I never expected this...

This happened yesterday:  I had finished the lecture part of my large intro class and was starting to tell them about their Test, which would be online through the weekend. Things like what topics to expect, the window the test would be available, how much time they have once they launch the test, and so on...  And as I was doing so, about a third of the class got up, gathered their stuff, and headed for the door.  While I was talking. This is the first I recall something like this happening, believe it or not, in about 30 years of teaching.  I have until next Tuesday to prepare a way to shame them into never doing this again, although I suspect, given that this is the United States of America, it would be pointless.

Those ivory tower perfessers

In the midst of a discussion over on Facebook, regarding the value and purpose of education, some commenters expressed views suggesting that they believe that the purpose of education is preparation for a job or jobs. There was also, the usual American folk notion of higher education being dominated by "liberals" who spend their class time "indoctrinating" students into particular "ideologies," mostly of course leftist (rightwing or conservative views are not, of course, "ideologies").  A number of misconceptions about the nature, purpose, and content of higher education emerged, and I promised to take it seriously and attempt to address some of the issues raised.  Only the gods know why...

ULL still abusing faculty...

A friend/colleague at the University of Louisiana/Lafayette met his first class of the summer term today.   Since the class is somewhat "under-enrolled" he still does not know how much less than the usual $2300 for a short summer course he's going to receive. (Note: that's already less than we pay adjunct faculty per course at my university, and this colleague is a permanent faculty member.)

Update (July 10, 2013):
I just learned that my colleague will be paid $1500 for teaching this three-credit class to a small number of students.  An adjunct at UNF would receive at least $2000, and likely more depending on how much they had been teaching for us.

More complaining about students

OK, so the linguistics students had an assignment to write an ecology of a specific dialect of a language.  They were to avoid broad generalized "languages," like "Spanish" or "Japanese," and focus on more localized varieties such as "Panamanian Spanish" or "Tokyo Japanese."

The ecology is developed by answering questions based on my reinterpretation of an article by Einar Haugen in The Linguistic Reporter, Winter 1971, page 25.  My questions:

• What is the name of the language variety (what do its speakers call it; what do nonspeakers call it; what do linguists call it)?
• Who are its users, and how are they grouped by nation, geographical location, class, religion, or any other relevant grouping?
• What larger “language” does it belong to? What are the main closely related dialects?
• What other dialects are employed by its users?
• Is this dialect written? If so, how and in what contexts?
• Is its use restricted or limited in certain ways, for example religion or ritual, written literature, legal proceedings, folk tales, and so on?
• What issues of power and authority are relevant to this dialect?
• Is the dialect endangered? If so, what factors might be involved? If not, what might be contributing to its vitality?

Most of the students turned in papers that correctly identified a dialect to write about, but then proceeded to ignore the questions.  Some wrote about their personal reasons for being interested in this dialect; others focused on issues of grammar; others focused on other issues not really relevant to the questions at hand.

And, far too many offered a list of references but did not bother to cite those references in the text of their papers.

What do we do, when our university students can't do what they should have learned to do in high school?

CNBC: University professor is the "least stressful job"

According to Careercast.com, and as reported by CNBC, university professor is the "least stressful job" for 2013.  Here's what Tony Lee, publisher of Careercast.com, says about it:

"If you look at the criteria for stressful jobs, things like working under deadlines, physical demands of the job, environmental conditions hazards, is your life at risk, are you responsible for the life of someone else, they rank like 'zero' on pretty much all of them!" Lee said.
Plus, they're in total control. They teach as many classes as they want and what they want to teach. They tell the students what to do and reign over the classroom. They are the managers of their own stress level."

Let's go through some of this and see how it holds up.

Working under deadlines.  Hmmm...  I am always under some kind of deadline:  deadline for ordering textbooks; deadline for posting my syllabuses; deadline for posting office hours (coming up soon); deadline for entering midterm grades for freshmen; deadline for posting final grades online; and so on.  And those are just the teaching deadlines.  There are deadlines for applying for things, deadlines for signing things, deadlines for...  well, you get the picture.

