Oh, Those Hypersensitive Students

February 21, 2016
Posted by Jay Livingston

Liberals, as Jonathan Haidt has documented, argue on the basis of only two principles or “moral foundations”: Hurt and Fairness. Conservatives add other bases for their positions: Loyalty (vs. betrayal), Authority (vs. subversion), and Sanctity (vs. degradation). Also Liberty, which Haidt later added to the original five. (A summary of Haidt's moral foundations is here: http://moralfoundations.org/.)

So conservatives have lots of ways to justify what they want. If hurt and unfairness are not in plain sight, conservatives can fight against betrayal or subversion. But liberals, absent real hurt or unfairness, must have recourse to finding micro-hurts and micro-unfairness from micro-aggressions.

This week’s example comes from Georgetown law school (source: Inside Higher Ed).  Justice Scalia was an undergrad at Georgetown and made several visits to the law school. Shortly after Scalia’s death, a law professor (Prof. G___ , to use a 19th century construction) sent out an e-mail to students and faculty eulogizing Scalia – his jurisprudence, his wit, his writing, and his refusal to trim his sails to the winds of political correctness. Scalia, said Prof. G____, stood steadfast in putting Constitutional principles ahead of the particular interests of classes of people, classes based on race, gender, or economic standing.

Some other professors objected to this e-mail, not for its content but for its effect on students.

Some of them are twenty-two-year-olds, less than six months into their legal education. Leaders of the Black Students Association, the Latino Law Students League, and two women’s groups reached out to us to tell us how traumatized, hurt, shaken and angry were their fellow students. Of particular concern to them were the students who are in Professor G____’s class who must now attend class knowing of his contempt for those who disagree with Scalia.  How are they now to participate freely in class? What reasoning would be deemed acceptable on their exams?

I think most people would doubt that students at a top law school would be “traumatized” by a professor stating his views about Scalia. Are these ambitious 20-somethings such delicate flowers that they must be protected from legal positions they disagree with lest they be “traumatized, hurt, shaken”? If so, maybe they should choose a different profession. Lawyering ain’t beanbag. And must a law professor, in the interest of fairness, pretend that all opinions are equally valid?

Conservatives will probably tell these students to stop their whining and sniveling and to man up (or attorney up). Conservatives could also argue on the basis of Liberty. People, even professors, should be free to expound their opinions; nobody should censor them.

There’s nothing new here, except . . .

It was the other way round. I reversed the actual facts. The Georgetown law professor who sent the e-mail, Gary Peller, came to criticize Scalia not to praise him. The faculty who then accused Peller of traumatizing the students are Scalia supporters. The hothouse flowers in need of protection are the student conservatives and libertarians.  (“Leaders of the Federalist Society chapter and of the student Republicans reached out to us to tell us how traumatized, hurt, shaken and angry were their fellow students.”)

When the claims of injury and intimidation on the one side and the accusations of hypersensitivity on the other are bouncing back and forth like this, it’s hard to tell the pot from the kettle.

Saoirse’s Choice

February 20, 2016
Posted by Jay Livingston

In a course I taught long ago, I would give students the set-up of a movie – act one – and ask them to write a plot summary of the rest of the film. When they had finished, I would tell them how the actual film went. It unfolded to something completely different from what they had thought up. That’s because it was French.

The students were very bad at thinking like a French cineaste, but they did a top-notch job of filling in the predictable character types and plot elements of American movies.

I remembered this after I saw “Brooklyn.” It’s certainly a pleasant hour and fifty minutes. The film is set in the early 1950s, but it cleaves so closely to America’s immigrant-story cliches that it could be taking place any time.  The trailer summarizes the story.



Eilis (Saoirse Ronan) must decide between two countries, Old Ireland and New America, and between two men, one in Enniscorthy, one in Brooklyn. In Ireland she lives in a small town and works for a particularly nasty shopowner, a snoop who uses her knowledge of everyone’s secrets as weapons. Eilis comes to America, an open land of opportunity where she works hard at her job and takes classes to improve her abilities. Predictably (i.e., just like in the movies) she keeps moving up.

The man she meets on her return trip to Ireland is at the top of the town’s social ladder. The man she meets in America is a working-class Italian, a plumber, but he has plans to start his own construction company (to build what we know will become the new suburbs). Like Eilis, Tony too is on the path to success.

