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Professor suspended for saying 那个 nà ge

languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu

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Re: Professor suspended for saying 那个 nà ge

#281

Post by tgv »

stjohnswarts wrote: post #253

It sounds like he can sue for lost and potential lost salary for sure. This is not a legitimate reason to fire him if he was doing it innocently. Students could have said something and he could have avoided it I suppose. However whenever I hear the term "microaggressions" I know I'm talking with an idiot who values being emotional over being logical and just stop the conversation.

It's apparently a common word, a demonstrative pronoun, similar to "that". Pretty hard to avoid without language acrobatics.

Re: Professor suspended for saying 那个 nà ge

#282

Post by sydd »

anonu wrote: post #255

The comment at the end is spot on: Please know that there are many people that support you and are sick of this hyper-sensitive, McCarthyism-like environment that is being fostered across the country." My view on this is it's the culmination of years of anti free speech trends on campus. It's a sad day when universities which should be bastions of tolerance, exploration and ideas have their culture consistently chipp…

But why does the university cave in so easily? Why is the Dean himself crawling on the floor to apologize for basically nothing? Are they afraid of bad PR? or lawsuits? Why?

Re: Professor suspended for saying 那个 nà ge

#283

Post by Alex3917 »

vladd wrote: post #276
anonu wrote: post #255

The comment at the end is spot on: Please know that there are many people that support you and are sick of this hyper-sensitive, McCarthyism-like environment that is being fostered across the country." My view on this is it's the culmination of years of anti free speech trends on campus. It's a sad day when universities which should be bastions of tolerance, exploration and ideas have their culture consistently chipp…

At the end of the day, students vote with their wallet. The decision of the dean chooses to protect an environment of low-risk social-compliant low-EQ classroom, which will act as a deterrent on the university's prestige moving forward (e.g. you don't see those traits associated with MIT or Harvard). At the end of the day the dean might get fired for his actions. To use an analogy, "nobody gets fired for choosing IBM…

> e.g. you don't see those traits associated with MIT or Harvard

Didn't this entire movement basically start with Larry Summers?

Re: Professor suspended for saying 那个 nà ge

#284

Post by SpicyLemonZest »

neonate wrote: post #244
Yetanfou wrote: post #205

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wonder how those who want to find the cause of their failure in other people's success eventually deal with the fact that Nigerian immigrants into the USA are far more successful compared to African Americans while they are visually indistinguishable from them. Will the Nigerians be accused of having some form of privilege? Will they be called 'white' just like Asians are now often considered to be 'white'? Will sa…

It's not so hard to understand. The issue is the legacy of slavery, and Nigerian immigrants aren't dealing with that.

Most racial justice activists don't agree - they believe that there's significant ongoing racism in addition to the legacy of slavery.

Re: Professor suspended for saying 那个 nà ge

#285

Post by white-flame »

sydd wrote: post #282
anonu wrote: post #255

The comment at the end is spot on: Please know that there are many people that support you and are sick of this hyper-sensitive, McCarthyism-like environment that is being fostered across the country." My view on this is it's the culmination of years of anti free speech trends on campus. It's a sad day when universities which should be bastions of tolerance, exploration and ideas have their culture consistently chipp…

But why does the university cave in so easily? Why is the Dean himself crawling on the floor to apologize for basically nothing? Are they afraid of bad PR? or lawsuits? Why?

I would say that's the most likely explanation. Plus, we see very similar things happen in primary education, where the loudest craziest parents cause the biggest potential PR/legal kerfuffles, so the schools often bend to them instead of standing on educational principles.

Re: Professor suspended for saying 那个 nà ge

#286

Post by clairity »

ev1 wrote: post #248
latch wrote: post #19

This word means "uhmm" and you can hear it dozens of times in a single conversation. It sounds like an English-language racial slur, but you stop being surprised to hear it pretty quickly when living in China. The story isn't loading for me, so I don't know the context, if this was a native Mandarin speaker speaking in Mandarin... Reminds me of the time someone pointed out that "salut" the french for "hi" sounds like…

The entire lead up to the professor saying it is the professor also explaining how certain cultures like in Chinese have pause words. There is absolutely all the correct context. The entire suspension is absurd.

yes, you hear it in chinese dramas all the time (which i watch subtitled), usually as a phrase trailing off ambiguously/uncertainly. the incident seems much ado about nothing.

Re: Professor suspended for saying 那个 nà ge

#287

Post by TheOperator »

neilv wrote: post #56

I just watched the video after reading the article, and the video -- if it's of the incident to which people were objecting -- wasn't as cringey as I expected it to be; however , I would've hoped that an expert who was lecturing about language and culture would've anticipated the problem, and been more sensitive to it. Maybe, if he saw the problem, he could've prefaced the example with warning, or otherwise acknowled…

>I would've hoped that an expert who was lecturing about language and culture would've anticipated the problem, and been more sensitive to it.

