No video this week. Weep and despair!
Item Berkeley prof wants to nix student evals after white male profs score higher
A University of California, Berkeley professor suggested scrapping end-of-semester student evaluations for hiring, promotion, and tenure decisions after claiming that the grades and evaluations are biased against female instructors and people of color.
“Over the next few weeks, students will get the chance to evaluate their professors and TAs. They’re going to get it wrong,” UC Berkeley history professor Brian DeLaytweeted on Sunday. “They’ll be harder on women and people of color than on white men. Tenured white male faculty, in particular, should help their students understand this.”
We get these stories wherever the intellect of folks is in question. Such as (I’m making these up, but only because I’m too lazy to cut and paste the actual real ones) “Women Coders Receive Lower Ratings”, “Black Mathematicians Receive Fewer Grants”, or whatever.
How is it the obvious conclusion is missed? That the white men winning out in all these areas, consistently, over long periods of time, and in all conditions are just better than their competition.
Equality is the great mind destroyer.
Item Professor Sues after University Requires He Use Student’s Preferred Pronoun
Nicolas Meriwether, a philosophy professor at Shawnee State University, referred to transgender female student as “sir” during his political philosophy class in January 2017, prompting the student to confront him after class and demand the use of female pronouns.
Meriwether resisted the student’s demands, causing the student to get “in his face in a threatening fashion” and call him a “c***” before filing a formal complaint with the university.
After conducting a formal investigation into the incident, the university rejected Meriwether’s offer to refer to the student solely by name and accused Meriwether of “creat[ing] a hostile environment.” Administrators then placed a warning in Meriwether’s personnel file and threatened “further corrective actions” unless he capitulated to the student’s demands.
University provost Jeffrey Bauer “openly laughed” at Meriwether’s claim that his religion precluded him from using the student’s preferred pronouns during a meeting held after the professor filed a complaint with his union, according to the suit.
Tee hee. Well, Bauer’s religion is the dominant one, in no danger of fading to a mere remnant, as is Meriwether’s. He may as well laugh. I have no wisdom to offer on the success of the lawsuit, but I can note that World War T is accelerating, as regular readers know (the phrase is Steve Sailer’s). Normal people are being persuaded bit by bit, through the blunt force trauma of repetition, to think maybe they are the ones who are insane for insisting on Reality. They (the normies) don’t think they are completely crazy yet, but they’re beginning to hold back protestations, if only a little. Propaganda works. Terror works. Our enemies never sleep.
Item Landmark study proves homosexuality is strongly linked to Catholic clergy sex abuse
The report also examines how “homosexual subcultures”within Catholic seminaries may have contributed to creating an environment where homosexual clergy were more likely to abuse minors.
“Although over 8 in 10 of victims have been boys, the idea that the abuse is related to homosexual men in the priesthood has not been widely accepted by Church leaders,” wrote Father Paul Sullins, a retired Catholic University of America (CUA) sociology professor, in a new report for the Ruth Institute. “The data show that more homosexual men in the priesthood was correlated with more overall abuse and more boys abused compared to girls.”
Sullins’ report is titled Is Catholic clergy sex abuse related to homosexual priests?
The priest said in a recent press conference that this “question comes up logically because the vast majority of [priestly sex abuse] victims were boys. Usually in sex abuse of minors, two-thirds of victims are girls.”…
“When you get up to 16 percent of priests that are homosexual — you’ve got eight times the proportion of homosexuals as you do in the general population — it’s as if the priesthood becomes a particularly welcoming and enabling and encouraging population for homosexual activity and behavior,” he added.
Anybody know if Sullins had to go into hiding yet?
Please, please don’t forget there are no such things as homosexuals. There are only men misbehaving and with misdirected sexual yearnings. Meaning, as should be clear, the taste of a man can change. If he is willing to have another man’s penis roving around his anus, he might also be willing to make use of the choirgirls and not just choirboys. Many men called “homosexual” have, as we all know, fathered children. Meaning Sullins’s report likely underplays the results.
Theresa May is facing calls to sack her new housing tsar over a series of controversial comments he has made about Islamophobia and homosexuality.
Conservative writer and philosopher Roger Scruton, who on Saturday was appointed by housing secretary James Brokenshire to chair a new government commission on building “beautiful” homes, has claimed Islamophobia and homophobia are “invented” and that homosexuality is not “normal”.
He has also been criticised for his links to Hungary’s right-wing prime minister Viktor Orbán and comments he made about the billionaire George Soros.
