Students show Professors up
March 30th, 2007 at 3:38 pm by David FarrarThere is no group of people more hostile to non left wing values than university faculties throughout the United States. Intolerance of those who do not conform is legendary.
This was shown recently in Florida, when the University of Florida Senate turned down an honorary degree for former Governor Jeb Bush. Now before people start raving, Jeb Bush is a very different person to George Bush. He was hugely popular in Florida (a state with more Democrats than Republicans in it) for his two terms, and had delivered significant extra funding to the University such as $20 million to help them (ironically) attract top faculty and new research centres. Never before had an honorary degree been turned down. It was unprecedented and done purely because Jeb was a Republican.
But there is a good ending to all this. Ashamed at the partisan behaviour of their Professors, the Student Senate unanimously passed a resolution honoring Jeb Bush’s contributions to the university.
Isn’t that great? The professors show their narrow mindedness, while the students, without dissent, recognise that this is not an issue for partisan politics, and showed the maturity their professors lacked. Some quotes:
Tags: United StatesIn an interview after the meeting, Student Body Vice President Arturo Armand said, “I think it shows a lot that the Senate unanimously approved the resolution. We wanted to recognize public service. Forget politics. Forget everything else. We want to recognize those who help out the University of Florida.”
March 30th, 2007 at 5:17 pm
“We want to recognize those who help out the University of Florida.”
What ever happened to a bunch of flowers and a thank you card?
Vote:March 30th, 2007 at 9:33 pm
Absolutely. Hell hath no fury like a PC academic scorned.
On the same subject of lack of tolerence for diversity of opinion, here’s an interesting trailer. It would be great to get the whole film called Indoctrinate U (u for university):
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U2u9OJvw5wk
BTW its the same in NZ. My son has the choice to hand in assignments toeing the left wing line or fail. We have far less freedom now that the 60s generation is the establishment than when we protested against the old so called establishment.
Vote:March 30th, 2007 at 10:36 pm
Those profs will regret it when Jeb wins the 2012 election…
Vote:March 30th, 2007 at 10:53 pm
Porcupine is right. Students in my son’s year did the same. They gritted their teeth and wrote the party line just so they would graduate.
Vote:So much for academic freedom.
March 31st, 2007 at 6:33 am
Agreed, my son showed an economics assignment that, get this, required answering patsy questions on a piece taken from The Guardian written by UK Labourite attacking Mrs Thatcher. The date on the clipping was 1987.
We agreed the assignment was total shite, but we put our heads together and crafted an outstanding PC left-wing, anti-free market diatribe – even bringing in Evil Ruth Richardson and some genuflections towards the useful policy directions taken by Messrs Clark and Cullen. Care was, of course, taken to include a few minor but noticeable grammatical mistakes, broken logic chains and some incomplete references. E voila! A nice 85%, few hours of fun and genuinely sound learning experience for my lad.
Vote:March 31st, 2007 at 10:08 am
Young people who have been brought up to be open and honest are like lambs to the slaughter for these left wing fascists, without a more worldly wise parent helping them out. I’ve had similar experiences with my son having to answer questions like “write a news article about the negative features of American foreign policy”.
The other strategy is to identify with the right demographic of course because these namby pamby twits automatically think brown, disabled, female = left wing sympathies. Tossers.
There are gatekeepers of the holy word throughout the university system from interview panels for med students, ethics committees and Kaumatua to approve research and teaching. Some brave social scientists are actually saying it is now impossible to do objective social science research in NZ.
I hear an animal rights activist managed to get onto the selection committee for med students this year and took one of the guys to task for hunting possums (=vermin).
All medical research applications now have to have a Maori relevance section.
The list goes on and on….all highly paid bureaucrats telling us what to think and bleeding money out of real research that could solve some of the county’s enormous problems.
Vote:March 31st, 2007 at 10:18 am
Let the students spout thwe stuff from the AdaM Smith Society
http://www.adamsmith.org/80ideas/site-map.htm
Some of the nonsense
“The radical new policies adopted by Adenauer’s post-war Christian Democrat government transformed a sclerotic economy. Between 1951 and 1960 the Federal German economy doubled in size. ”
A war damaged economy doubles in size , clear cause and effect here.