If you're speaking Mandarin you are going to hear this homophone with even less context than the professor is giving. Should professors slow down their lectures (which he did explaining the context) or compromise their education by simply not covering the topic to protect the sensibilities of adults?

>One reason I would suspect it's a problem (which I heard in a TV show, in which a character explains how an anti-gay slur is hurtful to them), is that they grew up hearing that slur hurled in the context of other injustices, from childhood. I can also imagine that insensitivity to how hurtful a slur is could feel like a signal that someone doesn't understand or care about the associated injustices.

Trigger warnings are not meaningfully helpful or harmful https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/216770261982701...

I've at least experienced hearing slurs in negative contexts, and people discussing them brashly without "contextualizing" it. Sometimes it's pretty jarring, sometimes it feels bad. I still have absolutely no patience for not even engaging in, but enforcing under threat to somebodies career that they engage in the practice of trigger warnings. That is just using peoples suffering to push a personal agenda which nominally will help other people but which evidence shows will not help other people.

Re: Professor suspended for saying 那个 nà ge

#288

Post by ffggvv »

xg15 wrote: post #280

To play sort-of devil's advocate, while the concrete situation is completely over-the-top, it's easy to imagine that "nà ge" could become an actual racist dog whistle if widely enough known. E.g., I personally believe there is ample room for criticism on the way the Israeli government treats Palestinians (to put it mildly). There are some attempts to define any and all criticism on the Israeli government by non-jews…

whats the point of that random devils advocate scenario when that isn't at all what happened and doesn't have any bearing on the current scenario

Re: Professor suspended for saying 那个 nà ge

#289

Post by vladd »

sydd wrote: post #282
anonu wrote: post #255

The comment at the end is spot on: Please know that there are many people that support you and are sick of this hyper-sensitive, McCarthyism-like environment that is being fostered across the country." My view on this is it's the culmination of years of anti free speech trends on campus. It's a sad day when universities which should be bastions of tolerance, exploration and ideas have their culture consistently chipp…

But why does the university cave in so easily? Why is the Dean himself crawling on the floor to apologize for basically nothing? Are they afraid of bad PR? or lawsuits? Why?

Deans, just like CEOs, are at the top of the leadership chain to protect the interests of the institution, and especially to maintain a long-term vision against short-term gains and speculation.

Most people cave in when it's time to make such decisions. A lot of folks would chose a cookie in the short term, while desiring to have a six-pack on the medium outlook.

In business or education, you fail as a leader every time you don't make that trade-off: every time when you take a quarterly one-time gain against the long-term interest or profits of the corporation, or when you fail to protect freedom of speech and the right of innovators to take risks just because the "safe path" is easier for now.

I think Paul Graham touches on this very well in his latest essay:

>> Why do the independent-minded need to be protected, though? Because they have all the new ideas. To be a successful scientist, for example, it's not enough just to be right. You have to be right when everyone else is wrong. Conventional-minded people can't do that. For similar reasons, all successful startup CEOs are not merely independent-minded, but aggressively so. So it's no coincidence that societies prosper only to the extent that they have customs for keeping the conventional-minded at bay. >> For the last couple centuries at least, when the aggressively conventional-minded were on the rampage for whatever reason, universities were the safest places to be. That may not work this time though, due to the unfortunate fact that the latest wave of intolerance began in universities. perhaps the decline in the spirit of free inquiry within universities is as much the symptom of the departure of the independent-minded as the cause. People who would have become professors 50 years ago have other options now. Now they can become quants or start startups. You have to be independent-minded to succeed at either of those. If these people had been professors, they'd have put up a stiffer resistance on behalf of academic freedom. So perhaps the picture of the independent-minded fleeing declining universities is too gloomy. Perhaps the universities are declining because so many have already left http://paulgraham.com/conformism.html

Re: Professor suspended for saying 那个 nà ge

#290

Post by white-flame »

geofft wrote: post #268
hintymad wrote: post #243

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is hardly surprising. We used to have lots of civil social discourse. Media, elites, and intellectuals would engage in such discourse and would present sometimes opposing thoughts. Only with such discourse will there be no room for radicals. And look what's been happening, moderates of a few years ago would be considered far-right today. Anyone with different opinions, now matter what reasons they offer, will be…

I think you're making your own counterargument: if you prioritize civil discourse, you necessarily exclude radicals - you've limited the space of discourse by insisting that the only acceptable propositions are those that people can reliably be civil about. Fewer people were making extreme claims, but many of those extreme claims could have been debated rationally, were people interested in doing so. It is a Potemkin…

There's also the moving goalposts of what's considered "extremist", especially where it's reduced around extremely small confines of acceptability, and invoking long-tail assumptions as direct accusations of intent against people.
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