Category: debate

Daniel Diermeier, Vanderbilt’s chancellor, lays out his views on academia in our era

November 20, 2024 • 11:30 am

Yesterday I mentioned this interview in the new Sapir quarterly magazine edited by Bret Stephens, who in this article interviews Daniel Diermeier, the Chancellor of Vanderbilt University. Diermeier was our provost from 2016 to 2020, but left to take the top job at Vanderbilt.  I, among many, miss him, for at Vandy he’s turned the school into a model of academic freedom and free speech, but hasn’t neglected the enforcement of “time, place, and manner” restrictions on speech.

The discussion below shows how deeply Diermeier has pondered all the issues around freedom of expression and the purpose of a university. Combined with Stephens’s probing questions, it’s an excellent conversation.

Here are three excerpts from a longish discussion, which is worth reading in toto. First, the politicization of universities versus social inequality:

Bret Stephens: Until recently, surveys showed that Americans had high confidence in higher education. It was seen as an essential ticket to success in American life. In the past decade or so, that confidence has plummeted. The last survey I saw, from Gallup, showed a sharp decline, and that came out before October 7 and the protests that followed. What happened in the past 10 years to cause that decline?

Daniel Diermeier: We’ve seen the same data, and I’ve been very concerned about the drop in approval and trust in higher education. The decline has been larger among people on the conservative side of the political spectrum, but it’s across the board, from the Left and the Right. My sense is that it comes from two concerns. From the progressive side, the concern is that highly selective universities are perpetuating inequality. And the concern from the Right is that we’re woke factories.

Stephens: Both of them can be true.

Diermeier: One hundred percent. My own sense is that the concerns about the propagation of inequality are, on closer inspection, much overblown. I think the concerns on the politicization of higher education and the ideological drift are much more valid.

The question of the politicization of higher education has come into stark relief after what we’ve seen last year: the conflict in the Middle East and the drama on campus. These developments have elevated into the public consciousness concerns that have been present for years. They now are front and center, much more serious, and they require a course correction by many universities.

The University of Chicago’s “foundational principles“:

Stephens: A historian might say, “Go back to the University of Chicago or Yale in the 1950s and you’ll find conservative critics railing against higher education as hotbeds of radicalism.” Now we look back on that and sort of chuckle. Is the criticism more valid today? If so, why?

Diermeier: Yes, I think the criticism is more valid today. If you look back, there were three pillars of how a university thought about its role in society. If you look at the University of Chicago, one pillar was this commitment to free speech that goes back to the founding and then through a whole variety of presidents, reaffirmed, most recently, by the 2015 report, often referred to as the Chicago Principles. Universities need to be places for open debate.

Pillar two is what we call institutional neutrality, which means that the university will not get involved, will not take positions, on controversial political and social issues that bear no direct relevance to the university’s mission. The University of Chicago’s formulation of this policy was the Kalven Report from 1967, which so eloquently articulates that when the university formulates a party line on any issue, it creates a chilling effect for faculty and students to engage in debate and discourse.

And the third pillar, less appreciated but important, is a commitment to reason, to respect, to using arguments and evidence. Discourse and debate at the university shouldn’t be about shouting. That’s a more cultural aspect. All three have eroded, and they have eroded over the past 10 years in significant fashion. Now we see the consequences of that.

I’m not sure how institutional neutrality has eroded, since it was really only embraced by the University of Chicago until very recently. Now, as FIRE reports, 25 colleges and universities have adopted the position. It seems to me that institutional neutrality has expanded, not “eroded.”

Finally, the ambit of institutional neutrality,  how it differs from propagandizing classrooms, and why the question of “affirmative action for conservative faculty” is not a major issue:

Stephens: Let me ask you about the role of university leaders. One thing you sometimes hear from presidents is I have no power. The faculty rule the institution. There’s a limit to what I can do in terms of what happens on my own campus. Tell us about governance structures. How can university leadership effectively use its position within those structures to set a tone, create a culture, have a set of rules and expectations for how the student and faculty behave? If you were speaking to first-time university presidents from across the country, what would you advise them?

Diermeier:

. . . . Institutional neutrality does not constrain faculty or students. It does constrain administrators. So the second concern that you pointed out, which I’m going to call the politicization of the classroom, is a separate one. That, to me, is a question of professionalism. If you’re using your classroom for indoctrination or propaganda, you’re fundamentally not doing your job. You’re not creating an effective learning environment for your students. So I think these are two separate issues that should not be commingled, because the point of institutional neutrality is to create freedom for faculty and students. If that freedom and responsibility are abused, that’s a different conversation.

