A politically conservative young person enrolls in a social science program at the University of Copenhagen and is dismayed to learn that her fellow students aren’t very friendly or receptive to her opinions. Does that show a woeful lack of understanding of society in 2020 that might disqualify her from pursuing a career in this field?
As I reported recently, Denmark may not yet be in full compliance with the social justice standards of the Anglosphere, but it is making strides to catch up. In that post, I looked back at highlights of political correctness in the country last year. Those were isolated incidents that were perhaps too easily conducive to jokes. But some people have to live with this code of conduct every day.
The University of Copenhagen’s student newspaper interviewed students and faculty members (DK) in the social science and political science departments and learned that, as in the US, both groups are overwhelming leftist. Conservative students felt they couldn’t express themselves candidly on subjects such as race, gender, inequality and immigration and sometimes found themselves shunned socially.
The sexual dimorphism heresy
One student said that of all the organizations he had experienced in schools and workplaces, this one was the most limiting of free debate. He felt he couldn’t discuss gender “because I believe there are two sexes and that’s almost an illegal opinion here.” A sociology student said that he couldn’t be sure whether right-wing students in his department felt marginalized because they’re weren’t any others left. The three others in their entering class had disappeared. There are certain basic assumptions that his fellow students agree on, he said, such as the multiplicity of sexes, and the only debates about them are between moderate and radical leftist positions.
In the student council election campaign in 2019, a conservative student displayed a poster that said “No to identity politics,” with a picture of a sombrero – a reference to a recent cultural appropriation scandal on campus. A photo of the poster was posted on Instagram with the description “white supremacist move” and a suggestion that the posters be torn down. The same thing happened to another candidate with the slogan “No thanks to grievance-readiness” (Nej tak til krænkelsesparathed). She said that other conservative students confided in her that they stayed in the closet or else got shamed for their opinions.
All opinions welcome – except yours
Two anthropology students behind a Facebook group called “Inclusive environment at U of Copenhagen” believe it is legitimate to exclude certain opinions. One said that some conservatives have views of humanity that are directly harmful and violate human rights: “We have accepted the idea that there should be room for all opinions and views and that it is okay not to like immigrants, to be transphobic or to hate women a little. But it is not an opinion that some people cannot have the same rights as others.” The other draws the line at racist, sexist and otherwise oppressive views: “The question is how you treat other people. Are you discriminatory in the words you use? Do you wound other people and make them sad?”
It is not apparent what rights they thought the conservatives wanted to deny to others or what words they perceived to be discriminatory. Some conservative students may have committed such infractions against general guidelines for ethical behavior, but the ones interviewed seemed very cautious and self-censoring. These progressive students share the same beliefs and tactics as their American counterparts. They want to limit free speech for those with opposing views, they use subjective emotional reactions as the criterion for determining whether something is to be prohibited, they think disturbing language is violence, and they rely on straw-man – er, straw-person – arguments.
Maoism light?
The professor who conducted one of the surveys, Assistant Professor Frederik Hjorth, found a surprising degree of political prejudice and “affective polarization” among the general population in Denmark. He also found that leftists were more likely to show intolerance than others, and so it was likely that social science and political science students tended to fit that description since leftists are overrepresented in those fields. He noted that this wasn’t a completely new phenomenon, however. There was a similar conformism to left-wing opinions and an intolerance of others in the 1970s, at that time according to a more classical socialist or communist ideology. In any case, he concluded, such an atmosphere of polarization and tribalism is bad for democracy; fear of stigmatization or social retaliation stifles the free exchange of ideas.
But Hjorth himself has not heard many pointed political opinions expressed in the classroom. On the contrary, he thinks his political science students are rather apolitical. The fact that a professor can research and describe the situation in an impartial way in itself indicates that the situation hasn’t reach the tendentious anti-science and anti–free speech atmosphere of many elite American liberal arts colleges. But that’s little comfort to the students who are being discouraged from entering these fields by subtler pressures. And their exclusion because of intolerance for intellectual diversity is a loss for the professions they were preparing for and the society they are supposed to serve.
Showing posts with label university. Show all posts
Showing posts with label university. Show all posts
28 February 2020
24 January 2020
Why there is less social justice warfare in Denmark
Why doesn’t Denmark have as much controversy about social justice issues as do the US and the UK?
First, racial and ethnic tensions are not as acute because Denmark does not have the same history of slavery and colonialism. Slave trade was conducted in the Danish West Indies until 1848, but there is no segment of the Danish population that has descended from slaves and endured centuries of discrimination. There is an ethnic underclass, but only around 13 percent of the population has a foreign background. The largest group are the descendants of “guest workers” who came mainly from Turkey in the 1960s and 1970s. It is difficult to remember a case of the police killing a person of color person under suspicious circumstances.
Second, conditions for women are more favorable because of the extensive welfare state and a tradition of greater egalitarianism.
