The majority of academics and journalists are not professional fact finders? Cite?
We’re in IMHO.
A conservative, bitching that professional fact finders are biased against him, refuses to back up his argument with facts.
Are you beginning to see the problem? Just a little? Maybe?
Huh. So conservatives stop sending their kids to college due to the misbegotten notion the kids will get liberalized or picked on. That means liberals will hold most of the careers that require a college education: medical doctors, attorneys, aeronautical engineers, etc., and many of the conservative kids will end up their resentful underlings. Interesting.
Of course, you could cut education funding so severely nobody gets an education, a real “cut off your nose to spite your face” move, especially since there wouldn’t be enough doctors around to sew it back on.
AFAICT, “professional fact finders” is just a figment of your imagination. I don’t feel the need to “back up” my rejection of your gratuitous and unsupported assertion (that profs and journos are “professional fact finders” with anything but my own gratuitous assertion.
Try this - it’s a question. Yes, a “hypothetical” question. It requires some thinking. People in this discussion have already done that and answered. No different than if I was on a history discussion board and asked “what if the US had lost the battle of Midway?”. It’s a type of question where people with expertise give their opinions. In this case I wanted persons in academia to give their input and some of them have.
You did NOT. You just insulted.
Part of, or some say a BIG part of, the purpose of college is to teach a person to think a little outside the box.
Didn’t YOUR college teach this?
It’s not just republicans. According to your cite it says 76% of democrats think colleges are good but that leaves 34% of democrats who say they are not. Also look about how those numbers of persons who have bad views of universities is growing.
Because… maybe they are … right? Maybe their are some things with the typical university system that are not so good for the country? Maybe we should have alternatives to a path to a middle class livelihood?
How about we forget all the left vs. right and the political and ideological stuff and look at costs and benefits? How about issues like the cost of college. Look also at graduation, retention, and dropout rates.
Look at how many students take 6 years to complete a 4 year degree. THEN look at how much money the universities cost.
Look at all the people in their 30’s struggling to pay off student loans. Look at how much that is beginning to drag down the economy.
You complain about state legislatures not giving state universities more money but why should universities have a monopoly on state funding? Is there a cheaper and more cost effective alternative?
Obama, a democrat. Also has/had some problems with the current university program and proposed another path. Please check out this link. It’s Obama’s 2015 commencement address as little Lake Area tech in Watertown South Dakota. In it he praises the schools high graduation in 2 years rates, The schools low cost. The fact that about 99% of the graduates find employment in their fields.
Maybe their are some issues that need to be addressed?
Actually you might be on to something.
Maybe a person could forget the typical 4 year and $60,000 route to say a degree in computer science and just take a 9 month, $2,000 course in information management systems or maybe some programming area?
No, how about we fund some of the education for other medical fields better? How about all the RN’s, LPN’s, the XRay techs, and dental hygienists? Do you know how much those schools cost and how full they are?
Oh, without question. But the idea that political opponents are out to get certain students is not an actual problem. The right wing is embracing a culture of victimhood (which, ironically, is what right wingers often criticize poor people of having) and so are blaming problems on all sorts of boogeymen – higher education, immigrants, people who say “happy holidays,” the news, etc.
I didn’t insult. I asked for clarification of your hypothetical, which you continue to ignore (though you finally decided to respond by insulting me. Congratulations).
I don’t know how anyone can answer your hypothetical effectively without an answer to this question, which I’ll pose again:
How is this hypothetical liberal professor “targeting” their conservative students?
This isn’t an insult. I’m just pointing out that your question is so vague as to be meaningless. What does “targeted” mean? Is the professor not smiling at them as much as at their liberal counterparts? Breaking ethical and contractual responsibilities by giving conservative students lower grades than they earned? Beating up conservative students in the back alley?
You’ve maybe got an interesting question here, but, as at least two college professors have already pointed out to you, your question is meaningless without clarification.
Perhaps others are willing to just spitball some ideas while just guessing at what you’re asking, but I find your inability to even articulate what it is you’re asking (or your intentional avoidance thereof, or some of both) to be telling.
As it stands, your question is, in essence: “What should a conservative student do if they have a liberal professor who [somethingsomething]?”
What does it mean to “target”? What does it mean to be “openly against”? Can you articulate, for the sake of your own hypothetical, what it is that this conservative student is responding to?
