Chain overreaction started by reading from Bible and dictionary

From this morning’s Inside Higher Ed:

The Alliance Defense Fund has sued the Los Angeles Community College District on behalf of a student [a Mr. Lopez] at Los Angeles City College who charges that his public speaking professor [a Mr. Matteson] called him a “fascist bastard” for a speech during which the student read a dictionary definition of marriage and two Bible passages.

The suit, which charges censorship of “Christian speech” in violation of the First Amendment, said that the instructor also refused to grade the speech, writing on an evaluation form that the student should “Ask God what your grade is.”
…
A letter from the college to the Alliance Defense Fund, sent prior to the lawsuit being filed, said that “action is being taken” against the professor involved, but that privacy rules barred the college from disclosing what was happening. The letter ... said that the college viewed the incident as “extremely serious.”

The letter, from Academic Affairs Dean Allison Jones, fills in some details:

I received statements from two students which were signed by several members of Mr. Lopez’ class. Contrary to Mr. Lopez’ assumptions, these classmates were deeply offended by his speech. One of the students stated that “His speech was not of the informative style that our assignment called for, but rather a preachy, persuasive speech that was completely inappropriate and deeply offensive. I respect his right to freedom of speech, but I also do not believe that our classroom is the proper platform for him to spout his hateful propaganda.”

The second student said “I don’t know what kind of actions can be taken in this situation, but I expect that this student should have to pay some price for preaching hate in the classroom.”

Where do we go from here? Regardless of the other students’ reactions to Mr. Lopez’ speech, Mr. Matteson will still be disciplined. First amendment rights will not be violated as is evidenced by the fact that even though many of the students were offended by Mr. Lopez’ speech, no action will be taken against any of them for expressing their opinions….

I don't get it. Why would action be taken against these students?

It's hard to see how Matteson's calling Lopez a "fascist bastard" could be appropriate in a classroom. It would be understandable, I suppose, if Lopez had just called Matteson a "mother f*ckin' t*tty s*ckin' two ball b*tch with a ping pong p*ssy and a rubber d*ck."*

That stuff will piss a guy off. 

The "ask God" note seems plainly unprofessional, but, again, I'd like to know the context. Maybe Lopez had just picked up a phone, listened to it, and said, "It's God, you h*mo atheist rat bastard. He wants to know my friggin' grade!"

Context is important, you know.

*In grad school, one colleague's lovely and sweet Christian wife would occasionally use this phrase. Wow. I never forgot it.

Liar, liar pants on fire

AS YOU KNOW, the SOCCCD has once again spent big bucks mailing South County residents a glossy new "report to the community," featuring big smiley pictures of Raghu, et al.

The booklet opens up to a letter "from the chancellor." (See.) It's mostly the usual Mathur Blather.

But one paragraph caught my eye. It explains our "basic aid" funding:

...Because the district is located in south Orange County, the property taxes collected are beyond the state funding formula. The board has chosen not to seek additional taxes in the form of "bond" measures because residents are already paying more. ... We consider "basic aid" dollars equivalent to "bond" money. [My emphases.]

Well, yes. That's exactly right. The board doesn't pursue bonds because our citizens already pay more than they would if we were a normal district that pursued bonds, owing to our Basic Aid gravy train (high property taxes revenue).

Just sayin'. But do remember that Tom Fuentes' based his reelection campaign on the claim that he

• Led District to one of the Highest Transfer Rates of students to four year colleges
• Produced a Balanced Budget with No Debt or New Bonds

Led? Naturally, the board had no role whatsoever in achieving our high transfer rates.

Elsewhere, Fuentes even more clearly implied that our not pursuing bonds showed that he and the other trustees are the taxpayers' friend.

Well, no. Like I keep sayin': we don't need to pursue bonds cuz we are already getting and spending sh*tloads of the people's money.

Taxpayers' friend my ***.

IVC twice as good as Saddleback

Here’s a curious report that appeared in today’s OC Register:

Saddleback College reports surge in enrollment

Saddleback College officials are reporting a seven percent enrollment increase from last year – attributing the surge to state college cuts and the faltering economy….

7%, eh? Good for them.

What’s curious is that, though the article mentions that the SOCCCD includes IVC, it doesn't mention that, at Irvine Valley College, enrollments have increased much more.

Shitloads more.

If you go to the district Almanac, you’ll find that, at least as of mid-January, headcount is up 7.3% at Saddleback.

But it's up 14.4% at IVC.

Headcount shmedcount

—More importantly, FTES (full-time equivalent student) is up 8.0% at Saddleback.

But it's up 16.4% at IVC. 

OK, I'll say it. IVC is twice as good as Saddleback College. Nyah!

They don't even know how to spell 

"Library" at Saddleback College

Hey, there's no dang School of 

Micromanagement at Irvine Valley College.

We have standards!

IVC students are generally acknowledged to be

twice as attractive as Saddleback College students

Saddleback College has long been plagued with large vermin.

