Slashdot Mirror

Really? Who is trying to deplatform those they don't agree with? It isn't the right.

Yes it is.

Incidents at Harvard and Catholic Universities challenge idea that liberals are the only ones preventing ideas from being voiced on campuses.

"The Hosty case is only part of the growing conservative attack on freedom of speech on campus."

Data shows a surprising campus free speech problem: left-wingers being fired for their opinions

Oh please.

A. Man bites dog. You know perfectly well that the vast tide is in the other direction.

B. Seriously, Catholic universities? What would you expect? I don't think anybody would object to explicitly Leftist Universities requiring leftism from their faculty.

Really? Who is trying to deplatform those they don't agree with? It isn't the right.

Yes it is.

Incidents at Harvard and Catholic Universities challenge idea that liberals are the only ones preventing ideas from being voiced on campuses.

"The Hosty case is only part of the growing conservative attack on freedom of speech on campus."

Data shows a surprising campus free speech problem: left-wingers being fired for their opinions

"A People's History of the United States"? Yeah, that made it to what, #2 on the list of least credible history books in print for the History News Network?

A book so bad that the President of Purdue University issued a statement which said he “wanted to make certain that Howard Zinn's textbook, which represents a falsified version of history, was not being foisted upon our young people" and "No one need take my word that my concerns were well-founded. Respected scholars and communicators of all ideologies agree that the work of Howard Zinn was irredeemably slanted and unsuited for teaching to schoolchildren.”

Try getting your history from real history books based on primary sources, not left-wing nonsense designed to push an agenda by misciting secondary sources.

What the world needs is more "Humanities" flunkies who can't pay for their basket weaving and feminist studies degrees

People who graduate with a 4-year humanities degree are basically just as employable and just as happy with their jobs as those with STEM degrees.

The other thing about getting yourself a humanities degree is that you aren't as easily socially engineered as someone who spends all his time with technical stuff and doesn't learn anything about people. The biggest suckers are those who are arrogant in their ignorance. I'm looking at you Gerald.

It's much more complicated than that. Sure, easy access to loans can lead to trouble--e.g., the housing market crash in 2007-2010--but another major contributor is that public higher education is becoming that in name only, as largely Republican-led state government decrease funding to public higher education in favor of tax cuts:

https://www.insidehighered.com...

But it goes beyond both of these as well, and is, in part, fueled by this issue. Universities want to attract students, and nowadays, students want their own suites, a climbing wall, a lazy river, WiFi that works in absolutely every nook and cranny on campus, mobile access to every university resource (grades, registration, coursework, events), etc. All of these things a.) cost money, b.) were not even a consideration a few decades ago (e.g., are additional expenses), and are rarely covered by states, so universities jack up student fees and tuition to cover such amenities. Furthermore, when university housing gets more expensive, rentals in the area get slightly less expensive. It all becomes something of an arms race between universities, who now have PR and Marketing groups that oversee admissions and registration.

Oh, and increased reliance on loans and federal funds leads to an increased need for compliance, which leads to more administration, which leads to higher costs, as one of the single most expensive aspect of a university is managing human capital (personnel, HR, benefits, etc.).

Perhaps you could share your experience? The more we know, the better we can deal with it.

Sure, would you like that list alphabetical, or in chronological order?

It's going to take me a while to type up an entire encyclopaedia anyway, so in the meantime here's a little primer for you:

https://www.insidehighered.com...

This also works out because Whites and Asians have an average IQ that's close to, and perhaps slightly above, 100.

Whites, asians, blacks, and latinos all have IQ scores that are close to 100.

YES, that part IS disproportionate. And the causes appear to be, at least in part, sociological in nature.

Prove it.

CAN DO!

Factors Impacting Women's Participation in STEM Fields.

Women in STEM: Challenges and determinants of success and well-being.

Why Female Students Leave STEM.

That was like 2 minutes of google cutting and pasting. You didn't really think this one through did you? "Gender studies" as part of humanities is one of those things that bored people go on and on about. And all I have to show is that there are SOME factors. Unless you can show that NOTHING in any of these papers and articles has any impact, you've got to yield to this one.

But seriously, nature vs nurture is an old debate that obviously isn't one-sided. You ARE a dumbfuck if you think it's all one or the other.

. Personality is also genetic. I don't know enough about the relationship between genetics and personality just yet to comment on if this has some correlation to race so I tend to leave that one alone.

Too late.

Nature isn't outdated. At least I don't think so. Our nature is fine tuned to survival

It's tuned to survive in a hunter-gatherer society that fucks at 15, most babies die before 5, and most people never see more than 200 people in their lifetime. Times have changed.

Supporting girls in STEM to the exclusion of boys is sexist.

I don't. As stated. Try reading shit instead of shoveling it into my mouth.

How about instead of worrying about what race and gender the people in these occupations are we simply allow people to choose freely which jobs they want?

We do. This is a highschool class. Kids are not adults and should be guided towards good paths. FURTHERMORE, taking AP comSci is also a choice for these girls.

Of what?

I wrote before what you convinced me of believing.

