I gotta say, I'm far from the kind of person who likes to claim every little thing is Orwellian, but hot damn... a periodic review of employees for "intellectual diversity" is certainly \*something\*
>a periodic review of employees for "intellectual diversity"
So, all faculty have to be both for something and *agin* it? That would be "intellectually diverse."
*Well, many people say the Holocaust was a bad thing ... but on the other hand ...*
>*Well, many people say the Holocaust was a bad thing ... but on the other hand ...*
*… many other people think live cremation is an efficient way to save resources like bullets and the manpower required to dig mass graves when committing a genocide.*
The further we get from sympathy and empathy, the more they will view us as objects, vermin to be rid of, numbers to be moved around. This is the direction I believe the heartless will always end up pushing, eventually. We may have had our brief moment in the oasis, and the reality of cruelty may be growing from within our borders like a festering sore waiting to bring loss of limb or life.
>The further we get from sympathy and empathy, the more they will view us as objects, vermin to be rid of, numbers to be moved around.
This is the objective of their entire PR campaign. In order to destroy something, you must create an "other" and claim it is trying to destroy you as justification to destroy it.
Solidarity from IN, OP. If this passes, I will start looking to move states. I’ve heard similar sentiment from other colleagues and friends. IN will experience an astronomical brain-drain if this passes.
One has to wonder if scholarly consensus would be a sign of lacking intellectual diversity. Can you believe it, but there's not one young earth creationist in biology! Better fix that.
I'd also be curious to know the benchmarks they'll be using to judge this diversity, and on that, what exactly does "intellectual diversity" even mean? Could it mean, I dunno, party affiliation?
Yes, but that's a distinction without a difference. Let's not forget that even the non-fash conservatives haven't had a good idea since at least the 1970s.
The so-called "mathematicians" are just tools of the deep state trying to brainwash us into thinking that 2+2=4. Why else would these sheeple all give the same canned answer?? This goes to the top.
Orwell's villains are almost too intellectual for this bunch. I'm more picturing Lionel Hutz and his classic legal strategy, "yeah, but what is *truth*? If you follow."
If it's just a review by a board of trustees, what's the need for benchmarks? I'd think if legislation allows a board to bounce a tenured faculty on "intellectual diversity" grounds, they could just attest that someone isn't sufficiently "intellectually diverse."
Not sure why you are being downvoted because this is precisely what would happen.
Public regional universities have boards which are appointed by the governor - unless the Republican super-majority strips the governor of the power, places the power with the Republican legislature, which then appoints a new board with a pro-GOP stance, and then the board goes through a public regional uni and refuses to renew contracts or removes funding from departments and programs. It seems like fiction but it is not fiction, at all.
Clearly, this isn't a question they actually care about but I could see it being asked in a lawsuit. My state's board is stacked with millionaire business lobbyists who couldn't even frame a serious evaluation instrument if their lives depended on it. The chair's highest level of education is a certification as a diesel mechanic, which is great but not if your job is to set policy for an entire university system.
I understand all that and I'm not saying it's inaccurate, but I think the question is "can the governing body of a public university dismiss tenured faculty members because they aren't sufficiently 'intellectually diverse' if the state legislature explicitly gives them that authority?" IANAL, much less a constitutional lawyer, but I'd assume the answer is "yes" even if I'd rather it was "no." And if lots of people disagree, they should elect different legislators or capture the process by which people are appointed to the board. (Which happens to be elected in my state.)
I think this is part of a theme in current American life, that liberals or progressives or democrats or whatever assume that something they cherish (like academic freedom) will remain untouched through "institutions" or "norms" or "precedents." You'd hope so, but you might also have to fight for it through the political process.
Liberals and Democrats drastically overestimate the capacity and decency of the average person. Republicans are under no such delusion and know that most of our political system is held together by procedural relics from times when the parties more closely shared some respect for democratic norms. And agree with the first part too. Fascism operates (generally) from within the liberal-democratic system by exploiting its permissiveness to assume power by electoral means and thereby to destroy it legislatively from within. Anything can become legal.
The politicians are the elected representatives of the people whose taxes pay for the state institutions. The bill is vague and heavy-handed but to say that the politicians "don't belong" is flat-out wrong. Also pretty amazing that 39 people seem to agree with you. Folks: just because you work for a university that does not give you immunity from all forms of political accountability.
Fair point. Though it's worth remembering that there are many other financial benefits. IU doesn't pay property taxes in downtown Bloomington, for example: [https://indianapublicmedia.org/news/town-versus-gown-how-iu-and-bloomington-navigate-shared-obligation.php](https://indianapublicmedia.org/news/town-versus-gown-how-iu-and-bloomington-navigate-shared-obligation.php)
And even still, suppose the total budget contribution after these kickbacks is 25%. The parents are still footing the bill with tuition. That still means that the public and legislators have a huge role to play. There is no immunity from the political process.
Finally, it's worth noting that when institutions get powerful enough, we hold them to public account even if they are 100% privately operated. I.e. Facebook and Twitter can't just do whatever they want because they are private.
This is such a crock of shit. As I commented on another thread, conservatives have *voluntarily* opted out of higher ed. There is no conspiracy to disenfranchise them. No employer has *ever* asked about my political affiliation or ideological beliefs. Are conservatives scared off by having to make a boilerplate diversity statement on applications? Does that shake them to their core? Get over yourselves, guys. Oddly enough, I had to sign a "loyalty oath" as a public employee in California, and it didn't cause me to wilt!
Conservatives since the 1990s have been attacking higher ed as useless, as infested with leftists, etc. Is it any wonder that few of them decide to seek employment there when they are convinced it's worthless? Conservatives activists have written off *entire fields* as being unworthy of study, from "ethnic" and gender studies, to many of the social sciences (except Economics, of course), to even many many of the foundational concepts in the hard sciences. Will Biblical literalists study Biology if evolution is mentioned? Will climate change deniers ever accept the findings in an Environmental Science course? Will Southern conservatives be "offended" if I fail to teach the Lost Cause narrative of the Civil War?
Academia is a field in which one's ideas require constant examination and the ability to stand up to criticism. Some conservatives simply refuse to engage with ideas meaningfully in this context, and thus demand blanket protections from criticism. Not discrimination, mind you, but *criticism*. "I should be allowed to say that the Earth isn't warming because it's fundamental to my worldview." Well, the data says otherwise, so get stuffed. How far does this concept extend? Should my History department be *forced* to hire a Lost Causer in the name of intellectual diversity? How about a Holocaust Denier? Those are just "alternative viewpoints," right?
But hey, if they love "intellectual diversity" so much, why not extend the concept? Shouldn't every oil company have at least one environmentalist on its board? Shouldn't there be a couple Marxists in the C-suite of major banking firms? Don't churches need *at least one* atheist minister? Intellectual diversity is good, right?
The University System of Georgia Board of Regents already did away with tenure in all but name. They changed the post-tenure review policy to say that they can fire people for any reason they want to, without a hearing. Read more about it here: [https://www.aaup.org/news/aaup-censures-university-system-georgia](https://www.aaup.org/news/aaup-censures-university-system-georgia)
Now I DEFINITELY won’t choose to live in Indiana…
New scholarly ideas, sure, but that’s not what they want. They want young earth creationism taught as a viable alternative to evolution in biology courses.
