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Banning Critical Race Theory

PhDeac said:
Junebug really has a problem with the truth. Jones didn’t come up with that out of thin air. She used contemporary source materials. None of that is new information to anybody who actually cares about real history.

Honest question, Junebug. Do you equate being against slavery with for Black equality?
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lol

The question reveals a pretty striking unfamiliarity with the criticisms of the 1619 Project. Maybe start with the Atlantic article I posted earlier.
 
Gotta love how Junebug thinks academic work is about the "clicks." Dumbasses like him think it works the same on both sides. Just because The Federalist just makes up shit it thinks people will like doesn't mean academia works the same way.
 
If the 1619 project is "the truth" and based on "real history", why was it criticized by historians who demanded corrections?

Are these historians all white supremacists as well?
 
I'm pretty sure that's not what the article from The Atlantic says.

But, NYT posts multiple stories on Iraq using contemporary source materials, leading people to faulty conclusions and resulting in a unnecessary war -- BAD NYT and its reporters !

NYT posts magazine article that history scholars readily poke holes in using contemporary source materials -- NYT and its reporters are beyond reproach !
 
WakeBored said:
It is objectively false, for example, that a primary reason for the American revolution was to protect the institution of slavery. That's not a "belief." That's a misstatement of fact. She was wrong, and she doubled down on it. It shouldn't matter how many clicks she got. That's just shoddy work unbecoming of an institution of higher learning.
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Not only was Jones wrong and continued to double down on it, but she was cheered along by many sycophants in the media (and on this board) who ran interference because it fed the preferred narrative.

The party of truth, my ass
 
WakeBored said:
It is objectively false, for example, that a primary reason for the American revolution was to protect the institution of slavery. That's not a "belief." That's a misstatement of fact. She was wrong, and she doubled down on it. It shouldn't matter how many clicks she got. That's just shoddy work unbecoming of an institution of higher learning.
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How does "Tenure is based on your academic publishing record and grant funding success" become "how many clicks she got?"
 
Colonel Angus said:
Not only was Jones wrong and continued to double down on it, but she was cheered along by many sycophants in the media (and on this board) who ran interference because it fed the preferred narrative.

The party of truth, my ass
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I don't know who this lady is, but tenure committees are not supposed to give one single fuck about media sycophants and posters in the Tunnels.
 
birdman said:
How does "Tenure is based on your academic publishing record and grant funding success" become "how many clicks she got?"
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birdman said:
I don't know who this lady is, but tenure committees are not supposed to give one single fuck about media sycophants and posters in the Tunnels.
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But they sometimes do.

Two birds; one stone (as it were).
 
I don't know how this stuff works. Is it customary for someone who doesn't have a PhD to get tenure?
 
WokeandBroke said:
I don't know how this stuff works. Is it customary for someone who doesn't have a PhD to get tenure?
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Depends on the department and field. The terminal degree in the field is the primary determinant. For example, there is no Ph.D. in Art, you get an MFA, a Master's in Fine Art, which qualifies you for faculty positions and tenure track jobs. Another example, There are tenured librarians at most universities with MLS degrees.
 
WakeBored said:
But they sometimes do.

Two birds; one stone (as it were).
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Then it's probably a violation of the tenure policy, but tenure decisions and deliberations are sealed, so it's hard to say what goes into a decision.

I knew a guy in fisheries back in Alabama that, in his first 5 years, graduated 7 students, published 20 papers and brought in >$3mil in grant funding, including a full indirect NSF project for $500K. That is fucking astronomical productivity in Fisheries management science and his department denied him tenure. Rumored to be because he was too liberal, had long hair and wore flip-flops to teach. The guy appealed the decision, and hired a lawyer. The Provost reversed the decisions but then the guy left anyway for a better school in a better location.
 
birdman said:
Depends on the department and field. The terminal degree in the field is the primary determinant. For example, there is no Ph.D. in Art, you get an MFA, a Master's in Fine Art, which qualifies you for faculty positions and tenure track jobs. Another example, There are tenured librarians at most universities with MLS degrees.
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That makes sense, thanks.
 
birdman said:
Then it's probably a violation of the tenure policy, but tenure decisions and deliberations are sealed, so it's hard to say what goes into a decision.