Yeah, yeah, grammar and geography. Whelp, you've convinced me you're a dumb fuck and an ass. Listen, Peterson is a smart guy and I believe a lot of what he says. He's careful not to step over the line from fact to opinion. You're not. Regurgitating his statements and adding your own interpretation isn't going so well for you. It makes you look not only like an idiot, but a racist sexist idiot.

Asian americans, 6% of the population, are at 36% at Google.

Harvard faced the same "Asians have higher scores than any other race" problem, tried to address it with "personality" scores, got sued.

It is interesting to note that Asian-American SAT scores improved by 54 points since 2006, while for other races they dropped (for whites only modestly, by 6 points);
source

So, why the hell don't we give the little snowflakes all 4.0 GPA, and just let them declare themselves as whatever they identify as.

Given that grades aren't earned any more, why on esrth are we studying ways for people to learn things - that is not what it is about now. You go to college, attempt to destroy your liver and enjoy the college lifestyle, and get all A's.

Realistically, crypto is likely to yield a better result than their humanities, arts, social science education. Looking at this chart... chart it appears to me there are other students making worse choices. At least the investment is unlikely to drop to zero value.

Then it shouldn't be too hard to find citations. I'm not seeing anything indicating Kathy Griffin is educated or has an advanced degree.
Katie Rich seems to have attended a fine school.

Both seemed to experience pushback from both liberals and conservatives and apologized.

Contrast that with this...
or this...
or this...

Ted Nugent is still a darling of the right, Liz Trotta apologized, but faced no disciplinary action.

Way to wish away the reality of the situation. Yes, extremists - like crazy lefties who want to silence speech

You appear to have an extreme case of irony deficiency. You should get that looked at.

"Crazy censoring lefties" is a talking point of your particular tribe of extremists who are desperate to accuse everybody else of your own crimes.

Rapper Common Disinvited By University As Commencement Speaker Over Song Lyrics
Vanderbilt puts Duke Med alum on leave after complaint about kneeling to protest white supremacy - The Chronicle
CBS Fires Jewish VP for Anti-White Comments Follows Las Vegas Shooting – Occidental Dissent
Drexel censures professor for white genocide tweet.
Firing of Shirley Sherrod - Wikipedia
After news reports on tweets, queer advocate fired from Claremont Colleges
Two Liberal Professors Fired after Making Controversial, Anti-White Remarks |
Texas State Student Who Wrote Anti-White Op-Ed Fired Off School Paper
L'Oreal Drops Transgender Model After 'All White People' Racism Post
Texas State newspaper fires anti-white column's author as backlash escalates | Fox News
Nurse fired for post suggesting sons of white women be ‘sacrificed’ | New York Post
Lawmaker pushing legislation to refund fans angered by anthem protests
Good News: Trump Protestors Accused Of 'Hiding Behind The First Amendment' Acquitted | Techdirt
Fox refuses to air tax ad with Trump impersonator - POLITICO
Profane anti-Trump sticker sparks free-speech debate in Texas | Fox News
Tennessee Baptist church that hired female pastor can't vote - WRCBtv.com | Chattanooga News, Weather & Sports
Why I was banned from the campus of Liberty University | Religion News Service
Why Liberty University Kicked an Anti-Trump Christian Author Off Campus - Th

The college system been successfully corporatized; that is, taken over by pointy-haired administrators instead of educators. The motivation becomes simply more students/money/diplomas, and the professors who care about upholding disciplinary standards have less and less say in the matter. Having more unprepared students in the classroom means more money/prestige for administrators, at the price of more ongoing nightmares for classroom educators.

See Ginsburg, The Fall of the Faculty: The Rise of the All-Administrative University and Why It Matters.

(his race - you think similar views expressed in this scenario by a fashionable race would have resulted in a firing)?

Saying "fashionable race" makes you sound like a really stable genius.

And conservative-correctness is everywhere. For example, this guy was fired for saying all he wanted for xmas was white genocide. This university newspaper fired a reporter for an anti-white column. This nurse was fired for anti-white tweets. L'Oreal fired this spokesmodel for her anti-white post on facebook. Shirley Sherrod was fired by the Obama administration after Breitbart quoted her out of context to make her look racist. This professor was fired after saying it was OK for a BLM protest to ban white people from joining. Pomona fired the head of their LGBTQ resources center for saying the police enforce white supremacy.

(his race - you think similar views expressed in this scenario by a fashionable race would have resulted in a firing)?

Saying "fashionable race" makes you sound like a really stable genius.

And conservative-correctness is everywhere. For example, this guy was fired for saying all he wanted for xmas was white genocide. This university newspaper fired a reporter for an anti-white column. This nurse was fired for anti-white tweets. L'Oreal fired this spokesmodel for her anti-white post on facebook. Shirley Sherrod was fired by the Obama administration after Breitbart quoted her out of context to make her look racist. This professor was fired after saying it was OK for a BLM protest to ban white people from joining. Pomona fired the head of their LGBTQ resources center for saying the police enforce white supremacy.

It appears this meant that books should be removed before the carry-on was scanned as part of the security check, and not that the books were not allowed back in the carry-on after the scanning and security check was complete.