Physical demands of the job.  Ok, in general this gig is not too physically demanding, but you can get pretty tired mentally and physically by the time you finish teaching for a day.  And try moving back and forth in front of 30 or 40 or a couple hundred students, lecturing and at the same time fielding some of the most off-the-wall questions you can imagine.  When you walk into a class and confront a group of college students, you really never know exactly what is going to happen, and you have to be able to think on your feet.

Environmental conditions hazards.  Yeah...  We actually had our social sciences building demolished because it was "sick," and making the people who inhabited it sick.  And, a few years ago I stood on a chair to put a video in a classroom VCR; the chair collapsed under me and I came away with a broken little finger, which required a trip to the emergency room so the good doctor could put the finger back together.

Is your life at risk?  Do I even have to say anything about standing up in front of dozens of people and telling them something they don't like to hear, in this day and age?  Especially when some of them are failing?

They teach as many classes as they want and what they want to teach.  No, not really.  At UNF we teach three classes per semester (in addition to performing service and research).  Those classes are dictated largely by what will put seats in the classroom chairs.  I'd love to teach a course on Caribbean Creole languages (my research specialty), but I'll likely never get to as long as I am where I am, because not enough people will sign up for it. What classes we teach is also dictated by our curriculum, which includes core courses that have to be taught, every semester.

They tell the students what to do and reign over the classroom.  "Reign" over the classroom, do we?  It doesn't feel that way to me.  One reason is the cultural attitudes students bring toward higher education and faculty.  We, the professoriate, are probably the most reviled class in America.  Articles like this one are a major reason why.

I'm guessing that Tony Lee never had to put together a tenure and promotion dossier, or an application for a summer research grant, or, well, whatever.

End of the semester, part I

It's the last week of classes, and there's good news and bad news.

The good news:  Two linguistics students came by the office worried about being able to finish their papers on time.  Their problem: too much material.  The paper is a squib, defined as a usually relatively short exploration of a topic, often incomplete.  I had to talk them down, explaining that squibs are not term papers and that at a convenient point they needed to just stop and suggest where they might go next in the exploration of their topic.  But it is good to know that some students seem to be finding linguistics engaging and relevant.

The bad news: A student emails asking which chapters, in addition to 18 and 19, will be on the final test next week.  Our textbook only has 13 chapters.

Irony!

Here I am at the door of one of my Fall 2012 classrooms.  I'll be teaching Introduction to Anthropology (ANT 2000) to about 200 students, with no help from a teaching assistant. Can you say "multiple choice?"  I was there this morning to see if my key opened the door (it did), and whether the lapel mic was working (it was).

I've taught here a number of times over the years, and each time I've thought that I should take a photo of this wall plaque outside the room, but I never got around to it.  Until today.

Oh, and the irony?  The classroom is located in the College of Health...

A step in the wrong direction

On Friday (June 22) we got this email from the university president:

Yesterday, the Florida Board of Governors approved at [sic] 13 percent tuition increase for UNF. We appreciate the work of the Board of Governors and are satisfied with its decision. As a sign of respect to the BOG and the Governor, we are not appealing the decision. This tuition increase will allow us to continue to provide a quality education to our students. 

The university had asked for a 15% increase, but that was turned down; 13% was the compromise.

This is a step in the wrong direction.  College student debt in the United States is already higher than credit card debt.  The right direction would be to make all education, kindergarten through university, free, i.e. tax-supported.  We could easily afford to do this, and add universal health care, if we didn't have to police the entire planet and at the same time coddle our millionaires.

I've said it before and I'll say it again: Our inability to get these kinds of things done is a function, or rather dysfunction, of our hyper-independence training.  For those who missed it, independence training is a cultural value that stresses individualism at the expense of the social good.  It has multiple ramifications throughout our culture, from the rejection of co-sleeping with infants and the emphasis on early weaning (to the point where images of women breastfeeding are seen as "dirty") through the Lone Ranger Syndrome in popular culture, all the way to our ambivalence toward the United Nations and our too-frequent willingness to "go it alone" in international adventures of dubious legality.