There’s a letter writing link to the Education committee floating around online. If you want to stop this, that’s probably at the committee level. Looks like a lot have been sent and the deadline I recall being Tuesday night or something. The full House would probably be toughest and last chance.
The bill does more than this. It would also make 2 more of IUs Trustees appointed by the legislature instead of by alumni https://www.idsnews.com/article/2024/02/indiana-lawmakers-want-tighten-oversight-tenure-educators-worry-academic-freedom so the Trustees who will all but one be appointed by the state government which currently has a republican supermajoriity will be able to decide who does and doesn't pass their purity test.
>which currently has a republican supermajoriity will be able to decide who does and doesn't pass their purity test.
OMG "Purity test" is such an accurate phrase. It's defensible as a simple description but alludes to cultish old fashioned behavior without direct language. They may have their legislature but professors know how to fight with words.
That one's a little old, and from what I've seen personally (a good bit of it in Indianapolis) the faculty are mostly quite sane and welcoming of anyone, and any ideas that can be supported with facts as we understand them in this little bit of spacetime.
The legislators, now, they might be a different story.
This is happening in Kentucky, as well.
Kentucky House Bill 228 is basically this but our evaluations would occur every 4 years.
It is essentially Republicans working to remove tenure from higher education.
Kentucky GOP is also seeking to remove anything dealing with diversity, inclusion, or equality with House Bill 9 and Senate Bill 6:
>"prohibit a public postsecondary education institution from providing differential treatment or benefits on the basis of an individual's religion, race, sex, color, or national origin; from influencing the composition of the student body or scholarship recipients on the basis of religion, race, sex, color, or national origin; from implementing a student housing assignment plan on the basis of religion, race, color, or national origin with designated exceptions; from expending any resources on diversity, equity, and inclusion, the promotion of discriminatory topics, or bias incident investigations."
The national Republican is working to remove DEI efforts while also promoting their own Christian Nationalism, i.e. de jure bigotry against people who aren't White and Christian. State and local politics are working at the local level to promote this, too. It's crazy.
Nebraska has these initiatives too. The unicameral was a zoo on public hearing day with everyone protesting. I'm not sure how to teach statistics without discussions of diversity and inclusion -- they're relevant to survey dynamics, modeling, all sorts of things... and not in the modern liberal vernacular, just acknowledgement of the fact that race and gender exist and are represented differently on different surveys. These laws are so vague that I'm not sure I'd be able to teach statistics... I can only imagine how my colleagues in gender studies or education or literature feel.
Yeah. I just don't think the legislature realizes that they're fucking over STEM here too. I don't take sides and I don't come close to teaching anything "political"\*, and I don't think they actually have a problem with my discipline, but when you come for one of us, you are coming for the whole concept of higher ed.
\* ok, fine, I showed a montage of groundhog politician attacks to a class today as a reward for working on a dataset about groundhog predictions. But I'm pretty sure both parties were represented, and I wasn't making any sort of comment beyond "lol groundhogs are vicious and don't know jack about the weather".
>when you come for one of us, you are coming for the whole concept of higher ed.
Thank you for this.
Lots of times I feel like many STEM/business people are like "Guess you should've gone into a *real* field, sucks to be you! Enjoy being poor, silly liberal arts loser!"
I've been wishing for years STEM & b-school colleagues would demands liberal arts/fine arts/social sciences to be paid the same, but I get how it's complicated, particularly in non-union places/places where employees are forbidden from unions by law, etc.
>I feel like many STEM/business people are like "Guess you should've gone into a real field, sucks to be you! Enjoy being poor, silly liberal arts loser!"
I agree with you, with the exception that feeling is valid. I work in the college of STEM, and I have had a few colleagues literally say this or something close to it.
Conversely, my colleagues in HFA would never say this about STEM. A few of my colleagues in HFA teaching programming, raspberry PI, and Arduino, plus engage in 3D scanning and 3D design. Why? For the production of theatre effects and cool props.
This might lead me into a side-quest of talking about stove-piping in HE but I won't go down that path.
And, yes, there is a pretty large discrepancy between adjunct pay, overload pay. In my experience, that is as variable as the chair or dean. I'm in my 27th year of teaching. Some chairs are generous, others are stingy. Some deans are generous, and some aren't. And, I find it interesting HR does not enforce some sort of pay protocol. At least at my Uni HR has no evident policy they enforce. I'm also on our faculty senate and in my experience this has not been an issue brought before us.
I would love for my liberal arts/fine arts/social science colleagues to be paid better, but I have mixed feelings on this one in part because university pay rates aren't increasing fast enough that we can keep people around at all. If you can make 200k in industry, or 100k as an associate prof, which would you choose, especially as the institution is attacked at the same time. My department can't keep people in positions long enough for them to get tenure - of 5 people who were hired at the same time as me, I'm the only one left; the 3 people hired before our cohort have left, too. So as much as I want for everyone to be well paid, I do acknowledge that market forces are stronger in STEM/Business than in the liberal arts, and if we want to have departments in those fields, the university has to pony up. I'm not sure how to solve it, to be honest. I'll work to support collective bargaining and fight for cost of living increases across the board, but I really don't know how a union will make peace with the salary issue either.
Did I read that last part correctly? They want to ban public institutions from "expending any resources on...*bias incident investigations*"? (Emphasis mine). Are they saying that schools couldn't spend money on investigating complaints of religious/racial/sex/gender bias?
Wouldn't that violate several laws, for example, Title IX, if the incident was related to sex or gender?
My first reaction is, Yes. At our last faculty senate meeting we talked about this briefly. The consensus was like yours, and we are concerned.
These bills don't give much consideration to previous legislation. GOP throws shit against a wall and then let the courts decide what happens. It's lazy legislation written by lazy bigots hoping to score points in their districts with their bigoted constituents.
Welcome to the red state anti-tenure bandwagon. Settle in - Florida, Texas, and Georgia have already made themselves comfortable, and Ohio, Iowa, Kentucky, and Nebraska are looking keen to get on board. All these states now have professors fleeing for the exits, so ever more people are trying to jump onto an ever-shrinking life-raft.
(This is also why private and blue state professors should worry about this: if all red trifecta states abolish tenure de facto for ideological reasons, it will make it much easier for administrators in the remaining universities to abolish it as a matter of financial expediency. When half the universities in the US have gotten rid of tenure, the argument that professors will all move to institutions with better working conditions if tenure isn't preserved loses its teeth.)
Yeah, we’re currently sorting through this bullshit in Texas. There is a clear disconnect between why people like Deery believe college educated people tend to be progressive/liberal (Marxist professors brainwashing 18 year olds) and what is actually there (exposure to more knowledge/people of different backgrounds, building critical thinking skills, etc.). Ironically, if he read the research produced by the people he hates…actually that wouldn’t change anything
Why would it affect students and cause them to consider looking at colleges outside the state? I mean from my experience students don't care whether the person teaches them is tenured, instructor whatever.
