If Mort Divine ruled the world

I understand the annoyance at generalisations, to a degree, but at some point will someone admit there's at least the beginnings of a problem? Because it seems like incidents similar to this or other incidents that are different but of a similar end result are coming to light more and more often, yet people are wrong for complaining about what they see as a trend?
 
The tone of those comments and their delivery (what is it, an email?) almost makes me want to say it's a high school instructor; which doesn't make it any better, but does explain the force of the response. But I have no idea who the tweeter is, so I could obviously be wrong.

We do find professors in colleges that do this--but like Baroque said, this is not indicative of a widespread tendency among university instructors. Rather than say "don't use business sources--they blame women," the instructor should point to specific references in the business sources and have a discussion with the student about them. Try to show how the business sources are one-sided, if they are; and if they aren't, maybe suggest how the student could produce a more complex analysis by placing certain sources in conversation with others, rather than ignoring certain sources entirely.

Lots (I won't say most) of university instructors do this. There are some scholars/instructors in the humanities who focus solely on business documents as evidence, and encourage students to do so. Cultural artifacts aren't just fictional or aesthetic in nature, they can also be of various nonfiction genres. Hell, during my graduate study I took a class called "Representing Finance in American Literature" and we read Donald fucking Trump's The Art of the Deal--which I am now very glad to have read, in fact.
 
CASSETTEISGOD said:
I understand the annoyance at generalisations, to a degree, but at some point will someone admit there's at least the beginnings of a problem? Because it seems like incidents similar to this or other incidents that are different but of a similar end result are coming to light more and more often, yet people are wrong for complaining about what they see as a trend?
Click to expand...

It's a shitty professor but I'm not even sure they should be fired. You have human beings teaching classes you're going to get human opinions. Personally I try to keep my classes politically neutral and would encourage others to do so, but I've definitely been a student in classes where the prof was on one end of the spectrum or the other. It's not only one type of professors doing this. What's important people realize is that in college you are an adult and you make your own decisions. You can disagree with the prof, you can take other classes. Whining about someone exercising free speech in college is honestly pretty ironically SJW.

If people want neutrality don't take freaking feminism 101 or whatever that class is about. Learn math.

If this did happen in a class for minors that's a whole different story.

Blaming colleges as a whole is really the wrong route here...
 
Baroque said:
It's a shitty professor but I'm not even sure they should be fired. You have human beings teaching classes you're going to get human opinions. Personally I try to keep my classes politically neutral and would encourage others to do so, but I've definitely been a student in classes where the prof was on one end of the spectrum or the other. It's not only one type of professors doing this. What's important people realize is that in college you are an adult and you make your own decisions. You can disagree with the prof, you can take other classes. Whining about someone exercising free speech in college is honestly pretty ironically SJW.
Click to expand...

The problem here is that the teacher is telling the student to take a certain stance on what is viewed as a more open-ended controversial issue. To some extent we would need more context to judge whether this teacher should be fired or not, but this type of advice is intellectually dishonest and should not be encouraged.

Baroque said:
If people want neutrality don't take freaking feminism 101 or whatever that class is about. Learn math.
Click to expand...

Sometimes people take classes like this not as a major, but as an elective course to get a view of the bigger picture. There is a difference between taking a class that you might not fundamentally agree with and a professor that is intellectually dishonest in their approach. Im actually ok with biased professors, but there are lines in academia that should not be crossed.
 
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Dak said:
Any particular reason you are glad about this now?
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Ammunition. :cool:

This whole issue is so complicated and involves various factors. First and foremost, teachers need to be cognizant of the power dynamic built into the student-teacher relationship. It isn't, nor should it be, an equal relationship. Instructors assess the students and give the grades, and their observation inevitably conditions their students' behavior and the work they produce. Teachers who make students feel that they can't speak their mind aren't doing their job, at least not to the full extent. It's sometimes remarkable to me that instructors in the humanities don't apply a Foucauldian analysis to their own institution. I'd venture to say that most do, but there are definitely some who don't.

Now, this relationship is complicated by the fact that today we have an increasing number of students who question the authority assumed by the "teacher" status. This skepticism has come about precisely because there are some instructors who don't treat it delicately enough and so alienate students of specific political attitudes; but it isn't helped by a right-wing media engine telling these students that academia is out to pull the veil over their eyes, to brainwash them, and (at the most extreme) to deprive them of certain rights. So now we have a growing resentment and distrust toward academics that is becoming increasingly difficult to combat because a) the right-wing media makes it next to impossible for academics to perform any kind of authoritative position, and b) ideologically offensive academics continue to drive away students and reinforce their distrust.

I like to think that the relationship can be salvaged by instructors who acknowledge the power dynamic and admit the expression of alternative views, provided they don't disrupt the class. But in the atmosphere of growing academic distrust, acknowledging the dynamic may not be enough, and instructors will be forced to fall back on the authority of their position; and I believe this tactic is granted to them as teachers--not to abuse, but to deploy strategically for educational purposes. However, at this point, instructors falling back on their institutional authority will likely only deepen the distrust.

I don't think that instructors should treat students this way; but our social media fervor will also feed the fires on the right as more disgruntled students tweet their disapproval. I have to think the responsibility falls on the instructor in situations like this though, because the student will feel backed into a corner due to the power dynamic of the relationship.

By the way, what I'm talking about here regarding the "power dynamic" of the student-teacher relation is pretty much intro-level grad humanities (i.e. it all comes back to Foucault :D).
 
It's an inevitable consequence of the state-educational complex. Too much money spent giving too many people degrees requiring too many shit-tier colleges means you'll have a lot of garbage professors.
 
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Nah, you have to start at the source and halve the number of people allowed to get into college to begin with.
 
I'm not saying anything about high school GPAs or anything (I mean, I was homeschooled so my GPA was basically worth shit), obviously some people need time to get properly motivated, but the bigger issue is the idea that college is the necessary next step after high school to get a fancy job, when the bottom quartile of BS/BA-holders earn the same as high school graduates. Also, axe student loans for 90% of private colleges, most of them are scams and if a person is too stupid to get into a mediocre state college, they should take that as a sign that they were meant to do other things.
 
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