Flagrant anti-gay discrimination in a Canadian nursing college

Uh-oh. There is evidence that the damning email might have been faked. The “from” field of the message looks to have been crudely pasted in, and this whole story may be a product of a slighted student’s imagination.

This is an astonishing example of homophobic bigotry in a nursing college. A student was basically flunked out of a key course in the curriculum for a reason you will find hard to believe — here’s a letter from a nursing faculty member to the student:

Nioska, I’ve been thinking about the meeting in rita’s office and I feel that maybe Nursing is the wrong career for you. As a nurse, I have to advocate for my patients, and i feel that female patients will be uncomfortable having a lesbian nurse caring for them. You do not provide a sense of security to patients when you keep important information from them. Your sexual orientation is something important that patients have a right to know so that they can decide if they wish to have you as their caregiver. I myself am not homophobic at all, but I would not want a lesbian nurse caring for me when I am vulnerable. I would just not feel comfortable with that.

I think it might be best if you see student services to explore other career options that do not involve physical interaction, and intimacy. It wuold look better if you left nursing out of your own accord, rather than get kicked out.

i am just being honest. at the beginning of the rotation you asked me to be honest in my feedback, and i am doing just that.

Tassy

Notice: the student is a lesbian, and she does not trouble her patients with her sexual orientation … and the faculty member is penalizing her for being discreet! She is actually insisting that her students declare their sexuality, a completely irrelevant characteristic, to all of her patients.

If I were in the hospital, and my nurse walked up to my bed and cheerfully announced, “I am a heterosexual!”, I can guarantee you that my wife would march up to the administration and demand an immediate change of the nursing assignment. The sexual preferences of nurses may be a staple of porn films, but it is not the reality of health care.

And look at that classic disclaimer…she’s not homophobic, oh no — she just wouldn’t want a homosexual giving her injections and changing her bedpan.

This is absolutely outrageous. Even worse, the college is dragging out the investigation, has hurt the student’s prospects, and shows no sign of actually wanting to address the issue, preferring to try and place the blame on the student. The college also outed the student to all of her fellow students in the course of ‘investigating’ the problem. I’ve got a full account from the student below the fold.

[Read more…]

Eroding our intellectual infrastructure

One of the challenges facing the country right now in this time of economic crisis is that we’re also about to be confronted by the result of a decade of neglect of the nation’s infrastructure, in particular, the chronic starvation of our universities. It’s an insidious problem, because as administrations have discovered time and again, you can cut an education budget and nothing bad happens, from their perspective. The faculty get a pay freeze; we tighten our belts. The universities lose public funds; we raise tuition a little bit. A few faculty are lost to attrition, and the state decides to defer their replacement for a year or two or indefinitely; the remaining faculty scramble to cover the manpower loss. We can continue to do our jobs, but behind the scenes, the stresses simply grow and worsen.

I can testify to this from personal experience. My biology department struggles every year with the routine business of retirements and sabbatical leaves — we have absolutely no fat in this group, with every member playing an essential role in the curriculum, so every departure, even temporary ones, increases the strain. We have to frantically rearrange schedules to cover our deficits, we have to drop courses for a year (so the students have to juggle their schedules as well), and we hang by our fingernails waiting for the administration to do basic things, like approve temporary hires or allow us to do a search for replacement faculty. Since the state is contributing less and less every year, we will soon reach a point where we simply won’t be allowed to replace essential personnel, and then the whole system is going to break down.

The University of Florida has reached that point. The College of Liberal Arts and Sciences has been told to cut 10% from its budget. Since the biggest chunk of any university’s budget is salaries, that means a lot of people are going on the chopping block — and the administration has decided to simply get rid of entire departments wholesale, including geology. Think about it: a college of science that simply cuts off and throws away an entire discipline. Is that really a place that is supporting science and education? The partitions we set up with these labels are entirely arbitrary, and we are all interdependent. My own discipline of biology is dead without mathematics, chemistry, and physics, and yes, geology is part of the environment we want our students to know. Now it’s true that if all we aimed to do was churn out pre-meds, we could dispense with geology; heck, we could toss out all those ecologists, too, and hone ourselves down to nothing but a service department for instruction in physiology and anatomy.

But we wouldn’t be a university anymore. We’d be a trade school.

The United States is supposed to take some pride in its educational system — at least, we’re accustomed to hearing politicians stand up and brag about how our universities are the envy of the world. It’s a lie. We’re being steadily eroded away, and all that’s holding it up right now is the desperate struggles of the faculty within it. We’re at the breaking point, though, where the losses can’t be supported much more, and the whole edifice is going to fall apart.

Here’s what you need to do. Write to the University of Florida administration and explain to them that what they’re doing is debilitating, and is going to irreparably weaken the mission of the university. Unfortunately, their hands are probably tied; they’ve got a shrinking budget and have to cut somewhere, and they will do so, but at this point all we can do is ask them to hold off on completely destroying a scientific asset.

