Or: How Not to Use Social Media, by Jill Abramson
(To be technically accurate, her daughter, who posted this picture of the ousted New York Times editor on Instagram yesterday. The NY Post picked it up.)
NYU president John Sexton recently got in trouble when it was disclosed that he had given his son a posh university-owned apartment that was intended for faculty housing—at greatly discounted rents.
Now it turns out that for years he has done the same for Harvard professor Skip Gates—even though Gates doesn’t actually teach anything at NYU.
Gates admitted to the The Post that he has long received his pricey housing perk even though he has never held a job at NYU. Instead, Gates said he has an informal “consultancy” with Sexton that is ungoverned by a written contract.
In addition to advising Sexton’s administration on affirmative action and minority faculty hiring, the African-American studies luminary said he has given three or four free talks at NYU over the years.
Gates also suggested that Sexton bestowed the apartment on him as part of an unconventional — and thus far unsuccessful — courting ritual that has dragged on for more than a decade.
Can Skip Gates maintain a straight face as he delivers this line?
“Although I do not have an offer from NYU, and while I am very happy at Harvard, were I to move anywhere… no university would beckon to me more strongly than NYU,” he added.
Except, perhaps, any university that offered him a better apartment.
The market value of the apartment is about $9, 000 a month. (It’s a nice apartment.) Gates says he pays the “full faculty rate,” which the Post guesses is about two grand a month. I would be curious to know if there are tax implications of receiving a heavily subsidized apartment for doing—let’s face it—nothing.
In so many of his various freelance ventures, in which he trades ethnic imprimatur for material reward, Skip Gates walks a fine ethical line. I think he’s crossed it this time. There’s no way someone offers you that deal and you think, Oh, I can defend this if it becomes public…
John Sexton, meanwhile, looks more and more corrupt.
I have a deadline at work and so can’t address this just yet, though I’ve been meaning to (and Sam Spektor has an interesting comment on the post below that I think is worth some discussion).
In the meantime, here are a few quick takes on this, aggregated by Andrew Sullivan.
Here is one excerpt that, on my quick read, makes a lot of sense—particularly in the wake of Drew Faust’s coddling of “offended” people in the black mass fiasco.
“Universities,” Greg Lukianoff argues, “have only themselves to blame for this mess”:
—not just for caving to pressure, but for teaching students the wrong lessons about the value of free and robust discourse. The Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (FIRE), of which I am the president, has found speech codes—policies that heavily restrict speech that is protected under the First Amendment—at 59% of the more than 400 colleges we survey, and deals every day with campus censorship of often even mildly offensive speech. Colleges have taught a generation of students that they have a “right not to be offended.” This belief has inevitably morphed into an expectation among students that they will be confirmed in their beliefs, not challenged. It’s no wonder, then, that they apply increasingly strict purity tests to potential campus speakers.
At the same time—and I’ll write more about this later—I think that some of these speakers who are so quick to drop out are overreacting. Condy Rice can’t handle a few protesters? Hey, it’s not like she’s being water boarded. Man up.
In my experience, the media is never more irresponsible and prone to insinuation and overstatement than when reporting on another member of the media, particularly someone who is well-known. Reporters think they know the story even before they’ve reported it…and their own biases really emerge.
Within hours after news broke of Jill Abramson being fired, I see this happening already. She was fired because she’s a woman! Because she complained about her pay! Because she was “pushy“!
I don’t know if there’s any truth to these stories; there are certainly no named sources in them.
A Facebook friend of mine, a woman and a reporter, wrote this about Abramson:
“Leaned in. Forced out. Looking forward to reading her side of the story.”
Argh.
We just have no idea if that’s true, but you know that this trope is going to gain a lot of traction…all based fundamentally on the idea that any firing of a top-level woman has to be sexist.
It’s not that I think this doesn’t happen. But we just don’t know. And people who should know better, who are supposed to be professionals about this sort of thing, are abandoning their critical faculties and throwing around silly mantras.
