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

jamesgmartin.center

221–230 of 241 posts

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

#221

Welcome to the Heckler's Veto becoming the norm of higher education if not corporate life. This is the method of choice in almost all instances of issues surrounding race, religion, and orientation, now. Look at Intersectionality[1] for clues to why the situation has gotten out of hand. In essence there are so many levels of grievance. In effect, unless you are part of the class of people your right to discuss or rai…

It may also be because women, as a group, have vastly higher purchasing power than men. And, dollars talk, as they say in the USA.

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

#222
post #167
post #156

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Your premise is flawed. Unless it's a direct incitement to violence, speech does not cause harm.

Ah, this would be the species of academic debate where a carefully referenced argument can be downvoted and rebutted with a flat unsourced statement of position?

The argument ultimately boiled down to just one person's opinion, nothing more. Adding a bunch of academic references doesn't make the author's opinion any more valid than mine. If you search around you can find just as many opposing references. So what. This isn't like actual science where anything can be verified or disproven.

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

#223
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…

"I'd rather they did it in a real ballot box, not in academia" You mentioned you're not american so please allow me as an american to educate you on how minorities and voting work. Minorities are systematically targeted in america to prevent voting. America, in fact, has a long and fairly recent history of attempting to prevent minories from voting or to make their votes literally worth less than others. The electora…

Thanks for the response.

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

#224

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>> 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. Can you provide some context to justify comparing microagressions with beating people with sticks?

Though it doesn't entirely answer your question, several philosophers of speech have identified no metaphysical difference between speech and non-speech, and some find the justifications for a law guaranteeing freedom of speech to be ultimately unfounded[0]. The issue for them is not whether speech causes harm (it does) but whether the harms are sufficient to allow some kind of regulation on speech; there is no evide…

From your 0th citation: "Please don’t cite or circulate it beyond the workshop."

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

#225
post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Science and religion are not comparable. A key difference is that science is stronger when people question its authority. Science does not require faith but scepticism. That is the whole point of the scientific method! Meanwhile religion requires faith. This sounds like a good question that should promote a good discussion and would probably end with a cohort of people far better equipped to argue the case for scienc…

Of course they're comparable, and you just compared them. Like all pairs of things, they have similarities and differences. You're claiming that they're very different, which is fine, but you're dressing it up in language that suggests it's not even possible to disagree, which is silly.

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

#226

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When did asking where someone is from become rudeness? It's an icebreaker question...

That has always been rude, but is especially so in today's political context. Immigrants of color know that lots of people in Western nations don't want them around. Random interrogations from random white people don't help them feel better about it. Rudeness isn't the end of the world, but we should still try to avoid it. I don't get pissed off when adults ask me about or make stupid jokes in light of my obvious phy…

I mean, that's the sort of question I'd expect to see come up in a "introduce yourselves to the group" icebreaker.

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

#227
post #121

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The article is not about his contract not being renewed, but about the reason for that lack of renewal. Saying someone who consistently rates amongst your top performers as having unsatisfactory performance is clearly false. Which means that not only did Duke cave in to an amount of complaints far outshone by praise, it also tried to hide this fact (circumventing its own bylaws).

Yep. I'm not disputing the injustice (at least, as his essay lays it out -- some comments on the article tell a different story of him being difficult to work with). But contracts not being renewed -- happens all the time in the "real" world. My point is just: good people don't get their contracts renewed all the time, often for silly or dumb reasons, and it's not some cosmic injustice because most people find anothe…

Where is the 'reward' of at-will employment? It seems it's mainly on the employer side.

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

#228
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…

"Such protectiveness is motivated less by a reasonable concern for students’ mental health and more by political ideology. The complaint of a group of conservative students who felt singled out or disrespected or uncomfortable in class would be taken far less seriously. I have been on the receiving end of faculty emails making light of just such complaints. Nor would a complaint by religious students that God and Chr…

The institution should be straight down the middle.

I cannot agree with this; both the left and the right are motivated to manipulate world views in order to control perception of the world and the direction of social progress.

The institution should cover the mainstream social perspectives and attempt to ascertain the motivations behind them. It should not, however, base its own perspective on any number of transient world views (at least not without transparent and reasoned analysis) - the middle line is not unbiased.

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

#229

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think this varies a bit from place to place and is misleading in some ways. I was a tenured professor who left academics for two reasons, the administrative nightmares of the university and department (to put it one way), and unrelated family reasons. The year before I left they did a survey of faculty satisfaction at the university I was at, and found that, although about 2/3-3/4 of faculty reported that they were…

Great feedback. Can you tell us more about your decision to leave? Besides the family stuff, what kind of "administrative nightmares" were you dealing with?

A lot of the administration problems had to do with internal communication problems in the department and university, and severe budget shortfalls (in part due to state politics). You could say it was climate or culture as well, but to me the primary issues were communication problems, mostly due to personal, private interactions superceding formal, transparent, public processes and discussion, coupled with a failure of people in administrative positions to recognize what was happening and respond appropriately. Where I was at, the atmosphere went from one of mutual respect and encouragement when I started, to one where there was constant mutual hostility and distrust, fueled by these sorts of "shadow" power structures that don't communicate with one another. My experiences by the end were kind of similar to what was described in the piece that's the focus of this thread, but involving different groups of faculty rather than faculty and students, and with everything, not just teaching.

I think if family considerations had not entered the picture I still probably would have stayed, or at least would have stayed long enough to leave for another university, but with the ongoing problems in the university and department, it was sort of the straw that broke the camel's back.

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

#230
post #53

Earlier 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.

The right has certainly not defended free speech. The same people who complain about the free speech to have the right to be paid tens of thousands of dollars to criticize weaker groups complain when football players decide to kneel during a national anthem. So free speech has little to do with it. But yes, the right has deployed free speech as an effective political weapon, while the left is all over the map.

I am sorry I don’t quite understand the point you’re trying to make here.

Who is the right that you are talking about?

Complaining is part of free speech as long as it doesn’t infringe on others right to complain back as well. If they complain because they disagree, that’s a very different thing than not defending or being hypocritical about free speech.

FWIW from my experience, the people I talk to respect players’ right to kneel even if they don’t agree with that action. That is the key to free speech I think —- to disagree peacefully but respect people’s right to express themselves.

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