The next layer of the problem is the state government. They keep seeing the educational system as a great target for saving money with budget cuts, because the effects will not be manifest for several years — and so they steadily hack and slash and chop, and the universities suffer…and now they’re at the point where they begin to break, and they keep cutting. Write to the Florida legislature! Tell them that we need to support higher education, that as a scientific and technological nation, we are dependent on a well-educated citizenry!

It’s not just Florida, either — your state is blithely gutting its system of higher education, too. Minnesota, for instance, has cut investment in higher ed by 28% between 2000 and 2007, while raising tuition 68% over the same period. We haven’t been given less to do, either — our workload increases while salaries fail to keep up with inflation. This is happening everywhere. We are all Florida.

Another part of the problem is…you. Why do you keep electing cretins to your legislatures who despise the “intellectual elite”, who think being smart is a sin, who are so short-sighted that they care nothing for investing in strengthening the country in ways that take ten or more years to pay off? Stop it! Your representatives should be people who value education enough to commit to at least maintaining the current meager level of funding, but instead we get chains of ignoramuses who want to demolish the universities…and simultaneously want to control them to support their favorite ideological nonsense, via “academic freedom” bills. This is also a long-term goal: we have to work to restore our government to some level of sanity. It’s been the domain of fools and thieves for far too long.

Shhhh. Don’t tell the students.

Professor Denis Rancourt of the University of Ottawa has taken a radical step in his teaching practices: he tells all the students in his classes that they automatically get an A+. For this, among other infractions of convention, he has been suspended with pay from his teaching position pending institutional review.

Prof. Rancourt’s suspension is the most serious step in a long series of grievances and conflicts with the university dating back to 2005, when, after researching new teaching methods, he first experimented with eliminating letter grades. He also altered course curriculum with student input – although not the approval of the university – an approach he calls “academic squatting.”

A well-published and politically outspoken scientist who revels in hashing out theories on napkins at conferences, Prof. Rancourt’s unconventional teaching style has generated both an ardent following among a core group of students, and the rancour of many of his fellow faculty members, one-third of whom signed a petition of complaint against him in the fall of 2007. In the letter, which he provided, the complaints stem largely from a series of critical e-mails he distributed about their “paternalistic” teaching methods – a criticism he still expresses, with little restraint, today.

Well, I have to say that what he proposes actually sounds cool and interesting, and that I’d have to see a lot more information before I could say whether the suspension was warranted or not. Grades are a pain and sometimes an obstacle to real learning, and sometimes they are a crutch — a whip we use to motivate when we can’t get the students excited about a subject. I think that one of the things tenured professors ought to be able to do is experiment and innovate in their teaching.

However, there are two potential problems. One is that sometimes innovation doesn’t work — if you’re going to experiment, sometimes experiments fail. The article doesn’t say whether there was some objective assessment of the outcomes of his classes. Do his students actually come out the other side of the term with him with more knowledge and understanding? If they do, bugger the objections, let him keep at it. If they don’t, and the university is actually complaining that he is ignoring the assessment of his experiments to keep doing stuff that doesn’t work, then goodbye Professor Rancourt.

The other problem is that a university education is not the product of a single instructor, and we must respect the whole of the curriculum and work together with our colleagues. I rely on other faculty to teach our students cell biology and molecular biology, for instance; if students showed up in my upper level elective courses with the expectation that they’d learn some developmental biology, and I discovered that they knew nothing about those foundational subjects because their instructors had decided that they’d teach philosophy and political science instead (something I know they wouldn’t do), I would be screwed, and more than a little upset. I’d like to know how far he deviated from the course curricula…a little flexibility is good, but if he was ignoring the needs of the whole discipline’s program, then that’s also reason to say bye-bye to Rancourt.

Snubbing degrees as a new kind of snobbery

There are days when you just want to slap a few journalists. The latest absurdity comes from the LA Times, in which an ignorant reporter waxes snarky over the fact that the vice president’s wife is addressed as “Dr. Biden”, since she has a doctorate in education, and snootily claims that:

Newspapers, including The Times, generally do not use the honorific “Dr.” unless the person in question has a medical degree.

And then she trots out Bill Walsh of the Post and the vapid little god-bunny, Amy Sullivan, to agree that you only call medical doctors “Dr.”

Yeah, right. How many appendectomies have Dr Kissinger, Dr Condoleezza Rice, and Dr Martin Luther King done, huh?

They claim that this is the convention. Step onto any college campus. Look at the directories and ask around. You’ll find that the formal title for faculty and staff with doctoral degrees is “Dr.” (although you’ll also find that many of us prefer not to be addressed quite so formally). All I can assume is that these lazy journalists are completely unfamiliar with higher education…and I am not surprised.