Meanwhile, vermin-free IVC has remained on the cutting edge of innovation and all manner of whiz-bangery

Saddleback College professors publish such tripe as Econo-Prof Howard Gensler's notoriously juvenile Avenger of Blood

IVC faculty, however, have organized the internationally acclaimed festival of helium known as "Blue and White Balloon Day."

Torture boy at Chapman

In this morning’s LA Times:

Bush policymaker escapes Berkeley's wrath

In Berkeley, city leaders branded him a war criminal and human rights activists put up a billboard to denounce him. But in suburban Orange County, Professor John Yoo—the primary architect of the Bush administration's policy on harsh interrogation techniques that many consider torture—has found relatively calmer waters.

Yoo is a visiting professor at Chapman University School of Law in Orange, on leave from his tenured post at UC Berkeley to teach foreign relations law.

Although a handful of protesters, one in a Statue of Liberty get-up and another in an orange Abu Ghraib jumpsuit and hood, demonstrated against Yoo on campus recently, law students said they appreciate the prestige and exposure he could bring the law school.

But a small group of local activists said they hope to stir up anger at the 14-year-old law school in the thick of conservative Orange County.

"Our aim is to get the man fired -- he has no business being in our community," said Pat Alviso, 56, of Huntington Beach, who heads the Orange County chapter of Military Families Speak Out. Her son is a Marine serving in Afghanistan who completed two tours in Iraq.

Chapman law school alumnus Michael Penn agrees: "I think it's a black eye to the school. . . . To me, he's a war criminal."

Yoo, a former Justice Department attorney, achieved notoriety by crafting memos -- later withdrawn by the department -- that narrowly defined torture and argued that Bush's authorization of controversial interrogation tactics against Al Qaeda did not violate the Geneva Conventions. The memos justified harsh treatment of prisoners at Guantanamo Bay and elsewhere, including the controversial waterboarding technique.
…
"I think it's interesting to have him there," said Billy Essayli, a second-year law student who heads the campus California Republican Lawyers Assn. Still, Essayli conceded that he was surprised there wasn't a greater public outcry at Yoo's arrival in January.
…
For his part, Yoo has stayed true to form since arriving at Chapman: Last month, he wrote an opinion piece in the Wall Street Journal criticizing President Obama, saying he had opened the door to future terrorist acts in the U.S....

And now, a word about distance ed, that wave of the future...

The Chronicle of Higher Education reports that the results of two surveys conducted by the National Association of State Universities and Land-Grant Colleges reveal widespread skepticism about the effectiveness of online education.


excerpt:

...online education doesn't translate into better learning outcomes, said respondents in the faculty survey. More than 10,000 faculty members at 67 public campuses responded to the survey.

While 30 percent of faculty members surveyed felt that online courses provided superior or equivalent learning outcomes when compared with face-to-face classes, 70 percent felt that learning outcomes were inferior...

... a majority of faculty members felt that institutions provided inadequate compensation for those taking on the additional responsibility of teaching online courses. And many respondents said that students needed more discipline before they could benefit from online instruction. Low retention rates among students and the lack of consideration of online teaching experience in tenure-and-promotion decisions were also cited as barriers to faculty interest in online teaching...

For the rest, click here.

OC sets the pace for the nation

I noticed that the OC Register has made available a brief video segment from CNBC's House of Cards. It concerns Orange County, the "birthplace of the sub-prime mortgage."

In the video, with the help of a Register reporter, we're introduced to one Daniel Sadek, a guy with a 3rd-grade education, who owned Quick Loan Funding, a seriously sleazy operation that specialized in giving loans to people who shouldn't get loans.

Click here to see the video. (You'll have to endure 15 seconds of a commercial first.)

Here's a recent (January) OC Register article about Sadek: How Citi bailed out an O.C. subprime lender:

..."There's a big irony, when thousands of people are struggling to get affordable loan modification offers from servicers that aren't responsive, that someone who has perpetrated harm would get a loan modification," said Paul Leonard, of the Center for Responsible Lending. "It's incredible."
…
Quick Loan Funding, which Sadek founded in 2002, wrote about $4 billion in subprime mortgages before it collapsed in 2007. Sadek made, and eventually lost, a fortune through Quick Loan. He bought a Newport Coast mansion, a fleet of exotic cars and a condo in Las Vegas where he became a high roller at the blackjack tables.
…
In May 2007, The Orange County Register reported that Sadek took out a $1 million marker from the account of his escrow company, Platinum Escrow, to gamble in Las Vegas.
…
"The Feds just worried that [Citi is] so big, so interconnected with the rest of the financial industry, that they can't let it fail," said Kurt Eggert, a Chapman University law professor and former advisor to the Federal Reserve Bank.

"It's poetic justice that Citi was in bed with this guy [Sadek] and they're stuck with him," Eggert said. "But why is it so hard for regular Joes to get loan mods when this guy, who seems like a terrible loan risk, can do it?" ....

