From Reason Magazine, a story about a gay student being kicked out of UTSA:
http://reason.com/blog/2017/10/30/philosophy-bisexual-islam-ut-san-antonio
A link to the googledocs transcript in the link above.
What’s your agenda here, @Zinhead ? I read that story and it’s pretty clear that the grad student involved had a whole bunch of issues that went way beyond the one conversation in question, and you don’t even learn much about the context of the conversation in question and why someone may have complained about it. It’s clear that the other student in the original conversation had felt that the grad student was personally disparaging him or her. And I think it’s also pretty clear that no one – not the department chair, the grad student, or the other student – was particularly surprised that someone might feel the grad student was being disparaging. This is the kind of conversation people have when there’s a lot of history.
It’s also clear that this conversation never led to any kind of further action on the part of the university or the department. The student himself isn’t talking about it, although presumably he was responsible for disseminating the recording of the conversation. It may have contributed to his decision to leave his PhD program, but it’s not like students don’t leave philosophy PhD programs on a regular basis for perfectly good, generally applicable reasons having nothing to do with political correctness or First Amendment issues. We don’t know why he left the program. We don’t even know why he claims he left the program.
So what we have is a right-wing blog making a big deal out of some comments taken out of context by a department chair about a conversation the student had with another student where we only have the first student’s self-serving account of what he said. And the point is what? That no one is allowed to make intellectual criticisms of Islam? Even if they are gay? Not very convincing.
@JHS - If the source bothers you, here is the original article in the Gay Star News.
https://www.gaystarnews.com/article/bisexual-student-dismissal/
As for the agenda, the department chair threatened to report MacDonald to the “Behavior Intervention Team” and “Student Conduct Board” for a conversation that MacDonald had with another student. This is a blatant disregard of the first amendment and an infringement of MacDonald’s right to free speech by a college bureaucrat.
@Zinhead - I don’t think it was “report” as much as being counseled about why his conversation might have been discriminatory. (Not saying I agree with the admin.)
It’s very unclear in what context the student had said what he had said. Whether they were talking about persecution in other countries or possibly the student was “attacking” (without warrant) the other student for marrying a Muslim man. The latter seems more likely in this case. Is that something you would say to a colleague? He could have possibly created a hostile work environment for his colleague.
I’m also not sure how you got “kicked out” of the program.
Also:
That whole blog post is very shaky and holds little substance especially after you read the actual quotes from the school administration. I’m not surprised that the student in question had to attend a meeting with an admin.
Also, funny how they managed to creep in some Islamophobia in the end with the university vs. madrassa quote.
That story makes it worse.
They reviewed 10 minutes out of a 30-minute meeting, and only quoted 2 or 3 minutes. From the quotes provided, it is clear that the student was NOT threatened with discipline for the particular incident the article is discussing, although he was threatened with some kind of quasi-disciplinary intervention if he continued to offend people in the future. It also seems clear from some of the statements quoted that the particular incident was not the only example of a complaint about him offending other people.
And we still only have his not-so-reliable account of what he said that the other students found offensive. Maybe that’s accurate, maybe not; we don’t know whether untranscribed portions of the interview included what other people say they heard. And even if his account is accurate, there’s no indication of the tone of voice he used, how relevant the statement was to the conversation, body language, all sorts of things beyond a transcript that are an integral part of what one is communicating in a personal encounter, and strongly affect how others will respond.
Plus, this student obviously had a laundry list of problems with his department, of which this incident was merely one.
This kind of news story – and your dissemination of it – has about the same intellectual integrity as a negative campaign ad. It’s not an argument, it’s just a big “Gotcha!” that you can spin however you want. No matter where it comes from, left or right, it debases public discourse and it discredits the people doing it.
Eugene Volokh answered that question far more eloquently than I can in the following Washington Post piece:
You guys have got to be kidding. Yes, the grad student sounds like a jerk who wasn’t taking his studies seriously. But when you defend conduct like this and try and argue against what is plain to see because it doesn’t fit your ideological world view you do far more harm to your “side” than good.
@Ohiodad51 - We still don’t know the entire story so it would not be prudent to jump to conclusions. However, anyone working in a team should expect a safe work environment without people commenting on other people’s personal lives.