My sense is that Jill Abramson is a great journalist in many ways and a not very pleasant person. She had reportedly provoked near-rebellion in her newsroom, but you have to take that with a grain of salt as well. People get disgruntled these days fast, and they have more outlets to leak that news without taking responsibility for doing so than they used to.
And there’s a certain irony to this situation, because Abramson herself was once accused of discrimination when she fired a female employee. As Forbes’ Jeff Bercovici describes,
In general, she sounds like someone you want on your side and really don’t want as an enemy. When a female former employee at an earlier job threatened to sue the company for sex discrimination after Abramson fired her, Abramson shouted at her then-boss, Steve Brill, “I discriminate against stupid people, and she’s stupid.”
It’s just too early to tell what really happened. But some people—probably Abramson and her friends—are trying to frame the story to make Abramson the victim of sexism. That’s such a convenient excuse, it gets my guard up. No one said that the Times promoted her because she was a woman; Arthur Sulzberger is sexist now, but he wasn’t then?
So…if you care, I’d read all this stuff about her with the highest skepticism. Let’s wait and see what really happened. It’s a building full of gossips. The news will out sooner or later.
I think I have a man-crush on Masahiro Tanaka. Where would the Yankees be without him? Also, to me, there is no greater joy in baseball than watching brilliant pitching.
That said, C.C. Sabathia’s knee injury sounds bad, meaning that the Yankees have now lost three starting pitchers to injury. A rotation of Tanaka, Hiroki Kurada and various long relievers is not going to win the pennant.
Also, I am bummed about the Nets. I’ve really never rooted for a basketball team before—I was a fair weather Knicks fan, but I just can’t stand the Dolans—but I’ve come to cheer on the Nets, largely because I lived next door to the Barclays Center as it was being built and have been to a bunch of games.
They were frustrating this season, with moments of mediocrity and spurts of great play. Now they’ve lost to the Heat, and there’s a sense that they underperformed—maybe the Heat are just too good, but shouldn’t the Nets have won more than one game? (That’s my feeling, anyway.)
It’s a tough way to end a season….
At Columbia, someone or some people is/are writing the names of alleged rapists on university walls….
This is unlikely to help the scribbler’s cause.
In related news, New York magazine reports that the Kennedy School has initiated “privilege-checking” to its student orientation.
Mody and other students began to organize for privilege training in the fall, when they bonded over their shared experiences of classroom hostility toward racial critiques. (Mody herself once walked out of a class on implicit cognitive biases when the professor told her, “This isn’t a discussion about racism.”)
(Ah, the old “walk out of the class when you get an answer you don’t like” move—that bodes well for the privilege-checking discussions.)
Students who are determined to come from privileged backgrounds will be asked to make a public “confession” in front of students who self-determine that they do not…
Let’s call this phenomenon, both at Columbia and at Harvard, “victims’ revenge.” Of course, whether the revengers are really victims or not is uncertain, but it doesn’t really matter, because they believe that they’re victims. Expect Drew Faust soon to attend a Eucharist in their honor.
After an outpouring of fear “outrage,” the “black mass” planned by the Harvard Extension School Cultural Studies Club was cancelled under pressure.
This terrifying event was promptly held at the Hong Kong in Harvard Square, home of unpalatable Chinese food and drinks with umbrellas in them. Which tells you something about how threatening it truly was.
Drew Faust took a bold stand, of course, calling the group’s sponsorship of the mass “abhorrent.” What a paragon of courage she is.
And various Catholic muckety-mucks got deeply offended, as seems to be their default mechanism.
While paying lip service to free speech, Faust stirred the outrage pot:
The ‘black mass’ had its historical origins as a means of denigrating the Catholic Church; it mocks a deeply sacred event in Catholicism, and is highly offensive to many in the Church and beyond. The decision by a student club to sponsor an enactment of this ritual is abhorrent; it represents a fundamental affront to the values of inclusion, belonging and mutual respect that must define our community. It is deeply regrettable that the organizers of this event, well aware of the offense they are causing so many others, have chosen to proceed with a form of expression that is so flagrantly disrespectful and inflammatory.
