Is This Fragility, Stupidity, or Just Narcissism?

Regular readers of this blog will know that Curmie is a big fan of finding links, confluences, and coincidences that bring together ideas that wouldn’t normally be associated with each other.  And here we go…

Last week, Curmie was called for jury duty.  He arrived at the courthouse a few minutes before he was scheduled to report, finally found an unlocked door, and joined the 75 or so other folks crowded into the hallway outside the courtroom of District Judge Jefferson Davis (this is Texas, remember, Gentle Reader?).  A few minutes after things were supposed to get underway, the courtroom door opened and we began to file in.

By pure chance, Curmie happened to be rather close to the open door instead of the one on the other side of the courtroom, so he was probably in the first dozen or fifteen propective jurors to enter.  But when he presented his card, the woman scanned down the list and couldn’t find his name.  Had he submitted the online questionnaire?  Yes, nearly three weeks previously. 

So either there was a technical glitch or one side or the other glanced at Curmie’s answers and ran screaming into the night even before the voir dire.  (Curmie rode down the elevator with another man who’d had the same experience, so it wasn’t just him.)  Anyway, Curmie proceeded to return home and take a nap.

The incident did recall, however, the one time Curmie actually served on a jury.  Twentysomething years ago, Curmie was a juror in a criminal case in which the defendant was charged with one count of simple battery and two counts of battery of a police officer.  It was pretty clear that the guy really did beat up his girlfriend, and that he took a swing at the cop who intervened.

That’s where things get a little murkier.  The policemen claimed he’d swung at one, grazed him, and ultimately hit the other, so he was guilty of both counts of battery.  Curmie believed that the guy had tried to hit the older cop, missed altogether, and accidentally hit the younger one.  He was able to convince the other jurors of his point of view.

The younger cop, the one who wasn’t a self-important asshole, was very hesitant on the stand and looked very much like he was more interested in appeasing his partner than in telling the truth.  Curmie remembers saying that he’d rather have the older cop lose his badge than convict the defendant, but that wasn’t an option.  Anyway, we convicted the defendant on two counts and acquitted him on the other. 

The day after Curmie’s jury non-adventure, he read this story from FIRE (the Federation for Individual Rights and Expression).  Curmie taught for a long time—well over 200 sections of college courses—and often used analogies and imagined scenaria to amplify or clarify a point in a lecture.  To see a law professor punished for doing so certainly aroused Curmie’s interest. 

But there was also the element of “transferred intent,” i.e., a situation in which someone tries to hurt Person X but hurts Person Y instead… precisely the scenario Curmie had been thinking about when remembering that case from a couple of decades ago.  So that raised the story from one to post about on the Facebook page to one to blog about.

The basics of the story are as follows: Kenneth Lawson is a law professor at the University of Hawai’i.  In a lecture about transferred intent, he used a hypothetical example: what if one of the school deans tried to shoot a different dean but shot Lawson himself instead?  This is precisely the kind of thing that happens in damned near every classroom in the country.  The only minor difference is that Lawson showed images of the hypothetical perp and the equally hypothetical intended and actual victims.  (You can see that image on FIRE page linked above.)

Ah, but one (apparently only one) anonymous (of course) student complained, describing the hypothetical as “extremely disturbing.”  Seriously!  This is a law student, mind you: in their twenties, at least, presumably of above average intelligence, and preparing for a career dealing with some stuff that actually is disturbing.

As FIRE’s Graham Piro wrote to the university, “To receive a proper education in the law, students will inevitably encounter difficult topics like sexual assault, homicide, physical assault, domestic violence, and may be faced in school and in their careers with descriptions of personal injuries far more graphic than those in Lawson’s hypothetical.”

The two cases both suggest pretty clearly that you don’t need to have the maturity of a spoiled toddler to get into law school, and that law school deans are apparently a hypersensitive, fragile, and humorless lot.  Naturally, the administration butted in, clumsily, stupidly, and in violation of any norm of academic freedom. (Details in a moment.)

Curmie was reminded of a case he wrote about almost 14 years ago.  The scenario was similar, although in that hypothetical, it was the professor who “shot” the dean.  Here’s a little of what Curmie said at the time:

I confess I have difficulty mustering a considerable amount of sympathy for the fragile little flowers who can’t endure a bit of a challenge to their world-view….

I don’t recall ever using my dean in such a hypothetical situation, but I very well might have. I know that in discussing Aristotle I’ve hypothesized that George W. Bush got hit by a bus (tragedy requires the protagonist be important). But, curiously enough, I never got visited by the Secret Service for that flight of fancy, because it was clear that I was making a very different point than threatening the President.

So what happened in Lawson’s case?  Well, the administrators admitted that Lawson had not violated any policy, but nonetheless demanded that he remove the thought experiment from a posted video of the class — or they would change it for him.  Curmie would be sore tempted to tell some busybody administrator that they could perform and exercise best suited to extremely limber hermaphrodites.  Or perhaps to break out a phrase that has found its way onto a good many t-shirts that get advertised on Curmie’s social media feed: póg mo thóin.

Of course, Lawson refused to do their idiotic bidding, and they did indeed alter his video… but get this, Gentle Reader.  They apparently didn’t care about the violence or the intentionality issues: they just didn’t want to be used in the exercise.  Curmie can’t do better than Piro in describing what happened:

“Remember: these changes were being made because, supposedly, some found a hypothetical of campus figures being shot to be disturbing. So this [the image you see at the top of this post] is what the administration came up with.

You will note that there is still a campus figure on that slide, and it’s the person who was (hypothetically) shot: Professor Lawson. Only the deans have been removed. It seems that at UH, some hypothetical victims are more equal than others.”

Tell it like it is, Graham!  (And nice Orwellian reference, too!)

Oh, and in the letter mentioned above, there’s this: “If the inclusion of the deans is “disturbing and harmful” to students in Lawson’s class, why would the idea of their professor being shot not be equally or more “disturbing”? This glaring double standard leaves room for only one interpretation: that UH’s objection to the slide is not about students’ psychological wellbeing, but rather about enforcing an unwritten and unwarranted prohibition against lese-majeste intended to protect the image or ego of high-ranking administrators.

Damn, Graham!

Piro goes on to suggest that this is more than “just more campus craziness,” and wonders “If administrators can ‘memory hole’ bits and pieces of curricula they don’t like, even when it violates no rule, where does it stop?”  He’s got a point.  Unfortunately, this kind of administrative interference has become so commonplace that it hardly even qualifies as news.  (And if it’s not some moronic dean, it’s an idiot state legislator.  Curmie offers the usual apologies for redundancy.)

Anyway, we’re left with three conclusions, which Curmie lists here in increasing order of confidence.

1.     1. Kenneth Lawson is good at his job.

2.     2. Law school deans need more bran in their diets.

3.     3. Curmie wants to be Graham Piro when he grows up.