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.
 
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