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Politics : Foreign Affairs Discussion Group -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: LindyBill who wrote (60357)	12/7/2002 12:39:19 PM
From: JohnM	Respond to of 281500

That site points to an issue in higher education that needs to be addressed. No doubt about it. Whether from the left or right, students should not be forced to adopt certain points of view to get good grades. It's indoctrination rather than education. And, typically at least in my experience, students adopt them for the duration of the requirements in that particular course (oh, so that's how I get a good grade here) but are turned off, dramatically, by the point of view. So it's self defeating as well. We had the problem from both the left and right. Moreover, there are not good procedures within the academy to address such problems. That's well known and the academy is derelict for not doing something about it. As for the point about course evaluations and even publicly distributed booklets from students evaluating courses, telling them which to take based on evaluations gathered from students, I have no problem with that so long as it's done responsibly. By that I mean it's not a hatchet job. There are quite a few different ways to do it well. All of this is quite different from CampusWatch however. The point in this most recent post is not the view of the faculty members nor their patriotism but their teaching skills. Those are simply bad teachers. Pipes is going after faculty members for their views and wants to have their views reported on. Finally, in this last post, my concern about it is that it's now being captured by the right wing so the comments are only offered vis a vis faculty members on the left and, because it's politicized, the problem is actually less likely to be addressed. As for the quote about theories of globalization that "portrayed Western civilization as almost demonic, heartless, and ruthless beasts that enslave the world for financial gain," I can see how that might set you off. Who knows whether it happened that way and if it did what context the faculty member provided. If she did as the student said and offered them no avenue to consider it simply as an idea among other ideas to be discussed, evaluated, whatever, but rather as god's own truth and they had to believe it, then she's a terrible teacher. And should be evaluated as such. That kind of teaching is certainly not typical of higher education in my experience. Not by a long shot.