But the problem with Germanys economy today is “too many rules and regulations. Apparently the swweping away of rules and regulations which worked aftre the war wasnt enough, there are now too many rules and regulations
Vote:March 31st, 2007 at 12:20 pm
Chancey – how much did East German economy increase from 1951 to 1960? They were war damaged also. Did your precious socialism manage to double an economy?
Vote:March 31st, 2007 at 12:21 pm
Having been told that it is culturally insensitive to do anything about headlice at primary school and taught that the moonlanding never happened at intermediate, my daughter is now being taught at secondary school that all chemicals are bad and manufacturers treat milk to make you absorb more fat.
We have a giggle, shed a little tear for the country and then stop wondering why the average take home wage is 33% higher in aussie.
Because all we are left with the quango crawlers, quacks and cat homeopathists.
Vote:March 31st, 2007 at 12:30 pm
Here we go again. Attacking the intellectuals for being left wing. David buddy I have no clue if you’ve been to University but even still you could’ve thought this through for a few seconds and arrived at the following conclusion: Maybe they are so left wing because their ideology is correct? After all a University is a concentration of some of the smartest people in the country.
Vote:March 31st, 2007 at 12:44 pm
All medical research applications now have to have a Maori relevance section.
This is true, but you might also like to know that most researchers have gotten round this with a standard cut-and-paste line. It doesn’t actually change a damn thing. It’s silly, I agree, but not actually an obstacle.
BTW its the same in NZ. My son has the choice to hand in assignments toeing the left wing line or fail.
This in nonsense. If you come up with a good essay (i.e. a well written essay with a clear argument supported with evidence) you will do well. Show me otherwise. The problem is that people just don’t write good essays and often fail to support their arguments (like many comments on this blog). Opinions aren’t good enough and never have been. By the way, people also fail if they write an essays supporting a lecturer’s views.
Sure, if you are going up against a dominant view, you probably have to try a bit harder. But that is fair enough. If I write an essay claiming that lots of fat and doing no exercise is good for your health, I will need to come up with a REALLY good argument and some REALLY good evidence to support that hypothesis. Perhaps it will have to be more solid and sound than an essay that supports the generally accepted position that a diet low in fat and high in fibre and plenty of exercise is required for good health (this doesn’t just apply to politics). However, if I do it well, I will also be well rewarded.
Oh yeah, there are lots of lecturers who tend to be right leaning.
Thomas Prebble, shut up you’re not helpng!!
Vote:March 31st, 2007 at 12:57 pm
Andrew:
Vote:It is the truth from my experience at University. But you are correct in saying if you write an essay and support all your arguments you will do well. You can be right wing in your essays if you like its just you can only express it through other peoples research, thats the way things work. Trouble is there is a major lack in right wing research to the right whinger who only wants to write an attack piece of the PM. Seen it so many times.
March 31st, 2007 at 1:07 pm
Thomas, I think we see eye-to-eye on this isssue. I just don’t think it is helpful when you say things like this:
Maybe they are so left wing because their ideology is correct?
If you go in that direction you have already lost the argument. In fact, that statement only serves to illustrates my point.
After all a University is a concentration of some of the smartest people in the country.
Not necessarilly true. I know lots of very smart people wo are not at university, and I know many very stupid people who are.
Vote:March 31st, 2007 at 1:14 pm
Sure, probably not helping my argument. But its what I often see, or perhaps the right wing professors know how to express an opinion without looking like a David Farrar or a John Key, they do it in a much more sedate and well thought out manner. You won’t for example see a right wing professor come out and say the Labour government is PC and Helen is a lesbian. Perhaps some kids with right wing ideologies have gone in and expected to be able to do that, get burnt and go running home to their daddies. I’m sure its happened and I’m sure thats helped breed the disdain you see among these types of universities.
Vote:March 31st, 2007 at 1:23 pm
You won’t for example see a right wing professor come out and say the Labour government is PC and Helen is a lesbian.