. . . .If [faculty are] using their classroom for political propaganda, it’s a different conversation. The right way to think about hiring and promotions is that they should be based on expertise and merit. I’ve cited a couple of these University of Chicago reports before, but there’s one called the Shils Report that makes that very clear: We do not want to have political litmus tests for whom we hire and promote.

That said, there is an important role for the university, including its curriculum, in a society that investigates and reflects on itself, its values, its history. A lot of that is in humanities, the social sciences, divinity schools, law schools, and so forth. There are multiple perspectives, and to have them in the classroom is vitally important. If you have a class on ethics, you want the students to deal with virtue ethics, deontological ethics, and consequential ethics. You want these perspectives well represented, so that they are challenged, and then students can make up their own mind about what they think. If that does not happen because of the ideological capture of a department or program, we’ve got a problem.

I’m very doubtful that the solution is affirmative action for conservatives. I’m also not convinced that these movements to create new centers are the solution, either. I think the challenge goes a little deeper than where people are on political orientation — it has to do with how fields of study are structured and how certain fields have evolved. But we cannot have an ideological monoculture in these types of classes. It’s a disservice to our students.

And, if you don’t want to read, here’s a 45-minute conversation between Diermeir and Dan Senor (Senor’s “Call Me Back” show) that covers much of the same ground as the Sapir article. Senor notes how happy Vandy’s students are compared to students at other places, and Diermeier tries to explain it (note: it has something to do with football, too). Diermeier does credit a lot of Vanderbilt’s academic policies to what he absorbed at the University of Chicago.

Note at about 30 minutes in, Diermeier describes the sit-in in the administration building which led to disciplining the pro-Palestinian protestors. The University of Chicago doesn’t go nearly this far in disciplining protestors that do exactly the same thing. At Vandy, there was suspensions, probation, and even arrests for assault. Diermeier also explains why he would not accede to the demonstrators’ demands for divestment of the university’s endowment from Israel, and explains why he considers encampments a violation of the school’s policy. At the end, he muses about what to do free speech crosses the borderline into illegal harassment or threats.

In my view, Diermeier is the best university President in America, for his policies are the best and are based on considerable thought (and of course, his experience at The University of Chicago).

Postmortem of the Presidential debate: Trump blew it big time

September 11, 2024 • 9:45 am

There were at least two op-eds in the New York Times in the last few days arguing that if Harris was to win last night’s debate, she could not spend her time attacking Trump but had to show that she had tangible policy proposals for the American people.  Well, Harris did win the debate (I’m not aware of anybody who disagrees with this, including conservative websites like the National Review), but it was not because of her policy proposals. (Fortunately, I managed to stay awake to watch the whole thing.)

The NYT was wrong: Harris won the debate hands down, not by presenting tangible policies (she did mention a few), but by doing what she was told not to do: baiting and attacking Trump. She did it calmly but persistently, to the point where Trump became so baffled and enraged that he simply lost it, becoming unhinged and yes, almost deranged. And when that happened, his narcissism and lying became uncontrollable. In fact, at some points I thought that, like Biden, he had simply lost his ability to think. It seems to me now that Trump is showing signs of age, in a manner different in degree but not in kind from the kind of fogginess that brought down Biden in his last debate with Trump.

If you didn’t see the debate, it’s below.

I suspect that some of Harris’s debate practice involved confecting statements that would unsettle Trump, and, sure enough, they worked, like a red cape shown to a bull.  Perhaps the most effective was Harris’s assertion that people got bored at Trump rallies, which were insubstantial and full of pop culture, and simply left them early.

That was enough to unsettle Trump, who claims that his rallies were, like everything else he does, the greatest in the history of America. And he never recovered his equilibrium.  The lies and misstatements spouted forth like water from a fountain.  There was the statement that Haitians were eating pets in Ohio, the claim that Harris met both Putin and Zelensky and failed to secure a peace (she never met Putin), the false claim that tariffs on foreign goods wouldn’t result in higher prices for consumers, that if was elected he could settle the Ukraine/Russia war before he took office, that Harris was a Marxist, that some Democrats support the execution of children after birth, and so on. None of that is true. When Harris said that world leaders were laughing at Trump’s ineptitude (another statement guaranteed to bait him), his response was to quote Hungarian President Viktor Orbán, a minor figure who admires Trump but also admires Putin. Was that the best he could do?

The WaPo and other sites have compiled a list of Trump’s lies and exaggerations, and it’s long.  Now Harris wasn’t immune to misstatements, either, but they were far fewer, and included her statement that “And as of today, there is not one member of the United States military who is in active duty in a combat zone, in any war zone around the world, the first time this century,”, which isn’t true. She claimed that the Biden administration created over 800,000 manufacturing jobs (the true number is close to 625,00).  But these are trivial compared to Trump’s fulminating and arrant lying.