One thing Scruton said “It is no more an act of discrimination to exclude gay couples than it is to exclude incestuous liaisons or communes of promiscuous swingers.” The Guardian is calling Scruton’s Soros comments “anti-Semitic.” Because Soros is a Jew, and Scruton was critical of him, even though Scruton was also critical of “anti-Semitism”.
This is Roger Scruton, we’re discussing. The Left’s is going after bigger and bigger game.
Item Labor plan a threat to biblical teaching, say Catholics
The Catholic Church is leading the campaign against Bill Shorten’s push to introduce a private member’s bill removing protections for faith-based educators, warning its ability to “teach Catholic beliefs is threatened” by the Labor plan.
If you can’t say sodomy is bad, you must say it is good, and ban others from saying it is bad. Turning down a request for sodomy will soon be seen as bigoted, phobic, etc.
Previously, Dr. Briggs seems to have had acknowledged what we all know, which is that student evaluations are worthless; simply measures of popularity, which encourage professors to inflate grades. But now that he’s come across a claim that white males come out better in these evaluations, he latches on to it like a hungry baby at the teat, as evidence that white males (a group to which he just happens to belong!) are superior. Truly pitiful.
No Lee you have that quite wrong. The point is that schools who choose (or insist) on using such evaluations immediately back away from the results when they appear to show a result that is not wanted. There is no contradiction in holding A- Student evaluation is rubbish, and B- Schools only use criteria that gives them a desired answer (even when the criteria was implemented be themselves). To suggest that holding both views is duplicitous is nothing more than a conjures trick, sleight of hand. The whole bit about white males is just insisting that if they set up such a system they follow where it (seems) to lead. Like the discussion a few days ago regarding accepting the achievements of those even if you find their political views abhorrent, Briggs’ personal inclinations are not relevant.
@Lee Philips
The only thing that follows from that beauty contest between professors is that the white male professors are more popular than the female professors, or the professors of color.
if you are generalizing from that measured fact, you are white supremacist.
My close observation of student evaluation of teaching surveys (I managed the technical aspects of one for a couple of decades) confirmed that good evaluations generally go to generous graders. The “hard” teachers were evaluated well if they were engaging and fair. Most got mediocre results. Bad instructors got low evaluations which I suspect were as much revenge protests as truly accurate appraisals. The faculty union forbade the results being used in promotion and tenure decisions, quite justifiably since the primary and maybe only benefit is for the instructor to improve his/her teaching, not advance in rank. The surveys allowed instructors to add their own supplementary questions but few took advantage of this valuable opportunity to get direct feedback. I suspect most were as afraid of what they would find out as are freshmen of their first calculus exam. Pity, because the information could make teaching more enjoyable and productive for the students.
Plantagenet is talking about what he imagines Dr. Briggs to have said, while I am talking about what he actually did say:
“the white men winning out in all these areas[…] are just better than their competition.”
So, today, Dr. Briggs regards the results of student evaluations as evidence that people who look like him are “just better” than other people. On other days, student evaluations are worthless. We all know people like Dr. Briggs.
Other than that, nice try, Plantagenet.
By the way, suppose that all races and sexes performed equally well as teachers, using any criteria you want. It should be obvious, after a moment’s thought, that the survey results should come out just as they did, rather than as a reflection of reality. Anyone for whom this is not evident does not possess much prowess in the interpretation of data.
Lee, just say what you want to say.
Lee, Leaving the data aside (as apparently irrelevant), if Dr. Briggs were something different (post-sexual trans-specie giraffe-human born on the colony on Mars), would you be willing to say: ‘But now that he’s come across a claim that Martian Giraffumyns come out better in these evaluations, he latches on to it like a hungry baby at the teat, as evidence that Martian Giraffumyns (a group to which he just happens to belong!) are superior’?
Bryant Poythress:
Yes.
Again the point is a school which introduced a system, presumably under the impression that it had merit, now considers abandoning it because the results, for whatever reason, do not reflect a bias with which they agree. It is implicit in the critique that had the results been more amenable to ( insert favoured groups here) Berkeley would be waving it around as further proof of the joys of multi-whatever. There is yet a further implication that our current climate will only allow for results that are desired.
Pointing out the irony that an institution that insists on using a system you consider flawed until such time as it disagrees with the orthodoxy you insist on is actually rather funny.