I knew a guy in fisheries back in Alabama that, in his first 5 years, graduated 7 students, published 20 papers and brought in >$3mil in grant funding, including a full indirect NSF project for $500K. That is fucking astronomical productivity in Fisheries management science and his department denied him tenure. Rumored to be because he was too liberal, had long hair and wore flip-flops to teach. The guy appealed the decision, and hired a lawyer. The Provost reversed the decisions but then the guy left anyway for a better school in a better location.
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Although I haven't done one in a while, part of my law practice used to involve representing universities in challenges to tenure denials. In my experience, the statement "He hired a lawyer" is invariably followed by "The Provost [or President] reversed the decision."
 
WakeBored said:
Although I haven't done one in a while, part of my law practice used to involve representing universities in challenges to tenure denials. In my experience, the statement "He hired a lawyer" is invariably followed by "The Provost [or President] reversed the decision."
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#defeated?
 
We Disagree on a Lot of Things. Except the Danger of Anti-Critical Race Theory Laws.

What is the purpose of a liberal education? This is the question at the heart of a bitter debate that has been roiling the nation for months.

Schools, particularly at the kindergarten-to-12th-grade level, are responsible for helping turn students into well-informed and discerning citizens. At their best, our nation’s schools equip young minds to grapple with complexity and navigate our differences. At their worst, they resemble indoctrination factories.

In recent weeks, Tennessee, Oklahoma, Iowa, Idaho and Texas have passed legislation that places significant restrictions on what can be taught in public school classrooms and, in some cases, public universities, too.

Tennessee House Bill SB 0623, for example, bans any teaching that could lead an individual to “feel discomfort, guilt, anguish or another form of psychological distress solely because of the individual’s race or sex.” In addition to this vague proscription, it restricts teaching that leads to “division between, or resentment of, a race, sex, religion, creed, nonviolent political affiliation, social class or class of people.”

Texas House Bill 3979 goes further, forbidding teaching that “slavery and racism are anything other than deviations from, betrayals of, or failures to live up to, the authentic founding principles of the United States.” It also bars any classroom from requiring “an understanding of the 1619 Project” — The New York Times Magazine’s special issue devoted to a reframing of the nation’s founding — and hence prohibits assigning any part of it as required reading.

These initiatives have been marketed as “anti-critical race theory” laws. We, the authors of this essay, have wide ideological divergences on the explicit targets of this legislation. Some of us are deeply influenced by the academic discipline of critical race theory and its critique of racist structures and admire the 1619 Project. Some of us are skeptical of structural racist explanations and racial identity itself and disagree with the mission and methodology of the 1619 Project. We span the ideological spectrum: a progressive, a moderate, a libertarian and a conservative.

It is because of these differences that we here join, as we are united in one overarching concern: the danger posed by these laws to liberal education.

The laws differ in some respects but generally agree on blocking any teaching that would lead students to feel discomfort, guilt or anguish because of one’s race or ancestry, as well as restricting teaching that subsequent generations have any kind of historical responsibility for actions of previous generations. They attempt various carve outs for the impartial teaching of the history of oppression of groups. But it’s hard to see how these attempts are at all consistent with demands to avoid discomfort. These measures would, by way of comparison, make Germany’s uncompromising and successful approach to teaching about the Holocaust illegal, as part of its goal is to infuse them with some sense of the weight of the past and (famously) lead many German students to feel anguish about their ancestry.

Indeed, the very act of learning history in a free and multiethnic society is inescapably fraught. Any accurate teaching of any country’s history could make some of its citizens feel uncomfortable (or even guilty) about the past. To deny this necessary consequence of education is, to quote W.E.B. Du Bois, to transform “history into propaganda.”

What’s more, these laws even make it difficult to teach U.S. history in a way that would reveal well-documented ways in which past policy decisions, like redlining, have contributed to present-day racial wealth gaps. An education of this sort would be negligent, creating ignorant citizens who are unable to understand, for instance, the case for reparations — or the case against them.

Because these laws often aim to protect the feelings of hypothetical children, they are dangerously imprecise. State governments exercise a high degree of lawful control over K-12 curriculum. But broad, vague laws violate due process and fundamental fairness because they don’t give the teachers fair warning of what’s prohibited. For example, the Tennessee statute prohibits a public school from including in a course of instruction any “concept” that promotes “division between, or resentment of” a “creed.” Would teachers be violating the law if they express the opinion that the creeds of Stalinism or Nazism were evil?