I don’t know how many undecided voters would have been swayed by Trump’s performance to vote for him, but I doubt that it’s anywhere close to half.  The debate was really a contrast in likability and personality, and Harris’s cool demeanor and failure to get flustered made her look far better than Trump, whom I’ve always said suffers from a form of personality disorder.  And voters want to like the person whose box they check on the Presidential ballot.

Both candidates evaded some questions, including Trump’s denial of any responsibility for Project 2025, his failure to own up to the “fine people on both sides” statements he said after the far-right rally in Charlottesville, and his failure to specify how he’d rid the country of 11 million illegal immigrants. For her part, Harris didn’t really explain how her policies could change if her values didn’t, and she didn’t own up to her change of policy on fracking nor admit the seriousness of the immigration issue. This was balanced by two statements by Harris that were eloquent and, at least to me, somewhat moving: her defense of abortion rights for women and her rebuke of Trump for failing to stand for America’s democratic values by not supporting Ukraine.

No, Harris wasn’t strong on presenting policies (she did outline some, like her $6,000 tax credit to parents with newborns and a reduction in tax credits, and her website now outlines specific plans, including giving $25,000 to first-time home buyers). Whether her plans are financially viable is another question, but neither she nor Trump were asked that. (Note that, according to the New Republic, many of Harris’s policies were lifted directly from Biden’s campaign website).

The one issue on which I strongly disagree with Harris is the stand on Israel she espoused. While she said she strongly supported Israel and its right to defend itself, she also argued that the death toll of civilians in Gaza (something that’s been lifted from Hamas’s figures) is too high, and that we need both an immediate cease-fire and especially a two-state solution.  Both of those policies explicitly deny Israel the right to defend itself: a cease-fire now is a loss for Israel and a victory for Hamas, and we simply cannot have a two-state solution now. There are not honest brokers on either side, and of course neither Israel nor the Palestinians really want a two-state “solution”, which won’t solve any problems. (Israel now has no faith that a Palestinian state will be peaceful, and the Palestinians want the erasure of the state of Israel far more than they want their own state alongside Israel.)  I have little faith that Harris will conduct an israeli policy to my liking, but of course many Americans are far less pro-Israel than I.

As for the moderators, they were pretty good, though David Muir dominated the questions over Linsey Davis, which seems to me a bit sexist. However, the questions were generally good, and I thought the policy of fact-checking false claims during the live debate was a good one (and probably threw Trump off even more).

I believe that the Democrats, flush with victory, are now calling for a second debate, but I’m not sure there will be one. If the polls show that voters (and the electoral college) have moved towards Harris, Trump will surely not agree to a second debate.

When I discussed this with Luana today, she came to a conclusion that is hers. And here it comes. There is one good outcome of this debate: whichever side loses will have to recalibrate. If Trump loses, then MAGA is gone and Trump has lost most of his influence in the GOP. If Harris loses, then the Democrats have to become yet more centrist (though I have to add that Harris has deliberately become more centrist recently as a pragmatic issue to win).

We don’t know who will win the election, and the next few days will show how much Trump’s embarrassing performance will cost the GOP. (Remember, he’s always been an awful debater but has nevertheless come out on top twice.)  But regardless of that, there’s no question that the winner of the debate was Kamala Harris. I’m still not a big fan of hers, but was reminded last night why I’ve always regarded Trump as a joke—but a very dangerous joke.

Now, of course, it’s your turn to weigh in, and I ask you to do so in the comments. (There was some weighing in after my livestream post on the debate last night.)

Tonight’s debate and what Tom Friedman thinks Harris must do to win

September 10, 2024 • 12:45 pm

As you know, there’s a Big Debate tonight between Kamala Harris and Donald Trump. It’ll be broadcast on television on ABC, a non-cable channel. ABC says this: (note that times are Eastern times):

The ABC News debate, moderated by David Muir and Linsey Davis, will take place on Tuesday, Sept. 10 at 9 p.m ET. A prime-time pre-debate special will air at 8 p.m. ET. It will air on ABC and stream on ABC News Live, Disney+ and Hulu. Viewers can also stream the debate on the ABC app on a smartphone or tablet, on ABC.com and connected devices.

The debate will last an hour and a half. I may do a live post with readers reacting in real time, but I will refrain from giving any of my own take until the next day.

