It’s the faculty who define a university

Unfortunately, it’s the administrators who shape the faculty, and they too often lose sight of the purpose of their institution. Here’s Eva von Dassow trying to remind the UM regents of their job.

Uh-oh. Von Dassow is in one of those liberal artsy departments, Classics and Near East Studies at the University of Minnesota. Now somebody up top is probably scrutinizing that academic unit and measuring its revenue generation, which, of course, is the true measure of a scholarly endeavor.

(via Left of Centre.)

Honesty about sex is going to disqualify a lot of professors of Catholic dogma

Kenneth Howell was an adjunct professor at the University of Illinois. He is not being rehired at the end of his contract, apparently because he has been accused of hate speech against gays by a student. He had written an email to his students defending the Catholic position on homosexuality, and a friend of one of the students wrote to the university and the media accusing the professor of “hate speech”, of “indoctrinating students”, and “limiting the marketplace of ideas”.

I hate to say it, but I think the student was wrong. I read the professor’s email, and I don’t think it is hate speech at all.

It’s stupid speech.

A letter that condemned students, that threatened students if they didn’t agree with his views, that discriminated against a segment of society, or that denied people full participation in the culture for their views or background or private practices…that would be hate speech. This letter, though, is a pedantic and polite explanation of the views of the professor and of the Catholic church and of his interpretation of utilitarianism, and in fact is careful to say that he isn’t condemning any individuals. We can’t endorse using this kind of discussion as an excuse to expel people from academia — we want professors and students to be able to communicate freely with one another, without fear of retaliation. I see no sign that the professor was discussing the matter in a way that disrespects any of his students.

And the student complaining was doing so poorly. The professor’s ideas made him uncomfortable. He disliked what he said. He thought the professor was insensitive.

Those are not good reasons. If a student is never made uncomfortable, that student is not getting an education.

Bad reasons are given, but I still think UI made the right decision in not renewing this guy’s contract. Kenneth Howell is in ignorant fool who mistakes his religious dogma and his personal prejudices for knowledge.

Here’s an example. Keep in mind that this fellow is a professor, supposedly teaching college students something about philosophy. Here he’s trying to explain why homosexuality is wrong.

But the more significant problem has to do with the fact that the consent criterion is not related in any way to the NATURE of the act itself. This is where Natural Moral Law (NML) objects. NML says that Morality must be a response to REALITY. In other words, sexual acts are only appropriate for people who are complementary, not the same. How do we know this? By looking at REALITY. Men and women are complementary in their anatomy, physiology, and psychology. Men and women are not interchangeable. So, a moral sexual act has to be between persons that are fitted for that act. Consent is important but there is more than consent needed.

One example applicable to homosexual acts illustrates the problem. To the best of my knowledge, in a sexual relationship between two men, one of them tends to act as the “woman” while the other acts as the “man.” In this scenario, homosexual men have been known to engage in certain types of actions for which their bodies are not fitted. I don’t want to be too graphic so I won’t go into details but a physician has told me that these acts are deleterious to the health of one or possibly both of the men. Yet, if the morality of the act is judged only by mutual consent, then there are clearly homosexual acts which are injurious to their health but which are consented to. Why are they injurious? Because they violate the meaning, structure, and (sometimes) health of the human body.

REALITY, huh?

Here’s reality. A penis fits nicely in the hand, and a hand is usually better at stimulating the clitoris than a penis in the vagina, and our anatomy is such that our arms are of the right length to comfortably reach our genitals. Therefore, masturbation is a moral sexual act. We can extend this to point out that a man’s hand can stimulate a clitoris and a woman’s hand can stimulate a penis, and therefore, mutual masturbation, as is being practiced by tens of thousands of teenagers on this Friday night, is also a rightful act. There is no practical difference in anatomy or physiology between mutual masturbation between a heterosexual couple and a homosexual couple, so these acts are also entirely natural.

This reasoning can be extended to a great many sexual acts: oral and anal sex, frottage of various kinds, fantasy play, sadomasochism, etc. There are more aspects of male and female anatomy in which they are alike than in which they differ, and in fact the only act which can be uniquely performed by a male and female couple is penile-vaginal intercourse. So this one act out of many is all that this professor can point to in order to justify heterosexuality as the only proper interaction, but this requires ignoring the majority of human sexual behaviors. I have to wonder if all Catholic teaching permits in the bedroom is genital-genital contact. How sad for them.

