On Tuesday, February 14, 2023 at 11:25:01 PM UTC, ltlee1 wrote:
Time for political/cultural rebalancing?
From the WSJ,
"A public university has a novel idea for creating a true marketplace for ideas.
Progressive politics has dominated elite universities since before the term woke was coined. But one university is trying to revive the academic ideal of a campus as a haven for free inquiry and debate.
...
According to a College Fix survey of 14 humanities and STEM departments at UNC, Democratic professors outnumber Republicans 16 to 1. In the English department, the ratio is 23 to 1 and in Chemistry 28-1. At private and Ivy League schools the ratios are
often steeper. By comparison, at Ohio State the faculty ratio is 7 to 1 and University of Nebraska-Omaha 5-1. Partisan affiliation isn’t always a measure of intellectual conformity, but it is indicative.
Most Americans have read about professors denied tenure for their political views or visiting speakers shouted down. Students too often feel obliged to self-censor for social as well as academic reasons, and those who do speak know they can face
harassment on social media as well as disciplinary action for words that offend dominant political sensibilities.
In 2015 the University of Chicago committed itself to freedom of expression on campus, and dozens of universities, including Columbia, Smith and Princeton, signed on to the Chicago Statement. Many have failed to live up to it, notably Princeton with
its mistreatment of former classics professor Joshua Katz.
In their new experiment, UNC will have students debate openly. “I don’t want to indoctrinate on the right anymore than I want to indoctrinate on the left,” says Mr. Preyer.
U.S. post-secondary education was once a great American cultural and competitive advantage, but it has deteriorated as progressive views and increasingly abstruse woke politics have taken over schools and departments. Too many university presidents and
boards have surrendered rather than speak up, even when core American principles like free speech are trampled on.
Credit to the UNC board for fighting for those principles and free inquiry. North Carolina at Chapel Hill is the nation’s oldest public university, and if change can happen there, maybe it can happen anywhere.
Appeared in the January 27, 2023, print edition as 'UNC vs. the Echo Chamber'.'"
One issue is of culture war which began decades ago is whether prejudice is inevitable and therefore must be accepted to some degree if one is not to close his or her mind.
The following from wikepedia's entry over Allan Bloom's 1987 book "The Closing of the American Mind":
"Throughout the book, he attacks the moral relativism that he claims has taken over American universities for the barrier it constructs to the notions of truth, critical thinking, and genuine knowledge. Bloom claims that students in the 1980s have
prioritized the immediate, blind relegation of prejudice as inferiority of thought, and therefore have closed their minds, as the title suggests, to asking the right questions, so that prejudice may be eradicated through logic and critical thinking, as
opposed to empty, baseless instinct.[citation needed] Bloom writes, "Prejudices, strong prejudices, are visions about the way things are. ... Error is indeed our enemy, but it alone points to the truth and therefore deserves our respectful treatment. The
mind that has no prejudices at the outset is empty."[3]
Wokedness, of course, is the view, one must wake up to ones prejudice and other nonsense first before one can open his or her mind.
--- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05
* Origin: fsxNet Usenet Gateway (21:1/5)