On a busman's holiday

I have delayed posting this for some time, because I don't want to point the finger at anyone, publicly. I debated whether or not to post it at all. As it stands it is merely opinionated commentary--a legitimate form of expression, but not one which can claim the interest of a reader. I am actually posting it to supplement my posting on a MOOC--where I have paraphrased and condensed some points, including events which happened after I wrote this version. Sorry--you didn't need to know that, did you?

---

I am on holiday; for once on a tour organised around a topic--the history of classical Greece. I won't go into more specifics for reasons which will become apparent.

On the whole it has been excellent. The site visits have been informative, and there is no substitute for going to the real locations. The organisation and the food have been almost exemplary. And the company of the other members of the party has been excellent.

Unfortunately the same cannot be said for the lecturer.

As I sat in the first lecture on the first morning, I berated myself for not having brought my trusty observation sheets with me. Had he been a student, I should not have been able to sign off on any item on my list. That is not in itself a problem (see here, for example), and indeed some of the things we are obliged to check would have been clearly inappropriate, such as "embedding functional skills". (It doesn't matter what that means.)

I note, re-reading the earlier post, that I commented then:

It was not about the tutor's technique... It was about "strategy", or really values.

And therein lies the difference. The lecturer started the session with the air of the whole thing being slightly beneath him--to think that it has come to this, to be hired by a package-tour company to lecture to a group of elderly people... There was evidence to support this, because he had clearly done very little preparation, despite--or perhaps because of--his apparent familiarity with the material. I say "apparent" because other members of the group who are more familiar with it than me have been more disparaging about his scholarship.

He did ask us who was in Greece for the first time. Otherwise he asked us no more questions. He said nothing about himself and his background, other than that this was the sixth time he had done this particular tour, and let slip references later to up to fifty years of visiting the eastern Mediterranean. He did decide not to undertake introductions, which was a fair call, probably; he obviously defined his role as an "expert" rather than a full-scale teacher. But it would have been interesting if he had shown just a small proportion of the interest in us which he clearly expected we would have in him. A show of hands on who were the old hands? On who spoke or read Greek? Considered themselves well-informed about the architecture, the history, the culture...? Five minutes would have sufficed.

He said he would get to know our names as time went on, and he did do that. (I could have said that he achieved this principally by counting us onto the bus, but that would be even snarkier than this account is already. Credit where credit is due!) But he missed out on so much information which could have been useful to a more confident and less arrogant person; there were people in the group with expertise from their professional backgrounds and travels who could have contributed fascinating material, which in practice was only shared with two or three others chatting over dinner.

Although I was not expecting and would not have wanted reams of paperwork, it would have been useful to have a list of titles of the lectures. However, it became apparent that in his view this was one long lecture which he would deliver in a series of chunks. Throughout the rest of the week, there was only the most token obeisance in the direction of a clear start and finish (except a sort of peroration in one talk given on the coach, but that was more about drama than structure).

He did supply a reading list; it was badly formatted and the bibliographical format was not standard. Who cares? Well, publishers and dates are quite useful. Perhaps more important, it had been corrected in long-hand and then copied without being re-typed. This clearly sends a message to the "class" that they are not worth serving properly; it amounts to an expression of contempt.

No visual aids. Well, he did have a carrier bag with some copies of picures from books, laminated, so he could hand them round. Given that all but the first of the talks were given on the coach, there might be something to be said for that, but the logistics of distribution and the number of copies, and their labelling, needs some thought. There was a single copy of each page to be shared sequentially among two dozen people, even if most of them were couples and would look at the page together.

He had prepared two pages on a flip-chart, though, showing a time-line. They were sloppily printed in marker pen, but they were big enough to read and he had covered them up with a blank sheet so they were not distracting until deliberately revealed.

So no presentation package, probably because of the setting of the talks, but also because I don't think he has the necessary skills to develop a slide-show. That might also account for the hand-written corrections on the book-list. Even so, the most important thing he could have achieved through a presentation, he could also have achieved for himself with a handful of 6x4 cards--a structure. But the consequence was that, together with a voice which sometimes descends into a mumble, and some irritating mannerisms, it was almost impossible to follow what he was talking about.

It is an egregious delusion that just because you know (or think you know) a lot about something, you can lecture about it. Even in an open-ended situation where the intention is to inform and perhaps entertain, where the group will not be assessed and they are free to take it or leave it at their discretion, where the language of "objectives" and "outcomes" is inappropriate--even then you need a structure. And when you are inclined to ramble on in a kind of drunkard's walk from one topic to another with little evidence of a theme, you definitely need a structure. I know because that is what I do, left to my own devices.