You can find more reactions from Mike Dunsford and Wesley Elsberry. I anticipate more — this is a fine example of media contempt for intellectuals.

For the UMM students taking my class next week

Classes start next week, and I’m teaching genetics again. I’m getting lots of questions from incoming students that I will answer right here, just in case there are a few of you reading the blog.

  1. There will be no labs the first week of class — first lab is on Tuesday, first lecture is on Wednesday, and I hate dragging students into a lab completely cold.

  2. Yes, you can use back editions of the textbook. Current edition is the 9th, but I’ll give out reading assignments and problems with numbers from the 7th, 8th, and 9th editions. It’s a pain in the butt, but the books are ridiculously expensive, and they don’t change that much from edition to edition.

If you are a UMM biology major in their junior year, I have another important announcement: I’m going to be on sabbatical next year. We are having a serious surge of enrollments that is making our required course in molecular biology into a major bottleneck, and we had to decide whether my temporary replacement would be someone to take over my genetics course, or someone who could offer a second section of molecular biology. Molecular biology is the priority right now.

That means that if you were counting on taking genetics next year, you can’t, and you’re going to have to rejigger your schedule and take it this year. Contact me soon, I’ll be very, very generous in squeezing more students in this term.

We now return Pharyngula to topics of more global interest.

What’s wrong with William Ayers?

William Ayers was a young radical in the 1960s — this is admitted, accepted, and not in question at all. Now William Ayers is a respected academic, somebody who is no longer advocating violence, who is a crusader for social justice and urban educational reform within the system, and that sounds like it ought to be an interesting and worthy story. So why is the Republican party trying to brand him as a terrorist? He’s a professor at the University of Illinois at Chicago!

The latest sad twist is that he was invited to speak at a student research conference, and the craven University of Nebraska-Lincoln canceled the event under pressure from donors and politicians. The governor of the state called the invitation an “embarrassment” and said “Ayers is a well-known radical who should never have been invited to the University of Nebraska”; representatives and senators chimed in with similar sentiments; a regent called it “bad judgment”; donors to the university threatened to withhold further contributions. This is insane. Ayers hasn’t committed a crime, and he’s not a danger to society — this is a fellow who clearly has a deep commitment to improving society (perhaps, to Republican eyes, that is his crime).

Has anybody thought to look at what Bill Ayers actually promotes? He has a website, and it’s trivial to look up what he’s advocating. For instance, here is a description of his book, Teaching Toward Feedom:

In Teaching toward Freedom, William Ayers illuminates the hope as well as the conflict that characterizes the craft of education: how it can be used in authoritarian ways at the service of the state, the church, or a restrictive existing social order-or, as he envisions it, as a way for students to become more fully human, more engaged, more participatory, more free. Using examples from his own classroom experiences as well as from popular culture, film, and novels, Ayers redraws the lines concerning how we teach, why we teach, and the surprising things we uncover when we allow students to become visible, vocal authors of their own lives and stories. This lucid and inspiring book will help teachers at every level to realize that ideal.

Why, that sounds admirable. So why are these lunatics shrieking for his head, and condemning Barack Obama for simply attending meetings as a community organizer at the same time as Bill Ayers?

It’s obvious. The right-wing hate machine, desperate for a way to smear a candidate who has an unimpeachable history as an advocate for social justice, strained to find some dangerous association, and the worst they could come up with is a gentle, writerly academic who let the passions of his youth lead him into violent and illegal actions 40 years ago — actions that he considers just. They ignore his history ever since — apparently, there is no redemption unless you embrace Jesus and Republican intolerance, ala Chuck Colson — and they pretend that his words now simply don’t matter. They stir up the mob to hatred, and the mob calls in threats of violence against an educator, and UNL simply surrenders in cowardice.

Bill Ayers is a reason to vote against Republican demagoguery tomorrow.

Physics is important to us biologists, too

The Canadian Undergraduate Physics Conference is in trouble — government support has been flat, and corporate support has been declining. They are really in trouble: here’s what I got from one of the people working on it:

The CUPC is the largest conference in North America organized entirely by undergraduate students. It brings together students from across Canada and the world studying a vast array of subject areas from mathematical and theoretical physics to medical biophysics to engineering and applied physics. This important event gives many students their first experience with academics outside of the classroom, and helps to cultivate an interest in research and higher study. I, and every one else working on the organization of this event, would therefore be extremely grateful if you would be willing to post a link to your blog for the conference (http://cupc.ca/) and ask for donations (which are accepted on the site). The conference is in only a few short days and we are desperate for funds. If the we cannot find adequate support, this will be the 44th and final CUPC, which will be a tremendous shame for science education.

If you can, donate. If you know any potential sponsors who care about undergraduate physics research, pass the word on.