Florida Governor Scott says we don't need anthropologists

Florida Governor Rick Voldemort Scott wants universities to turn their backs on the liberal arts and sciences and focus on useful things like, you know, engineering and computer science.  Op-ed cartoonist Jeff Parker at Florida Today captures the governor's worldview very nicely:

In addition, Jeff writes:

Instead of a well-rounded, competitive, educated populace, Scott seemingly prefers to develop "foot soldiers for capitalism" as Anthony Carnevale, director of the Georgetown University Center on Education and the Workforce puts it. The Governor appears satisfied with the idea of turning our universities into VoTech centers.
Plus, all that critical thinking and problem solving, nurtured by a liberal arts education, just gets in the way of ideological agendas like Scott's.

Nicely put.  I'll save my own rant for later.

Florida "lawmakers" seek to end tenure in the state colleges

This is a comment I just posted on Valencia Community College Computer Science professor Lisa Macon's blog devoted to discussing the attempt by the Florida legislature to end the tenure system in the state colleges:

... I don't think that the central concern of these folks is either cost-cutting or "bad teachers." I think the heart of the matter is that they hate education at all levels, but especially higher ed. This is where students are supposed to learn to observe the world around them and make critical, rational analyses of that world on the basis of evidence. The right-wing goons know that they were elected precisely because we have not done this as well as we should have, and they also know that if we ever do teach people to think critically they will never be elected to anything again. So, they want to destroy this aspect of higher higher education and turn everything into training colleges turning out good, compliant carbon-units for predatory capitalism. If they are successful with the state colleges, they will come for us in the universities next (they've already begun, actually).

Distinction without a difference: “Foreign Culture” and Cultural Diversity”

Currently at the University of North Florida, we have courses that students can take to fulfill “cultural diversity” (CD) and  “foreign culture” (FC) requirements. The CD requirement applies across the university to students in their first two years, while the FC requirement applies to students in the College of Arts and Sciences and is satisfied by a number of junior and senior level courses.  Neither of these categories is tied to a specific department: CD and FC courses are located across a wide range of academic fields.

The rationale for these requirements is that students need to be taken out of the cultural context they are familiar with and exposed to “others.”  I agree with this, and as an anthropologist, I might go so far as to say that the students need to be taken out of their comfort zones and then brought home again, hopefully to understand in a new way their own cultures.  But I have a problem with the distinction, as it is now drawn, between CD and FC.  CD courses are about “cultural diversity” as it exists within the US.  FC courses are limited to “cultures” outside the US, hence the term “foreign culture.”

This distinction ignores the fact that there are “cultures” within the US that are just as “foreign” to most of our students as many of the cultures they might encounter outside the US.  Consider:  Cherokee, Hopi, Navaho, Inuit, Lakota, Mikasuki, Cree, Omaha, and many other Native American cultures. Or African American cultures, such as Gullah/Geechee and Afro-Seminole. Or the Amish and Mennonites.  Or isolated Appalachian communities.  What about the Korean, Chinese, Vietnamese, and other Asian communities within the US?

And what about native Hawaiians?  Hawai’i is in the US, technically, but….  And where does Puerto Rico fall in this scheme? The people are US citizens by birth, but their first language is mostly Spanish, so do they represent “cultural diversity” or “foreign culture?”  What do we do with the Cuban and Haitian communities in South Florida?  Or American Samoa?  And to turn the question around, what might be wrong with considering the cultural diversity of a “foreign” place like China or India?  Does only the US exhibit “cultural diversity?”

Why does any of this matter?  It matters because CD and FC courses nearly always fully enroll, because they meet requirements that students have to fulfill.  Departments that are able to offer these courses can generate nice pots of tuition money for the university. And for faculty who teach them, especially in anthropology but likely some others as well, they represent the one chance we have to offer a course on our geographical foci (the Caribbean, West Africa, Mexico, etc.) without worrying that the course won’t attract enough students.