If you’re a PBS fan, there’s a bunch of broadcasting on PBS starting at 6 pm EDT with the PBS News Hour, and continuing through the debate (with, undoubtedly, some post-debate analysis).

A few comments and some related articles.

Although Harris has been notably silent about specific policy issues until now, and has sat for only one (softball interview), I now see that there’s a menu of policy positions on her website, which you can see here. You’d better believe that the Trump campaign will be scanning them for what they see as weak spots.  There are, of course, a gazillion ways Trump himselfcan be attacked, though, like Harris, he seems to have moderated some of his more extreme stands (e.g., on abortion) in a pragmatic bid for victory.

I’m not convinced that either candidate will tell the truth about what they really plan to do, as both now seem to be acting pragmatically: they both want to win, and both will say what they think will get them elected. Such is politics: you can’t govern unless you win.  That said, I think Harris is absolutely serious in wanting to pass a law that reinstates the provisions of Roe v Wade nationwide, and I support her on that. But unless both houses of Congress turn Democratic, she stands no chance. As for Trump, I have no idea what he’s absolutely serious about, which scares me.

But I don’t think that Trump will have the self-control that will gain him a victory in the debate. Still, a victory in the debate may not, unlike the fatal Trump/Biden debate, have much to do with how people vote come November.

What will happen tonight?  All I can predict with confidence is that it’s going to get nasty despite both candidates having moderated their tone and made noises about sticking to the issues. I don’t think Trump can control himself, and to the extent that Harris keeps her cool, she’ll come off looking better. But I hasten to add that Trump has always seemed impervious to how he “comes off,” and the support he’s enjoyed despite all the civil and criminal trials in his future support his statement that “”I could stand in the middle of Fifth Avenue and shoot somebody, and I wouldn’t lose any voters, OK?. . . . It’s, like, incredible.”

As Tom Friedman notes in the NYT op-ed below (click headline to read, or find the article archived here). Harris has taken some positions in the past that could come back to haunt her should Trump bring them up in the debate. These include immigration and Title IX issues. As the Free Press reports in its daily news summary.

Even as Harris gets a little more specific in 2024, the promises she made in 2019 remain a headache. The latest unwelcome reminder of the progressive positions she took in the Democratic primary five years ago come courtesy of CNN’s Andrew Kaczynski, who reports that during that race Harris told the ACLU she supports cutting ICE’s funding and providing gender transition surgery to detained migrants.

Further, she’s susceptible to her statement that her values haven’t changed but some of her positions have (e.g., fracking).  If I were a moderator, I’d ask her to explain that. She’s also not good when thinking on her feet, and, with the pressure of a deranged opponent coming down on her, she has to try hard to keep her cool.

I am not a fan of Friedman so much, but I think he’s pretty much correct in his article below:

An excerpt:

“Joe and I got a lot of things right, but we got some things wrong, too — and here is what I have learned.”

For my money, uttering those 23 words, or something like them, is the key for Kamala Harris to win Tuesday’s debate against Donald Trump — and the election.

Utter them, and she will hugely improve her chances to win more of the undecided voters in this tight race. Fail to utter them or continue to disguise her policy shifts with the incoherent statement she used in the CNN interview — that while her positions might have changed on fracking and immigration, “my values have not changed” — and she will struggle.

Madam V.P., if you say your positions have changed but your values haven’t, what does that even mean? And what should we expect from your presidency — your values or your actions? Our latest poll shows too many voters still don’t know.

It’s OK to say: “I learned a lot as vice president. I’m proud of our record of putting America on a sustainable path to a clean energy future. It will make us more secure and more prosperous. But I also see that we can’t get there overnight. For reasons of both economic security and national security, we need an all-of-the-above energy strategy right now. So you can trust that in a Harris presidency, America will continue to lead the world in exploiting our oil and gas advantages but we will do it in the cleanest way possible while making the transition as fast as possible.”

I’m not so sure that admitting she was wrong will “hugely improve her chances” to win over undecided voters, but if she doesn’t she’ll be in a tight place.

Will admitting she was wrong hurt her? Not to me, but perhaps to the American public, which may interpret it as a weak candidate flip-flopping on the issues.  Here’s one of the issues—from CNN—that she might want to back off on, especially given the fact that illegal immigration is now an important issue to many Americans (as is, to a lesser extent, “affirmative care”).

Click to read Kaczynski’s article mentioned above:

An excerpt from CNN:

As Kamala Harris pivots to the political center in her campaign for president, a 2019 questionnaire from a leading civil rights organization spotlights her past support for left-wing causes such as taxpayer-funded gender transition surgeries for detained immigrants and federal prisoners.

