"Students for Academic Freedom"

[Wiglaf]

DRoseDARS

[DRoseDARs]

Originally posted by Wiglaf
DRoseDARS

Yeah, don't you just hate it when someone raises the sheepskin to reveal the wolf hiding underneath?

[DRoseDARs]

http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=Foundation_for_Individual_Rights_in_Education

FIRE is a major proponent of the intellectual diversity movement which aims to dismantle the so-called liberal bias in higher academia.

[Pekka]

This whole "alternative academic" thing is a disgrace. It's like as if death is an alternative way of life. Sure, but not really. Or beating up people is removing bias from peaceful living and an alternative way to live peacefully.

I think all these idiots, who get their panties on a twist and don't get the point or are too stupid to just let it go, starting to affect the mental happiness of others, they should be laughed at, ridiculed and pointed out in a crowd. That's what happens in the real scientific community when someone is a moron, that's what should happen earlier, when students take stupid action that are contradictory. So yeah, bring it on, let's see the face of this student and laugh at the stupidity of that idiot, let's spit on the face of this person.

[Agathon]

There is no liberal bias in universities. There's a "pro reason" and "anti-idiocy" bias, which is often mistaken by conservatives for a liberal bias.

Conservatives don't really belong at universities. They belong in the army or other places where we need mindless cannon fodder.

[DinoDoc]

UM spokesman Joe Carr said Friday that Grosswiler’s classroom comments were not intended to be taken literally and that extra credit would not be granted for carrying out such activities.

If they weren't meant to be taken literally and extra credit wouldn't be offered, why did he offer it?

[OzzyKP]

Professors like Aggy are exactly why groups like FIRE exist.

[Patroklos]

So after reading the article, where exactly is the accusation of giving extra credit for performing specific political dispalys and not others refuted?

If this doesn't exist, why is anyone here not rightly critical. Even Aggie would have to be.

Conservatives don't really belong at universities. They belong in the army or other places where we need mindless cannon fodder.

Odd, isn't it the great communist utopias who embrace the cannon fodder view of tactics?

Stalin Mao Aggie

[Pekka]

Ozzykp, yes, idiots exists because of someone who challenges contemporary idiocy, yes?

I mean if you can't look pass the fact that a flag is a piece of cloth and a symbol at most, if you also have guaranteed to have it in your freedom of speech to burn it, what's the problem?

There is no problem, unless a person is so stuck up, that he believes all the laws equals moral equals good person equals my people equals **** the rest. Maybe higher education has a point in teaching people how to think. It's not necessarily that the thing X here is good and thing Y here isn't. It's to be able to ask the right questions, to challenge the norms, to seek new ways. Conforming people are the ones who submit and make things like nazis work. I know it's a Godwin but it's true as well. Nobody ever died for a symbol, or if they did, maybe that symbol was the Darwin Awards.

We call these people commiefascists.

[Koyaanisqatsi]

Originally posted by Patroklos
So after reading the article, where exactly is the accusation of giving extra credit for performing specific political dispalys and not others refuted?

Don't know if it's specifically stated in the article, though the last line might be a pretty good indication. It's clear to anybody who's ever taken the course, though. (I didn't when I was a student, but I know others who did.)

[Agathon]

Originally posted by OzzyKP
Professors like Aggy are exactly why groups like FIRE exist.

Hardly, I don't believe I've ever talked about my personal politics in any of my classes. I occasionally make fun of Bush, but that just means that I do it about one time for every twenty that students in the class do.

There's a number of reasons that conservatives don't get taken seriously at universities.

The first is that a great many of them predicate their arguments upon religious belief. Unfortunately, that is useless in open debate, since religious beliefs are almost all unprovable, and university people have this nasty habit of not accepting claims unargued for. Without such justification, conservative moral beliefs tend to collapse like a house of cards.

The second is that the secular beliefs that conservatives have are often crazy or easily refutable. For example, there are the crazy people who believe in the cracktard Austrian school of economics or insane weird **** like the Laffer Curve, both of which are completely crazed and obviously false. Or they tend to engage in ridiculous denial of established facts. I have never seen anyone in a class dispute the fact that Stalin was a bloodthirsty tyrant, but I've seen plenty attempt to defend the US record in Latin America (despite the fact that it is by and large indefensible on moral grounds).

The third is that universities are places where theories are expected to be well-defined, and conservatism just isn't. As I've proved on this forum numerous times, conservatives cannot even tell you what conservatism is without making it sound completely idiotic or trivial. Universities are set up in accord with the values of the Enlightenment: and those are liberal values.

The truth is, that if you put a bunch of smart people together and tell them to study the world's problems, you tend to produce people on the liberal left end of the spectrum (even if there is much disagreement over the details). Of course the rest of society tends to resent this, because they get told things that they don't want to hear, but that doesn't change the facts.

I've seen conservative students try to disrupt seminars time and time again with their uninformed claptrap or ridiculous conspiracy theories, and the result is always the same: they get assraped by people who know what they are talking about. It's like some hick farm team trying to play the Yankees and complaining that it's a conspiracy when they get beaten.

Conservatives have responded to this by opening up their own whackjob universities and think tanks, which are specifically funded to produce partisan material. Ordinary universities do not exercise such control over their faculty. The truth is that conservatism tends to fair badly in environments where truth, honesty and peer review are valued.

[Agathon]

A University of Maine student alleges her former professor offered extra credit to class members if they burned the American flag or the U.S. Constitution or were arrested defending free speech.

Seems to me that this allows infinite latitude in what a student could get arrested for. I could see someone like Ben Kenobi getting arrested for an abortion protest in response to this.

[Patroklos]

It's clear to anybody who's ever taken the course, though.

Yeah, it seems like that now, but in doesn't look like that was the way he said it in the beginning. I'd imagine if it was she would not have been all up in arms like that.

Hell, she could have gotten extra credit for protesting the flag burning of the other students from the last line there.

[Pekka]

Pat, exactly, but she was an idiot. She got what she deserved. We should all spit on her face.

[Patroklos]

Pat, exactly, but she was an idiot. She got what she deserved. We should all spit on her face.

If the professor was clear up front, which it looks like he wasn't, sure she is an idiot.

If the professor was not, then he was an idiot.