Like, I don't think I made this clear enough in my comment, but I think there needs to be a divide about how and when someone is speaking when it comes to 'speech.' If this were a case where she was speaking as a professor of law, if she was talking about something academically, if she was talking about something in regards to her profes…
Like, I don't think I made this clear enough in my comment, but I think there needs to be a divide about how and when someone is speaking when it comes to 'speech.'
If this were a case where she was speaking as a professor of law, if she was talking about something academically, if she was talking about something in regards to her profession, or expressing some opinion outside the norm that people disliked, I could understand this sort of view where you don't want to fire them for that speech.
Like, if she was saying that Brown V. Board was wrongly decided, I would disagree with her, and think she was a terrible person, but I could understand why you could theoretically back a law professor having controversial law opinions.
But she's not expressing opinions that have anything to do with her profession. She's not expressing anything that has anything to do with law. Are we now to believe that if you have tenure that you can just do anything and that you shouldn't ever be fired for it? If she came out in a klan hood, are we just supposed to go 'well, free speech!'
We're talking about publicly expressing beliefs that cut against the very idea of education. How can a professor be expected to treat every student equally when she publicly and repeatedly claims that she does not believe some of her students are genetically capable of learning the law?
Again, none of this is based around her academic beliefs. She's not expressing anything related to her job. How these viewpoints fit into academic freedom, I don't know, because there's nothing academic about them. Again, if you expressed these views at any other job, you would probably be fired on the spot for them. Why she should keep her job, a job where she's in charge of teaching people, after continuing to express these views, I don't know.
Beyond that, Mona's viewpoint that we should 'refute' her speech is moronic. How exactly do we 'refute' someone's beliefs? How exactly do we do this so that those who are taught under her get a fair shake? How do we refute her beliefs so that we can know, for certain, that she's treating every student equally?
I don't believe we can. I don't believe this is merely a difference of opinion; we're talking about whether or not we view individuals as being equals regardless of their skin color or national origin. I don't believe you can just refute her speech and expect her to be like 'man, I was wrong, I guess I have to treat black people as equals now.'
This isn't a case where we're arguing some kind of academic theory, we're talking about real people who she is saying are incapable of being the equals of people who look like her. That's not something you can just refute with more speech!
It occurs to me that this judge is just trying to explore a new career path. Lots of people get to a certain level of success in their lives and look around and wonder, is this all there is? What new field of endeavor could I try? For some of us, it's taking up guitar lessons. For others -- mid-life career jurists, for instance -- it's seeing how far they can get by being obnoxious and making a public spectacle of themselves.
To the misfortune of all, in our America today, there are rich rewards for notoriety. Fame and power, but also fortune -- fortune in many cases beyond the wildest dreams of avarice. We all have talents; success can be won by aligning our talents with the opportunities life puts in our way. In her case, she seems to be trying out her gifts for exploiting bigotry and intolerance. It's a crowded field with many contestants, but it's very much in the American tradition to give one's dreams a try.
Alas, I respectfully suggest the statement "if you expressed these views at any other job, you would probably be fired on the spot" is incorrect. True it might be in certain workplaces, but by no means everywhere.
You are on the mark though when you ask how to "refute" such speech. One might as well try to "refute" Putin's invasion of Ukraine, or persuade a drought to abate, or debate with a dog by barking.
What Mona misses is that this person's pronouncements are "speech" only in a very tortured sense. By "freedom of speech" in the first amendment sense, we generally mean speech intended as expression. Expression is of course an action but there is also action which is not really speech, even if it takes the outward form of expression. An action per se can be lauded, supported, opposed, condemned, or prevented, but it can't be rebutted or refuted. The bully who comes up to you in the bar, gets in your face, tells you you are ugly, and insists you try to do something about it, is not engaged in "speech".
The "speech" in question is more like "shut up, he explained" than proposing or even directly claiming x is inferior to y. To be sure, we may confidently infer that the judge does in fact believe x inferior to y, but what is really going on is nothing like an attempt to advance that view. Rather, it's just an effort to start a fistfight by making people she wants to destroy lose their temper and strike the first blow. She's like the self-righteous bigot on the streetcorner haranguing passersby with the admonition they are headed for hellfire if they don't come to Jesus. Putatively they are trying to save souls. Actually they are merely scratching their own personal itches in public.
What perhaps Mona should suggest is, not attempt to "refute" or "rebut". We might better just try to show what is really being attempted. Which of course is being tendentious for its own sake, to provoke ill-judged behavior by people she wants to malign.
