You may find this Inside Higher Ed article, which has fuller details, helpful.
Oh, no question that the professor is an ass. But the transcript with the eternally patient grad student! She is a goddamn saint.
Here's the (very long) letter from the school telling him he's being fired. The bit I found interesting was the very last page or so where it mentions that he has been previously asked on a couple of occasions not to blog about individual students by name.
2: Except for the fact that she recorded the conversation.
I think it helps to break this one down into separate questions:
Should he punished in some way: Yes
Should he have his tenure revoked: No
Should he be shot in the balls: Yes
Stripping tenure has to be for something really egregious. I think publicly naming a grad student at your institution is very bad, but not quite there. Part of the problem is that Marquette has offered so many bad reasons (like civility) to fire him that it's impossible to defend their stance.
Oh, correct that. The undergrad did the recording.
she recorded the conversation
No, the student did that.
No, the undergrad recorded the conversation.
4: It was the undergrad who recorded the conversation.
I'm kind of torn on this case.
On the one hand I can't help but suspect that university administrators are using the transparently appalling actions of the professor to set a precedent weakening tenure protections at Marquette.
But on the other hand the idea that what that professor was doing was an innocent airing of his views seems pretty dubious as well. What he actually said, especially given that he was lying about substantial parts of it, looks to me like a kind of SWATting, only using the right wing hate machine to prompt the various death threats and so on. Since left wing versions of this tend to lack the "credible threats of death/rape" part of the response there isn't an easy equivalence here to calling out various college republican/fraternity crap.
Maybe I can clarify something about who recorded what.
I tried to give a rat's ass about this but failed.
I think publicly naming a grad student at your institution is very bad, but not quite there.
Do you get past the 'not quite there' level when you know it's the third time the school has talked to him about this kind of thing, but the first two times he was calling out undergrads?
14: Calling out undergrads by name on a blog is bad bad bad.
The TA's own take on what happened is much more credible.
8 and 9: I'd already corrected myself, people.
I am really shocked by this. Tenure is surely like free speech: it if doesn't protect assholes, then it's worthless. I wouldn't assume innocence of any professor, and I don't understand that the tenure system does, either. And, actually, if there are gay students in the philosophy class, and they are too pathetic to hear arguments that challenge something they deeply believe, then the class is failing and utterly useless at teaching them what philosophy is about.
I mean, I give a rat's ass about academic freedom. I'm just not sure I care more about tenure than I do about senior people not deliberately tossing their juniors to the wolves.
Tenure is surely like free speech: it if doesn't protect assholes, then it's worthless.
Tenure is surely like ____________: it if doesn't protect assholes, then it's worthless.
Underwear? Donut pillows?
I think the letter from Marquette linked in 3 really is important to read. The open gloating from McAdams about the death threats, harm to her career, and so on really is important to see. This isn't just a difference of opinion or an unfair criticism of the graduate student.
I don't understand how you can hire graduate students to teach your classes and then undermine their authority to teach the class. Because you can't actually teach a class if any student can bring up gay marriage and go on about it for as long as he or she wants regardless of what the class was about that day.
And, actually, if there are gay students in the philosophy class, and they are too pathetic to hear arguments that challenge something they deeply believe, then the class is failing and utterly useless at teaching them what philosophy is about.
The link in 16 suggests that this is a deeply inaccurate account of what happened.
Academic freedom is the bedrock upon which our civil society rests. Any attack on a scholar's right to do...pretty much anything she* or he wants must therefore be understood as an attack on America: worse than Munich and Chappaquiddick** combined.
* Except academic freedom only really applies to men.
** The fact that spell check insists that Chappaquiddick is misspelled suggests how deep the rot runs.
(And the fact that it's a repeated offense on his part makes it pretty clear that he knew exactly what he was doing.)
Also, I agree with 5, 13, and most of 19.
19: Except I don't think those things have much to do with why they're trying to fire him. He lied (quite intentionally) about a graduate student by name with the result that (and yeah, I happen to think it was intentional and the SWATting analogy is apt) she was threatened with violence and verbally abused and had to leave the school. And he'd done it before and was asked to stop. He's not being fired for his beliefs; he's being fired because he harasses students.
In my own personal sphere, the takes on this are really breaking down along gender lines.
None of this has anything to do with what I would have thought of as "academic freedom," but it seems like an awful lot of people disagree with me.
Which is to say, I thought the point of tenure was to guarantee people's ability to research what they want. Criticizing students in public has nothing at all to do with that.
Though if "tenure means you have the right to be an asshole" is a widely accepted view, it would explain a lot!
Also, revealingly, he aggressively harasses only female students.
The fact that his department apparently stands behind Marquette in this, at least as far as the letter says, is probably a substantial point in favor of the claim that this isn't just about him disagreeing with other people.
He's only harassed three students. That's not enough to show statistical significance for gender-preferential harassment.
I'm generally apprehensive about university administrations' goal of controlling faculty members speech on private websites and in social media. There needs to be some line between work-related and non-work-related speech, and the latter shouldn't be any of the administration's business. However, the fact that this concerned students puts it on the work side of the line to me, so I'm not really bothered by this particular precedent.
I was interrupted before I could post 25, almost word for word.
30: I'm curious about how it's correlated with opinions about the Salaita case. FWIW I was strongly opposed to UIUC firing [I know; no one needs to correct me on the use of this word] Salaita and did see it as an affront to academic freedom, whereas I'm strongly in favor of Marquette's right to fire this asshole and don't see any problems for academic freedom in it.
Efficient breach, people. Even if this is inconsistent with his contract (and put me down as ok with firing the guy), a reasonable employer could decide they're better off paying an extra year's salary, or whatever some jury awards, than keeping the asshole around.
He has a duty to mitigate: he can go some place where assholes like that are valued. Oh, it's nowhere? Well, maybe there's a lesson in that . . .
31, 32: Well, he's in a discipline where it's not impossibly far removed from his actual academic work to talk about appropriate norms of pedagogy in classes relating to currently hot political issues.
They need to keep him until he harasses at least 20 students to get proof of gender bias.
40 to talk about appropriate norms of pedagogy in classes relating to currently hot political issues.
But to characterize what he did in that way is tilting the scale really heavily toward his side.
The article linked in the OP is kind of hysterical and kind of pisses me off. Being a right royal prick to students is a fundamental violation of the basic job, which is teaching, not research, FFS! If you want to do only research, there are places you can go for that if you are good enough. And if you are not good enough, taking a teaching position and then behaving the way McAdams did should get you fired with prejudice.
42: Oh, it's bending over backwards in his favor, sure. But I do think it's true that academic freedom isn't absolutely inapplicable: like, if he'd put up the same post without names or identifying information, and Marquette had fired him for it because they didn't like the substantive message, that would seem to me to be clearly a problem related to academic freedom.
44: In that alternate universe I might have a different opinion. But if tenure is supposed to guarantee you can't be fired for doing X, and you do offensive thing Y while simultaneously doing X, it doesn't follow that tenure protects you from being fired for Y.
The article linked in the OP is kind of hysterical and kind of pisses me off.
Isn't that what Friedersdorf does? He had a really irritating piece of trollery on campus rape a couple of weeks ago -- male college student tells a story of having walked a drunk female friend home; she kept groping him; he didn't want her to but didn't feel as if he could walk away from her because she was too drunk to get home safely; on reflection he realized that by modern standards of what we're calling sexual assault these days, he was assaulted; he doesn't want her expelled, but wants it recognized that he was sexually assaulted; implied conclusion is that if you think this guy is kind of being an idiot (which we all do, don't we, guys?) then you should agree that people complaining about sexual assault generally are also idiots (come on, you know it's what you really think).
44: And if my bubbe had balls she'd be my zeyde.
I think 44 is right to some extent, but that it might understate the difference between this case and the one where he doesn't include any identifying information (of the graduate student - he absolutely protected the identity of the undergraduate involved). If that information wasn't in there then he's wrong, and irresponsible too (especially since he's openly lying about large parts of the story). But with that in there it's clear that he's not just airing views at all but trying to incite violence, ruin her reputation and career and so on. And academic freedom really doesn't protect against that sort of thing at all, even when it doesn't interfere with one of the most basic functions of the university (and his job).
48: Exactly! This is on a continuum with the antics of James O'Keefe surreptitiously recording people for purposes of character assassination. It's become a right wing thing to collect scalps like this.
It's interesting that McAdams names the instructor but not the student involved.
There's something at the intersection of academia and politics that's bugging me. I've been on a graduate admissions committee and I think we do a fairly good job, given the pool we have to work with, of bringing in people from underrepresented groups. This year it looks like we are probably going to let in someone in the intersection of two underrepresented categories who I think was far below the standard we usually set. We passed up a lot of others who fall into one or the other of those two underrepresented categories, who I think clearly exceed our standard, in order to do this. To me this feels wrong. I'm not used to being on the less-progressive side of an argument, especially with coworkers, and it makes me uncomfortable. But it also makes me uncomfortable to not push for the other people who I think are more deserving. Should I just give up and not make waves?
The fact that spell check insists that Chappaquiddick is misspelled suggests how deep the rot runs.
Spell-checker probably thought you were referring to the underwater sport they play at Hogwarts: Chappaquidditich.
51: As you state it, I'd push for your preferred candidates.
Well, he's in a discipline where it's not impossibly far removed from his actual academic work to talk about appropriate norms of pedagogy in classes relating to currently hot political issues.
It's all part of his dissertation, entitled "What happens when an instructor is an asshole? A case-control comparison of intramural and extramural personal attacks on students."
51: I don't see anything wrong with pushing for the other people you want.
Maybe I should also add that it's clear that I will lose the argument and that people will be annoyed with me. The argument on the other side is that there is maybe 1 person in this student's category at the postgraduate level in my field in the entire US, so it would be stupid not to try to double that number.
I don't know why I think this is important, but when you say "this student's category" do you mean one or the other of their categories, or do you mean the intersection of the two categories -- as in "There are a number of other diabetics, and a number of other philatelists, but only one other diabetic philatelist."
51: In the long run, this seems to suggest that there's some weakness in your recruitment process - why aren't the best intersectionally-situated candidates applying?
In the short run, I personally (admittedly, I'm not an academic, but I'm in a situation where I've seen a lot of grad students of various skill levels and from various backgrounds come and go) tend to think that, first, there are always more grad students (and they get younger or I get older or something) and while on the one hand funding is tight and you want to make all of it count, on the other hand, some people - even the brightest! - are going to crash and burn anyway, so it's not as if recruiting only the very brightest guarantees anything; second, people do sometimes surprise you when they're given the opportunity - there have been a couple of good surprises around here; and third, in the long run, supporting a network of Intersectionally-Situated scholars will bring you stronger candidates anyway even if not every candidate is the Very Best.
Also on a personal level - I tend to distrust my own perceptions of people from marginalized backgrounds, because I know I've already received so much socialization that pushes me to see them as less competent and less of a good fit. I know you're looking at GREs and objectively quantifiable stuff as well as the other stuff, which is a bit different, but...I dunno, is there anyone who has reviewed the applications who is themselves of a background more similar to Intersectionally Situated student?
(I had a really surprising incident in a community ed class that I teach where people - smart, competent, educated people who are good readers - had terrible, terrible trouble even recognizing the work of a particular Somali-American writer as adult, competent, literary and engaged with both Somali and US traditions. The work - award-winning! - was met with far more skepticism and hostility than anything else we'd read, and the students did not, as I had expected based on past experience, try to see what traditions and concerns the writer was dealing with. Again, these were smart, well-read people who are left wing and non-horrible - but they had absorbed a certain way of seeing.)
Let it go, then, I say. Your preferred candidates will get a placement somewhere, and the candidate the other people want will either perform at an adequate level or fail and be gone.
I don't see the upside in waging a losing fight. Abstention, maybe.
why aren't the best intersectionally-situated candidates applying?
They are. This is one of them. The problem is earlier in the pipeline.
And 58.3 is something I was thinking about, but this person comes from a significantly more advantaged socioeconomic background than, say, I do, even if they are marginalized in other ways. If they were straightforwardly disadvantaged I would find it easier to get on board.
If it's a sure loss, anyway, there might be no point in arguing. But if there's any hope, and you're really sure that you're bypassing a significantly more qualified member of an underrepresented group in favor of someone who's really not well qualified to be admitted at all, regardless of their group membership, it does seem worth making your opinion known.
(I guess, whether I think it's worth sticking to your guns depends on what 'far below the standard we usually set' means. If you just mean that it's clear to you that your preferred candidates are preferable on whatever metric you're using, maybe let it go. If the two-category candidate is bad enough that you think they're unlikely to be successful at all, then arguing some seems reasonable.)
19, 25, 37.
Here's Werdna's disputed characterization:
And, actually, if there are gay students in the philosophy class, and they are too pathetic to hear arguments that challenge something they deeply believe, then the class is failing and utterly useless at teaching them what philosophy is about.
And here is the recording transcript, which I think supports his characterization:
Student: Regardless of why I'm against gay marriage, it's still wrong for the teacher of a class to completely discredit one person's opinion when they may have different opinions.
Abbate: Ok, there are some opinions that are not appropriate that are harmful, such as racist opinions, sexist opinions, and quite honestly, do you know if anyone in the class is homosexual?
Student: No, I don't.
Abbate: And don't you think that that would be offensive to them if you were to raise your hand and challenge this?
I don't think Abbate handled this particularly well, but I still think you have to fire McAdams.
58.2 is pretty important and, at least from what I know, true in general. (This may not apply to your discipline/record of predicting graduate student success/etc.) What actually happens to people when they hit graduate school varies widely, and isn't easily predictable.
Part of this is due to the difficulty in assessing their potential/ability/etc. but an equally large amount has to do with unrelated things going on. Health problems, random life events, ending up with the wrong adviser, and so on all play at least as significant a role, and not just in causing trouble for students. Seeing less desired candidates succeed* and more impressive ones under perform isn't that uncommon.
*I know of one case where a university ended up with literally the last (x) candidates on their waitlist and no one else one year. Without being told that by someone** there's literally no way to know that that happened at all from their performance (at least from what I know which basically amounts to progress-to-degree).
**Which, in a truly magnificent example of drunken academic obliviousness happened when a professor at a beginning of the term party explained to everyone that this had happened while literally sitting between two of them.
I may have already pasted Lemieux's take on this, "Attack on Academic Freedom." SL may have just been trolling his feminist blog and creating a track record, because he sure got a bunch of pushback from his regulars.
FWIW, which is nothing, I am pro-Abbate, pro-Holz, pro-Marquette, anti-MacAdams and anti-Friedensdorf (? wev). Anti-Rawls, but some other time. This is unlikely to wax the slippery slope that isn't already a toboggan run or chill those who don't need some chilling, and academics are already teaching in an atmosphere of abject terror and fear. Yes, Salaita should have come to mind.
I mainly watch these cases to keep score, without caring about either side, but to see how trends in power and privilege are moving. Ward Churchill,, uhh um the anti-Zionist guy, Salaita, this one.
a significantly more advantaged socioeconomic background
Are you sure they're truly a member of those disadvantaged categories, then, and not working an angle, like those people who hired the wheelchair-bound to cut in line at Disney?
If the two-category candidate is bad enough that you think they're unlikely to be successful at all, then arguing some seems reasonable.
I guess, as 58.2 and 65 say, it's hard to know. Performance seems only loosely correlated with initial expectations. So I guess I'll just let it go and see what happens. Hopefully I'll be pleasantly surprised.
It's really too bad Freidersdorf views his job as generating clicks and encouraging people to mindlessly share content via social media, instead of informing people about actual events that affect actual people.
This reminds a bit of the Jian Ghomeshi defense: construct a strawman with just enough "complexity" that it allows people to feel that they're taking a deep, smart, principled moral stand by defending you. Cue a million morons shaking their heads and defending an abusive fuckwit by saying "what happens in the bedroom is private and none of our business."
The Atlantic article frames the situation as a professor writing something on a blog that violates PC orthodoxy and then getting canned. For just one post, just for speaking his mind! In reality anyone who cares in the slightest about academic freedom should be deeply concerned about what happened to the graduate student, who was harrassed (the university needed to post security guards around her classroom) and forced to transfer to another school. Meanwhile this professor has a decades-long history of pulling shit like calling a student's home (parents) phone number and then after she told him that she did not want to be contacted at that number, posting on his blog how to find this number on the web.
64: this would have more weight if we had reason to trust McAdams' account of the transcript. But if you read 16 you will see that, at least according to the TA's account (and she comes across as highly credible), McAdams did not have access to the tape recording of the class lecture itself--he just talked to the undergraduate student (and no one else) about the incident before posting his blog post. Since there are other points in his blog post that are very clearly fabrications (whether by the undergraduate or by McAdams, it almost doesn't matter), I don't see any good reason to think this particular exchange isn't also a fabrication.
The problem is earlier in the pipeline.
I will admit that my reaction is colored by both my experience in and the discussion around recruitment/retention in the tech industry, so it's entirely possible I'm off base, but as soon as I hear someone blame the pipeline I want to call bullshit. (Not that I think you're consciously pulling a P/aul Gra/ham or Pet/er Thi/el!)
I'm also skeptical that people in your field are any better at hiring than people in mine, but that might just be my bitterness talking.
64 - I also think it's worth noting that the general point that Abbate is making is entirely correct. 'Anything goes' is certainly an important part of the spirit of philosophy. But in an introductory ethics class that deals with actual contemporary moral questions/issues it is really, really important for an instructor to police certain boundaries. It's not because some claims or questions are off limits philosophically, but because probably the most important part of the instructor's job is to keep a conversation going and when one student starts attacking another one on a personal level like that it's just not going to happen. It's no different than the standard "no bringing in God to support your position" rule that, one way or another, has to be enforced to get an actual set of arguments out of students.
