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MassArt professor fires back over sexual-harassment investigation

Greg Cook reports on Saul Levine's retort to a MassArt investigation into possible Title IX violations: They stem from him showing a 1989 movie he made - which, yes, has a scene with him and his partner having sex - to a senior-thesis class to make points about film editing.

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See, kids, if you don't edit selfie porn out of your films before you show them to students, you can get fired!

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It was a metaphor to address issues such as gender representation and power dynamics. Anyone can see that.

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Monty Python got laughs from this sort of thing in Meaning of Life, but this guy is no John Cleese.... or is he?.... Maybe if HBO does the reboot of The Office, this can be a Micheal Scott bit.

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In all the sciences, there's a thing called a false alarm rate and a true detection rate. One would like to design scientific experiments that lead to unambiguous conclusions, build widgets that work right all the time, make diagnostic tests that catch all disease and don't cause undue health scares, and craft laws that catch all the bad guys and don't ensare any good guys, but it's just not possible to do that.

The fundamental limitation on not being able to have a perfect test with no false alarms is called a ROC curve. The name comes from the design of radio communication and radar equipment during the Second World War, but the math behind it dates back to the late 1800s. And it is some pretty advanced math relative to what most people are taught in high school or even college. So to really appreciate why it is that no matter how hard you try, you can't have perfection, you've got to have a little of the asperger's about you to grok the formal proofs.

But there is some simple intuition:

Say a cancer test is right 80 percent of the time in detecting cancer and wrong 5 percent of the time in giving a false alarm. Say also that on average,10 percent of people have cancer. 100 people get the test. Of the 90 who don't have cancer, 4 or 5 will get a false alarm. Of the 10 who have cancer, 8 will get the right diagnosis. Thus, if you get an answer back that says you have cancer, chances are only 1/3 or so that you do. Which is far from "80 percent accurate" or "5 percent false alram rate."

That's the kind of thing you read in Scientific American or The Atlantic every once in a while when they are talking about medical tests (duh) or cautioning their readers against relying on their gut intuition when hearing claims of "99% accurate" tests or solutions to hot-button problems.

Here's the thing: there's nothing special about this scenario that's unique to medical testing or laboratory experiments. It applies every time you're making a yes/no decision, like when you're dealing with unproved accusations against people.

Let's say you're an art school with 100 professors and 1000 students and a policy that students are given carte-blanche to make anonymous career-ending accusations.

If 1% of all people are sociopaths, then you might have one harasser on your faculty but 10 students who are liable to go after people hard for no reason other than the pleasure of seeing them squirm under their boot. If those ten students are assigned to professors randomly, then about ten professors will have one of them in his class.

So you'll have 11 accusations. One of them will be true. Ten of them will be false.

Assuming you want to catch harassers so you can fire them, but you also don't want to screw over people who've worked for you for years without incident, is inviting anonymous potentially career-ending accusations a good policy?

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Honestly, I'd toss out my personal biases to sit on this jury if this ever came to trial. But of course people tend not to have access to the information in the court of public opinions. Either way, this does look messy.

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If I had to serve on a criminal jury, I'd do my level best to be skeptical of the prosecutors' claims until presented with evidence of guilt and if I had to serve on a civil jury I'd also do my level best to vote on the facts presented and not my own opinions.

That would mean I'd probably end up voting to convict (or rule against) some of those ten falsely accused, because I'd have to make a decision on what's presented at the trial, not on my own estimate of prior likelihoods.

But what's more, this isn't a legal proceeding. It's a guy getting fired because some anon made a claim against him. Freedom of the press is for people who own printing presses. Due process of law is for people with law degrees or the resources to hire people who have them. Everything else is "culture" and if the culture is Orwell's Oceania, then the letter of the law isn't much good. This guy clearly didn't have the money or time to lawyer up, so he just lost his job because someone complained about a film he made almost thirty years ago.

Incidentally, I found that the John Hurt version of Nineteen Eighty-Four is on Amazon, so I watched it, and I'll say it is worth watching.

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Starting with how if a professor is a harasser, there are usually a *bunch* of victims. And false accusations are far rarer than you believe.

