98 replies to this topic

[Mr. Roboto]

[freedom78]

Iowa Pol Pushing Bill To Get More GOP Profs On College Campuses

by Corky Siemaszko

 

 

An Iowa lawmaker is pushing bill to promote to what he calls "partisan balance" on college campuses — and which critics call a cap on Democratic college professors at state universities.

 

State Sen. Mark Chelgren, a Republican, claims his own experiences with "liberal professors" prompted him to put forward a plan to impose a hiring freeze until the number of registered Republicans and Democrats on university faculties are within 10 percent of each other.

 

Chelgren said Senate File 228, which critics say is unlikely to go anywhere, will be a boon to conservative students on campuses in Iowa and across the country.

 

"I'm pretty confident that any student that goes to any university anywhere in the United States of America has experienced intimidation for their conservative political views," he said. "I have personal experience with it. And I have heard from dozens of individuals who say they were too intimidated to say they supported Donald Trump or express a conservative viewpoint."

 

Chelgren insisted his aim was not to pave the way for more Republican professors but to "make sure we have a diversity of opinions on campuses."

"I believe strongly there should be open dialogue from both directions," he said.

 

Asked what difference it would make if, for example, a math professor were a Democrat or Republican, Chelgren responded: "If I knew a logics professor was a liberal, I would questions whether I should take that class."

 

Critics like the ACLU of Iowa said Chelgren is trying to impose a political litmus test on new hires for the state's university system.

 

"This bill, SF 288, mandates that decisions about whether to hire faculty be made not on the basis of who is best qualified for the position, but instead, on a candidate's political party affiliation," ACLU legal director Rita Bettis said. "It specifically exempts those who have declared no party. In that way, it infringes not only on the academic freedom and free speech of faculty members, it also limits their core political rights by making employment contingent on either having the 'right' political party or having no political party."

 

And so on... http://www.nbcnews.c...ampuses-n725281

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[freedom78]

I've never been much of a supporter of affirmative action, mostly because I see it as a policy aimed at the bottom.  My thinking (and we can run this by a logician of either liberal or conservative leanings) is that the most qualified students will be admitted, regardless of race.  To use a fictional quota (even though quotas are unconstitutional), imagine that a university wants 10% of its admits to be black. And, for reasons we don't need to debate in this post, as admissions are processed it realizes that only 9% of those admitted are black.  Now, those 9% got in on their merits, so they weren't what I would consider affirmative action admits.  But if we get down to the last thousand students admitted and realize we need to play catch up, and the admit rate would still lead to only 9% instead of 10%, then this fictional university would have to admit at a higher rate the racial minority students who were among the least qualified of those admitted.  Now, having taught in a university for 16 years, including grad school, I can tell which students come in unprepared, regardless of race, and those students are very commonly the ones who fail.  As much as affirmative action is meant to be the proverbial hand up, if it leads to admitting those who fail out or drop out, all its done is to put debt on students in the name of racial progress.  A better option and one that has become more widely available is for students who miss the cut to attend a two year program, study hard, kick ass, and reapply.  While it may not work at Yale, coming from a community college CAN offer proof of capabilities and seriousness.  However, at the same time, I see a LOT of students coming form community college who can't cut it...overall, I think admissions gets it right more often than not.  But if you believe that the concentration of minorities in poorer schools leaves them, in general, less prepared to take on college, then a two year program can help them overcome that to some extent.

 

On the other hand, affirmative action may be much MORE effective in an area like grad school.  Because universities are much more highly selective and admit a relatively small number of applicants to their grad programs (my grad school class was about a dozen students out of 200-ish applicants), and because grad school applicants have already proven themselves capable in a university setting, it might be a more useful policy at this level. 

 

However, I don't know how much any of this has been studied.  I don't know if universities mark students with an "AA" in their file and track their progress...they probably SHOULD if we want to know the effects.  I have seen, on multiple occasions, white students complaining that they didn't get admitted to a place because of affirmative action, which they couldn't possibly know.  I can only guess that their parents couldn't bear that their child didn't cut it somewhere and had to blame the minorities.

[Mr. Roboto]

Watched this with the Missus tonight. Loved it.

 

[AxlsMainMan]

Yeah, he's quite dope. We watched a lot of his stuff at teachers college.

[freedom78]

Most people in education could tell you something like what he said in that video.  Unfortunately, we have politicized teachers and teaching, making reform much harder.  I suspect that good innovations will occur locally or on the state level in some state will to take a chance, and others will follow when it pays off.

[AxlsMainMan]

Most people in education could tell you something like what he said in that video.  Unfortunately, we have politicized teachers and teaching, making reform much harder.  I suspect that good innovations will occur locally or on the state level in some state will to take a chance, and others will follow when it pays off.

 

Don't forget the unions. At least here in Canada, teachers have the absolute strongest unions, making any sort of reform or change an uphill battle. 

[freedom78]

Don't forget the unions. At least here in Canada, teachers have the absolute strongest unions, making any sort of reform or change an uphill battle. 

 

It's like entitlement reform.  The old farts at the AARP won't let you touch Social Security, even to save it.