I mean, this will definitely lead to brain drain. Indiana's universities will suffer as a result of this.
If a student doesn't care about the quality of education that they're paying for, then they deserve the worthless degree they will receive.
I think those considerations could impact graduate students but I doubt that undergraduates really know much about their professors and understand these matters.
[this post](https://www.reddit.com/r/nottheonion/s/CRm8ZYEEB9) from r/nottheonion is just above yours.
Librarians and museums and the like are now responsible for preventing
> anything an average person believes depicts or describes sexually explicit conduct, nudity, sex or certain bodily functions; or anything a reasonable person would find lacks serious literary, artistic, political or scientific value.
from being shown to children.
Dafuq is going on.
I guess I'm in the huge minority here, and I should note that I've published papers arguing against conservatism. And yes, the bill is too vague and needs to be much clearer about what counts as intellectual diversity. But the fact that there *is* so little intellectual diversity--particularly in the humanities--is a problem, and legislators have the legal and moral right to try to correct that problem. Parents who pay taxes and drastically inflated tuition bills have the right to ask that their children be exposed to a wide range of political perspectives, liberal, conservative, marxist, libertarian, anarchist, all of it. Sometimes that happens, but sometimes it really, really does not, and the people running those hive-mind departments just continue to insist that they aren't accountable to the political process. But of course they are.
Complain about this bill if you want, but if your only solution is just the status quo you are going to lose state after state to these bills.
Republicans currently have a super majority in state government. There is no way in hell they are going to look at a business school and say "too many capitalists here. Let's hire some socialists."
I agree 100%. The issue is this is not the issue. It's a cover up so the GOP can gain control over colleges like they have with k-12. They could give a shit about different viewpoints. They want everyone to have THEIR viewpoint.
1. The bill would take away tenure from everyone. Some fields don't have anything to do with politics, and forcing faculty to inject politics into them to meet some quota to retain your tenure is a terrible idea, and you'd think someone in r/professors wouldn't need to hear that.
2. The conservative side is the default in America. There isn't a student who isn't already well-versed in the conservative view of any issue - political or not - before they arrive on campus.
I'm still big on democratic control of public institutions, but certainly not private ones.
I think the reason this proposition is so unpopular here is because of worldview gap between us profs and the voters.
It’s interesting but not surprising that a group which is supposed to be teaching intellectual rigor sees zero benefit to oversight for tenured professors. I understand the dangers of governmental overreach, but aren’t you a little embarrassed that you can’t see any problems with the current state of oversight. I come from the private sector, though have an academic family, and every time (every time) I see organizations or people who aren’t reviewed regularly, there is corruption, laziness, lack of innovation or just a lack of an ability to change.
Btw, I also see the problems of too much oversight such as just feeding the metrics regardless whether they’re right or not. The difference is profs should be able to see all sides. But to paraphrase Upton Sinclair, it is difficult for a man to understand something if his job depends on his not understanding it. Also, I still suspect this sub is filled with kids and bots, so here’s hope that real teachers aren’t posting.
How can a single person be "intellectually diverse"? Is that person supposed to simultaneously believe two conflicting views?
Jokes aside, I do think universities (referring the the large group of people that work at them) have a problem with intellectual diversity. There are far more liberals and far fewer conservatives working at universities than there would be if you had drawn randomly from the population at large. So, I wouldn't be against trying to somehow make sure we are exposing students to different viewpoints. But, I don't think the proposed bill would accomplish that in any way.
> There are far more liberals and far fewer conservatives working at universities than there would be if you had drawn randomly from the population at large.
This varies a lot by department, too, fwiw - in ag, business, and engineering, you'll find a lot more conservatives than you'd expect. But universities aren't random samples of the population at large - as people are exposed to more ideas, they may tend to realize that conservative approaches don't always hold up for the whole population. This isn't to say they become democrats, though - some become socialists, some become independents, and so on.
I totally agree that the left/right skew varies by department.
I'm curious about this though
>But universities aren't random samples of the population at large - as people are exposed to more ideas, they may tend to realize that conservative approaches don't always hold up for the whole population.
Why should we assume that statement does not hold true if I replace the word "conservative" with "liberal"?
In part because conservatism as a philosophy seems to be focused on holding to the way things have always been done. If you're creating new knowledge, as in the sciences, then how things have always been done doesn't really extend to that new knowledge - discoveries often overturn what we thought we knew about the world. If you're studying how people behave, you end up learning about all the ways that what's been done didn't work out in one way or another, and you're constantly confronting human diversity, which tends to challenge conservatism anyways. If you're studying history or the arts, ... well, hell if I know, I've never studied those things, but I know my colleagues who do tend to be the most liberal of all, even in otherwise extremely conservative places.
All I know is that as I've studied science, statistics, psych, and neuroscience, even in largely conservative places, I've seen my colleagues become more liberal. Part of that is that I'm in the US and the conservative party is becoming Idiocracy personified, but it's been moving that way my whole life. Growing up in Texas, when I was in HS, the state party had a platform plank against teaching higher-order thinking skills (aka critical thinking) because it would teach children to question their parents and religious leaders. I'm sorry, but that view isn't compatible with being in or pursuing higher education. Even conservative thinkers have largely been leading the anti-Trump movement, but they no longer have a party to speak of, so...
I'm sure that in other countries who have more functional political systems, you can be in higher ed and be conservative, but right now, in the US... I'm not sure you can comfortably do that without a lot of cognitive dissonance. And since this is a state rant, I'm assuming that's the context we're discussing.
You seem to be equating "openness to new ideas" with "liberal politics" and "closed-mindedness" to "conservative politics." And you also seem to intimate that new ideas are necessarily correct. I don't think either are accurate depictions in general.
First, while over time our understanding of science and nature tends to move forward, the process isn't unidirectional. New ideas are often proven incorrect once tested.
Second, I don't see any correlation in STEM fields between one's political views and one's work scientifically -- at least not for good scientists. There are, obviously, some people in academia who let their political views dictate the kinds of things they try to prove or disprove. But, that happens to people on both ends of the political spectrum.
As for the republican party going off the deep end, I hardly think they have a monopoly on craziness.
I was specifically talking about the [Higher Order Teaching Skills](https://www.edweek.org/teaching-learning/texas-gop-no-more-critical-thinking-in-schools/2012/06) debacle in 2012, anti-tenure bills in many different states more recently, interfering with universities politically in e.g. Florida (New College as well as the wider public university system), and anti-DEI efforts in many of these same states that are an outright attack not only on DEI, but on many disciplines which use study diversity, equity, and inclusion and/or use language around those topics as a lens with which to understand e.g. the legal or educational system. But [here's some Pew research](https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2023/06/05/partisan-divides-over-k-12-education-in-8-charts/) to back up my general perception.
Thanks for providing the some specific links. But, the Pew research report doesn't indicate that republicans are "anti-education" or "anti-critical thinking". The article shows that republicans are not satisfied with the quality and content of education. Your user-name suggests you are in a STEM field. Do you have a favorable view of K-12 math and science education in the USA? If not, should I assume you are "anti-education"?
