Good luck, Dave!

It’s the end of our semester, and there’s another transition here: one of our colleagues, Dave Hoppe, is retiring, to our regret but to his happy progress. We all got together for a retirement dinner yesterday, so here’s the happy crew, the entire UMM biology discipline.

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From left to right: Chris Cole, Tracey Anderson, Margaret Kuchenreuther, Dave Hoppe, PZ Myers, Timna Wyckoff, Pete Wyckoff, Van Gooch

We hope Dave can still drag himself away from his lakefront home to say hello to us all now and then!

California public schools require teachers to sign a loyalty oath?

And it’s actually enforced? Two teachers have been fired for refusing to take an oath…an oath that was put in place during the McCarthy witch hunts. Apparently they just left it on the books, but now it’s a hook that can be used to eject troublemakers.

You know, like those rabble-rousing, dangerous Quakers.

The most incredibly ironic thing about this whole controversy is that non-citizens are not required to sign it. Says Marianne Kearney-Brown, one of the fired teachers, “The way it’s laid out, a noncitizen member of Al Qaeda could work for the university, but not a citizen Quaker.”

That’s America for you: the important things are the superficial, meaningless expressions in service of great ideals, and if it means throwing away the actual implementation of those important ideas like civil rights, freedom of expression and conscience, and a faith quietly and sincerely held in order to promote noisy but meaningless demonstrations of loyalty, so be it.

Last week of classes!

We are entering into the final week of classes here at UMM, when all of the administrative work for me reaches a horrible, cataclysmic crescendo with piles of exams and papers pouring in starting today. This would be a very poor time for a creationist spammer to try to cause trouble, because I’m going to be very pissy for a while, and blood might be spilled.

One cheery bit of news that means I might not be quite as vicious as I would otherwise: I’ve been invited to take a cruise to the Galapagos! Of course I’m going. It will be a fine tonic before I start next year’s classes. And there are actually three cabins still available on the trip, so if you want to join us in an educational jaunt, and if you have a large bucket of disposable cash, you can come with us!

Wheaton is a weird place

Wheaton has a good academic reputation, but man, it’s the little things that make it frightening. I would not want to live in the theocratic world it represents. Hank Fox has a couple of stories about Wheaton.

The first is the blog of a recent graduate of Wheaton who determined halfway through his undergraduate education that he was an atheist. It sounds like it was rough. He’s ended the blog, though, with a statement that “…now that I’m slightly closer to the real world, I just don’t think it’s that important whether you’re an atheist or a Christian” — which is true. The differences are accentuated when you’re wrapped up in a culture that makes religious belief central to everything; when Christians back off and don’t make their ridiculous superstitions a prerequisite to participation in politics and everyday life, they are entirely tolerable. I think the anonymous student is a little bit optimistic in his confidence that religion won’t intrude on him as much in wider American culture, but perhaps compared to Wheaton, that’s also true.

The second is more disturbing. A professor of English at Wheaton got a divorce from his wife — which the university considers grounds for firing him. The college actually has staff people who assess faculty divorces to determine whether they meet “Biblical standards,” and if they don’t, pffft, you’re gone. This isn’t a guy who was doing substandard work, nor, as his comments reveal, did he abandon Christianity. Other faculty have lost their job for converting to Catholicism. This is just plain freaky: “Wheaton requires faculty and staff to sign a faith statement and adhere to standards of conduct in areas including marriage.”

Has anyone noticed that our evil secular universities do not monitor the personal beliefs of their faculty, and do not consider going to the church of your choice grounds for dismissal? We even let our students believe whatever they want!

Pseudonymity ≠ anonymity

Another minor blog skirmish has erupted over a perennial issue in the blogosphere: the wickedness of anonymous commenters/bloggers/whatever. I’m going to sort of take the side of Greg Laden.

I despise anonymous commenters. It’s pretty much a sure sign that anything the person is going to say is worthless noise if they aren’t willing to sign a name to it.

That said, though, I consider a consistent pseudonym to be a name. I’ve gotten to know lots of people on the web via their chosen pseudonym, and that pseudonym acquires its own authority on the merits of the writing behind it. You don’t need to reveal your full, legal name to be known on the web — it’s good enough to have a handle so we can recognize you. Note that of the 17 Molly award winners here, 10 are using pseudonyms, and that’s just fine.

There are some people who use their own names who are effectively anonymous, and I’ve been getting lots of email from them this week (I may post some of them later — most are short and angry). If your name is Tom Smith, and you send me a one-shot email that is littered with expletives, I’ve never heard of you before and you certainly haven’t explained your position well. You are effectively anonymous. I don’t regard your contributions at all highly.

