SIO282: Debunking the Latest 'Campus Craziness' Stories

Transcript

This transcript was generated automatically and may contain errors — the audio is the record.

0:00:30 Thomas: Hello, and welcome to Serious Inquiries Only. This is episode 282. I'm Thomas, and with me is Dr. Lindsey Osterman. How you doing, Lindsey?

0:00:39 Lindsey: I'm great. How are you?

0:00:41 Thomas: Are you? Because you were so angry, as angry as I've seen you in text form, and so I want to see how mad you are actually able to manifest in your voice, because I've never heard it. Sometimes you'll say you're mad about something, and then you sound so nice, but maybe you can work on it. You can practice here. Let this be an open environment.

0:00:48 Lindsey: Yeah. I'm pretty irate.

0:00:59 Lindsey: Yeah. I get... Is this a safe space?

0:01:05 Thomas: It absolutely is a safe space to practice your Anger as much or as little as you want. It's up to you. But you were so mad, and it involved nothing other than cancel culture and the academic freedom and the universities and the kids and their music, all that stuff. And I'm so surprised because I didn't know if we were, are we still doing this? I guess, is this official notice that we're still doing? This is my first question. Well,

0:01:08 Lindsey: Okay. That's good to know. All right.

0:01:27 Lindsey: Apparently. Yeah. That's kind of how I felt about it, too. Yeah. I thought that we were over this. I was over this, like, this is something that I was super concerned about a couple of years ago. Well, more like five years ago now, I guess. But, you know, I went and looked at some of the evidence and changed my mind about it and I was kind of over it. And then I heard an interview the other day with somebody who is loudly complaining about this again. And yeah, sure enough, there's still a healthy discussion about whether academia is censoring conservative voices in particular, and whether there's viewpoint discrimination. And, and yeah, that's still alive debate, apparently.

0:02:05 Thomas: Debunk it. Did this send you down a rabbit hole? What happened?

0:02:10 Lindsey: Yeah. Yeah. So first of all, just like the very general claim and like why I think it's worth taking seriously if it were true. So general claim is that because the people who work in academia tend to lean left, and that's, you know, that's a true thing, especially in certain disciplines, that conservatives are receiving unfair treatment just for being conservative, not because they're doing something wrong or not doing their job or whatever, but just because they have a minority political position. And like, if that was true, like that would be problematic, right?

0:02:39 Lindsey: I don't think that's justified. And it's problematic in particular because of the second part of this narrative, which is that if conservatives are pushed out of academia, it will actually harm academic discourse and, like, particularly scientific research, because the loss of conservative viewpoints would harm, like, the ecosystem that makes the scientific process work. Work And so again, like, I think that these are claims that academics should be rightly concerned about. Like, we have a stake in this kind of thing not happening. And so to my mind, the question is like whether or not there's actually any evidence that

0:02:39 Thomas: Well,

0:03:12 Lindsey: It's happening.

0:03:13 Thomas: Do you buy that second argument? Because I could just as easily argue back that conservative versus liberal, especially post-Trump, I don't even know what that looks like. But I would argue that could even be a distinction that's meaningless in those terms. So what I mean by that That is like if tomorrow we decided that or there were enough people, however many, 40 percent, 30, whatever it is, who believe that the earth is flat. And we said those people are conservatives. Now, the lack of those people, I don't think, is going to diminish from academia. We can easily say, all right, that's stupid. So is there like a line at which somehow you need this, quote unquote, diversity of opinion that does help in a certain sense?

0:03:13 Lindsey: Yeah.

0:03:59 Thomas: But, know, over you that line, it's like, well, that's just an idea that science doesn't have to take seriously and we don't really need those perspectives. Do you view that argument there as valid, that we need conservatives in academia necessarily?

0:04:12 Lindsey: You're setting up perfectly, like, a distinction that I absolutely want to make. So I think the the argument, the way that people like Jonathan Height are couching it is like, you know, the the reason the scientific process works is because it's antagonistic, because you have people with multiple viewpoints looking at a single set of evidence and they're able to see different things about it, right? And, you know, criticize it from different perspectives, and through that antagonistic process, you know, we're able to accumulate reliable knowledge. Um.

0:04:43 Thomas: Which means, hold on, here's what that means. I'm not a scientist, but correct me if I'm wrong. When you're doing an experiment with, like, ball bearings or whatever, you want to just, I don't know what a current experiment is, but I guess this is dated. But okay, you're doing some ball bearings related experiments, you got to have someone who is like, "I believe people should have health care," and another person who's like, "I think the free market should decide and poor people should die." You need those two viewpoints to interpret the ball bearing experiment. Is that okay?

0:05:10 Lindsey: That's Correct, yeah.

0:05:13 Thomas: So I have it right? Is that how science works? Trickle Down Economics?

0:05:16 Lindsey: That's how how science works? No, no, no. Like I

0:05:18 Thomas: Oh, I see, the gravity is working a certain way on this ball bearing that you didn't see. Cause you don't like trickle down.

0:05:25 Lindsey: You know, I love the fact that it's so easy for you to intuit these things that it feels like it takes me so much effort to get to. Like, it took me hours of trying to work this shit out to realize that, like, there's a distinction between a political consensus and a scientific consensus, and they're conflating those two things in really dangerous ways. Took me hours, Thomas. And yeah.

0:05:44 Thomas: I, do you think when you outlined that argument a moment ago, I So people like height and people are very good at putting those arguments in a way that sounds so honestly, it sounds nice. Like it sounds scientific. It sounds rigorous. You know, know, they usually tie in like enlightenment values. I think they're very effective communicators of that message. And it's a very attractive message. Um, You know, you're totally right. Like we need this, but it just, because you're stating something in a calm, rational way that sound has words that It sounds like, you know, diversity of opinion and all that. I really don't think it means exactly what they're saying.

0:05:47 Lindsey: Yeah, yeah.

0:06:20 Lindsey: I don't either. Right. Right. I mean, I think, again, like, if if the way that this is being represented was actually reflecting a true underlying problem, I would have a problem with it. But that's not actually what's happening is the problem, right? Like, you do need viewpoint diversity. You do need people from different kinds of perspectives and backgrounds looking at a problem in order to really, you know, thoroughly be able to see the problems with it. But they're claiming that, you know, the current structures in academia and even in science itself are restricting diversity in a way that is corrosive to developing scientific knowledge, and that just – there's no evidence that that is happening. And the evidence that they're bringing forward is, like, bad. So

0:06:53 Thomas: Yeah. Yeah. Like from their point of view, I guess we could try to be scientific about it and be like, what would be the things you would expect to see if they're right about this? You know, like what I'm trying to think, like, what would the examples be? The only thing that comes to mind, maybe you could probably come up with a better example, maybe, but the only thing that comes to mind is, you know, more social science type stuff. Like that's where it feels like maybe bias could come into play. Like what if there was hypothetically, there was research that showed, you Know, I don't know, some sort of conservative thing. And again, I'm just playing hypotheticals here. Like something that shows that, you know, the, the.

