This is not the first time that student surveys have been used to create exaggerated fears that students are opposed to free speech, and the liberal students are the worst transgressors. If you have story to tell, its not hard to get the numbers to line up with it.
The truth of it is that most of us are not survey method experts, and even those who are are not going to dig into the methods. We just look at the headlines framed by the authors. So its all the more important to do it right. Prior example (thread).
One technique used in both the Thompson Center & RealClear Politics/Fire survey to exaggerate liberal intolerance is to use questions about issues which liberals are more sensitive toward, but not having a equivalent set of questions that would draw out conservative students.
Social scientists generally prefer behaviors (revealed preferences) over attitudes (cheap talk), which are often internally contradictory. So, pay more attention to orgs like @PENamerica, @JeffreyASachs or @TheFIREorg who track actual campus speech events. niskanencenter.org/the-campus-fre…
So lets look at behaviors on the WI-Madison campus, one student event where a Ben Shapiro event was delayed for about 10 minutes and the Regents passed a law that would have expelled students for protesting.
WI GOP legislators, including the person who chairs the Assembly committee that oversees higher education, have a nasty habit of examining faculty syllabi, and suggesting the university budget will be cut if faculty they don't like aren't removed.
So, if you want to push the idea that liberal students are snowflakes attacking free speech, its not that hard to use a survey to do that.
But the Thompson Center is silent about the more consequential attacks on free speech coming from the conservative lawmakers that created it.
As a general rule, be suspicious of any framing of campus speech issues that *only* looks at students. As I wrote a while back the role of other parties - donors, governing bodies, elected officials, and media policing campus speech - are more important. nytimes.com/2017/01/09/opi…
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It's MLK Day, the day in America when politicians who absolutely would have opposed Martin Luther King Jr. quote him to cast a sheen of legitimacy on their causes.
MLK Day is also the day when people say they are inspired by MLK Jr., despite undermining his legacy.
Left: MLK Jr. at the signing of the 1965 Voting Rights Act.
Right: The person most responsible for blocking a restoration of VRA, refusing to even give it a vote in the Senate.
MLK Day is the day when people like Ted Cruz seek to repurpose MLK Jr., pretending that a man who led protests and argued for radical notions of social equality is actually a conservative hero, alongside Churchill and Reagan.
The most striking thing about looking back on the attack of a professor who correctly identified the threat of a Trump Presidency is that those making the attacks still don’t think they did anything wrong and see themselves as victims.
By way of background, Ken is a friend and co-author. He tagged me b/c I blogged & tweeted about what happened at the time as an example of the ecosystem of right wing attacks on academia
this piece @HdxAcademy: heterodoxacademy.org/blog/academic-…
& thread:
.@KellyMeyerhofer, a Madison reporter did something I was always tempted to do: she went back to those who drove the attack on the faculty. Rep. Dave Murphy, and a student who had worked in Paul Ryans office. madison.com/wsj/news/local…
So, an emerging conventional wisdom is that the rapid COVID vaccine development and slow vaccine rollout is evidence of private sector success and government failure respectively. This is wrong for a number of reasons. 1/
The rapid vaccine development depended upon:
*building on years of NIH research
*massive government financial subsidization
*turned govt regulatory sequential processes into parallel processes
*used emergency use authorization to waive regulations newyorker.com/magazine/2020/…
We should think about the vaccine development as an extraordinary public private partnership. The private sector would not have developed it on its own, but were very much necessary. 3/
Those seeking to downplay an insurrection have made it a conventional wisdom that protestors were not prosecuted this summer. That is wildly untrue. Protestors faced felonies and terrorism charges often for little more than property damage or pushing back against a police charge.
DOJ officials made it a priority to prosecute protestors to the maximum extent of the law, including applying terrorism laws. theintercept.com/2020/08/27/bla…
New from me @ArcDigi: calls for unity or moving forward are pointless as long as Trump supporters believe the election was a fraud.
As long as this Big Lie is not debunked by Trump, the GOP, and right-wing media, expect more political violence. arcdigital.media/the-big-lie-de…
I wrote this piece b/c of statements like this from Graham. Yes, Trump finally conceded he will not be President but he refuses to tell his followers the truth: that he lost a legitimate election. If the GOP sees this as good enough, he will repeat the Big Lie for years to come.
It is unlikely that Trump will ever reject the Big Lie. But a willingness to do so serves as a reasonable criterion in assessing if GOP politicians and conservative media stand with American democracy or not. Some encouraging signs. arcdigital.media/the-big-lie-de…
Thread: I'd argue that its not just that defaults matter, but that they matter more in situations of choice overload where the choices are enormously complex. Medicare is just extraordinarily complex to navigate.
Nudges work when people need information or to direct attention. That is not the problem here. It is that people cannot manage the learning costs. They need help, not a nudge. Other options: fewer choices, or use AI to create better matches
Making bad decisions more costly does not help people when they are overwhelmed by the volume of information that they are being asked to process, and don't understand the outcomes.