Re: Is my CS instructor nuts?


Gerry Quinn wrote:
In article <1150512401.001665.25450@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>,
spinoza1111@xxxxxxxxx says...
Gerry Quinn wrote:

Your post, as far as I can see, is a wordy rewrite of what is claimed
on that website by an interested party, but with assertions of fact
replacing things that were only implied. Have you independently
checked any assumptios you have made regarding the specific terms and
legal status of agreements etc?

Yes. Furthermore, it is untenable to always assume that labor unions
lie when the Enron case establishes that management lies bigger.

I doubt whether you checked anything of significance. Nor did I assume
that labour unions always lie - I assumed that labour unions attempting
to enlist the aid of other parties spin their words in a case suited to
their endes. Enron was not, as far as I know, involved in this case.

The biggest spinners and liars are corporations and their managers.


The adjuncts for their part rely upon contract renewal to plan their
lives.

As restauranteurs rely on customers who like their food. But they
can't force them to choose their establishment.

Gee, news fa lash. The employee is not a customer.

There's certainly a case for permitting a certain amount of cartel
behaviour in the form of trade unions, in preference to a pure free
market, given that those on one side may have less freedom of
independent action on balance. Nevertheless, the point still applies -
the reliance of the restauranteur on those using his services is as
great and indeed greater than that of the employees of an institution.

Your point being? The problem is that the employee has far less power
than either the corporation or the university, but American employment
law doesn't recognize this as fact. The result is that executive pay,
for people like Ken Lay who claim ignorance of basic accounting, is an
absurd multiple of the pay of CPAs and other "ordinary" workers and
every year since the election of Reagan, 80% of the American population
has been increasingly immiserated...with the result that the current
generation is POORER than the previous ("Baby Boom") generation.

For this reason, the adjuncts thought they had a deal in which an
adjunct would not receive a letter saying "we will not rehire" UNLESS
Roosevelt followed procedures including mentoring and written warnings.
Instead of this, the chair phoned Giles and verbally ordered him not to
teach Zionism as a term: he refused the order: the letter was sent.

The site ( www.rafo.com )describes the sequence differently.

You are lying. End of discussion on this subthread, because you are
using the strategy of an unsupported lie to waste my fucking time.

Your blustering doesn't alter the fact that you are lying. The
sequence, as described by the site, was:

"During the review, the supervisor had two telephone conversations with
the adjunct about the case. [...] The supervisor copied the adjunct on
an e-mail memo to the student, saying that the adjunct had been told
not to introduce political content in a world religions class.

After the adjunct had requested a class for Spring 2006, he soon
received a letter of non-rehire."

With the omission of Giles' refusal, which he made in the phone
conversations, this is the SAME sequence of events. Any attorney
recognizes the idea of "constructive" termination where the facts of
the case indicate a clear intent to end the real relationship over more
than one class without going through the collectively bargained
procedures.

If a man gets a job in a distant city, and his wife doesn't work, and,
she refuses to go with him to that city, this is "constructive"
desertion on her part. But you are unable to see the "constructive"
because you can't parse situations, and you prefer to hurl crazy
accusations of lying to make your case like a jerk.

There is no indication that Giles refused the order, though he may have
done for all I know. However it is clear that the letter was sent, not
after any such refusal, but when he applied to be hired again for
another semester.

He has stated so and I believe him. Why do you suppose the chair had
her meltdown? Because he was defending the language of "Zionism" which
scared her and caused the racist meltdown.

If Giles did not refuse the order then he was sent a gratuitous letter
saying in essence, *** you ***, signed Roosevelt University, even
though he was cooperating...which only makes the constructive
termination worse. So in your eagerness to call your fellow man and
fellow worker a liar, you've made a complete fool of yourself.

In that session Giles was informed that Palestinians, who use the word
"Zionism" to describe Israel's policies, are "animals" in a way that
clearly communicated that in place of collegiality, Roosevelt's goal is
to offer pseudo-classes conducted like corporate training sessions by
instructors who will mechanically obey unwritten and written rules,
including a rule not to criticise Israel in any way.

Here you are quite explicitly putting your own spin on what is already
a one-sided account.

Yes, I am. Note that the biggest liars in the media, like Bill
O'Reilly, are the people who claim no spin. Note that Aristotle allows
"spin". It's called rhetoric.