Eh, ok, I see the transcript came from Holtz' letter. So 70 retracted.
71 but as soon as I hear someone blame the pipeline I want to call bullshit
Undergraduate education is in our hands too, so I'm not saying we're blameless. I'm just saying that we literally only have maybe one person in three years in the intersection of these categories applying to grad school (out of hundreds of applicants).
The university has an official policy of protecting students from harassment on the basis of sexual orientation, so there are also legalistic reasons why the classroom is not a no-holds-barred zone when it comes to discussing homosexuality.
Meanwhile this professor has a decades-long history of pulling shit like calling a student's home (parents) phone number and then after she told him that she did not want to be contacted at that number, posting on his blog how to find this number on the web.
Holy shit.
64: What makes nworB's characterization misplaced, IMO, is that the part of the conversation you quote was a side issue. Abbate didn't shut down a discussion of gay marriage because it might be offensive to gay students. Gay marriage was mentioned in passing as a relevant example in a discussion of Rawls. The annoying undergrad did not attempt to get into a discussion of the rights and wrongs of gay marriage in the class (if he did, it would have been irrelevant to the subject of the class unless it was tied to Rawls specifically, and should have been shut down on those grounds). The annoying undergrad then came up to her after class and hassled her for not affirmatively bringing up the possibility (in his terms, 'dismissing' it, but no one says that she 'dismissed' anything said by a student in her class) that someone might be opposed to gay marriage.
The quoted language comes after a back and forth, where she's raising the issue that in general, there are going to be some opinions that are offensive enough that it's an issue raising them in class, and suggests that opposition to gay marriage might fall into that category. And while she's speaking off the cuff, and so without all the precise qualifications you might want from someone drafting a position paper, this seems obviously right, depending on the reasons for the opposition and how it is expressed. If the rights and wrongs of gay marriage were relevant to the class discussion (which they weren't here and no one actually brought them up in class), while the subject as a whole certainly shouldn't be off limits, there are also certainly 'reasons' that I would find offensive and wouldn't want to have to listen to.
But if you read 16 you will see that, at least according to the TA's account (and she comes across as highly credible), McAdams did not have access to the tape recording of the class lecture itself
Right. McAdams is a liar and needs to be fired. I was backing the Werdna bit that you quoted, not McAdams' characterization of what happened in class.
The calling up the student's home was carefully documented by McAdams himself here.
Okay, having clicked through to Holtz' letter, let me just note that the transcription was trimmed by Friedersdorf, and the full exchange is more even painful than he lets on. I'm 100% in sympathy with the TA. Like he fails to note that this is how the entire exchange opened when the student approached after class:
S: I'm- I have to say, I'm very disappointed in you.
Abbate: Ok, for what reason?
But in an introductory ethics class that deals with actual contemporary moral questions/issues it is really, really important for an instructor to police certain boundaries.
As a principle, I'm completely behind this. The question is: Where do you draw the line?
There was a time in the US when it was legitimate, even laudable for an academic to ask the question: Should slavery be abolished?
Any instructor initiating that debate today would be an unambiguous racist.
Are we ready to say that we can no longer ask the question in class: Should gay marriage be permitted? I think that's Abbate's position, but I don't think we're there yet.
And if we're there now, were we there 10 years ago? What's the statute of limitations on debates of this sort?
Slatepitch: A true Rawlsian would be against gay marriage because ...
This case doesn't represent an assault on academic freedom; it's the exact opposite. This is a case where institutional reluctance to strip tenure from anyone allowed a serial harasser to keep his job for way, way too long.
The question is: Where do you draw the line?
Sure. And I think you, and nworB, are reacting as if "the line" has been drawn such that no discussion of gay marriage is possible in a classroom, and you think that's bad. As I said in 77, that's not a description of what actually happened -- someone trying to discuss gay marriage and getting shut down. No one tried to discuss gay marriage in the class, and it likely would have been irrelevant if they had.
The language from the taped conversation isn't absolutely incompatible with your reaction, but I think you're taking it out of context.
Are we ready to say that we can no longer ask the question in class: Should gay marriage be permitted? I think that's Abbate's position, but I don't think we're there yet.
I think if you read her blog post you would see that is very clearly not Abbate's position. Her position is that completely off-topic anti-homosexual comments could be offensive to some students and are not acceptable.
I'm not sure she even goes as far as saying the debate is off the table (though it's super close to it - not because of the question but because of the arguments on one side, all of which are exactly the sort of thing you have to lock out of the discussion). That whole thing only comes up when the student says
it's still wrong for the teacher of a class to completely discredit one person's opinion when they may have different opinions.
And of course Abbate didn't do anything like this in the first place. What she was talking about, and what she repeats later on, is whether or not Rawls' principles of justice would require allowing same sex marriage. What she is reported as saying in the class is absolutely what you'd expect to hear when some student tried to divert the discussion by saying they thought it was wrong/etc. and starting an unrelated fight.
What she is reported as saying in the class is absolutely what you'd expect to hear when some student tried to divert the discussion by saying they thought it was wrong/etc. and starting an unrelated fight.
While I agree with you generally, I don't think there's any indication that Mr. Annoying even tried to participate in the class on this point -- he's just complaining that someone offered gay marriage as an example, and she accepted it as a good one without going into the arguments against.
More fun from the full transcript. The TA really is a saint.
Abbate: I don't think gay marriage has- first of all, I would really question those statistics.
S: I'll send them to you.
Abbate: Just like you were going to send me the other statistics about tail docking and ...
S: Tail docking?
Abbate: That it doesn't cause pain.
S: Oh yeah, I'll send those to you as well.
76 - Over a performance of The Vagina Monologues, which is certainly dangerously radical enough that putting a 21-year-old's home phone number up on the public Internet is the responsible choice for a faculty member to make.
It doesn't go into enough detail to be sure exactly what happened, but the description that's in the letter really looked like a "ok back on track here" comment to me (it just doesn't say why she was saying it).
Ms. Abbate noted that this was a correct way to apply Rawls' Principle and is said to have asked "does anyone not agree with this?" Ms. Abbate later added that if anyone did not agree that gay marriage was an example of something that fits the Rawls' Equal Liberty Principle, they should see her after class.
It's the 'later added' part specifically that made me think that that's what happened - a right wing student looking to start a fight responding to the question by saying something about gay marriage being wrong seems really believable to me. And responding eventually with something like "if you still don't think it meets that criteria come by after class and I'll slowly explain what the principle is again" is what I think a lot of instructors would end up doing.
Oh, that does make sense. It's peculiar, though, that even McAdams doesn't focus on (or even really mention) the class discussion.
(I posted about this elsewhere last week; I'm mostly surprised in that I doubt Marquette actually managed to dot their i's and cross their t's enough to make this stick, but the repeated and ignored admonishments to stop putting students' personally identifying material on your goddamn blog, fuckwit, certainly move this out of an academic freedom argument and into a space where it seems to me as a layman that Marquette is concerned about their legal responsibility for his actions.*)
* Although they're losing out on things like the comedy value of his Queeg-like quest to prove that asking professors to teach 8:00 classes is a punitive measure given the availability of classrooms later in the morning**: http://mu-warrior.blogspot.com/2010/11/provost-pauly-caves-recends-800-am.html
** Which, I mean, strikes me as defensibly a matter of academic freedom, plus there's a timetable that proves that the crew could have gotten to the strawberries.
The language from the taped conversation isn't absolutely incompatible with your reaction, but I think you're taking it out of context.
Yeah, I'm still working my way through the relevant material. I didn't realize she subsequently discussed the matter in class.
BTW, this is how the genius who flunked out of the class began his surreptitiously recorded conversation with Abbate:
"And I would stress for you in your professional career going forward you're going to be teaching for many more years, that you watch how you approach those issues because when you set a precedent like that because you are the authority figure in the classroom, people truly do listen to you."
essear, I think the lost cause argument is worth making gently (first be qualified, then we'll give preference) provided it doesn't harm you personally, because there will probably be a next time.
The problem for me in the McAdams case is that firing him on the grounds as explicated by Marquette would be unacceptable, but firing him on much narrower grounds would have been possible.
The problem for me in the McAdams case is that firing him on the grounds as explicated by Marquette would be unacceptable, but firing him on much narrower grounds would have been possible.
Spin that out more? That is, what do you see as Marquette's actual, and unacceptable, grounds, and what do you see as the narrower grounds that would have been acceptable?
Professor Asshole has basically been using academic freedom as a shield to spend his time pursuing various objections to how his employer runs its operation, some based on politics and some just general crankery. That's not scholarly inquiry.
Yeah, no, but more importantly
Professor Asshole has basically been using academic freedom as a shield to spend his time
...harrassing the shit out of students. It's not just the objections to how his employer runs things, which while not a matter of scholarly inquiry are at least to some degree in the scope of the academic job (self-governance and all). The way he's been behaving to students isn't just "not scholarly inquiry" but a gross breach of his professional responsibilities and abuse of his position.
I think Marquette has to go with the more general grounds because those are the ones written into his employment contract and they have to show that he violated that contract in order to fire him. It's awkward for them because it's happening right after the Salaita debacle and so a lot of academics are already operating on a hair trigger when it comes to talk about civility and that kind of thing from university administrators (reasonably so). But I don't know that they had any other option.
Part of the problem is that Marquette has offered so many bad reasons (like civility) to fire him that it's impossible to defend their stance.
I'm not sure I agree with this. They are basically firing him for being an asshole -- substantially failing to meet "standards of excellence" -- which is indeed rather vague, but how could it be less vague? It's kind of like the criteria for getting tenure in the first place, the university has some ideals but the application of the ideals is necessarily subjective and idiosyncratic, a kind of "I know it when I see it" thing.
The key part of the letter to me is the part where Holtz explains why a lesser sanction (suspension or reprimand) cannot be imposed. And it basically boils down to, "you've been such an asshole for so long that we're not going to put up with it anymore, fuck you." Is this fair? Again, I don't have a clearly defined line to draw, but I think this is basically fair -- the university had probably been much too lenient with him in the past.
Surely if they had gotten him to put something in writing regarding his harassment of students the last time they could use that now? Academic freedom can't mean that he's allowed to open Marquette up to libel and harassment lawsuits for work unconnected to his research or faculty governance. I mean, it's clear that this is in some part due to the facts that he's insufferable to work with and he's ideologically incompatible with his coworkers, but e.g. one of the Cal States has a white supremacist on its faculty and while they clearly don't appreciate the fact that one of their professors spends all his time writing textbooks about the Jews nobody has stripped him of his tenure.
99: I don't disagree, but that's taking the issue more on his terms: you're firing him because of the way he's expressing views that he's entitled to hold. But having spent a few minutes trying to formulate the position more clearly, I'll admit that I haven't got it thought through well enough to figure out the line drawing.
I don't disagree, but that's taking the issue more on his terms: you're firing him because of the way he's expressing views that he's entitled to hold.
Huh, I see it the opposite way! (i.e. your characterization is much more open to the objection that he's being fired "because of the way he's expressing views that he's entitled to hold.") He *is* entitled to hold views about how the university runs things.
102 last -- I don't know, but wouldn't be a bit surprised if public vs. private was a factor here. And maybe differences in employment law between CA and WI.
99: This.
(I originally wrote "hear, hear!" but decided it sounded archaic.)
104 - I think 45 has the right response here: he's just not being fired for his views, or even for expressing them. He's being fired because he's actively harassing people, trying to ruin the career of a student by lying about them, and knowingly inciting very credible death and rape threats, and also he happens to be expressing his views.
The fact that he's also expressing views while doing this is beside the point: he could be doing this while expressing any view at all ("Abbate said she didn't like Guardians of the Galaxy and (insert lie carefully designed to cause those violent threats)" would count just as much here, and after multiple warnings about not doing that and doubling down on it after the university had to have security guards protect her the university would totally be justified in firing him.)
The contemporary way to put it is "Here, here."
And, to repeat myself, efficient breach. The worse that can happen even if the termination is no good is a (probably modest) sum of money.
105: Yes, but that isn't, or shouldn't be, a license to become a full-time abusive crank. He can advocate his views through faculty governance and administrative channels, try to persuade his colleagues, etc, but when he's just spending his time shitting on the place, I think it's fair to ask what the university is getting for its investment in his salary.
Trust me, you can become a full-time crank once you have tenure; you just have to pick the right topics.
106 - I think it's more that there's a strong presumption by academics not named Alan Dershowitz that political speech, even objectionable political speech, is expressly protected by academic freedom except under certain well-understood corner cases (religious institutions, say). The 45/99 thing is in play -- nobody would assert that, say, stalking someone or sleeping with a student or, I don't know, robbing a bank like that one dude was protected activity, and I personally feel that this goes into the same pool -- but I think his colleagues would be more interested in putting up a fuss on the general principle of the thing, as the AAUP is apparently doing, if he weren't a tremendous ass.
112: Trust me, I know. But I'm ok with starting to whittle away at the most abusive ones.
I don't think I wrote 113 very clearly. I think most academics would be inclined to sit this one out despite the strong presumption that political speech is protected because this isn't primarily a political speech issue but a harassment issue; that said, I think MacAdams' colleagues would be more likely to stand up for him and assert that he's being punished for political speech if he weren't a peen.
OT: How evil is C/a/p/el/l/a University? How evil would I be if I worked for them?
OT: How evil is C/a/p/el/l/a University? How evil would I be if I worked for them?
The AAUP is putting up a fuss?
What would be an appropriate punishment for posting someone's name and personal telephone number on the Internet?
That's not stalking, but it seems like it was foreseeable that it could lead to stalking. Not quite, shouting 'fire' in a crowded theater, but not good.
http://academeblog.org/2015/02/04/marquette-to-fire-john-mcadams-for-his-blog/
116: Not in the financial aid office or anything?
116-118: Looking at only their website, it would appear to be marginally better than the University of Phoe/nix, which is not saying much. Come on, you know the answer.
Would it make a difference if I said I was out of work February 15 and am not eligible for unemployment insurance?
120: There was a good (I thought) riposte to that on the same blog. http://academeblog.org/2015/02/07/marquette-to-fire-mcadams-for-dereliction-of-duty/
123: Chopper, you know the answer. Take the job and worry about getting another one once you are putting food on your family.
After the kids grow up, they don't get food put on them much.
Haven't gotten that far, was wondering if I should even interview. I guess I will--food on my family is important. Maybe I can just do a crappy job.
If you crap it, don't put it on your family.
If it's the best job you can get, take it and keep looking. It's a for-profit college, not Ming the Merciless's chief torturer.
Why are you opposed to torturing Ming the Merciless?
what do you see as Marquette's actual, and unacceptable, grounds, and what do you see as the narrower grounds that would have been acceptable?
There's a section of the letter linked in 3 on civility, and that's an ongoing fight between administrators and academics, and basically I think the right position is to never allow civility firings. And although Marquette's letter quotes from the AAUP standards, I think I recall that AAUP is saying, "no, that's not what it means."
The rest of it isn't so bad, but is concerningly vague. The "your value has been impaired" stuff.
The proper grounds for hiring are tough to spell out, I think. It's not really a harassment case, right? And I think that would be a high bar in court anyway. As far as I know, there's also nothing like a rule against naming people on blogs. You think someone is a shithead, you can say so, no matter how many times an administrator says "Boy, it sure is inconvenient when you do that." (Can McAdams be held responsible for the harassment that results from his postings? Genuine question.)
So I think Marquette's best course would have been to stick with the claim that he posted things about someone that he knew, or should have known, were false. And even that has to be narrowly worded, because what if your research turns out to be good faith wrong, etc.
That's why I favor shooting in the balls.
Chopper, Lee's job at a regional for-profit got us through the year after her unemployment ran out and gave her the chance to get the far better job she has now. She was able to help several of her students while there, including helping some transfer other places, and that's not nothing.
I think tenure should be abolished as a general principle. However, in a world where that has not yet come to pass, assholism is certainly not enough to merit having tenure revoked.
He obviously should not be put in similar teaching positions again. But surely Marquette has some online courses or similar drudgery he could be assigned. Two birds, one stone: his assholism is blunted, other faculty teach students, and the university doesn't end up going to court.
Most of the non-religious, non-professional-school parts of Marquette seem to be run poorly the last few years, from what little I know.
Trust me, you can become a full-time crank once you have tenure; you just have to pick the right topics.
Dinosaurs!
essear, I wonder if there's a way you could express concern about the student by gently suggesting that the people advocating for admission also take responsibility for providing for extra support and accountability -- however that might look. I don't know how supportive and attentive your department is, but it seems pretty reasonable that if you want to have a more diverse student body, you take concrete steps to give the needier candidates more feedback and help than "Congratulations, you're officially a genius now that you go here! Don't you feel great about yourself? The Office of Diversity is three miles from your lab in case you start to panic. DON'T CALL US. P.S. We might listen for a few minutes if you buy us a nicer watch than this [link]."
But I totally agree that performance is unpredictable. My own grad school cohort witnessed some pretty impressive shifts.
115 - Marquette's case against him certainly makes it look like that's the case. They explicitly talk about his department head basically saying that he's no good as a professor and should be fired which, honestly, has got to reflect some really remarkable bad blood between him and the rest of his department.
Your Department Chair recently detailed for the Dean of Arts & Sciences how your conduct has contributed to a culture of intolerance, threatened the practice of academic freedom, and often targeted women and those "in a lower position of power in academic standing at Marquette" than yourself. It thus is the consensus of your Department peers that you do significant damage to the University community.
