University violates its pledge of confidentiality over a homophobic remark. Thoughts?

Great Debates
61

So, you think every instructor - professor or TA - is perfect? Maybe you’d rather have the deans sit in on classes, like principals do for new teachers. Hardly anyone couldn’t benefit from some feedback, which does not involve jumping at every suggestion.

And your comment about teachers needing to inspire fear is about the stupidest thing I’ve ever heard. I took classes from famous guys, one a Nobel Laureate, and none of them thought it necessary to cause fear. That’s the game of incompetent bullies. Incompetent teachers should be identified and weeded out. Or should a class just suck up and take bad teaching?

62

Bwahhh? So what you’re saying is that the students should be held accountable to high standards and the professors shouldn’t? What do you call this educational theory? Intellectual mugging?

And since you brought up the lowering of intellectual standards, how can you generalize your own personal experiences to the world at large. “I saw it firsthand.” Well so what? You went to a crappy school. You should have transferred, but you didn’t. Ding on you. Why didn’t you speak up? Why didn’t you complain to the administration? And yet you feel qualified to offer replacing evals with “whining” as a viable solution.

Try learning something about education sometime, Dio. You might find it comes in handy when debating it.

63

Sure, and I have an understanding of what “hate speech” means in commonly-accepted usage.

And by my understanding, “hate speech” includes an expression of hatred against a group of people based on race, sex, religion, or sexual orientation.

So for example, if somebody says “I hate black people,” that’s hate speech. Similarly, if somebody says “I can’t stand homosexuals,” that’s hate speech.

64

I’m going to start using that in real life.

“Talk to the hand, bitch. My understanding controls.”

65

Anyone who has done upward evaluations - or gotten them - at work know that they aren’t as anonymous as promised, especially if there are comments. But this goes over the edge. If a professor can and does identify a student by handwriting for this, who would write anything negative if there is any chance of getting the professor for another class?

The student is an asshole of course, but it is not like the professor isn’t aware that there are homophobes around. I assume the student got a bad grade, for good reasons, and the prof. should be satisfied with that. Sticks and stones, etc.

66

Anyways, getting back to the OP. The school grants anonymity to the students in order to get their honest opinions about the instructors performance. Although not formalized in a contract, that should be the basic understanding of the students. It’s not supposed to be a platform to go on a hate filled diatribe against the professor. Once a student does that, he violates the implied terms of the granted anonymity, and it no longer applies.

67

There’s glory for you.

Given that the “hate speech”–as vague and messy a term as exists in current society–is pretty clearly not “I hate you” but relies on some form of name calling and given that we are discussing a particular institution whose rules can be found and given that you started off your reply with “LOL” and then offered a fairly silly example of how you would identify “hate speech” when you have demonstrated a general awareness of American society in other threads, I drew the eminently reasonable inference that you are just yanking Dio’s chain. Since the thread has already spun off into never-never-land, you may carry on with your games.

68

No, just that students are the wrong people to evaluate them.

“Fear” doesn’t have to mean physical fear, but students should at least be afraid of being penalized or failing instead of just assuming that the instructors will bend over backwards to accomdate them.

69

More glory.

70

No.
Again, what do you mean? You obviously used the wrong word, what point were you trying to make?

That’s a non-response.
What exactly is this ‘opinion’ based on? What makes a student incapable of commenting on whether or not a professor routinely lost papers that were handed in? Why are students ‘unqualified’ to note the facts of a matter? If the university paid an auditor to review the time it took a professor to return exams that would be more valid than a student reporting the same exact fact?

…
So you’re admitting that you’re just bullshitting, that your claim is based on no facts, evidence or logic, and simply on the fact you like to think it? You’re not honestly engaging in the middle-school level tactic of adopting an unsupported position, and then complaining about how you don’t have to support it, because everybody it entitled to their own opinions?

Yet again, since you’re real good on the first two words of what you said, but apparently having trouble with everything past the first word of my response: Do you have any proof for that, or is it just what you think?
You are aware that cleaving to a specific view of a factual position, sans any actual factual support, is playing a game of make-believe? And equally defensible?

Probably the same thing that tells you that offering unsupported opinions in a forum labeled Great Debates is acceptable conduct. You might also want to look up ‘sarcasm’ along with ‘risible’.

In case you’re unable to understand, likening students to soldiers is a false analogy.
Students are students, not soldiers. I was mocking your absurd act of comparing paying students to enlisted soldiers. And I pointed out that treating students as (lo and behold!) students, rather than a placeholder in a risible analogy, was the way to go.

Interesting, though, that in addition to being totally unable to support any of your claims with actual facts rather than simply claiming that they’re what you think, because you feel like thinking them… you also believe that even if I didn’t understand what the word “analogy” meant, that a single example would somehow make your case about dumbed down standards. This is GD, not Mr Wuzzle’s Tea Party. Opinions not backed up by facts aint worth the electrons with which they’re transmitted. And actually believing that committing the fallacy of hasty generalization backs up your position is, yep, risible.

