The Fora: A Higher Education Community

Quote from: dismalist on April 16, 2024, 01:56:27 PMYou can hardly expect individual institutions to harbor viewpoint diversity. Institutions, including media companies, universities, schools, and firms down to the retail establishment, develop or harbor their own cultures to reduce the cost of trying to figure out what to do. If the Times or Harvard had viewpoint diversity, you'd have knife fights all day, every day.

Viewpoint diversity can only exist through competition between institutions, not within institutions.

We have Fox as well as the Times, talk radio as well as NPR. In Economics Departments, e.g., we have the commies at the New School, the Americanized German Historical School in -- of all places -- Texas, and more mundanely in Macroeconomics, the Sweetwater flavor in Chicago and Minnesota, and the Saltwater flavor in Harvard, MIT, and the others on the coast of the Northeast.

So long as all this is possible, there is no problem.

Quote from: Langue_doc on April 16, 2024, 01:31:55 PM

QuoteU.S.C. Cancels Valedictorian's Speech After Jewish Groups Object
The university cited security concerns at the graduation. But the student, who is Muslim, said the school was "succumbing to a campaign of hate meant to silence my voice."

Quote from: Puget on April 05, 2024, 01:09:52 PMAn update: The division of science chairs sent a very strongly worded joint letter, and the dean has agreed to meet with them next week. Apparently the Division Head sent an even more strongly worded letter. I have not seen that one, but apparently she is really out for blood–the dean's, primarily, though deanlet is likely to get caught in the crossfire (deanlet seems like a generally nice guy who is just way out of his depth, especially when dealing with the sciences - he's a classicist and I think has no real understanding of things like indirect costs).

Quote from: Puget on April 03, 2024, 08:18:30 AM

Quote from: clean on April 02, 2024, 06:53:48 PMUntenured faculty facing such trust breaking actions might be encouraged to reenter the job market.
Tenured faculty facing such a problem (if any) should be rallying for a no confidence vote to make Bull a steer! 

As much as I'd love making Dean Bull a steer (love that joke, Clean!), I don't see that happening. Upper admin will do what it always does and circle the wagons around their own. But this and a thousand other ways they are trying to balance the books on the backs of faculty and while asking us to do more and more work with less, are inevitably going to do damage to the institution.

Chair pointed out today that those of us who have unspent start up funds have them precisely because we (a) have been successful in bringing in grants, and (b) have been prudent in budgeting our start ups for things we can't charge to the grants, including collecting pilot data for new grants. I don't think dean or deanlet (both of whom come from the humanities and have no experience with grants or more than minimal start up packages) have any idea how much $ the university could lose in the longer run in grant indirects as a result, not to mention the potential for well funded people to leave.

The division of science chairs are all meeting today to plot a unified response. Seeing how strongly and quickly our chairs and senior colleagues have our backs is the one bright spot in this fiasco.

QuoteNPR Suspends Editor Whose Essay Criticized the Broadcaster
Uri Berliner, a senior business editor at NPR, said the public radio network's liberal bias had tainted its coverage of important stories.

QuoteRace and identity became paramount in nearly every aspect of the workplace. Journalists were required to ask everyone we interviewed their race, gender, and ethnicity (among other questions), and had to enter it in a centralized tracking system. We were given unconscious bias training sessions. A growing DEI staff offered regular meetings imploring us to "start talking about race." Monthly dialogues were offered for "women of color" and "men of color." Nonbinary people of color were included, too.

These initiatives, bolstered by a $1 million grant from the NPR Foundation, came from management, from the top down. Crucially, they were in sync culturally with what was happening at the grassroots—among producers, reporters, and other staffers. Most visible was a burgeoning number of employee resource (or affinity) groups based on identity.

They included MGIPOC (Marginalized Genders and Intersex People of Color mentorship program); Mi Gente (Latinx employees at NPR); NPR Noir (black employees at NPR); Southwest Asians and North Africans at NPR; Ummah (for Muslim-identifying employees); Women, Gender-Expansive, and Transgender People in Technology Throughout Public Media; Khevre (Jewish heritage and culture at NPR); and NPR Pride (LGBTQIA employees at NPR).

All this reflected a broader movement in the culture of people clustering together based on ideology or a characteristic of birth. If, as NPR's internal website suggested, the groups were simply a "great way to meet like-minded colleagues" and "help new employees feel included," it would have been one thing.

But the role and standing of affinity groups, including those outside NPR, were more than that. They became a priority for NPR's union, SAG-AFTRA—an item in collective bargaining. The current contract, in a section on DEI, requires NPR management to "keep up to date with current language and style guidance from journalism affinity groups" and to inform employees if language differs from the diktats of those groups. In such a case, the dispute could go before the DEI Accountability Committee.

In essence, this means the NPR union, of which I am a dues-paying member, has ensured that advocacy groups are given a seat at the table in determining the terms and vocabulary of our news coverage.

Conflicts between workers and bosses, between labor and management, are common in workplaces. NPR has had its share. But what's notable is the extent to which people at every level of NPR have comfortably coalesced around the progressive worldview.

And this, I believe, is the most damaging development at NPR: the absence of viewpoint diversity.

QuoteU.S.C. Cancels Valedictorian's Speech After Jewish Groups Object
The university cited security concerns at the graduation. But the student, who is Muslim, said the school was "succumbing to a campaign of hate meant to silence my voice."

Quote from: apl68 on April 16, 2024, 07:35:42 AM

Quote from: marshwiggle on April 16, 2024, 05:18:33 AM

Quote from: fosca on April 15, 2024, 01:56:15 PMFrom a junior in college:

"goodmorning, and i feel like some of the assignments i earned more than what i got my actual work was good just was not formatted how you wanted but aside from how it's formatted the actual work i feel i should have a higher grade in certain assignments"

Wow! ee cummings has reincarnated!

LOL!

But actually pretty sad, especially if this is not an ESL student.  If the student's work looked remotely like this correspondence, then the student surely earned no better a grade than what fosca gave.