Complementarity is also an invalid requirement. Men have lips and a tongue; women have lips and a tongue. It seems to me that a lot of heterosexual couples acquire a great deal of pleasure from kissing, despite the fact that the anatomy of that portion of their bodies is largely interchangeable (in an abstract sense, of course). Is this wrongful? Or are we forced to agree that the equivalent kissing between two men or two women cannot be judged by the nature of the act to be in violation of natural moral law?

I would entirely agree with Howell on one point: complementarity of the psychology of the two sexual partners is an important part of healthy sex. Unfortunately for his premise, psychology is not so strictly sorted with the genitalia; just as there are many women and even more men with whom I would be miserable and stressed to share a bed, there are people who have a great deal of difficulty finding the necessary complementarity of desire in partners of a different sex. This should be the most important criterion in a sexual partner, whether you can find joy together, and it’s often independent of all that meat below the neck. Although that stuff helps. And the brain often finds arousal in surprising places.

Howell’s ideas about homosexual practices are embarrassingly ignorant. He doesn’t know, so why does he profess to know? This myth that homosexuality involves taking the roles of man and woman is one of the oldest and silliest claims around — it’s not usually true (although it can be, since sex seems to throw out all our rules and expectations). Gay men are attracted to men, lesbians are attracted to women, not to clumsy impersonations of the sex they are less interested in.

Homosexuals and heterosexuals do not engage in actions for which their bodies are not fitted. If they don’t fit, they can’t do them. I mean, really.

The health argument is completely wrong. Many homosexuals will engage only in the kinds of activities that heterosexuals would call heavy petting — this obviously isn’t a problem. That good Christian homosexual, George Rekers, reportedly achieved arousal and orgasm from massage and a “long stroke” which did not involve extensive genital contact at all. And most of the sexual activities carried out by gay men are also carried out by heterosexual men with their female partners. You just can’t isolate gay practices as unnatural without also condemning a great many heterosexual practices.

Also, if we’re going to judge the rightness of a sex act by its health consequences, then lesbians are the most natural and moral of us all. They have the least risk of transmission of sexual diseases, do the least physical damage to each other’s delicate tissues, and are not going to get each other pregnant, which has incredibly deleterious effects on a woman’s health. In fact, the worst thing you can do to a woman sexually in terms of her health is for a man to put his penis in her vagina. Talk about violating the structure and health of a human body!

Of course, later in his silly letter Howell tries to claim that sexual reality is all tied up in procreation and cusses out that great Catholic evil, contraception. Again, he has a blinkered view of sex: some of the best reasons to have it are love and fun. But then, Catholics always seem to forget those.

I think it entirely reasonable to boot Kenneth Howell out of UI because he’s not very bright and doesn’t meet the intellectual standards I expect of UI professors. Of course, part of the reason for his weird shortcomings is the fact that he’s a professor of religion who is spitting up Catholic dogma, and one big problem is that a respected major university is offering courses in Catholicism taught by its adherents as serious philosophy, rather than teaching it as cultural anthropology by someone who can maintain a little distance from its weird precepts. Kick Howell out, but send the Catholic theologians packing right after him.

Boycotting Nature?

Wow. The University of California system is facing a 400% increase in the subscription cost to Nature Publishing Group’s journals. Libraries have been struggling with this problem for years, with journal costs spiraling ever upwards (usually it’s Elsevier that is leading the way), and it’s a tremendous chunk of university library budgets. UC libraries are currently spending $300 thousand on just the various Nature journals — increasing that expense for a university system that is already straining to keep up sounds like a nightmare. Of course, not getting Nature is also a nightmare to researchers…so now it’s nightmare vs. nightmare. Who will win?

UC faculty are planning a boycott. It may not be difficult to organize since the libraries simply cannot afford the journals, no matter how much UC opponents may want to keep them.

It’s a very weird situation because those UC researchers that Nature wants to bill more are also among the people who are providing the content for the journals, and also provides some of the reviewers who work for free to maintain the high quality of the publications. This is not to deny that the professionals who publish and edit at Nature Publishing Group aren’t an essential part of the institution of publishing, but honestly, science journal publishing has the most incomprehensible screwed up model for making money that you can find just about anywhere. It’s not just Nature, either — earlier today I was looking into an obscure subject in developmental biology, and found that none of the core papers are available under my university’s subscription plan. This system should be about making the scientific information that scientists generate freely available, and it rarely is.

Nature has made a rather unconvincing reply to the UC’s dilemma. I don’t know what’s going to happen yet, but science publishing is one domain where their producers are their consumers and their consumers are their producers, and it’s trivial to piss off your suppliers and your market in one easy step…and it looks like California could be the place to force a crisis.

