Today is the day.

Today is the day that the Cooper Union trustees will hold their final vote on whether to impose tuition on this fall’s incoming class of undergraduates, or to, by adopting some other package of financial reforms, maintain Cooper’s status as the country’s most prominent and well-regarded tuition-free university.

The imposition  of tuition at Cooper has been years in coming, and for much of 2013 it appeared all but inevitable. But student activists last summer forced the college to establish a formal working group to consider alternatives, and when that working group brought forward a robust, detailed plan for keeping Cooper free last month, the trustees blinked. Announcing that the proposal needed further review, they deferred final action for another day.

Today is that day.

As for what’s coming, nobody’s offering predictions, at least publicly. One active alumnus posted on Facebook last night that by his reckoning there are nine solid votes against tuition on the board, and five trustees clearly in favor. With twenty-three voting seats on the board, that would mean tuition opponents need to pick up three of the nine unknowns.

I have no sense of how reliable that count is, though, and no concrete inside information from other sources. Tuition opponents have a huge mountain to climb with the trustees — the Cooper Union president still supports tuition, and a minority faction of the working group has drafted its own report breaking with the majority’s recommendations.

But if it’s true that nine members of the board are prepared to vote to keep Cooper free, tuition supporters on the board have another question in front of them: Imposing tuition is one thing. Imposing it over the objections of nearly 40 percent of your institution’s trustees is quite another.

Yesterday Cooper Union trustee Kevin Slavin, an alumnus elected by alumni to the board last year, published a passionate defense of a free Cooper Union. The whole thing should be read by anyone who cares about higher education tuition policy, but I’ll close this post with a brief excerpt:

If you’ve never experienced it, “free” just seems like a lower number on a slider that has “half-price” in the middle. But free is not a number.

If you paid for your education, you’re likely to understand education in transactional terms. In straightforward economic terms, it means that if you charge some money, you can have some stuff. With more money comes more stuff, higher quality stuff.

But “free” is something different than “less.” And free is not less than cheap. It’s something else entirely.

Free as in Cooper Union.

Fingers crossed.

4:45 Update | At 2:38 this afternoon the secretary of the Cooper Union board of trustees sent out an email to the campus community saying that the board meeting was over and that there would be “a communication from the Board … this evening concerning [its] outcome.”

Around the same time, alumni trustee Kevin Slavin posted the following on the Save Cooper Union Facebook page:

Over. Sitting w trustees and staff. Statement coming late tonight – from cooper but with my participation – and apologies I can’t say more now. Have pushed to make sure something is communicated today. Will be later in evening.

I can’t help but notice that neither statement specifically states that the board reached a decision on the tuition question. More when I get it.

5:55 Update | Less than an hour ago Slavin said on Twitter that the board was “working to send out a statement later tonight.” Fifteen minutes ago an editor at Architect magazine tweeted that an unnamed Cooper trustee had told him that “results on the Cooper Union board vote may not be made public until tomorrow.”

Evening Update | The trustees have announced that they voted to impose tuition. Much more tomorrow.

Daniel Jose Older has written a lovely long essay on the work of the author HP Lovecraft, a vicious racist who was perhaps the most influential horror/sci-fi writer of the early 20th century. Older gets it exactly right when he says we read Lovecraft not in spite of his racism but because of it, and I just want to take a few words to echo and expand on that analysis. (I was going to livetweet the essay as I read it, but as I leaped in I realized that not much of what it sparked in me was going to fit into 140-character bites.)

As Older suggests, Lovecraft’s racism — his paranoia, his xenophobia, his visceral disgust with Other People — lies at the heart of his genius. He’s not merely a racist writer, he is a virtuoso of racism itself. Racism is his art, and he’s a hell of an artist.

An example: When he lived there, Lovecraft described Brooklyn as a giant vat “crammed to the vomiting point with gangrenous vileness, and about to burst and inundate the world in one leprous cataclysm of semi-fluid rottenness.”

It hasn’t burst yet, note, but it will, and soon.

Lovecraft’s voice is the voice of the embattled, outnumbered, doomed paragon fighting desperately to stave off the annihilation of everything he cherishes. Lovecraft the writer despises humanity’s benighted past, fears its degraded future, and doesn’t hold out much hope for its present.

The standard weak defense of the offensive comedian is that he (or she) is an equal-opportunity offender: “He hates everyone!” It’s rarely true, of course, and even when it’s true it doesn’t mean very much. Making cruel fun of the powerful and prominent doesn’t carry the same illicit charge as the one that comes from kicking the already-down in the ribs. They’re not the same kind of thing, and doing one doesn’t balance out the other.

