Thursday, July 14, 2022

What About Dick?

I get the basic legal issue here. What I don't get is why this is a hill a professor would want to die on. Unless, of course, the professor is a dick.
Colleges increasingly promote land acknowledgment statements that recognize indigenous ties to the land on which a college sits. On a list of syllabus “best practices,” UW’s computer science department encourages professors to include such a statement and suggests using language developed by the university’s diversity office “to acknowledge that our campus sits on occupied land.” The fact that the statement could be adapted seemed clear — until Reges wrote one that administrators did not like.

“University administrators turned me into a pariah on campus because I included a land acknowledgment that wasn’t sufficiently progressive for them,” said Reges. “Land acknowledgments are performative acts of conformity that should be resisted, even if it lands you in court. I am pleased that FIRE joined with me to fight back against University of Washington’s illegal viewpoint discrimination.”

Syllabi are something of an innovation since I was in college.  I seem to remember encountering them in seminary; maybe we had them in law school so we knew what to read before class.  I honestly don't recall, they didn't mean anything to me beyond the calendar of readings, if we had one.  Maybe we had them as far back as undergraduate classes; but they left no impression on me at all.  There's a lesson there.

I wrote volumes of them in the 10+ years I taught in community college; one for every class, often three classes a semester, plus (in good times) two in the summer.  Mostly they were boilerplate, right down to the calendar of readings and the language on assignments and grading.  Those were the parts I got to write.  The rest was boilerplate mandated by the administration. 

And it was fairly dull stuff which the lawyer in me found laughable.  Some of it was language about class attendance or where you could go to get help (college students are a lot more helpless than when I was in college.  I thought that at first, then realized later it was help for students with no particular background in college, families without the support systems, etc.  Of course, that described my family:  my father was the first person in his family to go to college (G.I. Bill).  Some of my cousins went to college; some didn't.  Still, I get the idea and support the....support.  Times have changed, is all I mean.)

There was language about library hours and later they added language about how to contact the Department Chair, and language about using the Assessment Center (mostly used for make-up tests); language about sexual harassment in the classrooms or on campus; and racial harassment, etc.  It slowly grew, in other words, until the boilerplate overwhelmed the syllabus.  Mine easily ran 10 pages, with maybe two to two-and-a-half devoted to the reading/assignment schedule, and one page or less to grading and how it was calculated.  I can guarantee no student read it all, and only some actually read the calendar part (the most important part, IMHO) at all.  Every semester I had questions from students that were clearly addressed in the syllabus (assignments, due dates, readings for the next class) showing me they'd never looked at it, period.

And yet my department chairs (over time there were many) insisted it was a "contract" with my students and had to be scrupulously drafted and adhered to.  That's when the lawyer in me started laughing.  It was, of course, no such thing. An adhesion contract, possibly; but it didn't even rise to that level.  I expressly reserved the right to alter the reading schedule or the number and type of assignments at will, which made Administration happy.  I also left in anything they said they wanted in there; mostly because I never read it.

At the beginning we had templates we had to re-type for our class.  Of course you saved those from semester to semester, and got to where all you changed were dates on the calendar at the end.  I soon learned to turn those into "weeks," so the only dates I had to note were the weeks when holidays (Thanksgiving, Spring Break) occurred. By the end there was a program on-line we had to use.  You selected the text you wanted (say, about grading, or chewing gum in class or something else) and had to accept the boilerplate provided by the program.  At the end it created your syllabus, and Bob's your uncle.

Supposedly.  It worked fine, but it locked in the boilerplate, is my point.  If you tried to exclude something Administration deemed essential, your supervisor would send it back to you for correction.  Especially being an adjunct (no real difference for the First Amendment analysis in Popehat's tweets I didn't include above; a huge difference in reality), you didn't bark.  You just printed it, posted it, and moved on with lecturing.

Or I did, anyway.  Why not?  I had no pride of authorship in the thing.  The school required it, not me.  Some students treated it like the Bible of the course, some like fish wrap; what did I care?  The school could have required I include a phrase that "The moon is made of green cheese," and I'd have done it.  Why not?  Another pointless paragraph of bafflegab among the pages of it; so what?

I'm not sure how you block the retaliation against students, except by examining carefully the work and grading of any student who complained on those grounds. I plucked this out because the professor in question pretty clearly is a racist dickhead.

On Dec. 8, 2021, Reges criticized land acknowledgment statements in an email to faculty, and on Jan. 3, he included a modified version of UW’s example statement in his syllabus: “I acknowledge that by the labor theory of property the Coast Salish people can claim historical ownership of almost none of the land currently occupied by the University of Washington.” Reges’s statement was a nod to John Locke’s philosophical theory that property rights are established by labor.

On Jan. 4, the director of the computer science department, Magdalena Balazinska, ordered Reges to immediately remove his modified statement from his syllabus, labeling it “inappropriate” and “offensive,” and declaring that it created “a toxic environment” in the course. Reges refused because Balazinska’s demand was viewpoint discriminatory — other computer science professors included their own land acknowledgments on their syllabi. But UW did not investigate or punish them because those statements, unlike Reges’s, were consistent with the university’s viewpoint. 

Again, I take the legal point that his statement is not allowed but other modifications are.  The "toxic environment" claim should be tested in court, and may not be protected by 1A (that's not addressed by Popehat, who has more legal knowledge on the subject than I do), if only because toxic environment harassment claims don't fall to 1A absolutism.  Still, it's a dickish argument, whether or not it's based on Locke (which is not the principal of property ownership in this country anyway, unless the professor thinks his labor as a teacher somehow gives him property rights in his home, without paying a mortgage or having a deed or any other indicia of ownership).  Or if "established by labor" doesn't mean "working the land," then it's a pointless argument.  If it does, is he saying the Coast Salish people were layabouts and wastrels?

Yeah, real nice guy.  Goes far to explaining why this is a hill he wants to die on.  As I say, for that I don't get it.  This guy wants to be a dick over something most of his students probably aren't aware is in his syllabus.  Or it's in the syllabus of every teacher on the campus, and whose syllabus is it, anyway?  Does he follow the school's directive in including other boilerplate?  But this one he cannot, because he must live free or die?

I dunno; seems to me there's a certain insanity to this argument.  It seems like a de minimus issue, to me.  Maybe if I studied the case law and the facts upon which the legal doctrines rest that Popehat references, I'd feel differently.  But the old adage is "hard cases make bad law."

A modern corollary to that should be: dickhead cases make dickhead law. 

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