A month after the inauguration of Donald Trump I made a mistake in my classroom. I invited in someone — someone I didn’t know personally — to be a speaker.
He came recommended, we had a phone call beforehand, and the day was set. He was to speak about the topic of customer retention metrics (what I teach off of this blog is quite different than what you might expect).
Halfway through the class, at the appointed time, he arrived. He set up his laptop and started with an introduction to himself and his company. But things soon got sidetracked.
At about his third slide, a strange look came over him. He started to make references to the recent election and how upset he was about it. Then the following exchange happened, which I’m obviously repeating from memory since there was no video.
“The thing you have to remember about Trump is that he is the Antichrist,” he said.
I glanced around the room.
“And I don’t mean the Antichrist as if to say that he’s a bad guy. I mean that he is literally the incarnation of Satan walking on Earth. If you think of what Jesus would do, Trump does the opposite. You know who the Antichrist comes with, right?”
I made a feeble attempt to steer the conversation towards customer retention.
“The four horsemen of the Apocalypse. You know them, right? There’s War, Famine…”
Here he actually stopped because I believe he only knew two of the four horsemen. I let the pause go for a bit before I finally said “well, normally it’s Plague and Death as the other two. So, anyway customer retention is a pretty important topic that we’ve been studying…”
But there was no steering him back. He was transfixed. I saw him go into a political trance right before my eyes. At this point, there were only 10 minutes left in the class, the rest of his talk petered out, and we were done.
He was the second worst class visitor I’ve ever had.
But you know what I think about? That he sure was lucky there was no video of his visit. Now it’s just in my memory and the memory of the students who were there.
It’s better for him that there was no video. We can give him a pass for having an extremely bad day (in my class nonetheless). With video, today he might be a meme.
That was less than four years ago and today it’s different. Today, college classes are remote by default and classes are recorded by video, which is then shared with all the students.
This can lead to some good outcomes, for example where students want to review something from a class. There’s also the good outcome that students taking the class from a very different time zone don’t need to stay up in the middle of the night every time.
And then perhaps there are some other outcomes as well.
Primed and Not Primed
I don’t know why my class visitor lost himself in end-time conspiracies that day. Perhaps on the way into class he saw something that reminded him of Trump and it worked into his subconscious, already negatively primed by months of media. He couldn’t control himself once he let that trigger in to do its work. This kind of thing seems to happen a lot.
A year and a half after my class visitor there was another incident. Suddenly, fearful students started to message me about a shooter on USC’s campus, which I dismissed as fake.
A live shooter on a college campus in the US is, at least in recent years, not a fantasy. But multiple student reports weren’t a trigger for me since earlier that same day I heard about a mass shooting in Las Vegas. It seemed too coincidental for another similar event which I assumed took advance planning. (I swear that I am really like this.)
Later that day we learned that there was no shooter after all. That incident started when a professor (who had a friend killed in Las Vegas) showed up to class intoxicated, heard gunshots in her head (out of empathy for her friend, I imagine), and told her students to call the police. That professor was primed to hear gunshots in any bump. And I believe she did hear them.
Just last year in New York City, a crowd of people stampeded when they heard the sound of a motorcycle backfiring. They heard gunshots when there were none. Again, gunshots in New York City are plausible. Similar sounds in other big cities would never sound dangerous.
In 2018 we also had the widespread yanny / laurel debate. The same sound plays and people — even in the same room — hear two very different sounds. How can this be?
And in 2015 we had “the dress” that was seemingly either black and blue or white and gold. Again, different people saw very different things.
The yanny / laurel audio and the dress image are among many other examples of perception differences that show us that we should doubt what we observe. Philosophers have discussed this for centuries. But we still get caught up in the right or wrong debate.
About That
Another difference in perception that we are seeing now is related to a professor at USC who teaches communications to MBA students.
The communications professor, Greg Patton, used an example on filler words in different languages, including an example from Mandarin, I believe since he has also taught and worked in China for years. In English, the common filler word is “um,” while in Chinese, the common filler word is the word “that.”
After hearing the Chinese filler word 那個, which in pinyin is often written as nèige (and pronounced as “nay-guh”), students complained that the professor was saying a word similar to the N-word.