0:07:32 Lindsey: It's funny because I've got an actual example of that hypothetical in a minute. So, yeah.

0:07:34 Thomas: Oh, okay. Yeah. Like I was going to say like a man and a woman raising a kid, like that's the best way to get whatever it is, You know, some traditional conservative thing, uh, social science thing. And, and so that finding would have to be like, Oh no, we don't, we, you know, I know that you have evidence for this, but we don't want to publish that, you Know, or some, some other way that their viewpoint is silenced. That would be the kind of thing that I would expect if their theory were correct.

0:07:53 Lindsey: Yeah. Well, and they're blaming that they have that evidence. There are cases that are being pitched as though, like, you know, this team of researchers found this thing and they found evidence for this thing, and the paper was retracted because of progressive outrage and not on the basis of the evidence. That is the narrative. And I don't agree with the narrative on the base of evidence.

0:08:02 Thomas: Okay.

0:08:18 Thomas: Well, so did you, uh, do yourself a deep dive? Did you look into their claims? Oh, good.

0:08:22 Lindsey: I did do a few things. Yeah, yeah. But I want to admit just a couple of things up front to sort of couch these. So I started paying attention to these cases back when you moderated that infamous debate between Eli Bosnick and James Lindsay. Do you have any sense of how long ago that was?

0:08:36 Thomas: Hmm. Oh, Anywhere from three months ago to seven years ago. Somewhere in that range.

0:08:39 Lindsey: Right. Yeah. Yeah, It was May 2016. So that's a pretty good estimate.

0:08:44 Thomas: Oh, man. Wow.

0:08:46 Lindsey: It seems like forever ago. And I think that it's important – it is the before times. Yeah, briefly, right before the, yeah, anyway. So I think it's, I think it's important to admit that back then, and, you know, it's painful for me to admit this now, but I was very much on James, James Lindsay's side on that issue.

0:08:48 Thomas: The before times.

0:09:04 Thomas: Oh, here. Let me just hang up the Skype call. No, I'm just kidding.

0:09:08 Lindsey: Yes, please cancel me.

0:09:09 Thomas: Oh, I said this was a safe space. Yeah, no, that's interesting. Okay.

0:09:12 Lindsey: Yeah. Yeah, I, again, I'd been listening to people like Haidt, and you know before he was known for being vocal about these issues about censorship, he was known to most of us as this guy that does morality research, and he's done a lot of very good influential research in that regard, and that's how I knew him. And so people like him were making the case that people with conservative views were being subtly pushed out for unjust reasons, you know, for saying things in the classroom that some students found offensive just because they disagreed with them, or for pursuing legitimate research that went against progressive politics, like you just mentioned in your hypothetical. And so to me, these concerns seem plausible, seem possible that that was really happening. And it also felt incredibly personal, because I, like many academics, teach classes in which, you know, part of our job is to challenge students and tackle

0:09:25 Thomas: Yeah. Yeah. Mm-hmm. And

0:10:03 Lindsey: Very, you know, charge topics with them and students may disagree with us about those topics, um.

0:10:08 Thomas: I want to echo that. I think that is why that sales pitch worked on so many people. And, and, you know, I was like, you say, I mean, back maybe a little bit before that, I was definitely listening.

Like, I was willing to say like, "Oh Jesus, this what's happening," because I think a lot of us, if you're somebody who went to college, you or, or thereafter, or more college, you know, I just have an undergrad, but, but you still, even with just me, like a undergrad, I was a business major, but I took a lot of really fun classes. I couldn't decide what I wanted to do. I took some philosophy.

I took some, um, uh, took a lot of calculus cause I love math, but anyway, I took stuff that was really fun. And I took some classes that like did challenge me. And I think that pitch works so well because whether you're a student like me or somebody who actually teaches, you're thinking, yeah, that these are some like interactions that feel kind of of sacred in a way. Like it does feel like this should be happening, that ideas should be challenged. Echo that. I think it's such an effective sales pitch for that reason.

0:10:55 Lindsey: Absolutely. Yeah, yeah, because I mean, everything that's valuable about academia would be lost if this kind of censorship was really happening. And so, you know, again, I felt, I felt super invested in this topic. And so, and so, what did I do? Well, I decided what I wanted to be true about this issue, and then I just believed it, and I just yelled at anybody who suggested that my view was unsupported, like, I do, Thomas, you know me, no.

0:11:22 Thomas: I can't tell if you're being sarcastic right now because I'm like, there's no way you did that. But okay.

0:11:27 Lindsey: Obviously not, no.

0:11:28 Thomas: But I know you just admitted a minute ago you were on James's side. So I was like, did you have like a phase of like raging about the regressive left on Twitter that I didn't know about.

0:11:28 Lindsey: No, actually. I. I. No, not, not, not to that extent, but I, I would say that I had a period in which I had like a growing concern that maybe. I should be more and more vigilant about what I was saying in the classroom, you know, maybe I should be thinking more about topics that I was pursuing, like, I just, I took these concerns seriously, and I was very worried about them, um, and.

0:11:57 Thomas: Well, wait, is that not a good thing? I mean, shouldn't you be kind of mindful of what you might be saying in the classroom? Or do you mean that in a way that was like unhealthy or something?

0:12:06 Lindsey: I. Do mean it in a way that's unhealthy, I. Mean. Like, you know, can I talk about sexual assault in my classes anymore? Can I talk about racism in a way that isn't going to open me up to saying something that really is said, what, in a well-intentioned way, but that could be taken out of context and used as evidence, if, if you.

0:12:07 Thomas: Okay. Okay.

0:12:22 Lindsey: Know, students really are becoming hypersensitive, and administrations really are sort of, you know, bending over backwards to, to quiet outrage mobs, right, which is what is what was being said, right, it's what, or what is still being said, what's being claimed about this. So anyway, so that's where I was. And then, no, I didn't just double down on my pre-existing beliefs. I looked into a few of these cases. You covered a couple of these cases on the show, which was, I think, instrumental to me sort of developing more doubt about whether this was a real thing. And so anyway, I looked into several cases, and I changed my mind about whether this was a real threat, because everything that I encountered seemed, seem to suggest that actually these.

