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Academe is a hotbed of craven snitches

chronicle.com

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Re: Academe is a hotbed of craven snitches

#41

Post by yike321123 »

vvpan wrote: post #12
humanistbot wrote: post #8

If you are the President of a university (or a company) that has an explicit official policy prohibiting romantic relationships between superiors and subordinates, and you have a semi-secret romantic relationship with a subordinate that many people know about, then someone in the know who is upset with one of your management decisions retaliates by telling the truth to HR, then I have zero sympathy for you. Are they…

"Rules are meant to be broken" is a great maxim in my opinion. It's the expression of truly democratic attitude towards rules. Something that's "technically wrong" but taken by the majority as not an ethical issue deserves to live because it questions the legitimacy of the rule. How any progress happens.

In any situation where an individual has direct power over another can you really claim any form of relationship born from this is consensual? For many people who are not women it can be easy to shrug this aside for their own "personal interests" especially those in academia where most women tend to either leave the workforce or are left outside the pool of candidates for an individual. From an outsiders perspective looking in all I can say is no they cannot.

Re: Academe is a hotbed of craven snitches

#42

Post by recuter »

jchw wrote: post #37
recuter wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Zoot Allure. And what pray tell if these people fell in love? Is this not the plot of countless romance novels and movies for a reason? Nobody is special. Must follow rules. You will be reported. Zero sympathy. No exceptions. Are we in East Germany? Imagine if you were French. Or had a pulse. I swear, society is overrun with gross troglodytes. Look, lets be real honest here. The snitch is usually an unattractive jeal…

And we’ve blown past Godwin’s law already. That was fast. If the rule is so bad… shouldn’t they fix the rule ? But it’s there for a reason, so they shouldn’t fix it. It’s not broken.

I specifically said East! East! haha.

The person I responded to phrased it in a soul revealing manner:

> you chose to flagrantly violate the rules, thinking that you were special

Therefore the snitch will punish you and vengefully cut you down to size. You will be equally unspecial and unhappy compared to the snitch, don't you see?

We aren't talking some rule about borrowing red staplers. We're talking about private affairs between adults. Could be a perfectly happy couple.

This is very much the toxic vibe of East Germany and USSR societies. To a tee.

Re: Academe is a hotbed of craven snitches

#43

Post by ceeplusplus »

humanistbot wrote: post #8

If you are the President of a university (or a company) that has an explicit official policy prohibiting romantic relationships between superiors and subordinates, and you have a semi-secret romantic relationship with a subordinate that many people know about, then someone in the know who is upset with one of your management decisions retaliates by telling the truth to HR, then I have zero sympathy for you. Are they…

This comment really ignores the rest of the stories presented in the article, all of which paint a damning picture of cancel culture and wokeism (regardless of whether you consider these things legitimate causes) being wielded as political weapons by unscrupulous actors in academia.

Re: Academe is a hotbed of craven snitches

#44

Post by michaelt »

MattGaiser wrote: post #14

> for either minor or nonexistent offenses On the one hand, society institutes these rules and we supposedly claim to be rule following people. On the other hand, people who try to have the rules enforced are labelled as "snitches." Your answer to why tragedies occur but even when people knew, nobody did anything. Do the rules matter or not?

> Do the rules matter or not?

Go to the cops and try to turn yourself in for that time you ticked a "I have read the terms and conditions" checkbox dishonestly. I suspect you'll find some rules matter more than others.

Re: Academe is a hotbed of craven snitches

#45

Post by zozbot234 »

giraffe_lady wrote: post #9

I'm having a serious "Gell-Mann Amnesia effect" moment on this one: I don't think that representation of the Ewell paper is quite accurate, though admittedly it's been over a year since I read it. Despite being Jewish (would have had different significance later than during his time!) Schenker was a proud german nationalist and in his own words considered his method one of the ways german people could assert their su…

Schenker was a music critic/journalist of his day who routinely used exaggerated rhetoric to inflate his claims towards his largely non-professional audience. The basics of his analysis method are genuinely remarkably well-founded in historical practice (far more so than the "harmony" practice that's taught in music-theory introductory courses nowadays), but they are also much better described and contextualized by fully considering historical sources, as opposed to a narrow focus on Schenker himself. For instance, melodic reduction (undoing diminution and teasing out long-range prolongational relations) was integral already to the Italian Solfeggio of the 18th century, as recently discovered by music scholar Nicholas Baragwanath https://global.oup.com/academic/product/the-solfeggio-tradit... . Schenker is getting a lot of bad rhetoric thrown at him these days, but he started that game in the first place.