I don't care so much about refutation but I have listened to some of her talks. Some are about legitimate questions, and Joseph Henrich dealt with the uniqueness of the West in his recent book about Western, Educated, Industrial societies. Max Weber also dealt with the difference with Protestant Western societies.
Even the question of who the nation should let immigrate in a fair one. Unless one believes that we must treat all nations equally.
Still she ends up as a bitter person. I think she is her own worst enemy. I don't see why we should help her become a new right wing victim.
But why should she be able to play the bully while hiding behind tenure? How many of our institutions and norms of practice must be turned over to rightwing racists under the guise of 'free speech' before we say enough is enough.
I don't know that she is a bully (except for her power over her students). I don't really see that the universities have turned themselves over to bullies.
To me she comes off as a frustrated and angry person. And to be frank, it can be frustrating when others don't agree. So a conservative in a mostly liberal society (her university).
I see her turned into a right wing saint. But who knows.
I don’t understand how UPenn firing her is helping her to become a new right wing victim. Her legal arguments and interpretations are not why she would be fired. Her explicitly racist ideas about who belongs in her institution are why she should be fired.
I disagree that someone should be fired for expressing their views unless their contract sets forth that they cannot express certain views publicly in any forum at any time.
There is an old saw "sticks and stones may break my bones but words will never hurt me." We have become way too oversensitized to "offense" and "taking offense." Every thing you ever utter will "offend" SOMEone it they are looking to be offended.
Firing someone for their ideas and opinions leads to Book Burning and Book Banning and other forms of censorship.
It also leads to more silos, more tribalism, more polarization.
Peacefully protest abhorrent ideas. March. Sit in. Write letters. But engage in a way that has at least a possibility of change coming rather than ensuring any change will be bloody.
Both sides are now working to muzzle the opposition. Both are wrong.
So, she is afforded free speech protections, but the university isn’t? In fact, we are going to compel speech from the university by making them retain her?
If the path to success is being victimized, there are various ways to get there. Possibly she miscalculated, and only hoped to be made a pariah in her ivory tower, so she could sally back and forth from there to Fox to attract the attention and rewards of cancellation. Actually losing one's job is taking it a bit far. Perhaps she was just a would-be mendicant who used a knife to produce some pity-inducing scarification and accidentally cut off her arm.
Frankly, she's not the right demographic for "right wing martyr". They are not interested in adding an aging, female, Ivy-League law professor to their litany of saints. Maybe if she were 30 years younger and blonde, had shot someone like Kyle Rittenhouse, or had been on a reality TV show. But she seems much to boring for the right to care about.
I find racism a too easy label. And when I listened to her, I found more of a gadfly. Someone who challenges the nation of racism. Still if she is fired... well it won't make my life change at all.
“I often chuckle at the ads on TV which show a Black man married to a white woman in an upper-class picket-fence house,” she said, adding, “They never show Blacks the way they really are: a bunch of single moms with a bunch of guys who float in and out. Kids by different men.”
I know a Puerto Rican man in Paterson NJ who was changing a tire in his neighborhood when he was robbed by a black guy. Is he a racist for wanting to move to Clifton or Totowa?
And I know of several black women who are single mothers - several kids before 21 and a few fathers. They climbed out of a hole (work as clerks where I worked). Can we not worry about that?
I volunteer in Paterson. We see lots of motivated kids (HS age) some are interns where I volunteer. Very few have been African American in the 9 years I have been volunteering.
Mr. McKenna, if your tire-changing man wants to move because he is looking for a lower crime area that makes perfect sense. If he wants to move because his assailant had black skin he ought to think about what he'd do if his assailant had had white skin.
There are many reasons why black people may more frequently break the law or become single mothers. Poverty, urban economic segregation, alienation and cynicism due to longstanding social prejudice (which has, indeed, gutted optimistic motivation), unequal incarceration standards, and so forth. But dark complexion is not one of them.
When you observe and wonder, I hope you bear in mind that the effects you see are not due to any simple, essential cause: skin pigment. Professor Wax's stream of comments all reduce to: good things come from white skinned people; people with different skin color don't create good things and what they're good at creating are bad things.
“I often chuckle at the ads on TV which show a Black man married to a white woman in an upper-class picket-fence house,” she said, adding, “They never show Blacks the way they really are: a bunch of single moms with a bunch of guys who float in and out. Kids by different men.”