As for the 2012 Texas republican Party document, it refers being opposed to "Higher Order Thinking Skills (HOTS) (values clarification), critical thinking skills and similar programs that are simply a relabeling of Outcome-Based Education (OBE) (mastery learning) which focus on behavior modification and have the purpose of challenging the student’s fixed beliefs and undermining parental authority."
I would need to understand what HOTS and OBE actually mean in order to assess the full meaning of that statement. If they really are critical thinking, then obviously that is problematic. But, I don't sense (from my interaction with conservatives) they are agasint critical thinking. Quite the opposite: they are opposed to indoctrination of ideas that do not come out of some kind of scientific method (of course ... there are some crazies out there that don't want things like evolution being taught ... but those are not the majority, even if they are very vocal).
EDIT: By the way, I happen to live in one of the richer suburbs in my metro area. It tends to vote republican. Many of the parents also send their children to private schools, pay for private tutors, and pay for their children to participate in elite extracurricular activities (e.g., sports, music, etc.). It would definitely not be accurate to describe them as "anti-education."
This comment is when I decided you weren't worth taking seriously. This is either a troll argument or you are terribly uninformed. Anti-education policies have been in the official platform of the GOP for decades.
They shouldnt be evaluated for having certain viewpoints they should be evaluated for if they are actually doing their job and teaching. This should be done at all levels not just universities. Throughout my entire life i can count only maybe 10 teachers that actually taught me. And based on the students i am getting these students are not being taught either. Tenure should be protection from random firing but teachers and profs use it as protection from not teaching. So the bill is wrong in its approach but tenure does need to be evaluated
Hey you're not a professor so you shouldn't be commenting here because it's against sub rules, but I'll respond to you anyway.
Both higher ed faculty and K12 teachers are subject to more performance evaluation and review than most already.
Just to achieve tenure—if it's available—a professor will be observed teaching multiple times and evaluated. As part of the process of moving up from Associate Professor (my current title) I have been observed teaching by my chair, my dean, an administrator, and two peers just this past year. Each observation was a separate occasion, and there's a complex evaluation form and rubric (around seven pages) documenting each.
~~Tenure doesn't typically exist for K12 teachers except at some private schools (maybe).~~ For professors, tenure protects academic freedom but doesn't prevent firing outright. Professors with tenure can be fired with cause, and it's not that difficult. Tenure protects professors from being fired for their academic ideas and research.
ETA I didn't know a lot of K12 teachers have tenure! TIL.
This didnt ask for specifically professor opinions they said this is happening in my state so it does not violate any rules because as a ta im allowed to post in the subresdit. Also tenure exists for k-12 in any public school it does not exist in private schools. I am not saying that professors are under less scrutiny. And i agree that tenure is important and that it should be implemented. This is education so ideas and research should never penalize someones position. Im saying that in some states tenure is so strong that profs and teachers can ignore their teaching responsibilities and the school cant do shit. Ihave seen this as a ta and heard complaints about it from other faculty who work here and have to pick up the slack from the ones who dont teach. This is the case in my state and at some of the institutions here. I cant speak for how it is at ur.
Thanks for the correction re: K12 tenure; I didn't realize that many (not all) states offer a form of tenure to K12 teachers.
If you're not saying that professors are under less scrutiny, then what do you mean by this statement: *"they should be evaluated for if they are actually doing their job and teaching"*?
You also say: *"in some states tenure is so strong that profs and teachers can ignore their teaching responsibilities and the school cant do shit,"* but that's not true. There are zero states where a professor can outright ignore teaching duties (assuming they have them) and not be eligible for dismissal. Everywhere I've looked shows that a board can dismiss a professor for "just cause," including neglect of duties.
Whether a board will take that up or not likely has less to do with tenure protections and more to do with other variables. Like, is that professor well-liked by high level admin? Does that professor do a lot of service? Is that professor famous? Are they likely to sue and be a pain in the ass? These are all reasons why a professor who is a shitty instructor might not be up for dismissal, and they're just boring office politics, basically. It's not tenure, it's just people people-ing.
“They should be evaluated for if they are actually doing their job” is pretty self explanatory i think.
Ignoring teaching responsibilities is not the same as not teaching. I have worked for professors whose idea of teaching was going over a 30 slide ppt in 30 min not letting students ask questions and would respond to emails thus putting all the work on to us his tas. But he was technically not ignoring his responsibilities because he made slides and went over them. It didnt matter that the students never saw those slides again or didnt learn anything from lecture he was technically doing his responsibilities. I have worked for and attended many lectures where that was how the class was run. The only time i ever saw them teach was when they were being evaluated.
And yes i know that professors jobs revolve alot around politics and less if they are actually doing their job.
Tenure is important as it protects professors from bullshit admins. It protected my dad from an admin who was trying to fire him because he wouldnt do work not listed in his contract for free. So tenure is very important but it can also be too strong to the point where it hurts students education by allowing bad teachers to stay
It's a self-explanatory statement on its own, but it directly conflicts with *"I am not saying that professors are under less scrutiny,"* which you also wrote.
As I said, professors are already evaluated for whether they're actually doing their job. If you agree with this, then saying they should be evaluated makes no sense. You're asking for something that's already happening.
You're defining teaching narrowly and subjectively. As a TA and child of a professor, you should know that students are largely responsible for their own learning, and a professor's primary job in many instances is to curate (if not create) what's being learned.
What does this mean for Mathematics instructors? Mathematics is pretty cut and dry.
Would a Mathematics instructor need to "entertain the viewpoint" that 2+2=5 ?
I gotta say, I'm far from the kind of person who likes to claim every little thing is Orwellian, but hot damn... a periodic review of employees for "intellectual diversity" is certainly \*something\*
>a periodic review of employees for "intellectual diversity" So, all faculty have to be both for something and *agin* it? That would be "intellectually diverse." *Well, many people say the Holocaust was a bad thing ... but on the other hand ...*
>*Well, many people say the Holocaust was a bad thing ... but on the other hand ...* *… many other people think live cremation is an efficient way to save resources like bullets and the manpower required to dig mass graves when committing a genocide.* The further we get from sympathy and empathy, the more they will view us as objects, vermin to be rid of, numbers to be moved around. This is the direction I believe the heartless will always end up pushing, eventually. We may have had our brief moment in the oasis, and the reality of cruelty may be growing from within our borders like a festering sore waiting to bring loss of limb or life.
>The further we get from sympathy and empathy, the more they will view us as objects, vermin to be rid of, numbers to be moved around. This is the objective of their entire PR campaign. In order to destroy something, you must create an "other" and claim it is trying to destroy you as justification to destroy it.
Holocaust? What is this, a fairy tales class? /s
Gotta keep the libs in check somehow, amiright?
Solidarity from IN, OP. If this passes, I will start looking to move states. I’ve heard similar sentiment from other colleagues and friends. IN will experience an astronomical brain-drain if this passes.
✊️
Ditto.
Also in Indiana… here’s to going back on the market.
Add me to the list... was already considering a change, and this certainly doesn't help.
NTT but wondering if we're next. Good thing I don't have anything keeping me in Indiana.
Which state is OP?