113 nobody would assert that, say, stalking someone or sleeping with a student or, I don't know, robbing a bank like that one dude was protected activity
I don't know, I was surprised to hear that we didn't have a "no sleeping with students" rule until recently and the law school here seems to be starting a fight with the university administration over the new sexual harassment policy.
51, 58, 65: I don't know that a person's own status really matters. I served on the graduate admissions committee in a department that most would consider quite diverse. We had good numbers of grad students from several normally-underrepresented categories in our field.
On working with these students after their arrival I realized that my own student experience was so far removed from theirs in time (about 20 years) that it seemed to have almost nothing to do with these students' struggles in the system, or lack of struggle with it.
After the minimum requirements are reached, isn't making successful grad students mostly about creating supportive community once they arrive?
Plus, of course, predicting longterm success of an incoming grad student is probably 75% total crapshoot.
we didn't have a "no sleeping with students" rule until recently
Boomers, pulling the ladder up behind them once again.
It's all been downhill since they started tucking in their shirts.
This one doesn't bother me so much re: tenure, honestly. He isn't being fired for being a put-upon conservative on the Internet, or disagreeing about faculty governance, but for scheming with an undergraduate who was about to fail a class to set up a TA for a cheap gotcha, lied about what she said on his blog, and then helped with the pile-on which led to her getting the usual death and rape threats, and leaving the program (for a better school.) I can't see how harassing a student out of the program is considered to be protected academic speech, and I don't see why would be protected conduct (as opposed to running a blog, which is just fine even if his opinions are odious.)
Marquette seems to have followed their own procedures properly; the guy deserves due process. As I understand it, he got it. Sure, they've probably created a whiny ass martyr, but now they don't have to be colleagues with someone who is willing to sic the right-wing outrage machine on a grad student. I'm sure they're crying hard.
But surely Marquette has some online courses or similar drudgery he could be assigned.
It's not as if harassment in the context of online courses hasn't happened (hi, MIT!). Also, if someone changed my job so I only had to interact with students online and not in front of a classroom, I would actually be pretty happy about it--more time for research!
To be clear, it's very important that he was lying, not just disagreeing. But basically he pulled a - what's his name, O'Keefe -- on a colleague. Honestly, I'd be also okay with letting her kick him in the balls, but probably Marquette has a policy against that.
Sure, they've probably created a whiny ass martyr
Studies have shown that gay marriage will create ass martyrs.
the usual death and rape threats
Well this is the most depressing phrase I've read in a while.
I know, right? Death and rape threateners need to up their game and introduce some flair and originality into a tired art form.
It's about ethics in video game journalism.
147: Yeah no shit.
I think Abbate did pretty well for being put on the spot by poor man's O'Keefe when the class was talking about Rawls, not gay marriage. And yeah, it's completely fine to have to keep a class on topic, especially if off topic what-about-all-these-homosexuals-etc. is going to do nothing to advance the discussion, because a poor discussion of such issues is likely to be a lot worse than having no discussion.
Returning after some time away. I was picking up on the narrow point that I understood the TA to be making: you can't attack gay marriage in class because it will distress gay students. Inciting predictable harassment, as the professor seems to have done, is quite a different matter. For that, yes, shooting in the balls. And sacking. The whole business of taking the conversation is outside my experience and probably ought to get the student sacked as well, since it seems equally an assault on the idea I'd free expression. But I'm still very unhappy with the idea that philosophy students should not be allowed to troll their classes.
Which, OK, people who actually teach philosophy classes may disagree with me about
147: Yeah. Frog, pot, getting used to the discomfort and lassitude.
147: Do those kind of people just save their death/rape threats as a form letter and maybe just tweak it a little depending on the particular outrage?
Moby Hick wrote
"I think 5 would do it, if they are all female."
I figure that if no sexism is involved (the null hypothesis), he has a 50% chance each time of picking a male or female student to harass. In the absence of sexism (i.e., a preference for harassing females over harassing males), the probability of picking 5 females out of 5 students to harass is 1/32
I think 5 would do it, if they are all female.
I figure that if no sexism is involved (the null hypothesis), he has a 50% chance each time of picking a male or female student to harass. In the absence of sexism (i.e., a preference for harassing females over harassing males), the probability of picking 5 females out of 5 students to harass is 1/32
"I think 5 would do it, if they are all female."
I figure that if no sexism is involved (the null hypothesis), he has a 50% chance each time of picking a male or female student to harass. In the absence of sexism (i.e., a preference for harassing females over harassing males), the probability of picking 5 females out of 5 students to harass is 1/32
I think 5 would do it, if they are all female.
I figure that if no sexism is involved (the null hypothesis), he has a 50% chance each time of picking a male or female student to harass. In the absence of sexism (i.e., a preference for harassing females over harassing males), the probability of picking 5 females out of 5 students to harass is 1/32
You're probably right that 20 was too high. However, I don't think you can assume that that pool of students available to harass is 50% female.
151: In my experience a lot depends on context. I think it would be perfectly fine, in a discussion of gay marriage, for students to defend a natural-law view, even if I find it abhorrent and pretty silly. I think it's better to air these things out, and in practice this takes a bit of work -- not letting anyone get ganged up on, calmly pointing out assumptions that can be disagreed with, etc.
But if the discussion is about the equality principle in Rawls, or as has happened to me, when people want to bash the LDS faith when we're talking about Kierkegaard, or argue about gay people being disordered when talking about Aristotle, there are good reasons to take a heavier hand in the discussion, so the students aren't left with the impression that intolerant remarks can be thrown into any lecture whatsoever with no pushback, because that's exactly the kind of environment that is bad for doing philosophy. I don't think I'm under any obligation to derail my lesson plan in order to cater to some student's pet issue, and I think I have a responsibility when taking on a tough topic to make sure I do it well.
I was picking up on the narrow point that I understood the TA to be making: you can't attack gay marriage in class because it will distress gay students.
Like I said above, while this interpretation isn't clearly inconsistent with the quotes from the conversation, I don't think it's the most plausible reading. Obviously, there are things you can't say in an undergraduate philosophy class because they're uncivil enough to be derailing; floridly expressed racism or sexism (I'm not saying that anything that could be understood as racist or sexist would be out of line, but that you can easily come up with things that aren't compatible with a functional classroom environment), and there are reasons I've seen given for opposition to gay marriage (that, e.g., gay men want to marry and adopt to ensure access to children they can molest), that would be equivalently incompatible with a civil classroom discussion.
In the context of the quoted discussion, where the rights and wrongs of gay marriage was irrelevant to the subject matter of the actual class, I don't think there's any need to read her words as saying more than that gay marriage is a subject where maintaining a functionally civil classroom environment is a live issue.
I'm still very unhappy with the idea that philosophy students should not be allowed to troll their classes.
You must be understanding 'troll' to mean something different than I do. 'Troll', to me, means to derail any productive discussion and divert the community's attention to something pointless but impossible to ignore. We're talking about a class where people are trying to learn something; trolling seems like exactly the sort of thing you wouldn't want happening, just because there's limited time and attention available.
159: Well, I was thinking of ogged's sense of "trolling the blog": there is a tradition of sorts here that putting up outrageous opinions is fine if it's understood that you have to defend them, and concede defeat if they are beaten in a fair fight. I do see that the last clause is problematic. If there is no prior socialisation in the rules of argument, then you have the creationist-in-the-classroom problem, in that nothing will change their minds.
And I don't in the least think your point, or Cala's are unreasonable or wrong. But the idea that tenure can be revoked for shocking opinions, which seemed implied in some of this, seems to me fundamentally to undermined tenure (see also Salaita). For causing students to get death/rape threats -- yes, that is or ought to be a sackable offence.
It's probably a bit different with kids today, what with the greater support for teh gays and everything, but when I cast my mind back through the mists of time to undergrad, I remember lots of absolutely burning misery and shame when others got to, like, debate my very being or my right to participate in ordinary social institutions right in front of me. Do I speak up? Do I feel guilty for not speaking up? Do I get angry? Do I push myself not to be angry? The reason we have a "safe space" in the classroom (to the extent that such a thing is possible) is not to spare the tender-wender feelings of a generation of spoiled tumblrites but to guarantee, as much as possible, that students from marginalized groups will have the same experience of the classroom as students from majority groups, ie that we will not need to feel that at any moment other people will be able to hold forth on our nature, sexual practices, bodies, right to exist, the pathologies that bring us into being, etc etc. If I sign up for a class in debating whether homosexuality is moral, fine; if I sign up for a class which does not require debate on this point, I should be able to have the same kind of experience as every other student.
"Academic freedom" is the wrong lens through which to view the TA's after-class conversation with the student about gay marriage; the correct focus is on the rights of all students to a roughly equivalent experience of the class in question.
I think they should fire the guy, 'cause he's a clearly a bully and an asshole. In general I think that powerful tenured white guys being bullies is a bigger threat to academic freedom than the odd one losing his job for being an obvious asshole.
Moby wrote:
"You're probably right that 20 was too high. However, I don't think you can assume that that pool of students available to harass is 50% female."
If I may I appeal to Wikipedia, I will use a probability of selecting a female under the null hypothesis of no sexism of 0.53.
0.53^5 ~= 0.04
QED
Also seriously the AAUP look like massive fucking dicks for supporting this guy, who's obviously a bully and a thug, over the member of staff who seems to have been the recipient of some pretty awful workplace bullying.
But the idea that tenure can be revoked for shocking opinions, which seemed implied in some of this
I think this is a fundamental misunderstanding of what's going on. You're skidding from the TA (in some sense) not allowing an undergrad to express 'shocking opinions' in the classroom, to what happened to McAdams, as if McAdams were being fired for agreeing with the undergraduate. But the undergrad doesn't have any 'academic freedom' right to express himself as he sees fit in the classroom -- it is probably good pedagogy to let students express themselves to a certain degree, but fundamentally if there's going to be a class being taught, the teacher has to maintain some control over what's being said (at the most basic level, to keep the discussion focused on philosophy rather than, say, scuba diving). And no one took any action against the undergraduate.
What McAdams was fired for wasn't 'shocking opinions', it was posting falsehoods about a grad student in a manner calculated to draw harassment. I haven't searched his blog, but I'll bet there's some expression of opposition to same-sex marriage on there in the past that went unremarked upon.
163: OK. They should bring him back until he has had the chance to harass two more students.
I'm still very unhappy with the idea that philosophy students should not be allowed to troll their classes.
What do you think they are - the professor?
(No seriously one problem with letting students troll their class without restriction is that it really gets in the way of the productive trolling that the professor is doing. Some of it is fine, if it advances the discussion the right way, but the sort of thing in the student was up to pretty clearly wasn't.)
164 - Actually, in the link in Oudemia's 125, they clarify that their letter was not about whether the firing was a violation of MacAdams' academic freedom but rather a narrower objection to not following the AAUP-recommended procedure for suspension of a professor. Which is, in my mind, an unobjectionable stance from a union.
It's lame that "trolling" is a term of abuse. It should mean "taking deliberately extreme positions to attract attention and provoke discussion"; done well it's an art form.
done well it's an art form.
That's true. Trolling is a art.
Let me know if you find somebody who can do it well.
170 I was going with the view expressed in the post itself - it does seem that even if the AAUP itself hasn't take a stance, lots of AAUP affiliated people have, and *they*, if not the AAUP, definitely look like dicks.
174: If it's the campus chapter of the AAUP, and if he's a member (or perhaps even if he isn't), I believe that they have some sort of obligation to represent him. At least I seem to recall something like that when I signed up to pay my dues.
Now that I've read more carefully, it looks like it's the national organization.
Definitely his union should give him the workplace representation he's entitled to, and that's totally their duty.
But bigger picture, it's not a good look to be coming across as focussed on the right of senior faculty to bully other staff.
||
There's no way in hell I could make a mix of this, but for anyone who loves power pop, have a Spotify playlist.
|>
Let me know if you find somebody who can do it well,
RTFA
Let me know if you find somebody who can do it well,
RTFA
I think 182 might be a good after-dinner date plan for togolosh.
It would take me so long to post about Jon Stewart from my ipad that surely one of you would beat me to it, or have already.
Of course this guy should be fired, for extreme dickishness, and for dereliction of his professional duty.
The idea that nobody with tenure should ever be fired, no, never! will typically be couched in the high-flown, high-minded rhetoric of "academic freedom." But we should be careful to distinguish between a laudable societal ideal that is worth defending (academic freedom) and a clannish, cliquish guild privilege (academic tenure) that only covers a minority of those working in academia in any case (the vast majority, maybe 65 to 70%?, of college courses now taught by the untenured who will never, ever be tenured, after all).
165.2 -- OK. I was wrong. Now you can ban me for failing to maintain an argument for a 200 comment thread. But, seriously, the invocation of predictable mob violence, even virtual mob violence, on a student, is nothing that should be covered by academic freedom and I had not seen that this was the point at issue here.
Tenure is surely like free speech: it if doesn't protect assholes, then it's worthless.
This is one of those shibboleths that never quite convinced me, because it only ever seems to protect a certain kind of asshole. Ward Churchill wasn't protected by it when he called 9/11 victims "little Eichmans" but somebody who sicced the Internet Hate Machine on a TA should be?
It also overstates the importance of assholes in any debate to be honest.
185.last - that's what I find so weird about the AAUP's (seeming, subject to the caveats upthread) stance here - the actual academic engaged in teaching actual students and doing actual research in her field of actual academic expertise gets thrown under the bus, and the wanker bullying other staff into supporting his political position is seen as the guy upholding academic freedom, which seems inexplicable, unless you think the principle is "tenured faculty are special unicorns" which I dunno maybe is the case.
But TAs are not unionised, amirite? Why look further?
unless you think the principle is "tenured faculty are special unicorns" which I dunno maybe is the case.
It certainly seems to be the case from the outside.
I wish the AAUP had written their statement more clearly. I'm more or less on their side in the sense that the correct procedures should be followed when getting rid of an employee even when that employee obviously needs to go.
There's no defending MacAdams' conduct. He's essentially been engaging in harassment and borderline stalking campaigns against his university's students, has been warned multiple times to knock it off, and has refused to stop. He hasn't left the school with much recourse beyond getting rid of him.
The point is that this can be done in a way that weakens tenure protections overall or in a way that doesn't. Dismissal on some B.S. "civility" grounds needs to be fought against, even if it means siding with a jackass like MacAdams. A formal dismissal proceeding that clearly focused on his repeated actions targeting students would be fine with me, and I would think with the AAUP as well. The key is being specific about the bad actions. "He said something on his blog that we didn't like" isn't enough.
"He said something on his blog that we didn't like" is the premise of the clickbait Atlantic headline, not the dismissal letter.
The letter from Marquette mentions surprisingly little about civility and all that (and not the way I'd have expected from what the Atlantic article said). My guess is that McAdams is desperately trying to spin it that way out of the entirely accurate belief that it's the only thing that could get him off the hook and/or it's an easy way for him to score even more right wing anti-academia points.
McAdams will have a position at one of the right wing think tanks within the year. He'll be making more money, won't have to teach, and can say whatever the hell he wants. Plus he gets to play the victim card. He's set.
Maybe he could become a plaintiff in a suit designed to further cripple the ACA.
And speaking of the ACA and academic integrity, I wonder if Jonathan Adler appreciates what his reputation for utter intellectual dishonesty* is going to be among among thinking people no matter which way King turns out. Probably doesn't give a shit, but his increasing toolishness* is awesome to behold. Sympathies to anyone associated with his university, an unfortunate black mark on its reputation.
Which is pretty much required from him and Cannon if they intend to continue to pursue "the Moops actually invaded Spain" and not just the "card says Moops."
Just to underscore 193, Marquette's firing letter barely mentions civility:
Somewhat surprisingly, given that McAdams' speech is clearly uncivil and that the idea of "civility" has become central for those wishing to deny the centrality of academic freedom to anything that would be a university, Marquette does not invoke civility (save for a regrettable lapse on page 14 of a 15-page document) in justifying its dismissal of McAdams. Rather, Holz consistently foregrounds McAdams' failure to fulfill basic obligations to students.
It is beyond maddening to see how fast this is turning into "prof fired over blog! oh noes!" instead of "prof with a track record of harassing students sets up a graduate student instructor and then lies about what she said." I'm hearing that the poor man can't even be a good Catholic at Marquette!
197: At this point the formula for distorting a news story so that it can drum up outrage and go "viral" is fairly transparent. Right off the top of my head the "woman fired for breastfeeding ruled OK because men can lactate too" and "HBS professor goes to war with humble Asian immigrant over $4" stories were like this as well -- in these cases the news was obviously quite deliberately framed in a way to generate maximum echo chamber outrage.
In 191 my annoyance was largely with the AAUP because the language in their statement seems to accept MacAdams' framing of the story. That is, they harp on how inappropriate it is to dismiss a professor for extracurricular activities, as though MacAdams were just posting political screeds on his personal blog and was being persecuted for it.
Obviously engaging in creepy stalkerish behavior towards students isn't just another "extracurricular" activity separate from his responsibilities as a faculty member.
That guy fighting over the $4 was a huge asshole regardless.
199: sorry I misread.
200: no, not really.
186: Now you can ban me for failing to maintain an argument for a 200 comment thread.
Nworb is banned! We'll have no graciously arriving at agreement here -- this is a blog with standards.
203 to $4 Asian restaurant guy, not nworb.
202: Speaking of banned, did I miss an update or should we still be chastising you for showing up here during working hours?
The deadlines I was panicking over are tomorrow (vacation starts Friday), and everything is either done or in someone else's hands for the moment. I mean, I still shouldn't be commenting all day, but the specific emergency is mostly resolved. (And panicking worked! Admittedly, I still lurked assiduously, but that takes much less time and effort.)
