Reasons not given
Carolyn Sale at the Centre for Free Expression on another shunning:
In late March, Kathleen Lowrey, an associate professor at the University of Alberta, was asked to resign from her role as the Department of Anthropology’s associate chair, undergraduate programs, on the basis that one or more students had gone to the University’s Office of Safe Disclosure and Human Rights and the Dean of Students, André Costopolous, to complain about her without filing formal complaints. All Professor Lowrey has been told is that she is somehow making the learning environment “unsafe” for these students because she is a feminist who holds “gender critical” views.
Imagine, if you will, a black associate professor being asked to resign from a role as as the Department of Anything’s associate chair of undergraduate programs on the grounds that she is an anti-racism activist who holds anti-racism views.
It makes every bit as much sense. Feminism advocates equal rights for women, anti-racism advocates equal rights for black people. There’s more to it than that in both cases; both forms of activism are based on analysis of the roots of the existing inequality; nevertheless that’s the core. Students who want feminists with gender-critical views silenced want feminism silenced. You can’t have feminism that’s not allowed to be for and about women any more than you can have anti-racism that’s not allowed to be for and about people of color. White people don’t get to say what anti-racism can talk about, and men don’t get to say what feminism can talk about, even if those men say they are women.
Apparently, Lowrey’s very openness about her views is a problem. Should a course have gender or sex as a central theme, on day 1 she offers a summary of her views along with the declaration that no student need agree with her about any of it, as she did this year with her course “Anthropology of Women.” As she cleaves to a feminism that asserts the continuing importance of biological sex and feminist projects of resisting patriarchal oppression, her views put her out of step with much current thinking about the nature of gender, which from the seminal work of Judith Butler forward takes sex to be a social construct.
The “seminal” work of Judith Butler should not be made mandatory in universities. Agreement with Judith Butler should not be made mandatory in universities. Judith Butler should always be optional.
Lowrey refused to resign from her service role and insisted that if the University wished to dismiss her from it, it would need to put its reasons for doing so in writing. She subsequently received a letter from the Dean of Arts Lesley Cormack dismissing her from her service role without offering any specifics as to why. The letter simply declares that the Dean believes that “it is not in the best interests of the students or the University” for Lowrey to continue in it.
Honestly it’s as if trans ideology were plutonium in reverse – if you refuse to touch it YOU NEED TO BE SCRUBBED WITH WIRE BRUSHES AND BLEACH.
Having been disciplined without any concrete charges presented to her, Lowrey refers to what is happening to her as “McCarthyite.” As she has been confronted not with any specific complaint, but only with the broad claim that her views constitute an amorphous “harm,” we might find ex officio proceedings during the English Reformation an equally apt analogy for what she is experiencing; ex officio proceedings permitted those accused of supposedly heretical beliefs to be excommunicated, sometimes even executed, on the basis of secret disclosures to ecclesiastical judges of evidence never made public. Whichever analogy you prefer, this kind of disciplinary action against a professor, in which administrators refuse to offer any specific charges in relation to student complaints about a professor’s ideas, is inappropriate at a university in a democratic country twenty years into the twenty-first century.
If the “harm” is amorphous then it’s not really harm.
At its most alarming, the University of Alberta’s position appears to be that where students have a “perception” that an idea or a set of ideas harms them, it does not matter what the precise complaints are in regard to the person holding the ideas (or indeed whether there is any precise complaint). Lowrey has been expressly told that it doesn’t matter if any of the claims students are making about her are true.
I wonder if this applies in any other discipline at the University of Alberta. Can students try that with economics? Physics? Computer science?
Asking that question is itself a crime, isn’t it.
Outrageous.
I hope that there are still some avenues she can follow for a wrongful dismissal case.
It’s not really a dismissal, fortunately. I don’t think it makes any difference to her salary. Academics do all kinds of things for the “service” part of their job (the article explained). That doesn’t make it ok, to put it mildly, but at least she’s not out of a job with no reason given.
Updating to add: but latsot @ 7 points out it will hurt her career. Damn them.
My economics professor is an unabashed supporter of laissez faire capitalism. This harms me because I reject this view, which I consider unethical.
My history professor is not as critical of colonialism as previous professors were. This harms me because my parents and grandparents are from countries that suffered from colonization.
My linguistics professor is a proponent of Optimality Theory*. This harms me because I don’t find this model as useful or logically sound as others I have studied.
This is “fun.” We could do it all day. I understand that the “gender crowd” is fond of saying that gender critical views deny their existence and threaten their safety. But shouldn’t the students have to make this claim explicitly and give the professor an opportunity to respond to it? I mean, wouldn’t that be reasonable?
* Disclaimer: When I was working on my master’s thesis in the mid-90s, Optimality Theory was the hot new thing. I have no idea how people do phonology these days.
Yes, I know they are right wing associated fools but she needs to contact Jordan Petersen and Eric Weinstein to find out how they got stardom and settlements out of this kind of abuse of freedom of speech. Of course, she lacks a penis so maybe what worked for them won’t work for her………..
Phrenology? Just those silly bumps on your head, no worries Ben. :) Sticks and stones.
An exhaustive analysis of gender identification
Laeti Harris, Louise Moody, and Pam Thompson, “On Sex and Gender Identity: Perspectives from Biology, Neuroscience and Philosophy”
https://theelectricagora.com/2020/06/02/on-sex-and-gender-identity-perspectives-from-biology-neuroscience-and-philosophy/
that concludes, in part, with rejection that “Gender identity based on a person’s feelings supersedes a person’s biological sex” and support that “transgender people are entitled to respect, equal rights, and protection from violence and discrimination as transgender individuals … without encroaching on the rights and needs of others.”
Ophelia @2:
It will definitely hurt her career, though.
What shines through to me in this passage is the incredible cowardice of all concerned. A of something so dire that it makes students unsafe, and yet not dire enough to be put on record? This should have been ignored as nothing more than insinuation and scuttlebutt. But of course the dean caves in to it, fearing… a twitter storm? Angry emails? Pathetic.
I can hear them chanting: All Genders Matter!
latsot – ah, I didn’t grasp that.
Fuckers.
Ben,
The last phonology course I took, back in the late ’90s/early 00s, I wrote a term paper showing how optimality theory can’t explain affricate/fricative alternations in Euskera. Pretty much demolished the theory, at least among the two or three people who read the paper.
What a Maroon: I knew it!!