I don’t see this as an issue of “free speech” necessarily because the context in which he made his comments seems murky. Why did he say what he said? To educate the colleague? Why did he say it then? Why did he feel the need to make that comment at all? Should we all go around saying exactly what we feel about everyone all the time?
Also, I’m not quite following your comment on “But when you defend conduct like this and try and argue against what is plain to see because it doesn’t fit your ideological world view you do far more harm to your “side” than good.” Can you expand?
^ Sure. According to the transcript that was released, the kid said that he could be executed in something like a dozen countries. This is objectively true. It used to be that people could say things that were true without getting in trouble for doing so. That is apparently no longer the case, at least in that department (a philosophy department no less! My old professors, even the way lefty ones, would puke). Since I do not believe that the majority of the country is insane, I believe that arguing it is ok to threaten someone who is speaking objective truth is likely to reflect poorly on the person making the argument.
Eugene Volokh was being wordily eloquent about a straw man. Probably everyone can agree that philosophy graduate students must be allowed to challenge one another’s beliefs. Everyone can probably also agree that some limits on how and when such challenges occur – let’s start with no violence or personal threats, no late-night calls to harangue, no ad hominem attacks – are appropriate. If we tried to come up with a refined list of ground rules, there might be a lot of debate. Nothing in these hit-pieces convinces me that the University of Texas - San Antonio’s Philosophy Department is out of bounds on those issues. I don’t believe that any thinking person looking at those stories in good faith could reach a different conclusion – although I will also acknowledge that maybe if I listened to the whole recording I might agree that they went too far. It’s just not proven in these stories.
Another set of things everyone can probably agree on: Jerks have First Amendment rights, but exercising free speech doesn’t make a jerk any less of a jerk. To me, it looks like this was a long conversation about the grad student being a jerk in many, many ways, one of which maybe kinda sorta might have raised First Amendment concerns if the context were different and the actions taken were different and we knew more about what happened.
One last thing: What’s with this fixation on Islam? I don’t know whether it’s true or not that there are 10 Muslim countries that might execute someone for being gay, and I also don’t know whether it’s just a question of laws on the books or if the laws are ever actually enforced, and how often. I do know there are a lot more than 10 Muslim countries, and that lots of them have a long tradition of tolerance of homosexuality on a practical level. Meanwhile, the nation with the most virulent program of anti-gay penalties in recent years is Uganda, based supposedly on Christian values. The Old Testament, regarded as holy by both Christians and Jews, explicitly prescribes the death penalty for sex between men (unlike the Quran, which does not). I don’t think there was ever a death penalty, per se, but it is only during our adulthoods that homosexual sex has been decriminalized in the US and Great Britain. So the whole original premise of this foofaw – that the grad student was engaging in some critique of Islam’s position on homosexuality – makes very limited sense.
@JHS -
It is unclear if your ignorance is willfull or not, but here are some mainstream sources that support MacDonald’s claim.
My ignorance wasn’t willful, it was merely ignorance. I never bothered to look to see what countries had what laws on their books regarding penalties for homosexuality. I am familiar with the Old Testament and New Testament material on homosexuality, and knew a little bit about the Quran (which, frankly, I assumed would be consistent with the Old Testament, because it usually is). My synagogue has lots of gay and lesbian members, so we talk about the Jewish law of homosexuality a lot. (We don’t follow it.)
The WaPo story was behind a pay wall, but it was easy to find the reports in which it was sourced. As I suspected, (a) ten is a number that includes countries where the death penalty has not been enforced in a generation and countries where there are regions in the country that have a death penalty, whether or not enforced, (b) with the exception of Iran none of them represents a significant share of the world’s Muslim population, although Saudi Arabia has symbolic and economic importance, © half of them or more are not really functioning countries at all. It also turns out that there aren’t 10 countries where MacDonald’s claim that he could be executed is true, because a number of the countries apply the death penalty (that is, if they apply it at all) only to Muslims.
I don’t mean to make some defense of Islam here. I only mean to stand by my initial reaction when I read that story. MacDonald’s statement that he has a problem with Islam because there are ten Muslim countries where he could be executed is essentially stupid and under-educated and fit oddly into a conversation that – except for him – wasn’t about whether anyone believed or had a problem with Islam, and into which he apparently inserted himself. In other words, it is not out of the question that an objective observer would think he was being aggressive, rude, and insulting. Or not; I didn’t see it.