In an American Civil Liberties Union questionnaire then-Sen. Harris filled out as a candidate for president in 2020, she also expressed support for decriminalizing federal drug possession for personal use, and for sweeping reductions to Immigration and Custom Enforcement operations, including drastic cuts in ICE funding and an open-ended pledge to “end” immigration detention.

The questionnaire has received scant media attention and a spokesperson for the ACLU claimed it had remained live from 2019.

But the ACLU’s website upload and page source indicate the questionnaire was reposted last month after Harris became the presumptive Democratic nominee. CNN was unable to find questionnaires filled out by other candidates from the 2020 campaign that the ACLU had reposted.

Harris has acknowledged that some of her stances have evolved over time but that she holds core beliefs that remain unshakable: “My values have not changed,” she said in an interview with CNN last month.

The ACLU questionnaire, which was sent  to all Democratic and Republican candidates during the 2020 presidential campaign, provides a clear record of Harris’ progressive stances. Some candidates did not respond to the questionnaire, including Joe Biden.  The ACLU later ran radio ads attacking Biden for not answering.

The ACLU also had volunteers question candidates at public town halls and later posted videos on their website of their responses.

During one town hall event in New Hampshire in April 2019, Harris was asked by a voter if she supports adding a “third gender” to federal identification cards.

“Sure,” Harris answered to a round of applause from the crowd. “I have my entire life and career been an ally and I see the issue of LGBTQ rights as a fundamental civil rights and human rights issue, period,” Harris said.

Here’s a graphic of that, again from CNN:

I have to say that her stand on this: giving federal funding for gender surgery for immigrants who entered the country illegally, is absurd.  And slashing ICE funding is not something most Americans want.  She’d better be ready to disavow these positions, because if Team Trump has any smarts, they’ll bring them up.

Perhaps most Americans will be watching the debate as a form of entertainment rather than a way to figure out how to vote. It’s not at all clear that there will be more debates, though, so this may be the only chance to see the candidates go mano a mano. All we know is the country is poised to go down two very divergent paths, and I find debate about that to be more anxiety-inducing than entertaining.

Anyway, these are just random thoughts, but I invite your random thoughts or predictions about the debate.  I’m sure people will have more to say tomorrow.

Promised debate at Auckland University on indigenous ways of knowing vs. science fails to materialize

August 20, 2024 • 9:00 am

In 2021, the Listener Letter fracas erupted in New Zealand when seven professors at Auckland University argued that the indigenous “way of knowing,”  Mātauranga Māori (MM), while valuable in anthropology and sociology classes, should not be taught, as the government planned, as coequal with modern science.  The seven signers were right: while MM does contain some empirical knowledge obtained by trial and error, it’s also a mixture of that empiricism with religion, spirituality, morality, teleology, legends from word of mouth, and guidelines for proper behavior. That stuff doesn’t belong in science class, but they keep trying to sneak it in anyway.

Nevertheless, because the entire country has been captured by a woke mentality that holds the indigenous people as sacred, and their legends as sacrosanct, the signers of the Listener letter were demonized, threatened, and had some of their jobs downgraded. Further the Royal Society of New Zealand investigated the two members who signed the letter. (They were eventually exculpated.)

Since then, the drive to make MM coequal to science, and replace modern knowledge with Māori legends and tales, continues, even under a new and more conservative government.  And many people were “offended” by the letter; that is, they claimed it was hurtful to the indigenous people and damaged higher education. As I wrote on July 10, the Vice-Chancellor of Auckland University, Dawn Freshwater, issued a statement that said this in part:

A letter in this week’s issue of The Listener magazine from seven of our academic staff on the subject of whether mātauranga Māori can be called science has caused considerable hurt and dismay among our staff, students and alumni.

While the academics are free to express their views, I want to make it clear that they do not represent the views of the University of Auckland.

The University has deep respect for mātauranga Māori as a distinctive and valuable knowledge system. We believe that mātauranga Māori and Western empirical science are not at odds and do not need to compete. They are complementary and have much to learn from each other.

This view is at the heart of our new strategy and vision, Taumata Teitei, and the Waipapa Toitū framework, and is part of our wider commitment to Te Tiriti [the 1840 Treaty of Waitangi] and te ao [Māori] principles.

But the braver academics continued to beef, and so Vice-Chancellor Freshwater, the top official of Auckland Uni, promised in both August and December of 2021 that she would commission a series of academic debates and symposia on MM versus modern science. Her promises included these statements:

We will be setting up a series of VC lectures, panels and debating sessions, both within the University and externally, to address this and other topics. Universities like ours have an important thought-leadership role to play on these issues, which we embrace, while recognising that we need to foster an environment within which such debates can take place positively, respectfully and constructively.