That’s laying it on a little thick, isn’t it? I mean, isn’t Harvard secure enough not to get all in a frenzy about a sort of silly exercise of free speech? And what’s really so wrong with it? The Catholic Church has done plenty of offensive things throughout its history, and doesn’t seem to be slowing down. If this black mass was really supposed to be a critique or satire or parody or full-on attack on the Church—so what? I think the Church will survive. Our culture probably needs to spend more time critiquing powerful institutions, not less.
I know nothing about the “black mass” other than what I just read on Wikipedia. I doubt many of the protesters do either. One reason is because there doesn’t seem to be very much to know. There are apparently no reliable written representations of such a mass, and no consensus about what it is. Apparently it’s part of an array of various kinds of masses parodying the Catholic mass which emerged in the Middle Age—others included the “Feat of Fools” and the “Feast of Asses,” which sounds like a reasonably healthy thing to me. If I lived in the Middle Ages, I’d probably want to parody the Catholic mass too. Unless, of course, I was being tortured by the Spanish Inquisition. In which case I would be busy.
Here’s this paragraph from Anton Lavey, who wrote the Satanic Bible, which I guess is the standard for modern-day “satanists,” to the extent that there is such a thing.
The usual assumption is that the Satanic ceremony or service is always called a Black Mass. A Black Mass is not the magical ceremony practiced by Satanists. The Satanist would only employ the use of a Black Mass as a form of psychodrama. Furthermore, a Black Mass does not necessarily imply that the performers of such are Satanists. A Black Mass is essentially a parody on the religious service of the Roman Catholic Church, but can be loosely applied to a satire on any religious ceremony.[10]
A form of psychodrama—that sounds about right. It sounds to me like this was really a kind of performance art (if the student group had called it that, they might not have gotten so much heat). Stupid? Sure. Threatening? Only to the deeply insecure. Offensive? I suppose. So what? Get over it. But if the foremost American practitioner of Satanism calls this thing a “satire,” shouldn’t that be strongly protected by a university president?
Faust announced that during the time the Mass was going on, she would be attending a “Eucharistic Holy Hour” in support of inclusion and mutual respect and our Catholic friends. It’s a classically Faustian bargain—safe, non-controversial, “healing,” but ultimately teaching the lesson that no principle is more important than that of not giving offense—the reductio ad absurdum of a culture in which people are constantly taking offensive.
I wish she would have encouraged people to go to this black mass and pay respectful attention. That teaches a lesson in free speech as well—that in a free marketplace of ideas, the best ones will prevail. If this thing is truly moronic, then the best way to diminish it is to have more people see it. And if not…if there’s something to it-then shouldn’t people see it?
Or is that what Faust is really worried about? Because doesn’t it get a little more complicated if there’s actually a there there?
I was indeed referring to The Replacements, which is actually a very entertaining sports movie. Albeit with a somewhat disconcerting political subtext.
Deadspin offers a handy chart that tells you how often certain words—”natural,” for instance, or “intelligent”—are used to describe black college football players and how often they’re used to describe white players. (The sources for the descriptions are pre-draft scouting reports from several different sources.)
The results are, sadly, pretty much what you’d expect. African-American players are described as “natural” athletes far more frequently than white players are; white players are far more often described as “intelligent.”
In other words news, the New York Times today said that the New York Giants’ top pick in the draft, an African-American wide receiver named Odell Beckham, was known for running “crafty and shifty” pass routes.
To be fair, the Times also suggested that the Giants considered him “intelligent.”
That Robinson Cano really doesn’t play with passion. I agree with him; I’d take Dustin Pedroia over Cano in a heartbeat. If only because I’m not sure Cano has one…