Freedom of speech in academia

[liv]

I confess, I'm feeling a little depressed about the whole Tim Hunt thing. Partly because Hunt's work is foundational to mine, so he's someone I looked up to, and it's always a blow when you learn that your heroes have feet of clay.

Partly because I do feel directly targeted in some ways, as a female scientist trying to get by in what is in some ways still a male-centric if not completely male-dominated world. I mean, I can't claim I've never ever cried over problems at work. And I'm struggling with imposter syndrome and anxiety over my future in academic science right now anyway. Intellectually, I think Tim Hunt was talking arrant nonsense and he's nothing but a sexist dinosaur advertising just how out-of-touch he is. But emotionally, when I'm already having a hard time, it's hard not to add to my pile of worries the one that I'm maybe just not resilient enough for this career. I mean, plenty of women are in fact just as hard-nosed as any man and never let their emotions get in the way of their work, and most of the time I don't think being emotionally repressed makes you a better scientist anyway, regardless of gender. Just, I can't claim that I personally don't have the flaws that Hunt attributes to women scientists, whom he persists in referring to as "girls", and frankly he deserves most of the flak he's getting just for that. (Talking of terminology, I saw the rather sweet comment on Twitter that scientist was originally coined as a gender-neutral term for man of science, so really female scientists should be the unmarked case, we should be saying scientists / male scientists.)

Be that as it may, a lot of what's upsetting me about Hunt is the backlash. I think the outcome of his awful remarks has been really proportionate and appropriate: He's resigned from his honorary positions. Note: he wasn't sacked, he didn't even lose his job, he semi-voluntarily left honorary positions, because UCL and the European Research Council and other prestigious scientific organizations don't want to continue giving honour to someone who behaves like a sexist shit in public. And yet both mainstream media and the internet are full of horrified think-pieces about how it's terrible that such a great scientist could lose his job over holding the wrong opinions.

I agree that Hunt is a great scientist, as I said, I admire his work greatly and it's a big part of what paved the way for my own research. And I don't doubt that he has been a good mentor to many junior scientists, including women, because sexist men very often do make exceptions for women they're attracted to (Hunt's own wife is a feminist and a high-flying scientist and I think they met when she was working for him, even), or for women who don't seem threateningly feminine and whom they count as honorary men. But he's not doing great science or great mentoring right now, he's being paid a retainer to be a celebrity, a sort of ambassador for science, as it were. Which means that precisely the job that he lost was to promote science, and making public statements directly to journalists that "girls" are bad for science because they cry and make male scientists think #distractinglysexy thoughts is in fact directly harming the institutions that were paying him.

And goodness knows it's harming women's careers and therefore harming science itself, because every good person we lose because she can't handle any more sexism makes progress slower. Why this hand-wringing over the loss of a great man for holding the wrong opinions, when there are thousands of great women who are lost, or who never get the chance to show how great they are, because there is no possible set of opinions women can hold which makes them acceptable to a sexist world? Again, it seems to come down to this meme that white men in positions of privilege (and you really don't get much more privileged than an honorary professor trading on his Nobel prize) have a seemingly unlimited right to say whatever they like, no matter how much it hurts other people who already face discrimination and exclusion. Whereas anybody who has a problem with this is censoring free speech.

I'm depressed because many of the people who are supposed to be on my side are also responding in ways I find counterproductive. One, making jokes about how Tim Hunt's name rhymes with the C-word. I mean, seriously, mocking people's names is playground bullying, it has no place in political discourse. Also, calling Tim Hunt a cunt is in my mind rather more sexist than Tim Hunt calling female colleagues "girls". But that's just individuals who think it's funny, there's no official feminist party line that "Tim Hunt! rhyming slang! lol!" is an acceptable response.