. . . . I am calling for a return to a more respectful, open-minded, fact-based exchange of views on the relationship between mātauranga Māori and science, and I am committing the University to action on this.

In the first quarter of 2022 we will be holding a symposium in which the different viewpoints on this issue can be discussed and debated calmly, constructively and respectfully. I envisage a high-quality intellectual discourse with representation from all viewpoints: mātauranga Māori, science, the humanities, Pacific knowledge systems and others.

To give a short summary, these promises amounted to what comes out of the south end of a wildebeest facing north.

The debates and symposia never materialized, and I predicted as much.  Yes, there were at least three symposia, but they were purely rah-rah affairs boosting MM and indigenous knowledge, devoid of any dissenting views or debate, much less robust intellectual debate. Dean Freshwater simply brushed the issue under the rug in favor of further burnishing Auckland Uni’s worship of MM.

In light of this, I wrote Dean Freshwater in July of this year—THREE YEARS after she’d made her unfulfilled promise—asking her when the debates would happen between advocates of MM and advocates of modern science. I could do this because I’m not a Kiwi and won’t suffer professionally simply by asking this question. You can see my letter to VC Freshwater here.

I received no response from Freshwater, but she delegated her chief of staff to respond to me, and I got this email on August 7.

Dear Dr Coyne,

I write in response to your 06 July message to Vice-Chancellor Dawn Freshwater in reference to Mātauranga Māori and science at the University of Auckland.
As it happens, the University began holding an annual symposium on Mātauranga Māori in 2022, and our third event is scheduled for 11 September of this year. This symposium is open to the University community and focusses on different aspects of Māori knowledge systems (mātauranga). Our two events to date have each provided an opportunity for robust engagement.
In addition, during this same period the University’s Pro Vice-Chancellor Māori, Te Kawehau Hoskins, and Prof Alison Jones have led open discussions on a range of topics relating to Mātauranga and its relation to science, in every Faculty and a number of service divisions across the University.
Please know that the Vice-Chancellor’s position on this has not changed: respectful, open-minded, fact-based exchange of views—as enabled by the kinds of activities mentioned above—are essential within research universities such as ours. Thank you for your continued interest in this important topic.
Cordially,
Brian

Brian C. Ten Eyck, EdD
Poumatua Kaimahi | Chief of Staff
Tari o te Ihorangi | Office of the Vice Chancellor
Waipapa Taumata Rau | University of Auckland

This letter is a masterpiece of disingenous rhetoric. Check out the link to the “annual symposium” in Ten Eyck’s letter. Do you see any dissent or pushback in the summary below? Neither did I.

The University of Auckland, Waipapa Taumata Rau, is hosting its first Mātauranga Māori Symposium, exploring Te Ao Toi (Māori arts) and creative expression, with a diverse range of experts.

The symposium, set to occur annually with a focus on looking at different aspects of Mātauranga Māori, or Indigenous knowledge, will take place on Thursday 24 November and be held at Waipapa Marae at the University’s City Campus.

It will feature speakers who are experts in their respective fields, ranging from: Indigenous art history and architecture; moko signatures and iwi histories and traditions to whakairo (carving), weaving, multimedia installation, visual arts, photography, and the revival of Māori aute.

Speakers will include Waipapa Taumata Rau’s Associate Professor Ngarino Ellis, Te Ahukaramū Charles Royal, Bernard Makoare, Maureen Lander MNZM, Rongomai Grbic-Hoskins, Makareta Janke and Nikau Hindin.

Pro Vice-Chancellor Māori Te Kawehau Hoskins says the University is looking forward to opening this space to celebrate, share and engage with Mātauranga.

Several anonymous viewers of this symposium told me that there was no debate at all; one of them wrote me this:

This response is disingenuous. There have been presentations on MM but no opportunity to present different viewpoints. In other words, there has been no symposium fitting the description of the one promised by the VC in August 2021.

I’m told that there was a single pushback question from the floor, but it was largely sidestepped.

In other words, Vice Chancellor Freshwater lied when she promised a civil but robust debate on science vs. MM. My guess is that she knew when she made this promise that the debate would never take place. The University and VC Freshwater’s behavior are shameful.

And I’m pretty sure these debates never will happen. The entire curriculum of Auckland University, including its science offerings, is being captured by concepts from MM (more to come later), a capture heavily watering down the amount of science Auckland students will learn and giving them, instead, a big dose of postmodern philosophy of science. I’ll give one example of a “science” course, lacking any science, in a later post.