The problem is that the strict delineation between US-based CD and “foreign” FC means that any anthropologist who specializes within the US may have a tough time getting to teach their specialty. The Foreign Culture Committee, which bestows the label “foreign culture,” recently denied FC designation for an anthropology course on peoples and cultures of the Southwest on the grounds that “the southwest” is part of the US.  Such a course, as taught by our resident expert in this area, would give students beyond anthropology an entry to some pretty exotic cultures, including for example the Hopi, Apache, and Navaho, among others.  At the same time, the designation would ensure that the course is available for anthropology students.

My interim solution would be to keep CD courses as a designation for lower level (frosh and sophomore) courses that teach about “cultural diversity” within the United States, and then to expand FC to include upper level courses that examine the cultures of coherent communities within the United States that differ significantly from the mainstream, European-based, unmarked one that most of our students come from.

Any quest for change will face the inertia of a somewhat powerful College committee; but this is a fight worth having, I think.

The University of Louisiana at Lafayette is at it again!

On November 4, 2010, the faculty and staff at UL/Lafayette received an email that included this (my emphasis in bold):

Program Review and Budget Reduction Planning
Drs. Steve Landry and Carolyn Bruder are currently holding a second round of meetings with the academic deans to provide additional feedback regarding the deans’ original budget reduction plans and to elicit their responses to program review data.  Following these meetings, the President will receive from Academic Affairs the initial recommendations for budget reductions and program elimination, prioritization, and reorganization.  Should the President determine that some program closures must be initiated in response to the mid-year state budget reductions, campus leaders will meet with academic administrators, faculty, and students in the affected programs to explain the criteria that were considered in formulating a program elimination recommendation and to discuss the proposal with program constituents.  Mid-year budget reductions from the state should be announced before the semester break that begins in December.

Really?  You're going to tell people that they will no longer have a job in January just before Christmas break?

And the most important reason that they may get away with it: faculty at ULL, and indeed throughout the Louisiana system, have no faculty union.  Here in Florida, when Florida State University fired some 21 faculty, including well-known anthropologist Dean Falk, the union, United Faculty of Florida, was able to force them to hire all these faculty back. The reason: FSU administrators did not follow the procedures for termination specified in the collective bargaining agreement, which is the contract between faculty and the school's managerial elite.

Not only do ULL faculty not have a collective bargaining agreement; they also, as of today, continue to work the fall semester without having signed any contract at all! [Added Nov 13: One has to wonder whether being late with contracts is a deliberate strategy; that would be even more evil than I expected.]

Here's a suggestion for any ULL administrators that might read this: If you want to cut your budget, end the football program.  You've already canned Philosophy; "football" is not spelled with "ph."  Wait, wait: maybe you should consider closing the school of Business Administration; after all, it's graduates from those schools who have put us in this mess we're in now.

(For my thoughts on other mischief perpetrated by ULL, go here and here.)

Marvin Harris on holistic anthropology

From Theories of Culture in Postmodern Times, page 139 (Altamira Press 1999):

Anthropologists who are committed to holism must come to terms with the risks of making mistakes. In this connection, warning students that the findings of science are provisional and subject to various distortions and biases may help to relieve some of the angst associated with holistic perspectives. Another point to be kept in mind is that the misinformation transmitted through a holistic text or introductory class is not likely to be as remote from current expert opinion as the usual non-academic sources of knowledge about biocultural evolution, such as creationism and New Age necromancy. Bear in mind that only a very small percentage of students take introductory courses in anthropology in order to prepare for graduate school; the great majority are only passing through, and one anthropology course is all they will ever take. Indeed, that one anthropology course may be the only course in the social sciences they will ever take. Given the facts that anthropology has so much to say, that its knowledge is vital for our ability to live as informed and responsible citizens of the world, and that there is so little time and space in which to say it, our students deserve to have us try to give them the most holistic view possible.

Amen.

"Culture" comes to the Naval Academy

From an article in today's Washington Post:

Last month, the Naval Academy department then known as Department of Language Studies quietly changed its name to Department of Language and Cultures.