I think I'm more worried about the catastrophizing, the views that this proves that all of science is irredeemably sexist, it just feels really really defeatist. I mean, my experience has always been that cell biology is reasonably egalitarian, not perfectly, of course, but this kind of overt sexism has caused a big fuss precisely because it is rare and it isn't acceptable within my scientific community. In some ways I want to be celebrating that the right outcome occurred, here: a very, very famous and respected scientist made outrageous remarks, and suffered proportionate consequences, he wasn't protected by his massive amounts of influence and prestige in the field, even a Nobel laureate can't get away with dismissing the work of a whole gender. (I only wish James Watson had been similarly "hung out to dry" when he spouted off a bunch of scientific racism a few years ago, and he's always been disgustingly sexist besides. But he is a whole order of magnitude more famous than Hunt, he's a celebrity to people who aren't biologists.)

I'm connecting this case in my mind with the situation of American academic Laura Kipnis. She wrote a completely dreadful article titled sexual paranoia strikes academe, where she complains about how measures to prevent sexual harassment and tackle rape culture mean that:

Students were being encouraged to regard themselves as such exquisitely sensitive creatures that an errant classroom remark could impede their education, as such hothouse flowers that an unfunny joke was likely to create lasting trauma.

She tells a long anecdote where she mocks a student for experiencing PTSD after a sexual assault by a professor. She complains about using the language of survivors of sexual violence because the word should be confined to people who lived through the Nazi death camps (!) And she jumps on the bandwagon of how providing trigger warnings in an academic context makes students committed to their own vulnerability, conditioned to imagine they have no agency.

As a result, complaints were brought against Kipnis based on the American Title IX law which I don't understand the details of but it's to do with gender equality in university educational settings [ETA: see elf's clarification]. Her article about her experiences of being subjected to this complaint and how she felt she was denied any kind of due process is paywalled, but there's a summary here. I am somewhat suspicious of Kipnis' account, it just too conveniently feeds into the narrative she's already constructed that taking action against academics who sexually harass students constitutes a striking abridgment of everyone’s freedom. However, I do worry about the contrast between Hunt's experience and Kipnis'. Hunt said something as a direct public statement to journalists that was completely inappropriate, and directly impacted on his ability to do his job of being an ambassador for his institution and for science, and ended up resigning from honorary positions, probably under some degree of pressure. Kipnis wrote an opinion article which I strongly disagree with, but to my mind legitimately expressing her views, and she found herself facing nearly unanswerable and very damaging charges and put into a situation that amounts to being intimidated into shutting up. Now, it is the case that charges against Kipnis were eventually dropped and she did keep her job, but still, I think there is potentially a real academic freedom issue, much more so than with Hunt.

But I don't think the problem here is those dreadful social justice warriors and feminists who want students to be able to access education without being sexually harassed and assaulted. Nor is the problem offering trigger warnings so that students can prepare themselves to deal with disturbing and upsetting material. Making more effort to address rape culture and to be sensitive to the needs of trauma survivors are not an attack on academic freedom. These efforts are an extension of academic freedom, because they mean that people who have been, or are at risk of being, victims of sexual violence are much more likely to be able to add their voices to the discourse whereas without such measures they might have been shut out through fear for their own safety.

I agree with Amanda Taub's response to the debate, that a bigger threat to academic freedom than political correctness, is the corporatization of universities. Universities that are profit-focused instead of being part of public infrastructure, universities that treat students as customers rather than members of the community of learners, these are places where academic freedom is undermined. If a university is a business competing in a marketplace, they need to worry about their brand, they need to make sure that everything all the academics say is on-message. That's a problem for academic freedom. Universities that aim to cut costs by casualizing and disempowering academic labour are also contributing to an environment where would-be academics have to be extremely careful about what they say in public, and even in what they publish in the traditional academic sense. The problem is not that students are too sensitive, the problem is that shareholders and suchlike holders of the purse-strings are too sensitive.

Moreover, there's a far bigger threat to academic freedom that isn't being mentioned in much of the debate on trigger warnings and whether sexism and racism by academics should actually have consequences. Namely the government interfering with what can be taught and discussed and researched at universities in the name of preventing "terrorism". I am going to talk mainly about the UK situation which affects me directly, although my Kipnis example and Taub's astute comments come from the American context.

