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Professors worried students will share lectures with 'right wing sites'
Jon Street
Managing Editor
@JonStreet
on Mar 19, 2020 at 12:42 PM EDTProfessors across the country are expressing concern over courses being moved online as a result of the coronavirus pandemic.
One professor expressed concern that "right wing sites" could expose what is being taught in college courses.Professors across the country are taking to social media to express their concern over being forced to deliver their course lectures online amid the coronavirus outbreak, sharing with each other tips on how to limit the number of people who are able to see what they're teaching students, and criticizing "right wing sites" and even Campus Reform, specifically.
Texas Christian University Associate Professor of Political Science Emily Farris tweeted Thursday, "if you are recording a lecture on anything controversial, be prepared for right wing sites to ask students to share it." Campus Reform reached out to Farris via Twitter Direct Messaging to allow her the opportunity to further explain her comments or to clarify. She later blocked the author of this article on Twitter.
LaSalle University Assistant Professor of Public Health Christen Rexing replied to Farris' tweet, asking why others could find topics such as "gun safety, women's health, elections, etc." to be "controversial, as they are "evidence-based."
"Seems like the flood gates could open," Rexing commented in response to courses moving online.
University of North Carolina political science graduate student Stephanie Shady also weighed in, saying, "Annnnd I just realized that the second half of my course focuses on public opinion towards and politicization of immigration. This will be interesting." Another user with the Twitter name "Prof CWO" replied "Sigh, I teach about white nationalism and this has been my biggest fear since we began transitioning to online instruction."
Columbia University political science professor Jeffrey Lax said he has been "thinking about" how students would be able to record classes.
Trinity College Associate Professor of Political Science Isaac Kamola who, as Campus Reform previously reported sought to hire a "Campus Reform Early Responder," specifically mentioned Campus Reform in his reply to Farris.
"If Campus Reform harasses you or someone you know, the best response is to 'follow the money.' Campus Reform receives $1.4 million from the Leadership Institute, a Koch-funded organization designed to delegitimize academics they consider too left. They are not a new [sic] source," Kamola tweeted.
A user whose website says they are a history professor at a "community college in North Texas" wrote, "I'm taking steps to limit this but nothing is foolproof."
Farris asked how Gunter was working to ensure her lectures are not made public, to which Gunter responded with one tip for her colleague.
"Instead of posting videos direct to LMS (which would then own them) I'm posting links to the videos on youtube. The videos themselves are 'unlisted' meaning you can't find them in a search or if you go to my page-only if you have the direct link. Doesn't stop link sharing though," Gunter said.
https://www.campusreform.org/?ID=14563
So, here I am, trying to wrap my head around the fact that liberals FEAR the possibility of the public learning what they are teaching. Does that make any sense at all? If I want to shape the world, wouldn't I WANT more people to hear the word, to understand my thoughts and goals, and hopefully to get on board with my agenda?
Instead, we have liberals who FEAR the idea that their thoughts might go viral.
Imagine that. We might suspect that liberal college professors are actually just propaganda indoctrination technicians. Brainwash the kids while they are young, before they develop critical thinking skills, right?
(Score: 4, Interesting) by lentilla on Sunday March 22 2020, @09:14AM (11 children)
No, I believe it is more a case that people fear three things:
University-level discussions have traditionally taken place in a forum of trust and with considerable foreknowledge of what was discussed previously. In a way, it has much in common with a family dinner table - ideas can be bandied about because the family knows that everyone will be given the benefit of the doubt to fully flesh out an idea - or possibly to come to the conclusion that a particular idea, argument or opinion doesn't hold weight.
Let's be realistic - we alter the way we speak depending on the audience - not because we are afraid of what we think but because communication is more effective when we tailor it for the recipients. The last thing we want is to adopt a one-size-fits-all approach. Just imagine how boring that would be.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by Arik on Sunday March 22 2020, @09:43AM
If laughter is the best medicine, who are the best doctors?
(Score: 3, Insightful) by FatPhil on Sunday March 22 2020, @10:08AM (2 children)
But they cannot talk to the outside world that same way because ...
... they don't want the outside world to learn?
What is so dangerous about their knowledge that they positively do not want the outside world to learn it?
The far more parsimonious conclusion is fortunately the obvious one - they are trying to cover up the fact that they are brainwashing students.