Re: Academe is a hotbed of craven snitches

#46

Post by throwaway821909 »

recuter wrote: post #28
humanistbot wrote: post #8

If you are the President of a university (or a company) that has an explicit official policy prohibiting romantic relationships between superiors and subordinates, and you have a semi-secret romantic relationship with a subordinate that many people know about, then someone in the know who is upset with one of your management decisions retaliates by telling the truth to HR, then I have zero sympathy for you. Are they…

Zoot Allure. And what pray tell if these people fell in love? Is this not the plot of countless romance novels and movies for a reason? Nobody is special. Must follow rules. You will be reported. Zero sympathy. No exceptions. Are we in East Germany? Imagine if you were French. Or had a pulse. I swear, society is overrun with gross troglodytes. Look, lets be real honest here. The snitch is usually an unattractive jeal…

Normally I'd think "the President should follow the rules as well, so they have incentive to improve them". But maybe with tricky issues like this, the apparent self-interest in changing the rules would be seen just as badly as breaking them.

Also: if you could just as easily break vs. change a rule, want to do so, but still believe it's generally a good rule - is it better to just break it?

I guess this is what both sustains and dooms autocracies.

Re: Academe is a hotbed of craven snitches

#47

Post by jchw »

recuter wrote: post #42
jchw wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And we’ve blown past Godwin’s law already. That was fast. If the rule is so bad… shouldn’t they fix the rule ? But it’s there for a reason, so they shouldn’t fix it. It’s not broken.

I specifically said East! East! haha. The person I responded to phrased it in a soul revealing manner: > you chose to flagrantly violate the rules, thinking that you were special Therefore the snitch will punish you and vengefully cut you down to size. You will be equally unspecial and unhappy compared to the snitch, don't you see? We aren't talking some rule about borrowing red staplers. We're talking about private…

The whole reason why it’s difficult to empathize is not about whether someone snitches or not, or the mentality of the person who snitches. It’s already clear that the incentives for rule enforcement is screwy.

But the rule is there for a reason, a good reason, and everybody else had to follow it. I’ve heard of people leaving companies and having to effectively be demoted due to interpersonal relationships; that’s the responsible thing to do. It avoids the issues of conflict of interest and power dynamics. Choosing to simply flaunt the rules is not exactly admirable and maybe not even that romantic. The maximally romantic thing would be to give up the position as a sacrifice.

Do I get why someone wouldn’t want to do that? Sure, but you can’t eat your cake and have it too…

Re: Academe is a hotbed of craven snitches

#48

Post by otterley »

MattGaiser wrote: post #14

> for either minor or nonexistent offenses On the one hand, society institutes these rules and we supposedly claim to be rule following people. On the other hand, people who try to have the rules enforced are labelled as "snitches." Your answer to why tragedies occur but even when people knew, nobody did anything. Do the rules matter or not?

It’s not that black and white. Even rules themselves are subject to interpretation. Rules can matter, but first there needs to be agreement on what they mean: what precise conduct they proscribe — and, equally important — what they don’t.

Re: Academe is a hotbed of craven snitches

#49

Post by lbarrow »

giraffe_lady wrote: post #9

I'm having a serious "Gell-Mann Amnesia effect" moment on this one: I don't think that representation of the Ewell paper is quite accurate, though admittedly it's been over a year since I read it. Despite being Jewish (would have had different significance later than during his time!) Schenker was a proud german nationalist and in his own words considered his method one of the ways german people could assert their su…

Kipnis clearly doesn't think much of the Ewell paper, but I don't think her point centers on its contents; it's more that someone collected and published scholarly responses to the paper, and the social media pushback against these responses led to a grad student narcing on his professor and the professor losing funding, the journal, etc. That, to me, is not a healthy dynamic for a university to run on.

edit: Actually let me go a step further and agree with you a bit - I think Kipnis's point would be more clearly made if she didn't make her own perspective on the merits of the Ewell paper such a big part of that section of the article.

Re: Academe is a hotbed of craven snitches

#50

Post by a9h74j »

xhkkffbf wrote: post #4

It's sad but true in my experience. My thesis advisor makes this a sport, apparently. I learned this after I graduated. One friend explained that my advisor would often call up colleagues at other universities and tell them not to hire particular people. He's apparently known for this habit. It's one thing to provide a recommendation when requested. It's another to routinely campaign against others and provide anti-r…

I once read that the academic social contract before the 1970s was that an advisor would not accept a graduate student unless they were sure they had a "place" for them lined up, i.e., in another institution. I don't know how that could have worked, but it speaks to the difference in social contract prior to when graduate students were treated as exploitable labor with no actual academic prospects.
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