It hardly registers as big news. But to Clementine Fujimura, the lone anthropology professor at the Annapolis campus, the change is "huge."

Why? "Because it's acknowledging that the Navy is accepting that we need to be teaching about culture," she said.

 Yeah, well, I'm not so sure that this is the "huge news" Dr. Fujimura thinks it is. But first, I have a question:

The Naval Academy only has one anthropologist on faculty???  WTF?!?

 Moving on. Here's why I think that this may not be something to celebrate. When academic departments outside of anthropology teach "culture," they generally have in mind a sort of dumbed-down, laundry-list approach to culture:  Look at the exotic foods these folks eat, or their clothing, or the gestures they use for "come here" and "good-bye."  They rarely, if ever, apply the insights that anthropology has developed into the nature and structure of culture as a human adaptation.

Perhaps Dr. Fujimura is happy with this, but she shouldn't be, unless she happens to count herself among the "postmodern" "interpretivist" cultural types who have participated in the trivialization of the culture concept over the last couple of decades.

Here at UNF, our World Languages department (a fine name, I think) has proposed a name change to the "Department of Language, Literature, and Culture." As a group, we in the anthropology program saw this as outlandishly over-reaching (wouldn't the English Department have to be absorbed?), as well as a usurpation of what is, traditionally, the academic domain of anthropology. Since we are now in the middle of summer, we don't know whether World Languages' quest for this name change will be picked up in the fall or not, but there will certainly be some opposition.
And by the way, toward the end of the full WaPo article there is this:

...anthropologists have ever been wary of the use to which their profession might be put by the military, whose purpose, of course, goes far beyond the passive study of other cultures.

Excuse me. Anthropologist have never really been "passive" in their study of cultures.  The central research method of cultural anthropology is not called participant observation for nothing. And E. B. Tylor (1832-1917) referred to anthropology as "essentially a reformer's science... active at once in aiding progress and in removing hindrance" (quoted in Marvin Harris, Theories of Culture in Postmodern Times (p. 62), Altamira Press 1999).

The bureaukleptocrats are still at it!

Imagine a university where the following things happen:

• A "short" summer course is offered, to be taught in July, and students begin registering and paying for it.
• By early June, only eight students have registered, so some klepto administrator decides to cancel the class. The instructor slated to the teach the class is notified, not in writing, but verbally.
• The day before the class is scheduled to begin, the class is still listed on the university's web site, and nobody, other than the instructor, has been told that it was canceled.
• On the first day of class, the course is still online and the eight students are still registered. The instructor goes to the classroom at the appropriate time. Seven students are present. None have been told that the class was canceled. Some are upset to learn this, since the course is required for their major.  When asked whether they had paid for the class, most students answer affirmatively.
• Finally, the day after the first class, the course is removed from the web site.
• At least one student was able to get a Late Schedule Adjustment in order to register for a different class.
• As of this writing, the instructor still has not received official, written word that the course was canceled.

If there seems to be no clear, established routine for canceling classes and informing those affected in a timely manner, this is because the klepto administrators of this university prefer to keep it that way. As one of them was reported to have stated in a faculty senate meeting, they prefer to keep things vague, so that they can be "flexible."  One wonders what this means. We have already learned that one thing it means is that they can decide, after the fact, whether and what to pay a faculty member for teaching a course. Perhaps it also means that they can keep the money students have paid for registration as long as they want to, all the while pocketing the interest.

Apparently, also, this klepto administration prefers to offer students fewer choices in courses, and herd everyone into one large class. In the case described above, they "saved" $1200 (the medieval salary this instructor would have received) by canceling a class that would have brought in at least $3840 in tuition and fees. Based on this evidence, they aren't really very smart.

End of semester blues

In the semester just ended, I taught a section of Linguistic Anthropology. An ever-present theme in this course is the concept of linguist relativism: the idea that all human languages are equally good at being human languages, even those we often devalue or disparage, like African American Vernacular English (AAVE, or Ebonics). Complementing this is the idea that languages may have quite different ways of expressing some concept, but that this says nothing about the cognitive capacity of speakers.