Great minds discuss ideas; average minds discuss events; small minds discuss people; the smallest discuss themselves
(Score: 2) by lentilla on Sunday March 22 2020, @01:00PM
Well said. Holding knowledge secret is not a good thing. (Although I personally wouldn't publish "The Complete Beginner's Guide to Making Explosives In Your Own Kitchen".)
Perhaps my take on the matter is coloured. I am more than happy to oblige when asked to teach something - but if someone asks me to lecture into a camera lens to an unknown audience I will simply decline. (Well, not absolutely decline - but it will very much change my choice of delivery.)
It is hard to pin down exactly why I feel this way. Perhaps it is because I feel the need for a reciprocal arrangement where I can see those that I am teaching, learning the subject. Perhaps it is a need to open a dialogue. Perhaps it is just vanity. Hard to know.
I know I have little desire to be a TV presenter. If I am going to teach I want it to be part of a two-way process - otherwise I would simply write a book. So maybe that's the reason for feeling the way I do: if I want to learn something, I start reading. When and if I need further help I look for a teacher - that being someone I can interact with.
There is one additional element - and that regards feedback. I am more than happy to engage with students (after all, that is probably the best part of teaching). What I do not want to do is get heckled by anonymous mobs - which is something the Internet facilitates well. Given the assumption that I am teaching something valuable to a limited number of students, I don't want to be heckled by a much larger number of people who are interested only in causing trouble, with zero interest in seeking knowledge, and with no way to effectively engage with a meaningful dialogue with everyone.
So I don't believe I am promoting secret knowledge. There are particularly gifted "TV Educators" but I would not advocate forcing all teachers into that narrow specification. One of humanity's greatest attributes is our ability to pass on knowledge - and of those that have a special affinity to do so not every teacher (and not every student) is suited to broadcast learning.
Quite. Although in my case you'll have to take my word for it that I not trying to pull the wool over people's eyes - I simply want to pass on something they actually want to learn.
(Score: 2, Touché) by fustakrakich on Monday March 23 2020, @07:36PM
What is so dangerous about their knowledge that they positively do not want the outside world to learn it?
Most muggles aren't accustomed to seeing a flying car.
La politica e i criminali sono la stessa cosa..
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday March 22 2020, @04:10PM (5 children)
Eh? I went to a top 10 university. Literally anybody, student or not, could sit in any class they wanted. To my knowledge this is still the case, though I haven't visited the campus in more than a decade. I think the major difference is schools teaching people *how* to think versus teaching them *what* to think. Now a days, especially among degree mill universities, the latter seems to be becoming the norm. When you remain in the domain of logic and analysis it doesn't matter who you're talking to because you're not really taking any moral or ethical position one way or the other. It's only when one starts to aim to try to persuade people to think a certain way that issues start to emerge because you inherently begin to try to support (or oppose) various views for reasons outside of provable and impartial considerations.
This is part of the reason that I've always felt the social sciences have become increasingly inappropriate. In times past they made sense. They were little more than a fundraiser. They were there to enable rich kids to pursue to have something to shoot the shit about at their cocktail parties, with those funds subsidizing the cool stuff the school was actually doing and the education of those actually doing things. But now a days people coming from poor backgrounds are pursuing these courses that have no real redeemable value whatsoever. And then these people graduate 6 figures in debt and start ranting about capitalism because nobody wants to hire them and their impeccable knowledge of critical theory, intersectionality, and other topics which are mostly meaningless in terms of actually achieving things. But at least your barista can provide you some amusing rants.
(Score: 2, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday March 22 2020, @06:45PM (4 children)
You're a moron who views education solely as a means to economic development. Like some spoiled brat who gets the benefit of their family's hard work then goes and whines about doing chores, not getting the newest toy, and learns to criticize the "lazy" help.
You are the dipshit academic who would be easily manipulated into supporting Eugenics because you took no philosophy courses, no ethics courses, and no history courses to give you some sliver of wisdom from the humanity's development.
Current structure of society is fucked and leads to people denigrating"useless" endeavors. Pretty ridiculous when the goal of technological development was to make life better and free humanity to pursue less survival based activities.
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday March 22 2020, @07:27PM (2 children)
Ahhh but you, quite ironically, perfectly illustrate what I mean. Practically all [wikipedia.org] of academia were some of the biggest voices behind eugenics - Harvard, Wharton, Stanford and all the old money philanthropic organizations - the Carnegie Institution, Rockefeller Foundation, etc. And, in fact, nearly all universities even had courses specifically about eugenics as part of their curriculum. And as genetics was still in its infancy, the majority of arguments were specifically of the ethical and moral sort.