Teachers have a right to free speech, too (with a poll)

You may have noticed one thing about our so-called free society: there is one group of professional, well-educated, articulate people who have been de facto forbidden to speak aloud about their views. Those people are our teachers. In particular, if they dare to express liberal, socially conscious views in ways that risk a difference of opinion getting back to parents or, jebus forbid, donors and community activists, we all know what will happen: they will be fired. The teachers know this, too — almost all of them willingly self-muzzle, because it has been repeated over and over to them that actually having a social conscience will damage their relationship to their students.

It’s all a big lie.

It’s really an attempt — and so far, a very effective attempt — to silence a whole class of people who might say something enlightened about society and teaching. It’s disgusting to see how often it works.

Here’s a perfect example: Elizabeth Collins was a liberal, concerned teacher who created a blog to express her views about stuff she cared very much about, such as writing, teaching, and activism. Read it, it’s good stuff, and it’s obvious she cares passionately about those subjects. She also wrote about her experiences as a teacher, taking care to avoid naming the school or any individuals by name, but still being free about criticism and praise while protecting people’s privacy.

I know, most of you are already going “uh-oh”, and you already know where this is going. I also know that a lot of you have absorbed the recieved wisdom and are thinking that she deserves anything that happens to her, that she should know better than to talk about her teaching. You in the last group…you’re a bunch of assholes, and you’re part of the problem. Go away. I want teachers to write openly and frankly and honestly about teaching, and you don’t.

Yes, Elizabeth Collins was fired.

Her story is getting the expected responses, like this:

Enjoy unemployment you liberal, Dem, socialist, borderline commie hack that can’t tolerate an opionion that differs from your own. You got exactly what you deserved. Keep blindly following Obumbler. How’s that working out for you?

I don’t see that Collins demonstrated intolerance; she’s the one fired, not anyone else. If you want to see intolerance, look to the rich dogmatic conservatives who flexed a little muscle and expelled a thoughtful person from the school.

In a Feb. 24 posting, Collins wrote about unfounded accusations that teachers can face. Referring to the Whites’ e-mail – without naming names or spelling out the context – she added, “I realized I was dealing with some hard-core provincialism – not to mention intolerance of anything but ultraconservative views.”

Collins was crossing swords with prominent members of the local Catholic community. In 2009, James White received the Sourin Award from the Catholic Philopatrian Literary Institute for exemplifying Catholic ideals. (Cardinal Justin Rigali was given the award the year before.) He is also a trustee on several Catholic school boards, and James and Megan White and his construction company, J.J. White Inc., are donors to several Catholic schools, including Notre Dame de Namur.

…

The school showed the document to Collins and she wrote a reply in which she said that at the March 3 meeting, the Whites had “proceeded to harangue me, raising their voices, pointing at me, slapping the table.” She added that James White had demanded her resignation and threatened to sue the school.

He certainly does represent Catholic ideals in his little crusade to get anyone with different political views fired! And is anyone else surprised that it is conservative Christianity behind the firing? The Whites and their smug arrogance and tiny little minds are the problem here, not Elizabeth Collins. It’s too bad there isn’t an easy way to dethrone such vile thugs from their undeserved positions of respect in these communities.

We need to do more to protect teachers from this kind of bullying, this policy of silencing their contributions to society; actually, though, it’s an asymmetric silencing, because teachers who express conservative views, who echo the dogmatic stupidity of their communities, do not experience this kind of oppression (unless they cross the line into physically injuring students, and even then the community tends to rally around them). You can be an openly Republican gay-hating commie-bashing environment-trashing teacher, but if you’re a lesbian socialist civil rights activist in most parts of the country, you know what you have to do: you have to be very quiet and not raise a fuss if you want to keep your job.

And please note, I’m not talking about what you do in the classroom — there are reasonable restrictions on what you can do there, and there is also a specific set of tasks that you are expected to complete in order to do your job — but entirely outside the class, in your private life. There aren’t many jobs with those kinds of repressive restrictions. You can be a plumber or a carpenter or a taxi driver or a farmer or a Republican politician, and you can get off work and drink or gamble or vote for Ron Paul or Barney Frank, and be open about your views, and it won’t usually trickle back to your boss as a sign that you aren’t fit to unclog drains or plant asparagus. But write on a blog about social justice, civil rights for gays, or your support for public health care, and watch out — there are people who will decide that you are a bad influence on children.

Never mind that there are better reasons to keep devout Catholics away from kids than to so restrain liberal Democrats.