The simplest device of notes or a set of cards, each with only a key word or phrase on them demands some degree of planning. Cards are of course more flexible because you can re-order them, or take one out when you have answered a point in response to a question, earlier than planned...

So all this is very very basic. For most of the week I have been juggling hypotheses about what is going on. Is he merely incompetent? He is incompetent, but not merely so. His failings can be superficially rectified with advice, should he be inclined to accept it. But there is I think more to it than that; there's a fundamental self-absorption which suggests he hasn't got a clue about how other people respond to him and his work, and he doesn't care. (Apparently, nor does the company--I am led to believe that there has been critical feedback about him for years, but he is still employed.)

Beginning teachers are often very concerned about their own "performance" to the extent of not being able to pay attention to the students' performance; that's a natural stage which is soon overcome in most cases, and in any case their self-consciousness often makes them eager to seek and respond to feedback. For whatever reason, this guy is stuck...

But... all this does not extend to other aspects of his public role. Mingling with guests at social functions he is a little stiff and has to try hard to be charming. I empathise. I'm pretty inept at that, too: but then I don't set myself up to do a job which requires such skills. Tonight was a supposedly special dinner--characterised only by having to sit at long tables rather than self-selected small ones, and he was in "host" role. He was clearly not comfortable but he pulled it off quite well--better than I could have done, certainly. But his performance in making a simple vote of thanks for the organiser was largely about him and his next destination.

Something happens to this guy when he assumes the mantle of teacher or authority figure. What, why, how?

Thank goodness for local guides!

[There's no definitive answer, of course. But if you are tackling "the role of the teacher" on a post-school and adult education teacher training course, I think you might find this case-study stimulating.]

On---I'm exasperated about silly arguments!

This one is about pedagogy vs. andragogy. If you need primary sources; See here and here.

I have been teaching for forty+ years (whether my students have been learning for the same period is of course contestable).

I have never yet encountered any exclusively behavioural learning (even with our wonderful Westies) or "cognitive" or "humanistic" or any other label.

And as for pedagogy versus andragogy... It's a spurious distinction whose primary achievement was to raise the profile of Malcolm Knowles. But read his piece here. Is that about treating people as grown-ups?

What these theorists never (OK! rarely) discuss is what is being learned. You want to learn a foreign language? At some point you are going to have to memorise a lot of vocabulary. You want to throw pots or improve your tennis? You need to practise, and there are people who can do it much better than you and you would be stupid to ignore their advice. You want to study political philosophy (OK, this is the most difficult)? Most people, of course, don't study it. They go straight to teaching it in the saloon bar... But...

And that is to say nothing about STEM subjects (Science, Technology, Engineering and Maths), where it is self-evident that there is an enormous (and growing) body of knowledge into which you must be inducted before you can make any contribution.

As I complain here, andragogy is not an approach to teaching--it's a brand. And one which gets in the way of making appropriate decisions about how to teach a particular subject/topic/skills to a particular group of learners.

On one kind of American psyche

 Or--"Why I love my revolver more than my mobile phone."

I like Edwin Leap; I get his blog through RSS regularly, and if he is a little down-home Will Rogers-ish for a European taste, so be it. The list of awards to the right of the page testifies to how he is received in the US.

Every so often, though, a post from one of the US bloggers I casually follow acutely exposes a massive gulf between their mind-set and mine. (I am not so daft as to generalise this beyond the few people I follow, none of whom have been chosen for their extremism or freakery but simply for their interesting take on their world.) And this one is not merely any old gulf. It's a Grand Canyon (sorry about mixing geographical metaphors).

Actually, it is a classic statement and it is worth quoting at some length:

"The phone represents connection.  Especially a smart-phone, since it connects me not only to those I love, but in essence to the entire world in a way unfathomable a few short decades ago.  I can tap the World Wide Web from the comfort of my car or anywhere else, simply by pulling out my phone.  The phone represents the collective knowledge of humanity and our interdependency. [...] It allows me,  [...] to call others to my rescue, to ask others’ opinions, to check the collective opinion on millions of potential websites.

What about my little Smith and Wesson model 640?  Well, it isn’t about collective communication; though the sound of it being discharged will probably bring interested parties to investigate.  It has no communication device located anywhere on the frame.  It has three functions, as I see it.  It reassures me.  It may discourage those who would harm me or my family.  It is capable of causing harm.