0:12:22 Thomas: Well

0:13:04 Lindsey: Cases look different than they're being pitched to look. So

0:13:07 Thomas: It's of you to say that. So it's not just me. Cause I felt like I was taking crazy pills. Every single source you check and be like, wow, that's really not not what you're saying at all.

0:13:08 Lindsey: No. Yeah, yeah. So we're going to play another game of, oh, that's not what's being said at all. Just, Yeah, just with a couple of more recent cases. Know. But the thing that set me off on this topic more recently is that I heard this interview with a social psychologist, Lee Jessam. He's been another, another voice that's been devoting a lot of energy in the past few years toward documenting and amplifying the experience of academics who claim to have been canceled simply for, quote, unquote, expressing ideas, and particularly conservative ideas, and not for, you know, making errors or, you know, for misconduct or anything like that, but just being conservative. And so, you know, given that Dr. Seuss just got canceled, I thought this would be an interesting time to dig into this.

0:13:18 Thomas: Oh, good. I love that game.

0:13:45 Thomas: Yeah, poor guy.

0:13:54 Lindsey: Yeah, I know. Yeah. Yeah, so I looked into about 10 of the 50 cases that he currently has in this running blog post that he continually updates with new grievances. We're not going to talk about all 10. I know you're disappointed. That would take a while.

0:14:06 Thomas: Yeah. I'm disappointed you're not talking about all 50. Knowing you, you would have been like, we'll see if we can get to 40 of them, but I did all 50, that's what I would have expected.

0:14:18 Lindsey: Yeah, okay. I'll do better next time. But no, I dug into two of the very most recent things that he's put notes in that blog about. He hasn't completed his notes for them, but he's put them in his things to talk about. And they're cases that he mentioned in the interview that I heard. So two recently publicized cases. And, you know, again, I haven't looked into all 50 of the things that he's laid out. But based on what I have looked into, I feel comfortable saying that these are two representative cases of the kinds of things that we're talking about here. So from what I've seen, like these stories about academic cancellation share some common elements. So first of all, the person who is supposedly being censored or canceled is usually somebody that we can identify with, right? They're very well-meaning, they're a good citizen of academia, right, that's the way that they're portrayed.

0:15:05 Lindsey: Second, the incident that's at the center of the case is usually one of two things. Either it centers around some ambiguous comment that they made, so maybe in class or online or elsewhere or whatever, that could have been said with good intent but that gets interpreted as offensive and blown out out of proportion, right? So it's either a case like that, or it's an incident where, you know, they have a line of research that is perfectly legitimate and holds up to scientific scrutiny, but it's inconsistent with progressive values. And so it's evaluated as bad on ideological grounds rather than evidence-based grounds.

0:15:39 Lindsey: Third feature, yes, it absolutely would. It would be anathema to

0:15:39 Thomas: Which would be really bad, like, if that were happening, yeah. No progressive that I know of, know SJW that I know of. I mean, there's a lot of people in the world, but like, I don't know of anybody who's like, no, if the science disagreed with me, we need to ban science. Most of the time the way the conversation goes is like, no, the science actually supports my thing. And then Ben Shapiro's like, know, the science says there's two genders, and you're like, that's not what the science, you know, like most of time it's it's that. Oh,

0:15:47 Lindsey: Yeah. Yeah.

0:16:12 Lindsey: It is, and it's funny you say the thing about the two genders, because some, several of the cases in this post that he made are specifically about that, and I looked into those. Two, they're not the ones we're going to talk about, but like

0:16:17 Thomas: The two genders Yeah, I look, I've looked into to them.

0:16:23 Lindsey: Yes. Yeah. It's uh, it's pretty fun. Um, all right, so those are the first two common features across these cases. The third is that the incident, whatever it is, right, the the innocent comment or the the research or whatever, it gets blown out of proportion by someone, right, often by reactionary students or, you know, these days by an online mob. And then the people in power, so sometimes that's the university administrators, sometimes it's the journal editor or whatever, they are cowed by this outrage into delivering unjust consequences. So that's, that's The Narrative. That's what's painted about these cases. And the two that I've chosen here are among the strongest possible examples of this academic censorship claim, because the aggrieved parties in these cases actually did face professional consequences. So one was a tenured professor who was fired and the second was a scientific paper that actually was retracted by the journal. So like real consequences. And I think it's important to add that a lot of the other cases that were cited in this post involved no such consequences. It was mostly that somebody got yelled at a lot and I understand that that is

0:17:14 Thomas: Wow. Yeah, sure.

0:17:32 Lindsey: Very hard to deal with, but it's also not the same as getting fired or having a paper retracted. Okay, so here's the first case. This is, you know, toward that claim that if you express non-progressive views somewhere on Twitter, in classroom, whatever, it'll get you fired. Case focuses on Charles Negge. He's, until recently, was a tenured associate professor professor of psychology at the University of Central Florida. And the way that this case about him is being summarized in various news sources is misleading right off the bat. So let's take this headline from the Orlando Sentinel. Headline is, UCF So UCF moved to fire a professor accused of racist tweets for misconduct in the classroom.

0:18:17 Lindsey: There's a lot of things being packed into that headline, but you'll notice that the the firing is really close in the headline to the tweeting.

0:18:18 Thomas: Yeah. Yeah, but I instantly noticed that it also says for stuff in the classroom unless they were literally tweeting from the classroom, that sounds like two separate things.

0:18:28 Lindsey: Yeah. Yeah, it kind of sounds like maybe he was fired for reasons that were unrelated to the Tweeting.

0:18:37 Thomas: Yeah possibly.

0:18:38 Lindsey: And that's actually what's true. But yeah, but the way that it's getting spun by people who are concerned about academic cancellation culture is that, you know, this person tweeted some unpopular things and was called a racist and therefore the university fired him. Right. So here's some additional context that's useful for interpreting this case. This is an excerpt from that same Orlando Sentinel article. This was published January 13th, 2021. And this case started in the summer of 2020, by the way, like in the wake of George Floyd's murder, which is very relevant here. It's a quote from this article. UCF intends to terminate a professor who came under fire over the summer for tweets described as racist by students and alumni after a university investigation found that he created a hostile classroom environment, deterred students from filing complaints about his classroom conduct, failed to report that a student said she had been sexually assaulted by one of his teaching assistants, yeah, and provided false information during the probe.