Really, he wasn't an asshole. Or if you think he's an asshole, it's simply because you were told that a Harvard professor went to war with an Asian immigrant over $4 through some obscure legal loophole, which sounds like the very Platonic ideal of assholishness, and who wants to defend that? Even if he was 100% right, he's gotta be an asshole, right?
Here's how I see the story: pretty accomplished guy builds up career as consumer protection advocate, holding companies like Google and the airline industry accountable for how they advertise. One night he orders food online, notices a mismatch between what he was charged and what the online menu indicated, and emails the owner to understand why. Owner disingenuously replies that the online menu is out of date (no promise to fix) and offers to send him an up-to-date print menu. This is the sort of crap that people just tend to swallow, but consumer protection advocate points out that posting misleading prices is illegal and asks for $12 back ($4 plus double in penalties, the simple logic being that the $4 refund does not qualify as a punishment for dishonestly overcharging by $4 in the first place).
Cue the "we are just humble immigrants" media campaign, the mob deciding that overcharging $4 on every single online order is no big deal but asking for a $8 penalty is some super-sinister Harvard Law School witchcraft, and everyone with a Harvard affiliation scrambling to disassociate themselves from this asshole with four Harvard degrees because they're not all like that, really.
(Yeah, I spent a lot of time reading about this story, and maybe I'm deluded about it -- my opinions certainly don't seem very popular -- but I'm pretty sure that at least 99% of the assholishness in the story was planted by the original Boston.com headline.)
I think demanding the legal remedy to which no actual court has decided you are entitled is dickish.
208, 209: It's dickish to play "I'm a tough negotiator straight outta HBS" games with small businesses.
I don't think it's that dickish. It's certainly not half as dickish as knowingly overcharging in first place. HBS prof wasn't extorting them -- he reported them to whatever overworked regulatory body is in charge of that stuff anyway -- and if you read the emails he doesn't seem to actually care what the exact penalty is (he oscillates between $8, to half the order, to whatever the manager thinks is appropriate) as long as there was some sort of penalty. It was reported that HBS prof's billing rate is $800/hour, which of course was interpreted as him having zero sense of perspective, when to me it seems like a very clear signal that he was actually motivated by the principle of the situation, which is that businesses that deliberately overcharge customers should do more than simply refund their customers the overcharge.
208: Yeah, no. I think he's an asshole, and I'm not under any misconceptions about this being an "obscure legal loophole" or whatever. Even if you buy the premise that this restaurant was systematically ripping off the public and had to be stopped (which is I think pretty tendentious but not wholly unsupportable), it was still just bullshit asshole behavior. For your take to be right, HBS Asshole would have had to think, "if I just ask for my $4 back and/or let the guy know he's violating the law and should update the menu on the website, he'll keep screwing over the public and there will be no justice; but if I demand $12 he will stop this nefarious behavior!" Which is stupid. And aside from all that, only an asshole could have written the emails he actually wrote.
it seems like a very clear signal that he was actually motivated by the principle of the situation, which is that businesses that deliberately overcharge customers should do more than simply refund their customers the overchargeyou don't know who you're dealing with?!
Plus, the earlier emails to the Japanese restaurant about Groupon. Yeesh.
213: you write as if the restaurant made him wait 5 minutes and then gave him a table that he didn't like, so he decided to call a SWAT team because he didn't like being disrespected. In reality he was deliberately overcharged $4 and asked for $12 back. He actually does consumer protection advocacy for a living.
But gee, I wonder how there are people out there outraged that Marquette fired McAdams over a blog post.
I was wavering on this one -- I'm not dead sure that he isn't an asshole, but DB's reading of the situation isn't obviously wrong to me. That is, the situation looks very plausibly to me as if the restaurant was engaging in intentional misconduct (posting prices and not honoring them), and counting on no one making a fuss because in any given case it's no big deal. IIRC (and the facts in 208 are right), he wasn't hassling them for any significant amount of money, just making the point that it's conduct with a penalty.
Now, he has to be a bit of a prickly personality to think that getting into a scuffle like this is worth it, but that doesn't necessarily mean he's wrong to do it.
Except that I don't remember the wording of any of his actual emails, and so don't have any opinion on whether they show that he's an asshole.
217 -- You can be an asshole even when you're technically in the right. And assuming that the mismatch between internet and in-store prices was a deliberate fraud isn't supported by anything, iirc.
The non-asshole approach was outlined by potch: ask for the $4 back, tell them nicely that there are people who make a living exploiting errors like this, and gently encourage him to put updated prices on the internet.
"I'm a lawyer, give me $12 back for the $4 you overcharged me!" sounds like extortion. And I would have no problem if he made a big stink about getting them to update their online menu -- but he didn't do that, and that's the only thing that would help anyone other than him.
The emails are so deep into Team Asshole territory that they can see the colon.
Do folks remember the DC lawyer with the consumer protection claim against the dry cleaner over a pair of pants?
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/06/25/AR2007062500443.html
OK HBS guy and myself are clearly the only two people in the world with this perspective. Oh well.
For your take to be right, HBS Asshole would have had to think, "if I just ask for my $4 back and/or let the guy know he's violating the law and should update the menu on the website, he'll keep screwing over the public and there will be no justice; but if I demand $12 he will stop this nefarious behavior!"
Two things. First, what's the big deal about asking for $12? Everyone seems to agree that $4 is nothing in the grand scheme of things. So if $4 is nothing, then why is $12 some completely insane dollar figure? The restaurant can collect it from two other online overcharges. Surely they get that many online orders in less than an hour?
Second: so it seems that
(1) eating the $4 = social norm
(2) asking for the $4 refund = bold but justifiable behavior
(3) asking for $12 = remarkable social deviance that can only be justified by dramatic positive consequences like stopping a nuke from going off in New York City
And I see that, but I simply don't agree.
Oh come on. The online menu prices are all $1 below actual charge. You think that's an honest mistake? That the online prices were once accurate and they revised the menu by adding a dollar to every item but forgot to change the online menu?
It was the demanding of punitive damages that really took that dude to top-tier amazing asshole level. I mean, as I said at the time I kind of admire it in a way, that guy lives as a wholly-integrated person with no separation between his work and home life. Just say fuck it, lawyer everything to death and live like you mean it.
217 is right. I read all the emails. Asshole.
That the online prices were once accurate and they revised the menu by adding a dollar to every item but forgot to change the online menu?
Are you joking? This happens all the time. It's extremely common for items to go on and off the (actual) menu and the online menu remains unchanged. "Oh, sorry, we don't have that anymore."
I would totally ask for my $4, btw.
The emails just don't seem that bad to me. I mean, he's being ridiculous, but he's not being abusive, and I'm with FL, the restaurant is intentionally ripping people off. So he reported them to the authorities and made a formally polite fuss about it. It's silly, but most of the silly is in his engaging in back and forth when the restaurant owner starts bullshitting about it. (He does say that he'll take whatever refund they see fit to give him; I mean, this is clearly not about any particular tiny sum of money.)
That the online prices were once accurate and they revised the menu by adding a dollar to every item but forgot to change the online menu?
Why does this seems unlikely? Probably every few years they up all the prices by a buck, and I take the guy's claim that they don't have their web team on speed dial at face value.
228: Every item, the price changed by a buck? It's possible, but it wouldn't be my first guess.
Listen to what happened to my friend (not at Heebie U): up for tenure, some of the colleagues are too lazy to log in in order to look at her tenure material, so they use an old CV that the university has on their public website. Then they all vote no, because she hasn't done any work in years. She is voted down for tenure. The dean is confused, because this looks like a strong file, and calls an extra meeting where this all comes out, and they hold a re-vote, where she gets a thumbs up vote.
But holy shitballs! Someone might have lost their fucking job, because people can't be bothered to open up the actual tenure file online! I'm enraged on her behalf.
By the way DB is trolling in the positive sense outlined above. Keep it up! I mean you may have revealed yourself as a horrible person, but it's OK b/c commitment to the art.
232 was riffing on Oudie's "people don't bother to change their online menu" but now seems off-topic.
The emails just don't seem that bad to me.
Occupational hazard?
I take the guy's claim that they don't have their web team on speed dial at face value.
For a website that's functional enough that they're taking orders through it, they can't figure out how to edit the menu? I mean, again, possible. But this isn't an out of date static page sitting somewhere, it's something they're actively using.
Also, I've never heard of this $4/$12 potential asshole Ralph Nader crusader.
228, 230: This is like a violation of Benford's Law-- possible but unlikely. As a longtime observer of menu price revisions, I think it's much more plausible that they're deliberately switching the charges. Why have accurate prices on the print menus? So they can appeal to them when a customer disputes the bill.
235: Well, right. The emails are lawyerly, which is a language I speak, and the question is "Does it make you an asshole to get lawyerly at a small business over a couple of bucks?" And when it looks plausibly to me like they're ripping people off on purpose, and their immediate reaction is not to apologize and promise to fix it (that is, his first email isn't all that aggressive, and their first response is that they're not going to do anything about it), it's sort of a silly way to behave, but I don't know that it makes you an asshole necessarily. (I admit that my sense of the chances that he is an asshole goes way up after reading the emails -- going full-scale lawyer on a small business like this doesn't necessarily make you an asshole, but it it's the kind of thing an asshole is more likely to do -- but not to certainty.)
Good grief. I would say it is extremely common for the Seamless menu, the Delivery.com menu, and the restaurant's own menu all to be different. And to be different from the printed menu. I have in fact gamed this before trying to get restaurants to make things they've taken off the menu: "Oh the whatever is off the menu on Seamless, but still on at Delivery -- I'll order from them."
241: Yes. Were you busy in December of last year?
I'm sure that the prices were accurate at one point, and I'm sure it's a bit of a hassle to update the website. But it's also in the restaurant's interest for them to be lazy about updating it, which is why there are laws about this sort of thing! I'm sure if the restaurant was truly obligated to honor the website prices, they would have gotten around to making the update a lot faster.
People are generally too busy to check this sort of thing, which is why there are legal penalties for overcharging and bait-and-switch, because it can add up to a lot of money over time.
I have no way of proving this, but my larger point was that the original framing in Boston.com was extremely prejudicial. If people were simply given the emails without the initial framing of "Harvard Professor Goes to War Over $4", I don't think most people would characterize the emails in that way. And that framing was basically the restaurant's perspective (why on earth should we take their side?) coupled with media incentives to drum up hits.
244: Nope! I was still on sabbatical, actually! Huh.
they're taking orders through it
Unless I have the wrong restaurant, I don't think that's right. In fact, the online menu is just scans of the print menu, so the claim that he has an updated print menu but not online menu makes sense.
Where the owner goes wrong is in saying that the prices have been out of date for a long time. Ok, then update them. But the prof isn't content to say "this is actually a serious issue, please update, and I'll check back in a week" or some other non-assholish response. He says, this is serious, you owe me punitive damages. For fucks sake.
232: I have witnessed some truly crazy -- I mean outlandishly egregious -- shit in the past few years, but that story takes the cake. So much cake-taking does that story do, in fact, that I can't actually believe it as it's being recounted. But then again, had I not been in the room for all of the aforementioned horrors, I wouldn't have believed those either.
I took the email from 12/6 at 9:33AM to be a straight-up "Lovely business you have here, be a shame if anything should happen to it" extortion demand. I don't see any other way to read it. He's saying that on the one hand he could have a class action suit or on the other we could talk about his refund.
If 232 is in fact entirely accurate, and you are friends with the person in the story, heebie, I would strongly encourage you to help this person wage a fiery jihad against her/his colleagues.
He says, this is serious, you owe me punitive damages.
But the punitive damages are $8, not even the cost of a menu item. So is that going to war? It's a literally proportionate response.
their immediate reaction is not to apologize and promise to fix it
What? That's exactly their response.
DB, I don't think we're going to find consensus on this one.
He says he'll update it. Then he offers a $3 refund! And in the next email Edelman says he'll accept $4 or $12. (Granted, he reserves his right for future legal action.)
going full-scale lawyer on a small business like this doesn't necessarily make you an asshole
Sadly, it does, actually, unless you've for real been harmed or are actually working in some meaningful way, (like maybe by really acting as a lawyer instead of just using your training to be abusive) to protect the interests of other people who have been harmed.
We may not find consensus about the asshole HBS prof, but I think if we act together, we can murder all of the perpetrators mentioned in 232. We can, and should, do this to make the world a better place.
250: No, it's clearly not extortion. He's saying in that email that he's already reported them to the Brookline authorities, he's just continuing to hassle them about it. There's no threat of action contingent on the refund/damages he wants.
253: In their first email, (12/5, 3:04 pm) they don't offer him a refund, and they don't say they'll fix the website. All they're going to do is mail him a print menu with the updated prices. They don't offer to take any meaningful action until he goes all lawyerly at them in his next email. It's still over-the-top of him, but the wrong prices would have stayed on the website (which you're right about) if he hadn't gone over-the-top.
Sue them for $12.
Is that what you hear when someone says the words "fiery jihad" in Pittsburgh?
255: I'd bet an eggroll that the $3 came from somebody with English as a second language reading the earlier email with "triple".
250: you really don't see any other way to read it? The email is literally saying that it's not just about him and that he doesn't actually give a shit what his refund is. It is a literal explanation of why there are legal penalties for overcharging as well as why there is reason to believe that the overcharging was deliberate in this case.
232: This occurred at the college level, and now it's going up to the provost level. But if for some reason she gets denied tenure, I will personally finance her a lawyer.
It's still enshrouded in a bit of secrecy - a colleague told her "I'm so sorry" and she was totally clueless, because you don't usually find out the college vote, obviously. But then when she panicked, her mentor admitted what had happened. They'd re-requested her CV a few days earlier and she hadn't thought anything of it.
they don't say they'll fix the website
LB, read it again.
259 correction: Sorry, I misread the email somehow. Yes, they do say they'll fix the website. They don't offer a refund, though.
259.1: Come on. He ends with "accept that refund without prejudicing my rights as provided by law." He's threatening to sue.
tell them nicely that there are people who make a living exploiting errors like this, and gently encourage him to put updated prices on the internet.
After FACTA went into effect, it was still common enough for a while to get credit card slips with the full number printed on them. Whenever that happened to me, I would tell the merchant, as nicely as possible, that they really should get their credit card machine updated, because they're racking up a ton of exposure to statutory penalties. And then my dry cleaner somehow got the wrong end of stick and thought I was threatening to sue her, started screaming at me to get out, and I had to find a new dry cleaner.
Actually one of the few joys in my life is fucking around with lawyers who behave badly because they think they can because they're lawyers. For example, we had a case here we did recently pro bono on behalf of a contractor (who had done some work for somebody else here) who was being dicked around out of money by a lawyer-customer with ridiculous reasons and intended-to-be-intimidating assertions of authority. I didn't do much work on the case but the little I did was so satisfying and we fucked that lawyer up six ways from Sunday. More generally, it's just fun to have enough training to (on behalf of friends or acquaintances or whatever) to tell lawyer-bullies to just shut the fuck up.
According to the update at the end of the slate article, even Edelman now admits that he was being a huge asshole,* and he has apologized Which maybe means he's not truly an irredeemable asshole as a person, but it means we ought to all be able to agree that his actual behavior in this instance was absolutely, 100% asshole. Which it was; it's indefensible.
* It's possible he's not being sincere and just wanted to have people stop calling him bad names.
263: if by "lawyer" you mean "team of jihadis," we're on the same page. And smart move using code!*
*They're always listening.
268: A local restaurant chain here got nailed for that. I think it cost them $10 gift cards for every customer who signed up.
267: I'd read that as "I'm not dropping the complaint with the Brookline authorities just because you give me a refund," which doesn't seem unreasonable. It'd be extortion if that language was tied to anything particular he wanted them to do -- if he said "for $12, this is over, for $4, I'm reserving my rights", but I don't think that was said or implied.
261: the $3 came from this guy. A "celebrity bartender" who has appeared in GQ.
259 correction: Sorry, I misread the email somehow. Yes, they do say they'll fix the website. They don't offer a refund, though.
Yes, they do say they will fix the website, and no they don't offer him a refund, because they charged him what they thought was the correct price. The price on their actual menu. Remember, it was the website menu that was out of date.
It's still enshrouded in a bit of secrecy - a colleague told her "I'm so sorry" and she was totally clueless, because you don't usually find out the college vote, obviously. But then when she panicked, her mentor admitted what had happened. They'd re-requested her CV a few days earlier and she hadn't thought anything of it.
This is even crazier, by the way. "We've totally abdicated our responsibilities. But! Rather than owning up to our nearly career-ending (for someone else) laziness, we thought we'd just whistle, jam our hands in our pockets, step away from the tire fire that is our committee work, and hope that nobody notices." Good plan!*
* Until the jihadis arrive.
Hey let's not go crazy and characterize threats to bring a stupid but non-frivolous (in the lawyerly sense) lawsuit as "extortion", okay?
He was clearly hinting for a much bigger offer and being cagey enough not to put anything that could count as extortion in case the email got forwarded on.
278 to 273 and before seeing 277. I still like the word.
270: This is probably a better example of what he really thinks.
Someday maybe I'll write a tell-all memoir of my years striding through the hallowed halls of academe. But nobody would read it, because boring. Needs moar jihadis.
He's threatening to sue.
But it's worse than that--he's not really threatening to sue--it's just $12!--he's just mock-threatening to sue as part of pulling the "I'm a lawyer" bullshit, in order to intimidate them.
Does it affect anyone else's estimation of the assholishness levels that the restauranteur is doing some transparent bullshitting? The "I've got a lawyer too, and they say that the disclaimer covers us?" The "It's the wrong website anyway?"
