Re: Is my CS instructor nuts?


Gerry Quinn wrote:
In article <1149346875.629945.122730@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>,
spinoza1111@xxxxxxxxx says...

Reminds me of:
http://www.thepoorman.net/2006/05/20/this-is-my-truth-tell-me-yours/

Recently, an instructor at Roosevelt University in Chicago was
fired...for allowing students to discuss Zionism in a World Religions
class: see www.rafo.org.

You can't fire someone you haven't hired.

- Gerry Quinn

Roosevelt HAD hired Douglas Giles. They then fired him in violation of
their collective bargaining agreement without warning and because of a
good-faith decision he made about teaching his class, a decision which
was Professor Giles to make. "Zionism" is a World Religion issue: this
is obvious, indeed as obvious as the proposition that in order to teach
applications programming, you have to have an application to program.

However, Giles was subject to the sort of Kulturkampf that a computer
science professor was subject to when the latter, in a class at Hunter
College, assigned the calculation of Avogadro's number to a bunch of
business thugs. They sued the instructor because "dis got nuttin to do
wit' bizness".

The old saw, those who can't, teach, has to change, for it is now that
teachers cannot, dare not, teach, because thugs are lying in wait to
charge them with not teaching the right stuff, in order to get the
all-important A to show to employers, or their money back.

This affair is conducted in a nearly airless environment of
anti-intellectualism and alienation.

You see, the typical modern thug's head hurts when he encounters the
Other. Evidence for this is scattered throughout this newsgroup, where
we must talk only about programming, not programmers or, god forfend,
the relationship of programming to the rest of life, because the Focus
Thugs might not like it (bring it on, you motherfuckers).

This makes the teacher's job next to impossible and it makes a computer
science degree from all but good schools, protected for class interests
from Focus Thugs, a complete joke. Which is of course the plan: give
the working class an ersatz education in the name of "practicality" and
destroy any shred of intellectual curiosity.

The evidence for the human damage was in the Kulturkampfen conducted in
this newsgroup against anything manifesting any spark of originality or
curiosity, in a sniffy and tedious way, with a dull persistence that
has long seemed to me to be evidence of paid agrentry where it was not
evidence for serious psychological disturbance. Bring it on, you
motherfuckers.

.

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