Philosophically, it is light years from the phone.  Because it requires that I be master of my own fate.  It says, ‘no one will help you, but you, when the chips are down.’  The help summoned by a phone may not arrive for a very long time, as I live in ‘the sticks.’  The revolver says, ‘you must be accountable for this decision; you must carry and use me safely and you must use my capacity for injury with a profound awareness of morality, ethics and of the value of life.’   The revolver is about individuality.

Americans, Westerners in general, are slowly abdicating responsibility for self and embracing the collective.  The question is always, ‘who will help me?  Who will pay for me?  Who will give me? Who will come to me?  Who will allow me to do nothing while they do something?  Who can I blame?  Who will excuse me?’

This is a travesty.  This will be one of the deepest wounds to our nation, to our way of life.  Not the phone itself, which is merely a tool, but the abdication of accountability that communication can falsely represent.

If the law were just, I would gladly carry my revolver everywhere.  I like the phone, and I find it useful.  But I am old school.  I am old Southern.  I am descended from patriots.  I have been responsible for others and continue to be for myself.  I believe in the individual.

Furthermore, I am a physician in an emergency department.  I know what humans are capable of doing.  I love people.  Some of my favorite patients have been in handcuffs.  I joke with them, I like them.  But humans are dangerous.  If you doubt it, read the newspaper.

So in the end, based on my life, my experiences and my philosophy, I can only say that when I reach around my side, I love the feel of that handle far more than the feel of that phone.  And I love what it represents far more than any capacity for communication."

On an "outstanding" lesson

I've just been channel-hopping and came across Teachers' TV. It was citing an example of an "outstanding" lesson on elementary geometry for, I guess, 9-year-olds. "Outstanding" is Ofsted's term, by the way.

Not only was the lesson poorly constructed, but just under the surface it was teaching rubbish...

1. The teacher gave several instructions but then qualified them with, "but before that, you need to..."
   
   
2. She put up a small text slide outlining the lesson objectives. Why? This is teacher-speak, which means nothing to learners, who have no interest in framing stuff this way. Basically, in order to make sense of this kind of specification of steps towards a goal (if that is actually a good metaphor) you need to be able to stand outside the experience, to see the map of the journey; and of course very few learners can do that. Indeed, probably none of them... not even postgrads. So all this "explanation" does is to confuse further.
   
   
3. Most egregiously though, it reproduced precisely the offence I experienced at the same age. I can remember the class vividly. It was the first half of a Friday afternoon, just before Art or the Story which wound down the week, probably in the Spring of 1953 or thereabouts.
   
   We were given exactly the same exercise as the pupils in the programme. Construct a triangle (actually, these pupils had the triangles drawn and cut out for them), then use a protractor to measure the angles, and add them up to arrive at the magic total of 180 degrees.

Except that they didn't! As I recall, my total was about 183 degrees, and the girl next to me got 178 degrees. Neither our understanding nor the teacher's (OK--to confuse the issue but to explain much else, this was the bizarre year when my mother was also my class teacher) could cope with "margins of error". So there was a meta-learning in this lesson:

The theory and received wisdom is correct. If your experience differs, it is wrong. 

It was repeated many times afterwards, in practically every "science" lesson in particular throughout my schooling. To be fair, it wasn't surprising in those days. I was in secondary school in the late '50s when budgets were very tight, and the improvisation of equipment was taken for granted. 

But things have changed; we are no longer constrained by limited facilities (at this level). And while I and my peers understood at some level that our practicals were just playing at science, children today are accustomed to something more definitive.

I don't want to get hyperbolic, but forget "objectives" and aspirations, and get down to more realistic "takeaways" including the unintended ones.

About twenty years or more ago, there was a late night Open University programme on "Professional Judgement". [See; Dowie J and Elstein A (eds) (1988) Professional Judgement; a reader in clinical decision making Cambridge; Cambridge U P] It was fascinating, and I am amazed now to find out how old it is, but the relevant point is that at the end of each programme, there was space given to --as I remember-- an academic from the LSE, to critique the assumptions and the methodology of the preceding argument.

That's the way to promote sound development of practice, not facile and fiddled "demonstrations" of what "ought" to have happened.

On implicit values

There is no better opportunity than the enforced leisure of a ten-hour wait in an airport to reflect on the conference we (two collaborators and I) have just attended.