I am very, very concerned that everybody is bleating about academic freedom when it comes to the right of influential white men to make statements which reinforce existing power structures, but nobody is talking about the effect on academic freedom of making universities enforce draconian immigration restrictions. The thing where non-EU students in the UK have to report to an UK Visas & Immigration inspector every month and show all their papers. And where academics have to report our students to the border police if they don't show up for teaching at least a minimum number of times per week, and any time they travel either to visit their families or to attend academic conferences and carry out fieldwork internationally. And in some circumstances foreign students have to prove said attendance by providing samples of collagen, a protein from the skin which uniquely identifies anyone but identical twins, when they sign in. Because apparently signatures or ID cards or passports or even fingerprints aren't good enough for UKV&I because they can be forged. Right now students are "only" getting deported for not having their papers in order or not meeting the attendance requirements, but the machinery is perfectly well in place for deporting people for expressing the wrong opinions.

And what's worse is that the Counter-Terrorism and Security Act, which comes into force next month, creates a positive statutory duty on universities to identify individuals vulnerable to being drawn into terrorism and to share information about vulnerable individuals ie report them to authorities including the police. This duty very much includes so-called non-violent extremism, defined as

vocal or active opposition to fundamental British values, including democracy, the rule of law, individual liberty and mutual respect and tolerance of different faiths and beliefs.

And we have plenty of experience that "opposing British values" is a more often than not dogwhistle for "being openly Muslim". The new law hasn't even come into force yet, but we already have too many examples of people being punished or even criminalized for researching politically undesirable topics.

We're sleepwalking into a seriously Orwellian world (and yes, that word is over-used but I think it's really applicable here), and people are worrying that trigger warnings or pointing out that sexist comments are sexist might curtail academic freedom. I mean, there's more to this story that I'm not writing on a public blog, even anonymously, and I'm a middle-class white English woman with tenure and I'm only afraid for my job, not my actual liberty or personal safety. And most of the links I've included come from locked posts or from accounts that people don't want linked to more personal blogs, which is why everything's uncredited (but I am grateful to everybody who provided food for thought on related topics). Just so you know.

Which is all by way of telling you, I'm finding it hard to find room for a lot of sympathy for Tim Hunt, who frankly should have known better.

Comments

[ex_inklessej388]

This was a very well written and through provoking post. I would like to thank you for writing it.

I cannot offer much in the way regarding your perspective as a woman in the STEM field as I am a male and I am not in the STEM field. I can speak a little to the comments in your second last paragraph however.

You are correct to say that Mr. Hunt is a dinosaur when it comes to this kind of stuff (probably the nicest way I have seen this explained). And it is true that we should not defend him, because his position is honestly quiet undefendable. But we can gleam some interesting observations from his comments. Namely, that we have no made as much progress as we think.

And I can attest to this. I am a member of CAF and we are under a lot of pressure right now because of accusations of sexual assault and a general culture of machoism in the forces. This has caused a lot of personal reflection on my part especially considering that I am a mid-level supervisor who is responsible for policy enforcement. One thing has become very clear to me (and to many CIS white males who I work with) and that we have are terrible ill-equiped to deal with the impacts of equality in the workplace. For one reason or another (we know why, but no need to get into the details right now) we have been raised to not consider these things too much and now we are being asked to consider them. That means that for a lot of us we are treading into uncharted waters here and that can make a lot of otherwise rational people do really dumb things. I would like to note at this point that I am not making excuses, merely having a discussion, these comments are in no way meant to remove responsibiliti from Mr. Hunt or from any other sexist coworker.

We have a cadre of specifically CIS white males who believe in equality in the workplace and openly support feminism but have never been challenged to apply those concepts in day-to-day life until now. And the problem is that the system that brought them up did not even consider teaching them about these values. That I think is troubling.

This comment is rapidly become incoherant because this is the point where I am merely throwing up undeveloped thoughts because of how fresh all of this is in my own mind because of my own day to day experiences.

I guess, I want to thank you again for your post. While I admit that as a CIS white male, I have no clue how to move forward on this, I can be grateful for people like who take to time to write their experience so that I can take something from that to apply to my own day-to-day life. That I think is really how we can make this better.