It was likely a part of this pilot the TSA did, but United didn't get the message that the pilot was over with, or they didn't know the scope of the pilot:
https://www.insidehighered.com...

Look what happens on the college campuses - no one gets arrested for the violence

False. http://www.dailycal.org/2017/0...

https://www.insidehighered.com...

http://komonews.com/news/local...

Liberal media pretty much ignoring the violent left protests

Also false. See prior links.

Politicians regularly using heated rhetoric

Like how Trump endorsed violence throughout his campaign?

But overall, there are too many idiots on both sides that refuse to listen to the other sides ideas

Do not attempt to make a false equivalence here. The only reason it might seem that way is because one side has a massive persecution complex fed by an outrage machine dedicated to hyping that noise for profit and the other 'side' (described as the reality-based community by Karl Rove) treat such as cases as just another minor news event.

NYC: Linda Sarsour Faces Death Threats Ahead of Her CUNY Commencement Speech | Democracy Now!
Princeton professor who criticized Trump cancels events, saying she's received death threats
Shakespeare in the Park featured a Trump-like Julius Caesar, and right-wing media freaked out - Vox
Greg Gianforte Pleads Guilty To Assaulting A Journalist : The Two-Way : NPR
GOP pressured NPR into firing a journalist who reported on their bigotry / LGBTQ Nation
Lawmakers across the US are finding ways to turn protesting into a crime - Vox
Tom Price commends police who arrested journalist asking questions
GOP rep goes after activist by writing letter to employer | TheHill
Sinclair Requires TV Stations to Air Segments That Tilt to the Right - The New York Times
Oklahoma Governor Signs Anti-Protest Law Imposing Huge Fines on “Conspirator” Organizations
FDA Denies Ordering Employees to Switch Television Monitors to Fox News Channel
FCC to investigate, 'take appropriate action' on Colbert’s Trump rant | TheHill
Jury Convicts Woman Who Laughed At Jeff Sessions During Senate Hearing | HuffPost
Fordham U. blocked formation of pro-Palestinian group: suit - NY Daily News

So where's the evidence that it's reduced sexual assaults? There's plenty of evidence that it's ruined more than very few men's lives.

Random search result immediately returns..
https://www.insidehighered.com...

Let alone when you start looking at shit like Emma Sulkowicz, who made an entire fucking career out of fucking over an innocent man.

Title IX is ostensibly a good thing. The "Dear Colleague" letter that threatened the funding for colleges that didn't use it to fuck over their male students is horrific and causing massive damage to men and their lives.

I don't want women to be assaulted. I don't think Title IX protects women at all and protecting women is not an excuse to destroy the education and prospects of men.

There are numbers on this subject. We really don't need to guess or say "Well it goes both ways cause I know some people on both sides" or "we don't really know do we?" Because we do: conservatives tend to have less education while liberals tend to have more. Not an absolute, sure, but there's clear bias.

The urban government useful vs rural government bad thing is one factor probably, but there's definitely an element of tribalism going on in the GOP today that causes some uneducated rural whites to vote for Trump. And the GOP has definitely undergone a brain drain where all they stand for is saying "no" to anything besides tax cuts.

American conservatism hasn't just embraced nonsense, they've constructed an entire alternate information ecology of nonsense. From alternate-news like fox, breitbart and infowars to alternate-academia aka "think tanks."

Its all quite logical actually - when reality conflicts with ideology you can either change your ideology to incorporate reality, or you can try to change reality. American conservatives have opted for the later. It works great in the short run because nobody has ever gone broke telling people what they want to hear. But in the long run, well you can only out-run reality for so long before it catches up to you.

Not unlike the way the church doubled-down on geocentrism in the face of Gallileo's research disproving it, but after massive amounts of organizational cognitive dissonance they finally came around to accepting the facts of the matter. Its no surprise the people indulging in alternate-realities today also very much live a faith-based lifestyle.

And the reason tuition rates are going up is because of the increase in the money supply in the higher education system, which itself is entirely caused by the increased availability and ease of acquiring of student loans.

That's a big factor. But you're also overlooking that in the last ~25 years, most states have slashed state funding to state universities.

So all these students in the "second tier" of the system are getting a double whammy. These kids would mostly be from what used to be the middle class as opposed to most of those going to an ivy league school.

This myth won't die, will it? The funding for state schools has nothing to do with it.

https://www.insidehighered.com...

What I've found in the past when looking at long-term trends is that when state funding of universities doesn't rise, they raise tuition to "make up for it". But when the state funding goes up in the next year or whatever, the tuition never goes back down. So we have a ratchet effect.

State schools are well funded. Like most universities, they're also dramatically overstaffed, with a bunch of burdensome administrative staff members and no more faculty than before. That needs to change.

My only day job was working at Indiana University. One year they went nuts because there was a big cut in state funding. In reality, the state wasn't raising funding at the same level as the year before. We were still getting more money than last year, just not as much more as they wanted.