Again, this is not about a teacher keeping a Bible or Chairman Mao’s little red book on their desk, and flogging it to the students (either of which are reprehensible). It’s about what a teacher does on their own time, outside the school, and somehow we’ve got this attitude that teachers must be social ciphers in all circumstances. Teachers should have a right to be Christians or Communists (not that Collins is the latter, and I have no clue about her opinions on the former), but so far, the only privilege they’re usually granted is to be ideologically mainstream.

There is a poll associated with this story. The wording is good: does she deserve to be fired, which makes it easy for me; no, I don’t think she does, because no employer has the right to police the thoughts of its employees, and thoughtcrime should not be punishable. There’s a different question that isn’t relevant here: Does a private school have the right to fire someone for causes like this, and then I’d have to say that yes, they do. Because private schools can be pocket tyrannies. It just means that you shouldn’t work for such wretched institutions.

Did the teacher deserve to be fired for the blog post?

Yes 42.9%
No 50.5%
Not sure 6.6%

One other aspect of this story that really bugs me is that some parents have the idea that their kids should not be criticized: a teacher is supposed to somehow teach without ever giving any kind of discouraging word when a student is wrong. I hate that attitude. Sorry, students get to be told when they’re being little jerks, or being obtuse and failing to follow simple instructions, or even when they’re being narrow-minded little bigots. Teachers are smart in being able to get those messages across without being demeaning, as comes across clearly in Collins’ blog, but no, you can’t require that teachers be supportive of bigotry and stupidity. It’s kind of a violation of the job description.

Bat sex is not protected by academic freedom

Whoa, dudes. Did you hear about the bats who have oral sex?

Oral sex is widely used in human foreplay, but rarely documented in other animals. Fellatio has been recorded in bonobos Pan paniscus, but even then functions largely as play behaviour among juvenile males. The short-nosed fruit bat Cynopterus sphinx exhibits resource defence polygyny and one sexually active male often roosts with groups of females in tents made from leaves. Female bats often lick their mate’s penis during dorsoventral copulation. The female lowers her head to lick the shaft or the base of the male’s penis but does not lick the glans penis which has already penetrated the vagina. Males never withdrew their penis when it was licked by the mating partner. A positive relationship exists between the length of time that the female licked the male’s penis during copulation and the duration of copulation. Furthermore, mating pairs spent significantly more time in copulation if the female licked her mate’s penis than if fellatio was absent. Males also show postcopulatory genital grooming after intromission. At present, we do not know why genital licking occurs, and we present four non-mutually exclusive hypotheses that may explain the function of fellatio in C. sphinx.

Read that carefully. If it’s a bit difficult to imagine, here’s a video:

Not only do female bats give male bats oral sex, but they do it while they’re having intercourse. The male enters the female from the rear, and the female bends over to lick the shaft of the penis while he’s thrusting in and out. I have never seen that in a porn film. Maybe there is such a thing out there — I can’t claim much knowledge of porn — but this means that animals not only carry out sexually activities condemned by the religious as unnatural, but they do it better than we do.

I have just done something very wicked. I have compared human sexual behavior with that of another animal, describing work published in a serious scientific journal. I could get fired for that! If you were to show this story to co-workers and discuss the implications, you also could get condemned and sanctioned. We’re in trouble now!

You may find that hard to believe, but it’s true in at least one case: Dylan Evans, at University College Cork, in an argument about the uniqueness of human behavior, brought this article up, and his opponent shut him down by crying harassment, triggering an investigation. He was exonerated, but the university president has decided he needs to be sanctioned anyway.

Here’s the story straight from the target.

Dear Colleagues,

The President of University College Cork, Professor Michael Murphy, has imposed harsh sanctions on me for doing nothing more than showing an article from a peer-reviewed scientific article to a colleague.

The article was about fellatio in fruit bats. You can read it online at http://www.plosone.org/article/info:doi/10.1371/journal.pone.0007595

It was covered extensively in the media, including the Guardian – see http://www.guardian.co.uk/education/2009/nov/10/oral-sex-bats-improbable-research

The colleague to whom I showed the article complained to HR that the article was upsetting. I had been engaged in an ongoing debate with the colleague in question about the relevance of evolutionary biology to human behaviour, and in particular about the dubiousness of many claims for human uniqueness. I showed it the colleague in the context of this discussion, and in the presence of a third person. I also showed the article to over a dozen other colleagues on the same day, none of whom objected.