[liv]

Thank you for such an encouraging comment! Really interesting observations about a previously male-dominated / macho culture trying to adapt to the modern world and many of the men involved finding it challenging. I agree that actually putting egalitarian ideals into practice is not simple, and that listening to people with different life experiences from your own is a good start.

[davidgillon]

We have a cadre of specifically CIS white males who believe in equality in the workplace and openly support feminism but have never been challenged to apply those concepts in day-to-day life until now.

Feeling a lot of identifying with this. As I've shifted more into activism on the disability side of stuff, and realised that means I should try to be a good ally to other equality-based groups of activists, I do find I'm occasionally butting-up against areas I haven't really thought through, or had got hold of slightly the wrong impression, or where dinosaur-thoughts lurk previously undiscovered. Mostly I'm having the luxury of that happening within my inner dialogue, rather than where other people can see, but the cringe-factor is there regardless and all I can do is learn and try to move on in a positive direction.

[ex_inklessej388]

And this is why the best approach I think is to give people the tools to understand how to let someone know when they have said or done something out of line alongside giving people the tools to accept when someone is saying that they are offended by a comment or action that has been made. It gives the person a chance to learn from the situation and prevent further harm and advances the discussion of these serious issues which is important.

I will give a real life example. It was with a loving touch of sarcasm that prior to departing after being alongside for some time that I would say, "Let's get this bitch to sea." It was never meant to be hurtful and I never meant for it to reference the female gender specifically, at least I never thought that I was doing just that. One morning after I had said it to the Chief Engineer, my Navigating Officer pulled me aside (she is a woman) and explained to me that she did not like that comment because the word bitch is not gender neutral and is very charged as a negative comment toward woman. It was something that I had never considered and not because I am some macho, CIS, asshole who doesn't care about the feeling of others, but because I was never taught to look at my comments from that perspective. So I said sorry and that I would not make the comment again. This situation could have gone much differently but because she brought it to my attention it was a constructive approach.

Not everyone feels comfortable approaching another person. Not everyone can handle someone approaching them about something they have said. That I think is where it is up to us to give people these tools. So we can enhance the discussion back and forth and hopefully move ahead on this issue.

[davidgillon]

I've been in a similar position myself with respect to my writing, with a character who was, for very good reasons - she's a female wolf, being referred to as 'the bitch'. It became obvious that it was a problem for female readers, even if it was supposed to be an example of reclaiming language, and that I needed to rename her.

(And I probably took longer to realise that than I should have)

[cremains]

Hey, thanks for this. I'm a woman in an almost all-male field and I truly appreciate the challenge even to feminist men in considering what actually needs changing -- so often it's something practical and small-seeming when feminist discourse can focus a little too much on Big Underlying Issues (obviously this is important too). I would actually love to see some sort of "hack the patriarchy" guide to concrete, useful changes to make in the workplace.

In my field I had to literally dress in all men's clothes (not just pants, like straight up menswear) to get taken seriously and to be non-threatening enough to be mentored closely. At least CAF doesn't have to deal with the dress code BS.

[vatine]

Your concerns jibe well with my own when I heard of the push towards increased digital surveillance in the UK. This is a frightening development that is very much contra-democratic.

[liv]

Yeah, the surveillance stuff is a broader issue; I focus on academia because that's so directly relevant to me, and because it's been in the news a bit recently. But anti-democratic is exactly right.

[seekingferret]

I feel like geniuses fucking up is a hard problem in general. Like, how much abusive or assholish behavior should you tolerate if it means that some number of students, male and female, will benefit from his mentorship? It seems to me that the answer might be somewhere above zero.

[liv]

I think that's a valid question, but my intuitive answer is: considerably less than we're putting up with right now. In my own institution, which is generally pretty good on gender issues, there's a senior professor who gets off on making young women cry. And we tolerate it because he's a pretty good scientist, not a genius on Hunt's level, but pretty good and he brings in grants and publishes solid stuff and improves the prestige of the institution, so he's kind of untouchable. But deliberately making your junior colleagues cry is pretty unacceptable behaviour, even if you're otherwise a good mentor to them.