278: If I read it that way, I'd agree with you, but I don't see anything at all in the emails that suggests either that he wants more than $12, or that he's implicitly promising to do or not do anything on the basis of whatever refund he gets. Anything assholish I see in the emails is all the tone.
Not really. Somebody emails you about $4, how much time you want to spend on the reply?
" anything at all in the emails that suggests either that he wants more than $12,"
Well he later asks for half the cost of the meal.
284: in his very last email, he suggests that they should make his entire order half-price, as a "thank you" for bringing this important issue to their attention.
278: I actually don't think HBS Asshole was being cagey or hinting for a bigger offer, he was just trying to show the guy that he had a big penis stick to scare him.
282: Well but he already brought up class liability at that point, right? So the implicit threat of a lawsuit isn't for $12, it's for a shit-ton.
283: No, a little bullshitting is an appropriate fear response when someone like the HBS Asshole is threatening to bring a ton of bricks down on you.
286: And to smell the fear dripping from his face.
I love that this discussion is happening again.
And the 282/288.1 theory is better than outright extortion. I still enjoy using the word extortion.
Poor business owners. Constantly bullied by so-called "consumer" "advocates". This case is typical of what they must put up with. Truly we need tort reform now more than ever.
285: When you're flat wrong about the $4, I think it's reasonable to expect you to be straightforwardly apologetic.
(and I should have said nothing that suggests that he wants significantly more than $12. All the possible amounts of money, $4, $12, half the order, are fairly insignificant to both sides -- nothing in this is about the money.)
He was apologetic right from the start.
He's actually a friend of mine from freshman year of college. He's an interesting guy, he was paying his own way through school due to an excellent investment decision he made as an 8 year old. I'm not going to say he's not an asshole (I like him but I'm not surprised he did something like this), but I do think he's genuinely motivated by the public good. At some point his annoyance got the better of him, but I'm pretty sure his initial motivation was noble.
nothing in this is about the money
Of course it's not about the money... it's about principle if you're being charitable and, if you're not, then it's this asshole swinging his cock around until the poor business owner admits his is right, dammit, and gives him his $12, which, again, is all about the principle.
Following up on 223, I'd forgotten that the pants guy was an ALJ. Who lost his bid for re-appointment over it, then his federal case against DC for not re-appointing him (affirmed by the DC Circuit). Also lost the pants suit (for which he was demanding $54 million) his appeal, and his motion for rehearing en banc.
Maybe they weren't the right pants, but the essence of the profession is judgment, and any time a lawyer is conspicuously showing a serious lack of it, especially about their exaggerated own interests, it's worthy of a call out.
I don't doubt that the Marquette prof thinks he's some kind of academic freedom warrior (son to be martyr). Guild protection is earned by not getting drunk on our own whiskey.
Eh, while the first email does say the word 'apologize' and say they're going to update the website sometime, it does not seem to me to be taking the complaint terribly seriously. Which isn't obviously wrongful in itself, but when the next round of email comes through, making it clear that the customer (who remains actually right about having been overcharged), thinks it's a systematic big deal, maintaining the attitude of straightforward apology doesn't seem too much to expect.
The law professor is a crank about this stuff, but all of his crankishness seems to me to be directed to getting the restauranteur to agree that yes it really is a BFD (it's not the individual $4, it's the systematic overcharging).
Which is why, as I suggested, he could have been nice about it and said, "Bro, maybe I call you bro? This is actually a big deal, and it's my job, so I'm going to check back in a week."
Another way to put it is that while I'm sure the professor is a crank, and easily might be an asshole, I don't have an iota of sympathy for the restaurant. The professor's emails aren't abusive, they don't seem to state any falsehoods, and they don't make any threats I can see. The restauranteur, on the other hand, is bullshitting at an unhappy customer who is in the right about the specific transaction. Probably a more well-balanced and less irritating law professor would have dropped it after the first email, but I don't like the restauranteur at all either.
232 is really, really insane. I mean, it matches my general opinion of how academics do things, but it's still really impressive. Good for the Dean involved, though.
Also, that's going to be an interesting situation in the department from now on. Is your friend vindictive? I recommend vindictiveness highly.
But see it from the restauranteur's perspective. You overcharged a guy four bucks, and now he's asking for twelve. You see him as someone trying to take advantage of you, not as a crusader for the public good. When Edelman asked for $12, the possibility that this was going to be productive went away.
You overcharged a guy four bucks, and now he's asking for twelve.
And from the restaurateur's perspective, you didn't actually overcharge the guy at all. You charged him the right amount--he just happened to be looking at an outdated menu online. Which, you can definitely understand why he would be irritated about being charged more than he thought he was going to pay, and so you're willing to make it right, but from your perspective it was not an overcharge. Giving his the $4 is already giving him a discount.
305: Well, sure, if you cut the restauranteur slack for being so fresh off the boat that he's frightened and confused by a reference to consumer protection laws, but I'm not really seeing it. I mean, in the end he doesn't seem to have given any refund -- his position is "Fine, you went to the authorities, let's see what kind of refund they give you," but he could have done that immediately without the flurry of bullshit.
Also, that's going to be an interesting situation in the department from now on. Is your friend vindictive? I recommend vindictiveness highly.
The department vote was extremely favorable - this was the vote at the college level, where people didn't know her personally. So it shouldn't be too awkward, assuming everything ends up fine in the future.
He's not just asking for 12, he's already reported it to the authorities, says they may well impose a fine, and is asking for 12 in addition to whatever fine gets imposed.
his position is "Fine, you went to the authorities, let's see what kind of refund they give you,"
This is only his position after Edelman says that he's already reported the restaurant to the authorities. You really expect the owner to continue to be in a gracious mood after that?
Nah, the no-refund doesn't actually bother me -- all the sums of money are so small that it's NBD. It's the bullshitting about how he didn't do anything wrong -- we're not obliged to have the right prices on our menus! It wasn't really our menu! It wasn't me, it was two other guys!
I mean, the extended email chain is largely our cranky law professor politely calling bullshit bullshit, and I don't think that makes him look worse than the restauranteur. He certainly looks cranky, but cranky back at someone who's aggressively defending his violations of consumer protection law.
Of course the restaurant is going to think of Edelman as an asshole. My friends on Wall Street aren't big fans of Elizabeth Warren either. The question is why should everyone assume the restaurant's perspective. The answer is that's what boston.com did.
What really gets me about 232, is that the idiots in question knew they'd gotten her CV in a weird way, and reacted to the fact that there was nothing on it after a date sometime in the past. If that date was long enough ago to make a huge gap, and the department liked her, it stuns me that the idiots didn't think to check that they were looking at a current version.
For what it's worth (not very much, probably) I was recently talking to an HBS fellow I know who knows this guy pretty well, who quite strongly asserted that he (Edelman) is not at all an asshole, just a driven consumer protection advocate who has in fact done a ton of good for consumers. They're all vipers over on that side of the river etc. but that's what he said.
Is the question "who was right?" or "who was being a complete asshole?" Because those questions don't have to have different answers.
314: I know, right? It must be that almost everyone involved was EVEN LAZIER THAN THAT and looked at absolutely nothing. Then one person said, "Look at her CV! There's nothing on it since 2010!" and they all went "oooh, let's vote no."
And from the restaurateur's perspective, you didn't actually overcharge the guy at all. You charged him the right amount--he just happened to be looking at an outdated menu online.
Assuming an honest mistake on the restaurateur's behalf!
Except, of course, that surely the really lazy thing to do at that level is to go "the department likes her, sounds good to me!" Regardless, astounding.
316: Can we add in "Who was being more of an asshole in the situation"? That is, allowing assholishness to cancel?
I mean, I'd say Edelman's being a bully about it, but he's being formally not abusive, he's not making empty threats, and he's right. The restauranteur is both wrong and a bullshit artist.
312 -- No. Reread the restaurant's Friday Dec 5 email. The proper response, at that point, was 'No, it's $4, and thanks, yes, just put it on my credit card.' That's the only proper response. But re-read what he wrote instead.
and a bullshit artist.
And the Palestinians are a death cult. You like to make this point about sexism: there's no non-sexist control to evaluate sexist society against (this is not an analogy, just a reminder) and here there's no non-suspicious response from the restauranteur (other than his first apologetic one) after Edelman asks for $12.
232: I like that story, because it seems so clear-cuttedly about them being slackers, but no way. Maybe my own ride on the roller coaster made me more paranoid than cynical, but I can't really believe it could shake out like that. The thumbs-down had to be because someone torpedoed her, then the dean called them on it.
These things aren't contests. Supporters of the Marquette guy want to talk about how the TA is some sort of intolerant feminist, or is in the wrong for saying that certain opinions should be expressed. That's a smoke screen, and everyone knows it.
The question is whether the HBS guy is an asshole. The answer is yes. Whether or not the restaurant guy is a bullshitter is a separate question, and doesn't at all mitigate the HBS guy's obligation to use judgment when he's waving his dick around.
I had the impression when I read the emails some time ago that the guy was acting not just as some combination of pique, advocacy, combativeness, and assholishness, but also with the thought that it might if publicized drum up legal business for him. And that maybe that's why he's gone about this sort of thing more than once.
You charged him the right amount--he just happened to be looking at an outdated menu online.
So paper is necessarily the master version and online is an unreliable copy needing verification? He wasn't looking at a webpage and calling them up, he was ordering online. Arguably the "real" menu in his situation should be what's posted on the ordering site, since that's what's shown to the customer.
Also, to most everyone: restaurateur!
restaurateur
This must be the Canadian version of French.
he was ordering online
Are you sure? The web page I found for the restaurant doesn't have online ordering.
321 is exactly right. And any lawyer who uses phrases like "exceptionally light sanction" or "to wit" in an email exchange with a non-lawyer (or, really, in pretty much any context) is by definition an asshole.
If Edelman is pulling this shit on Comcast, he's not an asshole, he's a hero. So the identity and behavior of the restauranteur is highly relevant to the question of his assholishness.
321: Are you saying it was wrong of him to turn the restaurant in to whatever the administrative agency was (after they had first not offered a refund, and then offered the wrong amount)? He used a whole lot of verbiage about it, but he's a consumer protection guy, they were violating a law he's an activist about, and being unable to get the amount right when dealing with a clearly unhappy customer suggests that they weren't taking the complaint terribly seriously.
I'd flip over into 'asshole' if I saw him making threats: give me a bigger refund or I'll file a complaint. But filing a complaint seems legit to me, and non-abusively saying what recompense you think you're due (within reason, which I think he was) also seems legit.
He might have been swinging his dick around, but he didn't seem to to be working toward any wrongful goal.
325, 326: Ogged is right, and I made the same mistake. The website is an image and orders come in by phone.
Can we add in "Who was being more of an asshole in the situation"? That is, allowing assholishness to cancel?
I'm not sure that assholishness actually cancels assholishness in that way, but sure--let's stipulate that this is a reasonable way to evaluate the situation. I don't see anything assholish at all about any of the restaurant's responses. I see a guy struggling a bit with English trying to diffuse an asshole bomb of a customer.
325: I don't think so -- doubtful that his squabbling over Groupon coupons and Chinese takeout would be better for drumming up business than his academic work and high profile consulting gigs. Also, he ordered over the phone.
If he wanted to defuse the irate customer "I'm sorry, we'll get the website fixed immediately, here's your $12 (or $4, if he was going to be stiffnecked about the proposed penalty)" is pretty easy -- the difference between that and the actual interaction (we're allowed to put the wrong prices on our website! It's not even our website!) does not seem to me to be explained by poor English.
Restaurant guy came to the US at age 3 and has been media savvy enough to appear in GQ btw.
333: none of the restaurant's responses look obviously false to me. I'm not sure why you're so sure that they were lying.
329 -- Yes. If the restaurant had refused to refund $4 in response to what the guy should have said, then there's a choice to make. You're never supposed to wave your dick around on your own account. And when you do, the cliche 'fool for a client' may become apt.
12/6 1:14 -- he reached out to a professional for legal advice who told him that the disclaimer on the website meant the prices didn't have to be accurate? Do you think that's true? I mean, from the rest of the email chain he isn't represented by an attorney, but that email certainly looks as if he's claiming to be.
12/6 4:36 -- up until this point, he's been talking about 'the website', without questioning that it's his restaurant's website. Edelman successfully made an order by referring to the information on the website. The website has the address and phone number of his location on it. Can "this isn't really our website, it's the website of a restaurant with 'different management, different owner structures" be anything but conscious bullshit?
You're never supposed to wave your dick around on your own account.
He is a consumer advocate, he had noticed a violation of law that affected all the restaurant's customers who relied on the online menu, and he was making an effort to make sure the restaurant was actually going to correct it. This does not clearly to me seem to be to solely 'on his own account'.
If Edelman is pulling this shit on Comcast, he's not an asshole, he's a hero. So the identity and behavior of the restauranteur is highly relevant to the question of his assholishness.
It seems to me like after years of fighting this sort of battle, he'd forgotten that it would be possible for a corporation to portray itself as an underdog and him as a bully.
Yeah, the restaurant starts out acknowledging that the site is out of date, and then later comes up with an elaborate explanation that the site actually has a disclaimer saying that prices may vary by location. The guy also sanctimoniously invokes the proud hardworking mom and pop status of the business. Other than that, totally above board.
'Send me my $12' is different enough from ogged's polite 'I'll check back next week' that this is for his own account. Fool for a lawyer, although there's a species of client who's happy to get fleeced by/for this sort of meaningless aggressiveness, so if this has worked out for him, well, they're getting what they're paying for.
I think 339 nails it.
This thread will be much more awesome if DB turns out to be Edelman's sockpuppet.
334 could also describe Tela Tequila.
232 is pretty believable to me. Before I was offered my current job one of the senior faculty in the department told me he had been looking at my CV and was surprised to see that I had never published a paper, only posted them to arxiv. I then pointed out that every entry in the list he was looking at had a bit before the arxiv number, with the journal name and volume number and whatnot where they were published. Instead of apologizing or otherwise acknowledging his mistake he just took the opportunity to grumble about how young people don't take journals seriously enough.
343: DB first mentioned the issue, which I doubt is something Edelman tries to do.
Picking this apart a bit: I think a charitable version of Edelman's thought process, email by email, was
(1) I will complain about this violation of law, on a subject where I'm a passionate crank.
(2) The response indicates that the restaurant thinks it's no big deal -- they didn't even offer to give me a refund. I will respond making it clear that it is seriously a big deal, including a citation to a law that says they should give me a triple refund.
(3) They offered me a 75% refund. They really don't think it's a big deal. I will turn them into the authorities, tell them I'm doing it, and tell them that they can give me any refund they feel like, but that doesn't change that they're vulnerable to law enforcement as violators of law. Maybe now they'll recognize that it's a big deal law that should not be casually violated.
(4) Oh, now they're saying they don't have to obey the law because they have a disclaimer on their website, and they're bullshitting about having gotten legal advice to that effect. I will call bullshit.
(5) And now they're saying it wasn't their website. I will call bullshit on that as well.
The he's just an asshole version is:
(1) Hey, this restaurant overcharged me. By the power of being a pushy, entitled white guy with a big legal vocabulary, I'm going to bully them into giving me a big refund.
(2) and all subsequent emails. They're not being properly subservient to my authority, so I'm going to keep hassling them until they do, because I demand the respect that is due a Harvard Law Professor.
And it's certainly possible that there's a fair helping of the second thought process in what's going on in his head. But I think the first thought process, where he's mostly just a passionate crank about this stuff, is plausible as his primary motivation because he actually is an activist on exactly this issue, he's not asking for anything that's of substantial benefit to him, he's being a bit of a bully but he really isn't being abusive or nasty about it, and he's not making threats. If you flip any of those -- he doesn't have a record as a consumer protection advocate, he did get personally nasty, he was going for a remedy of substantial value, or he was trying to extort obedience with threats -- I'd be much closer to thinking he was all asshole.
That's why I put the names of the journals in bold.
So, the authorities apparently acted on the complaint: they called the restaurant, which said it had updated the online menu. Then they checked, and sure enough, it had been updated. Finally, they issued a reminder to everyone with a restaurant permit to keep their online pricing accurate.
A much better result than armchair attorney generals getting $12, imo.
"he was making an effort to make sure the restaurant was actually going to correct it. "
No, he did that, plus other stuff. Notifying the authorities and asking once, for one amount, should honestly have been enough.
Also: "And any lawyer who uses phrases like "exceptionally light sanction" or "to wit" in an email exchange with a non-lawyer... is by definition an asshole" is pretty well true. He wasn't doing that on accident he was dickswinging.
345: This is not legal advice, but if you had killed him, no jury would convict.
347 is bullshit at both ends. At (3), they've promised to fix the website and offered a refund in the incorrect amount. Correcting this ends the dispute.
His wish to teach them a lesson is an asshole motive.
349: You honestly don't think that the dickswinging had any effect on their finally getting around to updating the menu? I mean, that sounds to me as if the bullying, dickswinging, email exchange did get the menu updated, thereby bringing the restaurant into compliance with the law Edelman cares about. It didn't get him $12, but I don't think there's much reason to think he gave a damn about the $12.
I mean, maybe he should have relied on the initial response, where they did say they'd update the menu (didn't say when, of course). But what he did wasn't abusive, it didn't get him a dime, and it did get his pet law enforced, to the benefit of the public. So he's a dickswinging bully, but not necessarily a villain.
I'd like to hear how the Edelman defenders address the Groupon complaint.
Well, dickswinging bully == asshole... so.
Which you can read about here, if you didn't see it before.