At any rate, the whole country is also subject to this ideological capture, despite the “progressive” Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern being replaced by the more moderate Christopher Luxon.  The whole science curriculum of the country, from primary school through university, is in dire straits, accompanied by layoffs of faculty and staff.

Since I’m the only person outside of New Zealand to call the country repeatedly to account, and to point out the dissimulation of Vice-Chancellor Freshwater, my cry in the wilderness is made in hopes that things will change. But they won’t, for so long as the indigenous people are seen as sacred and their way of knowing immune from criticism or debate, the country’s educational system will be swirling down the drain.

************

To show you how much rancor this issue creates, here’s a comment I got from a Kiwi on this post (the address is clearly fake). Needless to say, I didn’t allow it to go through, but now seems an appropriate time to show it (“Aotearoa” is the Māori word for “New Zealand”):

fuckjerrycoyne
jerrycoynedefendsepsteinpedos@gmail.com

kiwi here. please none of you ever come to aotearoa, you racist fucks. kill yourselves, instead.

What questions would you ask the candidates?

July 31, 2024 • 10:00 am

A hypothetical question: You are one of the moderators of the next Presidential debate. (We’re not sure if there will be one, though there surely must.)  What question(s) would you most like to ask both candidates together, as well as either one separately. Since Harris hasn’t yet chosen a running mate, we’ll leave out VP questions, though if you want to say what you’d ask Vance, fire away.  Be hard on them!

But here’s one question I’d ask both candidates. A version of this was asked in 2007 among the Republican Presidential candidates, with three out of the ten candidates said they didn’t “believe in evolution.” Here’s the video of that:

So here’s what I’d ask both Trump and Harris:

Do you accept that evolution is true? Why or why not?

That’s a touchstone about whether they’d accept established scientific “truth.” If you don’t buy that, then you’re oblivious to evidence. I’m sure Harris would say “yes”, but don’t know what Trump would say.  But I’d also like to know if they know the evidence.

Here’s what I’d ask Trump (two questions):

You still maintain that the last Presidential election was rigged, with illegal votes counted in a way that made you lose.  If you lost this time, would you still say the same thing?

(This is to determine whether he’d still foment insurrection if he lost.)

As lagniappe, I’d ask him this:

You recently said this: 

“You got to get out and vote. In four years, you don’t have to vote again. We’ll have it fixed so good, you’re not going to have to vote.” 

And you’re sticking by that statement. Could you explain exactly what you meant by it? 

And here are two questions I’d ask Harris:

What do you think you accomplished on your own as Vice-President, as opposed to simply assenting to what Biden accomplished? I am referring to what you actually did to make America progress, as opposed to what you were supposed to do). 

I thought of one more:

You are hoping that you will win the Presidency by reinstalling Roe v. Wade as the law of the land. How, exactly, would you accomplish this if at least one house of Congress was majority Republican?

Both of those questions for Harris are designed to make her think on her feet as opposed to her custom of simply repeating a question as if it were an answer.

Put your questions below. Remember, you aren’t supposed to show partisan bias here, but to draw out the candidates, for that’s what debate moderators are supposed to do.

An unanswered letter to the head of the University of Auckland

July 10, 2024 • 9:45 am

This brouhaha all started in 2021 when seven faculty members at the University of Auckland posted the “The Listener letter on science”, a call to prevent teaching indigenous “ways of knowing” as science.   The letter is archived here and here though the text isn’t online.  If you click to enlarge the screenshot below, you’ll see it’s not all that controversial in itself; but its call that indigenous knowledge  “falls far short of what we can define as science itself” got plenty of Kiwi hackles up.  (The authors are talking about the local indigenous “way of knowing”, Mātauranga Māori (MM), which the government and schools were pushing should be taught in science classes as coequal to modern science.)

The authors were widely demonized, two were investigated by New Zealand’s Royal Society (who insisted at first that MM was indeed science), and several were threatened with academic punishment. As I wrote in my post of Dec. 14, 2021, the Vice-Chancellor of Auckland Uni, who is the head of the institution, also criticized the letter and its arguments:

Earlier this summer, Vice-Chancellor Dawn Freshwater issued a statement explicitly criticizing The Listener letter and its seven signers, making their identities easy to find. Two of her statements from Freshwater’s official announcement of July 26:

A letter in this week’s issue of The Listener magazine from seven of our academic staff on the subject of whether mātauranga Māori can be called science has caused considerable hurt and dismay among our staff, students and alumni.

Note the “hurt and dismay claim”, which at the very outset puts her statement in a context of emotionality rather than reason. And there was more:

While the academics are free to express their views, I want to make it clear that they do not represent the views of the University of Auckland.