Third, the country has historically been one of the most tolerant towards LGBT+ groups. It was the first to recognize same-sex partnerships, and it legalized same-sex marriage in 2012.
Fewer enemies
Fourth, the right-wing radicalism that provokes activism on the Left is less extensive and prominent. White supremacist and neo-Nazi groups are very small and are looked down upon by the general population. The extremist Stram Kurs (Hard Line) Party, which advocated deporting all Muslims, received 1.8 percent of the votes in the 2019 election and didn’t qualify for seats in Parliament.
Fifth, universities, where most social justice agitation and scandals have taken place in the US, have an infrastructure in Denmark that makes them less susceptible to activism. They are not residential colleges. There are some dormitories, but very few are located on campus. Many students commute from home or live in apartments. They do not congregate as often as American students in clubs and interest organizations and perhaps for that reason do not develop a tribal mentality. They are also more professionally oriented. They do not simply “go to college” to get a B.A. They choose their major fields when they apply and begin to specialize after one year. It is likely that more of them are more interested in pursuing their careers than in political activism. Additionally, they aren’t burdened by the prospect of a sizeable undischargeable debt upon graduation.
Sixth, Twitter, which offers the quickest and easiest way to engage in ideological warfare, is less widespread in Denmark than in the US. Facebook is the most popular social media forum here. It does sometimes attract heated debate but has less rapid-fire escalation of denunciation and insult-trading and, in the extreme, mob frenzy.
Marxism was here first
Seventh, the European socialist tradition already offered a theoretical framework and vocabulary for addressing social injustice. It was more firmly established and intellectually coherent than, say, Occupy Wall Street, Black Lives Matter and intersectionalism, which need to explain themselves.
Eighth (a corollary of the preceding), there were already well-established political parties on the far Left with a voice in Parliament and influence on center-left administrations. The Red-Green Party’s platform is more extreme than the American progressive movement’s. Activists have a channel to promote their causes and need not always be an protest element that is not taken seriously.
Ninth (something that could have been mentioned first), some of the main objectives of the social justice movement have already been accomplished here, most obviously universal health care, tuition-free university, and policies to prevent environmental damage and climate change. There is not as much crony capitalism and lobbyist influence to protest against.
Tenth, children here are less “coddled” than Americans, as famously documented by Lukianoff and Haidt. They are less sheltered and are encouraged to be more responsible for themselves and therefore less likely to develop an entitlement and grievance mentality.
Biology 101
Finally (and more speculative), both academics and, where relevant, politicians appear to be stronger adherents and defenders of free speech and a scientific viewpoint than their American counterparts. Denmark is proud of its democratic tradition, which is linked to its egalitarianism. It has high voter turnouts and numerous local organizations and cooperative housing associations founded and run by citizen groups that span socioeconomic strata. There is less tendency to attempt to silence and suppress opposing political positions and probably less need for students to insulate themselves from exposure to ideas that might make them uncomfortable.
I don’t know how deeply social constructionism has influenced the social sciences here, but I doubt that the natural sciences are seriously threatened by ideological campaigns to deny the distinction between sex and gender, for example. If university faculty are under less pressure because of the factors listed above, then there is less need for them to cede an evidence-based approach.
First, racial and ethnic tensions are not as acute because Denmark does not have the same history of slavery and colonialism. Slave trade was conducted in the Danish West Indies until 1848, but there is no segment of the Danish population that has descended from slaves and endured centuries of discrimination. There is an ethnic underclass, but only around 13 percent of the population has a foreign background. The largest group are the descendants of “guest workers” who came mainly from Turkey in the 1960s and 1970s. It is difficult to remember a case of the police killing a person of color person under suspicious circumstances.
Second, conditions for women are more favorable because of the extensive welfare state and a tradition of greater egalitarianism.
Third, the country has historically been one of the most tolerant towards LGBT+ groups. It was the first to recognize same-sex partnerships, and it legalized same-sex marriage in 2012.
Fewer enemies
Fourth, the right-wing radicalism that provokes activism on the Left is less extensive and prominent. White supremacist and neo-Nazi groups are very small and are looked down upon by the general population. The extremist Stram Kurs (Hard Line) Party, which advocated deporting all Muslims, received 1.8 percent of the votes in the 2019 election and didn’t qualify for seats in Parliament.
Fifth, universities, where most social justice agitation and scandals have taken place in the US, have an infrastructure in Denmark that makes them less susceptible to activism. They are not residential colleges. There are some dormitories, but very few are located on campus. Many students commute from home or live in apartments. They do not congregate as often as American students in clubs and interest organizations and perhaps for that reason do not develop a tribal mentality. They are also more professionally oriented. They do not simply “go to college” to get a B.A. They choose their major fields when they apply and begin to specialize after one year. It is likely that more of them are more interested in pursuing their careers than in political activism. Additionally, they aren’t burdened by the prospect of a sizeable undischargeable debt upon graduation.