So, when I put the following question on the last test, I fully expected it to be a throwaway, a sure couple of percentage points for everyone:

TRUE or FALSE:  When Ebonics (AAVE) speakers say Mary pen for Standard English Mary's pen, they are demonstrating their lack of the concept of possession.

Imagine my surprise when I found that only 67% of the students answered (correctly) "false," while 33% answered (incorrectly) "true."

This is after spending 15 weeks with a professor whose entire research life has been spent investigating, analyzing, writing about, and teaching about "non-standard" languages. A professor whose interest in these languages was jump-started back in the late 1970s by Bill Labov's classic article "The Logic of Non-Standard English," which should have killed these ideas, but obviously didn't.

Another question, this one also a presumed freebie:

According to your professor, the decision to call vernacular forms of language, such as Ebonics or creoles, a "language" or a "dialect" is based primarily on:  (a) science  (b) linguistics  (c) logic  (d) politics.

The correct answer is (d). In this same class, only 39% answered correctly; 61% were incorrect. All those who answered incorrectly chose (b). Again, this after repeated iterations of Max Weinreich's classic aphorism: "A language is a dialect with an army and navy." Plus a discussion of the brouhaha surrounding the Oakland (California) School Board's attempt to designate Ebonics a "language" for educational purposes (the African American community of Oakland does not have its own army and navy).

This same question, with slightly different answer choices, was on the final test in my other class, an introduction to linguistics for English and English Education majors. In this class, 83% gave the correct answer (politics); only 17% were incorrect.

What does all this mean? Are English majors "smarter" than Anthropology majors (and by "smarter" I mean only better at living up to the expectations of professors, nothing more)? I don't think so, generally, but the performance of the Anthropology majors in my class this semester, with a few exceptions, was certainly disappointing. For example, despite my constant needling, threats at testing (some carried out), talking about their importance, etc., they refused to commit to memory the required symbols of the International Phonetic Alphabet. Of course, this was true of some in the English linguistics class as well.

Overall, it was a somewhat frustrating semester.
-------------------------
Labov, W. 1972. Language in the Inner City: Studies in the Black English Vernacular. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. Pages 201-240.

Liberty University does it again

PZ Myers at Pharyngula has alerted us to the fact that Liberty University's commencement speaker this spring will be Glenn Beck. I'm not certain whether this constitutes educational malpractice, as I wrote about last month, but it can't be a good thing for LU's students.

Where the kleptobureaucrats rule: an update

On February 28 I posted about a friend and colleague who taught a short-term course during the Christmas recess for which his university refused to pay him. The university's stated reason for withholding pay was that, since only two students registered for the course, the course should have been canceled.

My friend, realizing at the time that having only two students enrolled might jeopardize the course, tried repeatedly to contact his Dean's office and get some official word as to whether the class would run or not. However, it was Christmas break, and he was unable to get a response, and so he went ahead and taught the course. At the end, the course was still listed on the university's web site, my friend posted grades for the students, and they got their three credits from the university. He waited to be paid, but no pay (a mere $1200) was forthcoming. My friend pursued his case onward and upward until, finally, one of the highest administrators at the university actually argued, over the phone, that my friend should have "camped out" at the Dean's office back before the start of the class.

I learned today that the university administration has finally agreed to pay my friend. But instead of the almost laughably low $1200 he had been promised, they're going to give him $600. They actually sent him a memo with the $1200 crossed out and $600 written in by hand! So, basically, the university stole what they consider to be one-half the value of my friend's labor.  And that brings me to the real purpose of this post: The university in question is the University of Louisiana at Lafayette.

