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

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

#191

Post by claudiawerner »

jessaustin wrote: post #189
claudiawerner wrote: post #172

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's not true at all; threats, for instance, are not incitements to violence, yet they cause harm. Fraud can be speech, but it is harmful. One philosopher noted how in his profession, if someone broke his left leg, this would not even compare to the kind of harm he'd suffer if someone wrote an slanderous piece against him and published it in a big newspaper. "Whites only" signs can be said to cause harm. Put it thi…

Speech and violence are both expressive intentional action, therefore they are the same? This seems a very basic sort of logical error. (Perhaps affirming the consequent?)

No. You've misread the argument; she is only enumerating what she has deduced, and the first deduction is that speech and physical assault are both expressive intentional action. This premise was in doubt in the paper she was responding to. She never claims that speech and physical assault are at all the same, but rather, that speech does not merit a special category when differentiated from other actions.

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

#192

Post by claudiawerner »

nradov wrote: post #190
claudiawerner wrote: post #172

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's not true at all; threats, for instance, are not incitements to violence, yet they cause harm. Fraud can be speech, but it is harmful. One philosopher noted how in his profession, if someone broke his left leg, this would not even compare to the kind of harm he'd suffer if someone wrote an slanderous piece against him and published it in a big newspaper. "Whites only" signs can be said to cause harm. Put it thi…

What you linked is not a good paper, it's pseudo-intellectual garbage dressed up with fancy words to intimidate the ignorant. Since speech is fundamentally different from physical conduct, the basic premise is invalid. Thus the argument is unworthy of serious consideration.

The author has attempted to show rationally that speech is not fundamentally different from physical conduct. You are simply asserting that it is. That's not very convincing.

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

#193

Post by bitL »

chongli wrote: post #5
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…

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…

Aaaand you are shooting yourself in the foot. Those Harvard/Stanford/MIT graduates will have both higher GPA and prestige, which is all that matters in the beginning (and via networking) throughout your career. You might feel good about getting an A in some impossible class, but nevertheless you are already seriously disadvantaged when competing for high-end jobs comparing to grade-inflated schools. Nobody cares that only 2 persons in your class got A in a given semester and most happily accepted just some passing grade, or that half of the students had to retake a particular class.

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

#194

Post by kbutler »

nradov wrote: post #147
roenxi wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I think it's a clever twist of the word "authority" There is overwhelming evidence that established science is correct, and the scientists are using objectively powerful techniques to establish truth. However, the mechanisms society at large uses to test and assimilate that knowledge are exactly the same as those used for religious authority. The major difference is that rituals invoking science tend to correlate m…

I agree with the point you're trying to make, but perhaps doctors aren't the best representatives of the scientific establishment. Medical practice today is still as much art as science. There is a significant amount of underlying science but many areas are still poorly understood. So doctors rely heavily on customs, guesswork, and intuition in areas where no reliable scientific data exists.

And the situation in medicine is exposed to additional confounding factors - the placebo effect exists (for both faith healers and doctors) and (at least for doctors) has been getting stronger: https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/placebo-effect-gr...

So the effect of the ritual of seeing the doctor and undergoing treatment has increased in strength, possibly as people have grown to trust doctors more.

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

#195

Post by xorand »

xorand wrote: post #180
roenxi wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I think it's a clever twist of the word "authority" There is overwhelming evidence that established science is correct, and the scientists are using objectively powerful techniques to establish truth. However, the mechanisms society at large uses to test and assimilate that knowledge are exactly the same as those used for religious authority. The major difference is that rituals invoking science tend to correlate m…

Fully agree (I am a mathematician). People believe scientists based on authority arguments. The alternative would be to believe them because they validated their work. Even among scientists, this is a very hard thing to do. Among mathematicians is close to impossible. The solution agreed since some decades is peer review, but peer review != validation.

As an extreme example about what people believe based on authority arguments, consider the case of a deep mathematician (Dan Barbilian) who was also a great hermetic poet (pen name Ion Barbu). I used Google Translate :) (and some pondering) to turn one of his most famous poems into English.

