Asked whether "it" was coming more from the faculty or the students, Pinker said he thinks a lot of it comes from the student life bureaucracy, such as deans, associate deans, Title IX administrators and affirmative action administrators.
Unresolvable The public record could not settle it.
Factual: Statements about the present or the past, checked against the record: did they hold up?
What would count as true or false
The proposition is about what Pinker said. TRUE: a transcript or recording of an interview on or around 2018-03-22 shows Pinker, asked whether 'it' (the campus climate or speech restrictions under discussion) came more from the faculty or the students, saying he thinks a lot of it comes from the student life bureaucracy, and naming deans/associate deans, Title IX administrators and affirmative action administrators, or close equivalents. MOSTLY TRUE: he said substantially this, but with a small difference in the question's wording, the list of offices or the date. MIXED: he named the bureaucracy only as one source among others given equal weight, or the remark answered a clearly different question. MOSTLY FALSE: he attributed it mainly to faculty or students and gave administrators only a passing mention. FALSE: the record shows he did not say this, or said the reverse.
Set before the research began.
Evidence (2)
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E1 A bit of advice for Harvard’s new president - The Boston Globe The Boston Globe · 18 February 2018 Own record
“Many of these illiberal antics come from a radical fringe of students, egged on by an autonomous student-life bureaucracy.”
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E2 Steven Pinker Loves the Enlightenment Reason · 21 May 2018
“This interview has been condensed and edited for style and clarity. For a video version, visit reason.com.”
Reasoning
E11 confirms that Reason ran a condensed and edited interview with Pinker and says a video version exists. The quoted excerpt does not include the exchange about faculty versus students or the student life bureaucracy. E4 is a separate Globe piece from about a month earlier, not independent of Pinker, which says many campus illiberal antics come from a radical fringe of students egged on by an autonomous student-life bureaucracy [E4]. It is not a record of the interview remark the claim describes. Neither item shows Pinker's actual wording or the question he was answering, so the claim cannot be settled.
Cite this claim
Steven Pinker, “Asked whether "it" was coming more from the faculty or the students, Pinker said he thinks a lot of it comes from the student life bureaucracy, such as deans, associate deans, Title IX administrators and affirmative action administrators.” (said 22 March 2018). Verdict: unresolvable. Reliability API, claim c_979f532f2e3e, method 0.1.0+28da144b, dataset release v1.1.2. https://epistacklabs.com/claims/c_979f532f2e3e
This claim is in dataset release v1.1.2, with the same verdict.
Reply to this claim
More factual claims by Steven Pinker
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Mostly true
“But in other kinds violence, such as homicides, the progress has definitely continued.”
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Mostly true
“I float a number of hypotheses as to why cooperation and human flourishing in general have increased.”
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Mostly true
“Those were as old as civilisation.”
Slavery and imperialism were as old as civilisation, predating the Enlightenment.
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Mixed
“Nuclear doomsday scenarios in the 1960s set off not disarmament but an arms race with the Soviets.”
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Mixed
“More countries are democratic than not, even though if it’s fewer than it was 20 years ago.”
More countries are democratic than not, though fewer than 20 years ago.
Verdicts are made automatically; how verdicts are made.