So we were told no pay raises, can't afford them. The morning that I was to talk to my manager about the pay raise I was walking in when I noticed the workers out front pulling up the flowers in front of our building to plant new ones. So when my manager tried to bullshit me about the "funding cuts" I shushed her and said "You know, it's funny, I *hear* about this lack of money, yet on my way in to work this morning I saw that the university is paying some guys to pull up perfectly beautiful flowers and plant new ones. See, if there really was some sort of budget crisis they wouldn't be pulling up flowers out front, because that doesn't help the university. I, on the other hand, do. So, since we're not acting like there's a budget crisis I'll assume it's made up bullshit and I'll be getting a raise this year." Yes, I was a dick. That was my largest single year raise during my four year tenure there.

I know a thing or two about this subject.

You're incapable of being a ballerina. Women are capable of becoming STEM professionals. This should be obvious, but to a lot of slashdotters, it seems like it is not.

Back on topic, there's some evidence to suggest women don't become STEM professionals because of choices they make in classes early on. In high school, I had some idea I wanted to be a scientist, but I had no idea what I was getting into. If someone had said "Hey, you should be a lawyer" after a boring math class, I might have ended up as a lawyer. Kids in high school often don't really know what they want to do. Things like "My friend doesn't like math or science so I don't either" can strongly influence career choices. It's disappointing that making kids take math classes doesn't have an effect on those mindsets. I think we need more scientific types, though I am biased.

If a work is under a Creative Commons / Free / Libre / Open Source license, then others can incrementally improve it to be accessible. Forcing the original author or publisher to do so themselves ignores the value of sharing works that others can make better.

It also makes me wonder about a culture of victimhood instead of a culture of agency. I say that prompted in part by the request for monetary *damages* by the plaintiffs for not being able to access the content in the form they preferred (compared to hiring someone to transform it for them) which to me seems to show bad intent. People offer free materials you are not required to interact with but they are not good enough for you for some reason so you are a victim. While *legally* the plaintiffs may have a case as the ADA law is written in the DOJ's view, the result feels morally wrong considering the works were free (and many others charge for such works) -- especially compared to the plaintiffs just saying thank you and improving the free works themselves or hiring others to do so or finding volunteers or philanthropists to help with that.

That said, I remain sympathetic to the request to make materials more accessible to those with disabilities or any other limitation in accessing the content (including things like language barriers). This is a wealthy planet with also a lot of people looking for work to do -- and so globally we should have plenty of resources to improve free resources as needed for people with any sort of special needs. That we choose to spend those resources instead by planning to blow everyone up using nuclear energy to fight over obsolete oil fields and such is a tragedy of modern times. As is the irony of using solar panels to ensure launch readiness at the nuclear missile silos...

More on this:
https://www.insidehighered.com...
http://www.adatitleiii.com/tag...
"The DOJ concluded that many of UC Berkeley's online videos did not have proper closed captions, and has threatened to file an enforcement lawsuit against the school unless it agrees to enter into a consent decree, caption all of its online content, and pay damages to individuals with disabilities who had been injured by UC Berkeley's failure to provide accessible online videos. ... The DOJ's position in its findings letter to UC Berkeley -- that a covered entity has a duty to ensure that content that it makes available to the public free of charge is accessible -- certainly pushes the boundaries of the ADA and has not been tested in the courts. If covered entities must in fact ensure that all of the information that they put out for the world to use for free (no matter how remotely related to their central mission) or face lawsuits and DOJ investigations, there may well be a significant reduction in the amount of information provided on the web for public consumption."

I do think it's worth pointing out that these are fairly old course videos - up to 10 years old - and the university is in the process of revising them. One imagines that the new videos will be more ADA compliant, due in part to lawsuits like this. They may not have been super excited about maintaining both legacy and new versions of the content, and happy to have an excuse to do away with the old stuff.

Has the university specifically said they were doing that? I do know they said that you will have to log in to see new ones. So people from outside Berkley probably won't be able to access them https://www.insidehighered.com...

I suppose that students from Washington won't be able to see the videos in order to launch another lawsuit.

It's not surprising, colleges have been weakening their standards for graduates for a generation. For example, you can get an English degree without ever reading Shakespeare. You can't even find a rhetoric class at many universities these days, and if you want public speaking experience you're better off at toastmasters (but that was once a common requirement). Foreign language and math requirements are dropping as well. In computer science, you can graduate with a degree without ever understanding how a computer works. In some cases, I've seen CS graduates who didn't feel comfortable programming. These are problems.

Then there is grade inflation. Which is fine if it corresponded to an increase in the skill level of graduates, but it doesn't. Because of the way student evaluations work, a professor who pushes students to work harder will end up with bad ratings. Too much homework? Bad rating. Hard tests? Bad rating. Whereas the clown teacher is entertaining, and gets a raise. Over time, there is evolutionary pressure downwards.

Then of course, students want to have fun in college. If I were designing a college, it would be like a monastery. Not many people would enjoy that, I admit. However, it encourages the universities to build new facilities, rock climbing gyms and saunas and such. Which aren't necessarily bad, but you can see these universities are not competing on the quality of their academics.

Political speech mostly, and the expression of ideas are the most protected.

That's a very vague answer...

