Classroom diversity

Those in the academic world who claim to have fashionable doubts about Enlightenment values might want to think long and hard right now about whether they really want to return to the 17th Century. Because in the United States as it exists today, the 17th Century- not some imagined postmodern Utopia- is the only alternative on offer. I don’t see how anybody who’s watched the religious right’s Big Lie Machine at work over the Schiavo fiasco can doubt that.

Would it help if someone pointed out that Darwin had a theology degree?

winston smith writes: Liberalism as I understand it views all bias as wrong–liberal bias included.

I appreciate the sentiment, but is it really possible to live without biases? What exactly would that mean? That you give equal consideration to all opinions? I just don’t think that’s possible. On any given topic, there will be thousands, if not millions of different opinions. There is just no way to sort them all out and give each one its day in court.

I don’t think that being unbiased is the correct goal—instead one should be open to changing one’s opinions, and one should constantly question one’s own beliefs. But it isn’t possible to live without bias, I don’t think.

‘The problem was that an anthropology professor “did a tirade” in his course that evolution was correct and that creationism was not.’

This is like a bad king fu movie. Dennis K. Baxley is humiliated as a young man by a master of Liberal Professor style kung fu — the same style of kung fu that killed Baxley’s Father (in heaven) — so young Baxley has dedicated himself to the attainment of great power via State Legislature Logroller Style kung fu — and now, at last, vengeance can be his!

Daryl,
I think it’s wrong to focus on limiting cases and highly-theoretical questions here. I’m not talking about the possibility of attaining pure objectivity, I’m talking about being ordinarily, achievably unbiased. Whether pure objectivity is humanly attainable is an interesting question, but not one I think we need to answer in this case.

Ted,
I’m thinking of sub-optimal pedagogical conduct that falls far short of what any sensible person could call abuse. In fact, I guess you could say that my worry is that, by making a non-abusive but still-irresponsible degree of bias acceptable in the classroom, we may have more-or-less invited over-reaction by conservatives.

Incidentally, I sorta think that may be part of what happened back in the ’80’s with the PC stuff. There was a lot of illiberal stuff going on on campus, but liberals let it slide because it came from the illiberal left rather than the illiberal right. I think that gave lots of energy to conservatives, and that’s partially responsible for the contemporary ascendancy of the right. That’s mostly a hunch, but read the first chapter of David Brock’s _Blinded by the Right_, about his experience at Berkeley and how it drove him to the right, for some supporting evidence.

“No relativistic conclusions follow from this. The evidence favors evolution, so we present the evidence. Good evidence speaks to those who have ears to hear.”

Unfortunately, this isn’t really true, at least not in the practice of our lives. A persuasive speaker (or writer, or filmmaker) can make use of the evidence to draw his listeners to entirely the wrong conclusion. If this were not true, then we would all be able to ‘do’ science well – once presented with the evidence the truth will be revealed. As this is not the case, we must conclude that there is a significant creative aspect to science, in drawing conclusions from the evidence. And this is what is infuriating about the creationists – they attempt to remove necessary parts of science education from the teaching of evolution – in the hope that the presentation of the bare evidence, which they know in itself to be an inadequate persuasive tool (necessarily so, this is not some failing of the theory of evolution), will lead students to conclude that their parents and pastors (who are conducting persuasive work) are correct. After all God is great, isn’t he? You hear that every day in America.

“The legislation requires faculty members to expose their students to a wide variety of viewpoints”
Since when is legislation necessary for this? Any prof worth his or her salt already does this. What makes this complicated is that it fuses two issues: 1, the creationism issue and 2, the Bauerlein/PC-group-think issue. I think there’s a difference between expecting ideological diversity in a political theory class and expecting scientists to teach flat-earth theory. But even if Horowitz and this legislation overstate the case, Bauerline’s original point was a decent one.

Yes!