"I am amused when our culture doesn't show all White men the way they really are: a bunch of overweight redneck fentanyl addicts who drive pickup trucks with confederate decals and AR-15's in the gunrack".
Cheese with your crackers, anyone?
Racism is not just KKK murderers burning crosses and blowing up black churches. It's more extensive and more subtle and doesn't even require personal malice toward anyone in particular.
She is allowed to say whatever she wants. When she makes sweeping statements about an entire race of people, she should expect people to pushback against her racism and the university is not curbing her academic freedom by firing her. At this point, we have exhausted this debate. I’m going to stop responding lest I say something uncivil. Your anecdotes however, aren’t data, I would ask you to refrain from using them in an argument.
Actually argument is not what I am after. In fact it is impossible without doing a full paper on a subject. And I don't want to. But you seem satisfied that racism is the label to use against her. I do not.
Racist is a chainsaw. I prefer to see her as a frustrated person and a gadfly.
Opinions are not appropriate in a learning environment, unless it is to discuss the whole subject - opinion, observation, experience, drawing conclusions and testing them out.
Her sharing her observations and conclusions she has drawn is spreading the bias that has developed in herself. This is what makes it racist.
If I say that every peach pie I have ever smelled or tasted is gross, I am spreading bias. But when the listener approaches their next peach pie and chooses not to try it, the pie's feeling will not be hurt nor will it have missed an opportunity to provide better for its children.
Easy to label as racist. I just don't see it. You are clearly angry. No need to be. The anecdote you shared above about her commenting on black men in ads... is that racist or her fair comment?
I think her comment above is clearly racist. I’m not so much angry as frustrated that here you are providing cover for a bigot. Incidentally, it’s not the only racist thing she has said. Yet, you seem to be okay with it.
It’s exactly how I feel. This isn’t a difference of interpretation of statutes. This is a person making wildly racist comments unrelated to her work and a private institution just needs to abide?! Turns out the argument is that we should be comfortable compelling speech from certain actors just because. The entire “cancel culture” debate rests on the idea that certain people are afforded “consequence-free speech” while others aren’t.
Like, I don't think I made this clear enough in my comment, but I think there needs to be a divide about how and when someone is speaking when it comes to 'speech.'
If this were a case where she was speaking as a professor of law, if she was talking about something academically, if she was talking about something in regards to her profession, or expressing some opinion outside the norm that people disliked, I could understand this sort of view where you don't want to fire them for that speech.
Like, if she was saying that Brown V. Board was wrongly decided, I would disagree with her, and think she was a terrible person, but I could understand why you could theoretically back a law professor having controversial law opinions.
But she's not expressing opinions that have anything to do with her profession. She's not expressing anything that has anything to do with law. Are we now to believe that if you have tenure that you can just do anything and that you shouldn't ever be fired for it? If she came out in a klan hood, are we just supposed to go 'well, free speech!'
We're talking about publicly expressing beliefs that cut against the very idea of education. How can a professor be expected to treat every student equally when she publicly and repeatedly claims that she does not believe some of her students are genetically capable of learning the law?
Again, none of this is based around her academic beliefs. She's not expressing anything related to her job. How these viewpoints fit into academic freedom, I don't know, because there's nothing academic about them. Again, if you expressed these views at any other job, you would probably be fired on the spot for them. Why she should keep her job, a job where she's in charge of teaching people, after continuing to express these views, I don't know.
Beyond that, Mona's viewpoint that we should 'refute' her speech is moronic. How exactly do we 'refute' someone's beliefs? How exactly do we do this so that those who are taught under her get a fair shake? How do we refute her beliefs so that we can know, for certain, that she's treating every student equally?
I don't believe we can. I don't believe this is merely a difference of opinion; we're talking about whether or not we view individuals as being equals regardless of their skin color or national origin. I don't believe you can just refute her speech and expect her to be like 'man, I was wrong, I guess I have to treat black people as equals now.'
This isn't a case where we're arguing some kind of academic theory, we're talking about real people who she is saying are incapable of being the equals of people who look like her. That's not something you can just refute with more speech!
It occurs to me that this judge is just trying to explore a new career path. Lots of people get to a certain level of success in their lives and look around and wonder, is this all there is? What new field of endeavor could I try? For some of us, it's taking up guitar lessons. For others -- mid-life career jurists, for instance -- it's seeing how far they can get by being obnoxious and making a public spectacle of themselves.