I mean, if abusive bullying arses were completely banned from scientific research, hypothetically, we'd lose some geniuses, and that would be a genuine cost. But I bet at least some of them would be able to adapt if they knew that was the only way to have a scientific career. We already expect scientists to sacrifice family life and the ability to settle in one place and the kind of money that a highly intelligent person could be earning outside of academia; why can't we also expect them to give up the right to abuse and harass others?

And how many new geniuses would in fact blossom, if we threw out the arsehole ones? We'd gain the research skills and mentorship of people who have done nothing wrong apart from happening to belong to groups it's considered acceptable to pick on, and maybe that would balance out what we'd lose if we kicked out the arsehole geniuses.

But yeah, I am willing to tolerate some amount of fucking up, just... I think the balance is too far over towards tolerating unpleasant and cruel behaviour as it stands.

[hilarita]

And if we stop expecting them to sacrifice their entire lives on the altar of academia, perhaps they will be less stressed, and then perhaps they will find it easier to not be arseholes, and they can direct some of their energy away from relentlessly pursuing grants and towards doing some diversity training, and working on the arseholish tendencies.

[liv]

Well, yes. If I ruled the world...

A lot of this is not individual sexists, it's a sick system, and one that, no matter what pieties are said and written about diversity, in fact rewards people who are hyper-competitive, empathy-deprived arses. And society being what it is those people are disproportionately likely to be male, so that's a vicious circle to start with.

[jack]

I really sympathise with someone who screws up without realising they're doing something wrong, whether they're a genius or not. And in general I agree with Liv's answer.

But I also think, the amount of assholishness isn't fixed -- it's usually "what people who are inclined to that sort of behaviour can get away with before they suffer consequences". And whether you set the amount of "assholishness" you're willing to permit at "a little bit less" or "absolutely none" you're likely to have to grit your teeth and enforce it on a few people at the expense of a certain amount of waste. But then people will adjust to the new level and know what not to do.

Thinking about it in those terms, I'm more willing to accept some people being caught in the gears as a price it's necessary to pay, any time we introduce new rules or laws about anything. It IS unfair -- of all the people who were doing bad things and hadn't realised they wouldn't be tolerated any more, a few will get unlucky and be punished and most will see them and adjust their behaviour. But it's almost impossible to enforce the change without that, and it's fairer than letting the status quo continue and everyone else suffer the consequences.

[seekingferret]

I like the points both you and liv make, and I definitely agree that we draw the line too permissively now. I was personally involved in college in a couple of cases involving professors creating hostile environments for women... when we reported the problems, we found that of course the administration and the professors' former students and EVERYONE knew all about the problems, but hadn't done anything or hadn't thought of them as problems because they'd gotten so used to giving them a pass, or at best had thought that telling the professor to stop and letting them fix the problems would actually work. It's infuriating how much we tolerate.

But I still think it's a hard problem, because it is a question to some degree of balancing two social virtues.

[liv]

Thank you for being one of the people who speak up and don't let professors get away with that sort of sexism. I am not at all surprised that everybody already knew but nobody wanted to rock the boat.

And I definitely agree that the discussion we're having is to do with balancing virtues, it's not that everybody in academia inexplicably decided to do things that support sexists at the expense of women purely for the sake of being gratuitously evil. It's not just the benefits of the scientific breakthroughs made by geniuses who happen to be arseholes in the balance here. It's that it's in many ways a good thing that academia strives to be somewhat meritocratic, it is an environment where it's possible to succeed without being a bland corporate drone, without having to suppress your opinions and your personality to fit into the box.

[liv]

Yes, I think this is a good framing. Most people are capable of adapting their behaviour if there are real consequences to doing the wrong thing. And equally any time you change the expectations, some people are going to be punished who wouldn't have been under the old regime. That's not an argument for always keeping the status quo, but change has a cost and it's foolish to pretend otherwise.

[elf]

Title 9 basics:
"No person in the United States shall, on the basis of sex, be excluded from participation in, be denied the benefits of, or be subjected to discrimination under any education program or activity receiving federal financial assistance."

It's not just universities; it's any school that receives federal money, which includes all public schools. (Much screaming at the high school level about being required to allow teenage girls to compete in sports.) And it's often interpreted broadly by the investigators, if a complaint gets to that stage. (The courts tend to have a bit more sense, but trying to pin down what counts as "discrimination" is slippery, so the rulings are all over the place.)