In the recent class, Patton said that word a few times in a row (as a Mandarin filler word it’s typically used quickly in succession). Then students complained to the school’s administration, saying that their mental health had been affected. The professor apologized. The dean apologized. And the professor is no longer teaching the class.
I focus on second-order effects in this blog, so this article isn’t on whether the reaction was appropriate or not. But for the record, I don’t think that Patton should have been removed. I also don’t hear the word 那個 as being that similar to the slur. But here I’m trying to understand why there was this reaction this time at all.
I’m told that Patton used this example for the past five years. I don’t imagine that he was the only person in the world to use this filler word example. It’s a common filler word spoken in a language with the most native speakers in the world. So why did things explode when Patton did it this time?
I kept looking for the rest of the story. Notably, apart from their letter to the dean, more detail on the reactions of the students who complained is so far absent, at least publicly.
When I reflect on the school’s and the students’ reactions, I can’t help but wonder if they were caught in a bad system — and one worse than usual. USC, probably more so than other universities, is sensitive to public appearance. There have been multiple scandals, many of which developed under a previous president, related to issues from fundraising, not removing a predatory doctor, keeping a drug-addict dean (who was also a great fundraiser), to the college admissions scandal, and more recently, reports of racism.
Now, with some different administrators in place, the school finds itself having to react to a situation when there is more awareness about racism. All with remote teaching during COVID.
In terms of risk-reward, the school made the right tactical call. A logical path for an institution can be to initially take the path of least resistance and then reverse course. After people forget about this issue and focus on the next one, I expect that Patton will be reinstated quietly if he chooses to keep teaching.
But why did the frequently used example have this outcome this time and not previous times?
The past few months have primed people to default to hearing a slur or feeling ill-will. This benefits no one except maybe media businesses. Six months ago I don’t believe that audio from the same professor would have been heard the same way. Even pronouncing the word the same, it would have been heard differently.
Did just having a recording of the class change things? I believe it did. Had there been no recording, the default would have been a personal discussion. I believe that discussion might have resulted in an accepted explanation and no further story to hear. Perhaps the impact to students’ harmed mental health — that was part of the students’ argument for Patton’s removal — would be less. With recordings, but with the class happening six months ago, before the many protests since, there wouldn’t have been the same heightened sensitivity to racism, and I don’t believe the classroom incident would have gone far.
But one other thing happened because there are recordings. They can be easily shared. Now many people have had the time, including myself, to view that clip of Prof. Patton talking in his communications class. And at least from what I have seen, and I’ve looked pretty broadly, public opinion is overwhelmingly in support of the professor. So it seems that the tech both increased the likelihood of the initial reaction but also may lead to what I believe will be the reinstatement of Patton or his move to another role somewhere else.
It’s a fit for the new cycle today. A burst of outrage, activity, awareness, but followed this time by a different outcome.
The Wrong Email
I made the mistake of looking at work email on the weekend and saw an email from a journalist at The Atlantic.
Oh good, I thought. They’re writing to ask me about one of the startups in my incubator portfolio. Or maybe about my book on customer acquisition cost and lifetime value that I finished last week. So nice to hear from them.
But it was something else instead. Here’s the first part of the email:
“I’m a staff writer at The Atlantic at work on an article about the USC business school’s removal of your colleague, Professor Greg Patton, from his fall semester course. I am hoping that you’ll share your thoughts and insights on this important matter, preferably on the record, though I will absolutely protect the anonymity of anyone who requests it (and advise that you reply from a personal email account rather than your USC account).
I am eager to hear from you regardless of your perspective on whether the removal was the right or the wrong call––and regardless of whether you comment on inclusion, academic freedom, cross-cultural differences, your own feelings about the climate in academia or business, or anything else you want to address––as I will strive to air the most nuanced thoughts on all sides of this matter, regardless of where I come down myself (thus far, I am very skeptical of the removal but open to the possibility that there is something about the case I don’t understand), so that all ensuing discussions are fully informed and more constructive….” And on for many more paragraphs.
I assume that hundreds of my colleagues received the same email.
Consider
- A reason that I generally don’t cover breaking news here (though I break this rule as you know) is that the story needs time to emerge.
- Having dramatic ups and downs in reaction is to no one’s advantage except the media industry or bad actors. For the media industry, this is great business.
- College professors are increasingly thinking about that other career they’ve been meaning to pursue.