You’re hijacking the thread. The OP asked about professors on a list. What does a private citizen like Ann Coulter speaking anywhere have to do with the subject?
I may have mentioned this elsewhere, but the only time I can recall a teacher’s personal views intruding into course material was during a freshman tutorial in college on some vague topic I can’t recall, when the professor (a chemistry prof who probably none of us at the time realized was a fervent Christian) assigned us all a paper on the subject “Is A Scientist Religious”?
I churned out something not terribly original to the effect that no, a scientist cannot take things on faith, and was duly given an A- in the course, which was as good as I probably deserved.
We had nitwits who favored us with their dingbat political views in college, but they were students.
Maybe I was indoctrinated anyway and never realized it. :eek::smack:
I like it. Tender little broflakes can avoid professors that might upset them. Everybody else gets to enjoy a classroom free of nuisance conservative victimhood. Win/win, and zero consequences for anybody.
I can honestly say that I’ve never had a problem disagreeing with professors in class. If anything, I think most of my professors enjoyed it, as long as the argument was well supported. Hell, I got into college writing my application essay about Rush Limbaugh being my hero, and they let me in. 
Through Freshman year I would write about conservative topics like political correctness and the like in classes and never felt that I was in any way punished for not having the “right” opinions. (I did eventually move leftward politically, but that was not from any influence from my professors.) One of the things I loved about college was that it was not expected for you to parrot back your professor, and I felt my professors generally graded you better if you didn’t just regurgitate what they said. Maybe I had particularly good professors.
I had six years of university (4 years undergrad, two grad school) and I only found out the political leanings of 3 of my professors.
One of them I found out was liberal long after I had graduated because we were friends on Facebook. I actually had guessed he was a conservative while I was taking his class and TAing that same class later. Shows what I know. (He was in the CS dept)
One of them made an oblique reference to the 2000 election while discussing voting mechanisms (He was also in the CS dept. The topic was relevant because we were discussing how to break ties when you have multiple AI agents voting on a course of action in a machine learning class).
The last was in a Comparative Government class I took for an elective. He said up front that due to the topic of the class, politics would come up, he wanted to be clear that while he was currently a liberal, he had been conservative in the past, and he considered it important that any intelligent person be able to argue either side of any political issue. And he frequently would: if one student made an argument, he’d pose the counterargument; If another student asked if that meant X was the right answer, he’d turn right around and argue the other side intelligently and cogently. He would mention political activities if people interested, but he explicitly mentioned them for both sides and he was clear that attending any of them was for our own education and wouldn’t change our grade one whit. He was a great professor (and not just because he let me redo an essay where I misread the prompt :smack:)
I went to an engineering school, where honestly I can’t see how politics would come up in 98% of the classes (the remaining 2% being the poli sci dept).
Are you serious? As if those authoritarinism-loving conservatives don’t do exactly the same thing. Give me a break. Actually, don;t even bother. I’ve seen it personally.
My point was that they are two different pressures, neither of which have much to do with the other, but both can be present at the same time.
I have papers!
May I have my Hot Apple Pie now?
I’ll second or third the people scratching their heads, wondering where these politically radical professors were and students sycophantically agreeing with everything they said. My college experience was quite the opposite.
I can vaguely remember maybe twice a prof mentioned their personal political beliefs. One had been a Freedom Rider who taught writing, and the other was a conservative astronomer. But barely a blip in my memory.
And as for agreeing with the professor for fear of a bad grade? I never got that memo. Hell, I had a reputation for being one of the students who grilled the professors, and demanded my money’s worth for my education. A very few resented that, and I had the sense that they were second-rate minds. The majority felt I was a bit intense and young, but intellectually honest and curious, so they encouraged me. One of my friends still tells a story about me publicly and decisively disagreeing with a professor’s pet theory one day in class. That never harmed me.
This was in the mid 90s. Have things changed so drastically since then? I’d be surprised to hear that a student disagreeing with a prof and sparring about ideas would be jeopardizing their grades.
I find this whole thing puzzling. Professors are supposed to be challenging, and students are supposed to push back. The growth inherent to that exchange is called “learning”. Students, being kids, are even supposed to get some silly ideas, mount protests that should have been thought out more carefully, and try out beliefs that they’ll later discard.
And putting teachers on a watch list sounds Nixonian at best, a little worse McCarthy-esque, and even downright Orwellian when I really think about it. I can only sooth myself with the thought that being on that list would be a kind of honor. Like the way Daniel Shore felt about being on Nixon’s enemies list.
The world is a strange place lately.
…did you see what he was responding to? The university as “bastion of free speech” is increasingly coming into question. Examples of the Left doing so are pertinent if we’re going to discuss this example coming from the Right.