Sadek made a film starring his girlfriend. It was called Redline. I think he spent his—or somebody else's—last dime on it. It stunk and tanked, losing tens of millions. 

Even Dick Army says so!

This morning, Rebel Girl asked me if I’d read Stanley Fish’s latest piece in the New York Times.

Nope, I said. I’d somehow missed it.

“It’s about academic freedom,” she said.

Neither of us is a big fan of Fish and his views about academic freedom. For instance, he has flatly argued against instructor “advocacy” in the classroom. Against this, I have argued that there is room for careful instructor advocacy.

This morning, Rebel Girl seemed particularly peeved. Said she: “Fish discusses some professor somewhere who gives A+'s to all of his students.”

I looked at her. She mentioned some of this professor’s other exotic practices and notions. She looked at me.

“What do you call it when someone finds the worst example of a thing in order to represent it and then attack it?,” she asked.

“The straw man fallacy?”

“Yeah, that's it. The straw man fallacy.”*


So today I read Fish’s piece, which is entitled, “The Two Languages of Academic Freedom.” Check it out.

I’m not entirely sure what Fish thinks he’s arguing for—no doubt he favors one of the “languages”—but I hope nobody is getting the idea that Fish's Nutty Professor is a common sort in academia. He's not.

Professor Denis Rancourt of the U of Ottawa has been “dismissed with cause.” Earlier, he had been suspended from teaching and “banned from campus.” He then defied the ban.

Reportedly, Rancourt is an anarchist who views society’s institutions as mechanisms of oppression. Accordingly, schools and universities exist to crank out “obedient workers.” Grading, according to this line (says Fish), is “a tool of coercion in order to make obedient people.”

Hence the A+’s.

Rancourt, says Fish, is an exponent of “‘squatting’ – ‘where one openly takes an existing course and does with it something different.’” Rancourt is supposed to teach physics. Instead, his course encourages “activism.”

Fish (speculatively, I think) attributes to Rancourt the following attitude toward his employers:

I refuse to do what I have contracted to do, but I will do everything in my power to subvert the enterprise you administer. Besides, you’re just dictators, and it is my obligation to undermine you.... And, by the way, I am entitled to do so by the doctrine of academic freedom, which I define as “the ideal under which professors and students are autonomous and design their own development and interactions.”

I suppose Fish is right to view Rancourt as embracing a very broad and extreme sense of academic freedom, one in which it is part of "a global project whose goal is nothing less than the freeing of revolutionary energies, not only in the schools but everywhere.” Fish seems to advocate a “narrower concept” according to which academic freedom is a “doctrine whose scope is defined by the purposes and protocols of the institution and its limited purposes.”

Well, OK. But I’ve never met an academic like Rancourt. Yes, I've met a handful who share some of Rancourt's theories--but I've met none who puts them into practice with A+'s, "squatting," and so on.

I and some of my colleagues here at Irvine Valley College have been ardent advocates of academic freedom, especially in the past dozen or so years. But none of us defines the concept as Rancourt seems to.

Do we believe that much is amiss with society and that, in some sense, society ought to change? Sure. But we also think that we should teach our subjects in the classroom and do that well.

That's what Rebel Girl thinks. That's what I think.

My subject is philosophy. As it happens, this afternoon, I was teaching Plato’s Republic, a work in which the Sophist Thracymachus famously argues that “justice is nothing but the advantage of the stronger.”

Thracymachus’ view, as portrayed by Plato, is not unlike Rancourt’s. On some interpretations, Thracymachus is a skeptic who views morality as a sham. We are earnestly taught that morality is meaningful, that virtue is its own reward. In reality, says Thracymachus (maybe), morality is a set of constraints and demands that serve to keep the elite comfortable and powerful. That's all.

Thracymachus seems actually to admire those who are grandly and profitably immoral.

In class, I focused on that idea--about the "elite" and power. I discussed Machiavelli, Marx, and Nietzsche. I explained Chomsky's views regarding the “manufacture” of consent. I asked: Is there any truth to this? Are most of us stupid sheep who are manipulated into cooperating with and furthering strategies and goals that are beyond our comprehension? Are Americans encouraged to concern themselves with the inane—silly entertainments, stupid politics—while the really real stuff is going on in the shadows?


Hmmm. This reminds me of former Congressman Dick Army (R-Texas) and something he said about politics on Hardball a few days ago. Check it out; you'll just love it:



Yeah, I know. Army's a sexist a**hole from hell. But forget that. What about his message?

“Politics is silly. It’s inane…Take what amusement you can from [practitioners of politics], but don’t take them seriously.”

*SEE ALSO:

• The "unrepresentative sample" fallacy
• The "false dilemma" fallacy
• The "black-or-white" fallacy

Chomsky on Charlie Rose:

I recommend starting at about thirty minutes into the interview.