So you claim here is that you are lying, but you are not the biggest
liar in the world, who is apparently someone called O'Reilly. That
doesn't alter the fact that you are lying.

You are flying on broken instruments, because this reply shows a
complete ignorance of reality and you've decided the case is made by
"proving" Nilges to be a liar, liar, pants on fire. Tactics typical, in
other words, of Bush and of people who use the "negative capability" of
trailer trash ignorance of the world.

If you can't parse situations, if you cannot READ situations, if you
cannot see the pain in the email, if you cannot EMPATHIZE with a
hard-working slob of an adjunct paid a pittance to teach 30+ bored and
alienated undergraduates at a pop, this Ignorance becomes your brutal
Strength, until reality breaks in.

What's this got to do with anything? And the question is not about
whether you would approve or disapprove, but whether if you disapproved
you had the right not to re-hire him when he came looking for another
job.

You have been so brutalized by computer "consulting" that you expect
other professions to make themselves over into a collection of
terrified dweebs. You might reflect that college professors have more
dignity.

There's not much dignity in demanding to be hired by an employer who
doesn't require your services.

The facts are that Roosevelt did require his services. The facts are
that universities aren't nasty little business offices run by crazed
martinets which appears to be all you expect, perhaps because you work
in a nasty little business office run by a crazed martinet and you
can't stand the idea that there are, or should be, or could be,
anything better.

What Roosevelt "requires" isn't determined by the department chair
(who as an art historian is as it happens is unqualified to run a
Philosophy department, indicating that Roosevelt is being seriously
mismanaged and can't unilaterally "require" jack ***). It's actually
determined by the North Central accreditation board, which requires it
to offer students a choice between Philosophy or World Religion to
satisfy their (perhaps strange to you) notion that a future computer
programmer or CPA be something MORE than a crazed Fundamentalist wack
job.

Giles had the credentials in the form of a post-BA degree and most of
his students, it appears to me from postings on the Giles case
newsgroup, learned World Religions effectively in his class including
the need to criticize World Religions for their failings including
Zionism.

Furthermore, there is NO indication that he didn't show up for classes,
lecture focused on World Religions including Zionist Judaism, grade
moronic papers, or try to answer questions, such as "what the *** is
Zionism?" And do note that when a terminated employee's meeting of
checkable and verifiable requirements is inventoried and enumerated,
this, in the absurdly imbalanced modern discussion of actual
terminations, is consistently rejected, the operating assumption being
that the terminated employee's concrete WORK was, like the
protestations of faith by *converso* Jews in Phillip II's Spain,
somehow, despite its tedious difficulty, nothing more than smoke up the
ass and a cover-up.

While simultaneously, we're supposed to give full faith and credit to
each lameass gesture the EMPLOYER makes towards due process. In their
letters on the subject, Roosevelt administrators tediously enumerate
the (damned few) ways in which they followed the letter of the
agreement as if each and every step that was taken was worth its weight
in gold.

It may be that Giles was noncommittal at first when the chair told him
not to discuss Zionism. It may be (the record isn't clear) that he was
nonplussed by the demand, since an educated common sense tells us that,
hey, Zionism was the cause of leading Jews commencing with Theodore
Herzl in the 1880s and of course it had to do with religion.

His confusion may have led him not to immediately suck up to the chair
as he would be expected to in a nasty little business office run by a
crazed martinet and to ask if the religious Moslem folk who use Zionism
to name a tendency might need to learn that Zionism used to be a
secular and socialist POV. Whereupon the supervisor had one of those
anger management moments which are an INCREASING phenomenon in
Amerikkka.

The thing about such moments is that they constitute a symbolic rape of
the employee and because of the shame they create, not only in the
employee but also in the supervisor, they often lead to a termination
of the employee because the system, considered as a meta-psychology,
can Do No Wrong.

Employment becomes less about "productivity" (what did Enron "produce"
other than power outages, in the last analysis?) and instead an *auto
da fe* in which the employee prostitutes himself in order to maintain a
foothold in the middle class.

There may not be any such dignity at all, in demanding that an employer
keep you on, if like Willy Loman you long ago gave the employer to
define you as a man, by systematically disrespecting the homeless and
the terminated and refusing the gesture of solidarity. Sure, if you are
some sort of Stinky Pete, there's no such thing and there is only
whining miserably in a void, or sobbing in a toilet like Willy Loman.

But a Teacher with something to Teach has a dignity if he chooses,
instead of going gently into that good night, or some new pitiful
Adjunct position while explaining to his new employers that he had a
problem with Obedience, to say *** this ***, and to form a newsgroup
which starts with the facts...that he was fired for teaching Zionism in
a class in World Religions.

Fired
For Teaching
A class in World Religions
The meaning, the usage
Of the word "Zionism".


Giles had the moral high ground. He wanted the relatively logically
weak ability to open one door in discussion, the door labeled
"Zionism". Whereas the chair wanted to lock that door.

Then he should get his own door.

The myth of entrepreneurship. Hey, as I asked earlier, just how well is
that working out for you, Ger?

My business is none of your business.

Thought so. It never is. And if you could point to some mega redneck
success, you'd do so. I'd suggest that you consider buying that rented
trailer. It's a tax break, Bubba.


If a university education has any meaning beyond pre-wealth business
studies, then Giles should be hired and the chair fired. This sounds
like and is not "rhetoric" because once you deny it, there's no reason
to go to university at all; all you need to do his train
spear-chuckers, water carriers and dancing girls for service to an
elite.

Garbage. No conclusion of such a nature can be drawn from a trivial
spat over the issue of whether a particular politically-charged subject
should form part of a particular course. Would you feel the same if
Giles had attempted to introduce an exploration of racial and gender
differences in physical and intellectual capacities into a course on
human biology?

At the school where I teach the approved textbook does exactly this. It
explores the scientific basis for a belief in innate differences and
shows it to be nonexistent.

Then it is written by liars to teach fools, since the existence of such
differences is entirely obvious, and well-supported in the scientific
literature. The only remotely controversial one of the four is whether
there exist racial differences in intellectual capacity, and the main
arguments against that seem to be that it's hard to prove, and anyway
people who are interested in it are awful. What is the name of this
laughable textbook?

Gee alert the media...Bubba here has discovered that despite the
consensus of modern biologists that human beings constitute one
species, homo sapiens sapiens, there are "innate" differences which are
"well supported"...which if innate would constitute the need to rewrite
even those biology texts which don't address the issue, but merely
contain a single species entry for all humans alive today.

The United Nations Declaration of Human Rights will have to be
rewritten, for based on the biological knowledge of 1945, it declares
that "human beings constitute a single species", a proposition that
would be FALSE if there are "innate" differences.

Miscegenation laws will also have to be revived, for if there are
innate differences there is a risk in fucking pure gene pools up with
the combination of like and unlike.

I'm not even prepared to admit, yet, that fat, stupid, and vile
American white trash constitute, yet, an innately different species,
but get back with me in 2030 when their feral children have grown into
wolfish adulthood, willya?


I suppose you'd prefer no exploration, and produce students
overeducated in sciences who in the humanities and in politics are
Fascist barbarians, as some scientists have been.

Scientists have a variety of politics - a synthesis of Fascism and
barbarism would be unusual, but each to his own. I would guess that
scientists on masse tend towards the centre-left. I merely pointed out
that it may be a good idea to avoid certain excessively contentious
subjects when teaching a course.

Such as Zionism in a World Religion class?

Actually, speaking as a teacher with university experience, I can say
that you are exactly wrong.

You're of course wrong in the humanities. A college campus needs to be
the one safe place where "contentious" issues need to be discussed.
Otherwise they are settled, aren't they, by child militias and the Army
of the Lord. You'd like that, Bubba?

Clerics in *madrassahs* allowed discussion of Zionism...and NO
discussion of liberation theology. The result was Sep 11. You had a
good day then, Bubba?

You are even wrong in the hardest of sciences. First of all, as Thomas
Kuhn has shown in The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, the
replacement of grand theories is ALWAYS highly contentious, and
undergraduates need to know this.

Secondly, even in the hardest of sciences, silence==death. Absent a
discussion of the politics of evolution in biology, teachers are
defenseless against Creationism. Absent a discussion of the compromised
figure of J. Robert Oppenheimer in physics, the physics majors will be
recruited by the current Administration to build another generation of
bunker-busting nuclear weapons. Absent a discussion of how statistics
are misused in mathematics, the math majors are recruits for
corporations which use their models to lie.