HR launched a formal investigation. Despite the fact that external investigators concluded that I was not guilty of harassment, Professor Murphy has imposed a two-year period of intensive monitoring and counselling on me, and as a result my application for tenure is likely to be denied.

I am now campaigning to have the sanctions lifted. I would be grateful for your support on this matter. I have created an online petition at:
http://www.ipetitions.com/petition/freedebate/

I’d be grateful if you sign the petition and ask your colleagues to do so. If you also felt like writing directly to the President of UCC, his address is:

Professor Michael Murphy
The President’s Office
University College Cork
Cork
Republic of Ireland.

Your support would be greatly appreciated.

Dylan Evans

Oh, well, the article was upsetting. Can’t have that; science articles are supposed to be affirming and soothing, I guess.

If you find the president’s actions unwarranted and ridiculous, sign the petition and write to him. And please, do feel free to discuss bat porn all you want.

Several of the documents in case are now available online.

I’m glad I’m not at risk of ever getting a job offer from a Catholic university

Not that I’d ever apply; I wouldn’t ever want to work in an instition with an irrational commitment to a weird medieval superstition. It leads them to make all kinds of strange decisions.

Marquette University has just done that. They’ve been searching for a new dean for the college of arts and sciences, and had made an offer to a Dr Jodi O’Brien, a professor of sociology at Seattle University. They have now abruptly yanked the offer off the table and announced that the search has failed.

The reason? Partly, it’s because she’s a lesbian. Marquette does have other gay faculty, though, so that’s not the whole story — the other part of the story is that she actively studies the sociology of homosexuality, and has written papers that favor gay marriage.

“I guess if she was a lesbian abut her research was on microorganisms, she might have been acceptable,” Franzoi said. But he said scholars study issues that are important to them and O’Brien’s sexual orientation makes her scholarship related to gays and lesbians important to her.

“This issue has always been a problem with Marquette officials. This is just the latest and probably most publicly embarrassing of its kind.”

Apparently, you can be a lesbian at Marquette as long as you aren’t too lesbian. People outside the university seem to have applied pressure — donors, possibly, who don’t want to hire administrators who are insufficiently conservative.

And that’s why I’m happy to stay clear of private universities with peculiar affiliations. They have a rather limited definition of academic freedom.

Et tu, Canada? It must be dangerous to teach while lesbian.

A pipe dream of proper priorities

This is an education plan I could get behind.

One additional requirement, besides diverting reasonable amounts of money into education: demand improvements in quality. Not this misbegotten accountability of No Child Left Behind, but shakeups in how school boards manage budgets; remove the elected officials from the business of dictating pedagogy and content, and let the qualified professionals design curricula that actually works. I listened to the video and just felt a sense of dread at the thought of the Texas Board of Education suddenly flush with new money and deciding to buy Bibles for every child, or something similarly absurd.

Liberty University: setting the bar high

Last year, Liberty University picked an appropriate commencement speaker: Ben Stein. And the laughter did peal across the nation.

What could they do to top that this year? Who could they possibly get as a commencement speaker for the class of 2010 to signify exactly how deeply into Wingnuttia they are? Who could possibly stand up and show them their future?

It’s Glenn Beck. Perfection!

They may have peaked. I don’t know who they could possibly get to be as representative in 2011.

Post-docs deserve a little help

Post-docs are the weird, easily forgotten positions in academia, neither fish nor fowl. They’re something more than a student — they’ve got Ph.D.s! — but definitely far less than faculty. On the plus side, it’s often the one position where you get to do nothing but research, research, research…but on the negative side, you’ve got minimal official status within your institution, have no say in governance or administration, and are at the mercy of your academic overlords. It’s also a low-paying position (although it has gotten somewhat better and more realistic since my post-doctoral days, when it was a poverty-level salary), with budgets basically frozen for the last few years. Remember, post-docs are highly trained professionals with degrees and publications and skills, and they are still treated like apprentices as far as the administration goes.

The good news is that Obama has proposed a small, 6% increase in the standard NIH post-doctoral stipend — not everyone is paid by NIH, of course, but it does provide a benchmark for what the typical post-doc salary should be.

Don’t start celebrating just yet, though. This is only the proposal, and it needs to be approved by congress, which generally treats that book-learnin’ infrastructure of the country as something expendable, and much less important than subsidizing corn, which has the virtue of being non-uppity and usually voting Republican. What you need to do right now is write to your representative and tell them that it sure would be nice if scientists could be paid a living wage commensurate with the investment in their education. Support your local post-docs, and especially if you are your local post-doc, write in!