Lovecraft has no interest in balance, and he doesn’t pretend to hate everyone. He, much more honestly, and much more potently, hates everyone who’s not like him. He’s repulsed by immigrants and upcountry New Englanders, by city folk and rural townspeople, by Africans and Asians and Italians and half-human-half-fish monstrosities.

We, as a species, gross him out.

And this, I think, is why his racism strikes such a powerful chord with the reader. We’ve all been trained to hate the Bull Connors of the world, the men in power who are beyond the reach of those they grind down. We understand and we reject the racist in the mansion and the Klansman on the horse and the redneck sheriff.

Lovecraft isn’t that kind of racist. He’s the creep who thinks he lost his job because his black boss has it in for him. He’s the jerk who bends your ear about how the Jews are running the world into the ground. He’s the fantasist, the conspiracist, the scapegoater, the whiner.

He’s us. He’s the worst of us.

That’s what makes him scary. That’s what makes him important.

And that, weirdly, is what makes him great.

This post was originally as a cut-and-paste Storify of a Twitter rant, but it’s continuing to get traffic so I’ve rewritten it a bit.  Thanks to @suey_park for the inspiration for the original piece.

In any discussion of racism these days, it’s almost inevitable that someone will accuse a person of color of being racist and someone else will say that people of color can’t be racist, by definition. Dictionaries get dragged out, tempers flare, and as often as not the whole conversation gets completely derailed.

If you’re someone who thinks that anyone can be racist, and you’re in an argument with someone who’s claiming that racism is a white-people thing, there’s stuff you should know before you sound off.

Let’s start by getting something out of the way. Yes, racism has often been defined, and often still is defined today, the way you define it. In this definition, racism is, as whoever Google uses for their dictionaries puts it, “prejudice, discrimination, or antagonism directed against someone of a different race based on the belief that one’s own race is superior.” 

You’re not imagining things, and you’re not making things up. That definition exists. It’s in dictionaries and everything. It’s real.

But it’s not the only definition. There’s another definition, one that many other activists and scholars use. It’s been around for a long time, and in many circles it’s the standard definition. (It’s not at all uncommon for words to have different meanings in different contexts.)

Under the activist definition, the crucial component of racism — what distinguishes “racism” from other kinds of ethnically-based bigotry — is its relationship to institutional power, to structures of authority.

This distinction is grounded in the fact that folks who are oppressed hating their oppressors isn’t the same phenomenon as the reverse. You can call the two phenomena by one name if you want, and many people do, but they’re two different phenomena all the same.

Because they’re different phenomena, and because they operate differently in a societal context, a lot of folks now use the term “racism” exclusively in the context of the oppressor’s bigotry, as a way to highlight the underlying structural issues.

That’s what’s going on here. That’s the root of the disagreement.

Now, you don’t have to accept this definition of racism. If you want to insist that all race prejudice must be called “racism,” that’s fine. But if you’re going to do that, you have to do two things:

First, you have to acknowledge the existence of a different definition, with a strong pedigree. Maybe you didn’t know about it before, but you do now. To say your definition of racism is real and the other one is made up is just false. Both definitions are real.

Second, you have to come up with some other way of distinguishing between the race prejudice that’s expressed by those who share a race with the most economically, politically, and culturally powerful people in a society and that which isn’t. Because even if you call them both “racism” (which, again, fine, whatever, go ahead), they’re not the same phenomenon. They don’t spring from the same roots, they don’t operate the same way, they don’t have the same effects. They don’t.

Lemon out. Questions? Comments?

The things she knew, let her forget again –
The voices in the sky, the fear, the cold,
The gaping shepherds, and the queer old men
Piling their clumsy gifts of foreign gold.

Let her have laughter with her little one;
Teach her the needless, tuneless songs to sing;
Grant her her right to whisper to her son
The foolish names one dare not call a king.

Keep from her dreams the rumble of a crowd,
The smell of rough-cut wood, the trail of red,
The thick and chilly whiteness of the shroud
That wraps the strange new body of the dead.

Ah, let her go, kind Lord, where mothers go
And boast his pretty words and ways, and plan
The proud and happy years that they shall know
Together, when her son is grown a man.

–Dorothy Parker, 1928

So last night, as the internet explosion over Justine Sacco was petering out, I got a series of tweets from Meghan Murphy.