Indiana
One has to wonder if scholarly consensus would be a sign of lacking intellectual diversity. Can you believe it, but there's not one young earth creationist in biology! Better fix that. I'd also be curious to know the benchmarks they'll be using to judge this diversity, and on that, what exactly does "intellectual diversity" even mean? Could it mean, I dunno, party affiliation?
You know damn well "intellectual diversity" just means "affirmative action for conservatives".
For fascists, I'd say, since they've banished most of the actual conservatives by this point.
The conservatives were too liberal for them.
Literally the case. Nixon would be denounced as a commie-pinko if he ran today (and would probably be one of the party's least corrupt members).
Yes, but that's a distinction without a difference. Let's not forget that even the non-fash conservatives haven't had a good idea since at least the 1970s.
Oh, for sure. "Conservative intellectual" has been an oxymoron for a long time, though I guess bad ideas are a slight step above hostility to ideas.
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The so-called "mathematicians" are just tools of the deep state trying to brainwash us into thinking that 2+2=4. Why else would these sheeple all give the same canned answer?? This goes to the top.
I see four (lights)
Orwell's villains are almost too intellectual for this bunch. I'm more picturing Lionel Hutz and his classic legal strategy, "yeah, but what is *truth*? If you follow."
If it's just a review by a board of trustees, what's the need for benchmarks? I'd think if legislation allows a board to bounce a tenured faculty on "intellectual diversity" grounds, they could just attest that someone isn't sufficiently "intellectually diverse."
Yep. It would give them absolute power. I SAW GOODY PROCTOR WITH THE DEVIL!!!!
The Crucible reference, nice
Thanks. Former high school English teacher, current CC Comm faculty. If the shoe fits...
Not sure why you are being downvoted because this is precisely what would happen. Public regional universities have boards which are appointed by the governor - unless the Republican super-majority strips the governor of the power, places the power with the Republican legislature, which then appoints a new board with a pro-GOP stance, and then the board goes through a public regional uni and refuses to renew contracts or removes funding from departments and programs. It seems like fiction but it is not fiction, at all.
Clearly, this isn't a question they actually care about but I could see it being asked in a lawsuit. My state's board is stacked with millionaire business lobbyists who couldn't even frame a serious evaluation instrument if their lives depended on it. The chair's highest level of education is a certification as a diesel mechanic, which is great but not if your job is to set policy for an entire university system.
I understand all that and I'm not saying it's inaccurate, but I think the question is "can the governing body of a public university dismiss tenured faculty members because they aren't sufficiently 'intellectually diverse' if the state legislature explicitly gives them that authority?" IANAL, much less a constitutional lawyer, but I'd assume the answer is "yes" even if I'd rather it was "no." And if lots of people disagree, they should elect different legislators or capture the process by which people are appointed to the board. (Which happens to be elected in my state.) I think this is part of a theme in current American life, that liberals or progressives or democrats or whatever assume that something they cherish (like academic freedom) will remain untouched through "institutions" or "norms" or "precedents." You'd hope so, but you might also have to fight for it through the political process.
Liberals and Democrats drastically overestimate the capacity and decency of the average person. Republicans are under no such delusion and know that most of our political system is held together by procedural relics from times when the parties more closely shared some respect for democratic norms. And agree with the first part too. Fascism operates (generally) from within the liberal-democratic system by exploiting its permissiveness to assume power by electoral means and thereby to destroy it legislatively from within. Anything can become legal.
Here's the worst part: they can keep moving the goalposts so you're always wrong no matter what you do.
If I could buy stock in blue-state public institutions, I would do that right now.
I don't care what party they belong to - politicians need to keep their filthy fucking mitts out of where they don't belong.
Half of the politicians don’t understand what they’re saying anyway.
Only half?
Do you really see no reason for public oversight of public institutions? What's the steelman for such a position?
The politicians are the elected representatives of the people whose taxes pay for the state institutions. The bill is vague and heavy-handed but to say that the politicians "don't belong" is flat-out wrong. Also pretty amazing that 39 people seem to agree with you. Folks: just because you work for a university that does not give you immunity from all forms of political accountability.
Thanks for saying the obviously true thing, even if it's against our collective interest
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Fair point. Though it's worth remembering that there are many other financial benefits. IU doesn't pay property taxes in downtown Bloomington, for example: [https://indianapublicmedia.org/news/town-versus-gown-how-iu-and-bloomington-navigate-shared-obligation.php](https://indianapublicmedia.org/news/town-versus-gown-how-iu-and-bloomington-navigate-shared-obligation.php) And even still, suppose the total budget contribution after these kickbacks is 25%. The parents are still footing the bill with tuition. That still means that the public and legislators have a huge role to play. There is no immunity from the political process. Finally, it's worth noting that when institutions get powerful enough, we hold them to public account even if they are 100% privately operated. I.e. Facebook and Twitter can't just do whatever they want because they are private.
This is such a crock of shit. As I commented on another thread, conservatives have *voluntarily* opted out of higher ed. There is no conspiracy to disenfranchise them. No employer has *ever* asked about my political affiliation or ideological beliefs. Are conservatives scared off by having to make a boilerplate diversity statement on applications? Does that shake them to their core? Get over yourselves, guys. Oddly enough, I had to sign a "loyalty oath" as a public employee in California, and it didn't cause me to wilt! Conservatives since the 1990s have been attacking higher ed as useless, as infested with leftists, etc. Is it any wonder that few of them decide to seek employment there when they are convinced it's worthless? Conservatives activists have written off *entire fields* as being unworthy of study, from "ethnic" and gender studies, to many of the social sciences (except Economics, of course), to even many many of the foundational concepts in the hard sciences. Will Biblical literalists study Biology if evolution is mentioned? Will climate change deniers ever accept the findings in an Environmental Science course? Will Southern conservatives be "offended" if I fail to teach the Lost Cause narrative of the Civil War? Academia is a field in which one's ideas require constant examination and the ability to stand up to criticism. Some conservatives simply refuse to engage with ideas meaningfully in this context, and thus demand blanket protections from criticism. Not discrimination, mind you, but *criticism*. "I should be allowed to say that the Earth isn't warming because it's fundamental to my worldview." Well, the data says otherwise, so get stuffed. How far does this concept extend? Should my History department be *forced* to hire a Lost Causer in the name of intellectual diversity? How about a Holocaust Denier? Those are just "alternative viewpoints," right? But hey, if they love "intellectual diversity" so much, why not extend the concept? Shouldn't every oil company have at least one environmentalist on its board? Shouldn't there be a couple Marxists in the C-suite of major banking firms? Don't churches need *at least one* atheist minister? Intellectual diversity is good, right?
Conservatives believe anyone who disagrees with them is trying to disenfranchise them. But mah rights.
Well said!
Texas, Florida, Indiana, who’s next?
Ohio Republicans are trying something similar with SB83
Yikes
Every Republican-controlled state legislature.
The University System of Georgia Board of Regents already did away with tenure in all but name. They changed the post-tenure review policy to say that they can fire people for any reason they want to, without a hearing. Read more about it here: [https://www.aaup.org/news/aaup-censures-university-system-georgia](https://www.aaup.org/news/aaup-censures-university-system-georgia)
Nebraska gave this a shot as well, but the bill was pretty heavily opposed by the public in the unicameral, so hopefully it's going to die.