To the misfortune of all, in our America today, there are rich rewards for notoriety. Fame and power, but also fortune -- fortune in many cases beyond the wildest dreams of avarice. We all have talents; success can be won by aligning our talents with the opportunities life puts in our way. In her case, she seems to be trying out her gifts for exploiting bigotry and intolerance. It's a crowded field with many contestants, but it's very much in the American tradition to give one's dreams a try.
Alas, I respectfully suggest the statement "if you expressed these views at any other job, you would probably be fired on the spot" is incorrect. True it might be in certain workplaces, but by no means everywhere.
You are on the mark though when you ask how to "refute" such speech. One might as well try to "refute" Putin's invasion of Ukraine, or persuade a drought to abate, or debate with a dog by barking.
What Mona misses is that this person's pronouncements are "speech" only in a very tortured sense. By "freedom of speech" in the first amendment sense, we generally mean speech intended as expression. Expression is of course an action but there is also action which is not really speech, even if it takes the outward form of expression. An action per se can be lauded, supported, opposed, condemned, or prevented, but it can't be rebutted or refuted. The bully who comes up to you in the bar, gets in your face, tells you you are ugly, and insists you try to do something about it, is not engaged in "speech".
The "speech" in question is more like "shut up, he explained" than proposing or even directly claiming x is inferior to y. To be sure, we may confidently infer that the judge does in fact believe x inferior to y, but what is really going on is nothing like an attempt to advance that view. Rather, it's just an effort to start a fistfight by making people she wants to destroy lose their temper and strike the first blow. She's like the self-righteous bigot on the streetcorner haranguing passersby with the admonition they are headed for hellfire if they don't come to Jesus. Putatively they are trying to save souls. Actually they are merely scratching their own personal itches in public.
What perhaps Mona should suggest is, not attempt to "refute" or "rebut". We might better just try to show what is really being attempted. Which of course is being tendentious for its own sake, to provoke ill-judged behavior by people she wants to malign.
I don't care so much about refutation but I have listened to some of her talks. Some are about legitimate questions, and Joseph Henrich dealt with the uniqueness of the West in his recent book about Western, Educated, Industrial societies. Max Weber also dealt with the difference with Protestant Western societies.
Even the question of who the nation should let immigrate in a fair one. Unless one believes that we must treat all nations equally.
Still she ends up as a bitter person. I think she is her own worst enemy. I don't see why we should help her become a new right wing victim.
But why should she be able to play the bully while hiding behind tenure? How many of our institutions and norms of practice must be turned over to rightwing racists under the guise of 'free speech' before we say enough is enough.
I don't know that she is a bully (except for her power over her students). I don't really see that the universities have turned themselves over to bullies.
To me she comes off as a frustrated and angry person. And to be frank, it can be frustrating when others don't agree. So a conservative in a mostly liberal society (her university).
I see her turned into a right wing saint. But who knows.
I don’t understand how UPenn firing her is helping her to become a new right wing victim. Her legal arguments and interpretations are not why she would be fired. Her explicitly racist ideas about who belongs in her institution are why she should be fired.
I disagree that someone should be fired for expressing their views unless their contract sets forth that they cannot express certain views publicly in any forum at any time.
There is an old saw "sticks and stones may break my bones but words will never hurt me." We have become way too oversensitized to "offense" and "taking offense." Every thing you ever utter will "offend" SOMEone it they are looking to be offended.
Firing someone for their ideas and opinions leads to Book Burning and Book Banning and other forms of censorship.
It also leads to more silos, more tribalism, more polarization.
Peacefully protest abhorrent ideas. March. Sit in. Write letters. But engage in a way that has at least a possibility of change coming rather than ensuring any change will be bloody.
Both sides are now working to muzzle the opposition. Both are wrong.
So, she is afforded free speech protections, but the university isn’t? In fact, we are going to compel speech from the university by making them retain her?
If the path to success is being victimized, there are various ways to get there. Possibly she miscalculated, and only hoped to be made a pariah in her ivory tower, so she could sally back and forth from there to Fox to attract the attention and rewards of cancellation. Actually losing one's job is taking it a bit far. Perhaps she was just a would-be mendicant who used a knife to produce some pity-inducing scarification and accidentally cut off her arm.
Frankly, she's not the right demographic for "right wing martyr". They are not interested in adding an aging, female, Ivy-League law professor to their litany of saints. Maybe if she were 30 years younger and blonde, had shot someone like Kyle Rittenhouse, or had been on a reality TV show. But she seems much to boring for the right to care about.