352: Well, what he's looking for (under the charitable reading), is an indication that they recognize this is a big deal and are going to actually take action. And he clearly took the offer of the short refund as an indication that they weren't seriously paying attention. So he made enough of a fuss that they paid attention, and it worked. No one got hurt, and he didn't get a dime out of it.
There was probably a more winsome way to go about it (there's no way to be sure that stopping after the first email wouldn't have worked), but what he did didn't break any bones.
Holy shit. Reading the Groupon one... this is impressive. He's really just a dick.
So he's a dickswinging bully, but not necessarily a villain.
You're parsing that pretty finely.
354: sure. Was Edelman in the wrong in the Groupon dispute? I thought the prix fixe item was clearly not a "special deal" and read that incident as him trolling a guy who didn't want to admit he was wrong.
360: I wouldn't have thought prix fixe was a special offer either, but saying that he was going to try to get the restaurant's license revoked over it?
359: Well, he seems to me to be doing a good, public-spirited thing (assisting in the enforcement of reasonable laws), in a way that isn't impolite, and isn't out for personal gain. He's bombastic and irritating about it, but there seems like a pretty clean line between irritatingly bombastic crusader and someone who's actually a bad guy. In both cases, I don't seem him doing anything to hurt anyone in a wrongful way.
If a prix fixe isn't an ordinary offer, I don't understand heterosexually. But really, what a fucking tool.
I've read 363 several times now and still don't know what it means.
Again, from the sushi place's perspective, of course Edelman is a huge asshole. As they say, he's trying to make them lose money and threatening to hold the law over their heads. They don't like it. From my point of view, however, the sushi guy is completely full of shit on the terms of the Groupon deal, so I don't understand why there's a need to put myself in his shoes and ask how I'd feel if my small-scale bait-and-switch was being aggressively attacked.
Sure, the insurance industry thought Elliot Spitzer was a huge asshole, and SAC thought the FBI was over the top, but we don't normally privilege the feelings of the dishonest.
If Elliot Spitzer were here, he'd be enforcing the analogy ban.
Yeah, I think its more than colorable that the Groupon should have covered the prix fixe. But the proper remedy is refund for the coupon, not revocation of the business' licenses. I get that they guy like to tell people he looks forward to seeing them crushed and driven before him, while hearing the lamentations of their women.
If Edelman can actual kill Groupon, I'll take back all the bad things I've said about him.
But we do support the dishonest and the unethical *if they're small business owners*. That's the crux here. People love small business owners even though they often pay terribly, employ the most vulnerable workers, don't give healthcare, try to avoid safety laws, etc.
But the proper remedy is refund for the coupon, not revocation of the business' licenses.
And once they restaurant is refusing to do that, which they were? Threatening to report someone to the authorities is a scary threat if the authorities are corrupt or insane, or if they're doing something wrong. The way you take the teeth out of that threat (assuming reasonable authorities, which I see no reason to assume the Boston licensing boards weren't) is to stop acting wrongly. That's the whole point of having authorities, that they're someone to go to when people are flouting the law.
in a way that isn't impolite
Responding to an offer to fix the problem and make you whole* with "no, I'm afraid you need addditional punishment" is pretty damn impolite..
*357's "he clearly took the offer of the short refund as an indication that they weren't seriously paying attention" is crazy. The only way Edelman could have taken "we'll honor the website prices and refund your $3" as a short offer as opposed to a mistake/typo is if he was being an extraordinarily uncharitable asshole.
372 was me.
371: Groupon appears to have given him a refund, per the restaurant's last email.
Yeah, that's the weakest link in the chain. But the reasoning I was suggesting was not that he thought the offer was intentionally short, but that a typo/mistake indicated that they weren't paying attention and therefore were likely not to be treating fixing the website with any particular urgency either.
It's not the restaurant that gives a refund for the coupons, and Edelman got a refund, apparently, from the people who do give them.
A dispute about what a coupon covers isn't going to be an alcohol licensing board issue. Come on.
374: OK, but it seems to me that leaping to the uncharitable conclusion that the restaurant isn't paying as much attention as you deserve and that you must therefore immediately whip out your dick is--wait for it--being an asshole.
375: You don't think? This one, I wouldn't expect them to actually act on it, but a consumer fraud issue generally? I'm too lazy to look it up, but I'd expect an alcohol license to be contingent on good character/honesty generally.
And I let 'refund for the coupon' go by, but of course that's not a complete remedy, if what you're concerned about is false advertising, which this guy is. If ten people buy the coupon relying on the false advertising, they're not all going to ask for a refund -- a refund only to the customers that make a fuss leaves the business profiting from the false advertising. The remedy is either to honor the coupon for all customers, refund it for all customers, or fix the advertising.
376: The alternative to getting more intense and aggressive about it was to do nothing, and very likely leave the restaurant in non-compliance with the law. He's a crusader, who cares about compliance. So he wrote some more aggressive emails. That didn't do anyone any harm whatsoever, didn't insult anyone personally, and plausibly did a fair amount of good (that is, the fact that the whole thing blew up seems to have inspired the Brookline authorities to pressure restaurants under their control generally to get into compliance. That looks like successful activism to me.)
LB, read the facts of this gross miscarriage of justice: http://www.dccourts.gov/internet/documents/07-CV-872.PDF
Yes, the guy who wanted $67 million dollars for his pants is a nutcase. Edelman seems very different to me.
And a refund wouldn't make them whole if they bought the Groupon to use for the prix fixe menu, schlepped to the restaurant, and then had to pay with dollars (or at best found out before ordering and left). I'm prepared to believe Edelman was pure-hearted and right in both of these cases, but going about things the way he did is the mark of an asshole (in the restaurant case for sure; seeing only the tail end of the groupon case it's harder to know, but serious asshole presumption).
Yeah, but he got 0. While the cleaners clearly lost his pants.
Wait. I just figured out 363 must have had something to do with mispronouncing "prix".
A thousand years ago when I was an undergrad, a bar in Annapolis had an all-you-can-eat oyster happy hour with $1 domestic beers. I looked over the beer menu and asked them where their house beer was made "New York." OK, and I ordered one of those (over and over and over and over). The bill comes and I see I am charged $5 a beer and not $1. What?! "Oh well, we count our beer as an import." Um, no. And I kicked up a fuss, that didn't include suing anyone. More like, "Are you fucking kidding me?" The manager fixed the bill, but sternly warned me, "Don't try this again!" Well, put on your menu that your beer is excluded! Anyway, all of this to say, I can be a total pain in the ass, and generally get my way, but it doesn't involve yelling about suing anyone or getting their liquor license pulled.
378: The alternative was to say "OK, thanks, look forward to seeing the refund on my credit card statement and seeing the website updated promptly." If those two things happen, hooray justice. If not, then you can decide whether the situation is outrageous enough to get more intense and aggressive. "Didn't do any harm" is not a defense to a charge of being an asshole, nor is "did a fair amount of good". Nobody's saying he shouldn't have made an effort to get the restaurant into compliance (at least I'm not). The efforts he actually made were obnoxious and disproportionate and almost certainly unnecessary to achieve his goal. The fact that he's a crusader may explain it but it doesn't make him not an asshole.
The way you handled it, someone who's less willing to kick up a fuss still gets cheated (not your fault, or your responsibility, of course). If someone like Edelman actually goes, or credibly threatens to go, to the authorities, there's a better chance that meek people don't have to pay extra.
384 is kind of interesting, insofar as some people use "domestic" to mean "the mass-produced shit in bottles" as opposed to "brewed in America."
Meek people mostly eat at national chain restaurants.
387: Give me some credit! I told them they needed to change it! I think they did. They were definitely worried that this was a ruse to be repeated by smartie-pants SLAC students to be repeated.
385: I can't establish that he's not an asshole, but based on the two incidents I've seen reported, I'm not opposed to his continuing to be that kind of asshole. I actually do think that doing substantive good should be regarded as an offset against having bad manners. (To a degree. If he were being personally abusive, I'd start feeling differently pretty fast.)
390: Your telling them to change it only has any effect if they think they're at risk of some kind of enforcement. If you implicitly invoked that enough to get compliance, you did what Edelman does. If you didn't, then nothing changed.
At the very least he's a social enforcer of norms (whether or not they affect him). That's almost certain to make someone look like an asshole in some cases, especially if it's a basic character trait. But it's also a necessity to have that to have a remotely functioning society, so I'm not sure it's safe to go as far as to say he's an asshole. He's certainly willing to come off as one to others, though.
392: You really see no difference between essentially saying, "Continue down this path and you will have other people here confused about their bill and complaining" and dickswinging about lawsuits and HBS and treble damages and liquor licenses? I am tempted to use an analogy but I won't.
Okay, if it's about 'other people will also complain', we're plausibly in the world where the meek continue to be overcharged. It really isn't your responsibility to fix that, but you have to recognize that you're not fixing that, and Edelman is trying to.
If you're implicitly saying "You have to stop doing this or you will get in trouble", that protects the meek, then you're implicitly making all the same threats Edelman is. At which point you're very likely smoother about it, but I don't think that puts him beyond the pale.
I think part of the problem here is that asshole/not-asshole is a false dichotomy. I like him and I think that usually his heart is in the right place and usually he's fighting people who are worse assholes than himself. That said, if I were to list the top 5 most asshole-y remarks I've ever heard someone say, a comment of his would make the top 5. I'm pretty confident that he's more of an asshole than the median person and less of an asshole than the median Harvard Business School professor. I'm also pretty confident he's more of an asshole than the business owners in the groupon situation, but quite likely less of an asshole than the owner who got this all in the news in the first place.
Your telling them to change it only has any effect if they think they're at risk of some kind of enforcement.
That's only right if you are in fact dealing with a scam rather than a mixup. Which you might be, and if so getting more aggressive might make sense. But maybe it really just didn't occur to the bar that people were expecting its house beer for a dollar, and maybe they fixed the misunderstanding when they became aware of it because they weren't trying to dupe anybody. There's probably no reason to give e.g. Comcast the benefit of the doubt, but when you're dealing with a small business that is hardly taking in money hand over fist* through its deception/mistake, you don't have to go straight for the jugular.
*while the restaurant was clearly in the wrong, even if it was a deliberate scam, it was not really profiting to the tune of $1 per dish, it was profiting to the tune of $1 per dish ordered off the website menu that wouldn't have been ordered had the customer known the correct price. That's not nothing but maybe not the most cunningly evil plan for unjust enrichment I've ever encountered.
I'm not will to concede that Edelman is succeeding at what he is trying to do. In my experience, the people who run small restaurants (and big ones) are very sensitive to consumer complaints. Especially now that everybody can bitch on the internet. The analogy to insurance mentioned above was especially bad because there are usually so many more options. Even meek people, if they feel cheated by a restaurant, tend to go elsewhere and tell their friends why. On the other hand, threatening to bring down the full power of the state for $4 can't help but hurt public support for regulations on businesses, including those regulations that are more vital.
"Straight for the jugular" meaning "using bombastic rhetoric in a way that does no actual harm."
Your telling them to change it only has any effect if they think they're at risk of some kind of enforcement.
In New York, no one has a conscience or makes an honest mistake. I think the "did he act like an asshole" argument has been conceded, and we're on to "was it worth it?" The important thing is that we keep arguing.
...and less of an asshole than the median Harvard Business School professor
I'm willing to concede that despite not ever having met a single one in my life.
Honestly, he's the only HBS prof I know, but extrapolating from people at other business schools and people at Harvard...
399: No, meaning "trying to scare the shit out of someone who maybe doesn't need to have the shit scared out of him to do the right thing, because he did not respond in precisely the deferential manner you expected of him."
396 should have been posted by John Oh, Near Boston.
I'm coming around to LB's position here more and more. It's clear he was violating all sorts of general social norms in raising a huge fuss about something really small, blustering and acting like it was a really huge deal and so on. But (and I'd trust someone who does the exact job that he does*) that's often the only way to actually get the more reasonable effect you want - and not just in the case of large corporate entities. His intention** could easily have been to be really, really aggressive in a way that would be memorable to the guy in order to frighten him off from these penny-ante scams in the future.
I would totally believe that a restaurant owner would set up a scam where they would "innocently" collect an extra buck here or there from some percentage of their customers. Profit margins on restaurants are not exactly huge and an extra $4 or $5 dollars each on say one third of your orders would be pretty tempting for a lot of them, I think. It depends on the local market for customers though: if there are a few similar restaurants around, and they all do a decent amount of takeout business on the side having prices that are (apparently) just one notch below everyone else's could be enough to justify this sort of low level screwing around.
*Of course, there are certain groups of people who would feel inclined and, especially, comfortable playing the socially-useful-asshole role and one of them is, well, the assholes.
**Or possibly just his basic habits which are kind of generally justified in these lights but it's not like he sits down and thinks things through in these terms each time.
400: Are we assuming that Edelman's meanness is what made the restaurant start lying? And that when the bartender told Oudemia "don't try that again" meant, "Our bad, we'll get it fixed"? Not every business that makes a systematic error in their own favor is pulling something, but it's not an unreasonable thing to guess.
397: Yes, exactly. I was under no impression that any great con was being run. They were dopily under the impression that their action made sense. It didn't and they were made aware this would be a continuing problem and they fixed it.
Also on the top 5 list of asshole comments, when our residential advisor who was a HBS student and a former Gov. W speechwriter was trying to come up with something poignant to say about how no matter how tough being a freshmen was it'd be worth it, could only come up with "You'll all be in the top 5% of income earners nationwide." So I'm also using that in my extrapolations. Though almost certainly the HBS professors are less of assholes than the students.
To be completely fair, I'm not all that far off from 391. And I could just about squint at this whole thing and see it as maybe kinda not profoundly assholish had it not been for the demand for $12 in treble damages. But there's just no way that demand contributes meaningfully to Edelman's justified goal of getting the restaurant to change its practices, it's 100% pure fuck you.
There should be a list somewhere of "things only people involved in internet arguments believe." The belief that this guy was not an asshole would certainly be one of them. The lengthiest categories are probably positions on relationships and parenting.
it's not an unreasonable thing to guess
I will concede the almost trivially true "not unreasonable to guess." I think I'm repeating myself now, but it's good to keep in mind that people running restaurants and bars are more scammed against than scamming. They have people trying to wrangle free/cheap stuff from them all the time on utter bullshit grounds. They're not going to extend charity to someone who seems to be trying to do that.
407: Bars can get kind of Geertzian in their menus.
Part of it is that on the internet it's totally OK to pose (or maybe be?) an Aspbergery* logic robot who is acting mechanically in the service of some greater good.
*unfair and probably offensive to those who actually have Aspbergers, but I can't think of a better word.
"things only people involved in internet arguments believe."
This is probably a more fair category than the category of "things only people on Unfogged claim to believe" that I have in my head.
There should be a list somewhere of "things only people involved in internet arguments believe." The belief that this guy was not an asshole would certainly be one of them.
Oh, no, there are plenty of lawyers outside the internet who would think he was acting normally.
I think I'm repeating myself now, but it's good to keep in mind that people running restaurants and bars are more scammed against than scamming. They have people trying to wrangle free/cheap stuff from them all the time on utter bullshit grounds.
Yeah, that's a good point.
*unfair and probably offensive to those who actually have Aspbergers, but I can't think of a better word.
"Homo economicus"
To my way of thinking, if you aren't willing to swallow a bit of glass, you should just pay for your meal.
12/6 1:14 -- he reached out to a professional for legal advice who told him that the disclaimer on the website meant the prices didn't have to be accurate? Do you think that's true? I mean, from the rest of the email chain he isn't represented by an attorney, but that email certainly looks as if he's claiming to be.
I don't see any reason to think it's not true. He doesn't claim to be "represented by an attorney", he claims he "reached out to a professional on legal advise". To me that sounds like he called his cousin Vinny, who went to law school, and Vinny said "the guy's acting like an asshole, you've got a disclaimer on your website that says the prices can change, that seems like it should be fine. Tell him to go away."
12/6 4:36 -- up until this point, he's been talking about 'the website', without questioning that it's his restaurant's website. Edelman successfully made an order by referring to the information on the website. The website has the address and phone number of his location on it. Can "this isn't really our website, it's the website of a restaurant with 'different management, different owner structures" be anything but conscious bullshit?
This is the first time the owner has offered an extended explanation. The fact that he referred to it as "our website" previously isn't damning; it's not a deposition and he wasn't being advised by counsel. For all practical purposes it *is* his restaurant's website--his website is down and customers call and order from the other website. But it's a website owned and hosted by the other location. I assume there is some overlapping ownership and a joint menu that has the addresses and phone numbers of both locations on it. And obviously he was able to ultimately get the menu updated. But none of this looks dishonest. His point is clearly just an exasperated "look, it's not like I'm in charge of the website--it's controlled out of our other location; I'm sorry it's out of date, we'll have them fix it; why are you being such a raging asshole?"
Speaking of consumer protection, this week I am mailing out 1.2 million letters or emails telling people that they just found five dollars or a bit more. They can also choose a free one day car rental. If you happen to get one of these letters, PLEASE take ten seconds to go on line to collect your refund. The letter is not a scam. You really were overcharged on a car rental at a Nevada airport. Also, if not enough people fill out the form, I may not get paid.
I can believe that restaurants are much scammed against, but that makes it easier to believe that they're therefore hoping to run scams themselves.
I don't think it's a homo economicus thing. For me personally it's that I feel no compulsion to identify with these restaurant managers at all (and a big angle on the Sichuan Garden thing was that the manager was a humble hardworking immigrant -- quite frankly as a hardworking immigrant myself I found Duan bringing this up in his second email equivalent to an admission of guilt, but YMMV) and then everyone seems so sure it's black and white that I get suckered into trolling on the topic.