0:18:39 Thomas: Yeah okay. Right. Wow okay. Yeah I feel like that's pretty valuable uh context to that, yeah, maybe necessary, so

0:19:44 Lindsey: Yeah. Context? Yeah. Yeah, maybe necessary, right? And then further quote about the, that addresses the tweet specifically. So, quote, but the university's Office of Institutional Equity noted that the First Amendment protects a public employee's right to speak about matters of public concern. And university spokesman Charles Bennett, I think is how it's pronounced, wrote in an email that Negge's posts did not play a role in the university'S decision to seek his firing. Right?

0:20:17 Thomas: Frustrating.

0:20:17 Lindsey: So I think what the narrative is here is, I mean, to the extent that they acknowledge these these other allegations at all. This is what the narrative would be, right? The real reason that he's fired, that the university is lying about, is the tweets. That's why he's hired, right. And the tweets, you know, sort of spurred this witch hunt. And, you Know, they sort of unearthed all these things that they were able to use as justification for firing. As an academic insider, I find no reason to distrust the public statement that the University made. I have familiarity with how these processes work and how these investigations work.

And there is no way, there is No way that he was fired over the tweets. And if they are identifying these these charges as the reasons for his termination, then I have every right to believe that that is true. And yeah, just to dig in on the last thing about the sexual assault, right? Right. For anybody who's not responsible with this, faculty members are responsible employees under Title IX, which means that we are obligated to report any report to us of sexual assault. Yeah. And, you know, sometimes that's really uncomfortable thing for faculty because students come to us as confidants that they trust and

0:20:18 Thomas: Yeah. Hmm. Yeah.

0:21:22 Thomas: As You should be Oh. Yeah, true.

0:21:30 Lindsey: They want to confess this thing and they don't want us to report it, but we have to.

0:21:31 Thomas: Do You kind of have to Give them the the disclaimer, like, hey, I'm obligated to report anything you tell me that's like a crime, kind of thing.

0:21:41 Lindsey: That is, that is precisely, yeah, if it looks like the conversation's going down that road, yes, we are advised to say, look, you know, I want you to share with whatever you want to share, but know that I'm a responsible employee and there's, these are my duties, if you say x, y, and z, right? And, right, that is not, I think, the situation that's being described in this article. It's not that a student came to him in confidence and he made a bad judgment call. Let me just read that again. He failed to report that a student said she had been sexually assaulted by one of his teaching assistants and provided false information during the probe.

0:21:43 Thomas: Yeah, right. Yeah. Wow.

0:22:17 Lindsey: That's bad. I don't, yeah, That's bad, right? The tweets, it's possible. It's totally possible that the reason that students felt comfortable coming forward ultimately about this, clearly what seems to me to be a pattern of problematic behavior on the part of this faculty member, if we take these claims at face value, it's possible that the incident on Twitter sort of empowered some students that otherwise might not have felt at liberty to come forward to come forward, right? There's lots of reasons that students feel hesitant to report misconduct on the part of faculty members, right, there's a power dynamic, there're all these things. But the idea that he was fired because of the tweets is ridiculous, and it's not supported. And if I were trying to make a strong evidence-based case for academic cancel culture being a threat, I would not want Charles Negge as my poster

0:22:20 Thomas: Yeah. That's really bad.

0:23:11 Thomas: Yeah,

0:23:11 Lindsey: Child for that claim.

0:23:11 Thomas: Go ahead and throw this one out. Whoops. How did that get here? Let's not include this story. No, absolutely.

0:23:19 Thomas: And forgive me because sometimes I don't catch all the details. So this was a public university and was this the guy who had tenure? You mentioned ahead of time the two different Things. Things, So I, to echo what you're saying, and again, you're the insider, so let me know if I'm, I have this wrong, but let's pretend that it was the tweets, um, that this guy tweeted, whatever, the university is, if, if they were to fire him for those tweets, would face so much legal jeopardy for that, right? I mean, that's not a move that any public university is going to try to make. Yeah.

0:23:24 Lindsey: Yes. Yes, yeah, he had tenure. Here.

0:23:43 Lindsey: Oh, yeah. See, I, I yes, I've got I've got that same question in my notes, because that's my assumption. It's my assumption is that it's in the university's best interest to make sure that they're not firing people for bad reasons. This is clearly an Andrew question. Right? But no, I it is I do not I do not think that any university would actually fire somebody for tweeting stuff. Like that's, yeah, it's

0:24:15 Thomas: Yeah. Unless it somehow crosses maybe a line that you're able to legally say, like, you know, if this person is literally I don't know. Yeah, or something so bad. But like, they're going to be very hesitant. Did we even get into what these, you Know, tweets were or was that not important to this story?

0:24:21 Lindsey: Inciting violence or something.

0:24:33 Thomas: They

0:24:30 Lindsey: I Oh, right. No, I did pull some of those out. So yeah, yeah, let's. All right. So again, this is in the wake of George Floyd being murdered and the protests going on. So quote, "If African Americans as a group had the same behavioral profile as Asian Americans," parentheses, "on average, performing the best academically, having the highest income, committing the lowest crime, etc." Close parentheses. "Would we still be proclaiming systemic racism exists?" And in a second tweet, quote, "Black privilege is real. Besides affirmative action, special scholarships, and other set asides being shielded from legitimate criticism is a privilege, but as a group they're missing out on much needed feedback." Absolutely

0:25:16 Thomas: Need some feedback, bit of feedback. That's the uh, the old Nanette uh, comedy uh, thing on Netflix. I left a bit of feedback for you. Yeah, um, first off, I mean, obviously those are really stupid tweets, but a university is not going to fire a professor, a tenured professor, for those tweets. Like, that's just not going to happen and like we can, you know, if someone wants to argue they should be able to, you know, whatever, that's a argument for another day.

I mean, I kind of, I, I, I think, I think I don't mind the idea that a public university, um, because again, you know, as we've seen the last four years, you never know who's going to be in charge of public universities, you know, that kind of thing, that shouldn't be allowed to fire people for First Amendment stuff that doesn't, you know, cross the line into the classroom, that kind of think that argument aside, the way the law sits right now, you're not getting fired for those tweets from a public University. There's no, I mean, I'm not the lawyer. I'm the guy who fails the bar exam, but like, I I'm

0:25:35 Lindsey: Not Yeah Exactly We'll

0:26:09 Thomas: Pretty confident in that opinion.

0:26:09 Lindsey: We'll Get we'll give Andrew to weigh in on This, I Would appreciate that. Um, but no, no, I totally agree, I totally agree. As it turns out, it's really hard to fire a tenured professor, professor. I mean You Know Let's I

0:26:12 Thomas: Yeah, sure. That was the question I was going to ask you. I was kind of waiting. I didn't want to jump the gun. Like what, how, you know, how often does a tenured professor get fired? It's got to be pretty rare, right?

