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The End of Being a Duke Professor and What It Means for the Future of Higher Ed

jamesgmartin.center

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Re: The End of Being a Duke Professor and What It Means for the Future of Higher Ed

#61

Post by pjc50 »

wpasc wrote: post #6

I believe HN has both right and left leaning individuals, but I wonder if most people would condemn the practice of professors being ousted from schools for daring to challenge their students' "safe space" notions and microagressing them? This is not an isolated event and universities skew heavily in one direction politically. Is it universally agreeable that the end of healthy debate in college is a really, really b…

I think there is a large amount of misunderstanding (and misinformation) about what safe spaces and trigger warnings are actually all about. They have also been subject to a certain amount of .. inflation? But the core ideas are important.

"Trigger" originally referred specifically to PTSD. There is a small number of students, such as women who have experienced sexual assault, for whom the subject is more than merely upsetting, it causes flashbacks and significant risk to short term mental health. They asked that they not be exposed to this material without warning. (Not that the material not be taught, nor even that it not be taught to them, but that they be informed in advance about the course content in order to mentally prepare for it)

> healthy debate

Healthy debate for whom? Do we need a debate about what constitutes a healthy and effective debate? Do we need to consider the validity of different modes of interaction? "Traditional" debate assumes a sort of weightlessness, that the issues involved are at a distance from the people having the debate. For things like sexual assault or abortion, or the racialisation of intelligence, it's people's actual experiences - well, for people other than the traditional professor class.

> microagressing them

Somehow I'm reminded of the debate over corporal punishment in schools, where pedagogical effectiveness takes a back seat to more primal ideas about punishment, conformity, and order. People used to be beaten for being left-handed, remember.

Re: The End of Being a Duke Professor and What It Means for the Future of Higher Ed

#62

Post by snaky »

edraferi wrote: post #3

It seems like there’s a gap in the market for a hard-nosed, teaching-first university. A place full of passionate professors with high standards. A place where high school valedictorians work their ass off for a B. A place where you feel your best will never be good enough because the standards are impossible... until, one day, you get an A. And that grade MEANS something. And after four years, the students walk out…

There's something like that at K-12 level

https://www.bostonglobe.com/lifestyle/2016/03/15/there-fear-...

Re: The End of Being a Duke Professor and What It Means for the Future of Higher Ed

#63

Post by arethuza »

pjc50 wrote: post #52
dboreham wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Scotland?

Scotland has a number of universities with very different styles and backgrounds?

And those universities differ wildly in how good the courses and departments are... like everywhere I suspect!

Re: The End of Being a Duke Professor and What It Means for the Future of Higher Ed

#64

Post by sytelus »

emmelaich wrote: post #39
rland wrote: post #18

I have read probably 4 or 5 of these articles, written by professors/teachers, claiming to have been punished for their speech. 2 common threads about them. The first is that they rarely discuss specifics about what positions or what opinions got them censured. The second is that the comments section is typically full of drive by commenters who aren't responding to the content of the post in particular but to the ide…

Did you read the linked docs? They're pretty compelling. You cannot say it doesn't discuss specifics.

No, there is nothing specific in linked docs. It seems administration decided to get rid of him, appointed two faculty members to form committee and didn't followed their own bylaws. The tiny glimpse in the doc is that there were some low student ranking in 2018 and few people had negative experience interacting with him - but nothing specific. As per the doc, no one has made any formal complaints.

It's however quite apparent that Prof Charney had issues with liberalism. He, for example, asks why people bowing down to "scientific authorities" are considered open-minded but people bowing down to religious authority are considered closed minded. I think it's a clever twist of the word "authority" in to forcing people to think that religion and science are the same thing. If this is his "research", I don't feel too bad for him.

Re: The End of Being a Duke Professor and What It Means for the Future of Higher Ed

#65

Post by ninguem2 »

edraferi wrote: post #3

It seems like there’s a gap in the market for a hard-nosed, teaching-first university. A place full of passionate professors with high standards. A place where high school valedictorians work their ass off for a B. A place where you feel your best will never be good enough because the standards are impossible... until, one day, you get an A. And that grade MEANS something. And after four years, the students walk out…

Williams, Harvey-Mudd, Reed...These places exist. But more people would like to go to Duke, Harvard, Berkeley,... Why is that, I am not sure but the market values the latter better.