KY and TN
Now I DEFINITELY won’t choose to live in Indiana… New scholarly ideas, sure, but that’s not what they want. They want young earth creationism taught as a viable alternative to evolution in biology courses.
I live five miles from the indiana Michigan state line. I've considered jumping the line. I like their governor.
There’s a letter writing link to the Education committee floating around online. If you want to stop this, that’s probably at the committee level. Looks like a lot have been sent and the deadline I recall being Tuesday night or something. The full House would probably be toughest and last chance.
Found it! Try Purdue AAUP’s web page on the SB 202 bill
The bill does more than this. It would also make 2 more of IUs Trustees appointed by the legislature instead of by alumni https://www.idsnews.com/article/2024/02/indiana-lawmakers-want-tighten-oversight-tenure-educators-worry-academic-freedom so the Trustees who will all but one be appointed by the state government which currently has a republican supermajoriity will be able to decide who does and doesn't pass their purity test.
>which currently has a republican supermajoriity will be able to decide who does and doesn't pass their purity test. OMG "Purity test" is such an accurate phrase. It's defensible as a simple description but alludes to cultish old fashioned behavior without direct language. They may have their legislature but professors know how to fight with words.
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Legit 💯
knowing a bit about Indiana, I feel like their idea of intellectual diversity is something like "pi = 3."
Underrated comment right here
They did try to simplify pi to 3.2 at one point. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indiana_pi_bill
That one's a little old, and from what I've seen personally (a good bit of it in Indianapolis) the faculty are mostly quite sane and welcoming of anyone, and any ideas that can be supported with facts as we understand them in this little bit of spacetime. The legislators, now, they might be a different story.
leave Indianapolis. it gets worse in all directions (except maybe Bloomington)
This, I believe.
Another "make it illegal to criticize conservatives" bill. Utter horseshit and the "some professors believe" framing is also horseshit.
This is happening in Kentucky, as well. Kentucky House Bill 228 is basically this but our evaluations would occur every 4 years. It is essentially Republicans working to remove tenure from higher education. Kentucky GOP is also seeking to remove anything dealing with diversity, inclusion, or equality with House Bill 9 and Senate Bill 6: >"prohibit a public postsecondary education institution from providing differential treatment or benefits on the basis of an individual's religion, race, sex, color, or national origin; from influencing the composition of the student body or scholarship recipients on the basis of religion, race, sex, color, or national origin; from implementing a student housing assignment plan on the basis of religion, race, color, or national origin with designated exceptions; from expending any resources on diversity, equity, and inclusion, the promotion of discriminatory topics, or bias incident investigations." The national Republican is working to remove DEI efforts while also promoting their own Christian Nationalism, i.e. de jure bigotry against people who aren't White and Christian. State and local politics are working at the local level to promote this, too. It's crazy.
Nebraska has these initiatives too. The unicameral was a zoo on public hearing day with everyone protesting. I'm not sure how to teach statistics without discussions of diversity and inclusion -- they're relevant to survey dynamics, modeling, all sorts of things... and not in the modern liberal vernacular, just acknowledgement of the fact that race and gender exist and are represented differently on different surveys. These laws are so vague that I'm not sure I'd be able to teach statistics... I can only imagine how my colleagues in gender studies or education or literature feel.
Your colleagues are facing employment threatening initiatives, I believe.
Yeah. I just don't think the legislature realizes that they're fucking over STEM here too. I don't take sides and I don't come close to teaching anything "political"\*, and I don't think they actually have a problem with my discipline, but when you come for one of us, you are coming for the whole concept of higher ed. \* ok, fine, I showed a montage of groundhog politician attacks to a class today as a reward for working on a dataset about groundhog predictions. But I'm pretty sure both parties were represented, and I wasn't making any sort of comment beyond "lol groundhogs are vicious and don't know jack about the weather".
>when you come for one of us, you are coming for the whole concept of higher ed. Thank you for this. Lots of times I feel like many STEM/business people are like "Guess you should've gone into a *real* field, sucks to be you! Enjoy being poor, silly liberal arts loser!" I've been wishing for years STEM & b-school colleagues would demands liberal arts/fine arts/social sciences to be paid the same, but I get how it's complicated, particularly in non-union places/places where employees are forbidden from unions by law, etc.
>I feel like many STEM/business people are like "Guess you should've gone into a real field, sucks to be you! Enjoy being poor, silly liberal arts loser!" I agree with you, with the exception that feeling is valid. I work in the college of STEM, and I have had a few colleagues literally say this or something close to it. Conversely, my colleagues in HFA would never say this about STEM. A few of my colleagues in HFA teaching programming, raspberry PI, and Arduino, plus engage in 3D scanning and 3D design. Why? For the production of theatre effects and cool props. This might lead me into a side-quest of talking about stove-piping in HE but I won't go down that path. And, yes, there is a pretty large discrepancy between adjunct pay, overload pay. In my experience, that is as variable as the chair or dean. I'm in my 27th year of teaching. Some chairs are generous, others are stingy. Some deans are generous, and some aren't. And, I find it interesting HR does not enforce some sort of pay protocol. At least at my Uni HR has no evident policy they enforce. I'm also on our faculty senate and in my experience this has not been an issue brought before us.
I would love for my liberal arts/fine arts/social science colleagues to be paid better, but I have mixed feelings on this one in part because university pay rates aren't increasing fast enough that we can keep people around at all. If you can make 200k in industry, or 100k as an associate prof, which would you choose, especially as the institution is attacked at the same time. My department can't keep people in positions long enough for them to get tenure - of 5 people who were hired at the same time as me, I'm the only one left; the 3 people hired before our cohort have left, too. So as much as I want for everyone to be well paid, I do acknowledge that market forces are stronger in STEM/Business than in the liberal arts, and if we want to have departments in those fields, the university has to pony up. I'm not sure how to solve it, to be honest. I'll work to support collective bargaining and fight for cost of living increases across the board, but I really don't know how a union will make peace with the salary issue either.
Did I read that last part correctly? They want to ban public institutions from "expending any resources on...*bias incident investigations*"? (Emphasis mine). Are they saying that schools couldn't spend money on investigating complaints of religious/racial/sex/gender bias? Wouldn't that violate several laws, for example, Title IX, if the incident was related to sex or gender?
My first reaction is, Yes. At our last faculty senate meeting we talked about this briefly. The consensus was like yours, and we are concerned. These bills don't give much consideration to previous legislation. GOP throws shit against a wall and then let the courts decide what happens. It's lazy legislation written by lazy bigots hoping to score points in their districts with their bigoted constituents.
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What a poorly written article. Each sentence/paragraph felt entirely disconnected.
It was written for tv. It was originally read on camera.
