U-MD gone the way of Mizzou

[jackstar7]

What policy would you define that prevents people from "shitting on other people" without inadvertently limiting free speech for all?

You have a faulty premise. Free speech is already limited for all. But also, I don't actually need a policy against the language. What I prefer is recognition that bigoted language in a hateful context is violence, and if it is met with violence, let's just remember that freedom of speech isn't freedom from someone reacting to it, it's just freedom from the state's actions against it.

You want to protect bigoted speech? Are you openly throwing around n-words? I'll guess no and also suppose you just think people should be free to say what they want. News flash: they effectively are. But the moment it leaves their brain/mouth and enters someone's ears they ought to be prepared for a response. You're watching the end of the era of people just taking it and keeping the higher ground. The low road won the presidency, so clearly the high's value showing its limits...

 

[jackstar7]

On second thought, your premise isn't flawed, just incomplete and rife with room to do pedantic spinning and twisting ad nauseum. I'll save us some time and let you know I'm already sick to my stomach of that lazy faux-intellectulism. Bring some honesty to the discussion. See things from another point of view.

 

[Starbuck1975]

You have a faulty premise. Free speech is already limited for all. But also, I don't actually need a policy against the language. What I prefer is recognition that bigoted language in a hateful context is violence, and if it is met with violence, let's just remember that freedom of speech isn't freedom from someone reacting to it, it's just freedom from the state's actions against it.

You want to protect bigoted speech? Are you openly throwing around n-words? I'll guess no and also suppose you just think people should be free to say what they want. News flash: they effectively are. But the moment it leaves their brain/mouth and enters someone's ears they ought to be prepared for a response. You're watching the end of the era of people just taking it and keeping the higher ground. The low road won the presidency, so clearly the high's value showing its limits...

I never claimed that bigoted language in a hateful context is appropriate. What I am claiming is that attempting to censor bigoted language can easily slip into the realm of speech infringement.

I am glad you brought up the "n" word. I have never uttered it. I respect that it is a word never to be said in public. Yet I hear it on an almost daily basis on the subway, uttered by people I can assure you are not white. What do you think the response would be if I, as a white male, asked them to stop using said word out of respect for the children who are also on the subway?

Also, how expansive do we make protective classes? Can we protect every nerd who is going to get picked on by every jock in high schools across the country? Sure anti bullying campaigns may stop it in high school, but those nerds will be even less equipped to deal with bullying when it manifests itself in other ways in college or even in corporate America.

Safe spaces don't make evil go away. They just make you less equipped to deal with it.

 

[jackstar7]

I never claimed that bigoted language in a hateful context is appropriate. What I am claiming is that attempting to censor bigoted language can easily slip into the realm of speech infringement.

I am glad you brought up the "n" word. I have never uttered it. I respect that it is a word never to be said in public. Yet I hear it on an almost daily basis on the subway, uttered by people I can assure you are not white. What do you think the response would be if I, as a white male, asked them to stop using said word out of respect for the children who are also on the subway?

Also, how expansive do we make protective classes? Can we protect every nerd who is going to get picked on by every jock in high schools across the country? Sure anti bullying campaigns may stop it in high school, but those nerds will be even less equipped to deal with bullying when it manifests itself in other ways in college or even in corporate America.

Safe spaces don't make evil go away. They just make you less equipped to deal with it.

And what is your means of dealing with it?

And honestly, while I don't think the safe space agenda is viable, I don't think you can dismiss it as a way of clearly stating that some behaviors ought not be compatible in civilized society. Of course it's not going to stop evil, but it might also give it less room to grow. To judge its efficacy at this point is putting carts well before horses.

 

[Starbuck1975]

And what is your means of dealing with it?

And honestly, while I don't think the safe space agenda is viable, I don't think you can dismiss it as a way of clearly stating that some behaviors ought not be compatible in civilized society. Of course it's not going to stop evil, but it might also give it less room to grow. To judge its efficacy at this point is putting carts well before horses.

Yoga or cookies and milk

 

[jackstar7]

Yoga or cookies and milk

So you want to force everyone to practice yoga? Bold strategy.

 

[Starbuck1975]

So you want to force everyone to practice yoga? Bold strategy.

Yes, or consume cookies and milk. But they need to be organic gluten free cookies that contain fair trade cocoa chocolate chips and milk from free range cows that have a view of the Pacific Ocean. Oh and the cookies need to be baked in a nut free factory.

 

[jackstar7]

Yes, or consume cookies and milk. But they need to be organic gluten free cookies that contain fair trade cocoa chocolate chips and milk from free range cows that have a view of the Pacific Ocean. Oh and the cookies need to be baked in a nut free factory.

So I feel like you get what you give.

 

[werepossum]

Has anyone actually read the list explanations included with each item?
Do any of you understand the origins of protectUMD and how this list was compiled?
Did any of you people actually go to college and do anything other than "cram for exams related to your major"?

http://www.dbknews.com/2016/12/01/protests-college-demands-diversity-umd/

The list contains a lot of silly crap, a lot of unrealistic but understandable request.
A list that can be expected from a bunch of kids in a university environment.

From an educational standpoint, the contents of the list is not important. whats important is tasking students putting some thought into issues that impact them and coming up with solutions on their own.

