War on Universities, Lawyers & Expertise

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donbosco said:
Trap. Charlatan.
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I think schools would be wise for now to avoid traps. I would avoid discussing trans issues at the undergraduate level. Still do the research but don't trigger traps. Hopefully in three years things will be better.

But the crazy thing is that I don't think that the assignment even invited a trap. It was about gender conformity, resulting popularity and bullying, and the impact on mental health. That is a pretty non-controversial topic even for fundamentalists.

I didn't read the full study so I could be wrong but here are some comments:

  1. She argued against several points that were not in the study:
    • Eliminating gender
    • Multiple genders
    • Normality of kids who follow gender stereotypes - the study never claimed kids who follow gender stereotypes are abnormal.
  2. She goes into irrelevant tangents about how people incorrectly think the bible is condescending towards women. How is this remotely relevant? Did the study ever claim that the bible is condescending towards women? She brought up the bible herself then went on a tangent about how parts of it are misinterpreted.
  3. She wrote she doesn't feel that people are pressured to be more masculine or feminine.
    • This ignores the experience as reported by the study participants. If she were to disagree with the accuracy of the study, make specific references to the study and why she believes it may be inaccurate.
    • The tone of her response was that men were created to be one way and women the other. This contradicts her point that people are not pressured to be masculine or feminine.

I was an engineering major so I didn't read a lot of papers from peers. But I know that nobody I went to school with would have written garbage like that. Well, I did know one guy who was probably dumb enough to do it.

The only other exception was a student in freshmen English class. It was in my first week or two of college and we had to edit papers written by other students in our group. There was a female student who was on a golf scholarship who gave us a paper full of misspellings and grammatical mistakes including sentence fragments. It was so bad it was almost illegible. I just kind of ignored it and let the other students correct it. I didn't know how to approach it, and I viewed myself as a nice guy and didn't want to upset her. (Doing what I did was not nice in retrospect.)

* I am convinced I spent far more time writing and editing this response than she did writing her paper.
 
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nycfan said:
BTW, this assignment represents 3% of the total class grade.
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Doesn't matter - having read about this student's mother and her history of ginning up controversy I do get the impression that this was some kind of setup. The fact that the paper was only a tiny portion of her grade was irrelevant to the goals of the parent and student, which was to cry "victim!" and then go to right-wing media to create a scandal. Which has worked out very nicely for them, but not for the poor professor. What a world when professors and teachers now have to watch their backs because they might be literally set up by some of their own students for social media hits and controversy.
 
nycfan said:
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I always thought the unlimited time accommodation was a little unfair. Almost all of the questions I missed on the ACT were due to time constraints - things I didn't get to or things I had to rush through. I remember just filling in B's for a dozen or more questions on the math section. (ACT does not punish for wrong answers like SAT so you might as well fill in random entries.) Part of the reason is that there were topics my small high school didn't cover so I had to figure it out on the fly. Things like rotation/translation of graphs. But I should be punished for going slower there because I didn't know / wasn't exposed to the concepts.

By allowing unlimited time you entirely remove one factor that is meant to differentiate students. I understand some people legitimately need more time for learning disability reasons but the only real fair compromise is to give everyone unlimited time.

Note: I sort of cheated on the ACT. The room had no clock and I had no watch. Time was called for that section. I filled in the B's during the next section. I justified it because had I had a clock I could have stopped 20 seconds earlier and to fill it in. Was kind of pissed the room had no clock.
 
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From what Ive seen at some other schools....those disabilities can also be used to game the housing system (preferred dorms or single rooms).
 
So I was thinking about how the right views African American Studies now vs early ‘90s.

When I was in college I remember hearing some more conservative people complain about specific things taught in African American studies.

Today conservatives no longer have specific complaints but instead want to rid us of African American studies programs altogether. Plus rewrite the history books on slavery.

The right has moved so far right in the decades since I was in college.

I don’t think society itself has moved so far right but we are electing people who are pushing these agendas.
 
ChapelHillSooner said:
So I was thinking about how the right views African American Studies now vs early ‘90s.

When I was in college I remember hearing some more conservative people complain about specific things taught in African American studies.

Today conservatives no longer have specific complaints but instead want to rid us of African American studies programs altogether. Plus rewrite the history books on slavery.

The right has moved so far right in the decades since I was in college.

I don’t think society itself has moved so far right but we are electing people who are pushing these agendas.
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Which is why it’s infuriating to hear folks talk about “the extreme left” as if there’s really an extreme left party/agenda in the US.

