Brown University is under fire this week for an act of censorship that undermines its status as a leading academic institution. The university removed an article discussing a peer-reviewed article that ran in PLOS One by Lisa Littman, an assistant professor in behavioral sciences at Brown. The article discusses “rapid-onset gender dysphoria” and how this transition toward transgender status is influenced by social media and online videos. That nexus was immediately flagged by activists as not fitting the narrative that such gender decisions are predetermined and pressure was put on Brown University to act. Bess Marcus, dean of Brown’s School of Public Health, explained that the article was removed because ” the study could be used to discredit efforts to support transgender youth and invalidate the perspectives of members of the transgender community.” Instead, Marcus and the university discredited its entire academic institution by engaging in censorship and attacking academic freedom principles. Rather than simply allowing an opposing academic viewpoint to be heard, the university removed a story on research by popular demand.
My objections to this action by Brown has nothing to do with the conclusions of the article. Indeed, Marcus should have taken the same approach and said that the conclusions — or how they are received — is not the basis for censorship or countervailing action from the university.
In a statement, Marcus acknowledges that the university “has heard from Brown community members” outraged over the suggestion of the study expressing concerns that the conclusions of the study could be used to discredit efforts to “conclusions of the study.” The study details the accounts of parents about a common “immersion in social media,” likeas binge-watching “transition videos” and excessive use of social media.
The removals triggered a Daily Wire report but Brown’s faculty has been relatively quiet in the face of this extraordinary action.
What is weird is that I fail to see why this study is so discrediting of the transgender views of critics. A child who is transgender is likely to focus on social media and videos in trying to make sense of their feelings and explore their options. It can also be taken in a more cause-and-effect way. However, this is all part of what should be an academic debate. Instead, Brown sought to end the debate through censorship while Marcus implausibly insisted that Brown still believes in academic freedom.
Marcus only recently started as dean after coming from the University of California (San Diego). In my view, she should resign if she pushed for the censorship of this article. Ironically, when she was hired, Brown heralded her selection as someone who “brings a remarkable track record of promoting public health research and education as a senior leader at UCSD,” Paxson said. “Her collaborative leadership style and strong commitment to advancing high-impact research will be instrumental in inspiring students and faculty to confront the wide array of complex public health challenges that face society.” Apparently, that only applies to research that she or the others find comfortable or acceptable in their conclusions.
The action of Brown is a chilling example of the increasing pressures felt by academics in limiting free speech, associational, and academic rights on campuses. The entire value of tenure is that professors feel free to buck commonly held or popular views in the pursuit of truth. That does not mean that they are always right, but the academic freedom and free speech values of universities sustain the intellectual life of these institutions. Marcus and others are sending a chilling message to young academics that, if they do not reach popular conclusions, they could face censorship and ultimately negative consequences in their pursuit advancement and tenure.
What is particularly disturbing is that academics decided that — rather than engaged in good-faith debate with Professor Littman and published counterarguments, they contacted the university to prevent others from reading about the study on the website.
The relative silence of the Brown faculty is itself alarming and gives this chilling message a glacial meaning.
FWIW, see The Werther Effect, as reporter by Wiki:
“A copycat suicide is defined as an emulation of another suicide that the person attempting suicide knows about either from local knowledge or due to accounts or depictions of the original suicide on television and in other media.