-----

Regarding Hunt: I'd have more sympathy for the "just a bad joke at the wrong time" claim if he followed it with a statement of how much he respects the work of his female colleagues, and named several of them whose work impresses the hell out of him.

I can believe "joke from a previous era; oops, I hadn't realized how bad it was;" I've got a few of those jokes in my own head, and one might slip out at the wrong time. But if I were trying to convince anyone that I don't actively support those views, I'd offer a counterpoint--here's the people of that category I admire; here's what I'm doing to support them; here's what was wrong with what I said and now that I'm aware of it; here's what I'm going to work on in myself so I don't make this kind of joke anymore.

Not, "it was just a joke; of course I didn't mean anything harmful by it; my wife agrees I am not a sexist."

[liv]

Thank you, most helpful. I had only come across Title IX in the context of universities, but it's important that it applies to all federally funded education. And it's interesting that over-zealous and extra-judicial investigation of discrimination complaints is a more general norm, not just something that happened to Kipnis in isolation.

I agree entirely about Hunt, his apology, and his wife's justification of him, don't seem meaningful at all. I think the situation would be playing out really differently if he were genuinely an egalitarian guy who just made one bad joke.

[davidgillon]

The two most interesting articles I've seen on this are the ones by Deborah Blum, the Pulitzer-winning reporter who spoke alongside Hunt, who says she took him aside afterwards to ask him if he really meant it, and who he told he was being 'honest'. Which really throws everything he's said since under a shadow of intellectual dishonesty.

Her storify about what he actually said
Sexist Scientist: I Was Being ‘Honest’

[liv]

Thanks, those are useful information. It was pretty clear that Hunt has been intellectually dishonest throughout this, but it's also good to have the account of someone who was actually there; I know the internet can distort stories sometimes.

[nameandnature]

Hunt's whining in the Observer about being hung out to dry seems particularly dishonest if that other report is accurate. If he really thought he was unfairly treated, he could refuse to resign and force the organisations he was a member of to go through whatever procedures they have to go though to get rid of him, which would presumably give him the chance to have his say. At least we don't have "at will" employment in this country (assuming he was actually employed).

[liv]

Yeah, I'm not exactly sure of the details of Hunt's relationship with the various institutions he's resigned from; it's pretty clear he jumped before he was pushed. And honestly I don't think he's going to lose very much, as a Nobel laureate he will still get paid handsomely to speak at pretty much any event he wants to grace with his presence, he doesn't need the endorsement of the ERC or UCL for that.

And I agree with you and elf, his apology doesn't seem sincere. He doesn't really even seem to believe he's been unfairly treated, that whining article seemed pretty much phoned in. And really, if you directly address a meeting of an association of women in science and tech by saying that girls in the lab cause trouble by falling in love and crying, you haven't got much of a leg to stand on to say that you were misquoted or a chance remark was blown out of proportion.

[davidgillon]

Particularly not if you compounded it by suggesting segregated labs!

[merrythebard]

Thank you so much for writing this. Fascinating and concerning and wise and sensible. I... mostly read it while nodding my head vigorously.

I especially would like to thank you for this:

Making more effort to address rape culture and to be sensitive to the needs of trauma survivors are not an attack on academic freedom. These efforts are an extension of academic freedom, because they mean that people who have been, or are at risk of being, victims of sexual violence are much more likely to be able to add their voices to the discourse whereas without such measures they might have been shut out through fear for their own safety.

That really means a lot to me, as a trauma survivor who is not in academia, but needs to be very careful what I read, what I watch, what I listen to - not because I'm talked myself into thinking that I'm a delicate little flower, but because getting to be warned about the presence of triggers and thus make an active choice to engage with that material, or at least prepare myself, makes me both safer and stronger. Actually my main paid work at the moment is proofreading an autobiography that is *immensely* triggering to me. But I knew it was going to be because my client warned me (she's super and knows I've been through similar things to her), so I can choose when I've got the emotional cope to engage with it. I often work just after going to the allotment, when I am feeling grounded and secure and full of green. :-) If the material had been sprung on me with no warning, or if it were back in the days when I didn't have enough self-compassion to allow for my PTSD symptoms when making choices about what I do when? I think I'd be struggling very badly by now. As it is, I'm thoroughly enjoying the work and I'm doing a pretty fine job.

