Saturday, November 25, 2017

Jordan Peterson Suggests Website Identifying College Courses That Are Left-Biased

link
Why are leftist academicians so panicky about people finding out what's in their courses? (Remember how upset people got when anti-Trump tirades in classes were caught on tape?) I've never heard ordinary academicians express concerns about their course content being made public. I'm not averse in any way to people knowing what's in my courses. And, of course, if the PC left doesn't like something, they simply assert that it makes them "unsafe" or itself constitutes "violence" against them. The fact that they get away with such nonsense shows how biased toward the left academia is. That bullshit should be mercilessly ridiculed. Instead, such obviously false ploys are automatically treated as if they were true..
   At any rate, I'm about the most ardent defender of academic freedom there is. But I just don't see the problem with general facts about the content of courses being made public. The freedom to teach what you want does not depend on your course content being secret. And, of course, it's fairly clear that a lot of courses in the social science and humanities would turn out to be a series of political indoctrination sessions. So I understand why the professors who teach them are against this fact being made public. But the very fact that they'd use the bogus excuse that they fear for their safety is, IMO, a reason for making the information public. Look, students have a legitimate interest in knowing which professors teach politically biased courses. But the idea that bias is bad is, of course, a liberal view. The PC left thinks that leftist bias is good. Their principles entail that they should trick students into taking their courses if possible. Of course if right-wing bias were widespread in the academy, the left would be singing a very different tune on this.

3 Comments:

Blogger Pete Mack said...

It's a great idea, but there are some serious hurdles in implementation.
"The Civil War" was primarily fought over slavery, and economic issues emanating from it." Leftist claim? (A lot of right wingers will say yes.)

9:03 PM  
Blogger Winston Smith said...

I have no doubt that such a site would be composed largely of bullshit / score-settling...just like a millions other sites on the web, including RateMyProfessor.

Presumably, though, people will be inclined to give specific examples, and to tell something like the truth in the aggregate.

I'm not even in favor of such a site...except as retaliation against the all-purpose PC left appeal to fear / unsafety.

9:18 PM  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

"I'm not even in favor of such a site"

Yeah, ceteris paribus, I wouldn't consider this sort of thing a good idea. An interesting counterpoint would be if it were targeted at conservative professors. I wouldn't consider a complaint that it made them unsafe to be totally unreasonable at all. Now, part of that is that the left is so dominant in universities and are genuinely a mad cult who would threaten conservatives, but the sword cuts both ways too and there probably is nonzero risk to leftist professors from this from cultish conservatives also.

The problem is that the campus left, particularly in the humanities, are effectively defrauding their students of 60k a year right now (really more because what they offer is of negative value, not valueless). So the risk they bear is entirely outweighed by the genuine need to inform students how to wisely use their education, a good that seems to be completely lost on the sociology-humanities left. And frankly it strikes me as just plain justice that people know the crap they have been hawking.

9:34 PM  

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