I find your protestation illuminating.
So, I didn’t search that website in-depth, but from the profiles I did read, I didn’t see any complaints about any of these professors actually being bad at their jobs. It’s all, “This guy Tweeted this,” and “This guy wrote a paper saying that,” and “This guy tried to brain someone with a bicycle lock.” Which, okay, that last one is genuinely bad, but you know what I didn’t see? Complaints about unfair grading, or being targeting in a classroom for disagreeing with a professor, or any actual discrimination against actual students.
Exactly. It’s like the example i gave upthread of the guy who landed on the list for comments he made on Facebook. There are some, though, who do seem to make inappropriate comments in their classrooms, or who make some of their students uncomfortable. And some show incredibly poor judgment, even if it doesn’t actually affect their classroom work. Here’s an example.
I have a friend who IS on the list for some social media comments he made. He’s not at the same university as me (he’s at CSU Fresno), but we went to graduate school together, we were in seminars together, and we hung out.
This is his entry on the list. Here’s a story that goes into more detail about the specific things he said.
Reading that, you probably won’t be surprised by his presence on the list. I was agog when i found out about this, and i’m not here to defend what he said. I will, however, note a few things about him.
He has been teaching at Fresno for ten years now, and in all of that time there have been no complaints made about his teaching by students. And we’re talking about a pretty conservative part of California here. As various news stories, like this LA Times article, also note, he receives generally positive reviews on the RateMyProfessors website, where about the worst thing said about him is that his lectures can sometimes be boring. Furthermore, in a report (PDF) on this incident, the university itself noted that:
And you know that, once this story became public, the first thing the university did is send someone to go through his previous teaching evaluations to see if any students had complained about inappropriate behavior in the past.
Having sat in graduate seminars with this guy, and having read some of his work, i can also attest that his historical research and analysis and writing is of the caliber you would expect from someone who holds a Doctorate from a top-rated university. The year he finished grad school, his PhD dissertation won an award.
The comments he made, whatever you think of them, were made on a Twitter account where he had a total of 28 followers, all of whom were personal friends. He was pretty silly to allow the comments to be viewed publicly, but knowing him, that was probably a result of not knowing the difference between public and private accounts, rather than about wanting to make a public statement. As he said in a public apology about the incident (from the PDF document linked above):
And the only reason that this became a public thing was that the Tweets were apparently discovered by someone who notified the Breitbart “news” organization about them.
So we’ve got a guy who said some stupid and inflammatory things, in a setting that had nothing to do with his work. He does good historical research and writing. He’s been teaching at his university for over a decade with no suggestion that such comments ever emerge in his classroom. He gets decent rating on RateMyProfessors, and has passed all of his university reviews. And, all of these professional things aside, he’s a nice guy, a sensitive guy, and a completely non-violent person.
And he was forced to leave his home for a while after this story broke because he, his wife, and their two young children were getting death threats.
As i said previously, i’m an unrepentant man of the left, and i make that clear on this message board. I’ve been posting here for over 15 years. I’ve said stuff here that makes clear my disdain for certain politicians and certain political viewpoints. I’d be interested in knowing whether that posting history would, in the minds of people like the OP, warrant my inclusion on the list. If you believe that it does, then you clearly believe that academics should be allowed no private political or moral or ethical independence whatsoever. And if it doesn’t, then why is it so bad for an academic to make a public Facebook post that you disagree with?
Much as it might satisfy the persecution complex of some conservatives to believe otherwise, i’m well aware of my professional responsibilities in the classroom. I draw a clear distinction between the things i say in my personal and private life (including this message board), and the things i say in my professional capacity as a university instructor. I’ve said things on here about Donald Trump, for example, that i would never say to my students, because i take seriously my role as an educator.
I’m not under any illusion that my teaching is completely apolitical, or completely without evidence of my own beliefs. That is, quite frankly, pretty much impossible. But i am confident that my teaching, in terms of both content and pedagogical approaches, reflects a concern with promoting student learning rather than pushing a particular political barrow, or turning students into carbon copies of me. I also believe that good teaching is, in fact, compatible with strong political commitments, and i believe that even teachers who make their political positions known to their students can still be excellent teachers, and can still encourage a wide variety of viewpoints. And this applies whether they’re liberals or conservatives, Marxists or Randians, atheist or religious.
And honestly, a lot of the people who whine about allegedly politicized teachers seem to have little or no faith in the intelligence and the independence of the students themselves. If you think that sitting in front of a liberal professor for three hours a week in one fifteen-week semester is going to turn your little Johnny or Jane into a raving socialist, well, you have far more confidence than i do in my ability to influence my students.
Was I? Was Charles Manson? Was David Avocado Wolfe? Clearly, someone at the university thought her views were worth hearing, but those people are objectively wrong.