One might be tempted to see this situation as some kind of anomaly, but it isn't. This is Louisiana, home of the "big easy." Consider the news that Louisiana Governor Bobby Jindal blackmailed his Democratic Attorney General into supporting the round of totally mindless and morally bankrupt lawsuits challenging the legality of President Obama's recently passed Affordable Care Act. That's right, blackmailed: Jindal told AG Buddy Caldwell that if he joined in the lawsuit, his employees would be immune from the budget cuts Jindal wants to use to reduce the size of state government. This earned Jindal "Worst Person in the World" for Tuesday, April 6:

Visit msnbc.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

No, these aren't anomalies; these are manifestations of a dysfunctional culture.

Educational malpractice at Liberty University

The internet news site Common Dreams carried an article recently about a group of students from Liberty University visiting the Smithsonian Institution. Students at LU are encouraged to fit natural history, and especially biological evolution, into the fantasy religion-based creationist biblical literalism advocated by the school's founder, the late fundamentalist evangelist Jerry Falwell. And, as an Indonesian fundamentalist Islamic saying goes, "when faith and facts conflict, faith wins."

Illustrating how faith wins over facts, LU students scoffed at the Smithsonian's model of a 210 million year old rat-sized creature hypothesized to be the common ancestor of all mammals. First, there's no way a ratty-looking thing could ever become a human being. Second, the 210 million year window for this to happen violates the young earth creationism taught at LU, which is based on arithmetical gymnastics of Archbishop James Ussher (1581-1656) who calculated that God created Everything on October 23, 4004 BC, making the Earth only around 6,000 years old.

Further reinforcing the triumph of faith over facts, Marcus Ross, an Assistant Professor of Geology at LU, made this comment about Adam and Eve:

"I feel they were real people, they were the first people."

OK, then. But there's a problem. "I feel..." is not a legitimate way to introduce a scientific proposition. "The evidence suggests..." would be more appropriate. But for these folks, evidence is not required. In fact, evidence that conflicts with "faith," which really means unquestioning obedience, is ignored, disparaged, ridiculed, tossed aside. It doesn't matter that the evidence suggests that there really never was, at any single point in time, a "first woman" or "first man." When evidence conflicts with faith, faith wins.

Anyway, I was intrigued by this article, so I went online to look for course descriptions at Liberty University. After all, LU is accredited by the same agency as my school, the University of North Florida.  I found a course called History of Life, and here are the description and "rationale" for that course:

COURSE DESCRIPTION
An interdisciplinary study of the origin and history of life in the universe. Faculty of the Center for Creation Studies will draw from science, religion, history, and philosophy in presenting the evidence and arguments for creation and against evolution. This course is required for all Liberty students. 

RATIONALE

This course is designed to instill in our students a clear understanding of the relationship between science and Scripture as it pertains to the study of origins. In particular, it is designed to help students develop a clear and consistent Biblical creationist worldview and defend it.

Wow. The "History of Life" is essentially a course designed to show students how to ignore almost everything we know about the history of life in favor of a rambling collection of myths written down by some Middle Eastern nomads centuries before anyone even knew that life on Earth is carbon-based. And just to drive the point home, here are the course's "measurable learning outcomes" (at least they have the academic assessment jargon down pat):

A. Students should be able to discuss and contrast creation science and evolution worldviews.

B. Students should be able to discuss the creation science view from Biblical accounts and rebut creation compromise views. 

C. Students should be able to discuss the theories of natural selection and evolution. 

D. Students should be able to discuss scientific evidences in support of a recent creation. 

E. Students should be able to discuss the evidence of the fossil record and its implications of origins. 

F. Students should be able to discuss evidence for the unique creation of man. 

G. Students should be able to discuss evidence for creation using concepts such as irreducible complexity. 

H. Students should be able to discuss the importance of the Biblical creation message in understanding major doctrines and application for personal evangelism.

Why is this "educational malpractice," as I suggested in the title of this post? It's malpractice because this university's faculty are lying to their students, just as egregiously as if, in an astronomy class, they taught them that the Sun revolves around the Earth. And, by the way, this would be true even if the lies were not based on religious dogma.

The empirical, objectively valid facts about the history of life on Earth, the falsifiable hypotheses that scientists create to describe and explain those facts, and the theories that result when related  unfalsified hypotheses converge on the explanation of some set of those facts, cannot be evaluated by what's in the Bible, any more than they can be evaluated by what's in Lord of the Rings.

