Florida GOP Wants To Take On ‘Cancel Culture’ By Secretly Recording Professors

Both? The academy is full of aggrieved people on all parts of the spectrum, as far as I can tell. In the humanities and social sciences, it has more people on the left end of the spectrum, but please believe me: they are all equally aggrieved. Miserable environment, to be honest, except for the students.

 

Yeah that's what I was thinking and the same thing.

I think we just need to be blunt most people are aggrieved and more are willing to let you know about it.

 

Do the majority of people in Florida still like DeSantis?

 

Yep.

https://thehill.com/homenews/campaign/541106-desantis-approval-ticks-upward-in-new-poll

 

So the GOP is promoting quotas for viewpoints? Free speech but only if it's in the right proportions of what they want to hear?

 

Lulz. When did YOU first realize you entered the Twilight Zone?

 

Sort or reminds me of conservatives while waxing nostalgic about the Consitution wanting to suppress the vote because their policies aren't popular.

Conservatives insure most college teaching does not pay much money, which is conservatives main emphasis in life so they are underrepresented in academia. The same conservatives scoff at many PhD's as their heroes wealthy business guys do not have PhD's. They then get upset when the underpaid PhD's teaching, who often are deeply in debt for their education do not support conservative economic policies. Therefore spy on the to pressure them to spout more conservative talking points under concern for "inclusion" which they generally snivel at.

 

the first speaker today was quite good, Lee Jussim, who is chair of the Psychology dept at Rutgers. can share screen caps of slides if there is interest

 

MSU conference,fairly depressing analysis of Generation Z not being interested in either "ideas" or "the life of the mind." This is depicted as a contributing factor to the growing intolerance of ideas that students and recent graduates disagree with, in part a failure to understand those ideas before rejecting them outright

Liberal arts also seen as a needless expense that doesn't offer much of a return on investment job-wise for students.

made worse by financial pressures on non-elite institutions to engage in cost-cutting measures, lower tuition, and crank graduates out more quickly than the traditional 4-year timeline

 

Thanks for the updates. That conference looks really interesting, and I'm sad to hear it supports the idea that the future of the "life of the mind" looks kinda grim. Have to wonder what the internet has done to generation Z in particular but all of us in general.

 

I don't think the conference as a whole supports that idea in general; it was really a fairly strongly-argued view from April Kelly-Woessner, who teaches at Elizabethtown College (a fairly small school)

On the other hand, many of the other talks are quite candid about the kinds of responses/complaints they get from students who, for lack of a better term, are "easily offended." The afternoon's talks have been quite interesting

 

I wonder if Texas and other Republican run red states will demand their own version of Trump, Stop the Steal, and the Jan 6th insurrection in the textbooks. They surely won't allow the truth to be told, or have him descrbed him as the worst President in US History. They will probably want their own version of the Covid pandemic as well, calling it the China Virus.

 

When I started grad school many years ago, I was chatting with my buddy's mom at a wedding in bum F Texas. She says to me, "it's great that you're furthering your education, but watch out for those liberal professors." She wasn't the first, nor the last, to personally express that sentiment to me over the years. Not that there isn't bias depending on which professor you take, but jeebus, 95% of school isn't the crap in the news, even for poli-sci. It's mostly math, believe it or not. It's mostly go and and scratch your eyes out and pull your hair out math for a few hours a day and maybe you've made some progress. And the more you do that, the better student you are. And the less you do that, you have a greather chance at becoming a bloviating nincompoop of a student who b****es and moans about the unfairness of school when you just didn't go home and do your math homework for 3 hours like you should have. Oh yeah, and read for another 5 hours each night. And F Florida's dumbass legislature. I already record every lecture I give. Come at me you swampwater drinking idiots.

 

Funny, but DeSantis' views on education are the exact opposite of how Republicans treat actual Americans. Here's his quote......

"They’re trying to make people view each other based on race, I want to do the opposite. I want to treat people as individuals. I want to treat people based on character, but when you put this curriculum in, it ends up creating more divisions and so I think we understand some of the things that that are not working in other parts of the country and we don’t want that to come to Florida.”
https://www.clickorlando.com/news/l...s-plan-to-change-civics-education-in-florida/

 

A philosophy group that I'm in had a similar discussion. This group is primarily made up of Millenials and Gen. Z but there are a few Gen X and Boomers. Many agreed that one problem with the Internet and Social Media in particular is that misinformation and radicalization spread so easily is because lack of teaching things like basic logic, ethics or epistemology.

 

Rocket River

 

just this week in the Harvard Crimson

"‘An Endangered Species’: The Scarcity of Harvard’s Conservative Faculty":

https://www.thecrimson.com/article/2021/4/9/disappearance-conservative-faculty/

 

There are still some conservatives in the hard sciences. The social sciences and liberal arts have been dominated by the left for 30 years.

Jordan Peterson doesn't really champion traditional gender roles. He doesn't say a woman's place is in the home and only men should work. He doesn't say women are the property of their fathers and husbands. Usually when talking about men and women he is either talking about their interactions with each other or their psychological proclivities on average (eg. women tend to score higher on trait agreeableness than men). Most of his points are in fact gender neutral. I would say his one defining idea is that the modern world has embraced freedom but not responsibility, and that it is in accepting responsibility that people can live more fulfilling lives with true purpose. He champions the idea that making group identities paramount is a terrible idea with deadly consequence and that everyone is a unique individual and should act as such instead of being a woman, a black person, a conservative, a Christian, an American, a trans person, etc. This likely comes from his being a clinical psychologist and his scholarship in both religion and communism. His class lectures are freely available on YouTube, so he clearly would not fear his students recording him. They are pretty interesting, though without an interest in psychology and religion can be a slog.

I would say it is not outrageous for a legislature to be involved in a code of conduct at publicly funded universities, but the devil is in the details. Something like a student cannot be punished for their political views is fair. Something like you have to teach flat earth theory in astronomy would be stupid.

 

Agree with that. I work with some republican physicists, and one of them has completely rejected masks, mostly based on political identification and not trusting liberal politicians. I consider us friends, for what it's worth, but we haven't palled around during the pandemic.
...

I agree with that too. This must mean the Rockets are about to go on a season-ruining win streak or something.

 

Fair enough on Jordan Peterson.

The problem that I see with a legislature writing a code of conduct, especially doing so based on a survey of ideological diversity, is that they would do so for short term political gain. The view driving this at the moment is that the legislature doesn't ideologically agree with the academy. That may be true now but might not be so a few years from now. Further such a code rather than encouraging ideological diversity may end up stifling diversity depending on how it's written.