A spike of emulation suicides after a widely publicized suicide is known as the Werther effect, following Goethe’s novel The Sorrows of Young Werther.[1]
One of the earliest known associations between the media and suicide arose from Goethe’s novel Die Leiden des jungen Werthers (The Sorrows of Young Werther). Soon after its publication in 1774, young men began to mimic the main character by dressing in yellow pants and blue jackets. In the novel, Werther shoots himself with a pistol after he is rejected by the woman he loves, and shortly after its publication there were reports of young men using the same method to kill themselves in acts of hopelessness.[5]
This resulted in the book being banned in several places. Hence the term “Werther effect”, used in the technical literature to designate copycat suicides.[6] The term was coined by researcher David Phillips in 1974.[7]
Reports in 1985 and 1989 by Phillips and his colleagues found that suicides and other accidents seem to rise after a well-publicized suicide.[5]
The publicized suicide serves as a trigger, in the absence of protective factors, for the next suicide by a susceptible or suggestible person. This is referred to as suicide contagion.[2] They occasionally spread through a school system, through a community, or in terms of a celebrity suicide wave, nationally. This is called a suicide cluster.[2] Suicide clusters are caused by the social learning of suicide-related behaviors, or “copycat suicides”. Point clusters are clusters of suicides in both time and space, and have been linked to direct social learning from nearby individuals.[3] Mass clusters are clusters of suicides in time but not space, and have been linked to the broadcasting of information concerning celebrity suicides via the mass media.[4]
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copycat_suicide
——
Squeeky Fromm
Girl Reporter
Another word for “Werther effect” would be “Evolution.”
If it can happen that science must take a back seat to the Tranazis, how could one not believe that the whole global warming thing could also be similarly politically driven? To where science plays second fiddle to political correctness.
Squeeky Fromm
Girl Reporter
Listen to Squeeky…
(music to tune of Short People by Randy Newman)
Bent people got no reason…
Bent people got no reason.
Bent people got no reason… to Live.
They got little bitty eyes, little bitty feet
Little bitty voices going peep, peep, peep.
Don’t want no bent people.
Don’t want no bent people.
Don’t want no Bent people round here.
http://thefederalist.com/2018/08/31/explosive-ivy-league-study-repressed-for-finding-transgender-kids-may-be-a-social-contagion/?utm_source=The+Federalist+List&utm_campaign=25951632f5-RSS_The_Federalist_Daily_Updates_w_Transom&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_cfcb868ceb-25951632f5-79248369
Well written, JT! Bravo! However, from my personal experience, I definitely disagree with your statement on tenure: “The entire value of tenure is that professors feel free to buck commonly held or popular views in the pursuit of truth. That does not mean that they are always right, but the academic freedom and free speech values of universities sustain the intellectual life of these institutions.”
Those who manage to climb the careerist ladder up to a tenure position via requisite blind-eye turning, kowtowing ad nauseam, and ever cautiously stepping are largely (99%) unlikely to express, once they’ve gotten into their tenure cocoons, any critical opinions whatsoever regarding the university and/or its general PC-ideology. Tenure is in place to weed out those with courage and individuality. Camille Paglia puts it nicely: “The hiring, promotion, and tenure system has institutionalized sycophancy toward those in power.” And Charles Sykes puts it even ‘nicer: “Tenure corrupts, enervates, and dulls higher education. It is, moreover, the academic culture’s ultimate control mechanism to weed out the idiosyncratic, the creative, the nonconformist.”
In essence, the entire value of tenure is to create a body of professors, who fit in and team play—certainly not a body of professors who value freedom of speech and who possess the courage to speak their minds openly. It was mind-boggling for me to witness, as an untenured professor who did speak out openly, so many tenured professors who would actually close doors when expressing themselves.
One would have to have his or her head firmly buried in the sand and never have actually tested the murky waters of academe to actually believe that universities possess any sort of “academic freedom and free speech values.” Just try, for example, criticizing a professor or administrator and send the criticism to the student newspaper. My experience underscores that most student editors (99%) will not even respond. In essence, those so called “free speech values” have already trickled down to future professors. Or try sending the criticism to Inside Higher Ed or The Chronicle of Higher Education. Oh, yeah…
Check out The American Dissident website to examine my numerous tests RE the murky waters of academe.