I also have to comment on something from Drugmonkey. Note, first of all, that “Drugmonkey” is a pseudonym for a person who has a nice consistent voice on the web — I have a clear picture of who “Drugmonkey” is from his writing, which may or may not align well with the person, but that doesn’t matter. And usually I enjoy what he writes, but not this bit.

A final comment on the special SuperDuperz occupational hazard of the teaching college professor. Now, I love you all, really I do. And I once aspired to be one of y’all. Heck, I may eventually be one of you. For full disclosure I’ll further admit that I spent a considerable number of my formative years in rather close proximity to one of you. Here’s the thing. Your whole professional life is predicated on you as the Authority. In the classroom, you have all the knowledge and the students have relatively little. They are explicitly seeking you out for your authority. Even within most “teaching departments” you are the sole expert in not just a narrow area but in several subfields, are you not? And…c’mon, ‘fess up. It goes to your head after awhile doesn’t it? And even more pernicious…do you teach at a small college in the middle of nowhere? Plopped down amongst the local rubes? So you are more worldly and informed on many topics than most of your neighbors? Which makes you…an authoritah? On oh-so-many things?

Well, it’s nice that he aspired to be one of us, but he clearly didn’t make the cut, and I can guess why. His assumptions are faulty. In my classroom, I’m an authority only by accident of birth — I’ve got a thirty year head start on my students. However, my whole goal is to get these students to start questioning and challenging me, and finding out new stuff that I didn’t know before. I even like it when the creationists in class start raising objections. If Drugmonkey thinks a college classroom is a place where the best teaching is done by imposing his views on a roomful of students, he’s not going to make it to that exalted position of The Teaching College Professor, because he won’t be teaching.

Bad professor

To my students and advisees: I’ve emailed a few of you, but just in case, I’m also putting this here. You’ve been trying to get in touch with me, especially this week when registration is pending, but when I’m not in class I’m flitting off to somewhere else. I was away in Washington DC last Thursday afternoon through Sunday, and I’m about to do it again with trips to Mankato tomorrow, a long weekend at a conference in Oregon, and then zooming away again right after class on Monday to Fergus Falls. Trust me, though, you’re not the only one feeling a bit tired of it all.

Here’s the deal, though. I’m done with today’s teaching at 12:45. I’m going to be in my office from 1 to 5, with the door wide open. I’ve even shoveled the stacks of books off of two of my office chairs — it’s almost hospitable in here. So come on by, I’ll be there all afternoon, and the only business will be student business. If you’ve got registration stuff to take care of, we can do that; if you just want to say hello, that’s cool, too.

Two wrongs don’t make a right

A far right wing wanker is suing Ohio State University for discrimination. I hate to say it, but if this account is at all accurate, he might have a case.

In 2006, Savage agreed to serve on a committee to determine required reading for incoming freshmen at the Mansfield campus.

Savage said the books considered by the committee were too liberal and suggested The Marketing of Evil by David Kupelian.

Professors James F. Buckley and Norman W. Jones filed a sexual-harassment complaint against Savage, saying he was homophobic for suggesting the book. The complaint was dismissed as unfounded.

Because he continued to be harassed, Savage said, he was forced to resign.

Kupelian is a vile, dishonest hack, and his book, which is the usual tripe about a gay conspiracy to force college students to become atheist abortionists and communists, is unadulterated garbage of the sort peddled by Wing Nut Daily. To even suggest such a bad book reveals that Scott Savage is an incompetent ideologue, and that yes, he most certainly is a homophobe. I’d be socially snubbing such a person at my workplace, just as I would if he were to show up wearing KKK robes.

But being a homophobe isn’t a crime, and suggesting a rotten book (a suggestion that I’m sure was shot down without hesitation by the other members of the committee) isn’t sufficient grounds for a lawsuit. Unless there’s an awful lot more to Savage’s actions than are revealed in this story, it sounds like people did try to drive him out of his job.

Of course, my sympathy for the clown has limits. This exceeds them:

The suit says he is a devout Christian, married for 18 years and the father of eight. It says he has struggled to find library work since leaving OSU.

Lots of people at universities are Christian, many of them have been married for a long time (my 28th wedding anniversary was just yesterday), and although 8 children may be a little excessive, you’ll also find lots of people who love kids at universities — and you’ll also find gay communist atheists who love children and have long term relationships. That claim is irrelevant to his lawsuit and is the protest of a close-minded bigot who likes to toss out these nice testimonials to his purported goodness while denying that the people he demonizes might have very similar values.

So no sympathy for the ugly little hater from me, but I have to concede that at least one of the actions against him also crossed the line.