uni. prof, ask me anything
![[Post New]](/jforum/templates/default/images/icon_minipost_new.gif){kind=icon}
Anonymous
|
Anonymous
People in humanities have critical thinking skills. Why are you associating dumb conspiracy theorists with college professors? |
Anonymous
| I am sorry to say that there are several threads on DCUM that reveal an appalling ignorance of basic facts about our technology-based life, including, but not restricted to, the role of business aircraft, and the basic operations of cell phones. I assume that most people who post on DCUM are college-educated, so I wonder (1) where they got those dumb ideas -- and they are dumb -- or (2) what kind of "critical thinking," as the professor describes it, has led them to such beliefs. |
Anonymous
Op here: oh, boy. Leaving aside many of the gross inaccuracies or outright false statements in this post, you seem to have a very deficient view of human thinking and the good life if you think the "humanities" have no role. I'll just leave it at that and leave you to your rage. |
Anonymous
(Op here): Indeed. The pandemic, if it taught us anything, revealed how "I've done my research" bears little on whether one has gained any *real* understanding. |
Anonymous
I have no right to demand careful exposition on a free anonymous forum. But this is the type of shallow sloppy thinking that makes me skeptical of humanities. We could use religion to prevent science from becoming a tyranny. Or we could substitute sports, or video games, or my other favorite hobbies. "They are all equally vital." Critical studies, cultural anthropology, philosophy, and ethnic/victim studies are intellectually unimportant. I'm glad somebody translated the Rosetta Stone and wrote down history. Music, art, and religion thrive better outside the academy. You need more to justify a blank check to support every Babylonian pottery expert. |
Anonymous
|
What grade would you give this college advice board ?
|
Anonymous
You are a humanities professor. Please stay in your lane. Vaccines don't prevent transmission, but they DO prevent acquisition, which in turn means no transmission needs to be prevented. |
Anonymous
| OP, I assume you have tenure. Many people - especially those who have not achieved tenure-track positions - believe that the current system of tenure, which involves dedicating the bulk of the instructional budget to a few tenured individuals while the majority of credits are taught by non-tenured instructors (adjuncts, TA's, etc.) is unsustainable and represents a lot of what is wrong with academia today. Of course they (and I) would never say that to a tenured professor's face. What's your opinion on that matter? |
Anonymous
Historian here, and you might be interested in knowing that we don't "write down history." |
Anonymous
Not sure why you’re being such a defensive dick. Just because you’re so self-centered and think because YOU aren’t interested in talking about where they went to school or other parts of their background, that doesn’t mean others can’t be interested. I’ve been on both sides (grew up poor with working class family) and put myself through college and grad school. I’ve worked and been friends with people across all spectrum of society. I can say that more people talk about or show some interest in these things than do not. You seem to be the only weirdo that is finding some bizarre offense to the topic. I’d say that speaks more to your own insecurities than anything. |
Anonymous
Different poster: I'm a tenured professor in a non-humanities area. The original justification was that tenure protected professors from being fired for political reasons. This is overstated. However, several adjunct professors have been recently dismissed for minor slips that offended Black Lives Matter. It is efficient and sustainable to specialize. My dean can find many lecturers or non-tenure-track faculty to cover courses cheaply. Some of them are excellent teachers. But you need people who are permanently committed to the school to recruit, hire, and nurture junior faculty, develop new programs, etc. I am more committed to my field than my school. If the school does not offer security, then I will act like an independent contractor. The biggest threat is a dean. My new dean wanted us to do cryptocurrency and blockchain. Now wants climate change research. Next year, it will be something else. Deans don't last long. They have incentive to cut expensive faculty and hire short-term lecturers to balance the budget. After a few years, the whole curriculum deteriorates as new lecturers don't know what is in the curriculum and don't prepare students for subsequent courses. |
Anonymous
Yet, you come on a forum and expound upon how much better prepared private school students are. I would agree on some level, they are more prepared to bull sh!t professors and have been well versed in how to charm authority. They are well aware of their privilege and how to use it. |
Anonymous
Academically Adrift: Limited Learning on College Campuses reported many colleges fail to improve critical thinking. I don't see why humanities teach "critical thinking" better than other areas. Some people consider themselves cultured if they know about ancient Greeks or Renaissance literature. Many public intellectuals misunderstand basic economics from the 1800's. They don't understand how public key cryptography can be secure. They don't understand the 2022 Nobel Physics experiment that shows reality is not local. They don't know how banks, hedge funds, and futures markets work. There has been more change in science and culture in the past 100-200 years than in previous history. critical thinking and the way many of today’s academics define it can be traced back to the post-structuralist critical theories that invaded our English departments ... . [D]econstruction ... has been profoundly influential, not only on English faculty but also on their colleagues in the other humanities and even the social sciences. (Consider, for example, the current popularity of ethnography, a form of social science “research” that combines fieldwork with subjective story-telling.) Unfortunately, those disciplines are also where most critical thinking instruction supposedly occurs in our universities. (Actually, other fields, such as the hard sciences and engineering, probably do a better job of teaching true thinking skills—compiling and evaluating evidence, formulating hypotheses based on that evidence, testing those hypotheses for accuracy before arriving at firm conclusions. They just don’t brag about it as much.) https://www.jamesgmartin.center/2017/03/college-graduates-still-cant-think/ |
Anonymous
Economist here. History has a strong empirical component, and analyzes evidence. My favorite example is showing that Homer's "Odyssey" originated in oral tradition. Historians are experts at documenting what happened, but not at explaining why it happened, because they do not observe counterfactuals. Economics has developed statistical methods that address this. "if railroads did not exist in 1890, then they probably do not exist now, for there is no record of them being invented in the last ninety-two years." https://www.jstor.org/stable/1816570 |