reality of Eastern Europe. Many historians believe that single line cost him the 1976 election. 

A similar moment played out recently involving a considerably less important figure than the President of the United States. This time the offender was wrestler and B-movie actor John Cena. There’s a twist, though, and not merely in the status of the speaker. You see, in a promotional spot for an upcoming movie, Cena had the audacity to call Taiwan a country. Yes, it’s a country, but the fine folks in Beijing—you know, the ones whose lies about the coronavirus exacerbated the pandemic—were sore offended, because despite… you know... reality, Beijing still regards the island as their territory. Absurdly, organizations like the United Nations have allowed them to perpetuate this fraud. 

But whereas American diplomats might need to tread carefully around a vexed topic, there’s nothing to prevent an apolitical celebrity from speaking the truth. Well, there is something: money. Cena wants his movie to sell in mainland China, so his tough guy image melted faster than ice cream in a Texas summer when confronted with angry tweets from Beijing. Cena immediately apologized—in Mandarin, no less—to “China and the Chinese people,” deploring his “mistake,” and groveling rather embarrassingly. 

The good news is that his renunciation of the reality that he himself had described was met with derision from across the political spectrum. When, after all, was the last time Keith Olbermann (who called the apology “shameful”) and Tom Cotton (who declared it “pathetic”) agreed on anything, including that grass is green? The almighty dollar still reigns supreme, even in the communist world, but maybe we’re coming to understand that there might be some circumstances in which it shouldn’t? Baby steps. Baby steps. 

3. Calling out hypocrites is a good thing. 

Curmie is no great fan of President Biden (“lesser of two evils” isn’t high praise), but I do appreciate skill at political gamesmanship, and it doesn’t get much better than pointing out the fact that a goodly number of GOP legislators have been claiming credit for various provisions of the American Rescue Plan, a.k.a. the second pandemic package: the very bill they had voted against. And he read out their names! In a just universe, none would be re-elected; this is, alas, somewhat less than a just universe, but embarrassing the hypocrites can’t be all bad. 

4. Lying with statistics. 

President Biden gets credit for what Curmie just described, but he also gets called out for crass political posturing. Whereas any attempt to reduce hate crimes, especially violence, is a good thing, exaggerating the extent of, in this case, anti-Asian activity is a good way to look silly. So the hype surrounding the need for new anti-hate legislation, much of it coming from the White House, is really so much balloon juice. Left-leaning news sites breathlessly report some 6603 “hate incidents” in the year between March 2020 and March 2021. That figure is drawn from the report of an organization called Stop AAPI Hate. And there are… let’s see… a little over 23,200,000 Asians and Asian-Americans in the US. So 1 in 3514 Asians experienced some kind of bias in that year. Oh, and over 83% of those incidents weren’t crimes: verbal harassment and shunning may be despicable, but they’re not criminal. So let’s amend that number to 1 in over 20,000 who endured violence, civil rights violations, vandalism, etc. 

We also see that “Anti-Asian hates crimes increased by nearly 150%, mostly in N.Y. and L.A.”. That sounds bad. But if we’re going to call out Tucker Carlson for using statistics to deceive, we need to do so here, too. Yes, New York and Los Angeles saw significant increases: from a total of 10 cases in those two cities in 2019 to 43 in 2020. Curmie is having trouble disentangling numbers for the city and county of Los Angeles, and isn’t sure which is being referenced in the increase of 7 to 15 cases there, so let’s just look at New York: 28 cases for a total Asian population of a little under 2,000,000 (apologies that the best source I can find is Wikipedia). The East Asian population is just under 750,000; that’s probably the more relevant figure, but if the case numbers say “Asian,” then perhaps the larger number is indeed more accurate. Even limiting the population figures to just four East Asian nationalities: Chinese, Japanese, Korean, and Vietnamese, the average East Asian would go for roughly 27 years without experiencing a 1% chance of a race-inspired crime. This is not exactly cause for panic. 

5. You can’t make this stuff up. 

(Alleged) serial sexual predator Kevin Spacey will appear in his first acting role since the proverbial fecal matter interfaced the whirling rotors some four years ago. The role: “a detective investigating a false claim of paedophilia.” Bloody hell.

6. It’s actually OK to produce No Exit.

Students—it’s unclear exactly how many—at Western Washington University sought to cancel the production of Jean-Paul Sartre’s No Exit, claiming it ignores matters of gender and sexuality (among other things).  Curmie is, shall we say, unconvinced.  

I first read about this incident on Ethics Alarms; I e-mailed that site’s proprietor, Jack Marshall, saying I would be responding, but I might be writing more than would qualify as simply a comment.  He suggested I send him my commentary and he would post it as a Guest Post.  I agreed.  So, here’s my post; I do suggest that you read Jack’s earlier post on the subject (and follow the links he includes) to be better able to understand what I’m talking about, since my remarks were intended to be read by people who were already familiar with the basics of the story.