G. Tod Slone, PhD (Université de Nantes, FR), aka P. Maudit,
Founding Editor (1998)
The American Dissident, a 501c3 Nonprofit Journal of Literature, Democracy, and Dissidence
http://www.theamericandissident.org
wwwtheamericandissidentorg.blogspot.com
todslone@hotmail.com
217 Commerce Rd.
Barnstable, MA 02630
I was banned from Inside Higher Education for talking back to one of their pet commenters. I’d discovered before that that the editors would allow only one reply to be posted per thread to the remarks of one particular pet commenter (a different one that the dame of which I ran afoul). All other replies were deleted.
This nonsense continues to multiply at increasing rates. It’s only a matter of time before the first weirdo starts to engage in “trans-species” behavior and then expects special treatment for it.
As a matter of fact, I’m feeling a little “cetaceous” of late and plan to self-identify as a bottlenose dolphin beginning after Labor Day.
STUDY DESCRIBES A ‘SOCIAL CONTAGION’ EFFECT
I read at least half of the study and it supports suspicions I have long harbored. Young teenagers, lacking strong identity, can come to believe they are trans-gender from peer groups and social media. In other words, if society is ‘too receptive’ in its recognition of trans-genders, that environment could encourage mixed up kids to think they ‘are’ trans-gender. Here are some case studies from the report.
A 12-year-old natal female was bullied specifically for going through early puberty and the responding parent wrote “as a result she said she felt fat and hated her breasts.” She learned online that hating your breasts is a sign of being transgender. She edited her diary (by crossing out existing text and writing in new text) to make it appear that she has always felt that she is transgender.
A 14-year-old natal female and three of her natal female friends were taking group lessons together with a very popular coach. The coach came out as transgender, and, within one year, all four students announced they were also transgender.
A natal female was traumatized by a rape when she was 16 years of age. Before the rape, she was described as a happy girl; after the rape, she became withdrawn and fearful. Several months after the rape, she announced that she was transgender and told her parents that she needed to transition.
A 21-year-old natal male who had been academically successful at a prestigious university seemed depressed for about six months. Since concluding that he was transgender, he went on to have a marked decline in his social functioning and has become increasingly angry and hostile to his family. He refuses to move out or look for a job. His entire family, including several members who are very supportive of the transgender community, believe that he is “suffering from a mental disorder which has nothing to do with gender.”
A 14-year-old natal female and three of her natal female friends are part of a larger friend group that spends much of their time talking about gender and sexuality. The three natal female friends all announced they were trans boys and chose similar masculine names. After spending time with these three friends, the 14-year-old natal female announced that she was also a trans boy.
Brown has long been the latrine of the Ivy League. This incident is unsurprising. Marcus should be fired toute-de-suite but she won’t be. Brown’s faculty will say nothing because they do not disapprove of what they did.
Many disciplines taught in these settings have decayed into an apologetical exercise. No conclusion is valid unless it supports a credo determined a priori. Because the credo is largely humbug, this whole tendency has severely vitiated the value of higher education. Time to start slashing budgets and closing institutions.
While we’re at it, it is good to recall Dr. Paul McHugh’s pithy argument against the quack medical establishment ‘treating’ ‘transgenders’: “we don’t give liposuction to anorectics”. It’s time for the medical establishment to put these characters out of business and for the law to do so if the medical establishment will not.
It’s as though Brown and other academic institutions that are effectively censoring speech believe they only need to stamp a grade of F on these papers to justify removing them from circulation.
“rapid-onset gender dysphoria”
What the heck is that ??? Like a dizzy spell ?
Jay S – I suspect it is very expensive to treat.
it’s the lemming effect of youth.
Just remember where she comes from and who her boss used to be. Then you know the answer to it all. This isn’t even a surprise.
They have done a great job of ensuring the paper and its author go viral. They may not want to talk with her, plenty of others will.
I agree, but that’s not enough. There needs to be an identifiable public presence, a depository, for ALL censored material. A kind of Wikileaks for it, call it WikiBanned. The censurers should know that the material does not go away, and that their action will reach many more people than would have ever seen the censored piece in the first place.
