- Jan 2024
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cacm.acm.org cacm.acm.org
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"=" to mean assignment and resorting to a special symbol for equality, rather than the obviously better reverse
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- Nov 2022
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onlinelibrary.wiley.com onlinelibrary.wiley.com
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For example, when Stock was invited to give a lecture on aesthetics at her own institution, graduate students invited a twitter-troll known primarily for her obsessive interest in Stock to give a talk denouncing her at the same time.
This is supposed to be an example of "the campaign"'s bullying behaviour. However, it is a paradigmatic example of counterspeech even on their description. At the very least the authors should engage with that fact instead of labeling it as a "can only be described as bullying". Obviously not!
Moreover and even more severely, the so-called 'twiiter-troll' is in fact a graduate student in the same field as Stock. The best case here is a clash of academic freedom. But that best case is impossible: Two academics giving a talk at the same time infringes no one's academic freedom. Even if one is about the other.
Furthermore, the countertalk was not specifially about Stock but about gender critical feminism as a movement.
The slides from the talk are online: https://drive.google.com/file/d/18nIpqucbIjD3Jpu4E_3GRsW9EKTQyvpw/view
In addition to being specifically a bullying act, it is wildly unscholarly. It fails to note pertinent information (it was an academic counter talk), conceals a key person under a multiply negative description (i.e., saying someone is a twitter troll implies they aren't an academic), and fails to cite the work they misrepresent (citation fail is one issue; misrepresentation is another.
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The campaign against her has employed tactics that can only be described as bullying.
"The campaign" is significantly ambiguous. There was a student protest movement. There are also a number of critics of Stock. These are not all one thing.
"can only be described as bullying" is also extremely problematic. First, it is unscholarly. In a discussion of academic freedom and related notions of freedom of speech, it is vital to be precise about actions which are merely unpleasant (e.g., refuting counterspeech), aggressive but still legitimate, individually bullying (e.g., a threat), and individually not-bullying but collectively so (e.g., a hostile environment). It's also important to distinguish responsibilities. If lots of people oppose you independently but vigorously, that might have the net effect of a hostile environment with none of the opposers being required to cease their opposition. (The employers might have some obligations to mitigate, of course.)
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