One notes approvingly that Florida was

home to the forward-looking

Cyrus Teed, whose courage in defying solid-earth orthodoxy foreshadowed the flowering of scientific inquiry now represented by our intrepid Intelligent Design advocates.

Maybe, if this bill passes, we can get Florida to mandate that solid-earth and hollow-earth theories of geology be taught side-by-side.

Giles: If its Physical Anthropology then evolutionary theory is very much essential to the subject. I can’t believe I even had to write that.

I do Religious Studies but mayhap I can teach my “Theory of the Brontosaurus”?

This line of Baxley’s takes the cake:

But Baxley brushed off Gelber’s concerns. “Freedom is a dangerous thing, and you might be exposed to things you don’t want to hear,” he said.

Crybabies.

Evolution is the foundation of all modern biology. The alternative is asserting that miracles are responsible for speciation. If you reject the idea that you can actually apply the scientific method to human evolution…how can you justify applying it to any other area of anthropology? Saying that UFOs planted the giant statues on Easter Island has the same standing as “Intelligent Design”.

Evolution through natural selection is as scientifically controversial as the germ theory of disease or the Special Theory of Relativity. If it makes some Americans uncomfortable – too bad. Stalinists didn’t like it either. If I wanted an example of why this is a bad idea, in fact, I couldn’t pick a better one that evolution. It’s a scientific idea with tremendous support from many avenues, and it is badly misunderstood by a large fraction of Americans. The answer isn’t to water down a powerful idea because it offends some people – the answer is better education so that misunderstandings of science are reduced.

So, in college I had this political science course taught be a self-avowed “Marxist.” He gave us broad ranging reading materials, but spent every class trying to convince us of the truth of value of Marxism (as this was in 1992, he didn’t get many converts).

Anyway, a whole semester of this, and then the final exam came. He hands out the final exam questions, and says, “I didn’t include any questions about Marxism, because I wasn’t sure whether I could grade them objectively.”

It was, seriously, all I studied for the class. I ended up getting a B-, I think. I still get angry thinking about his sudden conversion to objectivity.

Ok, I’ve read the text of the bill and the report. By themselves, most of the provisions seem unobjectionable. As a statement of principles in a college catalog, they would be fine. There are a couple of problems in the implementation, however. First, the point of the law is that it allows students to take their grievances to court. In some cases, this is redundant. For example, under current law, students could take their case to court if they were marked down due to their political or religious beliefs. Certainly, they could charge breach of contract, couldn’t they?

The thing that is really troubling however, is that it would allow students to bring legal action if the professor introduced controversial material that is not relevant to course content or pedagogie. The courts would thus, have to determine this. What a mess. So I guess the court would appoint “outside experts” like David Horowitz and Stanley Fish to judge whether “controversial material” (undefined by the legislation) is relevant to the course or teaching.

Please rightists, is this what you want? Do you really think that University education will be improved by involving the legal system, the same legal system whose interference you are trying to reduce in medical, environmental, and commercial cases?

I’m thinking of sub-optimal pedagogical conduct that falls far short of what any sensible person could call abuse.

That sounds suspiciously like a “hostile enviroment” claim, something I thought tough-minded conservatives either didn’t believe existed or didn’t believe legislation could ameliorate.

at least if you don’t want to see this sort of thing become widespread

I’d fight this nonsense if I were a Fla legislator, but since I’m not, nor even a Fla resident, I say “Bring it on!” Not only would I delight in watching Jeb! burn his Universities to the ground, I will delight in watching it inevitably turned against conservative institutions, too.

No, the threat of it becoming widespread doesn’t scare me at all. Who am I to stop Americans from embracing idiots if they choose?

Barry: Physical Anthropology is just another name for Biological Anthropology – I beleive – I can’t believe I wrote that ;)

“Please rightists, is this what you want?”

Err no – its just another nail against free speach.

I went to graduate school (in a humanities field) at a prestigious secular private reasearch university. Every time I read about the scourge of tyrannical leftist professors, I ask myself , “Where the hell were they in the 80s and 90s when I was in school?”