Mr. MacDonald has a First Amendment right to say all the stupid, under-educated things he wants to say about Islam, but the fact that he’s saying stupid, under-educated things about a topic of legitimate public interest doesn’t excuse personal rudeness, if that’s what happened. (Ultimately, though, PhD students are allowed to be punished for being stupid and under-educated. The First Amendment does not require giving stipends and awarding degrees to people who say dumb things.) And nothing yet has convinced me that his conversation with his department chair was fundamentally a conversation about censoring ideas – as Volokh and the others are quick to conclude – rather than a conversation about not being a jerk to everyone around you.
And I also fundamentally don’t get why the words “Muslim” or “Islam” seem to act like Pavlov’s bell to people like MacDonald or Volokh. They start to foam at the mouth, and making sense seems not to matter any more.
Read Volokh’s “eloquent” last sentence again: “What if someone not only says that her fiancee is Muslim, but that she thinks it’s a lovely religion; does he have to remain silent, or can he point out that several countries that adhere to the religion would potentially criminally punish — or even execute — gays?” Notice: he’s expanding the facts. Notice: the response still isn’t exactly apposite. “Several countries that adhere to the religion?” How about all the other countries that adhere to the religion but don’t execute gays? How about all the many countries in the world that completely don’t adhere to Islam but still potentially criminally punish gays (but not by execution)? Why is he talking about countries at all? He could talk about sharia . . . but then he might have to talk about canon law, and church law, and rabbinic law, and different interpretations of Hinduism, and regional Buddhist thought, and, ooops, what’s so special about Islam?
What if someone tells me her fiance is a Christian. That happens quite a bit. Would you not think I was a little off if I responded by ranting: “I have a problem with Christianity. Christians tell me I am going to burn in hell for all eternity, no matter how good a person I am. And for centuries Christians couldn’t wait for eternity to arrive, and took it upon themselves to start burning my ancestors alive.” I have a First Amendment right to make that statement, and it’s both more apposite (but not by much) and more accurate than MacDonald’s statement. But I don’t imagine Eugene Volokh waxing eloquent in my defense if someone pulled me aside and told me to stop being rude.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LGBT_rights_by_country_or_territory is a convenient table of the legal situation regarding LGBT issues in various countries, if anyone wants to fact-check claims about that.
@JHS - MacDonald’s statement that got him in trouble with the Dean was: “I said that I was bothered that I could be killed in ten Muslim countries. I’m bisexual. So they’d definitely do that in the ten countries where I would be – you know.”
You conveniently left out the article from the Independent which states:
Also, remember that MacDonald’s statement occurred after Pulse nightclub killing:
http://www.cnn.com/2016/06/12/us/orlando-nightclub-shooting/index.html
So, far from being “stupid, under-educated” as you call it, MacDonald’s statements seem factual.
It is one thing to be pulled aside and being told to stop being rude. It is quite another thing for a department chair to call someone into her office and threaten dismissal because of factual statements made to another student outside of a classroom. Behavior Intervention Teams belong in dystopian novels, not on American college campuses.
The “factual” nature of MacDonald’s statement is not clear at all. At best, it’s factual at the level of the headline on a PR piece that is trying to be sensational.
The research I saw did not include Pakistan or the UAE in that list (but acknowledged that there was some controversy over the UAE, while noting that there was no record of anyone ever being executed on this basis there). “Parts” of Syria and Iraq refers to ISIS, not to any kind of recognized legislative authority. In Nigeria , Sudan, and Somalia, it applies to a few, relatively rural areas, not to the whole country (to the extent that Somalia functions as a country). In about half of those jurisdictions, the criminal offense only applies to Muslims, so – at least legally – the statement “I could be killed [for being bisexual] in ten Muslim countries” is not true. (Of course, he could be killed in a lot more than 10 Muslim countries, but not as an official punishment for illegal sex. No country on the list penalizes the state of being bisexual.) Also, in a couple of the countries, what is punishable by death is any kind of sex outside of marriage, without regard to the gender of one’s partner, so it’s a stretch to imply that bisexuals are being targeted. Finally, notwithstanding the laws on the books, in many of those countries the law is not enforced and no one has been executed by the government for homosexual sex in decades.
