It's just like being back in high school. Students do this all the time. It's like those in career academia never leave the mindset. It's one reason I've always hated school.
In a faculty meeting, I was RIDICULED for teaching students to paraphrase according to objective standards -- to properly rewrite the text as opposed to copying and pasting without quotation marks or plugging synonyms into the same structure. This Chuckle Head said of my teaching this: "Not even native speakers do that." In other words, just carry on with the Chinese Nationals plagiarizing everything (and not learning how to analyze a text either.) Note that HE is still teaching there; I was quietly erased in a restructuring.
At this same school, in a review meeting with the director, I expressed concern for meeting the standards on the rubric, because the students' portfolios showed only minor grammatical comments from instructors on drafts of their papers; in other words, the content never budged. This indicates that the papers were plagiarized, which I happened to know because I had designed a process that made it nearly impossible for students to plagiarize, and which revealed not just how their usage and technical writing skills were lacking, but their analytical and reading comprehension skills. On my students' portfolios, there was a clear improvement from one draft to the next; the outside source content was made transparent, as well as the students' ability to distinguish between outside and inside sources (I had them color code it). The director said, "What do you want? Parity?" I said, I want to know what the expectations are, because my portfolios are not considered exempt, while these other ones with no evidence of proper outside source usage are leveled exempt. How is it possible that these students write a first draft that requires minimal feedback from the instructor?
At another school, when teaching grammar, i designed portfolios that mix various grammatical forms to emulate real world writing requirements at a school of design. It took hours of my personal time to craft these. I admit they were tedious to complete, and they were tedious to grade. Students complained because across the hall, in the other section, they were playing games -- the grammar was articles for about two weeks, perhaps the least useful grammar on which to invest time at that level. I was removed from the grammar course for not playing games, and my design-oriented content was replaced with STUDYING GRAMMAR THROUGH A SOCIAL JUSTICE LENS.
I could go on and on about this....recently there was a complaint that students felt "anxious and uncomfortable" in my class because I was a guest on a podcast discussing my regrets over ending up childless due to feminist "choices." The director told me NOT TO LET STUDENTS KNOW WHAT I WRITE ABOUT....(even though it's just a click away...)
While I was studying kendo I learned a common Japanese saying: "出る釘は打たれる deru kugi wa utareru”, the nail that sticks up gets hammered down. Apparently this phenomenon is common across cultures.
It is no accident that Kevin Bass has written The Record and the Wound on Substack and that it appeals to many of us here. Independent spirits regularly get cut off at the knees, or even higher up, by institutions of this era. I first heard the term scapegoating in this context from Nathalie Martinek a few months ago and was delighted to realize there was a name for what happened to me forty years ago in what used to be the freewheeling field of newspaper journalism. Now Kevin Bass demonstrates that my expulsion from the club is worthy of deep academic examination.
Newsrooms were once lively, happy, drunken and contrarian worlds. Today, they are as hide-bound and sterile as monasteries, filled with moralistic puritans of the left-wing persuasion and therefore becoming less and less relevant to the rest of society. The battle for primacy in the media started in the 1970s, when "public intellectuals" learned that the barriers to entry in journalism were fairly low and the positional rewards could be amazingly high. Woodward and Bernstein were commoners who became power brokers, setting a course other ambitious folks with verbal facility could follow. Suddenly all the old, free-wheeling action became a holy calling. I was from the old school back then, even though I was only 30, and I recall a loud argument I once had with a colleague from a posh J-school about what he called the "didactic function of reporting." He defined that as reporting facts and then telling the reader what conclusion should be drawn from those facts. (also ignoring facts that didn't support his thesis.)
In a large and aggressive newsroom in the 70s, a war was being waged: the old-style fact-based and the newfangled interpretive. I was one of three reporters (all males btw) who could walk into a police press room or detective bureau and come out with the facts for a story. For the counterpoint, we could also call up people on the other side of the law at times to get context. But that was so old-fashioned and socially irresponsible. A decade later, all three of us had left the newsroom: I saw the handwriting, left voluntarily ahead of being fired; the other two, both in their mid-40s, were dead of stress-induced heart attacks.
It turned out to be the best thing that ever happened to me. I survived and thrived with the help of a mate and writing partner whose talent exceeded mine. But until I started hearing stories of others, like Martinek and Bass, I just felt I was a failure at journalism and a success at longer forms. I now see the broader context and can enjoy even more than I have the idea that the place I was thrown out of has degraded for the reasons Kevin Bass outlines.
So thanks for the insights all around. Living long enough to see the blunt reality of corporate journalism's downfall is piquant.