0:26:30 Lindsey: Yeah, I mean, that's kind of the whole reason you want to tenure, right? It's, it's So So you Can tweet shitty Things. Yeah Yeah I I, I just got tenure uh, not too long ago and like since then I've just been tweeting all, all kinds of stuff That I've been Saving Up

0:26:34 Thomas: So you can start tweeting Adam Carolla type, yeah, humor on Twitter. Yeah, you're just a total racist. That's what you do it for. No, I'm just kidding. You've been coming on my show and like.

0:26:45 Lindsey: Yeah It's All this racist stuff. Yeah, um, but yeah, no, no, shitty tweets wouldn't do it is like, and even like, let's take it, let's set Twitter aside, even saying like pretty bad things in the classroom wouldn't do it. Like this claim about creating a hostile classroom environment, again, this is an entry question so I don't, I don't want to speak beyond what I know, but my impression is that the, the standard of evidence for that is, is pretty high. Um

0:27:13 Thomas: Well, and you would, I imagine, have some insight from your job description and things you're expected to do. Yeah.

0:27:26 Lindsey: It's Like of the, of the academic institutions is on the side of protecting speech, even bad speech that we disagree with, right?

0:27:33 Thomas: This is something I also wanted to run by you and I could wait for the end, but we're kind of on the topic now because I saw somebody tweeting about this recently and it made sense to me. I think it's come up a little bit, but people mistake. Essentially, the theory is this and give me your take on it, but But people mistake like the very, you know, very liberal student body of certain schools, which obviously like schools, universities are going to be on average pretty, pretty flaming liberal. You know, that's that's why we love them. But anyway, they mistake that for like the faculty and the the people who run it and the institution itself. And like those things and the same goes for they made the comparison of like Hollywood or like local government in liberal areas. Areas often, too.

0:27:34 Lindsey: Yeah

0:28:20 Thomas: There's a big problem with San Francisco and other cities where it's like we really need to expand housing. And then everybody comes in is like, but I don't want a skyscraper. And then that basically ruins a bunch of people's lives because there's never any housing. It's a big problem. Like places that, you Know, places that are liberal, like universities, whatever the thing is, the institution, you think it's, it takes place in a liberal setting, a very progressive setting. But often the infrastructure, like the actual institution, the people who are, are making those decisions are kind of small c conservative, um, much so, and they're not going to be the ones who are making these big progressive liberal, uh, decisions and taking these actions that you would think they would based on the setting. Is that, does that ring true for you, that maybe the institution itself is a little more conservative than you might think?

0:28:34 Lindsey: Yeah That's interesting. I mean, I, I, I can't, I, I'm not, I don't know about any uh, like statistics on like the administrators Which I think is who you're talking about, um, but I mean the, the faculty, you know, in certain disciplines, any, any way, like, do tend to skew left, left

0:29:13 Thomas: Sure No, I Meant The um, I guess I'm not even talking about individual people, it's more the, the system itself. Like when you try to go make some change, just the gears and the, you know, and, and maybe it is, it could be also individuals. Like it could Be that individuals and administrations or whatever are more conservative than you might think as well. But just the idea, like people sometimes blame progressives for shortcomings in certain places or institutions where it's like, well, actually this, unquote, progressives are not able to just make change the way they want to because of kind these systems that have been in place, these structural barriers.

0:29:23 Lindsey: Um Oh Yeah Mm-hmm I do agree with that. Yeah, like the, the process. And that reminds me actually, um, so do you remember in the first part of this blog post, I know you read the first bit at least That

0:30:10 Thomas: I may have just rage quit part of way through, but we won't tell anybody that I rage quit partly through. That's between you and I.

0:30:12 Lindsey: I'm Yeah Sorry Um, yeah, in the, but in the first part of the, of the blog post, he's, he highlights this um, this like faculty petition that went out about anti-racism, and this was, was the thing that he was calling, oh God, what did he say? He was like, it was really dramatic language.

0:30:34 Thomas: Yeah. That's honestly while I quit. I say I rage quite. I quit reading this part way through because it wasn't just the same old shtick about the kids and their music and the universities. It was that, but also done in a very mediocre way. Like it wasn't even like, like if I'm going to, if I've been a rage read, you know, my, the, the, kind of the other side of this issue, I want at least somebody who can really do it like a, like, uh, like a hate or a pinker or, you Know, somebody who's really going to write well, this was like, all right, you're mailing this in or you're copying somebody or you, it wasn'T very well done.

0:30:59 Lindsey: That's fair.

0:31:08 Lindsey: Yeah, it's fair, that's fair, so the thing that connects it to sort of like the systems that are in place to sort of, you know, be resistant to dramatic shifts and changes, right? The thing that he said, that dramatic thing, and I really wish I had the quote in front of me, but I don't, because he was like, look, the progressive, the crazy progressives or like, you know, doing an authoritarian regime. It was something to that effect. And the story that he was talking about was, again, it was this faculty petition. It was like an open letter that they sent to administration and a bunch of faculty signed it. And, you know, I've been part of things like this before. And he was acting like, you know, this was a, like a demand letter, like a ransom letter that the, that the faculty were sending.

0:31:45 Thomas: Yeah. And I, I have the quote 'Cause I sent it to you, where if that's the one you're talking about, where I quit, it, he just said, "The quote is, if that's not a call for an academic version of Big Brother, I don't know what is." What's next re-education camps. All right, okay, buddy, yeah, thanks. 2014 once it's like really sharp, keen, biting rhetoric about the cancel culture left back, they called, yeah.

0:31:56 Lindsey: That is what he's talking about. Yeah. Yeah. But yeah.

0:32:10 Lindsey: But the reason the thing that makes it the thing that makes that claim so ridiculous, and the reason that it seems dishonest to me is that again, this person is Lee Jessam is an academic, he's a professor, and he knows what a faculty petition doesn't do.

0:32:21 Thomas: Yeah.

0:32:25 Lindsey: It's, it's, It's a statement of like, you know, faculty concerns to administration, right? And then they like, look at it for a while, and they come back and talk to the faculty. And then like, if they want to try to to implement any of the things, then a lot of those kinds of things have to come to a full faculty vote. At least that's how it works at my school. I don't know how much diversity there is at other schools in terms of how that works. But the point is, is like a petition is nothing. It does nothing. Anyway, it was, yeah. So that was fun. Okay. So case two then?