Other laws appear to potentially ban even expression as benign as support for affirmative action, but it’s far from clear. In fact, shortly after Texas passed its purported ban on critical race theory, the Texas Public Policy Foundation, a conservative think tank, published a list of words and concepts that help “identify critical race theory in the classroom.” The list included terms such as “social justice,” “colonialism” and “identity.” Applying the same standards to colleges or private institutions would be flatly unconstitutional.

These laws threaten the basic purpose of a historical education in a liberal democracy. But censorship is the wrong approach even to the concepts that are the intended targets of these laws.

Though some of us share the antipathy of the legislation’s authors toward some of these targets and object to overreaches that leave many parents understandably anxious about the stewardship of their children’s education, we all reject the means by which these measures encode that antipathy into legislation.

A wiser response to problematic elements of what is being labeled critical race theory would be twofold: propose better curriculums and enforce existing civil rights laws. Title VI and Title VII of the Civil Rights Act prohibit discrimination on the basis of race, and they are rooted in a considerable body of case law that provides administrators with far more concrete guidance on how to proceed. In fact, there is already an Education Department Office of Civil Rights complaint and a federal lawsuit aimed at programs that allegedly attempt to place students or teachers into racial affinity groups.

The task of defending the fundamentally liberal democratic nature of the American project ultimately requires the confidence to meet challenges to that vision. Censoring such challenges is a concession to their power, not a defense.

Let’s not mince words about these laws. They are speech codes. They seek to change public education by banning the expression of ideas. Even if this censorship is legal in the narrow context of public primary and secondary education, it is antithetical to educating students in the culture of American free expression.

There will always be disagreement about any nation’s history. The United States is no exception. If history is to judge the United States as exceptional, it is because we welcome such contestation in our public spaces as part of our unfolding national ethos. It is a violation of this commonly shared vision of America as a nation of free, vigorous and open debate to resort to the apparatus of the government to shut it down.
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PhDeac said:
Yeah. I’m not against being friends with Tarholes. They haven’t been at UNC very long though.

But seriously, this is on the heels (no pun intended) of the Silent Sam debacle. The student body president letter was scathing. UNC needs to right the ship.
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I mean all the UNCs are a mess right now, from what I understand. The Regents need to quit meddling and playing politics with higher education funding because for as bad as it is at UNC, it's so much worse at the other campuses.
 
A survey of over 1,100 educators (including 900 or so public school teachers) of the Association of American Educators reveals that CRT is not being taught in the vast majority of schools in any systematic or official capacity.

"The association surveyed its professional membership between June 24 and June 29 and received 1,134 completed responses, nearly 900 of them from traditional public schools. More than 96 percent said their schools did not require them to teach critical race theory, and only 45 percent said that teachers should have the option to add it to their lesson plans...Most teachers who responded to the survey said they had not changed their curriculum in response to the past year’s reflection on race. More than half said that they are apprehensive about saying anything about race and getting into trouble.

Colin Sharkey, the association’s executive director, said the bills in statehouses and the heated rhetoric seen at school board meetings across the country could have a chilling effect on normal day-to-day activities and further burden teachers who have faced a difficult year during the pandemic...“Teaching is a hard job on a good day,” he said. “There’s a lot that can go wrong, but there are teachers who want to help have a productive conversation about race in America with their students, and now they’re worried about whether they might say the wrong thing.”

“I have teachers who are already leery of teaching race issues,” said a Detroit-area teacher who spoke on the condition of anonymity after being warned not to speak to the press. “Creating laws about this is only going to make them quieter and make teachers even less relevant to high schoolers who are working through ideas.” Nearly 78 percent of teachers said they felt as though the current rhetoric around the issue was “interfering with a productive and necessary discussion regarding race in America.”

Link: https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/teaching-critical-race-theory-isn-t-happening-classrooms-teachers-say-n1272945
 
WakeBored said:
For the university, maybe, but I don't view counseling a university to reverse the denial of tenure as a personal defeat, no.
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So universities paid you to counsel them on how not deny people for tenure?
 
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