I vividly remember the intolerant conservative stranglehold on my graduate department, and even my university.

Fully half of the dozen professors in our department, and almost all of those who had a say in running things, were right-wing nut jobs. They relentlessly pushed their extreme views — in and out of the classroom.

I remember the department chair who spent a whole two hours of a graduate seminar ranting about the evils of Jesse Jackson.

I remember the professor who spent an entire seminar expounding upon the physical and intellectual inferiority of women.

And then there was the department neo-Con — meaning neo-Confederate, in his case. At least that professor usually confined his apologetics for Southern racism to private conversations rather than wasting our class time with his ranting.

I remember the brilliant young professor they purged when they found out he hung out with too liberal a crowd on his own time.

The atmosphere at the university as a whole was little better. I particularly remember the Republican hecklers who came to disrupt talks by insufficiently conservative visiting speakers. The university administration never saw fit even to criticize those assaults on free speech.

Despite being surrounded by real academic bias every day, it never occurred to me to whine and pout and cry. I sucked it up and got on with life. So these pathetic mewlings from conservatives who imagine they are being dissed simply disgust me. Grow up, already!

I don’t think it is so easy to distinguish good teaching from advocacy or even from belligerence.

As to the latter, one of the best things that happened to me in graduate school was getting chewed out (and I mean literally yelled at)in a seminar on Kant by the late George Schrader, Jr., who was offended by my Strawson-influenced perspective on the text and who was, at the time, having us read Kant in conjunction with Wilhelm Reich’s “The Mass Psychology of Fascism.” What was helpful about his anger was that it shocked me into reconsidering not so much Kant as what it meant to seriously engage in the study of a philosophical text. It would have been possible to see his treatment of me as abusive, I suppose, and as reflecting either a left-wing or an anti-analytic ‘bias’. (His reading of Kant was certainly politicized, and the department was engaged in a sort of civil war over ‘analytic’ vs. ‘continental’ conceptions of philosophy.) I was grateful (and still am) that he cared enough about his subject and his students to get mad and yell.

Well, one might make a partial exception for graduate seminars, in which participants should be on more of an equal footing (and perhaps you’re being trained to hold your own in professional life) but even there I wonder how useful yelling is and what kind of macho tone is set. My models in grad school were people who could find and convey the insights in a position they *didn’t* hold. And the last post shows one of the problems of the *assumption* of politicization which is that students will cynically submit the most appalling PC crap because they think it will get them an A. Once you reach that stage it’s very hard to get people back to the point of taking a subject seriously.

“Special case”, eh? I’m sure lots of evolutionary biologists would be thrilled to hear your ideas about the flaws in their science. Could be a Nobel Prize in there somewhere. C’mon, don’t hold back!

There’s a post on this topic http://www.pandasthumb.org/cgi-bin/mt/mt-tb.cgi/902
at the Panda’s Thumb which points out that the Florida constitution will render the proposed legislation toothles, at best.

The problem is that Horowitz is not really an academic, he is a polemicist and carrier-on, an outside agitator if you will. He earns his money by singing his song, and lately his tune has but a few notes. In many ways the people he works for are afraid of their own inability to keep up with the world of science and academia. How can people who made or received their fortunes from old-time industries (manufacturing and so on) conceive of advances in physics, biology, chemistry, and archaeology/anthropology? The synergies between them are staggering in their importance and the market capitalist mindset has a difficult time conceiving of the productization of, say, string theory, pleistocene radiations into the New World, and so on. These advances are several market cycles from reality for the people who are running our politics and businesses, which increasingly are indistinguishable and unseparate to the detriment of the world.

To much focus on the trees. The specific subject in question is unimportant. This bill is about moving power from the university faculty to a state’s legislature. In the past, Florida universities decided what behavior is acceptable on their campuses. The Florida legislature is now making that determination.