My response to Ann Coulter: “You have free speech. It’s just that your ideas and your speech are unbefitting a kindergarten classroom, let alone an institute of higher learning. There is erotic fiction about you involving the terms ‘yogurt cannon’ and ‘chocolate socket’ with more intellectual, political, and literary value than everything you’ve ever written combined. The idea that anyone would even consider inviting you to speak at UC Berkeley sickens me much in the same way seeing Michael Moore or more realistically Charles Manson would.”
And as much as I want to agree with all of this, I’m left wondering - what if, instead of calling for the assassination of Trump, he was on this list for calling for someone to overturn Obergfell, or for “religious liberty” to discriminate against gay people? Would we all be saying, “He’s good at his job, don’t worry about it”? I don’t know if we would, and I kind of have an issue with that.
Can’t write much right now, as I’m on a tablet.
But my answer to this is that I would, in fact, be saying the same thing. I have plenty of disdain for people who oppose gay marriage, and would be happy to tell them so to their faces, but if the person in question is not preaching his bigotry in the classroom, and is an otherwise capable instructor, I would not be calling for his sacking or his resignation.
And, by the same token, just because I don’t think he should be fired, I’m not asking people to refrain from criticizing or mocking my friend. He said those things, and people have a right to be angry or upset about it.
The question of germane to the subject at hand does not come about?
Lets say you have a capable Engineering Professor.; He opposes Gay marriage openly. Is a charter member of the “Safe from Sodomy Society”. Never brings it up in his professional setting either in class or in the staff room. As far as you can tell, he has been nothing but professional and couteous to homosexual students and collegues. Would you raise it?
Now if he was a Professor of law, but everything else is the same, would your answer change? Since Gay marriage is infact very much a topical matter in law and jurisprudence.
I would say there is a difference.
And while I will freely take you at your word, I worry there are many who will see your argumentation, and simultaneously not think it through to its conclusions on points that disagree with them like homophobia, racism, etc. I’m 99% sure that I’d be one of them if I hadn’t been reading basically nothing but Less Wrong and SlateStarCodex the last few days. 
It seems likely to me that the great majority of college/university profs are indeed objective enough to treat students with differing political views fairly when it comes to grading and other functions.
I suspect there are some who don’t manage quite as well, even though they may think they treat everyone according to quality of work. I’m reminded of those physicians who were outraged at the implication that even minor gifts from drug reps influenced their prescribing patterns (studies have indicated otherwise).
However, I doubt that stunts like the “watch list” are going to be useful in ferreting out professors who go over the line.
I think the main difference is that Rate My Professor is useful, whereas this site breathlessly tells me about a tweet some guy made in 2012 about Paul Ryan.
Bullshit. I went to the infamous Evergreen State College in the nineties. In one class, a professor assigned Biopiracy–a screed against Monsanto, GMOs, and gene-patenting–for seminar.
I showed up for seminar loaded for bear, having researched four different sources the author relied on, showing how she’d misrepresented these sources in fatal fashions, and how her points relied on such misrepresentations. A couple of students defended the book, but the professor didn’t.
On the contrary: this lefty professor apologized to me after the seminar for assigning the book, and thanked me for bringing up the counterarguments.
I can’t say all professors would respond similarly, but the only way to find out is to try. I often challenged professors, and I can’t think of any case where my grade suffered for it.
I also never knew the political opinions of any of my professors, even in my actual class where we discussed political stuff in the news. (I think it was Political Science or similar). My only exposure to any political ideas at all was when the College Republicans and College Democrats were recruiting.
Everyone talks about the Internet being a bubble, but I’ve been exposed to far, far more diverse opinion on politics online than anywhere else. College was all focused on either social stuff or classes, most of mine being music.
I do know the religion of some of my professors, because it came up. But politics? Only by guesswork, like a professor who I’m pretty sure was gay (as he’d had the same male roommate for decades). I just can guess that he was liberal.
That said, I do think there is a problem in this country where some things are considered to be political when they are just facts, and I don’t support pretending otherwise. And, unfortunately, that seems to be more an issue on the Right than on the Left. The Left has its share of problematic beliefs, but they usually aren’t problems with facts.
As for arguing with professors? That literally never came up. The closest was writing a paper that differed from the view the professor taught. And, if you supported it properly, you got an A.
Not necessarily, everyday defense attorneys put their individual morals aside to defend clients who they find repugnant and in some cases know are guilty because one of the great principles of the U.S. justice system is that a lawyer defends his or her client to the best of their legal ability. I am certain there are a great many judges interpret the law according to the Constitution not their faiths’ religious books. I see no reason a college professor wouldn’t apply the same standards of professionalism. Incidentally, most do.