The theme of this year's STLHE conference in Fredericton, New Brunswick was "Between the Tides"; quite appropriate considering that it took place not far (by Canadian standards) from the Bay of Fundy, home to the "highest tides in the world" according to its website. So it looked at negotiating the countervailing influences and pressures to which higher education--particularly in Canada--is subject.

Generally speaking conference "themes" are meaningless. They are cast so widely and blandly as to say nothing which might possibly discourage any attendance or any papers, so they say nothing at all. This one was different, and was structured around four dilemmas, explored principally of course in the Canadian context, but of much wider applicability.

They were;

• disciplinary education vs. liberal education


• physical environment vs. virtual environment


• curricular learning vs. extra-curricular learning


• institutional/professional autonomy vs. public accountability

I'm not going to go into them directly, but simply to point out that once you start exploring constructs such as these it almost inevitably leads back to the values implicit in them (cf. the "laddering" method in personal construct theory), and the theme of making explicit what is already implicit--so that it can be explored and debated--cropped up time and again in the papers I attended.

It was even there in our own, on "Safe teaching, risky learning?" in which we encouraged participants (it is the tradition to be quite participatory) to explore risk-taking in teaching, in a risk-averse "quality"-obsessed HE culture. (It is even worse in FE.)

What was encouraging was the extent to which such discourses and debates were readily accepted by the conference membership. The hegemony of utilitarian and neo-liberal discourse is being challenged; at least in Canada, at the chalk-face. ("PowerPoint" [blah] -face does not have quite the same ring...)

But what was challenging was to realise that what I had thought of as my stock-in-trade for many years, having grown old teaching social work, is now being being taken up and explored in many more disciplines, via many more frameworks. Instead of people wanting to impose an ethical or political framework on what are seen as basically technical issues such as curriculum design and the adoption of models of learning or even of student attributes---instead of that, there is a new recognition that those issues were never merely technical. They always contained (in several senses) implicit values, and perhaps the choice of technical means ought to follow the value-based ends?

What are these values? What are the frameworks? Hey, work out some answers. There are lots of potential ones!

On training child abusers

OK. The heading is a little dramatic, and I have no direct involvement with the Irish situation. Nor have I read the whole report. But I was involved in training "residential child care officers" in the '70s.

From 1975 to 79 I was the tutor-in-charge of the largest Certificate in the Residential Care of Children and Young People (CRCCYP) course in England. It was based in a College of Technology (up-market college of further education which in this case eventually became part of a university) and validated--very loosely by present standards--by the then Central Council for Education and Training in Social Work, predecessor of...who cares?

• Incidentally, I had no direct experience at all of practice in residential child care or any kind of residential social work, or indeed of any kind of social work beyond some volunteering at university.
• but I did have a first degree in European Studies and a Master's in Religious Studies
• and a sociological interest in "total institutions"...
• and a year's introduction to the psychoanalytic approach to group relations
  
• and I and the team of tutors, were really proud of the intensive educational and vocational programme we offered
  

Why mention all this? Because of what it suggests about the disconnection between the training--and probably the inspection--and the practice of care.

• Some of the people I trained---and licensed to practise---were later prosecuted for abusing children in their care. (I find myself seeking to exculpate the course by claiming, "merely" physically, not sexually. As if that mitigated anything.)
• Some of the practice placements we used were later shown to be the settings of abuse. The details are not always public (nor I admit are all the allegations tested), but it appears that in some cases "therapeutic" was a cover for "abusive" activity. (I am being scrupulous here. In the absence of evidence, both descriptors go in quotes. But New Barns, one of the establishments identified in the linked article below, was regarded as one of our very best student placements.)
• One of the external examiners for the course was later convicted of child sexual abuse. (See here.) I became a friend of his; he stayed with me rather than go to a hotel when he came up for examiners' meetings (even that would be frowned upon now). We discussed how unjustly he had been treated in various ways for admitting to being gay. Above all I remember to my shame commiserating with him over the abuse he had received (including excrement through his letter-box, he said) over an item he wrote for his column in Social Work Today entitled "Sex and the Residential Social Worker" in which he argued for an end to the absolute prohibition of sexual relations between staff and residents--spinning it to imply that he was referring to establishments for morally and mentally competent adults with physical disabilities...
  

This is 30-year-old history. I am not trying to re-open old wounds. (That may indeed be a just and worthwhile project, but it is a different one.)