The sad reality is, once you accept even a seemingly innocuous infringement — such as, for example, that famous example of yelling "fire" (or "gun!") in a crowd, you start down a very steep and slippery slope. For example, Trump is — according to millions of Americans — a very dangerous man to this country, his election promising to be a disaster far more dangerous than a handful of deaths in a panicked crowd of any theater. He is also a racist, is not he? Ergo, Trump's speech, however political, should be curtailed, his followers suppressed. (Wait for AC follow-ups here expressing agreement with this sentence.)

If you think, this is an unlikely and asinine scenario, you haven't been paying attention. There are articles and educated opinions out there already proposing a ban on "hate speech" in general (such as on this, supposedly "Liberal" web-site) and on pro-Trump speech in particular... Other perfectly respectable countries ban "hate speech" already — even that of politicians.

One should be extremely careful accepting new arguments for infringing more speech — and always seek to get rid of existing ones.

you can't say your snake oil contains unicorn tears, cures cancer

A Republic (and a Democracy) can survive such bogus claims being legal. They are a nuisance, but not a threat.

Now? The right wing have always accused the ACLU of having a liberal bias.

And you think that is "odd"?

The ACLU’s Communist, Atheist Roots
The ACLU’s untold Stalinist heritage

They aren't quite as bad as they started, but they still are trying to drive American society towards its vision, which is very different than that of the Founders.

Then again, I'm not sure there is anything they haven't accused of having a liberal bias.

I'm curious, have you even investigated to see if there might be anything to it?

Survey: 7 percent of reporters identify as Republican
Republicans’ media bias claims boosted by scarcity of right-leaning journalists

Survey shocker: Liberal profs admit they’d discriminate against conservatives in hiring, advancement
Moving Further to the Left

Lawyers are more liberal than general population, study finds; what about judges?

Do you think we need to cover unions? Civil servants?

And if you have the curiosity, you might find a surprise or two, or three.

Some places to find new perspectives:
National Review
Weekly Standard
Commentary
Reason
Instapundit
Dennis Prager / Prager U
Hugh Hewitt

Agreed, consider this book by Scherer and Anson: Community Colleges and the Access Effect: Why Open Admissions Suppresses Achievement.

Since at least the 1990s (when I first became aware of them). Basically the modus operandi is you found a school in some field where students can get college loans, preferably government-backed since a lot of the students aren't very credit-worthy. The students apply and are accepted into your school, pay their tuition with government or government-guaranteed student loans, and you "educate" them in the promised field. Net effect is you get the loan money, student gets the debt, and the government is on the hook for any debt the students can't pay back. You're effectively using the students to launder the money you're receiving from the government (they are listed as the recipient, not you).

The problem is this is the exact same MO as a legit school. There are supposed to be accrediting organizations which audit the schools' programs and confirm that they are legitimately teaching students marketable skills. But some of these accrediting organizations aren't very good and should've been removed from the authorized list decades ago. Basically the same problem that led to the housing bubble - the bond credit rating agencies which were supposed to investigate mortgage-backed investments (because the average investor/student has nowhere near the resources or skill necessary for a through investigation) shirked their duties and just rubber stamped them as low-risk when they were anything but.

It's ok to put a high-performance engine into your car. But you damn well better be sure the instruments and gauges monitoring that engine are working properly, lest it blow up on you.

Accreditation has already been heavily compromised in order to suck up student loan money.

Is this only true of national accrediting agencies, such as the infamous ACICS (which the Department of Education will likely shut down), or also true of the regional accrediting agencies that oversee traditional universities?

For ages and generations an artist (writer, composer, singer, dancer, painter, what have you) had to be either independently wealthy or have a rich sponsor to create.

Cheap replication (coupled with strong copyrights and intellectual property laws) have helped, but it still requires a strong business acumen in addition to artistic talent for an artist to prosper.

If, indeed, computers and robots take up more of the drudgery in the next industrial revolution, the creative jobs may proliferate... And I don't mean simply people majoring in Arts, who then "sell out" to earn more — the actual artists. People, who want to be musicians today, but are (mediocre) programmers instead, because music does not pay... Maybe, it will?

Supposedly, AIs will be able to create art too, but I suspect, people will eventually treat such creations — deservingly or not — the way art-reproductions are treated today.

(To spoil the impression this post may have created in your mind, I'll point out, that this all may happen just as the people pushed to STEM by government enter the workforce...)

The NSF is usually very careful about who it gives money to; only something like 10% of funding request are granted. For those who are curious, the basic grant information on this grant is available from the NSF:

http://www.nsf.gov/awardsearch...

The grant was done through the Directorate for Social, Behavioral and Economic Sciences (specifically the division of Social and Economic Sciences) -- as opposed to the Geosciences Directorate, which I believe normally handles the climate change work. (The NSF is divided into different parts for funding different areas.)

FWIW, the house science committee has long been working to cut the budget for the Directorate for Social, Behavioral and Economic Sciences. I'm sure that good work gets funded by that directorate, but it sure does make me pissed that a BS grant like this gets funded, while more useful grants in applied physics (my area) don't get funded.

