Who is raising these kids to believe that hearing something they disagree is equivalent to "harm"? It must be my filter bubble, but I only ever hear about people decrying this practice and never anyone supporting it. Where is it coming from?
The End of Being a Duke Professor and What It Means for the Future of Higher Ed
91–100 of 241 posts
Re: The End of Being a Duke Professor and What It Means for the Future of Higher Ed
#92I 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
#93I 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…
He wasn't an adjunct. Some universities (or schools within universities) do five year contracts now as an alternative approach to tenure.
I think this is a difference of degree but not kind. Duke still has tenured faculty. He is clearly not afforded the rights of tenured faculty. For this matter functionally he's an adjunct because that's how they ruled on him.
Re: The End of Being a Duke Professor and What It Means for the Future of Higher Ed
#94A friend was let go from a teaching job at a prestigious college in my city because she was - in the words of the administration - harsh and hostile to students who had blatantly plagiarised their papers.
I guess when education becomes a business, you have to place the customers - the students - satisfaction over, you know, the education
Re: The End of Being a Duke Professor and What It Means for the Future of Higher Ed
#95I 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
These sorts of things only happen at elite universities because they can drive headlines. As a graduate of a mid tier university over a decade ago, I assure you they were suppressing faculty speech even more and with a whole lot less fanfare.
Re: The End of Being a Duke Professor and What It Means for the Future of Higher Ed
#96It 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…
I don't know how to say this without it sounding like a brag, but here goes anyway: this is University of Waterloo in a nutshell. I'm entering third year, studying math, and every single one of my friends has gone from high 90s in high school (multiple valedictorians) to struggling to keep an average in the 70s-80s range. Anecdotally, one of my friends did a work term for the Dean of Science (and pure mathematics pro…
I'd be interested in seeing that assignment, if you can lay your hands on it. I teach university maths.
Re: The End of Being a Duke Professor and What It Means for the Future of Higher Ed
#97Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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.
1) "assuming there's no trust issues involved" is doing an awful lot of load-bearing there 2) One of the things that people keep starting "free speech controversies" over is the idea that some groups are intrinsically less intelligent or apt than others. When, as a member of such a minority group, you are confronted with this idea, what can you conclude from the suggestion that you are intrinsically less intelligent…
Depends on how the group is defined. I've found myself in the group of people defined as "with IQ score below 140" and you can say, with high degree of certainty, that I'm less intelligent than group of people "with IQ score at or above 140", but I don't lose much sleep about it.
Also, what exactly "intrinsically less intelligent" means? For example, I'm statistically more likely to be less intelligent than people of some ethnic background, but this effect is slight enough so that every time I'm compared to a person from this group (and he has to be randomly chosen, and I have to have no other information about him/her other than his ethnicity for this whole premise to work, btw), it's like 55%/45% in his favour, not 100%/0% - not a reason to drop out either.
Re: The End of Being a Duke Professor and What It Means for the Future of Higher Ed
#98Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
I think it’s important to separate what one ought to do with what the law ought to force one to do. To the extent that universities are truly privately-funded institutions (they’re not, but in my opinion should be), I think the law should have very little to say about who they hire and fire.
But they are still failing in their self-proclaimed mission as cathedrals of knowledge and discourse if they engage in ideological purges. And really, anyone who makes hiring and firing decisions out of resentment and spite should really think about who they are and who they want to be.
Re: The End of Being a Duke Professor and What It Means for the Future of Higher Ed
#99I haven't figured out a good opinion on the controversies of trigger warnings and safe spaces. It might be a brief pendulum swing. I think that we all could stand to show more sensitivity to everyone else, and I don't know whether that would be enough. But I've never met any 12th-grader who is so knowledgeable and wise that frosh year at a proper college shouldn't shake up their developing mind, and challenge much of…
Higher education has changed as students are now consumers who are investing large amounts of money in the form of debt. No one would want to be uncomfortable for that exchange, students these days ask for more value for money. They want a good exchange with little risk.
Re: The End of Being a Duke Professor and What It Means for the Future of Higher Ed
#100Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
He was an ethics professor. I bet a good amount of money that the point he was making pertained to blindly trusting authority rather than doing your own research. Or in other words: