The Fora: A Higher Education Community

Given that this would end up in court if agreed to, in my opinion (of interest to absolutely no one, most likely)  they should be required to define their terms, like for example, 'racism.' You know, like a lawyer has to.
I went to a faculty development seminar some time ago where a faculty member told us that the white American ruling class has brainwashed working class white people into thinking we are superior to black people. He thinks of this as a forgiving stance I guess, because it means gullible stupid people like me can't be blamed for our bigotry, or can only be blamed so much (though I don't believe what he claims I believe.) But a color-blind definition of racism could easily allege it against him, if he sorts white people into two groups, the sinister and the mindless.
This is, of course, guy with PhD and a slew of books you can find in a bookstore that serves academia.
Yeah, it infringes on academic freedom, but then again, so does tenure.

Pinker and Murrey are terrible scientists who willfully misconstrue data to make the points they want to make.

So that's where my admins got it from. I've always wondered . . .

Quote from: writingprof on July 09, 2020, 06:31:58 AM

Quote from: Hibush on July 08, 2020, 05:19:49 PM

At my place, the old faculty are strongly pro free speech, even speech with which they vehemently disagree. Younger faculty are more conservative.

Hibush, the usual thing is to call revolutionaries "conservative" only after they win formal governing power and entrench themselves for a few generations.  Hence the American progressive tendency to apply that word to, e.g., Konstantin Chernenko.  The old villain would have been surprised to hear himself described as a man of the right!

What you're doing is either rank ignorance or gaslighting.  Your "old faculty" clearly have a conservative attitude toward free speech, irrespective of whether they are Democrats or Republicans.  Your "younger faculty" are more progressive. 

Or do you really want to argue here that it's conservatives who are driving cancel-culture, shouting down speakers, equating free speech with "violence," etc.?

I meant little-c conservative in that they are less inclined to provide something in favor of conserving it for themselves.

I apologize?  However, I am searching the world's dictionaries in vain for the assertion that "conservative" can mean "less inclined to provide something in favor of conserving it for themselves."

Trump is a Narcissist...he has a grandiose view of himself. Others might resign in this situation, but Trump has no shame.
He also has some kind of dementia or something and is decompensating at an alarming rate...but his enablers (children, wife) don't want to give up the power they have.

Quote from: Treehugger on July 09, 2020, 04:19:48 AM

Quote

If you want to see heads actually explode, go to Charles Murray who has offended nearly everyone who has not read the Bell Curve or Coming Apart. Anyone who thinks this guy is some radical simply hasn't read a single word he's said, yet he's the poster child for racism in the academy for including one section in a text on cognitive ability the implications of differences among ethnic groups. This is definitely a topic that is not allowed, not even because the Middlebury mob crowd cares about the race per se. You're HAVE to say everything is due to environment because if anything is heritable or innate, that leaves no room for a government "solution."

To be honest, I haven’t read Charles Murray precisely because I had heard such bad things about him and his work. However, I probably should given that I do think that it is highly unlikely that there aren’t cognitive differences among ethnic groups. It feels incredibly politically incorrect to even write this, but it just makes sense. It is widely recognized, on the one hand, that there are significant physical differences between races (it’s not just all about skin color, but difference races are more susceptible to different diseases and have differing physical/athletic abilities) and on the other that the mind/brain is actually just another part of our physical body (unless you are religious or a dualist which many scientists are not). So what conclusion can we draw?

To be honest, Charles Murray makes heads explode (for people who haven't read his work) because the very idea of innate differences in certain abilities bothers them. (Ironically, these people have no problem accepting that character qualities are entirely determined by skin colour, sex, etc.)

Definitely worth reading. (And of course, no matter how many times it's pointed out, the fact that small, measurable differences in the means of distributions tell you virtually nothing about individuals it doesn't suit the narrative of the detractors so gets ignored entirely.) Case in point: even though my wife and I were both STEM people, she had WAY better spacial reasoning than me.

But, not to keep score, I notice the age old theory off 'women's intuition' (which I have recently heard attributed to a woman's ability to use both sides of the brain in concert more effectively than a man's whereas a man is able to use one side or the other predominantly to better effect; sorry, no citation) doesn't seem to offend.