If you randomly ask twenty people what their favourite food is, and against the odds they all say Chicken Madras well there’s a lot to consider here…a lot to chew on. But you would be remiss not to consider that Chicken Madras is really delicious. Unless, of course, your a vegetarian planning a menu. In which case you discount the info and make sure your next pole is qualified.
Personally, I believe the racism/sexism/externallyidentifiabletraitsism in this case was perpetrated by whomever thought it would be a good idea to sort student evaluations by irrelevant characteristics of the professors.
But getting back off-topic, it has been one of the great disappointments of my engineering career that good product designs don’t sell themselves. My department at work has 3x or 4x the number of marketing people as product designers. And most disappointing of all is that this approach actually works.
Several years ago we released a bit of a stinker of a product, from a technical point of view. The project started off with the mandate to correct some deficiencies in a previous product, but through management changes and a bad case of featuritis, it limped into production well behind schedule. Despite that, the product met its original sales forecast. Marketing then decided to double the sales of the product and initiated a targeted marketing campaign. I was very skeptical, but . . . sure enough, sales doubled and have remained there ever since.
My disappointment that good products don’t sell themselves is dwarfed by my disappointment that personal competence doesn’t sell itself. The self-promoters got the big raises and promotions, while the team has endured the loss of some key people whose contributions weren’t understood or appreciated.
It would be nice if humans were better at recognizing the true contributions of others, but that isn’t realistic. For the quietly competent, just a lucky few find avenues where their accomplishments speak for themselves. The rest will just have learn to be satisfied with the satisfaction that comes from within. Einstein was able to change the world with his mind alone, but many future breakthroughs will require a supporting infrastructure and a pile of money, which means that a quiet genius is very unlikely to be in the right place at the right time.
I swear I had a relevant point to make when I started to write this.
Exam numbers used to get around the problem of bias. There were no boys or girl’s names. Or names typical of a certain group.
Public exam boards for degree courses, would get around this. It is the introduction of course work which changed everything in schools first, then university. All because exams make people nervous! They do! It’s all part of the test.
Lecturers shouldn’t be marking exams of their own students.
If universities shared exam boards it would be a way around the problem of lowering standards for grading. Universities subscribing to external marking would then start turning out higher quality students, without t’rying’, and the pressure would be on the admissions staff to get things right in the first place.
Or, Universities of the future need to be private ventures, with students agreeing to terms and conditions to get around the lawyers.
A benefactor who cares enough and knows who to hire, one would have thought, could work around this problem. If it matters.
Particularly at university level, it is harder to blame the lecturer for bad ‘teaching’. Used to hear stories of a physics lecturer who would come into the room, start writing on the board, top left to bottom right *English! and say nothing until the board was full of hard sums! He would then leave.
Terrifying! but true.
But Lee, what you then seem to be saying, is ‘no member of a group can state anything about that group which is true if it also benefits that group above another in some way’. This seems close to a philosophical pre-commitment about groups and their members that cannot possibly be correct.
Bryant Poythress:
What? I neither “seem to be saying” that nor did I, you know, say it. I’m not responsible for other people’s hallucinations about what I said. And if my clear and obvious point continues to sail above your head, I’d be just fine with not hearing about it any more.
Lee, if Dr. Briggs had stated that the “obvious conclusion” that “white men ‘losing’ out in all these areas, consistently, over long periods of time, and in all conditions” proves they are “just better than their competition”, he might be coming to the wrong conclusion based on the data. But since you are willing to leave data aside or are content simply asserting that he “seems to have had acknowledged what we all know, which is that student evaluations are worthless” and he did not actually ‘you know, say it’, your arguments are shown inconsistent, your attitude peevish and your insults unseemly.
If you can’t say sodomy is bad, you must say it is good, and ban others from saying it is bad. Turning down a request for sodomy will soon be seen as bigoted, phobic, etc.
I’ve often remarked that the (moral?) imperative to accept homosexuality, having morphed into a requirement to celebrate homosexuality (and all things LGBTQWERTY), will eventually require participation in homosexual relations, in order to demonstrate one’s bona fides in that regard.
“If you can’t say sodomy is bad, you must say it is good”. What?! I don’t say sodomy is bad, I don’t say it is good. I don’t say doing nude yoga in your living room is bad or good, either. But let’s say I did say sodomy is bad, I may also say orange juice is bad….so what?? I want to like this blog but the irrationality is too much. Why be worried about what weird things people are doing, if they are not harming others?