The right has gone so far to the extreme, that the left has lurched further rightward to compensate.

We literally no longer have any moderate D party members who stand for universal healthcare, nationwide abortion rights, higher taxes on the rich, etc. These ideas used to be a cornerstone of “moderate”liberal ideology—and now they’re seen as extreme leftist.
 
EyeballKid said:
Which is why it’s infuriating to hear folks talk about “the extreme left” as if there’s really an extreme left party/agenda in the US.

The right has gone so far to the extreme, that the left has lurched further rightward to compensate.

We literally no longer have any moderate D party members who stand for universal healthcare, nationwide abortion rights, higher taxes on the rich, etc. These ideas used to be a cornerstone of “moderate”liberal ideology—and now they’re seen as extreme leftist.
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Yep...we've had virtually no electorally viable Left in my lifetime. Yeah, Bernie Sanders and AOC and now Mamdani "make the scene" but even there we're talking about unaligned center-left at best. It is why many, many years ago I resigned myself to voting as effectively anti-Rightist as I could, even working for candidates who had a chance to defeat such people.
 
EyeballKid said:
Which is why it’s infuriating to hear folks talk about “the extreme left” as if there’s really an extreme left party/agenda in the US.

The right has gone so far to the extreme, that the left has lurched further rightward to compensate.

We literally no longer have any moderate D party members who stand for universal healthcare, nationwide abortion rights, higher taxes on the rich, etc. These ideas used to be a cornerstone of “moderate”liberal ideology—and now they’re seen as extreme leftist.
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In many of the world's other democracies today's Democrats would be seen as dead center or even center-right, while Republicans would be seen as extreme, fringe, blatant xenophobic white supremacist very far right. Which is exactly what they are, of course, but they persist in seeing themselves as "common sense", "in the middle", and so on. There are no true moderates or centrists at all in the GOP anymore, people like John McCain and Mitt Romney and Lynne Cheney were (or are) themselves all hard-right. The real battles in today's GOP are not between moderates and hard conservatives, it's between hard-right conservatives with at least some brains and sense of reality and extreme nutcase conspiracy quack cult loons living in their own little evidence-free fantasy world.
 
"McCoul was fired in September after a student over the summer secretly recorded a classroom exchange in which the student disagreed with McCoul about whether it was legal to teach that there are more than two genders. The student then met with — and also secretly recorded — then-university president Mark Welsh III, who initially refused to fire McCoul. State Rep. Brian Harrison, R-Midlothian, posted the videos on X weeks after they were made.

Although there is no law prohibiting instruction that acknowledges more than two genders, Welsh did eventually fire her after the videos drew conservative backlash, saying her teaching was not consistent with the course description. Welsh later resigned.

After McCoul’s firing, the university system began reviewing courses across its 12 universities, including through the use of an artificial intelligence tool. On Dec. 18, the Board of Regents passed a policy prohibiting courses from “advocating race or gender ideology, or topics related to sexual orientation or gender identity” except in certain non-core or graduate courses that are reviewed, shown to serve a “necessary educational purpose” and approved in writing by a campus president.

Two faculty panels have found McCoul’s termination was not justified and that her academic freedom was violated, concluding the university fired her over what she taught and failed to follow required dismissal procedures.

The controversy at Texas A&M, along with new laws expanding the power of governor-appointed regents over curriculum, hiring and discipline and expression on campuses, sparked changes across Texas higher education, with university systems launching course audits and adopting new restrictions on how race, gender and sexuality are taught."
 
donbosco said:
"McCoul was fired in September after a student over the summer secretly recorded a classroom exchange in which the student disagreed with McCoul about whether it was legal to teach that there are more than two genders. The student then met with — and also secretly recorded — then-university president Mark Welsh III, who initially refused to fire McCoul. State Rep. Brian Harrison, R-Midlothian, posted the videos on X weeks after they were made.

Although there is no law prohibiting instruction that acknowledges more than two genders, Welsh did eventually fire her after the videos drew conservative backlash, saying her teaching was not consistent with the course description. Welsh later resigned.

After McCoul’s firing, the university system began reviewing courses across its 12 universities, including through the use of an artificial intelligence tool. On Dec. 18, the Board of Regents passed a policy prohibiting courses from “advocating race or gender ideology, or topics related to sexual orientation or gender identity” except in certain non-core or graduate courses that are reviewed, shown to serve a “necessary educational purpose” and approved in writing by a campus president.

Two faculty panels have found McCoul’s termination was not justified and that her academic freedom was violated, concluding the university fired her over what she taught and failed to follow required dismissal procedures.

The controversy at Texas A&M, along with new laws expanding the power of governor-appointed regents over curriculum, hiring and discipline and expression on campuses, sparked changes across Texas higher education, with university systems launching course audits and adopting new restrictions on how race, gender and sexuality are taught."
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They're treating professors like public school teachers - not just high school, but elementary school. And say goodbye to Women's Studies, African-American Studies, Gender Studies, Cultural Studies, and all of those other departments that have grown since the Sixties. This is the culture war being fought full-force by conservatives who have successfully packed university board of trustees and directors and chancellors with their people, and who are now clamping down on traditional academic and faculty freedom and starting to micromanage college curricula and what can and cannot be taught. American education is entering its own dark ages.
 
Mulberry Heel said:
They're treating professors like public school teachers - not just high school, but elementary school. And say goodbye to Women's Studies, African-American Studies, Gender Studies, Cultural Studies, and all of those other departments that have grown since the Sixties. This is the culture war being fought full-force by conservatives who have successfully packed university board of trustees and directors and chancellors with their people, and who are now clamping down on traditional academic and faculty freedom and starting to micromanage college curricula and what can and cannot be taught. American education is entering its own dark ages.
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Bingo...note that the mandate to make syllabi public is much more of a power move than most realize. Reposting this piece from the "Syllabus" Thread.

ncnewsline.com

UNC system’s new 'work for hire' policy is a right-wing Trojan horse • NC Newsline

COMMENTARY: As faculty objecting to the policy argued, making syllabi public isn’t really about transparency for the benefit of students, as Hans claims, but about making faculty and their courses easier targets for outside critics with an ideological agenda.
ncnewsline.com ncnewsline.com
 
From March, 2015

"Pope Center researchers say that higher education should be regarded as an economic good like any other, and that low tuition rates “subsidize” it and distort the market. Based on this theory, the Pope Center argues for raising tuition in the U.N.C. system and shifting public funding to tuition grants for students attending private colleges, eroding the distinction between public and private institutions. Of course, increasing the financial burden on students in the U.N.C. system would likely cause them to cluster in safe pre-professional majors. This would be just fine, according to higher education’s market reformers, because those are the programs that provide returns on investment."

www.newyorker.com

Ayn Rand Comes to U.N.C.

For several years, there have been indications that the state’s new leaders want to change the mission of public higher education in North Carolina.
www.newyorker.com www.newyorker.com
 
donbosco said:
From March, 2015

"Pope Center researchers say that higher education should be regarded as an economic good like any other, and that low tuition rates “subsidize” it and distort the market. Based on this theory, the Pope Center argues for raising tuition in the U.N.C. system and shifting public funding to tuition grants for students attending private colleges, eroding the distinction between public and private institutions. Of course, increasing the financial burden on students in the U.N.C. system would likely cause them to cluster in safe pre-professional majors. This would be just fine, according to higher education’s market reformers, because those are the programs that provide returns on investment."

www.newyorker.com

Ayn Rand Comes to U.N.C.

For several years, there have been indications that the state’s new leaders want to change the mission of public higher education in North Carolina.
www.newyorker.com www.newyorker.com
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UNC has historically been one of the very top liberal arts (Humanities) universities in the country, certainly among public universities. That 2015 Pope Center report details what they wanted to do a decade ago, and they're following that blueprint almost exactly. Gradually abolish or at least greatly trim the liberal arts at every UNC System school and move in a kind of trade school/STEM direction. And it's not just about doing what's "profitable" - right wingers have been fighting to prevent people from getting a liberal arts education since the days of segregation.

When Booker T. Washington cut his Atlanta Compromise to found public colleges for black men at the end of the 1800s, one thing he had to promise is that they would not primarily be liberal arts colleges, but would focus mainly on what we now call STEM subjects. Why? Partly it was from the fear that blacks with a liberal arts degree wouldn't work at manual labor jobs that white Southerners thought blacks should fill, but it was also due to white segregationist state governments fearing that if young black men took humanities courses and critically examined just how oppressed they were and the history of slavery and segregation that they would organize and do more to overthrow or at least change that system. And I suspect that this is the reasoning behind this much broader attack on the Humanities and liberal arts - it's really an assault on the whole concept of teaching critical thinking and not just sticking to the surface of most issues.
 
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