Trigger Warnings--A Compromise?

 Saw a tweet by FIRE arguing against a call at my alma mater for mandatory trigger warnings.  Here's a piece in the college newspaper arguing against it.

I can sympathize with someone whose emotions are so easily triggered as the result of some trauma in the past, but as an old fart, my knee-jerk reaction is: tough it out, snow flake.

I seems to me there's a reasonable compromise: FIRE agrees a professor is perfectly free to give trigger warnings.  I'd suggest requiring every professor to have a policy on trigger warnings that's announced in the first class of the semester. That way students have fair warning of what the rules are.  If the professor is my age, and with my views, they can drop out of the class (though after it becomes a requirement, it will be easy enough to include the professor's policy in the write-up of the course). If the professor is a "woke" member of a younger generation and wants to commit to giving trigger warnings, fine.

Unrest Within the Organic Community

The Post did an investigation of a big "organic" dairy a while back.  I put in the quotes because the article raised questions about whether it met the requirements for being organic, especially whether the cows were grazing or not. Here's a piece questioning whether USDA's subsequent investigation which found no big problems were sufficiently thorough (apparently the dairy was warned before the investigators showed up).

This would be a good episode for some academic to write on, because it involves several issues: efficiency from scaling up, the tradeoffs of grazing versus grain (and the simple logistics of grazing), the bureaucracy of writing and enforcing regulations, capture of bureaucracy by interest groups, strategies of interest groups of various kinds (the "organics" wage a media war, the industry wage a guerilla war of lobbyists).

Why the Left Dominates the Humanities?

Consider this excerpt from the conservative Republican get-together, as transcribed byMichelle Cottle in the Atlantic:

" During the Freedom Caucus Q&A, a young man stood up—prompting moderator Fred Barnes to crack, “You’re the only one under 60 who’s going to ask” a question—to say he would soon be graduating with his master’s degree and wanted the panelists’ thoughts on how to improve job prospects for his generation.Mulvaney responded by asking the guy what he’d studied. “U.S. history,” the young man replied. Solid, patriotic, non-multi-culti degree to make the likes of conservative icon and history professor Newt Gingrich proud, right? Not any more. Representative Mark Meadows promptly teased, “That’s the problem!” Everybody laughed. Mulvaney then launched into a lecture about how, back in his day, banks wouldn’t give a guy a student loan unless the applicant offered assurances that he would be able to pay it back some day. But now that the federal government just hands over the money, nobody bothers worrying about whether or not they’re pursuing a worthless degree. “This is not to denigrate or demean folks who want to study philosophy or U.S. history or anything,” Mulvaney assured the young scholar. “But you need to sort of consider job prospects when making those decisions.” It’s all well and good to go study “sub-Saharan African basket weaving,” quipped Mulvaney, but afterward “don’t come looking to us and say, ‘Where are the jobs for sub-Saharan basket-weavers?’”

  Discriminattion against conservatives in the academy is one theory offered to account for a perceived dominance by liberals.  This response is an anecdote pointing to two other explanations: conservatives disdain academics and put money first.  Of course what makes the anecdote special is a conservative calling US history a worthless degree.

Failed Historian's Favorite Sentence

"The truth is that what goes on in the pages of the American Educational Research Journal stays in the pages of the American Education Research Journal."

That's from an interesting article by Sam Wineburg on history, historians, and making an impact in the real world.  His point, to save lazy people from clicking through, is that there's no set of interpreters who take the results of academic research in peer-reviewed journals and make it attractive to the general public, or even the teachers in schools.''

[Update--to clarify, I'm the "failed historian" in the title.]

Public Management Conference With No Public Managers

That seems almost be the case (there were two civil servants there) at this conference reported by Federal Computer Weekly.

A Little Invective Adds Savor to the Day

Margaret Soltan at University Diaries has a long excerpt of a review of a book by a sociologist.  The last paragraph she quotes goes:

In a blurb, Michael Burawoy, a previous president of the American Sociological Association and a prominent leftist sociologist, calls the book “encyclopedic” in its breadth and “daunting” in its ambition. He states, “Only a thinker of Wright’s genius could sustain such a badly needed political imagination without losing analytical clarity and precision.” With the correction that Wright is no genius and that the book is suffocatingly narrow in scope, impossibly cramped in imagination, and irreparably muddy in execution, the blurb is accurate.

You Too Can Write Like an Academic

There's now software available to do the work, and all the thinking, for you.  Find it here.

Hat tip: American Historians Blog.

Do Students Still Applaud Their Professors?

I have a memory from my college days of a handful of times when, at the conclusion of a lecture, the students broke into applause. As that was 50 years or so in the dim dark past, this may be totally inaccurate. But I think it was a combination of the structure of the lecture, coming to a climax of the argument right at the 50 minute mark; the knowledge which was evident during the course of the lecture; and the clarity, passion and enthusiasm of the delivery. I might be conflating applause for the final lecture with applause for lectures during the year, but I'm comfortable David Brion Davis (American intellectual history) and Walter LaFeber (history of foreign policy) both got applause at times.

I wonder if students still do that, or are they too blase, too wrapped up in their laptops?

I suspect maybe Brad DeLong might get applauded occasionally. If not, I hereby applaud his philosophy, as stated here, despite the obvious error in his first sentence:

This is the University of California at Berkeley, the finest public university in the world. You are all upper-middle class or upper class--if not in the size of your parents' houses in your options and expections--and thus much richer than the average taxpayer of California. Yet, even at today's reduced funding levels, the taxpayers of California are spending $10,000 a year subsidizing your education. Why are they doing this? Because they believe that if your brains get crammed full of knowledge and skills than many of you will do great things that will redound to the benefit of the state, the country, and the world. Therefore it is my business to cram your brains full of knowledge and skills. It is then your business to go out and try to do great things--and if those great things happen to involve a lot of money, remember the investment that the poorer-than-you taxpayers of California made in your education, and pass some of the resources you will earn on to your successors here at Berkeley. If I am happy in December with how the course has gone, the median grade will be a low B+. If I am mezza-mezza, the median grade will be a low B. If I am unhappy, the median grade will be a B-. If people don't do the work I assign--or if I were to assign less work--I assure you I will not be happy come December.

Best Sentence Today

University Diaries: "The lesson of Rancourt is that professors and administrators typically have little trouble discerning the difference between dissent and dysentery." (From a discussion of a Prof. Stanley Fish post on an academic.)