Like you say: trigger warnings are about extending freedom, not restricting it.

[liv]

Thank you for commenting to say so; I'm really glad it spoke to you. Also impressed at your strategies for handling the proofreading and related aspects of keeping yourself safe. Yay allotment :-)

I am really fed up with people like Kipnis claiming that people recovering from trauma are weak and over-sensitive. People who are finding ways to navigate a hostile world are incredibly strong and brave, and if academics don't like having to make accommodations, well, they should blame the people who committed the crimes and horrors that led to some of their students being traumatized, not the survivors.

[merrythebard]

Oh yay, thank you. :-)

I am really fed up with people like Kipnis claiming that people recovering from trauma are weak and over-sensitive. People who are finding ways to navigate a hostile world are incredibly strong and brave, and if academics don't like having to make accommodations, well, they should blame the people who committed the crimes and horrors that led to some of their students being traumatized, not the survivors.

Absolutely!

[nicki]

I would suspect that he'd not any more or less sexist than any other average male who went to school in the 50s and early 60s. That, however, does not mean he gets to walk around like a living episode of Madmen. My guess is that he has probably spent a lot of time around a cadre of people (probably including his wife) who excused his "eccentricities" due to his science skill and that this did him a terrible disservice. He should have been able to look beyond that to a changing society and realized that a "we're all good humored lads here, eh? eh?" joke wasn't going to make everyone in the room feel like "one of the boys", but it's easy not to change if everyone around you humors you outdated ideas.

I'm sure it's sad for him that he gets to be a warning for others to heed, but the world's been changing for most of his academic career and he should have bothered to keep current with the social mores as well as the scientific ideas.

[liv]

Yes, I agree entirely. Because he's a very successful scientist, and I don't doubt he deserves his success, he's very able, but also because he's a white man from a public school background, he's always been surrounded by people who make excuses for him. Frankly, I'm glad that is changing.

It's not his age at all, he's a good ten years younger than my parents who would never dream of complaining that girls can't do science because they cry too much. And even in the 60s there were a lot of prominent and influential women in molecular life sciences, let alone by the time Hunt was actually an adult.

[metaphortunate]

I saw something on Twitter that kind of rocked me with the power of reframing: what if instead people side-eyed men and asked them if they could really be considered committed to their work if it had never affected them enough to make them cry?

[liv]

Yes, that certainly is an amusing reframing! See also the thing where women who cry are "too emotional" for science, but men who yell and lose their tempers are expected because anger isn't an emotion. I think in general I want to avoid policing anybody's emotional affect, but yes, crying is despised because women do it, not that women are despised because they are more prone to crying.

[merrythebard]

Yes, all of this!

I'd like to see a further reframing, which is that people should side-eye people who make their colleagues cry, and ask how committed they can be to their work and their status as mentors when they can't be bothered to learn how to give criticism in a way that doesn't cause people that much distress...

[liv]

Hmm, I think this is largely true, rather than a jokey reframing to make people reconsider their views. Like, when Hunt complained that women cry and make him fall in love, most people reacted by saying that he's the problem if he can't criticize people without making them cry, and can't see attractive women colleagues without being distracted from his work.

There is a version of feminism, and I think it's where Kipnis is coming from, which says that women can behave just like society expects men to behave and if they do that, they should be equally rewarded with success and admiration. And that's true, as far as it goes, but I also think that women shouldn't have to emulate these largely dysfunctional male-coded behaviours, and that men shouldn't have to be hyper-competitive and have no personal life to succeed either.

[davidgillon]

Oh, ick on the immigration stuff, I hadn't realised it was anything like that bad. And share information about vulnerable individuals sends a shudder up my spine because 'vulnerable individuals' is a very problematic term that gets used around disabled people a lot, especially by the police, and that tends to be code for 'you're not really an adult' (aka discrimination via infantilisation). It's bad enough applying it to disabled people, but widening its use to cover non-traditionally British ethnicity or religion is not a positive development.

