More McPherson
By I suppose this silly column doesn’t really merit further discussion, but I think gmack’s comment merits elevation to the main page:
So far as I can tell, no one here knows whether McPherson harasses women. But we can tell that his argument is utterly ridiculous: if his complaint is that the training is boring and pointless, then why is this worth publishing in the LA Times? Moreover, that obviously isn’t his complaint: if it was, then he would be advocating for reforms to make the training more useful or effective. Given that this is not what he’s interested in, we can also conclude that he doesn’t care about sexual harassment, and indeed, thinks that it is simply a matter of “political correctness.”
Precisely. This may be exceedingly charitable, but let’s assume that an earnest, humorless, self-righteous column with the sole point that “meetings can be boring” wouldn’t justify a column in any newspaper. In fairness, that’s not McPherson’s point; his point (well, one of his points — he also seems arguing that taking your employer’s money while refusing to comply with reasonable professional obligations makes you some sort of hero) is pretty clearly that training that tries to make employees aware of and tries to reduce sexual harassment is wrong in principle. Needless to say, he makes no attempt to actually justify this, but then invoking “politically correctness” as pretty much always about insulating beliefs you’d prefer not to defend on the merits from criticism.
Giving away the show, of course, is the idiotic idea that these meetings somehow undermine his “academic freedom.” Obviously, he seems to have no idea what the term means, but the real claim seems to be that the training is objectionable because it has “a political cast.” Well, on some level this would be true. But, then, McPherson’s implicit argument that the university should remain publicly neutral on the question of whether the harassment and sexual exploitation of students is a good thing would also a “political” decision. The university has to choose among substantive values, and (while the training itself may well be flawed) in this case it’s making the right choice.
Another commenter believes that this follow-up is helpful. Since it makes no actual substantive defense of any of McPherson’s specious claims I’m not really seeing it, but people can make their own judgments…