She’s a nurse who homeschooled her children and she wants to head the K-12 instruction for the state.
She has demonstrated a spectacularly failure in her grasp of basic civics, US history, and political science despite receiving a BS at UNC.
This is a perfect example of why people who major in STEM subjects need to take rigorous courses in social sciences in college.
Science is important, but FFS, you need the humanities too. Humanities can tell you other things about the world that isn’t in the purview of science. I’m kind of sick of people treating these two things like they are at odds with one another.
My three favorite classes (within an engineering degree) were a history class, a literature class, and an engineering class, in that order. I still use skills from all three regularly.
Besides the inherent stupidity of that position, that really seems like it could backfire catastrophically for the state. Let’s say IU hires a white supremacist to teach one of these “intellectual diversity” classes and they say something like holocaust denial or that Black people were better off as slaves. Now that would fall under government speech rather than university academic freedom, while violating oodles of federal anti-discrimination and hate crime statutes. A student or university employee would be suing the State of Indiana rather than the university, and doing so in federal court. That seems like a major problem.
[Op-Ed: When politicians claim professors like me are the enemy, what are they really attacking? - Los Angeles Times (latimes.com)]
If Vance were to be honest about who he thinks his enemies really are, he would have to say minorities, immigrants and others who don’t fit into his vision of American values. These are the people hurt by the kind of politics he advances. But it doesn’t sound quite so good to say this out loud.
To be fair, he IS saying that, too… or at least his campaign is. On a regular basis.
The New College of Florida is in the news today for illustrating the logical progression of the idea that Republicans must protect the nation from those who would destroy it. The New College of Florida was at the center of Republican governor Ron DeSantis’s program to get rid of traditional academic freedom. He stripped the New College of its independence and replaced officials with Christian loyalists who tried to build a school modeled after those that Viktor Orbán’s loyalists took over in Hungary. New College officials painted over student murals celebrating diversity, suppressed student support for civil rights, and voted to eliminate the diversity, equity, and inclusion office and the gender studies program. Faculty fled the New College, and more than a quarter of the students dropped out. To keep its numbers up, the school dropped its admission standards.
Yesterday, Steven Walker of the Sarasota Herald-Tribune reported that the school cleared out the Gender and Diversity Center, throwing the books it had accumulated into a dumpster. Officials said the books are no longer serving the needs of the college: “gender studies has been discontinued as an area of concentration at New College and the books are not part of any official college collection or inventory.”
The image of piles of books in a dumpster in the United States of America is not easily forgettable.
Wow, Stanford just fired a bunch of lecturers in creative writing:
future fired
“The Deans clarified that this was not their decision, but was instead the decision of the Senior Professors of Creative Writing. These are literally our teaching colleagues of the last 5 to 15 years. And they decided in a previous secret meeting to fire all 23 of their junior colleagues.”
What?