I wouldn't pin this bad grant on the NSF as a whole. Hopefully it's the exception for that directorate rather than the rule.

FIRE does take a lot of those cases, but yeah your post is pretty ignorant and downright incorrect. Let me list a few: 1) Defending a self-described socialist - http://web.archive.org/web/200...
2) Student suspended for reading a book from school library on the downfall of hte KKK - http://www.thefire.org/article...
3) Defending a student who'd been unilaterally expelled over a joke - http://chronicle.com/article/F...
4) Defending an atheist college professor - http://insidehighered.com/news...
5) Calling out Depaul for not recognizing a pro-marijauna group - http://thefire.org/article/123...
6) FIRE calls out university for denying an LGBT group school recognition - https://www.thefire.org/fire-l...

I can go on if you want. Lots of these cases do seem skewed toward benefitting white males, but if you look at the actual cases well you'd see why. Lots of the decisions they draw FIRE's ire are fucking stupid, short-sighted, and somehow scraped their way out of a poorly run administration meeting.

So let's be clear: pretty much all of these situations are completely unacceptable, and most disturbingly they show a tendency for much of these sorts of problems to occur on the left, what essentially amounts to the "illiberal left" http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2015/01/liberals-and-the-illiberal-left/384988/. However, FIRE's own biases are coming into play in this list, in that every example they decide to include is on the left or has no political aspect. But there were a lot of rimilar activities with an apparently right-wing bent, such as the situation at Wheaton College https://www.insidehighered.com/news/2016/01/06/wheaton-illinois-moves-fire-professor-who-wore-hijab. It may be that FIRE's top list is still more of an issue for legitimate reasons because many of these universities are large, public universities and thus engaging in trampling on free speech is even more serious, but it does seem like FIRE's own biases may be having a role in what they've decided to highlight.

However, the general upshot should be clear: trampling on free speech is not ok. And we should support free speech whether or not it is speech we agree with. Universities must be bastions of free expression for them to effectively do their jobs. And groups of all sorts should remember that even if they have power now to censor others, they may not always be the ones in power.

So to be clear, private colleges (not all) *can* and do stifle free speech and are exempt from many parts of Title XIV or free speech restrictions. Thus concentrating on a private school is pretty dopey. Granted if they accept federal funds in any capacity they have to adhere to some part (not that I know them offhand).

When a publicly funded institution violates constitutional laws, it is a much bigger deal as they are AGENTS OF THE STATE. FIRE concentrating on large public institutions makes perfect sense because it affects far more people than private institutions and they shouldn't even be *thinking* of doing stuff like this, yet do anyway.

So let's be clear: pretty much all of these situations are completely unacceptable, and most disturbingly they show a tendency for much of these sorts of problems to occur on the left, what essentially amounts to the "illiberal left" http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2015/01/liberals-and-the-illiberal-left/384988/. However, FIRE's own biases are coming into play in this list, in that every example they decide to include is on the left or has no political aspect. But there were a lot of rimilar activities with an apparently right-wing bent, such as the situation at Wheaton College https://www.insidehighered.com/news/2016/01/06/wheaton-illinois-moves-fire-professor-who-wore-hijab. It may be that FIRE's top list is still more of an issue for legitimate reasons because many of these universities are large, public universities and thus engaging in trampling on free speech is even more serious, but it does seem like FIRE's own biases may be having a role in what they've decided to highlight.

However, the general upshot should be clear: trampling on free speech is not ok. And we should support free speech whether or not it is speech we agree with. Universities must be bastions of free expression for them to effectively do their jobs. And groups of all sorts should remember that even if they have power now to censor others, they may not always be the ones in power.

So what kind of evidence and investigation went into those claims of "feces swastika" and "klansmen making death threats" at that Georgia university? You know, the one where some girl was caught fabricating a phony threat? Or were those initial claims just taken at face value, because it was members of a majority being accused by a members of a minority, which seems to be hip these days?

"Make it about “political correctness run amok”: For instance, you might open the article with the transgender students’ protesting the Person of Stature’s University talk. But then you will pan back and show that this is but one instance among many in a much larger and disturbing trend sweeping the nation—aka, “political correctness running amok.” (I am not sure why political correctness is always “running amok” as opposed to other synonymous phrases, but just roll with it.) And at this point, you can simply provide readers with a laundry list of seemingly similar incidents of activists and minority groups taking things way too far with their “political correctness” and “censorship.” For examples of this laundry-list approach, see recent high profile pieces by Jonathan Chait, Michelle Goldberg, and Caitlin Flanagan (there are countless others—The Atlantic alone seems to be churning out one or two of these per month!). The benefit of this approach is that you don’t have to go too in depth about any specific issue (e.g., interviewing all the parties involved, accurately conveying their differing perspectives, etc.)—you can just hastily depict all of them as being outrageous. Additionally, this allows you to conflate some potentially legitimate issues (e.g., protests of the Person of Stature) with a bunch of random mean things that random people (who have no stature) have said on Twitter." https://medium.com/@juliaseran...
"When people rail against political correctness, they're usually stating that it has run amok." http://www.dummies.com/how-to/...
"Political Correctness Run Amuck!" http://reflectionsfromtheburg....
"On the other hand, I do think political correctness has run amuck" http://greginhollywood.com/jer...
"There are those who claim that political correctness has run amuck." http://www.ferris.edu/HTMLS/ne...
"Flag defenders: Political correctness has run amok." https://www.dailyadvance.com/n...
“the clearest example of political correctness run amok that I have seen in quite some time.” http://knoxblogs.com/humphreyh...
"Political correctness run amuck again." http://forum.woodenboat.com/sh...
"Has political correctness really 'run amok' on college campuses?" http://talk.collegeconfidentia...
"Political Correctness Run Amok" http://www.newsmax.com/Freind/...
"Has political correctness really 'run amok' on college campuses?" https://www.washingtonpost.com...
"Has Political Correctness Run Amok?" https://www.insidehighered.com...
"In Fort Collins, political correctness run amok"