In a post nine years ago (here) I speculated that all American movies, even romantic comedies, are really about achieving success. “Brooklyn” is firmly in that tradition. The movie presents both men as ideal, someone any girl would want to marry, and Saoirse Ronan is able to convince us that the choice is agonizing. But while Eilis may feel torn between the man who has already inherited a life of comfort and the man who is getting there through honest work, we in the audience, schooled on scores of American movies, know immediately who is preferable.

“Brooklyn” lays out its cards in such a familiar arrangement that the movie’s real achievement is in making us believe that the sides in this choice are nearly equal. It does that mostly with the pull of family obligations.  Eilis’s mother needs care, and now that Eilis’s sister has died, Eilis is the only family she has left. But that also means that an aging mother is the only family that Eilis herself has, her only real human bond to Ireland. Even if we weren’t Americans rooting for America, we know what the right choice is, and “Brooklyn” does not disappoint. To its credit, the movie avoids the impossibly perfect solution, the “Hollywood ending,” which might have been for Eilis to bring her mother to America to live happily ever after.

On the podcast “Culture Gabfest,” Julia Turner comments that “Brooklyn” could almost be a silent movie. This is said in praise of Saoirse Ronan’s acting – her face tells so much. But it could be a silent movie also because the plot and characters are so familiar – the spiteful shopowner, the kindly priest, the Italian family – that the dialogue doesn’t add anything to our understanding of them.

That said, the film is very good for what it is. It looks terrific, the story is well told, and Saoirse Ronan deserves her Oscar nomination. But “Brooklyn” is the movie equivalent of comfort food – familiar, pleasant, and easy to digest.

Polish Joke

February 16, 2016
Posted by Jay Livingston

I am not all familiar with Freeman beauty products, but I am somewhat familiar with the French language. So I wonder: how did this happen? (Note the English and French lines below “Goyave.”)

(Click on an image for a larger view.)

The translation gaffe was soon corrected (I assume that the Salt Scrub on the right is the later version*). But how could polishes ever become les polonais (Polish people)?

Google Translate had no problem with it, though it preferred softening the skin to smoothing out the wrinkles.

The linguists at Language Log haven’t checked in on this one, and until they do here’s my guess: Freeman is a privately held company. I imagine it as a family operation – a mom-and-pop beauty products company. Old Mr. Freeman, the founder, ponders the new product, and says, referring to his grandson, “Little Ryan is taking French – they start ’em in fourth grade nowadays – let’s give him a shot at this one.” So Ryan, a not-so-adept student in Beginning French, looks up polish and finds le polonais, pl. les polonais.


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My keen-eyed colleague Lois Oppenheim points out that in the somewhat-corrected version the accent on protége [sic] is aigu when it should be grave.

Hat Tip: Polly-vous Français

Margin of Error – Mostly Error

February 14, 2016
Posted by Jay Livingston

It’s the sort of social “science” I’d expect from Fox, not Vox. But today, Valentine’s Day, Vox (here) posted this map purporting to show the average amount people in each state spent on Valentine’s Day.

(Click on the image for a larger view.)

“What’s with North Dakota spending $108 on average, but South Dakota spending just $36?” asks Vox. The answer is almost surely: Error.

The sample size was 3,121. If they sampled each state in its proportion of the US population, the sample in the each Dakota would be about n = 80 n = 8. The source of the data, Finder, does not report any margins of error or standard deviations, so we can’t know. Possibly, a couple of guys in North Dakota who’d saved their oil-boom money and spent it on chocolates are responsible for that average. Idaho, Nevada, and Kansas – the only other states over the $100 mark – are also small-n. So are the states at the other other end, the supposedly low-spending states (SD, WY, VT, NH, ME, etc.). So we can’t trust these numbers.

The sample in the states with large populations (NY, CA, TX, etc.) might have been as high as 300-400, possibly enough to make legitimate comparisons, but the differences among them are small – less than $20.

My consultant on this matter, Dan Cassino (he does a lot of serious polling), confirmed my own suspicions. “The study is complete bullshit.”

UPDATE February 24, 2016: Andrew Gelman (here) downloaded the data did a far more thorough analysis, estimating the variation for each state. His graph of the states shows that even between the state with the highest mean and the state with the lowest, the uncertainty is too great to allow for any conclusions: “Soooo . . . we got nuthin’.”

Andrew explains why it’s worthwhile to do a serious analysis even on frivolous data like this Valentine-spending survey. He also corrects my order-of-magnitude overestimation of the North Dakota sample size.