The University has deep respect for mātauranga Māori as a distinctive and valuable knowledge system. We believe that mātauranga Māori and Western empirical science are not at odds and do not need to compete. They are complementary and have much to learn from each other.

This view is at the heart of our new strategy and vision, Taumata Teitei, and the Waipapa Toitū framework, and is part of our wider commitment to Te Tiriti and te ao principles.

Now it’s not even clear if the University of Auckland even has an official view about science vs. mātauranga Māori, yet note that Freshwater characterizes the latter as “a distinctive and valuable knowledge system”, maintaining that “mātauranga Māori and Western empirical science are not at odds and do not need to compete.”  That is an arrant falsehood. For one thing, mātauranga Māori is creationist, which puts it squarely at odds with evolution. I won’t go on; you can find for yourself many other ways the two areas are “at odds” with each other.

Freshwater subsequently walked back her opposition after some pushback, and announced twice that year that the University of Auckland would host a series of discussions, debates, and panels on the relationship of local indigenous knowledge to modern science. All of us dealing with this issue from the “modern-science-is-not-equivalent-to-indigenous knowledge” side eagerly awaited this event.

It never happened. That of course is not surprising given that the climate in NZ sacralizes indigenous knowledge, and if you question it as a form of science you can be fired or deplatformed.  But of course I’m not a Kiwi, and I can say what I want. What I’ve wanted to do all these four years is to ask Dr. Freshwater what happened to the debates. So I wrote her this email last week:

Dear Vice-Chancellor Freshwater,

 

I’ve followed for some time the debates in New Zealand about the relationship between modern science and Mātauranga Māori.  Looking at my records,I see that on August 13 and December 14 of 2021, you sent out two notices that the University of Auckland would hold a series of lectures, panels, and debates on this issue.

This is from August 13, 2021:

In recent weeks we have witnessed a widespread public debate on the issue of mātauranga Māori and science. The debate has raised important questions about freedom
of expression, respect for opposing views, academic freedom and the role of universities in Aotearoa New Zealand. On Tuesday the NZ Herald published an opinion piece
on these issues, which you can read on our News pages here.

 

We will be setting up a series of VC lectures, panels and debating sessions, both within the University and externally, to address this and other topics. Universities like ours have an important thought-leadership role to play on these issues, which we embrace, while recognising that we need to foster an environment within which such debates can take place positively, respectfully and constructively.

And from December 14 of the same year:

I am calling for a return to a more respectful, open-minded, fact-based exchange of views on the relationship between mātauranga Māori and science, and I am committing the University to action on this.

In the first quarter of 2022 we will be holding a symposium in which the different viewpoints on this issue can be discussed and debated calmly, constructively and respectfully. I envisage a high-quality intellectual discourse with representation from all viewpoints: mātauranga Māori, science, the humanities, Pacific knowledge systems and others.

As far as I know, no symposia, discussions, or debates were ever held, though this was nearly three years ago. Was this idea discarded, or did I miss something?

Thanks for your attention.

Cordially,
Jerry Coyne
Professor Emeritus
Dept. Ecology and Evolution
The University of Chicago

I have had no reply.  Do you think I will get one? I’m not holding my breath.  I know, because Auckland Uni scours the internet for its mentions (I’ve received stern emails from them demanding corrections of my posts), that they’ll see this, even if Freshwater doesn’t read my email.

The upshot is that there’s never been ANY discussion or debate of this kind in New Zealand, although there have been articles written back and forth, most of them defending the scientific aspect of MM. But rumor has it that there will soon be some significant pushback soon on equating MM with science.

But the University of Auckland, the premier university in New Zealand, has failed abysmally in its promise to encourage free discussion of this important issue. It’s important because resolving whether indigenous knowledge should be taught as science will decide how the country and its students fare in competition with other first-world countries in scientific advances and education.  One of the purposes of a university is to find the truth, but that can’t be done if free discussion is banned.

Two Bill Maher videos from this week’s Real Time: a short one on Biden and the regular news/comedy bit, featuring a mock TED talk

June 29, 2024 • 11:00 am

Bill’s take on the debate in 1.5 minutes:. “Trump told lie after lie after lie. . . he wouldn’t have gotten away with it if Joe Biden had been there.”  As for Biden, “I’ve seen beauty pageant contestants answer questions better.”

Here’s Bill’s 10-minute monologue, in which he delivers a mock TED talk (with appropriate attire and gestures) telling young men how to find women using his “G.A.M.E.” strategy. And yes, it’s very sound, especially because Maher’s had a ton of experience.