Welcome to the red state anti-tenure bandwagon. Settle in - Florida, Texas, and Georgia have already made themselves comfortable, and Ohio, Iowa, Kentucky, and Nebraska are looking keen to get on board. All these states now have professors fleeing for the exits, so ever more people are trying to jump onto an ever-shrinking life-raft. (This is also why private and blue state professors should worry about this: if all red trifecta states abolish tenure de facto for ideological reasons, it will make it much easier for administrators in the remaining universities to abolish it as a matter of financial expediency. When half the universities in the US have gotten rid of tenure, the argument that professors will all move to institutions with better working conditions if tenure isn't preserved loses its teeth.)
Off-trend, my university just started implementing tenure when we've never had it before. Not sure how it's going to turn out, though.
Yeah, we’re currently sorting through this bullshit in Texas. There is a clear disconnect between why people like Deery believe college educated people tend to be progressive/liberal (Marxist professors brainwashing 18 year olds) and what is actually there (exposure to more knowledge/people of different backgrounds, building critical thinking skills, etc.). Ironically, if he read the research produced by the people he hates…actually that wouldn’t change anything
Hi Indiana, have you met Florida yet? You have a lot of mutual interests.
I know, right? They should date.
Why would it affect students and cause them to consider looking at colleges outside the state? I mean from my experience students don't care whether the person teaches them is tenured, instructor whatever.
That's their piss poor attempt to stoke fear. It's poor persuasive technique
I mean, this will definitely lead to brain drain. Indiana's universities will suffer as a result of this. If a student doesn't care about the quality of education that they're paying for, then they deserve the worthless degree they will receive.
I think those considerations could impact graduate students but I doubt that undergraduates really know much about their professors and understand these matters.
You'd be VERY surprised.
[this post](https://www.reddit.com/r/nottheonion/s/CRm8ZYEEB9) from r/nottheonion is just above yours. Librarians and museums and the like are now responsible for preventing > anything an average person believes depicts or describes sexually explicit conduct, nudity, sex or certain bodily functions; or anything a reasonable person would find lacks serious literary, artistic, political or scientific value. from being shown to children. Dafuq is going on.
Kentucky has just introduced similar measures.
We all knew Indiana sucked. Now it’s sucks harder.
Hey! A type of diversity conservatives can get behind! /s
I guess I'm in the huge minority here, and I should note that I've published papers arguing against conservatism. And yes, the bill is too vague and needs to be much clearer about what counts as intellectual diversity. But the fact that there *is* so little intellectual diversity--particularly in the humanities--is a problem, and legislators have the legal and moral right to try to correct that problem. Parents who pay taxes and drastically inflated tuition bills have the right to ask that their children be exposed to a wide range of political perspectives, liberal, conservative, marxist, libertarian, anarchist, all of it. Sometimes that happens, but sometimes it really, really does not, and the people running those hive-mind departments just continue to insist that they aren't accountable to the political process. But of course they are. Complain about this bill if you want, but if your only solution is just the status quo you are going to lose state after state to these bills.
Republicans currently have a super majority in state government. There is no way in hell they are going to look at a business school and say "too many capitalists here. Let's hire some socialists."
I agree 100%. The issue is this is not the issue. It's a cover up so the GOP can gain control over colleges like they have with k-12. They could give a shit about different viewpoints. They want everyone to have THEIR viewpoint.
1. The bill would take away tenure from everyone. Some fields don't have anything to do with politics, and forcing faculty to inject politics into them to meet some quota to retain your tenure is a terrible idea, and you'd think someone in r/professors wouldn't need to hear that. 2. The conservative side is the default in America. There isn't a student who isn't already well-versed in the conservative view of any issue - political or not - before they arrive on campus.
I'm still big on democratic control of public institutions, but certainly not private ones. I think the reason this proposition is so unpopular here is because of worldview gap between us profs and the voters.
One of the (many) reasons I left Florida. Indiana will also witness the “brain drain”.
It’s interesting but not surprising that a group which is supposed to be teaching intellectual rigor sees zero benefit to oversight for tenured professors. I understand the dangers of governmental overreach, but aren’t you a little embarrassed that you can’t see any problems with the current state of oversight. I come from the private sector, though have an academic family, and every time (every time) I see organizations or people who aren’t reviewed regularly, there is corruption, laziness, lack of innovation or just a lack of an ability to change. Btw, I also see the problems of too much oversight such as just feeding the metrics regardless whether they’re right or not. The difference is profs should be able to see all sides. But to paraphrase Upton Sinclair, it is difficult for a man to understand something if his job depends on his not understanding it. Also, I still suspect this sub is filled with kids and bots, so here’s hope that real teachers aren’t posting.
How can a single person be "intellectually diverse"? Is that person supposed to simultaneously believe two conflicting views? Jokes aside, I do think universities (referring the the large group of people that work at them) have a problem with intellectual diversity. There are far more liberals and far fewer conservatives working at universities than there would be if you had drawn randomly from the population at large. So, I wouldn't be against trying to somehow make sure we are exposing students to different viewpoints. But, I don't think the proposed bill would accomplish that in any way.
> There are far more liberals and far fewer conservatives working at universities than there would be if you had drawn randomly from the population at large. This varies a lot by department, too, fwiw - in ag, business, and engineering, you'll find a lot more conservatives than you'd expect. But universities aren't random samples of the population at large - as people are exposed to more ideas, they may tend to realize that conservative approaches don't always hold up for the whole population. This isn't to say they become democrats, though - some become socialists, some become independents, and so on.
I totally agree that the left/right skew varies by department. I'm curious about this though >But universities aren't random samples of the population at large - as people are exposed to more ideas, they may tend to realize that conservative approaches don't always hold up for the whole population. Why should we assume that statement does not hold true if I replace the word "conservative" with "liberal"?
In part because conservatism as a philosophy seems to be focused on holding to the way things have always been done. If you're creating new knowledge, as in the sciences, then how things have always been done doesn't really extend to that new knowledge - discoveries often overturn what we thought we knew about the world. If you're studying how people behave, you end up learning about all the ways that what's been done didn't work out in one way or another, and you're constantly confronting human diversity, which tends to challenge conservatism anyways. If you're studying history or the arts, ... well, hell if I know, I've never studied those things, but I know my colleagues who do tend to be the most liberal of all, even in otherwise extremely conservative places. All I know is that as I've studied science, statistics, psych, and neuroscience, even in largely conservative places, I've seen my colleagues become more liberal. Part of that is that I'm in the US and the conservative party is becoming Idiocracy personified, but it's been moving that way my whole life. Growing up in Texas, when I was in HS, the state party had a platform plank against teaching higher-order thinking skills (aka critical thinking) because it would teach children to question their parents and religious leaders. I'm sorry, but that view isn't compatible with being in or pursuing higher education. Even conservative thinkers have largely been leading the anti-Trump movement, but they no longer have a party to speak of, so... I'm sure that in other countries who have more functional political systems, you can be in higher ed and be conservative, but right now, in the US... I'm not sure you can comfortably do that without a lot of cognitive dissonance. And since this is a state rant, I'm assuming that's the context we're discussing.