But I am not surprised that the Irish authorities in those day were so easily deceived by the abusers. I was certainly even more naive than other people in my position. I cringe now to think that only once, out of more than 300 students with whom I worked, did it even occur to me that he or she might be a premeditating abuser. (I did confront that person over his failure to obtain parental consent for a planned "expedition" with children. I never saw him again... but there was no evidence to pursue it further.)

Later, in 1979, trying to set up a crisis intervention project for young people at odds with their families, using volunteers, I was challenged by a Director of Social Services; "How are you going to guarantee that your volunteers do not abuse the young people?" Strange question. Well, they want to help, not hurt, don't they? And besides, this is a Christian project... How can you be so negative and suspicious? Pathetic response.

Ireland in the '70s was quite different from the rather-frayed Celtic Tiger of just yesterday. If we failed to see what was beneath our noses in secular social services in England, how much more likely was that in an Irish Republic in thrall to the Catholic church?

Now, of course, much is different. Fear of abuse has unsurprisingly become an obsession, to the detriment of some of the best practice of thirty years ago. Sadly, those abusive practitioners not only destroyed directly many young lives, but they also destroyed any notion of trust within the system. So that the possibility of rebuilding hope for those children who have already been abused is severely limited; for every school or children's home which dares physically to touch them, there are many which do not.

About fifteen years ago, I was peripherally involved in giving evidence to an enquiry into the peremptory closure in the middle of the night of Oxendon House in Leighton Buzzard. (The link is about the only useful one I can find on the web, interestingly.) The reason for the action was claimed to be that members of staff had been giving young people massages to help them relax before bed, under the supervision of a fully-trained masseuse. The parliamentary written answer states;

the acting principal of the home has been arrested by the police and that four other members of staff have been suspended. Following advice from the social services inspectorate, the county council is conducting an investigation into allegations of inappropriate therapies and restraint techniques and the general culture of the home. Meanwhile the home has been closed, the children relocated and 45 members of staff have been given leave of absence.The social services inspectorate is continuing to monitor the situation.

All criminal charges were dropped. A subsequent inquiry (costing, I was told, £250,000) found no abuse or wrong-doing, although some practices were "capable of being misconstrued". But there was nothing to merit the precipitate closure, nothing to justify the relocation of children who were just in some cases finding the firsrt safe place in their lives, or blighting the careers of the staff. The Director of Social Services was the one who resigned.

I'm rambling. That's what happens. It is very difficult to retain focus or perspective. There's a deep desire for some simple angle. Sometimes the most difficult part of reflection is to acknowledge that there isn't one.

On not so much a job, more a way of life...

Friday—Good Friday—was a sort of second-class public holiday in the UK. (I leave aside the theological dimension.)

Nowadays I work part-time. Sorry. I get paid for working part-time. I was reminded of that yesterday by an email from my "line-manager"...

Digression! Times Higher Education this week has been themed on the interface* between academics and administrators, particularly this article.

However, she or he wrote:

I have checked with HR what happens about your hours and the public holidays. Apparently all public holidays have already been factored into your leave allowance. This means that if you normally work on a day that a public holiday falls then you have to take it off your annual leave allowance, but if you don't normally work that day then it does not affect your leave or hours. So, for example: If you are usually at work on Friday then that day has to come off your annual leave allowance. (My emphasis)

I don't have the kind of mind which wonders whether or not this is fair--and I am thankful that on the whole the system has played fair with me. So far.

No, my issue is rather different. When I worked "full-time" there was no real problem. (There could have been, of course. "Academic freedom" is an important area. But my current concern is much more trivial and domestic.)

Then, I was never not working. My wool-gathering while walking the dog ---was work. My boredom watching an over-hyped film ---was work. My attempts to re-create that Platonic souvlaki I had in Bristol of all places ---were work. My serendipitous encounter with an argument or quote in reading for pleasure in another discipline ---was work. You get the point.

• Remember, I work in "education", as opposed to, say, quantum physics, or the law of intellectual property, or archaeology. "Work" requires few specialised resources or equipment, at least in its early stages. And the boundaries of the discipline are notoriously fuzzy...
  

So, much to the annoyance of my wife, who reckons that the boundary was always drawn in favour of "work", I just did not draw the boundary. The same issue is explored here by an academic in the US wondering what compulsory unpaid leave amounts to.

So, again, what does working "0.4" mean, for an academic? Two days a week? Yes, notionally. And I still have default days of attendance at the university, but now that the classes schedules for those days are over, they make no sense...

