Posted by JumpCrisscross 2 days ago
But that particular part - "laws requiring professors to publicly post their course outlines in searchable databases" - is great, and should be done everywhere. There are actually universities who _claim_ to have great math (or physics or other science) program, but actually just teach it at "advanced high school" level. So public syllabi - something that was very common in 2000's but going out of style today - are critical for anyone choosing the university to go to.
What's happening in practice, though, is a group of people (like Campus Watch) are looking specifically for anyone teaching gender, trans issues, race, and religion, and analyzing the coursework through their ideologies and harassing professors on account of it. And they're going through past years as well as present.
A friend of mine was harassed by these sorts of groups for their teaching. They received death threats, hardcore pornography, and gore in their inbox from these chuds. The trigger was the availability of their course material online.
Cool, if you feel that way then go face them. Don't force professors to stand in the firing line in your stead.
> Not sharing course outlines is not going to help make this problem better.
It would make finding targets more difficult than just doing a ctrl-f, which obviously would make the problem better just by making it harder to find professors to harass.
Remember, the attackers are not a few oddballs. The are members of a vast MAGA movement that has enough member to elect the present president and that encourages this sort of behavior. And they have tons of money behind them.
Not really, they don't have sufficient time budget and a network of agents to do that as comprehensively as with a simple "google search" some bureaucrat/activist can perform in a few minutes
> And they have tons of money behind them.
Sure, and each dollar has plenty competing uses
[1] https://www.insidehighered.com/news/faculty-issues/academic-...
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1943_Amsterdam_civil_registry_...
College history courses aren't "one-sided morality plays."
The reason why there is more discussion of atrocities committed by europeans is because there is way more course material focused on europeans. There are more courses on the american and french revolutions than the haitian revolution. Even orientalism is a european frame, focusing on how europeans engaged with the near and far east. A course on orientalism is not a course on the middle east. It is a course on europeans.
I do not observe classes on precolumbian american or the islamic golden age shying away from atrocities in their course material. Courses on specific topics rather than time period / region pairings don't tend to shy away from a global frame either.
So you've got a few options.
You could insist that when atrocities come up in courses that focus on europeans that the course contains a "but actually" where it discusses other atrocities to balance things out. This seems odd from a pedagogical standpoint.
You could reduce the number of courses focusing on europeans and increase the number of courses focused elsewhere. But doing this is also considered "woke."
You could deliberately avoid discussion of atrocities committed by europeans in "western civ" style courses. This also doesn't strike me as right.
Could you share what specifically you'd expect to change about history curricula?
> Even orientalism is a european frame, focusing on how europeans engaged with the near and far east. A course on orientalism is not a course on the middle east. It is a course on europeans.
It is nothing of the sort. "Orientalism" is not about Barbary slave raids that emptied whole villages, about Ottoman invaders colonizing half of eastern Europe for centuries, or about the Islamic invasion of Spain. Instead it's focused on problematizing the fact that Europeans viewed these invaders as an 'other', and did not accept and welcome them as their own.
There is, notably, not a similar course chiding native Americans for seeing Europeans as 'other'. There's not even a course problematizing how Ottomans viewed [1] Europe.
You're free to invent further sophisticated reasons why this ridiculous cherry-picking is all perfectly natural and not motivated at all. I am done.
[1] Sorry did I say 'viewed'? I meant 'view', present tense: “Have five children, not three. You are Europe’s future.” - https://www.ndtv.com/world-news/recep-tayyip-erdogan-tells-t...
Again, the reason why we see more courses on Orientalism than the reverse is because of the continued disproportionate focus on european history in the academy. And at least for my professor friend who teaches indigenous american history, there is absolutely discussion of the ways that they understood and misunderstood europeans.
I do not understand how a modern authoritarian leader relates to this whatsoever. Does Erdogan have some say in history curricula at US universities?
Also the condemnation of "treats political disagreement as moral evil" landed harder back before the other tribe decided to embrace the dynamic and fortify their political stances with blatant immoral evil.