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except instead of 1 true accusation and 10 false ones, you'll get 1 true accusation per term and 10 false accusations per term.

EDIT: and if you fire the one true harasser, all you'd be left with is false accusations. You'd have so many accusations it'd look like you're running a torture dungeon that hands out degrees at the end.

Also, you'll need to exercise a little doublethink and assume that this me-too/SJW/red-guard/rat-out-your-own-mother-for-not-being-woke-enough nonsense has always been going on and didn't just get turned on a few years ago.

Playing devil's advocate and assuming it is new, you'd conclude that if the accusation faucet was just opened recently, most of the new accusations you're getting are spurious.

Also, and even more importantly: seeing something you may not care for in no way shape or form makes you a victim.

As for the rate of false accusations? It's on you to prove to me they're rare. Unless they're proved true, they're all fake. That's how "innocent until proved guilty" works. This here seems like a clear case of a fake accusation.

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Title IX is like a puffy cloud - if you squint enough, you can see anything.

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...Title IX has been like a puffy cloud armed with magical destructive powers where anyone accused was guilty. Many times, when civil authorities were called in to take over from the school's 'hearings', no provable case under civil law was found. Ask me for citings? Well, I can think of a few off the top of my head.

It's time for the pendulum to be taken under control.

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Did he deliberately try and get fired? HELLO ..... !

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and nothing's changed, except that the in-real-life troll farm that is the modern SJW movement noticed that he exists.

This dude at Princeton has for decades been posing to his class the question

What is worse, a white man punching a black man, or a white man calling a black man a nigger?

without incident. Then there was an incident, and now it seems he cannot pose a provocative question in a class about a provocative topic, or even teach a class about a provocative topic anymore, on account of someone got his feelings hurt when teacher said a bad word.

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Did students have other options to complete their thesis or is this class required to graduate? Regardless, were they told in advance that their elderly, handicapped professor would be featured in a gay sex video from 30 years ago, when that behavior was still a crime? Even if students voluntarily opted-in for the class, were they required to critically evaluate the sex-scene(s) featuring the same professor who would be grading them? Wouldn't there be tremendous pressure on students to praise the professors work? I can understand the students need to complain anonymously, especially if they had no options or advanced warning.

Can you imagine the reaction from the PC crowd if the professor was a young male showing homemade porn of his straight sex life?

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This asshole then lock him up

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Whether he should have been fired is open to debate (I lean towards 'no'), but he did not do anything remotely criminal.

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it is certainly in bad taste, and definitely a bad idea. Putting students in a position where they are compelled to watch a movie involving their teacher having sex is just a recipe for disaster.

The fact that he's been doing this for years and that this issue has come up before shows that the school has been negligent as well. The correct time to act was *years* ago (a "look dude, find a different video to use" from the school would have sufficed), and now they're probably trying to overcompensate for earlier lack of inaction.

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and lots of people do, demanding trigger warnings for Huckleberry Finn and presidential debates.

As you might guess, I'm not a fan of stuff describable as selfie gay porn, but it's the guy's class and if he attracts students teaching what he's been teaching...let him.

When I started college in the early part of the previous decade, the progressive thing was to hand out condoms like candy. I had a campus job doing IT support, and even though IT has jack shit to do with sex (with an actual partner, that is), I had to have a bowl of condoms on my desk in the computer lab because university policy was to hand out free condoms in the computer labs.

I didn't think that was the best thing, and about fifteen years later it seems everyone else now gets why having free condoms handed out everywhere might not be the best message to send to college kids, but I was enough of an adult to just let it happen because you know what...if you blow a gasket every time someone out there does something you disagree with, you'll run out of gaskets right quick and need to start re-purposing condoms, and then you'll be glad there's a big bowl of them sitting right on your desk.

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This is the college's administration waiting for a publicly plausible excuse to fire a teacher who they wish would just retire and disappear. Most likely the true reason for firing Nicholas Nixon from Masshole, I mean Art. Same deal with NEC firing Benjamin Zander.

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Good for him. So there's at least one person fighting back against this generation's witch hunt...

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