Re: The End of Being a Duke Professor and What It Means for the Future of Higher Ed

#66

Post by pjc50 »

esyir wrote: post #53
yarg wrote: post #28

More and more this safe space bullshit is infiltrating the former bastions of free-thought. It is a disturbing trend where it no longer matters if someone can convey a counter argument to any given point of view, the mere presence of a point of view contrary to the modern anti-liberal left world view - even if purely rhetorical - breaches the safe space contract and justifies censuring or even punishment. It will onl…

On the free speech front, I'll note that at the moment, the right seems to care more about it than the left, or at least it pays more respect to its dressings. Whether this changes once the power balance tips is a whole different story.

From where I see it the right has leapt to the defence of certain kinds of speech, but absolutely not all speech, and certainly not all kinds of employer-speech interaction. I don't think the right is really going to stand up for "you can't fire your employees for their public statements", is it? In fact, the right is more likely to be in favour of "employers should be able to fire their employees at any time for any reason", so why is the highly specific case of university professors (and no other educators) different?

The right is also more likely to conflate free speech with some kind of "unchallenge privilege" - the idea that people using their speech to complain about your speech is somehow bad. The giveaway for this is people going on television and writing in the national newspapers to complain about how they are "silenced". If they were really silenced I wouldn't be hearing about it through those channels but through some kind of samizdat.

Re: The End of Being a Duke Professor and What It Means for the Future of Higher Ed

#67

Post by golergka »

pjc50 wrote: post #61
wpasc wrote: post #6

I believe HN has both right and left leaning individuals, but I wonder if most people would condemn the practice of professors being ousted from schools for daring to challenge their students' "safe space" notions and microagressing them? This is not an isolated event and universities skew heavily in one direction politically. Is it universally agreeable that the end of healthy debate in college is a really, really b…

I think there is a large amount of misunderstanding (and misinformation) about what safe spaces and trigger warnings are actually all about. They have also been subject to a certain amount of .. inflation? But the core ideas are important. "Trigger" originally referred specifically to PTSD. There is a small number of students, such as women who have experienced sexual assault, for whom the subject is more than merely…

> it's people's actual experiences

First-hand experience gives you unique perspective that you can share with others, but doesn't make you a final authority on the matter. Once you shared your information with others (and assuming there's no trust issues involved), you're on equal grounds as to what to conclude from it.

Re: The End of Being a Duke Professor and What It Means for the Future of Higher Ed

#68

Post by akhilcacharya »

rland wrote: post #18

I have read probably 4 or 5 of these articles, written by professors/teachers, claiming to have been punished for their speech. 2 common threads about them. The first is that they rarely discuss specifics about what positions or what opinions got them censured. The second is that the comments section is typically full of drive by commenters who aren't responding to the content of the post in particular but to the ide…

I share your observations and raise it with another one - has anybody noticed that these sorts of things only happen at elite institutions? I never hear about this sort of thing (about “chilled free speech”) at my alma mater

Re: The End of Being a Duke Professor and What It Means for the Future of Higher Ed

#69

Post by ptah »

ggm wrote: post #30

This "trigger warning" and "harm" thing.. I've been out of tertiary education too long to understand it. I'm sure it's not only American but it feels like an American crafted problem taken worldwide. Future leaders in minority communities need to be able to defend themselves but learning to do it by firing academics on negative feedback feels like the wrong lesson. I'd rather they did it in a real ballot box, not in…

minorities should not have to waste energy defending themselves, when others use that energy to further themselves instead

Re: The End of Being a Duke Professor and What It Means for the Future of Higher Ed

#70

Post by WesternStar »

I think the way to read the response of the Faculty Comittee is this. He was an adjunct he hasn't earned the protection of academic freedom. He gets to keep his job if he fulfills what we feel like is necessary to be a member of our community. We feel like he's a negative experience for students and we don't think his addition is worthwhile. I'm all for not indulging the carebears but the message "You were allowed to stick around after you failed because we thought we could use you and felt sorry for you. But we don't like you and some of our students don't like you. Go find another job." That is not a carebear handling of things if he wanted to have academic freedom he had a right to get tenure. He's an adjunct he needs to act like it. This is very much like Augusta where the don't have formal rules some things are simply frowned upon and its your responsibility to understand the culture of the club. It was his responsibility to understand the culture of the faculty in his tenuous position. That is a very important lesson for him and for students by his example.
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