Sixth, Twitter, which offers the quickest and easiest way to engage in ideological warfare, is less widespread in Denmark than in the US. Facebook is the most popular social media forum here. It does sometimes attract heated debate but has less rapid-fire escalation of denunciation and insult-trading and, in the extreme, mob frenzy.
Marxism was here first
Seventh, the European socialist tradition already offered a theoretical framework and vocabulary for addressing social injustice. It was more firmly established and intellectually coherent than, say, Occupy Wall Street, Black Lives Matter and intersectionalism, which need to explain themselves.
Eighth (a corollary of the preceding), there were already well-established political parties on the far Left with a voice in Parliament and influence on center-left administrations. The Red-Green Party’s platform is more extreme than the American progressive movement’s. Activists have a channel to promote their causes and need not always be an protest element that is not taken seriously.
Ninth (something that could have been mentioned first), some of the main objectives of the social justice movement have already been accomplished here, most obviously universal health care, tuition-free university, and policies to prevent environmental damage and climate change. There is not as much crony capitalism and lobbyist influence to protest against.
Tenth, children here are less “coddled” than Americans, as famously documented by Lukianoff and Haidt. They are less sheltered and are encouraged to be more responsible for themselves and therefore less likely to develop an entitlement and grievance mentality.
Biology 101
Finally (and more speculative), both academics and, where relevant, politicians appear to be stronger adherents and defenders of free speech and a scientific viewpoint than their American counterparts. Denmark is proud of its democratic tradition, which is linked to its egalitarianism. It has high voter turnouts and numerous local organizations and cooperative housing associations founded and run by citizen groups that span socioeconomic strata. There is less tendency to attempt to silence and suppress opposing political positions and probably less need for students to insulate themselves from exposure to ideas that might make them uncomfortable.
I don’t know how deeply social constructionism has influenced the social sciences here, but I doubt that the natural sciences are seriously threatened by ideological campaigns to deny the distinction between sex and gender, for example. If university faculty are under less pressure because of the factors listed above, then there is less need for them to cede an evidence-based approach.
20 December 2019
Campus grievance culture revisited
Last month there was a little ruckus over a questionnaire (DK) for a thesis project that two University of Copenhagen students sent to 7,000 other students over the University’s shared email system. One of the respondents hit Reply All and complained very politely, almost apologetically, that they [sic] couldn’t complete the questionnaire because it asked the subjects to identify themselves as male or female and the student was neither of those.
The student was attacked less politely in further replies by people who thought they were a whining snowflake or worse. Others asked for the administration to take action, particularly against the first student’s accusers. The associate dean explained that the administration hadn’t been aware of the inappropriate Reply All function in the email system and afterward shut down the system. He added that it is important to have a space where people can discuss topics such as sex, gender and identity, and it should preferably be offline.
Rules on outrage
That was apparently the end of the incident. The most striking thing about the report is that it reminds us how little in Denmark we hear of the kind of culture wars that are raging in the US and the UK, particularly on campuses: bias reporting, protests, deplatforming, calls for resignation, self-censorship. Identity politics is hardly unknown here, but it doesn’t have a pervasive influence on academic life. In fact the most noteworthy recent event on this front was the University of Copenhagen’s revision of its guidelines on offensive behavior (DK) to define such behavior more narrowly.
The University had instituted a set of guidelines in 2018 after the so-called Sombrero Scandal in which students at the Law Faculty objected to costumes based on ethnic stereotypes at a Mexican theme party. The Faculty banned such parties, and a controversial debate on cultural appropriation and “offense-culture,” as it’s called here, ensued at the University. The result was a set of rules that defined offensive behavior very broadly as any action that caused a perception of violation on the part of an individual university employee or student; that is, any subjective feeling of harassment, discrimination or even discomfort.
This is the key sentence: “It is the employee’s or student’s experience of having been subjected to offensive behavior that is the basis [of the case].”
Anything qualifies for a citizen’s arrest?
The guidelines in turn prompted a new debate about whether the criteria for an offense should be an individual’s opinion or more objective categories of behavior. They occasioned protests by some faculty members that they would hamper academic freedom, classroom discussion and research. This phase led to a re-evaluation and eventually a revision of the guidelines at the end of October of this year.
The new guidelines are no longer based on a subjective perception of violation but rather on the definition set forth by the Danish Working Environment Authority. The Authority’s definition also takes the individual’s experience as the starting point, regardless of whether or not the behavior arose from a deliberate intention to offend. But it makes an important qualification that an individual’s reaction is not automatically accepted as evidence of a violation:
“It is a case of offensive behavior when one or more persons grossly or repeatedly subject other persons to behavior that is perceived by the latter as demeaning. This implies that there may be situations in which a person feels violated but management determines that it was not offensive behavior.” (my translation)
Rolling back the presumption of guilt
The new guidelines state that they do not cover referrals from students about the content or methods of teaching or about teaching assignments. They also set forth a procedure for persons who feel violated: First they should object or refuse to participate in the situation, and then they should speak to others about the incident and possibly to their manager or administrator. For their part, managers should investigate the circumstances that led to the report before opening a formal case.