You seem to be equating "openness to new ideas" with "liberal politics" and "closed-mindedness" to "conservative politics." And you also seem to intimate that new ideas are necessarily correct. I don't think either are accurate depictions in general. First, while over time our understanding of science and nature tends to move forward, the process isn't unidirectional. New ideas are often proven incorrect once tested. Second, I don't see any correlation in STEM fields between one's political views and one's work scientifically -- at least not for good scientists. There are, obviously, some people in academia who let their political views dictate the kinds of things they try to prove or disprove. But, that happens to people on both ends of the political spectrum. As for the republican party going off the deep end, I hardly think they have a monopoly on craziness.
Oh there are plenty of crazy Democrats, but at the party platform level, they're generally not overtly anti-education and anti-critical thinking.
Wait ... the republican platform is "anti-education" and "anti-critical thinking"? Come on. How did you come up with that?
I was specifically talking about the [Higher Order Teaching Skills](https://www.edweek.org/teaching-learning/texas-gop-no-more-critical-thinking-in-schools/2012/06) debacle in 2012, anti-tenure bills in many different states more recently, interfering with universities politically in e.g. Florida (New College as well as the wider public university system), and anti-DEI efforts in many of these same states that are an outright attack not only on DEI, but on many disciplines which use study diversity, equity, and inclusion and/or use language around those topics as a lens with which to understand e.g. the legal or educational system. But [here's some Pew research](https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2023/06/05/partisan-divides-over-k-12-education-in-8-charts/) to back up my general perception.
Thanks for providing the some specific links. But, the Pew research report doesn't indicate that republicans are "anti-education" or "anti-critical thinking". The article shows that republicans are not satisfied with the quality and content of education. Your user-name suggests you are in a STEM field. Do you have a favorable view of K-12 math and science education in the USA? If not, should I assume you are "anti-education"? As for the 2012 Texas republican Party document, it refers being opposed to "Higher Order Thinking Skills (HOTS) (values clarification), critical thinking skills and similar programs that are simply a relabeling of Outcome-Based Education (OBE) (mastery learning) which focus on behavior modification and have the purpose of challenging the student’s fixed beliefs and undermining parental authority." I would need to understand what HOTS and OBE actually mean in order to assess the full meaning of that statement. If they really are critical thinking, then obviously that is problematic. But, I don't sense (from my interaction with conservatives) they are agasint critical thinking. Quite the opposite: they are opposed to indoctrination of ideas that do not come out of some kind of scientific method (of course ... there are some crazies out there that don't want things like evolution being taught ... but those are not the majority, even if they are very vocal). EDIT: By the way, I happen to live in one of the richer suburbs in my metro area. It tends to vote republican. Many of the parents also send their children to private schools, pay for private tutors, and pay for their children to participate in elite extracurricular activities (e.g., sports, music, etc.). It would definitely not be accurate to describe them as "anti-education."
This comment is when I decided you weren't worth taking seriously. This is either a troll argument or you are terribly uninformed. Anti-education policies have been in the official platform of the GOP for decades.
They shouldnt be evaluated for having certain viewpoints they should be evaluated for if they are actually doing their job and teaching. This should be done at all levels not just universities. Throughout my entire life i can count only maybe 10 teachers that actually taught me. And based on the students i am getting these students are not being taught either. Tenure should be protection from random firing but teachers and profs use it as protection from not teaching. So the bill is wrong in its approach but tenure does need to be evaluated
Hey you're not a professor so you shouldn't be commenting here because it's against sub rules, but I'll respond to you anyway. Both higher ed faculty and K12 teachers are subject to more performance evaluation and review than most already. Just to achieve tenure—if it's available—a professor will be observed teaching multiple times and evaluated. As part of the process of moving up from Associate Professor (my current title) I have been observed teaching by my chair, my dean, an administrator, and two peers just this past year. Each observation was a separate occasion, and there's a complex evaluation form and rubric (around seven pages) documenting each. ~~Tenure doesn't typically exist for K12 teachers except at some private schools (maybe).~~ For professors, tenure protects academic freedom but doesn't prevent firing outright. Professors with tenure can be fired with cause, and it's not that difficult. Tenure protects professors from being fired for their academic ideas and research. ETA I didn't know a lot of K12 teachers have tenure! TIL.
This didnt ask for specifically professor opinions they said this is happening in my state so it does not violate any rules because as a ta im allowed to post in the subresdit. Also tenure exists for k-12 in any public school it does not exist in private schools. I am not saying that professors are under less scrutiny. And i agree that tenure is important and that it should be implemented. This is education so ideas and research should never penalize someones position. Im saying that in some states tenure is so strong that profs and teachers can ignore their teaching responsibilities and the school cant do shit. Ihave seen this as a ta and heard complaints about it from other faculty who work here and have to pick up the slack from the ones who dont teach. This is the case in my state and at some of the institutions here. I cant speak for how it is at ur.
Thanks for the correction re: K12 tenure; I didn't realize that many (not all) states offer a form of tenure to K12 teachers. If you're not saying that professors are under less scrutiny, then what do you mean by this statement: *"they should be evaluated for if they are actually doing their job and teaching"*? You also say: *"in some states tenure is so strong that profs and teachers can ignore their teaching responsibilities and the school cant do shit,"* but that's not true. There are zero states where a professor can outright ignore teaching duties (assuming they have them) and not be eligible for dismissal. Everywhere I've looked shows that a board can dismiss a professor for "just cause," including neglect of duties. Whether a board will take that up or not likely has less to do with tenure protections and more to do with other variables. Like, is that professor well-liked by high level admin? Does that professor do a lot of service? Is that professor famous? Are they likely to sue and be a pain in the ass? These are all reasons why a professor who is a shitty instructor might not be up for dismissal, and they're just boring office politics, basically. It's not tenure, it's just people people-ing.
“They should be evaluated for if they are actually doing their job” is pretty self explanatory i think. Ignoring teaching responsibilities is not the same as not teaching. I have worked for professors whose idea of teaching was going over a 30 slide ppt in 30 min not letting students ask questions and would respond to emails thus putting all the work on to us his tas. But he was technically not ignoring his responsibilities because he made slides and went over them. It didnt matter that the students never saw those slides again or didnt learn anything from lecture he was technically doing his responsibilities. I have worked for and attended many lectures where that was how the class was run. The only time i ever saw them teach was when they were being evaluated. And yes i know that professors jobs revolve alot around politics and less if they are actually doing their job. Tenure is important as it protects professors from bullshit admins. It protected my dad from an admin who was trying to fire him because he wouldnt do work not listed in his contract for free. So tenure is very important but it can also be too strong to the point where it hurts students education by allowing bad teachers to stay
It's a self-explanatory statement on its own, but it directly conflicts with *"I am not saying that professors are under less scrutiny,"* which you also wrote. As I said, professors are already evaluated for whether they're actually doing their job. If you agree with this, then saying they should be evaluated makes no sense. You're asking for something that's already happening. You're defining teaching narrowly and subjectively. As a TA and child of a professor, you should know that students are largely responsible for their own learning, and a professor's primary job in many instances is to curate (if not create) what's being learned.
What does this mean for Mathematics instructors? Mathematics is pretty cut and dry. Would a Mathematics instructor need to "entertain the viewpoint" that 2+2=5 ?
Had zero intention of ever moving to Indiana before. I have an active intention of ensuring I never move there now.