In the final analysis, "0.4" means 0.6 not at work. And that is hard work. It means gardening (it is not accidental that the civil service calls suspension, "gardening leave") or decorating or anything which precludes thinking... (and much as I dislike both activities, they don't work in that respect). Can't do it. So blow the whole thing. The role of academic, even in a spurious "discipline" like education, is not something one can pick up and put down; it is (for better or for worse) an identity. I am reminded of a point I made in a previous post;

(I asked Mr Lyward what he had asked the student ... to do. "DO?" he replied. "I don't want him to do anything. I want him to be." He would have stood no chance as a "practice teacher" nowadays.)

So am I "at work" as I write this?

* "themed on the interface" I really do have to congratulate myself on coining a truly vacuous example of management-speak which may well become a classic, going forward!

On 45 years on

I'm an outsider (British, if you haven't noticed), and political comment is not the business of this blog, but today is Martin Luther King Jr. day in the USA, and tomorrow is arguably the most tangible fulfilment of his dream of 28 August 1963. There is a synergy here which cannot be ignored;

On Yorick

The news story today concerns the use (or not) of a genuine skull in the graveyard scene opening the final act of Hamlet (Shakespeare c.1600). The skull was bequeathed by a concert pianist, Andre Tchaikowsky.

I knew him, Horatio! No, actually I didn't; but one day in October 1972 I was visiting a student on placement at one of the world's most amazing therapeutic establishments for young men, Finchden Manor. Do read this site. I was not quite 28 years old; two years older than the oldest resident in the establishment at the time.

I was ushered into the presence of George Lyward, the charismatic founder and Chief of the place. No, it was not a "therapeutic community" as now understood and discussed in the literature. It was far too autocratic. I could go on and on about Finchden Manor on the basis of my limited acquaintance in Mr Lyward's final years, but you can get first-hand testimony from the website.

Mr Lyward was indeed charismatic (in the Weberian sense). But his charismatic quality was one I had never before (or since) encountered. He made me feel that he was privileged to meet me. I was a callow 28! An upstart tutor on a social work course who had never done any social work in his life. A fraud, basically (although not deliberately so; I was so naive then that I did even know that there were some things a degree in European Studies did not equip you for). And Mr Lyward was honoured to meet me. It was not an act.

This of course was even more disorienting than being interrogated and put down. However, from the room next door came wonderful piano music. Trying to make conversation in my blundering way (nowadays of course, I should not have to "make conversation". We would immediately have got down to the forms and reports and checklists), I asked about the hi-fi, as I thought it must be. "No," said Mr Lyward, "that's not a recording. That's Andre Tchaikowsky practising for his concert at the Festival Hall. He's an old boy of Finchden, you know, and he comes back here to practise when he has something big coming up." Tchaikowsky had come to Finchden to overcome some of his trauma from growing up in Warsaw in WW2 and the loss of most of his family.

(An aside; when I ventured to get down to the material for the placement report, I asked Mr Lyward what he had asked the student [Steve Williams--I remember you, and it's an episode for you to be proud of, too] to do. "DO?" he replied. "I don't want him to do anything. I want him to be." He would have stood no chance as a "practice teacher" nowadays.)

That's as close as I got to Yorick, and to some other things, too.

On the potency of taking offence

This is only indirectly a teaching point, but it does reflect on the culture of our classrooms. This article and this one (both from rather right-wing perspectives, agreed, but that does not mean there is no virtue in them) make the point that sensitivity to possible offence is now a potent element in political debate at all levels--particularly where a shame-culture prevails (as it does much more than most of us would like to think). See also this report.

"Political correctness" (in itself a contestable label) in its most benign form, sets out not to offend anyone. OK, but that gives hostages to fortune in ceding great power to anyone who decides to be hypersensitive about, for example, being bald (sorry! "Follically challenged" I don't think that phrase was ever more than a joke anyway, and I can call it because I am myself bald...). Or being of a particular ethnic origin, or having a specific learning disability, or espousing a particular faith...

The fact that one falls into one or more of those categories (and several more) does not automatically make one a morally superior person, exempt from venal desires to take personal (or group) advantage from any strategic error by a competitor. (I'm looking at this systemically.)

If major players in a system elevate "not giving offence" to their primary moral principle, then they cede authority to whoever can be most easily offended. And given that "not offending" is th ultimate pusillanimity (wow! Did I spell that right?) they probably deserve the consequences.