The literary authority claims that the poem is about the poetic art, while a mathematician would think it is about a Fourier transform (noncommutative, see the "groups of water", SL(2)?).

Here is the translation of the poem Ion Barbu, Din ceas dedus:

From the clock, down the depth of this calm peak,

Passed through the mirror into blessed azure,

Tailoring on the crushing of the aggressive herds

In groups of water a second, purer game.

Latent nadir! The poet raises the sum

Of spreading harps lost into reversed flight.

The song exhausts: as deep as the sea bears

Its jellies, from under the green bells.

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

#196

Post by elamje »

elamje wrote: post #10

This commentary is a subset of what is happening in the world. Free speech is not under attack as an alarmist might conclude, but is rather under review. Unfortunately , the review is being held and judged by mainstream media which tends to go the way that the author describes Sanford. At the end of the day, our social norms will be pulled towards the most sensitive people rather than the intellectually challenging o…

So many downvoted comments on this thread :’-(

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

#197

Post by [deleted] »

yostrovs wrote: post #126
batty_alex wrote: post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> More and more this safe space bullshit is infiltrating the former bastions of free-thought. Responding to an article about Duke with this conclusion is rich. Duke is a hyper-wealthy institution that is hardly apolitical. Their neatly-manicured campus right next to impoverished portions of Durham and their decision to destroy a decades-long battle for light-rail by changing their mind last-minute doesn't strike me a…

The people that fired a great professor, it sounds like, are not pretty nice.

[deleted]

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

#198

Post by screye »

davemp wrote: post #151
yostrovs wrote: post #122

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe there's not enough academic jobs because too many people try to obtain them. And the reason there's too many is because of false advertising of what academic life is really like. Who would really want to be a professor given what this professor is going through? And he probably didn't earn much. In the media, though, a professor is always presented with respect. It's a professor! So kids get the wrong idea. The…

AFAIK professors are routinely at the top of job satisfaction surveys.

There is obviously a selection bias here.

Professors are often exactly the kind of person who loves to work night and day on a topic of their interest. People also tend to judge the job for profs with tenure. The vast majority of professionals in academia are either pursuing PhDs, post Docs or untenured professors. Doctors have great job satisfaction once they are established too. But similar to profs the road to get there is among the most grueling.

The whole idea of tenure, is that the university expects the professor to be self motivated enough to warrant zero supervision or threat of losing their job.

A professors job is great for someone who is suited for a professors job. The traditional person who values other things may not find it to be as nice.

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

#199

Post by akhilcacharya »

bluedevil2k wrote: post #184
akhilcacharya wrote: post #181

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have more of an anti-elite bias than an anti-Duke bias. I’d rather have a society that listens to the grievances of everyone than one that focuses exclusively on the top 1% at a very specific age.

You do realize that not everyone that attends Duke is an elite, right? Some of my best friends were as middle class as you can get and were super smart kids who earned their way in. Your view on society is rather jaded as well, probably too influenced by the media and their far-left/far-right biases. In the US, society is definitely somewhere in the middle of "everyone" and "the 1%".

As someone that didn’t get in, you’re still elite if you are “super smart”.

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

#200

Post by screye »

linuxftw wrote: post #136
ordinaryperson wrote: post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

While I agree and sympathize with Professor Charney's on one level, on another the real problem (IMHO) is the lack of legit opportunities in Higher Ed. In the corporate world people are fired or let go for silly reasons or non-reasons all the time: that's at-will employment. But for people in most fields they just find another job and move on; the problem here is there aren't many opportunities to teach at a prestigi…

> the lack of legit opportunities in Higher Ed. Higher ed was never a legit opportunity in the first place. It's all gate-keeping by the establishment. In this professor's case, they seemed to mistake experience with value. Turns out, you can use a slave-laborer (grad student) to teach classes much more efficiently. The market value of a college professor is apparently 0.

When the only good job in a field is to teach people who want to enter the field, it is the closest equivalent of an academic pyramid scheme.
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