I presume Giles willingly acceded to whatever regime he was emplyed
under, which in the case of this particular contract appears to be
that. There is a lot to be said for the notion of applying such
contracts more widely in academia.

Is there? They've been widespread in the sense that one of the reasons
for using adjuncts is that many adjuncts are terrified dweebs who
accept at-will termination, and the result is student alienation,
passivity and drug use over the past 20 years.

I doubt whether the impact on the students of the adjunct's job
concerns is so severe.

So, young people don't take their cues from the messages, overt and
subliminal, of the adults. Again: alert the media.


Do you expect the university willingly to acceed to some regime where
when you hire someone to teach one course, you're stuck with him as
long as he wants to remain?

No. The collective bargaining agreement, however, recognizes that the
REAL employment relationship is one-many in the sense that there is a
common interest in one adjunct becoming more experienced in delivering
a survey class.

This MEANS that the university may NOT apply at-will without going
through the collectively bargained procedure. Roosevelt did not do so.

Yet they seem to be standing theire ground, suggesting that they feel
they are in the right. Perhaps it is time both sides thrashed out a
new agreement that will be acceptable to all, and covering the
seemingly unaddressed issue of what adjuncts may insert into particular
courses.

It was addressed in the collective bargaining issue. Adjuncts at all
accredited universities have the right to develop course content that
is relevant, and I think even you will admit that Zionism is relevant
to World Religion. If you seriously want to sit back and suspend your
judgement on that issue then you probably don't know Zionism or World
Religion, which means your competence in this matter is null.

This collectively bargained right could not be, but was, taken away by
the chair.


Grow up. You've been brutalized by the theory of at-will employment in
which termination from computer positions is so capricious that it has,
in my direct experience over thirty years, infantilized computer
professionals to the extent that few can actually write code, and many
spend their entire working lives AVOIDING situations in which their
growing incompetence might be exposed.

The very idea that in another profession, a man might actually seek
solidarity with other men and women scares the *** out of you.

On the contrary, I have little interest in Professor Giles; I posted to
correct a deliberate lie on your part, viz. "Recently, an instructor at
Roosevelt University in Chicago was fired...for allowing students to
discuss Zionism in a World Religions class."

That is what happened. People are fired in many ways, and at the upper
level the termination is often masked as a voluntary separation. For
example, former Treasury Secretary John Snow was asked to leave not by
President Bush, his boss on the Cabinet, but, as a deliberate insult,
by *** Cheney, who as Vice President had no line authority.

Had Snow not been the decent person that he was, he could have had an
unfair termination case right there, but he was heartily sick of both
clowns by that point, who had completely ignored his call for Treasury
action on global warming using the world financial system. The result
today is absurd and bizarre weather, so Snow was right, and his firing
would be a firing had Snow elected to call it thus and so. Snow
accepted Cheney as speaking for Bush because as an insider Snow knows
that Cheney has taken over the functions of government in the same
extralegal way as Hitler grabbed power from Paul Hindenburg.

Under the reality of constructive termination, the employee has at
least as much right to renarrate what happened as a firing. Were this
not so, then to terminate the company would merely have to make the
employee's life miserable. The fact that this happens in the computer
business is merely a testimony to the emasculation of the American
programmer by computer thugs over the past 25 years.

Had you posted that he was involved in an industrial dispute concerning
his rehiring, probably as an indirect consequence of introducing
questions on Zionism into an examination on World Religions, I doubt
whether I would have responded at all.

....saving us a lot of time with your lies. However, since I have taught
at Roosevelt, and since I was hired to teach Logic by a department
chair who left in disgust at the way this place was turning into a
farce, I know that Giles was indeed fired...for doing his job.

The basic fact is that educated people know that Zionism is a World
Religion issue, and the chair directed Giles to cover up this fact.
This was educational malpractice which in a just world would cause
Roosevelt to lose its accreditation.

The central fact is that Zionism is relevant to world religion. A
university has no competence to redefine the content of its subjects
at-will. Corporations such as Enron had as it happened no competence to
define their financial position at-will, and the United States
government has no competence to withhold *habeus corpus* from
detainees.

Terrified dweebs fantasize that their "technical skill" can carve out a
niche in a world of systematic lying and have your tendency to dance
around the issue while sounding all scientific on a matter which has to
do with PEOPLE who are getting SCREWED: not only Giles but also his
students.

- Gerry Quinn

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