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University Students: A Captive Audience

Some professors look at a room full of students and see propaganda dupes, army recruits. Teaching for these people is rallying the troops, reminding them every Tuesday and Thursday of the cosmic justice of the cause.

There are more agitprop profs around than you might think. UD has covered a ton of them on this blog, including a very curious Canadian physics instructor

Slightly more benign versions of the rabble-rouser are professors who are running for state rep and who give their students extra credit for leafleting on their behalf, and professors who have found personal liberation via this or that guru and want to burble to the kids about it for two and a half hours a week. And of course there are professors who simply steal money from the sitting ducks. Details here.

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Universities need to be vigilant about all of this, er, extracurricular activity; but it’s often hard to know what’s up, and students will tolerate amazing amounts of shit from professors before they complain.

When things get way over-the-top, however, students will complain, as they did a number of years ago at UD‘s own George Washington University. A visiting professor’s course, Arab-Israeli Conflict, turned out to be Israeli Wonderland. According to students, she virtually never mentioned the Arab world, let alone bothered arguing about/against it, and instead sang the praises of the land from which she came. She left the university.

And now there’s the course Berkeley shut down. And then reopened. I think.

Berkeley has a deal where undergrads can teach one-credit courses. This course was one of those.

Here’s the first article about it. After complaints by Jewish groups about the allegedly doctrinaire, relentlessly anti-Israeli nature of the course, the school suspended it. But then they reinstated it. But (the article’s last line) a “new version [of its syllabus] now goes to the Academic Senate’s course committee for consideration.” UD is confused.

Anyway. A Berkeley prof’s defense of the course is a little shaky, seems to me.

The student instructors “are not going to be teaching [some of these courses] from a balanced, cautious perspective — they’re impassioned,” she said.

“It’s as if I were to say, ‘Let’s consider U.S. history through the perspective of Native American genocide,’ … “There are people who’d say, ‘What about George Washington?’ Well, they can teach that course, too.”

Balance is for the cautious! Let your passions rule!

Is it Berkeley, or is it To God Be the Glory U?

Margaret Soltan, September 24, 2016 7:11AM
Posted in: forms of religious experience

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5 Responses to “University Students: A Captive Audience”

  1. Stephen Karlson Says:

    At any state university in Illinois, a faculty member who grants extra credit for leafletting commits an ethics violation, and students have standing to alert the university Ethics Officer and the state Office of Inspector General.

    Still seems like a lot of extra trouble when my still toiling colleagues have to sit their mandatory ethics training.

  2. Margaret Soltan Says:

    Stephen: And isn’t that mandatory ethics training the legacy of one Rod Blagojevich?

  3. wayward Says:

    Sure is.

  4. Stephen Karlson Says:

    What wayward said!

  5. theprofessor Says:

    I don’t think that extra credit for leafleting or canvassing is forbidden here, as long as it has some connection to the course subject matter and is not limited to a particular political party. We have a “social justice” or some such requirement that was designed by certain faculty in order to facilitate this sort of thing, after all. In reality, a few of our departments are reliable suppliers of volunteers for the Democratic Party, but I don’t have the sense that students are being coerced.

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