In all fairness, I have never heard DPF say that either. I agree with the last part though.
Vote:March 31st, 2007 at 1:26 pm
Well its generalizing of course, I’ll admit to that but its what you often see with people especially over the anti-smacking debate where the words lesbian and PC and thrown around very liberally.
Vote:March 31st, 2007 at 3:03 pm
Andrew, thank you for responding to Thomas’s drivel for me. There are plenty fo concnetrations of very intelligent people outside universities and to think that those inside universities have got it right is exactly what David was talking about.
But I and others have given you several examples of where the marks really do reflect the content and not the arguement. I have seen my son marked down for stating both sides of the argument.
Sure the cut and paste still works (just) in the hard sciences but in the social sciences you are excluded from funding if you dont toe the line. Ask Elizabeth Rata at Auckland University. You also are not allowed to do much social research unless you have a Maori researcher on your team, and to try to explain your findings without a racial compontent (eg by deprivation only) is almost not allowed.
So believe me what is shown on that video I linked to is rampant in NZ universities and schools also.
Vote:March 31st, 2007 at 5:06 pm
But I and others have given you several examples of where the marks really do reflect the content and not the arguement. I have seen my son marked down for stating both sides of the argument.
I honestly find this surprising. Most lecturers I know actually like reading essays and assignments that present a different point of view and don’t simply regurgitate lecture notes. They stand out and are generally well rewarded. However, I admit that there may be one or two exceptions. There are some lecturers who walk a very fine line between good old eccentricity and stark raving paranoid delusional lunacy. If your case is true, take it up with the university. You would be entirely within your right to do so, and the university will not fob you off, now that we have consumers of education, rather than students. But make sure that it really is because of some bias from the lecturer, and not just because the assignment isn’t actually as good as you might think. Trust me when I say that that happens a lot.
You also are not allowed to do much social research unless you have a Maori researcher on your team, and to try to explain your findings without a racial compontent (eg by deprivation only) is almost not allowed.
Look, this is simply not true. I do a huge amount a research that does not require participation from Maori researchers. I agree that there are a few people who try to push this through, but I think this was far more common and a real problem in the mid to late 90s.
I had first-hand experience of this when I made an ethics application for some PhD research I was conducting in 1999. There was just 1 person on the North Health Ethics Committee who made life very difficult for researchers. Not surprisingly, she was thick as 2 planks and you could not reason with her. North Health had 2 committees, A & B. Everyone knew before hand that if you got committee A you were fine, and if you got committee B you were in the pooh. It was luck of the draw. But that was only one person (admittedly with too much power) who, as I recall, was ultimately done for fraud or embezzlement of funds a few years later. There will always be scumbags.
I have never come across this problem again. I now cynically paste the appropriate sentence into the appropriate box and things are hunky-dory. Researchers do fight against this sort of thing, and these hijackers don’t get away with it for long. Remember, researchers do in that respect have a lot of power and most academics will fight against that kind of insanity. These nuts are a very small minority
Vote:March 31st, 2007 at 11:09 pm
Or, instead of indoctrinating kids with your own beliefs could trust them to develop their own views and be smart enough and persuasive enough to get good marks regadless of their political alignment and/or that of their lecturers?
I had left wing, right wing, and relatively apolitical lecturers at uni. And, as far as I can recall, the exam questions weren’t massively biased towards left or right wing politics. I also know there was a fairly even spread of political views in the students finishing towards the top of my year.
Vote:April 1st, 2007 at 11:43 am
Concerning Jeb Bush and the Gators (U of Florida), it is misleading to simply say the Jeb wasn’t awarded an honorary degree because he is a Republican. This is a little reactionary to say the least. You must consider the possibility that the U of Florida is going through the same dilemma that Southern Methodist University in Dallas (regarding the G. W. Bush presidential library) is going through – the very real fear of having their institution’s identity attached to the “intellectual” tradition of neo-conservatism (and not simply a disastrous foreign policy). It is especially important to point out that Jeb Bush is strongly associated with this “intellectual” traditional, far more so than his older brother. Therefore, the extent to which Jeb is “different” from George is also misleading.
Vote: