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from the debating-whether-something's-debatable dept.
It looks like anybody can be against academic censorship, as this opinion piece in the Washington Post shows:
Wisconsin's Supreme Court can soon right a flagrant wrong stemming from events set in motion in 2014 at Milwaukee's Marquette University by Cheryl Abbate. Although just a graduate student, she already had a precocious aptitude for academic nastiness.
On Oct. 28, in an undergraduate course she was teaching on ethics, when the subject of same-sex marriage arose, there was no debate, because, a student said, Abbate insisted that there could be no defensible opposition to this. (Marquette is a Jesuit school.) After class, the student told her that he opposed same-sex marriage and her discouraging of debate about it. She replied (he recorded their interaction) that "there are some opinions that are not appropriate that are harmful [...]
[...] McAdams, a tenured professor then in his 41st year at Marquette and a conservative who blogs about the school's news, emailed Abbate seeking her version of the episode. Without responding to him, she immediately forwarded his email to some professors. She has called McAdams "the ringleader" of "extreme white [sic] wing, hateful people," a "moron," "a flaming bigot, sexist and homophobic idiot" and a "creepy homophobic person with bad argumentation skills."
Because there is almost no Wisconsin case law concerning academic freedom that could have guided the circuit court, McAdams is asking the state supreme court to bypass the appeals court and perform its function as the state's "law-developing court." He is also asking the court to be cognizant of the cultural context: Nationwide, colleges and universities "are under pressure" — all of it from within the institutions — "to enact or implement speech codes or otherwise restrict speech in various ways."
[Post-publishing edit: An A/C below helpfully provides the following far more neutral reportage by Inside higher Ed titled Ethics Lesson which explains the situation with more light and less head. Thanks A/C - Ed. (FP)]
(Score: 4, Insightful) by meustrus on Tuesday January 09 2018, @02:42PM (6 children)
I found it rather difficult to summarize the article in such a way that the interesting bits were still the focus. It was my intent to make sure anybody arguing the facts was arguing all the facts, which requires a lot of context. I initially included more of the facts, but pared it down because it doubled the size of the summary, choosing instead to require the reader to click into TFA to get the full story. It also would have copied more than half of the original article, which is ethically and legally dubious. Furthermore, the parts of the original article that contain the facts are also unfortunately sprinkled with much of the most inflammatory unqualified opinions in the whole piece, which I definitely did not want to include in the summary.
That doesn't mean I admit to no mistakes. I post on SoylentNews to learn to communicate better, and in this case you and at least 5 others seem to believe I've failed. With the difficulties mentioned above, what would you suggest I could have done better? Would you like to take a stab at writing a better summary?
In order to make a concise summary which includes more of the facts and less clickbait, I would have needed to substantially rewrite the article. I chose not to do so because the style of SoylentNews entries is usually a direct block quote. Would writing an original summary have been the right choice?
If there isn't at least one reference or primary source, it's not +1 Informative. Maybe the underused +1 Interesting?
(Score: 3, Informative) by FatPhil on Tuesday January 09 2018, @03:02PM (4 children)
In the future, can you minimise the invasiveness of your edits. Less can actually be more. Feel free to select whole paragraphs to be in or out, but often if you're editing within paragraphs it's harder for us to claim it's a quote of the original. (Every "[...]" is needed, and if that starts making the paragraph unreadable, then elision is doing more harm than good.)
Additionally, finding other sources for the story and including URLs is a great benefit. Sometimes you come across a rendering of the tale that's so superior to the original one you simply scrap the original! I should have done that, but it was late, and I was in a rush - the queue was empty!
Great minds discuss ideas; average minds discuss events; small minds discuss people; the smallest discuss themselves
(Score: 3, Insightful) by meustrus on Tuesday January 09 2018, @04:07PM (1 child)
There are only two "[...]"s, and they are at the end and beginning of paragraphs. I opted to "select whole paragraphs" and that, combined with the poor structure of TFA, seems to be why the summary turned out poorly.
Funny thing - I was so surprised to see this side of the argument coming from the Washington Post that I forgot my normal skepticism. I should say I do not necessarily agree with the tone of TFA that I found, but thought the people here would agree more.
Personally, I support gay rights, and am really bothered by this situation because Abbate opted for anti-free-speech rhetoric, squashing a perfect opportunity for academic debate to change the mind of someone with apparently paper-thin reasoning, and encouraging the student in question to see the issue in terms of orthodoxy and loyalty instead of based on its actual merits.
In short, regardless of the issue at hand, the teacher is just bad at rational thought. That was the story I thought I was posting, with the sort of right-wing window dressing that I also thought was preferred around here.
If there isn't at least one reference or primary source, it's not +1 Informative. Maybe the underused +1 Interesting?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday January 10 2018, @02:16AM
> In short, regardless of the issue at hand, the teacher is just bad at rational thought. That was the story I thought I was posting, with the sort of right-wing window dressing that I also thought was preferred around here.
Hey now, this is *not* a right-wing site! Sure, we have some right-wing nuts like TMB and Runaway1234, but we also have left-wing nuts like aristarchus and moderate lefties & righties in between. I would consider myself a moderate-to-strong leftie, for example.
(Score: 2) by meustrus on Tuesday January 09 2018, @04:15PM (1 child)
...nevermind my previous comment about the [...]s. I did not realize that the summary above is not the one that I wrote. Shows how good my memory is. I can't seem to find any discussion about edits to the summary before it was posted; maybe this is only visible to editors.
If there isn't at least one reference or primary source, it's not +1 Informative. Maybe the underused +1 Interesting?
(Score: 2) by FatPhil on Tuesday January 09 2018, @06:01PM
Great minds discuss ideas; average minds discuss events; small minds discuss people; the smallest discuss themselves
(Score: 1) by khallow on Tuesday January 09 2018, @03:05PM