0:32:58 Thomas: Oh, OK. Yeah, let's do it.

0:33:00 Lindsey: Yeah. All

0:33:00 Thomas: I feel like that one did not go the way that they thought the arguers wanted it to go. So that one's crap. Let's go to the second one.

0:33:00 Lindsey: Right. Right. No, no. Yeah, this is the second one. And honestly, like there are there are academics that are honest, that I respect, that are taking this one more seriously. So I want to say that up front. Right. So this one is an example of the claim that, like, if you publish research with anti-progressive implications, it's going to be retracted because of progressive outrage. Age. So Badour Al-Shabli and her colleagues had a scientific paper retracted, which was entitled The Association Between Early Career Informal Mentorship and Academic Collaborations and Junior Author Performance. And the broad strokes is that this paper purported to show, based on analyses of this massive database that they got access to, they didn't collect the data, it was an existing database. But it had like 3 million pairs of academic mentors and protégés that had published academic papers together collaboratively. And anyway, so here are the controversial conclusions that are under discussion here.

0:33:15 Thomas: OK.

0:34:04 Lindsey: So first of all, quote, female protégées who remain in academia reap more benefits when mentored by males rather than equally impactful females. Males. And so, yeah. And so, in other words, based on the way that they measured their variables, this means that the publications of people who are mentored by women have a lesser scientific impact. They aren't cited as widely. Second claim is that mentors benefit more when working with male protégés rather than working with comparable female protégées, especially when that mentor is female.

0:34:16 Thomas: Huh.

0:34:39 Lindsey: So, women who mentor other women don't benefit as much from those mentoring relationships, again, defined by the impact of the publications of citations from those publications that come out as a result of the mentorship. And they say really that, you know, working with female protégés in general is going to harm your academic output, but it's a lot more dramatic in the paper if the mentor is also a woman. So those are some strong claims, yes?

0:35:05 Thomas: I'm not, I'm already not sure how this is meant, though. Is this meant in a way of like, you know, this is reinforcing the sexism already present, like for what, a reputational connection reason, whatever it is, um, you know, that this is something that is actually an existing phenomenon explained more by, um, like gender bias, or is this something they're trying to say, like, see, women aren't as good at this? Okay.

0:35:26 Lindsey: So I don't want to make any claims about the motivations of these researchers, Because I, I, you know, I genuinely think that this could have been published in good faith. I don't know that they were trying to support any agenda. But to answer your question, right, here's what they say in the discussion section is the conclusions of these findings that they had. So they say, quote, "Current diversity policies promoting female-female mentorships, as well as, or as well intended as they may be, could hinder the careers of women who remain in academia in unexpected ways. Female scientists, in fact, may benefit from opposite gender mentorships in terms of their publication potential and impact throughout their post-mentorship careers. Policymakers should thus revisit first and second order consequences of diversity policies while focusing on not only retaining women in science, but also maximizing their long-term scientific impact." So?

0:35:32 Thomas: Hmm.

0:36:00 Thomas: Interesting.

0:36:20 Lindsey: How does that strike you?

0:36:21 Thomas: I... I, I don't, again, I don't know if, if you're gonna tell me that the, oh, actually the the math on this paper is way off, so it's crap, like, I don't know if I, if I'm taking for granted that their findings are true, that, know, I could imagine there being a few mechanisms that could reinforce that. Like, there's the idea, there's... there's the old problem when you talk about the gender wage gap, for example, where it's like, well, just the jobs that women want to do just aren't don't make any money. And they're like, Well, why is there a reason for that? I mean, is it possible that maybe we're somehow as a society undervaluing work? It could there be a similar thing going on here where it's like, well, the fields we're talking about or maybe the sub, you know, specialties like the areas that papers are being published or whatever it is, when women are doing it is being systematically undervalued. That's a possibility. I don't know. I'm shooting in the dark, though.

0:36:41 Lindsey: Yeah. That?

0:37:11 Lindsey: No. So it's something along those lines that I would expect to account for these findings. If this is if this is in fact a real effect, right, there there's some methodological and statistical issues, uh, with the paper, so, you know, that's really where the the crux of the criticism ended up being, but the reason this this paper sparked like a very loud conversation online like, there was, you know, online sort of outrage about this, um, and some have claimed that essentially the paper was retracted because of that outrage. And the outrage is coming from the fact that, like, like, they're doing, they're presenting a kind of evidence here that, like, even if everything was solid, is very, very preliminary, and they're not providing any evidence about mechanisms. They're not accounting for the kinds of of like, you know, things that we know from past research on women working in the sciences and academia in general influence these kinds of metrics. They're Not.

0:37:15 Thomas: Mm hmm. Mm hmm, huh? Huh.

0:38:03 Thomas: Well, can you tell us from your experience, the thing they were evaluating was citations, right? Like how often. And so if that's your thingy you're looking at, I'm such a scientist. If that's Your Thing that you're Looking at, is it true? And this is something I just don't know. So coming from your background, is It something where if you were mentored by somebody like, you know, someone well known, better known, Someone with more respect in their field who, if, you know, if there's still some sexism in the system, is going to tend to be a man who has these, like, connections and has achieved higher positions, whatever. Does that make you more likely to be published in a way or in a paper or in journal or whatever that'll be taken seriously over and above just the topic you're publishing on?

0:38:10 Lindsey: Yes. Mm hmm. Mm Hmm. Yeah,

0:38:52 Thomas: Like, is there room for that in the System? I don't even know.

0:38:52 Lindsey: Yeah, it does. Yes. Yeah, no, that's definitely true. And actually, funnily enough, those were those were two other central variables that they looked at in the study. So they were looking at like, you know, sort of, they, they operationalize what they called like a big shot factor, like, you know whether somebody is like a, a big deal. And they also, they also had a proxy for like how well connected the people in this, in the set were. And so they were were looking at all these things simultaneously and saying like, even if we control for like how big a name they are, even if we control for how well connected they are, you still get these these gender effects. Uh-huh.

0:38:56 Thomas: Okay. Hmm. Ah.

0:39:26 Thomas: Oh, well, that's interesting. Okay.

0:39:28 Lindsey: Yeah, there's a lot of other things that they're not controlling for, though. That's, you know, when critics came back to this article, we're like, you know, what there's all these things that, based on this pretty large corpus of research about the effects of gender and working in these kinds of environments, would have been relevant to control for, and you didn't. And that was partly like a practical constraint, right? They're dealing with this pre-existing data set, and there's only so much that you can do.