Ironically, in light of what follows, I can’t quote them since she’s (I assume unrelatedly) locked her account, but the gist went something like this:

I was a hypocrite, she suggested — that word I remember clearly — because the previous night I had demanded that she strike several quotes from a controversial blogpost she’d written earlier in the week while saying nothing about others’ unethical use of quotes from her.

Here’s the piece in question, if you missed it. In it, Murphy had argued that “Twitter is a horrible place for feminism … a place where intellectual laziness is encouraged, oversimplification is mandatory, posturing is de rigueur, and bullying is rewarded … a place hateful people are drawn towards to gleefully spread their hate, mostly without repercussion.”

Further down in the piece, Murphy had quoted from an essay by Ngọc Loan Trần in which Trần had articulated “calling in” as an alternative to calling people out for their bad behavior. Calling out, Murphy suggested, was an “unproductive and a fear-based response.”

Trần’s original piece, though, had offered “calling in” as an alternative to calling out only in situations in which the two parties’ “common ground is strong enough to carry us through how we have enacted violence on each other.” In a disclaimer at the end, Trần reiterated that the essay was “specifically about us calling in people who we want to be in community with, people who we have reason to trust or with whom we have common ground,” not about how we interact with random strangers on the internet.

When Trần learned that they’d been quoted by Murphy, they took to Twitter to ask that she pull the quote, saying that their writing had been “misused to justify something I disagree with.” “I’m a writer,” Trần said. “I blog, I willingly publish my work. That doesn’t equal giving permission to people exploiting my work for their white supremacist agenda.” (I’ve expanded some contractions in these tweets.)

Having read both pieces, I agree that Murphy’s quotes misrepresented Trần’s argument. But the issue of “permission” raises important questions. The night before last I got into a discussion about those questions on Twitter with some journalists I know, a conversation that began with Irin Carmon of MSNBC tweeting to ask “Who can explain why things written in public spaces cannot be quoted, as they can in every field of writing I’ve ever encountered?”

The conversation that followed was huge and sprawling, and I won’t be able to do it justice here, but my own position is summed up pretty well by a few early tweets. “I think it’s fair,” I wrote in the first, “to complain when someone who positions themselves as being your ally dragoons you by quoting.”

That “someone who positions themselves as your ally” part is crucial, because (as I said in a followup tweet) I think in this case what was happening was someone saying “don’t use my intellectual labor to advance a cause I abhor.” Although Murphy presented herself as agreeing with Trần, Trần felt misrepresented, and — because those misrepresentations had to do with important and sensitive issues within the feminist community — harmed.

Did Murphy have the legal right to misrepresent Trần in this way? Yes. Would Murphy, if she had been writing as a journalist, have had an ethical obligation to take down the quotes because of Trần’s objections? No, not if she and her editors stood by her use of the material.

But Trần’s objection wasn’t grounded in law or journalistic practice. It was a personal request, and a political one.

Murphy’s piece was a call for more openness in internet feminism, more reaching out, more working together. Given that, the fact that one of the feminists quoted most prominently in the piece feels abused by Murphy’s use of their writing seems worth mentioning, and the fact that Murphy refused to correct or alter her piece after Trần’s objections were brought to her attention seems like something that can be legitimately said to reflect badly on her.

If you position yourself as someone’s political ally, as Murphy did with Trần, you have — as Trần argued in their piece — an obligation to treat that person with decency. The contours and limits of that obligation can be debated, of course, but there is a growing consensus in some provinces of the online left that a respect for that person’s wishes with regard to the use of the fruits of their intellectual labor is an element of it.

What does that respect entail? Crediting them for their work, for starters, even if that work is only the invention of a hashtag. Prominently crediting and linking to writing that inspired you. Bringing them along if the work you do that’s grounded in theirs results in opportunities for other writing or speaking gigs. And yes, checking in before quoting someone, or at least respecting their wishes if it turns out they’re not comfortable with how you’ve used their words.

This isn’t all about credit, though credit is obviously a part of it. A Twitter account that has a hundred followers and a website that gets a million hits a day may both be public spaces, in some sense, but they’re not the same kind of public space, and what someone shares in one arena may not be something they’re happy with seeing shared in the other.

Now, the lines here are fuzzy, and there’s room for reasonable people to disagree about where to draw them. I’m not, for instance, going to be sending a draft of this essay to anyone quoted in it before I post, though I will give them all a heads-up when it goes live. And again, comradeship is a crucial element of how these obligations are construed.

