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Your federal tax dollars at work.

Yes, it’s “notoriously disgraceful,” as his dean put it, that a professor at the Merchant Marine Academy made a tasteless joke about the Aurora shooter to his students – especially since he’d been sent an email informing him that one of the students in that class was the son of a man who’d been killed in the incident. The school plans to fire the guy, though this seems to me to be going a bit far.

Also disgraceful, by the way, is what the guy was doing as he made the comment. See how the article starts? See what the professors you and I pay for do in their classrooms?

After turning down the lights in his classroom at the United States Merchant Marine Academy, Prof. Gregory F. Sullivan began showing a documentary and prepared to step out for a moment.

But first, according to an internal personnel document, he paused to make a parting joke: “If someone with orange hair appears in the corner of the room,” he is said to have remarked to his students, “run for the exit.”

That’s right, kiddies. They’re showing movies. We’re paying for them to turn off the lights, turn on a machine, and leave.

***************************

Outside the classroom, Sullivan writes about Japan.

It is especially in the state interventionist measures that Oka finally came to endorse in order to forestall orthogenetically-driven degeneration that the technocratic proclivities of his statist orientation become most apparent.

Scathing Online Schoolmarm calls this writing style Translation from the German.

Margaret Soltan, August 16, 2012 7:01AM
Posted in: professors, Scathing Online Schoolmarm

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6 Responses to “Your federal tax dollars at work.”

  1. theprofessor Says:

    I will see your orthogenetically-driven degeneration and raise you two technocratic proclivities and a transformative hermeneutic.

  2. Margaret Soltan Says:

    Sorry tp: I need to correct your sentence.

    Your orthogenetically-driven degeneration I will see and by two technocratic proclivities and a transformative hermeneutic I will raise you.

  3. Derek Says:

    Really? Showing movies, say documentaries in a history class, is now illegitimate? I dunno. I was in the documentary on the Freedom Rides and I have to say, the idea that it is illegitimate to show it in a college class seems a bit too much. Too much would be too much, yes. But I’m pretty certain you don’t have the data to discern whether this is a one-off or a trend. You have every right to be critical. I also think you have a responsibility to be fair.

    Let’s say you want to cover an issue in a class. You don’t want to assign a full book on the topic — or you want to assign a book but you also want to give a contradictory view (politically, historiographically, interpretively, what have you). A documentary might be perfect. Especially if it’s outside of your immediate area of expertise.

    Sorry, Margaret, but no one’s too good for one of the Eyes on the Prize episodes. There are times when you need to tone back on the generalizations — Scathing In-Class School Marm (Pa? Need we gender it?) tends to be rather harsh toward these kinds of overly broad assertions.

    And yeah, he should not lose his job. he may be shamed, but even that should not come from official sanction. Once they start encroaching on our informal interactions in the classroom the slope grows steep and slippery.

    dcat

  4. Margaret Soltan Says:

    dcat:
    Why is the film being shown during class? We’re all on our computers all the time – why not have students watch the films on their own time outside of class? It’s just so clear that teachers are hired to teach, not to turn on machines for forty-five minutes.

  5. Derek Says:

    Sure, and most of the time I’ll show documentaries if I have to be out of town, and I show them on a limited basis. But in fact it can be hard to have students watch documentaries on their own, especially if you are not showing something fairly mainstream. Do they have to pay for those movies? Are they even available online? (Good luck showing a California Newsreel video online in the way you suggest, for example.) Are you teaching a course on something outside of the US — I teach both US and African history, and if you think the internet is swimming with African documentaries I’m afraid I have to correct you. I might also point out that at my Hispanic Serving Institution in West Texas not all of my students DO have laptops or ipads or what have you. Making them download/access videos outside of class thus puts them at a severe disadvantage. Having grown up poor, having married a Mexican American woman (also a professor in my department), and being a civil rights historian, I’m not about to assume privilege because that assumption would be dead wrong and the outcomes on that assumption would be deleterious to my most vulnerable students. Lots of my students still need to use the computer labs or their roommates’ computers. Some of them are seeing this world of technology for the first time. As professors it’s probably not a good idea to actually take the perspective of that famous “New Yorker’s View of the World” cover. If I demand that they access films outside of class I am giving a huge leg up to my affluent white students still suckling from mommy and daddy’s teat and am giving a huge disadvantage to my first-generation college student whose family did not have hot water in their house, never mind an ipad, or even a dvd player.

    I also teach a couple of History Through Film classes during our summer or Maymesters. I only will teach them in those terms because of the format and because I’m protective of my regular rotation of classes and because I actually do have my concerns about these kinds of courses. But do you really look at film as an illegitimate medium for study? If you’re being paid to teach a course on the films of (insert director/auteur here) I’m going to assume that showing some of those films is not only legitimate, but expected. And hell, in many cases you actually get to improve a student’s cultural literacy. We can debate this, but I’m not going to simply allow you to assert ipse dixit that seeing Dr. Strangelove is never legitimate in a college course about the Cold War, post-1945 America, American film, or American popular culture.

    There are also realities of student scheduling at work here: At Williams professors would show films in allotted times outside of class and you were expected to attend one of the showings. I can promise you that at most state universities you would not be able to compel students to show up at specific times outside of the class meeting. That would be my ideal solution, but trust me, for those of us working in less rarefied air the fact that our students work have families, and what have you means that our ability to say “you must be here at one of these times” if those times are not class hours is minimal. I may disagree with students not prioritizing my classes, but my hands are a bit tied.

    Utilizing documentaries or other films as apt to a course’s themes is legitimate. To steal from Molly Ivans, none of us is the Cosmos. There are other people, other sources, than ourselves that we can occasionally utilize. I’m not unaware that we’re “hired to teach.” But we use other peoples’ resources to teach all the time. Drawing the line at documentaries seems to me to be rather capricious and maybe a little self-serving. You apparently don’t do it. That’s great. But be careful in making categorical assertions about what goes on in other peoples’ classrooms. You do many things wonderfully well. But you are not the Cosmos.

    dcat

  6. theprofessor Says:

    I agree with your edits, UD.

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