War on Universities, Lawyers & Expertise

[donbosco]

BTW, this assignment represents 3% of the total class grade.

Trap. Charlatan.

 

[ChapelHillSooner]

Trap. Charlatan.

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.

 

[Mulberry Heel]

BTW, this assignment represents 3% of the total class grade.

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.