Quote:
Originally posted by Bad_Rich_Chic
I've seen it. It can be pretty obvious. Details of the most colorful incidents are somewhat outable, since 100 people in my LS class witnessed the same incidents I did. But I will say that, when a professor tries to have a student expelled for sexual harassment because the student "demeaned" her in front of the class by asking her to explain factually incorrect statements used as the proof of an argument, it ain't hard to tell.
But I did get an A+ in the most relentlessly thoughtless, knee-jerk-PC professor's class I ever took by treating the exams and term paper as exercises in satire. With blind grading, anyone with a brain can usually avoid retaliation by lying like hell on the exam (caveat: above). It's not a useless exercise to learn; one should be able to understand arguments one disagrees with enough to make them before dismissing them. But it doesn't speak well for the openmindedness of academe.
I've of course seen conservative professors do exactly the same thing, though less frequently (which is certainly only because I've encountered conservative professors less frequently). And liberal profs I've known seemed to express much more dismay when hearing of other profs shutting down student inquiry that didn't comport to that other prof's political views - though I believe, in sincerity, that the conservative profs were themselves so used to being on the receiving end of disrespect and nasty allegations intended to shut them up that their attitude tended to be "university is about learning to defend yourself against the slings and arrows of closed-minded bigots; stop whining and get used to it" rather than "I am shocked - SHOCKED - that such a thing could happen here!"
|
Try saying "I agree wholeheartedly with Milton Friedman's free market theories" durin Econ 101 taught by a 60ish radical professor who'd never worked outside a 4000 person liberal arts institution. Dead flat "C". The paper on why 1980s bank deregulation was a great thing garnered a fat "C-".
Threaded Mode