But if you are limited in the data that you're working with in this way, you need to be very careful and qualified in the conclusions that you are drawing. And so a big part of the problem that people had with this is like, you did this study, and even under the best of circumstances, the claims that you could justify making based on this study are very modest. And then you're saying like, you know, there's this, you know, we've had this policy push to encourage women to mentor other women in the sciences. And maybe that's not a good idea. Maybe we should actually have men, you know, being in more of those mentorship roles because based on this data, it looks like they're going to publish more and have more of an impact or excuse me, not publish more, but their publishing is going to have more more of

0:40:13 Thomas: Yeah. Mm-hmm.

0:40:38 Lindsey: A scientific impact. And it's like, to say that is to ignore some pretty important social and historical context. And like, I mean, you know, nominally, they do it, they do acknowledge it in the discussion, they say, like, you know, our data weren't appropriate to evaluate mechanisms. And, you know, this difference that we're finding could be due to any number of things like childcare responsibilities falling disproportionately to women, all that they made all those qualifications. But nonetheless, at the end of the paper, they're like, policymakers should consider X, Y, and Z.

0:41:08 Thomas: Yeah, yeah.

0:41:09 Lindsey: And it's a little too strong for

0:41:12 Thomas: Are you, do you normally publish something and then say, and here's my policy recommendation based on sometimes?

0:41:17 Lindsey: Sometimes. But like, again, it's the kind of thing that you want to be super careful about. And if you're going to, especially with an issue like this that has, you know, if anybody is to pay attention to this, it is going to have major impacts, right? You want to do a lot of to the policy recommendations that you're making.

0:41:18 Thomas: Okay. Okay, yeah, hmm.

0:41:32 Lindsey: But like yeah, if you are doing work that has applied value, it it typical to include include implications that are applied in that way and say, these are the potential implications for policy. But anyway, so we don't have a ton of time to do like a deep dive on all of the things here. And, but I will, I'll talk about a couple of things, right? So first of all, given what this paper was purporting to investigate, the way that their central variables were measured seems very questionable so I, you know, again as I mentioned, they're working with this like massive pre-existing data set of these records of academic publications, and they had to infer things about the mentorship relationship as well as the gender of the co-authors, right, that wasn't actually data that was directly in the data set, um,

0:41:39 Thomas: Okay that's interesting.

0:42:20 Lindsey: Very indirectly. And so the the methods that they use to infer those things have been criticized on a number of grounds by by several um people who have published responses to this paper. And because of this, I and other people, again, who have publish responses to these, I'm not comfortable saying that what this study actually captured necessarily had much to do with mentorship, as much as it did with just like collaborative publication. And I think it's very likely that there's a ton of error in their measurement of gender. Like they used... I can't remember what...

0:42:51 Thomas: So they use like proxies

0:42:53 Lindsey: They were using names, names, right?

0:42:53 Thomas: To try to get it. OK.

0:42:58 Lindsey: But like, there are there are plenty of names that, you know, are very ambiguous in that way. And like, they did their best to account for that. But nonetheless, they're using like an algorithm to try to make these judgments about names in this data set of like 3 million pairs of people. And it's across like all of these disciplines. It's so that I think that there's probably a hefty margin of error and how they're making those categorizations. And that's to say say nothing about like, you know, the role that gender identity is actually playing here, you know?

0:43:02 Thomas: Yeah. Mm-hmm.

0:43:28 Lindsey: Anyway, so I think there's likely to be a lot of error there. And so when you're not, when you're drawing conclusions about one thing, and they're not closely enough tied to your operationalizations, it's, that's a problem, right? That's something that ought to be centered in the way that you're talking about your results, and it wasn't here, right.

0:43:49 Lindsey: So They drew their conclusions about one thing, and what they actually looked at was another. Another problem was that, I mentioned this before, there was virtually no attempt in the analysis to try to control for confounding variables that might have been associated with gender or with their other variables of interest. That's a problem. This is a correlational study, right? Typically some attempt is made to control for some things that could be associated with the things that you're looking at. And finally, right, they did note that their analysis was limited, but again, that didn't prevent them from suggesting these policy recommendations. And again, best case scenario, this is a preliminary study to establish a gender difference at best. And before strong policy recommendations are appropriate, the evidence that you compile needs to be paired with other investigations that allow you to support explanations of why the effect exists.

0:43:49 Thomas: Mm hm. Yeah. Yeah,

0:44:38 Lindsey: Oh, and yeah, And that's to say nothing of the of like how this, this evidence sort of related to a past work. So there's a corpus of literature that sort of go against the more broad claim that they're making about whether it's good to have women mentoring other women. So they're making a claim that's like at odds in some ways with a scientific consensus. And that requires even stronger evidence for what you're saying. So, they drew conclusions about this that like were very strong, and they just, they weren't justified by the strength of the evidence that was collected. And that's the reason that the paper was retracted. At least that's the official position of the journal, yeah.

0:44:38 Thomas: Like. Oh, sorry. Good.

0:45:17 Thomas: Yeah. And I think you've brought this up before and other things we're talking about where it's like just talking about a phenomenon without any sort of plausible mechanism is not always the way to go. Right. I mean, what I'd be very curious as to how they would go about demonstrating what this mechanism would be if, if it's not some of the things that we've kind of guessed at, you know, if it's not some some inherent kind of bias in in in either the reputational differences or whatever it might be. I'd be curious what would be the explanation for this, that women aren't as smart or aren't able to write papers that go as... I don't even know what it would be.

0:45:45 Lindsey: Again.

0:46:04 Lindsey: Again. I really, yeah, I really don't, I don't want to speculate about their, their personal motives here, um, but what

0:46:13 Thomas: Well, if they're going to make a policy recommendation based on a stupid thing, I'm trying to at least come up with what they would have to say the mechanism even is for this.

0:46:13 Lindsey: Yeah. Well, I mean maybe they do think that the mechanism does come down to these bias things, and that nonetheless, like, the way to address that is to put men in power positions. I could, because that's the recommendation. Right, there's other policy recommendations you could have made on the basis of this. You could have said, like, you know, know so we need to investigate these mechanisms further and and try to figure out how to, how to be more supportive of of women so that, you know, and also, and this is a, this is totally, this is not worth, this is tangent, not worth going down, but the just the proxy of like, uh, using scientific citations as the impact indicator is also a controversial thing. Like, this is, uh, this is a conversation that's ongoing as to whether or not that's a good way of quantifying impact. Pact. So I don't know. There's a bunch of things here.

0:46:28 Thomas: Right. Yeah. Yeah.