I find racism a too easy label. And when I listened to her, I found more of a gadfly. Someone who challenges the nation of racism. Still if she is fired... well it won't make my life change at all.
Ah yes, just challenging the notion of race.
“I often chuckle at the ads on TV which show a Black man married to a white woman in an upper-class picket-fence house,” she said, adding, “They never show Blacks the way they really are: a bunch of single moms with a bunch of guys who float in and out. Kids by different men.”
Is she not allowed to say that?
I know a Puerto Rican man in Paterson NJ who was changing a tire in his neighborhood when he was robbed by a black guy. Is he a racist for wanting to move to Clifton or Totowa?
And I know of several black women who are single mothers - several kids before 21 and a few fathers. They climbed out of a hole (work as clerks where I worked). Can we not worry about that?
I volunteer in Paterson. We see lots of motivated kids (HS age) some are interns where I volunteer. Very few have been African American in the 9 years I have been volunteering.
Can we not observe and worry? Wonder?
Mr. McKenna, if your tire-changing man wants to move because he is looking for a lower crime area that makes perfect sense. If he wants to move because his assailant had black skin he ought to think about what he'd do if his assailant had had white skin.
There are many reasons why black people may more frequently break the law or become single mothers. Poverty, urban economic segregation, alienation and cynicism due to longstanding social prejudice (which has, indeed, gutted optimistic motivation), unequal incarceration standards, and so forth. But dark complexion is not one of them.
When you observe and wonder, I hope you bear in mind that the effects you see are not due to any simple, essential cause: skin pigment. Professor Wax's stream of comments all reduce to: good things come from white skinned people; people with different skin color don't create good things and what they're good at creating are bad things.
I admire you for volunteering.
“I often chuckle at the ads on TV which show a Black man married to a white woman in an upper-class picket-fence house,” she said, adding, “They never show Blacks the way they really are: a bunch of single moms with a bunch of guys who float in and out. Kids by different men.”
"I am amused when our culture doesn't show all White men the way they really are: a bunch of overweight redneck fentanyl addicts who drive pickup trucks with confederate decals and AR-15's in the gunrack".
Cheese with your crackers, anyone?
Racism is not just KKK murderers burning crosses and blowing up black churches. It's more extensive and more subtle and doesn't even require personal malice toward anyone in particular.
She is allowed to say whatever she wants. When she makes sweeping statements about an entire race of people, she should expect people to pushback against her racism and the university is not curbing her academic freedom by firing her. At this point, we have exhausted this debate. I’m going to stop responding lest I say something uncivil. Your anecdotes however, aren’t data, I would ask you to refrain from using them in an argument.
Actually argument is not what I am after. In fact it is impossible without doing a full paper on a subject. And I don't want to. But you seem satisfied that racism is the label to use against her. I do not.
Racist is a chainsaw. I prefer to see her as a frustrated person and a gadfly.
Opinions are not appropriate in a learning environment, unless it is to discuss the whole subject - opinion, observation, experience, drawing conclusions and testing them out.
Her sharing her observations and conclusions she has drawn is spreading the bias that has developed in herself. This is what makes it racist.
If I say that every peach pie I have ever smelled or tasted is gross, I am spreading bias. But when the listener approaches their next peach pie and chooses not to try it, the pie's feeling will not be hurt nor will it have missed an opportunity to provide better for its children.
When she repeatedly makes racist statements, she’s a racist. Providing cover for her bigotry isn’t something you need to do.
Easy to label as racist. I just don't see it. You are clearly angry. No need to be. The anecdote you shared above about her commenting on black men in ads... is that racist or her fair comment?
The 'tell' in her comment is "they never show BLACKS as they REALLY are". That's kind of saying blacks are all like this. Bigoted by definition.
I think her comment above is clearly racist. I’m not so much angry as frustrated that here you are providing cover for a bigot. Incidentally, it’s not the only racist thing she has said. Yet, you seem to be okay with it.
It’s exactly how I feel. This isn’t a difference of interpretation of statutes. This is a person making wildly racist comments unrelated to her work and a private institution just needs to abide?! Turns out the argument is that we should be comfortable compelling speech from certain actors just because. The entire “cancel culture” debate rests on the idea that certain people are afforded “consequence-free speech” while others aren’t.
A good point. It is often not that a system is good, but rather that the alternative is worse.
A point that was made about democracy and other systems of governance . . .