Of course, he could have said something only slightly different and been accurate. “There are a number of Muslim countries where it would be punishable by death for me to have sex with a man.” “Two of the most important countries in the Muslim world, Iran and Saudi Arabia, would execute me for having sex with a man. So would any number of crazy fundamentalists anywhere.” It’s not that he was saying something utterly wrong. He was saying something that was not actually thoughtful or researched, and he was inserting it into a conversation where it wasn’t relevant. So it’s not crazy to think that maybe he was being rude and offensive, and maybe he was doing that deliberately. Or not deliberately, but with a tin ear to how much offense might be taken at what he said and how he said it.
And as for what he said: We only have his word for it. The department chair may not have been reacting at all to the statements he told her he made, but to statements reported by others.
Look, maybe the articles are right. Maybe there’s a PC culture of fear in the Philosophy Department at UT - San Antonio, enforced by a Stalinist department chair who determines what graduate students can and cannot talk about. I just don’t believe it, not on the strength of the articles you posted. They are trying to imply that’s the case, but if you look carefully behind that strategic editing and knowing implications, I think what it looks like is a graduate student with some significant interpersonal issues and a bunch of axes to grind being counseled on that, and trying to make it look like he’s the victim of censorship – something that could get him notoriety and maybe even a job, unlike a philosophy doctorate from UTSA – rather than a putz.
@jhs, so are you saying the audio recording has been faked?
Of course not. I am saying that the article I read noted that the original audiotape was 30 minutes long, and no one reported on it. Then MacDonald created a 10-minute edited version, and some right-wing news operations picked it up. The articles they wrote quote three or four sentences from that 10-minute version, and – as would be the case with any news story – they are selected to illustrate the point of the story, not necessarily to give a fair account of the half-hour conversation as a whole.
If I trusted them to be fair about the conversation as a whole, or if something in the article indicated that they had paid attention to the conversation as a whole and were characterizing it objectively, I would be more willing to take their word for it. But since the tone of the articles is so much gotcha! journalism, and since what they are reporting doesn’t correspond at all to my sense of what conversations occur in the real world, I am suspicious. That’s all. I don’t trust that there isn’t a moment in the full audiotape where the department chair says, in exasperation, “Mr. MacDonald, this has nothing to do with your views on Islam or your sexuality! It has to do with the pattern of rude behavior we have been talking about for half an hour, of which that was only one out of many examples.” I don’t trust that they would not have reported the conversation the way they did anyway even if they were aware of that. Do you?
Arguing the number of countries that MacDonald would be killed in is a bizarre way to argue your case. It does not matter whether is was 5, 10 or 15 countries, what matters is whether or not he had a legitimate cause to believe his statement. Your own research shows that there was plenty of evidence to support his opinion. As you stated, in many of these countries, any sex outside of marriage is illegal, and since same sex marriage is illegal, all homosexual sex is illegal as well even if there no separate law for it.
Regarding whether or not the department chair is a Stalinist enforcing a PC culture, she made that perfectly clear in the transcript that the Muslin comment was grounds to be fired.
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@jhs, I agree that some context would be nice, and I also agree that the kid sounds like a jerk. But as far as we know Prof. Browning said what she said. It is hard to imagine how some more context would not make the quoted language above would not sound creepy.
The context that would make the quoted language above not sound creepy is if it were clear from the rest of the discussion that the issue was not his negative views on Islam but his aggressive insertion of those views into conversations that had nothing to do with Islam, in a way that one or more of his interlocutors would feel they had been attacked.
If we are all coworkers, and we are all standing around talking about the President, it’s one thing if I said, “I think Donald Trump is a disgraceful, fraudulent liar,” and quite another if I interrupted you while you were talking about your new granddaughter, or what you were doing for Thanksgiving, and I said the same thing. And maybe I said it like I was challenging you to a fight because I knew you still supported Trump. In that context, it doesn’t matter that I have a First Amendment right to my opinion, and it doesn’t even matter that I am factually correct. I am being a certain type of hole, and criticizing me for it is not the equivalent of censorship…