I believe that the accrediting agency should put Liberty University's program in biology on probation until those who teach in that program stop lying to their students.

Bureaukleptocrats make me cranky...

Especially when they're in charge of "educational" institutions, which is becoming increasingly common these days as the corporatization of universities turns them into crypto-fascist safehouses for a managerial elite that is probably too incompetent to be successful out in the real business world but that has somehow wormed its way into the structure of higher education. Anyway, here's the story...

I have a friend who's been teaching anthropology at a fairly large state university in the deep south of the United States for over 20 years. Every now and then, like many universities, they offer a special short course that students can complete between semesters. So during the last winter break, my friend was scheduled to teach a short introduction to cultural anthropology. As the class start date approached there were only two students registered, a fact that at most places would trigger a cancellation of the class. However, nothing happened: no memo, no email, nothing. The fact that the class missed being included in the posted listing of courses might have caused the low number, but it was on the registrar's web site and the students were still shown as registered. Just to be sure, my friend called the Dean's office, but got no response as everyone was away on Christmas break.

So, my friend did the only responsible thing he could have done. He gave the two students an introduction to cultural anthropology. After all, they had paid for it. They met for the required number of hours, took a final exam, and when it came time to give them their grades my friend was able to do so, because the class final grade report was available online. So far, so good.

But then, my friend waited to be paid for this extra course, which was over and above his normal teaching schedule, and nothing happened. When he inquired about it, he was told that the course only had two students and therefore "should have been canceled." He should not have taught the course, and so he should not be paid for actually teaching it.

Now, here's the thing. At my university, and I'm pretty sure at most, individual faculty members can neither schedule or cancel classes. At North Florida, this is done in the Dean's Office, and if the start of a class is approaching and too few students are enrolled, we get a memo telling us that the course either may be or is being canceled, possibly with a request to justify teaching it with such a small number of students. And yet, at my friend's school they seem to be insisting that he should have taken care of it. It's not clear what mechanism he could have employed to accomplish this, but I know that where I am, there is none available to me. They even suggested that the "paperwork" for the course had not been approved "on time," but if that was the case how is it that those two students were allowed to register for it?

My friend has met with his Dean and Provost in an attempt to extract the money owed him, but so far the best he can get is a promise to examine the situation further with a view toward maybe paying him a fraction of what he should have received if the class had enrolled the minimum number of students.

And this brings us to the sad part of all this: this particular university pays a Scrooge McDuck-worthy $1200 to have a full-time faculty member teach an extra course. At my place, we get 1/8 of our regular salary, which in my case would be about $7,000. Why the difference?  My university has a faculty union, part of a state-wide organization that in turn is part of the National Education Association. Our collective bargaining agreement includes a grievance procedure through which my friend would almost certainly win his case in a slam-dunk.

In fact, at a functional university managed by rational, thoughtful human beings, even without a faculty union, this would be a slam-dunk. Imagine a contractor who hires someone to dig a hole. The hole-digger goes off and digs the hole, and then returns to be paid only to be told that, after the hole was dug, the contractor decided that a hole shouldn't be dug after all, and thus no pay would be forthcoming.

This, however, is clearly not a functional university, and the people who run it are not rational, thoughtful human beings. They are viciously self-indulgent kleptocrats living in a part of the country where mean-spirited social irresponsibility, a result of hyper-independence training, is the accepted norm. Not just accepted, but lauded, as if it were a virtue, while social responsibility is punished.

One wonders whether my friend's $1200 is being shared by the Dean and Provost as a sort of Christmas bonus...  oh, if only I could tell you where this place is!

Update: March 1, 2010...

I forgot to add that after talking with some other faculty members about his predicament, my friend discovered that his university had done this same thing to at least two others. Serial kleptocracy!

Another update: March 5, 2010:

My friend still doesn't have his pay, and he has discovered another faculty member whose labor has been stolen in this way.