409: the treble damages create some small amount of pain for the manager, without which they are better off cheating than being honest. Yes, it's a fuck you, but it's a fuck you to someone who is trying to cheat you. Is it disproportionate? No, it's actually exactly proportionate! If the original cheating is no big deal, then three no big deals is still not a big deal. Is it normal? No, but why is not being normal a bigger crime than trying to rip people off?
1.2 million * $5 * 30% contingency fee = woot!
Aspbergers have a dangerous meaty bite.
the treble damages create some small amount of pain for the manager, without which they are better off cheating than being honest
No, $12 is not meaningfully more pain than $4 when all Edelman is demanding is his treble damages. If they were cheating, they would remain better off cheating--only a demand for classwide statutory damages would change the calculus and while Edelman was hinting at that he wasn't demanding it. And I'm not suggesting it's a "big deal", I'm suggesting it's an asshole move.
why is not being normal a bigger crime than trying to rip people off?
Setting aside the question begging, why are you trying to make this a contest? Edelman's goal may have been just but there's a non-asshole way of achieving it and an asshole way of achieving it. If you pick the latter for no good reason, that makes you an asshole.
He's well into the big ice cube trend.
He garnished with fog. I just made a donation to the Edelman fund. DB, let me know if you got it.
425: got as far as "garnish with fog" before concluding that Edelman in fact went far too easy on the guy.
I didn't have the attention span to watch it to the end. I don't know what that means.
Wait, so now Edelman should have initiated a goddamned class action lawsuit if he really cared? The guy asked for 8 bucks and everyone agreed that this was "going to war" and it made national news.
I agree that it's weird for Edelman to be applying the logic of class action lawsuits to his own individual case, but I view that as his attempt to maintain proportion. Yes, weird and unusual, but with its own reasonable logic. And the restaurant managers clearly didn't view treble damages for an individual as no big deal, they found it horribly unpleasant and impossible to comply with.
There's a new bar near us where all they serve you is the fog in a glass. I believe earl grey tea fog. For $8.
432: no, my point is that demanding $12 did nothing at all to advance his legitimate goal, and was therefore nothing but an asshole move.
427: thanks! Edelman should have enough money to hire someone else to help troll on his behalf now (especially when you toss in the Groupon refund cash).
A donation as been made in your name to the Human Fund.
435: in the Sichuan Garden case, I don't see how the restaurant bothers to change the menu without him being an asshole about it.
I guess I am conceding that he is being an asshole here, but a good one.
438: so wait a couple days and check, if it hasn't changed, be an asshole then.. He had no good reason to think it wouldn't be fixed at the point he started being a petulant little shit, he just lashed out and decided that he was going to teach the guy a lesson rather than just educate him. That was a seriously obnoxious move.
Hey, I just remembered that I was in a similar situation a few years ago. I ordered some kids' straws from a third-party seller on Amazon and when they arrived, the package said "CONTAINS LEAD." I couldn't believe it. Here's what I sent them, while I simultaneously made a complaint to Amazon.
1) These just arrived, and the packaging clearly notes that these straws contain lead. What are you doing selling drinking straws that contain lead?
2) Thanks for the refund, but I'm more interested in making sure that these aren't sold to anyone else. I'm willing to complain to a consumer protection agency, or the media, but would prefer not to. Please remove these items. They're something that might be bought for children, intended to go in their mouths, and they contain lead. That's not acceptable.
3) I've sent one previous message about this, but received no response. These drinking straws contain lead. It's incredible that you continue to sell these. I've already had my money refunded, but I'd really like to see these removed from sale.
At that point they were removed, whether because of my emails to them, or to Amazon, or some other reason, I don't know. Clearly on the assholish side from me, complete with threats, but selling leaded straws to children is a slightly worse sin than overcharging the residents of Brookline for Chinese food.
I like that I can't tell if 434 is a joke or not.
440: Sounds like you may have ordered from Mainway Toys.
Actually, TrueTiger. Are any Chinese not scamming the good American people?
Wow, you guys got right on top of this one. Several months later. And LB was clearly suffering from some kind of online argument withdrawal.
It's good to know that nothing significant could ever change for millions of people based on legal action prompted by debatable njuries of a few dollars to several individuals.
|| In more important news, the bid to outlaw yoga pants has failed in our lege. And men can still take off their shirts in public. |>
The package said "contains lead" precisely to let you know what you should or shouldn't do with the novelty kids' straws. If you put them in your kids' mouths, that's on you. They were being honest, not defrauding you with deceptive menu practices unlike the Chinese restaurant owners.*
*I have actually worked on the plaintiffs' side of a deceptive menu case, unlike the rest of you all talk no action losers.
448 contains lead, so to be safe I didn't read it.
Look, can we agree that the restauranteur is as bent as a $9 bill and ought to go to jail, and Edelman is a big old meanie who should lose tenure. That seems to satisfy all parties.
440: I know lead probably isn't Halal, but stop forcing Sharia law on the rest of us.
The package said "contains lead," but the online listing did not.
Actually, I'm quite willing to support any asshole behavior in the case mentioned in 440.
That is, any asshole behavior to get them to stop selling the item, not the asshole behavior of selling kiddie toys that contain lead, labeling or no.
439: yeah, Edelman was not being perfectly charitable, which is somewhat jerkish. This email exchange will not appear in the next edition of How to Win Friends and Influence People.
The media coverage was not about an instance of someone being uncharitable to somebody who may or may not have deserved it, however. The headlines basically suggested that Edelman had to wait a bit long for his food and responded by getting the restaurant closed over some obscure regulation about how much red can appear on a menu. Then he got the guy's parents deported. Because don't fuck with HBS.
By the time Edelman violates all norms of human decency by asking for 12 bucks, it has been established that the restaurant had been aware of the mismatch between online prices and actual prices for a long time, which suggests that merely being aware of the issue is not sufficient to cause action. The restaurant has also not offered him a refund, showing that they are quite happy to profit from the discrepancy. After Edelman asks for 12 bucks, Duan replies by saying that they are a hardworking mom and pop operation and that they take pride in their food. I personally find this incredibly disingenuous (and I should know) but as I said before YMMV. The point is that there are a number of signs indicating that the restaurant is not fully deserving of charity, which makes the professor's behavior non-outrageous, if not exactly laudable.
The other point is that Benjamin Edelman is the smartest, kindest, bravest person I have ever met. (Just kidding: we have never met, I get my marching orders over email.)
What I don't understand is why so many of you keep suggesting that Edelman had to be an asshole about this in order to get results. That just doesn't seem even arguably credible. His first email is fine, and his second email is basically perfect right up until his ridiculous demand for a $12 refund. If his second email had just left that out--or even better replaced it with an explanation that they could technically be liable for triple refunds to all customers who got overcharged (e.g., under the law they could owe him $12, not just the $4 discrepancy)--no one would be criticizing him. It wouldn't even be bad if he added "I don't mean to sound like a jerk, but this is actually a pet issue of mine, so please be sure to get this corrected asap or I'll feel forced to report the violation to applicable authorities."
(It also might not have hurt if he'd added "By the way, the food was good!" somewhere in there. But that may be asking too much.)
If they don't take corrective action in response to this, then feel free to report the violation. Same results, and no one would be calling him an entitled asshole.
456: no, he didn't have to be a jerk, that is true. But he also doesn't need to apologize and act all sheepish for trying to push the restaurant to follow the law. Do you think it would have helped if he had some emoticons in his email? ;)
I don't think he necessarily had to be an asshole to do what he did; you're right that someone who was smoother could have done exactly the same thing more politely. (And John Harvard attests from personal knowledge that he is kind of an asshole.) I just think he was doing something that is arguably a good thing, without being personally abusive, and so if he was kind of an asshole about it, it indicates that he has an unfortunate way of interacting with people but I wouldn't call him a bad person or think that his misconduct is terribly important.
if he was kind of an asshole about it, it indicates that he has an unfortunate way of interacting with people but I wouldn't call him a bad person or think that his misconduct is terribly important
Talk about shifting the goalposts.
Anyway, back when I triggered this derail 250 cpmments ago, I was simply trying to make the point that the media slanted this story to generate outrage. If you think Edelman asking for 8 bucks from a restaurant that is systematically overcharging people is a story worthy of national outrage, that's fine, I clearly can't change your mind about anything.
I have experienced multiple scenarios where being polite and friendly didn't get me anywhere at all, but being angry and talking about laws and lawyers resulted in meaningful action. One of the situations where this has happened repeatedly is doctors and hospitals refusing to provide qualified interpreters. At this point, it has happened so many times that I no longer give a new doctor the benefit of the doubt: I do not start off friendly and polite, I start off angry and making threats about laws and lawyers. This probably means I come off as a jerk, because it's not the current doctor's fault that all the previous doctors were shitheads, but I don't really care- the issue is clearly systemic and it is their responsibility to know and follow the law.
I can imagine that if Edelman is a person who has had similar kinds of conversations with many business owners previously, he has come to the conclusion that being friendly and polite might get you a vague promise to fix the menu but doesn't result in actual change. I would understand, in this case, if he started skipping the softball intro as useless- the issue is clearly systemic and it is their responsibility to know and follow the law.
If you think so, sure. Not sure where you think I had them before, or on what basis.
This email exchange will not appear in the next edition of How to Win Friends and Influence People.
More to the point, it will also not appear in the next edition of "Getting to Yes"
462 to 459. And 461 makes perfect sense to me: the biggest thing that makes Edelman look like a jerk (other than bombastic word choices) is that he doesn't take the initial email saying that they'll get the website fixed at face value. (Sort of the same thing Oudemia is talking about, where she's confident that pointing out the issue with the beer menu got it fixed, because it was an honest mistake.) If he's got experience with this sort of interaction that makes him systematically distrust offhanded assurances like that, it'd go a long way to explain the rest of his communications.
464: It not only did get to yes (the menu was fixed), the publicity it created got institutional actors to do something Edelman wanted (more pressure on restaurants generally to comply). Edelman's a national scandal as being a jerk, but if consumer protection on this issue is what he cares about more than what people think of his manners, you can't fault his tactics.
464: But Edelman is not trying to arrange a mutually beneficial solutuon, he's trying to get the restaurant to follow the fucking law.
Yeah, from the restaurant manager's perspective, this is a negotation over money. Why do we give a shit about what they think again?
461.1 makes sense, but I don't agree with the extension to 461.2. Generally speaking, I think that if you treat a restaurant price being off by a dollar or a Groupon missing a caveat with the same seriousness that you treat a patient being unable to communicate with a doctor, there is vanishingly little chance that you won't come across as an asshole.
Somewhat Off-topic, but this made me think of a situation where I didn't have power and was unable to enforce a right.
I asked for an ergonomic chair and a foot stool at a job, because I was getting a lot of pain from the set up which was an ancient desk from the 50's. My supervisor was supportive, but her boss (herself an occupational therapist working for the EOHHS) said that she had never heard of anyone getting an occupational assessment. I had a letter from my PCP requesting one. My supervisor wasn't about to fight for me, and nobody was going to look anything up, because they'd been there forever and they all knew "policy."
In a lot of places, you just ask nicely and they get you the assessment and a proper chair. But, if there's any resistance at all, it's hard not to come off as a legalistic asshole and get labeled a troublemaker.
I'm pretty sure that when I've tried to stand up for myself in situations like that, I've been pretty scared and, as a consequence of that, I sounded, not exactly defensive, but irritating.
462: really?
***
200: That guy fighting over the $4 was a huge asshole regardless.
Posted by: Moby Hick
200: no, not really.
Posted by: Disingenuous Bastard
203: Nope. Huge asshole.
Posted by: Moby Hick
208: Really, he wasn't an asshole. Or if you think he's an asshole, it's simply because you were told that a Harvard professor went to war with an Asian immigrant over $4 through some obscure legal loophole, which sounds like the very Platonic ideal of assholishness, and who wants to defend that? Even if he was 100% right, he's gotta be an asshole, right?
Posted by: Disingenuous Bastard
217: I was wavering on this one -- I'm not dead sure that he isn't an asshole, but DB's reading of the situation isn't obviously wrong to me.
Posted by: LizardBreath
219: Except that I don't remember the wording of any of his actual emails, and so don't have any opinion on whether they show that he's an asshole.
Posted by: LizardBreath
229: The emails just don't seem that bad to me.
Posted by: LizardBreath
464 is a joke--Edelmen is in the Negotiation, blah and whatever department of the HBS, and GTY was generated by folks at H (though not BS) and deprecates the use of hardball tactics.
A barrage of lawspeak by a lawyer at a non-lawyer without reallly solid basis is a jerk move.
242: Me: (I admit that my sense of the chances that he is an asshole goes way up after reading the emails -- going full-scale lawyer on a small business like this doesn't necessarily make you an asshole, but it it's the kind of thing an asshole is more likely to do -- but not to certainty.)
284: Me: Anything assholish I see in the emails is all the tone.
302: Me: Another way to put it is that while I'm sure the professor is a crank, and easily might be an asshole,
353: Me. So he's a dickswinging bully, but not necessarily a villain.
I don't think I'm changing my position significantly here. If you do, I can't argue with you. (Who am I kidding. Of course I can argue. Indefinitely, about anything. I am the most easily baited person I know.)
I agree with 468, but also the thing that makes me jump straight to fury isn't that it's a big crucial important thing, but that I'm so tired of having the same conversation over and over. I absolutely overreact from being on a hair trigger about it now, because I'm bringing so much baggage to each new interaction.
I also don't think the menu being off is as important (or important at all, really- this isn't something I would probably even notice), but I still can understand the emotional reaction of jumping way into the middle of a fight based on previous interactions.
And also I am on the side of people who think being polite wouldn't have accomplished anything, but also on the side of people who think he (and I) should have tried harder to be polite first anyway, because it's nicer.
To 464 and 466.
I actually think we've converged on a solution mentioned earlier--he's a jerk but he was also correct on the merits to both insist and notify authorities.
The think about both 458 and 478 is that we're not "converging on a solution"; you are now conceding the point that Edelman's critics have been hammering all along in this thread. (See CC, way back in 220: "You can be an asshole even when you're technically in the right.") No one is suggesting that helping to enforce consumer protection laws is a bad thing to do. We are just saying that Edelman was personally being a huge asshole in the way that he went about it.
Or I might be wrong. My menus are all fully up to date, though.
If he's got experience with this sort of interaction that makes him systematically distrust offhanded assurances like that, it'd go a long way to explain the rest of his communications.
I can imagine that, too, in the abstract, but it still doesn't explain what he actually did. Had he just opened with "you lying bastards better fix the website tomorrow or I'm going to the authorities/filing suit", I would maybe think, "wow, asshole, but perhaps understandable if past experience gave him reason to think being friendly won't work". But demanding $12 (to say nothing of his later suggestion that they should give him half his check back to thank him for the valuable lesson he was teaching them) isn't part of a game of hardball, it's being a dick.
I'd like to see Ben Affleck and Matt Damon stage a reading of the emails, as their Good Will Hunting characters.
I absolutely overreact from being on a hair trigger about it now, because I'm bringing so much baggage to each new interaction.
Right. But what makes Edelman overreact is something he can entirely avoid at his own discretion.
483 was meant to jokingly imply that asshole words on paper might seem perfectly normal when someone says them in a Boston accent.
I basically agree with CharleyCarp's "You can be an asshole even when you're technically in the right" summary from 220, but have avoided weighing in so far because this whole thing is giving me unpleasant flashbacks to the time last year when a Mexican restaurant in Georgetown charged my debit card $800 for a $40 meal, totally clearing out my bank account three days after the actual meal. That "negotiation" went very quickly to threats of calling the police, but my bank ultimately refunded the money, and it became their problem.
I'm sure that part of my reaction to this is that my Midwestern-honed sense of assholeness is calibrated differently than that of someone who grew up where being an asshole is normal, like Boston.
a Mexican restaurant in Georgetown charged my debit card $800 for a $40 meal
I'm assuming this is the Texas Georgetown?
So OK it seems that we all agree that Edelman was being a dick, comity. My question now is why was this worthy of national outrage? If he was being a dick to an innocent child dying of cancer, that seems really terrible. If he was going up to random Asian-Americans and saying "Give me 10 bucks or I'll report you to the immigration authorities," that seems incredibly shitty. If he murdered the restaurant manager, or hacked into his bank account, or got a racist hate group to harass him, or used his law enforcement connections to get a SWAT team sent to the guy's house, or contacted someone's kids and pestered them, yeah, that's totally beyond the pale.
But what happened was that he got overcharged, the restaurant gave multiple signs that they didn't really care, and then he asked for 12 bucks, then 4 bucks, then whatever the guy wanted to give him, then 25 bucks, then whatever.
I understand that all the Harvard grads and lawyers in the crowd spend a lot of time hiding their assholishness from everyone, so this behavior triggers anxiety attacks that they will be rounded up and sent to the gulag as they deserve, but why would anyone else really care?
487: I had a real down the rabbit hole moment with a bank when I deposited a $500 check from a friend and the bank, several days after the deposit, bounced the check. Said friend was not in a position to bounce checks and also my BFF so gave me a bank statement showing that the check had in fact cleared the account. I took this to the bank and was told, "No, it bounced. Sorry." "No, it didn't, look." "OK, we'll do an investigation." Investigation: "It bounced." Me: "I have a statement from friend's bank right here. It cleared. Debited from account. Lotsa money there. Check numbers the same. Here is a picture of the check." "No, we did an investigation." Me: Head explodes scanners style in bank. Other bank employee: Come over to my desk. I will put the money back in your account. (I later get the impression from follow up phone calls from the bank that a bank employee cleared a bad $500 check into someone's account and "bounced" mine. It seemed perhaps to be intentional, as in, bank employee helping out friend on one side or the other of the bad check.)
why would anyone else really care?