Healthcare costs increase are mainly due to a lack of universal coverage

If this were the reason, we would've seen sharp increases before WW2 as well. We did not. Fail.

Working with the government is much simpler, which saves time, which saves money

That may be, because the government has unlimited pockets — if they run short, they can always take more money from taxpayers.

I've not only learned this in class

Ah, so you are still under the influence of the Illiberalism — college professors are overwhelmingly Left and getting worse. Themselves overwhelmingly paid by the government, their solutions to most problems are inevitably Statist as well. It will take you years to shake off their influence — until then discussions of such topics with you aren't going to be productive...

Our complicated private insurance healthcare system is extremely wasteful.

Because it is not really "private" — the heavy regulations, mandates, and the government-enforced absence of competition is keeping it inefficient. The health-care market in general — and the insurance market in particular — aren't really free: the barrier to entry is enormous — an Alabama insurer, for example, can not sell policies to Tennessee residents. Instead of using the Commerce-clause to force States to open-up their markets for health-insurance, the Federal government is looking the other way — since 1945... Any corporation will get slow and inefficient in the absence of competition — it may, indeed, become worse than government in that case.

You seem to be under some illusions about the working conditions of University professors. Most of your professors are adjuncts, working part time for less than minimum wage.

You're upset because your professor didn't contact you way before the first class to tell you what the expectations were? Guess what? The University probably hadn't even gotten around to hiring her yet. And even if they had, they reserved the right to say "just kidding" and cancel it at the last minute.

You want someone to blame for the poor quality of your education? It's not your professors. It's the "dooshbags" they are working for.

I am sorry to hear that you are out an extra $50 for the cost of a new textbook. Your professor, who makes about $20,000 a year by working at three different schools with no benefits, no job security and no support from their employer, knows what that feels like.

Similar issues have shown up in other fields. Psychology has had serious faillures to replicate many major studies http://www.slate.com/articles/health_and_science/science/2014/07/replication_controversy_in_psychology_bullying_file_drawer_effect_blog_posts.html and when there have been attempts to replicate them they have often not gotten the same results. And there are very similar problems in education https://www.insidehighered.com/news/2014/08/14/almost-no-education-research-replicated-new-article-shows. Pre-registration of experiments is important, but it would also help a lot if there were journals dedicated to replication and also if academia took replication more seriously: I know people who are tenure track who haven't tried to replicate some studies because it doesn't look as good for tenure promotion to just replicate something rather than do something new. There are serious cultural issues that need to change.

But, jesting aside, the 2011 article you dismiss as "one-girl story" says:

Studies show that Asian-Americans meet these colleges' admissions standards far out of proportion to their 6 percent representation in the U.S. population, and that they often need test scores hundreds of points higher than applicants from other ethnic groups to have an equal chance of admission. Critics say these numbers, along with the fact that some top colleges with race-blind admissions have double the Asian percentage of Ivy League schools, prove the existence of discrimination.

That is not a citation. It says "studies show..." but there are no studies cited.

Seems rather convincing to me

Bias does not need evidence to convince it.

What? Since when is one girl's account not enough to prove everything and destroy the reputations of all involved?[unrelated links to rape allegation removed]

Uhh.. what? Were we talking about rape?

In that case, they wouldn't be favouring "underrepresented minorities" over Whites.

Ah finally! That's somewhat of a citation. That wasn't hard, was it? Let's actually read the article so we can parse what's going on.

A minority of elite colleges and universities (21 percent) starts off on measures of "institutional fit." These colleges do the initial cut based on student essays, recommendations and specific questions of whether particular students will thrive at and contribute to the college in various ways. In an interview, Rubin said she believed that these colleges also valued academic merit, but that the vast majority of applicants had an appropriate level of academic merit, so that could be weighed later, while other parts of "creating a class" needed to dominate at the point of first cut.

Ok, so the researcher says that 21% of elite schools consider "institutional fit" to cut down the volume of applications, because "the vast majority of applicants had an appropriate level of academic merit."

This is followed by a table that says, of that 21% of schools, 42% consider "Underrepresented race/ethnicity" as the most important variable in "institutional fit," and another 42% consider "Exceptional talent" as the most important variable.