0:47:09 Thomas: Yeah. Okay. Okay. Well, where do you in the, in the little time we have left, where do you want to take us? I don't want to derail if you had something for the end here.

0:47:13 Lindsey: Okay. Yeah. I do. I've got just a little bit for the end. Yeah, maybe we actually timed this right. This is good. So, Okay. So I don't buy that the second case with the paper retraction is good evidence of conservative conclusions being stifled just because they're out of step with progressive politics. This was a case of a strong claim being made and a claim that seemed to be inconsistent with past evidence about this topic. And the scientific community did what it should have done. It scrutinized the evidence, and it found that the claims weren't justified, right? And like, to be fair, it is true that an online outcry usually wouldn't be part of the scientific or academic response to this. And I think that it was partly the quick exposure that it got online that led to to these responses coming in as quickly as they did and the retraction happening as quickly as it did, but nonetheless, right? And also I get that getting that online reaction like is genuinely terrifying. Like imagining this happening to one of my papers is like, yeah, it's horrifying,

0:47:21 Thomas: Okay, cool. Yeah. And,

0:48:19 Lindsey: Right. That'd be super scary.

0:48:20 Thomas: And, and I, I don't think there's a need to, you know, nobody on, you know, quote unquote, the SJW side, or at least I'll speak for myself. Like I would never say that every like online dragging is justified and proportionate. Like there's definitely huge problems with that, it's not really something that you can control, though, so it's yeah you

0:48:38 Lindsey: No, totally agree. I totally agree, and the really central claim here, and the one that I want to push back on, is that the narrative is that that the online outcry was responsible for the retraction of the paper. And I think that's disingenuous. The retraction seemed to have very much been evidence-based. And so, you know, just to draw a line under this, on the basis of cases like this retraction, folks like Haidt and Jessam are noticing that the evidence seems to hold up to scientific scrutiny when it supports progressive conclusions. And they are using that as evidence that it's the political beliefs of the scientists scientists themselves, and not the evidence that's actually guiding scientific consensus, which, as we discussed a few minutes ago, would be very disturbing. And they also use it as evidence that conservatives are being pushed out of the scientific discourse, because the narrative goes, if they weren't, if it really was only about the evidence, then you'd have more representation of scientifically supported claims supporting right wing views.

0:49:39 Lindsey: Okay. Now, first of all, I think that that this position flagrantly ignores the fact that the entire scientific system is designed to correct for exactly this kind of bias. And when you dig into the specifics of these cases of alleged censorship, like this retraction, what you find over and over again is that science is working as it should. Scientists are responding to the strength of the evidence. And so I want to say one thing that I want to very clearly flag as speculative, but I also feel very comfortable owning the speculation. I think that there's another potential explanation for why the conclusions that hold up to scientific scrutiny tend to be consistent with progressive politics. I think it has something to do with the fact that, for whatever reason, and I think it's very complicated reasons, political conservatives in the United States have wedded themselves to scientifically unsupported positions, like that there is no evidence for human-caused climate change.

0:50:31 Lindsey: And they've wedded themselves to political positions on this topic that that are directly opposed to the existing scientific consensus on these topics, meaning that they have wedded themselves to positions that are not evidence-based. And so if you do that, and then you decide to become a scientist, you're going to have a hard time, precisely because science is designed to be resistant to and corrective of those kinds of biases.

0:50:27 Thomas: Don't say, yeah yeah yeah

0:50:58 Lindsey: That is my speculation, end of speculation.

0:50:58 Thomas: It makes sense. I mean, you're, if you're epistemology, and just taking it wider than just climate change, you know, if your conservative epistemology is is in some sense rooted on religion, Christianity, whatever, you know, that whole thing. Yeah, you're going to run into some problems when the real world says otherwise, when the data in the real word is a different way than what you want it to be because of a really old, out of touch, irrelevant belief.

0:51:21 Lindsey: Yes, yeah, exactly, right? Right. And I and I think I think that, you know, continuing to promote this narrative, given that I think as has been shown over and over again, there's not good evidence for this narrative that conservatives are being canceled in academia. And I think the first case suggests that, like, academia is a system in which there's no due process. Right. Right. Allegations of misconduct are brought forward, you know, without any evidence and, you know, administrations fire people capriciously. And I think that fosters unjust or unjustified mistrust of those institutions. And for the second piece, right, the suggestion is that the scientific process and,you know, particularly within the social sciences is to be mistrusted as well, because the consensus there isn't actually evidence based.

0:52:18 Lindsey: It's, you know, all about this majority political position. That's hugely corrosive to, I think, very well earned trust in things like the scientific process. And it makes me mad. Can you tell yet?

0:52:29 Thomas: Yeah. We need to do a separate episode. There's so much there you're

0:52:39 Lindsey: I really, oh, God, I'm so mad. My face is so red.

0:52:42 Thomas: You're it's, it's awesome. I love the passion, I love that you're heated about this. And I, I gotta say, I'm not entirely surprised that once again, when someone has a list of grievances about the, the cancel culture laugh, that wouldn't you know it, even a good faith, uh, interpretation, somebody like you, and and who I've been in the past too, where I'm like, oh, wow, shit, is this really a thing? Let me dig into these examples. Wouldn't you know it, surprise, surprise. Every single time it's like, well, that's not at all how that's being represented by your side.

0:53:05 Lindsey: Uh-huh. Yeah. There's no evidence for it.

0:53:14 Thomas: Yeah. And if, you know, and if there were, it'd be a chance for us to be like, hey, actually, this one thing seems not good. I won't support that one thing. You know, like if you had an example and if you Had a better example in your list of 50 grievances, I'm sure it would be more prominent or something, you Know, like, yeah, so.

0:53:15 Lindsey: Yeah. Exactly. Right? Yeah. The fact that the faculty position was the thing that was centered at the very top of the post as like the you know, yeah, it's it's pretty fun, yeah.

0:53:38 Thomas: Yeah. So, so, well, uh, Lindsey, thanks so much as always for coming on and giving us that brilliant breakdown, um,

0:53:46 Lindsey: No, Thank you. Thank you for letting me yell and scream, express my liberal outrage, thank

0:53:46 Thomas: Yeah. Absolutely. It is a safe space for that, um, as Always, you can, uh, you can catch Lindsay here all the time from, or, uh, catch us on the Twitch stream from time to time, as Well, twitch.tv slash SRSNES, it's lot of fun, we always, we, you know, Lindsay answers questions, we talk about stuff, it's a lot of fun, so if you are a fan of Lindsay as much as I am, go check it out.

0:53:56 Lindsey: You, mm-hmm. Or battle toads.

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