In a broad sense, there's no reason anyone should care, and you're right that it only became a national story is because it was framed that way for clickbait headlines.
In a narrower sense, we "care" (in the sense that we are arguing about this) because establishing norms for what is and what isn't socially acceptable behavior is important, and there were some people on this very blog (ahem) who were defending this guy's behavior, and explicitly claiming that it was not assholish behavior. With that point now conceded, as it seems like it has been, there is no reason to care.
489: Nope, we were in DC for eight months.
491: Ugh. That reminds of another lovely DC-area customer-service experience, when I called our landline/internet provider with a question about our bill, and literally every rep I talked to insisted that the account didn't exist. I was calling from the landline they provided, which was in turn attached to a modem with their name on it.
In contrast, 491 is the sort of situation where it would be totally appropriate for Edelman to start strangling people with his cock.
"My question now is why was this worthy of national outrage?"
Was there national outrage? I remember seeing it and certainly the Boston story struck me as a low-bore human interest/news of the weird-type thing.
"No, we did an investigation" is brilliantly monstrous in the spirit of Kafka.
OK. In my defense, my position is a bit extreme because it seemed to me that at least 97% of the people discussing this on social media were convinced that he was history's greatest monster (there were plenty of people who proudly declared their need to go dine at this restaurant to show support for their slightly shady business practices). The facts that the restaurant was actually mischarging its customers, that Edelman was actually a genuine consumer advocate, and that Edelman was correct that the refund of a single customer's money doesn't actually set things right were seriously downplayed. It's true that asking for personal punitive damages doesn't do much for the greater good either, but it's basically being a dick to someone who deserves it. We are not all innocent small business owners scheming for a dollar wherever we can find it, so no special need to stand in solidarity.
495: not really national outrage, it was mostly Boston.com but it did pick up coverage in Slate, etc. and was framed in a way so that everyone could quickly chime in with "Gee, what an entitled asshole, those Harvard guys think they're better than everyone, I feel bad for the poor innocent restaurant man who was being picked on."
Okay, well, I don't know what to tell you. People on the internet were wrong?
Yeah, what can I say, this one just pushed all my buttons.
497, 498: Right, that's the basis on which I've been agreeing with you -- that all the coverage of it I saw was "Asshole Harvard Professor Goes Nuclear On Poor Struggling Restaurant Over Bullshit Tiny Complaint," and that seems to me to be both a bad representation of the facts, and the result of some really deft media management from the restaurant. If the headlines were "Crusading Consumer Protection Advocate Is A Real Jerk About How He Interacts With Violators Of His Pet Laws", that'd be pretty fair.
I think the media also really underplayed what a jerk the restaurant owner was here too. He's not only treating his customers badly, breaking the law, and acting weasely about it when caught, he follows it up with trying to destroy the career of the person who had the gall to point out that he was ripping people off and breaking the law! He's obviously a huge asshole too! (Note Edelman, despite being an associate prof is not tenured, because Harvard.)
In a narrower sense, we "care" (in the sense that we are arguing about this) because establishing norms for what is and what isn't socially acceptable behavior is important, and there were some people on this very blog (ahem) who were defending this guy's behavior, and explicitly claiming that it was not assholish behavior.
Also, in terms of establishing social norms? I'm not sure that I want this guy to be socially unacceptable. He's not being nice, but he does seem to be doing good. Ideally, he'd be a nice person who does good. But taking this guy as a whole, I think there's a good chance that I want him to keep on keeping on with his cranky self, rather than staying out of advocacy because he doesn't have the people skills to be pleasant about it.
Unlike a lot of academics, his website makes it really easy to see everything he's doing in one place. I highly recommend checking it out. For example, on the first page there's his work on airlines lying about their fuel surcharge being a "tax." Lots of documentation, complaints filed, BA got fined 250K, etc.
Relatedly, right now there's an issue that fuel prices are dropping, but the airlines aren't going to drop their fuel surcharges (because the point of fuel surcharges is to collude to set a minimum price for trans-oceanic flights and to rip people off in various ways, none of which has anything to do with the actual fuel prices). This is blatantly illegal, but companies just ignore the law all the time. Edelman is the person most likely to actually do something about this. But this brouhaha means he's less likely to be successful since he's now a national punchline because of the asshole bartender guy.
503: I think I've mentioned this before, but I doubt that he's doing good overall. There must be some number of owner/managers he's scaring into checking for menu/advertising accuracy, but there are downsides. He's also training some number of them to treat every customer complaint as a potential legal battle plus he's a walking advertisement for reasons why people hate "big government." If it becomes common for people to bring the same types of legal maneuvers and threats that they would use against a giant corporation into small matters with small businesses, the end result will almost certainly be an overall discrediting of the idea that businesses should be regulated. In the end, politics really is just a big popularity contest.
But this brouhaha means he's less likely to be successful since he's now a national punchline because of the asshole bartender guy.
Good lord.
505 before I read 504. When I said "I doubt he's doing good overall," I was referring specifically to his restaurant crusade.
503: I'm perfectly okay with "Sure, he's a huge asshole, but it's important that there be a few assholes out there working aggressively on the side of good. You take the good with the bad; he gets results."
I'm not okay with "Really, he's not an asshole."
Edelman is the person most likely to actually do something about this.
Oh get a grip. There are legions of very good plaintiffs' attorneys out there who have every incentive in the world to pursue the kinds of things you're talking about. Edelman isn't even a rounding error, much less the world's only hope for consumer protection.
I literally cannot believe the word 'omelet' isn't spelled 'omelette'. That makes no sense.
510 is relevant because 508.1 was originally going to include "you can't make an omelette without breaking a few eggs", until I gave up because I couldn't get the spelling right.
505: Hard to tell. I'm unconvinced, or maybe I think the background attitude you're talking about is something to be pushed back aggressively against. Regulation is important (says the woman who spends her days representing regulators). If we don't trust regulatory authorities, that's a huge problem that has to be fixed. If we do trust them, which I do, mostly, after spending a fair amount of time working with them behind the scenes, threatening to turn someone in to a regulatory authority is either an empty threat (if they're not doing anything wrong), or an actively good thing to do (if they are): it's very unlikely to be an unjust injury.
I'm fairly certain that "omelette" is an acceptable spelling.
Not according to whatever spell checker is running in my browser.
512: But he's not actually a regulatory authority or he is not simply turning somebody in to a regulatory authority. He's using the regulatory authority as a threat in his argument against someone who is almost certainly not as familiar with the technical details of the law. It's a very good way to convince somebody that regulation is bad.
And, of course, threatening to turn somebody into a regulatory authority isn't an empty threat even if they are doing nothing wrong. Even with the most efficient and honest regulatory authority in the world, it's going to take a huge chunk out of your day or a chunk of money to fix an incorrect accusation.
509: And at some point they would need to do put together documentation of what exactly they were doing wrong and for how long, and if that involves stuff on the internet there's a pretty decent chance they'd hire Edelman.
514: Same with my browser, but Wikipedia uses it.
If it becomes common for people to bring the same types of legal maneuvers and threats that they would use against a giant corporation into small matters with small businesses, the end result will almost certainly be an overall discrediting of the idea that businesses should be regulated.
And what's the end consequence of that? That small businesses are going to feel free to advertise prices that are different from what they actually charge, because they're a small business and it's oh so much hassle to update the website and the regulations are so obscure and confusing and regulators are too busy to actually check anyway? Oh no, what a dystopian nightmare.
The end consequence is that less regulation of small and large businesses.
He's using the regulatory authority as a threat in his argument against someone who is almost certainly not as familiar with the technical details of the law. It's a very good way to convince somebody that regulation is bad.
He did give the guy the law he was talking about -- googling the reference in his email would have given the restaurant the text of the statute to check it. Yes, he should have been politer about it, but "You're breaking the law. This is the law you're breaking. I told the the authorities that you're breaking the law." only seems like a way to convince someone that regulation is bad if they're already pretty committed to the idea that regulation is bullshit and they shouldn't have to comply.
My motto on this is Caligula's: Oderint dum metuant.
That's effective governance, right?
"You're breaking the law. This is the law you're breaking. I told the the authorities that you're breaking the law."
You forgot "Now give me $12, to which I am rightfully entitled!"
None of the coverage suggested to me that the guy wasn't owed the $4 back. It caught national attention because it's ridiculous for this guy, in his position, to be writing these long aggressive emails over what could easily have been an honest mistake. He's a hammer seeing everything as a nail, swatting flies with his sledgehammer, making big holes in his wall.
I doubt this will have any impact at all on his real cases.
But none of them suggested that he was a consumer advocate trying to get a systemic problem fixed, rather than a random asshole trying to get $4, whether or not he was right about it. When I first read about the story, the impression I got was Harvard professor bully defending his own trivial rights, rather than consumer advocate, going a little berserk on a minor consumer protection issue.
523.last: Surely it's going to affect his ability to be an expert witness in jury cases.
Yes, he should have been politer about it, but "You're breaking the law. This is the law you're breaking. I told the the authorities that you're breaking the law." only seems like a way to convince someone that regulation is bad if they're already pretty committed to the idea that regulation is bullshit and they shouldn't have to comply.
Really? There are a great many laws and regulations that are widely ignored to the extent that almost anybody who is called to account for breaking them feels they were singled out unfairly. If you approach buying lunch with the same attitude you use in looking at legal contracts, you will almost certainly alienate a huge percentage of the population very quickly.
525: No, surely not. I find it hard to believe that his notoriety from this incident is so widespread/memorable that there's much chance of a random juror ever having heard of him (or connecting the name with the incident), and it's not like the other side is going to get to introduce evidence of that time he was a dick to a Chinese restaurant.
There are a great many laws and regulations that are widely ignored to the extent that almost anybody who is called to account for breaking them feels they were singled out unfairly.
That is a very bad state of affairs (I'm not saying it's not true, but it's true like "the poor are always with us" or "there's no way to eliminate crime". Not a neutral norm, but a terrible, bad thing about the world that should be fixed as much as possible.) Laws and regulations should be broadly enforced, or they should be off the books. The "advertised prices have to be accurate and honored" rule seems like a good one to me, at which point enforcing it is good, and I think anyone who argues that any particular enforcement of it is a bad thing has to be able to make a principled argument that the rule is a bad rule in itself (or that whatever the specific penalty imposed is, is unjust under the particular circumstances).
anyone who argues that any particular enforcement of it is a bad thing has to be able to make a principled argument that the rule is a bad rule in itself
No one is upset that he alerted the authorities to the price discrepancy. They are upset because he was a colossal dick about it.
I agree that "advertised prices have to be accurate and honored" is a good rule but I don't think that means I have to make a principled argument against the rule to say that you are an asshole if you worry about small violations. I don't think it is possible to craft a set of laws that is sufficiently discriminatory in these types of cases and simple enough that the general public could be expected to get the gist of it easily. The commonly held norm about not turning a small matter into a legal issue seems a reasonable and widely accepted solution.
what could easily have been an honest mistake
Not by the time he's getting long-winded and aggressive. "Oh yeah the website menu's been wrong since forever, let me send you a new one" is basically an admission that they don't give a shit that there's a mismatch between the website and what they charge. It may not feel that way to the restaurant manager, who is convinced that he's a great person who loves America and therefore nothing he does is that bad, but honesty and fair dealing is not a matter of self-perception.
Duan then follows that up with "we're a mom-and-pop operation and we're very proud of our great food." That doesn't make him a country bumpkin who just wants to make delicious meals! That's him projecting an image so that he can avoid taking responsibility for his dishonesty.
And *then* Edelman gets long-winded.
Laws and regulations should be broadly enforced, or they should be off the books.
This seems like longing for utopia. Isn't there a well known form of "slowdown strike" where employees bring an organization to a standstill by rigorously insisting on following every rule to the letter? I doubt most systems could function without a bit of latitude. Obviously there are exceptions like safety checklists for airlines & etc., but generally speaking I think that "enforced or off the books" is impossible.
530: I guess I don't think a wrong price that's been posted for a long time, even if it's just a couple of bucks, is a small violation. It's a business, and they're supposed to be professional about following the regs. Hassling a kid's lemonade stand would be crazy, but for a real restaurant, someone points out you're breaking a law, you might grumble, but I don't think you've got a leg to stand on feeling seriously aggrieved about having to comply.
532: Perfect enforcement at all times is obviously impossible, but I think for regulations that apply to businesses, if there's a regulation that a business would be in the right to feel aggrieved about being told to comply with, then that regulation shouldn't be on the books.
It went viral because people thought Edelman was overreacting, in a self-important way that's typical of his kind. In writing. No one but DB (and maybe LB) cares whether the restaurant was either over- or under-reacting. Because the carnival freak here is the professor so lost in his entitlement that he can't act like a normal human being.
the professor so lost in his entitlement
I really think 'entitlement' is wrong. If he wasn't an activist -- if this was J. Ralph ConLawProfessor using his legal knowledge to bully a restaurant because they'd overcharged him and weren't going to get away with it, I'd call him entitled.
This guy, while he's a jerk about it, doesn't seem like an entitled jerk, he seems like a cranky activist jerk. And I kind of like cranky activist, even when they're kind of jerks.
I don't actually have an opinion about this, but the people with a more generous assessment of Edelman seem to be saying:
the professor so lost in his entitlement advocacy that he can't act like a normal human being
and Edelman's advocacy is net good.
(I don't want to defend this, I haven't read the originals and don't care, really.)
I think the large overlap between "self-appointed activist" and "asshole" is why the concept of "first world problems" and the like have such wide-spread resonance.
I really don't think you can write off this guy's reactions as just being passionate to a fault about his advocacy. LB sort of tried that in 347 and failed laughably. He's both (a) passionate about his advocacy (which is a good thing) and (b) a raging entitled asshole (which is a bad thing). Maybe in his case these two things are inseparable, so you can say: sure, he's a jerk but at least he's doing good and on net I'd rather have him keep at it than stop. That's fine. But these two things don't have to be inseparable. It's possible to be just as passionate about advocacy without being a jerk.
It went viral because people thought Edelman was overreacting, in a self-important way that's typical of his kind. In writing. No one but DB (and maybe LB) cares whether the restaurant was either over- or under-reacting.
In order to judge whether Edelman is overreacting or not, you have to judge what the restaurant was doing. If you flat-out say that you don't care what the restaurant did, then you are accepting the restaurant's framing of the situation, which is that they are simply a generic anonymous innocent party that suddenly found themselves the target of this Harvard guy's ire for absolutely no reason at all other than his insane sense of superiority and entitlement. And that's bullshit.
But yeah, I get it, you went to law school, you're a lawyer, you've seen a lot of self-important windbags and it's important to stress that you're one of the good ones, we're all in this together, united against our common enemy, the arrogant insane Harvard professor who wants to impose regulations on poor innocent businesses that just want to make their customers happy. Warren/Clinton '16.
539.1: I reject the dichotomy you've forced there and that I guess Edelman sees also. I don't see the issue as requiring me to accept the restaurant's framing or to see them as an innocent party. I have no problem at all holding that there is a class of conflicts where you can be right on the merits but still in the wrong if you are the person who escalates or attempts to escalate the issue.
It's possible to be just as passionate about advocacy without being a jerk.
Possible, but that is an extremely narrow slice. Those people are bodhisattvas. I don't hold people to that standard (passionate advocates who can regulate themselves that well).
540: there's no need to take sides at all. It's like LB said in 501 -- if the headline was "Crusading Consumer Protection Advocate Is A Real Jerk About How He Interacts With Violators Of His Pet Laws", that's actually a reasonably accurate description of what happened.
Edelman being a jerk is one part of the story. In my moral calculus, it's not the most important part of the story -- I don't think his asking for 8 bucks was a greater moral wrong than the restaurant systematically charging more than their advertised price for a long time, but apparently people disagree. But the story went viral because Boston.com highlighted the jerkiness, along with Edelman's four Harvard degrees (not actually a key part of this story, contrary to what all the aw-shucks-champions-of-the-common-man would have you believe), and completely slanted the context ($4, "may have been just an innocent mistake", simple-minded immigrant).
539.3 -- I'd never claim not to get drunk on my own whiskey from time to time. It's an occupational hazard, and this guy managed to make himself a temporary national laughingstock on account of it. He'll be fine, I'm sure.
I'd never claim not to get drunk on my own whiskey from time to time.
As long as you didn't overcharge yourself for it it's all good.
It's not entertaining because people are making a moral calculus about what's important, or who's in the right; it's entertaining because a guy with lots of privilege was acting like a Real Jerk in writing.
I agree that adding in that he's a crusader is material, but I don't think it changes the viral entertainment value. We just go from entitled clueless professor acting like a Real Jerk to entitled clueless crusader who can't tell the difference between dragons and salamanders acting like a Real Jerk.
542: I don't think the "innocent mistake" telling is completely slanted and think it is unproven that the restaurant did anything morally (as opposed to technically) wrong.
But really, the story went viral because Edelman backed a guy into a corner while at the same time handing him the perfect weapon for a PR victory.
The Trevor Law Group: American heroes.
545: correct. And going back to 198, it's not that people think that grad students should be harassed out of their departments, it's that people believe that universities are staffed by hypocritical PC liberals who can't tolerate wrongthink about gays. And it's not that people understand anything about employment law, it's that our society has a lot of sexism and very little support for working mothers and some crazy-ass judges.
OK that only took 350 comments. So what's timely... I heard the Patriots deflated some footballs. And just how bad was that pass call on the goal line?
*That* pass call or *a* pass call?
Most effective thread killer ever.