In particular imagine somebody is about to be born. You know this child will end up a murderer of great harm and no value to society. If you have the choice, is it ethical to prevent this birth? Regardless of whether you view the world deontologically, consequentially, or in a simple utilitarian fashion - the answer would probably be yes. From this point you've already created the ethical foundation of eugenics. What remains is little more than a question of certainty and criteria. E.g. what if you're 99% sure? What if instead of being a murderer he's "just" rapist? So forth and so on.
We could go further, but it's beside the point. I'm certainly not arguing in favor of eugenics. I'd rather pluck my own eyes out than to see our dysfunctional governments be granted [...more...] power over life and death itself, regardless of the arguable utility. But that's because of my own personal beliefs, not because I think eugenics is not supportable. The sole reason you apparently seem to think there could exist no argument in favor of eugenics from a moral or ethical viewpoint is exclusively because you have not been taught, or at least not learned, *how* to think, but only *what* to think. And that is sad. It results in you having such a limited perspective of the world due to impaired reasoning and logic abilities.
(Score: 2) by Bot on Monday March 23 2020, @08:14AM (1 child)
> You know this child will end up a murderer of great harm and no value to society. If you have the choice, is it ethical to prevent this birth?
Never got to understand this question. If you know the future 100% accu, just have a couple policemen around as he brings the knife against the first person. Plus, whoever else has this divination power? "You know this doctor will end up murdering your kid, if you have the choice....". In other word, moral questions about impossible situations are irrelevant, they are just there to establish a slippery slope.
Account abandoned.
(Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Monday March 23 2020, @04:25PM
Ah, but this scenario doesn't create any sort of a slippery slope. These issues are always present in our views and values, but people who never really bother to delve into *why* they think what they think, never really consider them. All the scenario does is emphasize that your views are not necessarily what you think they are.
To understand the importance of considering these scenarios we can turn to one of the most influential philosophers of all time - Al-Ghazali. [wikipedia.org] People are quick to recount that the Islamic world was at one time the center of education and learning in the world. And that is, mostly, true. Of course everything from Arabic numerals to Algebra (from Ilm al-jabr wa l-muqābala) all came from the Islamic world especially during the Islamic Golden Age. But few ever talk about what happened. Why did this end, how? That is where our friend Al-Ghazali comes into play.
Al-Ghazali was a philosopher and particularly a religious philosopher. However, he rather tired of these sort of logical games posing various difficult to answer questions to views that were not really as sound as people liked to imagine they were. So he developed a new theory, extensively elaborated upon in his famous treatise, 'The Incoherence of the Philosophers'. He resolved all of these logical problems by simply rejecting them all, not all that different than you are indirectly proposing. He posited that when a leaf comes to light, it wasn't because it was heated to a certain level, because it was exposed to fire, or anything like this. It was solely and exclusively because God willed it to come to flames at that exact moment. And the only reason such a thing would repeat is because, each and every time, god wills it happen. It has nothing to do with the fire, nothing to do with the leaf, nothing to do with anything except for fire. Everything happens because, and only because, God wills it happen at that exact moment.
That philosophy was comforting to many because it again justified belief in absolutes without all these pesky logical issues that they tend to run into. And it spread far and wide across the Islamic world. That view also persists to this day. It's the very reason that the Islamic world went from the world leader in what was practically everything to a mentally desolate 'nation' with little to nothing to show for their contributions to humanity, in spite of making up a one of the largest chunks of our species' population. And indeed the Islamic Golden Age would come to an end relatively shortly following the adoption of Al-Ghazali's 'resolution.'
(Score: 1) by khallow on Sunday April 05 2020, @03:56AM
Completely mischaracterizing another person's statements is truly the essence of the educated mind. I hope you didn't pay a lot for that.
(Score: 2) by Bot on Sunday March 22 2020, @09:18PM
Indeed there are other possibilities. Not one of them, short of risk from a mob of nazis (that one day will materialize, if only for the tons of time they have been evoked), justifies censorship. I mean, your sons and daughters are being shaped by those guys, and we should care about them being in a controversy? I'd say, all the power and no responsibility? fuck them.
Account abandoned.