When I first commented in this thread, I had rudimentary knowledge of scapegoating as a socio/psychological phenomenon. Then, thanks for the Web, I wandered into the realm of René Girard, where the concept seems to have begun. Just Google (or DuckDuckGo) for Girard and scapegoating and read about an increasing amount of attention being paid to the idea. And then thank Whoever for the Web and AI.
SO painfully familiar. Thank you for taking the time to comb through this research and identify these patterns. I’m sorry you’ve gone through this, but glad you’re speaking up!
There are layers of explanation here which I didn’t touch because I needed to stay focused. The Fox News answer is leftism. The deeper answer is left-wing university/institutional capture. Deeper than that is Caldwell’s rival constitution’s thesis: civil right’s law creates a leftist institutional culture hostile to truth in the name of safety. The even deeper answer is “rule by managers”, i.e. Burnham’s managerialism in a post-Christian (moralistic), hyper-legalized American context, which created civil right’s law.
The really deep answer is modernization/institutional democratization under the constraints of the American constitution and Christian universalism.
If you want to get really deep, this kind of thing has always happened and always will but the “grammar” of it today is proceduralist and left-wing and essentially hypocritical; the institutions cannot admit that they are political and hide their increasingly self-protective partisanship behind procedure.
What we know is that China has a significantly different trajectory. I also believe legitimate governance forms besides proceduralist bureaucracy not only drive progress but are increasingly likely to become stronger over the next 10-20 years.
This means instead of abstract diagnosis the answer may just be more exposure of the failures of the proceduralist form and the creation of parallel nonproceduralist alternatives that can generate independent legitimacy and supplant the current decaying organization form.
Not to deprecate Kevin, but Andrews' piece is one of the best pieces I have read for 20 years. She has finally assembled all of the pieces that we knew were true and put them together in essentially unassailable fashion. Everyone here should read it -- you are right...it adds to this conversation remarkably.
We can talk about DEI, civil rights law, feminization, etc., but the fact that America always lurches leftward is instructive. There’s a structural logic baked into the bones of the country. Politicians have only ever slowed it. They have never stopped it.
Absolutely spot on – I just read Girard's The Scapegoat which is relevant here! Many of us got mobbed since 2020, whether we were in academia or not – but universities are ruthlessly petty.
It's just like being back in high school. Students do this all the time. It's like those in career academia never leave the mindset. It's one reason I've always hated school.
Adolescence run amok.
This resonates with me.
In a faculty meeting, I was RIDICULED for teaching students to paraphrase according to objective standards -- to properly rewrite the text as opposed to copying and pasting without quotation marks or plugging synonyms into the same structure. This Chuckle Head said of my teaching this: "Not even native speakers do that." In other words, just carry on with the Chinese Nationals plagiarizing everything (and not learning how to analyze a text either.) Note that HE is still teaching there; I was quietly erased in a restructuring.
At this same school, in a review meeting with the director, I expressed concern for meeting the standards on the rubric, because the students' portfolios showed only minor grammatical comments from instructors on drafts of their papers; in other words, the content never budged. This indicates that the papers were plagiarized, which I happened to know because I had designed a process that made it nearly impossible for students to plagiarize, and which revealed not just how their usage and technical writing skills were lacking, but their analytical and reading comprehension skills. On my students' portfolios, there was a clear improvement from one draft to the next; the outside source content was made transparent, as well as the students' ability to distinguish between outside and inside sources (I had them color code it). The director said, "What do you want? Parity?" I said, I want to know what the expectations are, because my portfolios are not considered exempt, while these other ones with no evidence of proper outside source usage are leveled exempt. How is it possible that these students write a first draft that requires minimal feedback from the instructor?
At another school, when teaching grammar, i designed portfolios that mix various grammatical forms to emulate real world writing requirements at a school of design. It took hours of my personal time to craft these. I admit they were tedious to complete, and they were tedious to grade. Students complained because across the hall, in the other section, they were playing games -- the grammar was articles for about two weeks, perhaps the least useful grammar on which to invest time at that level. I was removed from the grammar course for not playing games, and my design-oriented content was replaced with STUDYING GRAMMAR THROUGH A SOCIAL JUSTICE LENS.
I could go on and on about this....recently there was a complaint that students felt "anxious and uncomfortable" in my class because I was a guest on a podcast discussing my regrets over ending up childless due to feminist "choices." The director told me NOT TO LET STUDENTS KNOW WHAT I WRITE ABOUT....(even though it's just a click away...)
And that's not even the half of it.
While I was studying kendo I learned a common Japanese saying: "出る釘は打たれる deru kugi wa utareru”, the nail that sticks up gets hammered down. Apparently this phenomenon is common across cultures.
It is no accident that Kevin Bass has written The Record and the Wound on Substack and that it appeals to many of us here. Independent spirits regularly get cut off at the knees, or even higher up, by institutions of this era. I first heard the term scapegoating in this context from Nathalie Martinek a few months ago and was delighted to realize there was a name for what happened to me forty years ago in what used to be the freewheeling field of newspaper journalism. Now Kevin Bass demonstrates that my expulsion from the club is worthy of deep academic examination.