” They may not want to talk with her, plenty of others will.”
Who knows, she may be invited on The Rubin Report or Joe Rogan Show if it really goes viral.
In ten years research such as this will get you arrested for “hate speech”. Political Correctness is the Lysenkoism of our age.
In Canada and over a dozen European nations, so-called “holocaust deniers” are imprisoned, i.e. fully formed Orwellian “thought control crimes.”
Global warming scientists demand that deniers be imprisoned.
Overlord justification for the above is the same as that given when the alphabet departments classify documents to prohibit public scrutiny: “national security.”
What you can not criticize is your God.
Overlord justification for the above is the same as that given when the alphabet departments classify documents to prohibit public scrutiny: “national security.”
Don’t be stupid. Keeping something a state secret prevents the use of information by bad actors. Keeping something confidential protects private citizens whose information is in the hands of public agencies. The problem with the classification regime is that it can be abused to protect bumbling public bureaucracies.
Hop on the bus Gus. Throw away the key Lee. Make Gus go to the rear of the bus if he is bent.
How bout you Brown? That was a phrase from a movie or a song. I can’t recall which.
Brown U needs to have a discussion about which restroom (pee and poop room) they allow transgender students and teachers and others to go into. Example: guy becomes a girl in outward dress and makeup only. He still has his male genital. Should he/she be required to use the Mens Room and stand up and pee at the urinal? What if he/she goes all the way with LBJ and gets the dong removed and gets a vagina? Same way in reverse. This is a discussion which Brown U should have. At a school nearby my home there is a sign at the Womens Room door which says: No dongs allowed.
If claiming to be a “girl” will put me in the shower with Taylor Swift, where do I sign up? I AM NOW A GIRL.
Anybody watching knows the academe has fallen. And fallen first. Quit giving to these radical incubators and institutions of higher prevarication. Let ‘em wither.
Pardon the stutter but the new app is really slow.
Anybody paying attention knows the academe has fallen. And it fell first. Is anyone really surprised? Quit giving to these radical incubators and institutions of higher prevarication! Let ‘em wither.
I strongly object to this kind of censorship. Nothing is more destructive of serious discussion than censorship of serious scientific research because some one may be offended by its conclusions or content.
Anyone with any common sense understands that it is nature and nurture, not nature or nurture. It may be mostly nature or mostly nurture but not just one or the other. Brown puts itself at the same level, in the same conversation, of the same mentality as those that believe that homosexuality and/or the rest of the conditions can be controlled by faith and/or self discipline. Talk about lowering the credibility of the argument, university, scholasticism.
A thoughtful comment re a complex issue. I agree with you.
Dr. Deborah Soh has some interesting information on this. She probably would not agree with you in your statement.
homosexuality is a behavioral continuum. at the extremes i would agree that it’s basically
biological but in the middle range (bisexuals) likely tastes can be altered by cultivating different habits.
that too is a subtlety obscured by pc dogma; or on the other hand, as you suggest, at times by religious dogma
remember just because there are mountains and plains, doesnt mean there arent foothills
at the extremes i would agree that it’s basically
biological
Again, discordance among identical twins is at lease as common as concordant homosexuality.
interesting, did not know that. I am neither a Puritan who reviles gays nor a libertine, nor even a student of scientific studies of the topic. i personally neither dislike gays nor think about nor care too much about this segment of the population, a small number by proportion, they are free to do as they like in private as we all do.
I do resent the judicial legislation to legalize their “marriages” which is very undemocratic and flaunts the social conventions of thousands of years of culture.
i think it’s unfortunate as we can see that objective research in the field is lacking, or at least, affected by continuous institutional bias in favor of LGBTQ agenda
It seems like a serious medical issue that should be approached with respect for natural biological determinants.
Then again most American men are circumcised which shows little cultural respect for natural intact-ivity so what can one expect.
Obviously there is a new orthodoxy with a modern version of heresy hunters.