Bull, followed by shit.
You know zilch about “students these days”. If anything, you can speak to a small body of students who you saw/interacted with/had knowledge of at your specific university, whenever that was.

Even for an argument as poor as yours, claiming that you ‘saw firsthand’ anything, at all, that could possibly yield a sweeping generalization of “students these days” is, you guessed it, risible.

71

Man, I thought I had a problem with higher education!

I’ve got to ask. Does your view of higher education really consist of a bunch of spoiled brats who have to be cowed into utter terror and submission or they’ll run rampant around the schools in an orgy of not turning in their papers on time? Do you really think that the best teachers are those who can instill fear at a glance? Man, I don’t even want to know where you went to college, because as bad as Boston colleges can be, your alma mater is out of control!

Colleges aren’t the real world, but neither is your view of them. Once again, you really, and I mean really, don’t know what the fuck you’re talking about.

72

Are you seriously claiming that “I hate blacks” does not qualify as “hate speech”?

Anyway, it’s a little late for you to be arguing that the phrase “hate speech” is vague and messy. You already claimed that I know what it means.

Oh really? Suppose a student says the following:

I suppose that’s not “hate speech,” hey?

I have no idea if the institution in question has a rule about “hate speech.” Diogenes brought up the phrase, not me.

73

I am the OP, and in retrospect I have no idea. I have a vague impression that the feminine pronoun was used in the print version of the article, which is what I read, but I don’t have the NYT Magazine with me so I can’t check. Certainly I could have been mistaken.

74

No name calling. No attribution of negative qualities to a group. No expression of ill intent toward a group or its members.
Simple declaration of personal feelings.

Nope. Not hate speech.

I did not argue that it was vague and messy; I acknowledged that it is vague and messy and I assert that despite those negative aspects, a general understanding of hate speech is possessed by any functionally literate adult member of American society in 2008.

Wishing ill on someone including making derogatory comments about them that includes a specific reference to their purported membership in a perceived group? That would seem to meet most understandings of hate speech. The student then followed up with the comment using the derogatory “fags.” That is a pretty clear case of name calling.

I am not really on Dio’s side of this fight. I just found your approach with the seemingly disingenuous Whatever is hate speech? claim to challenging him along with your fairly silly example to be a rather ill-advised hijacking of the thread.

Of course, now Dio, himself has made sufficient outrageous statements inviting challenge and retort from so many quarters that the thread is pretty tattered. I’d already said that I was not going to stand in the way of your hijack.

  • ::: shrug ::: *
75

Well, then I guess you were wrong when you claimed that I know what hate speech is. Because to me, “I hate blacks” is hate speech and I understand that phrase.

Is not the same thing as name-calling. Earlier you seemed to be imposing a “name-calling” requirement on hate speech.

It was a perfectly reasonable question. Diogenes seemed to be saying that breaking confidentiality is acceptable, even if there is no threat made, if there is “hate speech.”

I wanted to know what he means by “hate speech.”

76

Are you saying that “name-calling” is part of the defintion of hate speech? Whatever happened to the “sticks and stones” adage most of us grew up with?

77

The students are exactly the people to be evaluating them. Because they are, you know, the paying customer. If my tuition is paying some morons salary, it is entirely within my rights and responsibilities to make sure that Administration knows the person is incompetent, and if enough students bitch, to can the boob. I’m the one paying the money. “He who pays the piper” and all that.

78

I don’t know if this question is addressed to me. One man’s hate speech is another man’s . . . not hate speech.

Diogenes apparently believes that it’s ok for colleges to break confidentiality and punish people who put “hate speech” on class evaluations. It’s not entirely clear what he means by “hate speech,” but he and tomndebb both assure me that I know. Except when I don’t. Or something like that.

There’s a corollary to that adage: Never piss off “the man.”

79

Wow, that was a mouthful.

Because you went to some goofball college you think students are incapable of providing feedback? And by extension instructors should instill hatred and fear in students in an effort to make them smarter?

Should we assume all the students from your college are incapable of constructive opinion or do you have a list of names for us to follow?

80

Diogenes the Cynic, what is this nonsense about students learning from teachers they hate? I can accept that students can learn from teachers they fear. The best professor that I ever had did not allow me to breathe for the first two weeks in his classroom, but I didn’t stop trembling until near the end of the third quarter. That was forty-six years ago and I still keep up with him.

But it is rare that a student learns much from a teacher she or he hates. If the student is learning, any resentment toward the professor tends to go away. I haven’t run across any exceptions in my career though I will leave the door open for an exception or two.