Re: Is my CS instructor nuts?

In article <1150569081.256748.223630@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>,
spinoza1111@xxxxxxxxx says...
Gerry Quinn wrote:

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.

As I posted elsewhere in the thread just now, Giles' reported
description of events do not entirely coincide with those of RAFO.

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.

According to RAFO, the letter - however you choose to characterise its
contents - was not gratuitous, but consequent on an application by
Giles for further work.

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.

What case is made? By proving you a liar, I simply demonstate that you
have made no case, not that no case is mad by anyone. How the spat at
Roosevelt will pan out eventually, I don't know. The case you are
making is a bizarre concoction of which it forms only the seed.

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.

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.

Door-to-door evangelists will be pleased with your support.

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.

That human beings constitute one species has never been in serious
dispute. That, however, is not the assertion you made. You are
claiming that unlike other species, humankind does not express sexual
dimorphism, or variations between geographic lineages. This claim is
palpable untrue.

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.

No, because it says nothing whatsoever about the existence of innate
differences between individuals, or average differences between groups
within a species.

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.

A minor risk in a single species - hybrid vigour is likely to strongly
outweigh any deleterious effects.

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?

Yes, or racial differences in a biology class.

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

I think the criteria for universities should be different than those
for schools, certainly - but maybe not much so for minor optional
classes.

Secondly, even in the hardest of sciences, silence==death. Absent a
discussion of the politics of evolution in biology, teachers are
defenseless against Creationism.

Ironic, but perhaps you intend it, because you refer to the politics
rather than the science of evolution. Just like the creationists, you
believe that evolution does not apply to the human species; that it
stopped when our species diverged from other hominids. [You propose
this for political rather than religious reasons. This gives you a
problem - religious anti-evolutionists can at least assert that the
purported cessation or non-existence of evolution is the work of an
omnipotent named entity, whereas anti-evolutionists of the political
kind can only bluster and shriek and attempt to change the subject.]

[Giles... Snow... Hitler...]

[--] 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

Quite.


- Gerry Quinn

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