These are significant changes not only because they moderate the policy but also because they defer to the civil rights that apply to society as a whole and do not treat students as a vulnerable class in need of special indulgence. Students are already protected by laws against discrimination and harassment that protect all citizens. The University opted out of the more expansive conception of harm that can be problematic to implement and that can have negative consequences for the fundamental principle of free expression.
Uncommon sense
The University Rector, Henrik Wegener, explains that the guidelines are intended to balance the interests of academic freedom and need for students and employees to feel that they are in a safe environment. That sounds like obvious common sense, but the University’s position doesn’t appear to be a very common viewpoint on American campuses. One problem with the welfare state is that once a social group receives a specific benefit, it becomes almost impossible to scale it back, even if economic or other factors argue for doing so. The same may be the case for the burgeoning diversity and inclusion bureaucracy in the US that has a vested interest in its own prohibitions.
The student was attacked less politely in further replies by people who thought they were a whining snowflake or worse. Others asked for the administration to take action, particularly against the first student’s accusers. The associate dean explained that the administration hadn’t been aware of the inappropriate Reply All function in the email system and afterward shut down the system. He added that it is important to have a space where people can discuss topics such as sex, gender and identity, and it should preferably be offline.
Rules on outrage
That was apparently the end of the incident. The most striking thing about the report is that it reminds us how little in Denmark we hear of the kind of culture wars that are raging in the US and the UK, particularly on campuses: bias reporting, protests, deplatforming, calls for resignation, self-censorship. Identity politics is hardly unknown here, but it doesn’t have a pervasive influence on academic life. In fact the most noteworthy recent event on this front was the University of Copenhagen’s revision of its guidelines on offensive behavior (DK) to define such behavior more narrowly.
The University had instituted a set of guidelines in 2018 after the so-called Sombrero Scandal in which students at the Law Faculty objected to costumes based on ethnic stereotypes at a Mexican theme party. The Faculty banned such parties, and a controversial debate on cultural appropriation and “offense-culture,” as it’s called here, ensued at the University. The result was a set of rules that defined offensive behavior very broadly as any action that caused a perception of violation on the part of an individual university employee or student; that is, any subjective feeling of harassment, discrimination or even discomfort.
This is the key sentence: “It is the employee’s or student’s experience of having been subjected to offensive behavior that is the basis [of the case].”
Anything qualifies for a citizen’s arrest?
The guidelines in turn prompted a new debate about whether the criteria for an offense should be an individual’s opinion or more objective categories of behavior. They occasioned protests by some faculty members that they would hamper academic freedom, classroom discussion and research. This phase led to a re-evaluation and eventually a revision of the guidelines at the end of October of this year.
The new guidelines are no longer based on a subjective perception of violation but rather on the definition set forth by the Danish Working Environment Authority. The Authority’s definition also takes the individual’s experience as the starting point, regardless of whether or not the behavior arose from a deliberate intention to offend. But it makes an important qualification that an individual’s reaction is not automatically accepted as evidence of a violation:
“It is a case of offensive behavior when one or more persons grossly or repeatedly subject other persons to behavior that is perceived by the latter as demeaning. This implies that there may be situations in which a person feels violated but management determines that it was not offensive behavior.” (my translation)
Rolling back the presumption of guilt
The new guidelines state that they do not cover referrals from students about the content or methods of teaching or about teaching assignments. They also set forth a procedure for persons who feel violated: First they should object or refuse to participate in the situation, and then they should speak to others about the incident and possibly to their manager or administrator. For their part, managers should investigate the circumstances that led to the report before opening a formal case.
These are significant changes not only because they moderate the policy but also because they defer to the civil rights that apply to society as a whole and do not treat students as a vulnerable class in need of special indulgence. Students are already protected by laws against discrimination and harassment that protect all citizens. The University opted out of the more expansive conception of harm that can be problematic to implement and that can have negative consequences for the fundamental principle of free expression.
Uncommon sense
The University Rector, Henrik Wegener, explains that the guidelines are intended to balance the interests of academic freedom and need for students and employees to feel that they are in a safe environment. That sounds like obvious common sense, but the University’s position doesn’t appear to be a very common viewpoint on American campuses. One problem with the welfare state is that once a social group receives a specific benefit, it becomes almost impossible to scale it back, even if economic or other factors argue for doing so. The same may be the case for the burgeoning diversity and inclusion bureaucracy in the US that has a vested interest in its own prohibitions.
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