This duty very much includes so-called non-violent extremism,
vocal or active opposition to fundamental British values, including democracy, the rule of law, individual liberty and mutual respect and tolerance of different faiths and beliefs.

When you consider that a Tory MP (Paul Maynard, Blackpool North and Cleveleys) branded disability activists 'extremists' during the last Parliament (never mind that he's one of the tiny handful of MPs who are themselves disabled), the potential for this to spread into other areas is chillingly apparent.

Someone who has been writing good stuff on the US side of academic freedom of expression is David Perry (aka @Lollardfish on twitter, blog at http://www.thismess.net/) who is both a medievalist and an appallingly prolific essay writer for the NYT, Salon, Vice, Al Jazeera and so on. Besides academic stuff he also covers disability and the intersection of policing and disability and how that so often goes wrong.

[liv]

It's very clear in the legislation and related guidance that vulnerable means "vulnerable to being drawn into extremism"; it's explicitly differentiated from vulnerable in the safeguarding sense. But yes, very good point about the infantilization of automatically describing all disabled adults as vulnerable.

I am really, really upset about being coerced into enforcing authoritarian and intrusive immigration policies. I mean, I'm not literally forced to do it, I could refuse, but the university stands to lose its right to award degrees if we don't comply, so there's pretty strong pressure. And if I get kicked out of the university because I am not willing to take tissue samples to prove my students' attendance, well, that's pretty much it for my academic freedom. Not being allowed to make off-colour jokes in my lectures is really trivial compared to that threat.

And yes, the whole mission creep thing of calling opinions the establishment don't like "non-violent extremism" is really scaring me. It really is criminalizing political protest, and your example of disability activism is extremely chilling. I meant to include something in this post about really draconian and even violent policing of student protests (about such "extremist" issues as pressuring universities to pay cleaning staff a living wage), but I didn't have links readily to hand.

Thanks for the Perry link, that looks like a blog I should be following.

[obandsoller]

Really good piece - as ever.

I'm asking this question because you seem more informed than me. I'm not asking to try to defend Hunt.

You say that he resigned from honorary positions. Does that mean he still retains some positions that aren't honorary?

[liv]

Thanks for saying! I am afraid I don't know if Hunt has any real jobs; he's getting on in years, most likely he'd have retired by now. But you know how it is with emeritus academics, they sort of hang about institutions doing the fun bits of research when they feel like it, but not having the kinds of jobs that require admin or the boring bits of teaching. So I wouldn't be surprised if he were still research active to an extent.

[shreena]

Not going to comment on the immigration stuff obviously (Home Office civil servant!) though happy to discuss in person sometime.

On Tim Hunt, I think the thing that was really egregious about his comments was the way that he clearly viewed it as the natural order of things that labs were for men and it was open for debate whether women should be in them. Similarly, the way that his comments were all assuming that 'you' (as in the person he was addressing) were male. It reminded me a lot of a card in Scruples (board game) - "Your daughter brings home a black boyfriend, what is your reaction?" - which clearly assumes that you cannot be black yourself!

[liv]

Yes, I would like to talk to you about immigration policies; I'm pretty angry about a lot of stuff related to immigration, but I only know what's in the newspapers and what my friends have experienced.

I completely agree that Tim Hunt was doing the awful thing of assuming his audience were male scientists, which is impressively thoughtless when he was in fact addressing an association of women in tech! Watson pissed me off for the same reason, by saying that the secret to scientific success is that "you" should spend more time talking to scientific colleagues and less time talking to your wives. And yes, the assumption that women's participation is open to debate at all is just gross. (That Scruples card is absolutely horrible, worse than Cards Against Humanity, which has the very slight excuse that it's deliberately trying to be offensive.)

[highlyeccentric]

Yes, all this. Permission to tweet/link/reblog?

[liv]

Yes, please do. Though if you could avoid linking it to my offline and work identity, that'd be appreciated. Thank you for asking.