The University of California is one of the largest universities in the US. It is governed by a Board of Regents. The majority of those Regents are appointed by the state Governor.
Do you consider that 'political interference'?
One of the things those Regents did was vote to end the use of SAT scores in admissions. They did during a meeting in which several spoke of the value of the SAT. And they acted against the recommendations of the Academic Council's Standardized Testing Task Force.
You might think that the staggered and long terms protect against political interference/influence. But if that's the case, how do we explain how so many votes are unanimous when, on the day of the vote, some regents express opposing views?
That reminds me of the Politburo voting scene in The Death of Stalin. Small group politics at their finest.
Anyway, the UC Board of Regents is full of political hacks and corrupt cronies. Diane Feinstein's husband was famously a regent, while simultaneously serving as Chairman of both CBRE and his own leveraged buyout private equity firm.
What do you mean by that? And could you give an example?
It's hard to imagine any university teaching science majors at 'advanced high school' level, as I understand it. I could see a US community college or almost any university teaching intro courses that way. I can't iamgine what a 4th year chemistry major would be studying that fits the scope of 'advanced high school'.
You have to think about the consequences.
It seems like a great thing until doors are smashed down and people are taken away for discussing topics the current regime doesn’t want discussed.
The "exclusivity" and "networking considerations" stop mattering if you not looking into Ivy League.. and most people don't go there.
Universities have always had their critics and back then was no exception. Complaints centered widely from about the ratbag student element causing troubles, to critism of subsidiaries/what universities cost the state, and about the spoilt and privileged class, and that universities were a hotbed of political activism—which at the time they were—but nothing approached this level of intense scrutiny.
We students and those teaching us could say what we wanted without retribution. I remember being cheered by the student body after giving an anti-Vietnam War speech in the student union building and I suffered no repercussions, and that's how it was for everyone, staff and students alike.
It was a wonderful time to be a university student, and 1968 was very special.
In that case, we can simplify things by applying the same educational standards across the entirety of the k-16 system.
No double standards allowed!
Joking aside, it would be worth restoring tenure and explicitly strengthening it as a safeguard against outrage-driven firings.
Expanding the definition of misconduct to equate controversial speech with a “hostile environment” is unconscionable.
https://public.websites.umich.edu/~rsc/Editorials/fascism.ht...
In this case, we can recognize: "11. Disdain for Intellectuals and the Arts".
1. cult of tradition
2. rejection of modernism
3. action for action’s sake
4. disagreement is treason
5. fear of difference
6. appeal to a frustrated middle class
7. obsession with a plot
8. the enemies are at the same time too strong and too weak.
9. pacifism is trafficking with the enemy.
10. contempt for the weak
11. everybody is educated to become a hero
12. machismo - both disdain for women and intolerance and condemnation of nonstandard sexual habits, from chastity to homosexuality,[...] Since even sex is a difficult game to play, the Ur-Fascist hero tends to play with weapons
13. selective populism
14. Newspeak
These are only his major points of his speach in 1995. The speach is at the moment available here: https://www.nybooks.com/articles/1995/06/22/ur-fascism/
If you make the opposing opinion illegal (the US has not, but the trend is obviously there), don't be surprised if people with the opposing opinion do something about it. The current administration is a hacked mess, of course, but the universities got themselves into it with things like requiring "diversity statements". What if you want to be a professor but you don't think that implementing progressive diversity is important? Too bad, no choice. If a private Christian or a Muslim university requires a statement of faith, well, it's kind of in the name. But a State-funded university that requires a "statement of faith" implementing a progressive political policy, seems like a clear overreach.
I am not defending the Trump administration, which may very well contain fascist elements. But don't go crying "fascist!" and ignore the other side's self-righteous totalitarianism.
See, that's the core difference. One side wants to leave people free to do as they please. The other side wants to control what the first does.
Yes, there are exceptions, on both sides. But they're this, exceptions.
If you are interested in removing bias, then hopefully you're interested in removing bias in the military too?