DrZoidberg
Contributor
So they hire a leading expert in a field and then people who are less experts in that field tell the expert how to do their job. What could possibly go wrong? Why not just fire the expert and just have a poll where students get to vote on what they want to be true?
NO! The administration should back the fuck off and not tell the professor how to do their job. That's a very important factor in keeping universities relevant.
And it's not a minor thing. Universities are increasingly becoming irrelevant. Skills are increasingly taught via on-line courses. But these are very specialized courses that don't give students a well rounded generally scientific training. But they do make the universities to lose income, which impacts teaching. This is not the time to fuck around with the standards of the education.
I think it's a good idea to sit back and let your people do their jobs. But they still work for you; you are responsible for getting the best out of them, and you are responsible if they underperform. A hands-off management approach does not mean that you can abdicate responsibility.
I don't think administrators should tell professors "how to do their job". But they sure as shit should step in when a professor does their job badly. If university administrators can figure out that a professor is an expert in their field, then they can also figure out whether or not the professor is doing a good job, whether that be teaching people or doing research.
No, they can't. How isn't that the Dunning-Kruger paradox. And I think you are wrong. The administrators getting involved is just undermining the authority of the lecturer. Especially when they getting involved is the result of pressure from students. Which is what the problem has been all along.
If I were a university administrator and one of my professors invited Milo Yiannopoulos, Richard Spencer, or Ann Coulter to give a guest lecture, I'd want a pretty compelling explanation as to why.
But what are you afraid of? What's the problem with having these as guest lecturers. That's what I don't understand. You said that it risks given them credibility. Well, they are famous and influential. It is interesting to hear them speak. Especially to people who think they are incarnations of evil. What I hear you say is that you wished they were less influential and that you think that deplatforming them will make them less influential. Nope. It just forces them into their ideological echo-chambers where their signals is boosted to infinity. Who benefits from that? We're always better off with having our laundry hung to dry in public. If you think these are as evil as you do, isn't it more important to invite them to speak? And give students the chance to ask them poignant questions? Isn't this exactly what universities are for?
I do think you also need to separate the humanities (soft sciences) from hard sciences. The hard sciences have none of the problems the softer sciences do. They're still free from the influence of PC cancel culture. For obvious reasons. But is is coming. Watson was booed out of his world speaking tour because he made the true statement that there's no scientific data to either deny or affirm the existence of racial differences on behaviour. It should have been an uncontroversial statement. Anybody with access to scientific databases could confirm the statement. Yet he was forced to cancel his tour.
This is a huge problem right now