When Meghan Murphy called me a hypocrite on Twitter last night, she was wrong on the facts. I’d never demanded that she pull Trần’s quote. But she was right that I considered her quoting of Trần more problematic than the quotes of her that she’d objected to, and I think the distinction between the two helps to illuminate the concepts I’m grappling with here.

We’ve already discussed Murphy’s Trần quotes, so let’s move on to the Murphy quotes that bothered her:

Meghan Murphy has been accused, not always fairly, of being a close ally of discredited pseudo-feminist Hugo Schwyzer. I say “not always fairly” because Murphy and Schwyzer had strong disagreements on a variety of issues. But when Murphy said in her essay this week that she’d been “consistently, publicly critical of” Schwyzer, “his work, and his teaching, from the moment I was aware he existed,” that wasn’t quite accurate either — or at least it wasn’t the whole story.

Murphy may have been critical of Schwyzer all along, but she was also friendly with him for a time — even after others’ objections to him were widely circulated. In one quote from Facebook that’s been making the rounds, Murphy said she didn’t “see Hugo as a misogynist,” that although they disagreed on some issues she believed “he does genuinely want equality,” and that she thought “he is, in the end, a decent person.”

Murphy believes — if I’m remembering our exchange from last night correctly — that it’s unfair to circulate these quotes because they’re from a private Facebook conversation, they’re taken out of context, and they’re undated.

So does my quoting of Murphy here, in the context of what I’ve said above about her quoting of Trần, make me a hypocrite? Unsurprisingly, I don’t think so.

I’m not a lawyer, and I’m likely to mangle this analogy, but when I think about these two situations I keep coming back to the distinction between a friendly and a hostile witness. When you, as a lawyer, are questioning a “friendly witness” on the stand, you have an obligation to let them tell their story in their own way. With a hostile witness, however — a witness for the other side, or a witness for your side who has turned against you — you’re allowed to frame your questioning in such a way as to try to impeach their testimony or undermine their credibility.

So it is here, I think. Trần’s objection to Murphy’s piece isn’t that Murphy quoted Trần, but that Murphy selectively quoted Trần to make it appear that Trần agreed with a set of propositions Trần actually opposes. Trần may be right or wrong about that, but right or wrong it’s an objection that a friend would treat with more respect than Murphy has shown.

When Aura Bogado quoted Murphy’s past statements about Schwyzer, however, she was honest about her aim — she was trying to impeach Murphy’s position. When you’re arguing with someone, when you’re trying to refute their claims by dredging up contradictory things they’ve said in the past, you’re necessarily going to wind up quoting stuff they wish you wouldn’t, and it’s reasonable to give their objections less weight than you otherwise might.

Let me turn this discussion back on myself for one final example.

When I was debating journalistic ethics on Twitter the other night it was fairly late in the evening. I was in a relaxed mood, the conversation was moving very quickly, and I was tweeting in haste. I stand by the substance of everything I said, but there were a few grammatical infelicities and some language that was rather earthier than is my standard practice in public speech.

So let’s say that someone wrote a blogpost about that conversation, and quoted me in a way I found a bit embarrassing. As a matter of journalistic ethics, I’d have no grounds for complaint. I said that stuff, I said it in public, and it’s anyone’s right to quote it if they please. If Meghan Murphy wants to put those tweets on her blog, there’s nothing I can do about it, and not much chance I’d try.

But let’s say it wasn’t Meghan Murphy who wrote the piece. Let’s say it was someone who presented themselves as my friend and ally. In that case I might well drop them a line asking if they wouldn’t mind paraphrasing instead of quoting, or inserting a strategic ellipsis or two. And if they didn’t comply, and I got the impression that their intent in not complying was to embarrass me, I might well conclude that they weren’t much of a friend or ally after all.

It’s not likely that I’d make a huge case out of such a disagreement, for a bunch of reasons, but I’d likely remember it. And if something like that happened in a situation in which the stakes were higher, I might well take my complaint public. I might even publicly request that they take a quote down. I’ve never done it, but I can see doing it, and I stand behind the reasons why I might.

•          •          •

I said during the conversation the other night that I found the moral fluidity surrounding these issues exciting, and several of the folks I was talking to responded that they didn’t find it exciting at all — just the opposite.

I definitely get where they’re coming from, and I think the fact that I’ve only rarely been a target of this kind of ire shapes my emotional response. But at the same time, I think what we’re seeing here is an articulation of a new — and increasingly coherent — set of moral principles. They’re not arbitrary, they’re not incomprehensible, and they’ve got real merit.

Note | In the last two paragraphs above, I originally used the word “ethical” where I meant “moral.” I’ve fixed it.