Seems a part of the thread is drifting into the longstanding debate about whether postsecondary schooling should be all about advanced job training as opposed to “liberal education”, I suppose because in the former there is less need to debate policy (uh-huh… how about engineers talking climate or fuels, or health practitioners talking reproductive health).
But going back to the OP, as we can see from the actual faculty who have contributed, they are quite willing to give a conservative student a fair shake and to call upon the school’s mechanisms to address any actual hostility to the outlier student.
That said, IMO a faculty member (or a manager) should not be in aggressive proselytizing mode in the classroom(/workplace), however, neither should they be compelled to “closet” themselves as long as they are civil about it and do not detract unnecessarily from the course. That a particular professor is clearly to the left or right and his commentary and expression lets it be known should not be a cause for the students to feel intimidated or persecuted, as long as the class is conducted in a civil and fair manner – but mind you,** “fair” does not mean “my side wins the argument at least half the time”**, either.
It’s not just ideology.
If you are employed at a state university you also are (most likely) in a public employee union. You pay union dues. That union gives money to mostly democratic politicians. So democrats are playing to their base.
Its like years ago when California governor Jerry Brown was elected with heavy support from public service unions. After he was elected he passed a law requiring all government employees to join said union and pay their union dues.
One hand washes the other even if the rank and file are not totally with the plan.
I agree. Sorry I went in another direction. I appreciate the input from college faculty.
I DID respond to them and thanked them for their input.
So what? Lots of liberals work in sectors of the economy where the powers that be lean right. Whoop-dee-do.
ETA: not to mention that your grievance against unions has literally nothing to do with the question of whether a Republican college student can possibly survive college without getting his feelings hurt by different ideas.
You want me to cite that the people we see gathering facts with tape recorders and notebooks and delivering the results in print and electronic media every day are professional fact finders? And that people who conduct research following scientific methods and publish results in peer reviewed journals are professional fact finders? You want me to provide a cite for that assertion? OK. Just so I’m spending my time fruitfully, give me an idea of the kind of evidence you’d accept. A study by social scientists, published in a major news outlet perhaps? Would that be a sufficient cite for you?
If you ask “what if the US had lost the battle of Midway?”, I know precisely what your question means. What you’ve done in this thread is more along the lines of ‘what if there had been a different (unspecified) outcome to some (unspecified) battle that the US was involved in?’ Anyone who does choose to answer that may be trying to provide an answer to an entirely different question than anyone else choosing to answer; just as people in this thread have tried to answer everything from ‘what if there’s an actual physical attack based only on knowing the student’s politics’ to ‘what if the professor’s trying to correct challenges to the basic facts of the professor’s field?’
There are so many things that you might mean by “targeting” that I have no idea what the question you’ve been asked to explain means. That’s why multiple people are asking you to clarify it. Why are you so reluctant to do so?
The issue that needs to be addressed seems to me to have nothing to do with whether professors are liberal or conservative. The issue that needs to be addressed seems to me to be that employers – most of them in the private sector – have decided to simplify their job application process by requiring certain degrees before they’ll consider the applications; and that, not surprisingly since the intention is to narrow down the pack, as more and more people succeed in obtaining the desired degrees the employers start requiring additional degrees.
So over the last century we’ve moved by stages from ‘you can get a decent job if you made it through sixth grade, or maybe high school’ to ‘you can’t get most jobs without a college degree, and you can’t get a lot of them without a master’s or even a doctorate’. This does have something to do with the nature of the jobs, but it’s got also a great deal to do with using the degrees as a gateway. And that’s a private sector problem, for the most part; and it’s not a left-right issue. Colleges and universities have shifted to try to accommodate it; but that’s because of the demand being pressed upon them.
Agreeing with that, and expanding on it:
It’s entirely unreasonable to expect instructors in a field to have no opinions of their own. So in cases in which political positions are actually relevant to the course, it’s very useful for the students to know what the instructor’s own stance is, so that they can consider for themselves whether the sources chosen and the information supplied are affected by that stance. Hiding the information is in those cases an actual disadvantage to the students, whatever their own politics are.
This of course doesn’t apply to courses in which the information’s not relevant; and applies only minimally to courses in which it shouldn’t really be relevant but may crop up anyway, such as geology and biology courses, in which all the student needs to know about the instructor’s politics or religion is that the instructor agrees with the state of the science about the age of the planet or the existence of evolution; whether the professor prefers Clinton to Trump or vice versa isn’t relevant in those cases, and causing or allowing discussions of it would be a waste of class time.
I think your math needs some work.
Stop targeting him!