Newsrooms were once lively, happy, drunken and contrarian worlds. Today, they are as hide-bound and sterile as monasteries, filled with moralistic puritans of the left-wing persuasion and therefore becoming less and less relevant to the rest of society. The battle for primacy in the media started in the 1970s, when "public intellectuals" learned that the barriers to entry in journalism were fairly low and the positional rewards could be amazingly high. Woodward and Bernstein were commoners who became power brokers, setting a course other ambitious folks with verbal facility could follow. Suddenly all the old, free-wheeling action became a holy calling. I was from the old school back then, even though I was only 30, and I recall a loud argument I once had with a colleague from a posh J-school about what he called the "didactic function of reporting." He defined that as reporting facts and then telling the reader what conclusion should be drawn from those facts. (also ignoring facts that didn't support his thesis.)
In a large and aggressive newsroom in the 70s, a war was being waged: the old-style fact-based and the newfangled interpretive. I was one of three reporters (all males btw) who could walk into a police press room or detective bureau and come out with the facts for a story. For the counterpoint, we could also call up people on the other side of the law at times to get context. But that was so old-fashioned and socially irresponsible. A decade later, all three of us had left the newsroom: I saw the handwriting, left voluntarily ahead of being fired; the other two, both in their mid-40s, were dead of stress-induced heart attacks.
It turned out to be the best thing that ever happened to me. I survived and thrived with the help of a mate and writing partner whose talent exceeded mine. But until I started hearing stories of others, like Martinek and Bass, I just felt I was a failure at journalism and a success at longer forms. I now see the broader context and can enjoy even more than I have the idea that the place I was thrown out of has degraded for the reasons Kevin Bass outlines.
So thanks for the insights all around. Living long enough to see the blunt reality of corporate journalism's downfall is piquant.
Don’t leave the media off that list. I’ve worked in health care and academia, and your observations about them are well spotted. Media is worse.
When I first commented in this thread, I had rudimentary knowledge of scapegoating as a socio/psychological phenomenon. Then, thanks for the Web, I wandered into the realm of René Girard, where the concept seems to have begun. Just Google (or DuckDuckGo) for Girard and scapegoating and read about an increasing amount of attention being paid to the idea. And then thank Whoever for the Web and AI.
SO painfully familiar. Thank you for taking the time to comb through this research and identify these patterns. I’m sorry you’ve gone through this, but glad you’re speaking up!
It’s only just started. I just want to have a life and work that I am proud of and can make a positive impact on the world.
Ok, I follow all this, but who or what is really behind it all? Where does the hate come from and why? What is the antidote?
There are layers of explanation here which I didn’t touch because I needed to stay focused. The Fox News answer is leftism. The deeper answer is left-wing university/institutional capture. Deeper than that is Caldwell’s rival constitution’s thesis: civil right’s law creates a leftist institutional culture hostile to truth in the name of safety. The even deeper answer is “rule by managers”, i.e. Burnham’s managerialism in a post-Christian (moralistic), hyper-legalized American context, which created civil right’s law.
The really deep answer is modernization/institutional democratization under the constraints of the American constitution and Christian universalism.
If you want to get really deep, this kind of thing has always happened and always will but the “grammar” of it today is proceduralist and left-wing and essentially hypocritical; the institutions cannot admit that they are political and hide their increasingly self-protective partisanship behind procedure.
What we know is that China has a significantly different trajectory. I also believe legitimate governance forms besides proceduralist bureaucracy not only drive progress but are increasingly likely to become stronger over the next 10-20 years.
This means instead of abstract diagnosis the answer may just be more exposure of the failures of the proceduralist form and the creation of parallel nonproceduralist alternatives that can generate independent legitimacy and supplant the current decaying organization form.
So more building basically.
If that wasn’t helpful I’m sorry.
Have you read Helen Andrews' "The Great Feminization?" The mobbing is female behavior.
Not to deprecate Kevin, but Andrews' piece is one of the best pieces I have read for 20 years. She has finally assembled all of the pieces that we knew were true and put them together in essentially unassailable fashion. Everyone here should read it -- you are right...it adds to this conversation remarkably.
https://www.compactmag.com/article/the-great-feminization/
We can talk about DEI, civil rights law, feminization, etc., but the fact that America always lurches leftward is instructive. There’s a structural logic baked into the bones of the country. Politicians have only ever slowed it. They have never stopped it.
Absolutely spot on – I just read Girard's The Scapegoat which is relevant here! Many of us got mobbed since 2020, whether we were in academia or not – but universities are ruthlessly petty.