Last year, the social psychologist Jonathan Haidt argued that recent conflicts at institutions of higher education are rooted in conflicting assessments of their telos, or core purpose.Is it to seek truth or to advance social justice?
Those missions aren’t always at odds. But in Haidt’s view, they are presently coming into conflict often enough that the status quo is unmanageable. . . .
Source:
https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2017/07/a-college-student-seeks-to-learn-rather-than-to-teach/531594/
Just how much social justice are you going to get without truth?
ReplyDeleteMy first thought, too -- and the article seems to agree.
DeleteI'm also glad to see a more balanced description of the current higher ed student body in _The Atlantic_, which I generally like, but sometimes seems rather alarmist in its approach to campus news.
Both. The nearly 70 year old document that I read when I need to be reinvigorated*
ReplyDeletehttp://www.myacpa.org/student-personnel-point-view-1949
*Usually mid-semester after dealing with a crusty colleague such as the ones I had to deal with during summer session I http://zoozethehorse.blogspot.com/2017/06/speedy-rant-from-wombat-of-copier.html
That IS good, WoTC, and thank you for pointing in everyone's direction!
DeleteGlad you liked it. ACPAs website went down yesterday right after Zooze posted this, so I was afraid it looked like I was trying to be ironic. Happy someone saw it after it got restored. :)
DeleteBut what if it's either truth OR social justice? An example of this may be the idea that not all 18-to-22-year-olds should go to college, some of whom because they just don't have the IQ.
ReplyDeleteI'm not buying the proposed examples of conflict. The "OR" is a false dilemma. It's the cyber-ivory-tower version of "Would you rather?" Neither Haidt's nor Frod's scenarios involve a real conflict. It is NOT socially just to say all 18-to-22-year-olds should go to college, so saying the opposite isn't a conflict. I used to teach at a vocational school. Sending most of my vocational students to college would have been financially and psychologically abusive. It was socially just to do the opposite.
ReplyDeleteLet's say there's an elite school that rejects almost everyone, but everyone who gets in is a rock star who majors in physics and specializes in string theory. I was a physics major and I don't even know what the fuck string theory is, so it can't be my mother's idea of the foundation of social justice. All the students who "just don't have the IQ" have been kept out. No one is studying soup-kitchen administration. 98 students graduate and discover Science Channel has all of the string theorists it needs, and they get real estate licenses instead. 1 becomes the AP physics teacher at Choate. And one (I know, you think I'm about to go Disney and make him the science teacher in South Central who takes undocumented dyslexic gang members and turns them into scientists - but we don't even have to go there) goes to average quality largish lower-middle-classish public HS in the North East and teaches general science. It's fucking great to have a rock star in public school! Social justice has been served.
Maybe there's a situation that presents a conflict - but I can't think of one and I reject those that have been proposed thus far.
I don't think this is a convincing example. String theorists may be able to teach high-school math well, but as theorists, they'll need to pick up experimental and management skills, for running and stocking high-school labs. We have a string theorist here who rarely does a classroom demo without screwing it up: he's just not very good with his hands.
DeleteString theorists also apparently often get little training on making their ideas comprehensible simply. When listening to one talk about 10- or 11-dimensional vibrational modes that correspond to particles, it can sound like speaking in tongues. I don’t want students to learn that science is incomprehensible.
And of course, a major problem with string theory is that, in the absence of any experiments either for or against it, the whole thing might be untrue, a scientific dead end like phlogiston or caloric. Quite a lot of academics are getting increasingly adept at making excuses for this, but this problem is still there.
(That and, all the string theorists I know who couldn’t get jobs as string theorists got jobs in electronics design, software development, or finance. None of them tried to go into high-school teaching. My astronomy grads who don't get jobs as astronomers do frequently go into teaching. I like to think it's partly because I insist they get experience with the general public at events hosted by the local amateur astronomy club.)
I can think of another example of an idea popular in recent years among academics that may pose problems for truth versus social justice: free trade. It’s getting hard to ignore free trade's bad effects on middle- and working-class jobs in the U.S. Nevertheless, every economist I know is still insists that free trade is best for economic growth. If a round of trade protectionism is ahead, I suppose we may find out something about this experimentally.
Several problems of truth versus social justice come from IQ psychology. Several others come from genetics. To GMO or not to GMO, and should we allow this in humans? It’s hard to imagine anything that would aggravate social inequality more egregiously than even a small number of designer babies---or more irrevocably than their descendents---the procedures paid for offshore by mega-wealthy parents. Then again, one of my best students ever is slowly going blind and deaf due to Usher syndrome. Simply banning CRISPR technology wouldn't be so simple.
You're making my case stronger. If string theorists have no natural ability to life, then higher education is their only hope for self sufficiency. Social justice.
ReplyDeleteOurs can do electronic design, software development, and sometimes even finance.
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