I feel like there should be mandatory classes at the high school level- once you go from 8th to 9th grade, we’re going to cut out the bullshit and make-believe and teach you about reality.
Every major psuedoscience and scam “treatment” and mythology and cult should be listed, and described, and it should be explained very slowly and very carefully why they are unsupported, unscientific, unproven, or proven outright to be fraudulent.
And then we need to ask the children which of those things are really real in spite of what they just learned. And then, we need to force them to re-take the class (and/or slap them repeatedly) until they give the correct answer, which is none of the above.
Then, after that, they’re on their own. You get swindled after that, that’s the price you pay for being stupid.
Columbia deigns (my new favorite SDMB word) not, in the name of tenure. Tenure is explained to us as a protection for the academic mind against persecution.
And for all this time now I’d thought tenure was the power that enabled a professor to decide that the $200 textbook his students were required to purchase was coincidentally the $200 textbook he or she had authored, and if anyone called bullshit on it they could go piss up a rope.
I’m not an expert on such things, but I don’t think the concept of tenure would prevent them from removing him from the position of vice-chair of the department of surgery (which the news article seems to indicate he is). It’s just bordering on impossible to fire him outright given his tenure.
“Columbia” isn’t one thing. The president may be on board with removing him from his post, but maybe the department chair isn’t, and that’s who really needs to be, and the department chair just may not want the publicity. Or maybe an ad hoc committee needs to examine the issue, and no one will volunteer for it. Stuff at universities move slowly.
Posted this in the thread about the wellness blogger. Oz’ answer to his critics was not to provide actual evidence for his position but to dig up dirt about the doctors who sent the letter to Columbia asking them to remove him from his faculty position.