And now you draw this conclusion:

They simply must discriminate against the more successful races

You've taken some very dilute evidence (42% of 21% of schools that responded to the survey report they consider underrepresented races, which are not necessarily black) to make a very strong claim against "Big Education," which I suppose includes all colleges and universities.

[...] because otherwise they will have disproportionately many Asians and too few Blacks.

The article said nothing about that. Here is what it does say:

One private university dean noted, 'The hardest part is that everyone [in the school community] wants more of something and it's a balancing act -- it's a zero sum game. Size [of the school] is fixed, but faculty, trustees, etc., want more students of color, more athletes, more great pianists....

So, this sounds like universities choose students holistically to fit their needs. This is not surprising... Grad schools don't always accept students based on raw GRE scores and GPA; they are frequently picked by how their research interests overlap with the specialties at the school. That's not meritorious, either.

You still haven't come close to proving your claims. Try again.

That the Big Education discriminates against Asians and Whites has long been very well known.

Citation needed.

I did offer a citation. Here it is again.

None of these links cite any studies.

Ah, so you did see them — you just didn't like them. Why, then, did you pretend, I have not offered anything? Could it be something personal?..

The first is the story of a girl who believes

What? Since when is one girl's account not enough to prove everything and destroy the reputations of all involved?

But, jesting aside, the 2011 article you dismiss as "one-girl story" says:

Studies show that Asian-Americans meet these colleges' admissions standards far out of proportion to their 6 percent representation in the U.S. population, and that they often need test scores hundreds of points higher than applicants from other ethnic groups to have an equal chance of admission. Critics say these numbers, along with the fact that some top colleges with race-blind admissions have double the Asian percentage of Ivy League schools, prove the existence of discrimination.

Seems rather convincing to me — which is why I cited it in the first place.

primarily to allow them to admit "legacy" students, who are children of other Harvard alumni

In that case, they wouldn't be favouring "underrepresented minorities" over Whites. The phenomena you describe may well exists, but it would not account for all of the observed discrimination. And, besides, I've encountered plenty of Asians among Harvard students even 20 years ago. Their children are now "children of alumni" too, which further reduces the effect, with which you try to explain the existing anti-Asian bias.

They simply must discriminate against the more successful races, because otherwise they will have disproportionately many Asians and too few Blacks. This would make them a target of various boycotts and governmental investigations by the assholes favoring equality of results over that of opportunity ...

Oh, really?
 
Now try to find a reason to dismiss the data just so you can feel like you're right.

As found by another Slashdot user, the following article gives a much more complete picture.

This article has a picture at the top of an (F) being drawn in chalk by a black felt-tip marker. Where2buy board which turns marker into chalk?

The "coming entitlement generation" has been on its way since at least the late 1980s when it was supposedly my cohort...and probably much, much longer. Although you can always find a few examples of entitled brats--and that's nothing new, of course--the whole "kids these days" thing appears to me to still be as much of a myth as it always has been. From https://www.insidehighered.com... : "Asked if the decision to fail every one of the 30-plus enrollees was fair to every student, Horwitz said that "a few" students had not engaged in misbehavior, and he said that those students were also the best academic performers. Horwitz said he offered to the university that he would continue to teach just those students, but was told that wasn't possible, so he felt he had no choice but to fail everyone and leave the course." "A spokesman for the university said via email that 'all accusations made by the professor about the students' behavior in class are also being investigated and disciplinary action will be taken' against students found to have behaved inappropriately. The spokesman said that one cheating allegation referenced by Horwitz has already been investigated and that a student committee cleared the student of cheating." It looks to me like the instructor had a melt-down and attempted to combine rage quitting and collective punishment. I'm sure some of the kids were a-holes, but not all of them were, by the instructor's own admission.

As found by another Slashdot user, the following article gives a much more complete picture.

He's not even in a tenured position - in this case, he's more likely looking at a permanent leave of absence. Here's an article with more details: https://www.insidehighered.com/news/2015/04/27/professor-fails-his-entire-class-and-his-university-intervenes

I've seen a lot of whining about special snowflakes always needing passing grades, but in this case I think the overrule was the correct call. From the Inside Higher Ed write up on it, this is the section that gets me:

Asked if the decision to fail every one of the 30-plus enrollees was fair to every student, Horwitz said that "a few" students had not engaged in misbehavior, and he said that those students were also the best academic performers. Horwitz said he offered to the university that he would continue to teach just those students, but was told that wasn't possible, so he felt he had no choice but to fail everyone and leave the course.

Instead of failing just the students that deserved it and giving appropriate grades to the rest of the students, he decided to fail everyone because the school wouldn't let him quit the course. So several students are doing the work and paying the tuition only to get a failing grade on their transcript because the professor wants to make a point. That's why it's getting justifiably overruled.

MIT's enrollment is biased in favor of female applicants. They have to make a show of being tough on harassment to maintain the image of a female friendly school.

If it wasn't MIT, they wouldn't have to worry. Today women outnumber men in college 1.4:1 nationally.

I know that the ratio was even worse the other way around even a century ago, but to me this indicates that we really need to stop pushing college in female-centric ways, even concentrate on drawing more men.