This is some special project that was done in November.
Learn how to identify issues important to you.
Learn how to express yourself in a clear professional manner
Learn how to organize and communicate with others

Do something other than wasting time on social media or the internet (like anandtech) complaining about shit and come up with solutions.

I can understand that this upsets some.
Especially the old farts who basically lost the ability to think for themselves and rely on their preferred news channel to tell them what to think and how to express it.
I can understand the "I'm an engineer" brigade who tend to get think they know better than everyone on every goddamn topic that floats in front of em and get locked in their mindset. People who don't understand the point of non STEM curriculum or curriculum not directly related a career that makes at least 6 figures.


To look at this from another angle,
These students are consumers of a service. This list is a request for modifications to services provided by the university. The university responded by saying "Thank you for your list. We will now review it so that we can come up with responses that both educate the students on how to respond appropriately to crap like this. Also smoothly shoot down the demands that are ridiculous.

disclaimer: Screw proofreading and grammar corrections.

Nah, we understand the purpose of non-STEM, non-practical career curricula. It gives you a nice four year break between asking if we want fries for spending money and asking if we want fries as a career.

 

[werepossum]

If you are suggesting that the quality of their ideas is a function of age, I would counter that this deficiency is unique to American liberal arts students and the education they receive.

The STEM and foreign exchange interns I deal with on a routine basis in that age bracket are a wealth of well developed and mature ideas, because they understand that identifying a problem without offering the semblance of a reasonable or equitable solution is a waste of everyone's time.

Agreed, and well said. I too deal with young people who went to college for what the world could teach them, not what the world owes them for existing.

 

[werepossum]

Yes, or consume cookies and milk. But they need to be organic gluten free cookies that contain fair trade cocoa chocolate chips and milk from free range cows that have a view of the Pacific Ocean. Oh and the cookies need to be baked in a nut free factory.

Right, so cookies from most college towns are right out. Nowadays it seems like universities attract nuts like Elton John's chin.

 

[s0me0nesmind1]

"Trump won the election because there were not enough people who wanted to vote for the Democratic candidate."

You're like the national football broadcaster who I painfully listened to during his pregame bit predict - "The team that will win this game will be the team that finds a way to score more points than the opposition."

In all honesty though, he is correct. Democrats lost because of themselves, not because of republican turn out.

Democrats had more turn out for both of the Obama elections - and as the population increases (inevitably) the voter turnout (in theory) would increase. Clearly there was a lack of enthusiasm within their own party for their own candidate, hence Trump won on a lack of democrat votes, not a surplus of republican votes.

That said, I think the assertion of this is why Trump won is correct. I also think the election results shows what the silent majority actually cares about. So Maryland University has 2 options:
1) Bend over. Try to reason with these kids in any way - be it partially or in full.
2) Gather them all up and tell them if they continue they will be expelled. No questions. Shut the fuck up and return to class. You have 0 warnings remaining. And if they want to continue protesting don't hesitate for a second and kick them out of the University on the spot.

You see, Mizzou went with #1. How did that go for them? Their attendance rates plummeted. They are in serious deep shit. That is because the silent majority of sane, rational, and intelligent people roll their eyes to bullshit like this list of demands. They tell themselves "I would never go to a University filled with people this fucking stupid". My point being, if they kicked these stupid kids to the curb, they might just see an increase in attendance if anything

 

[bshole]

Nah, we understand the purpose of non-STEM, non-practical career curricula. It gives you a nice four year break between asking if we want fries for spending money and asking if we want fries as a career.

The sad part is that they will pay the same amount of money for that useless major as the STEM students do for their useful majors. If a college is going to offer a major in which the graduate has no realistic chance of a career (say less than 5%), they should be forced to advertise that fact on the brochure. Additionally they should adjust the cost of those majors to reflect their relative usefulness in obtaining careers. These kids are paying 40K/yr for the education. That debt has lifetime consequences if the degree is useless. I see the colleges peddling useless majors at full cost as nothing more than capitalist predators and naïve students as their prey.

 

[MooseNSquirrel]

I thought I would add to the discussion by pointing out that Putin is Asian too!

 

[agent00f]

Nah, we understand the purpose of non-STEM, non-practical career curricula. It gives you a nice four year break between asking if we want fries for spending money and asking if we want fries as a career.

It's pretty obvious that improved rhetorical and thinking skills inherent to liberal arts would provide a world of benefit to many here.

 

[HamburgerBoy]

It's pretty obvious that improved rhetorical and thinking skills inherent to liberal arts would provide a world of benefit to many here.

For A-students, with the right program, maybe, although most of them probably have those basic skills regardless. Overall I'd love to see an objective metric of the "rhetorical and thinking skills" advertised in promotion of the degree industry.

 

[agent00f]

For A-students, with the right program, maybe, although most of them probably have those basic skills regardless. Overall I'd love to see an objective metric of the "rhetorical and thinking skills" advertised in promotion of the degree industry.

If you believe that practice improves skill level and the ceiling here isn't exactly low, reading/writing and the linguistic thinking process inherent to both is literally what students do for many of those fields.

If we're to be cynically realistic, language skills are a bulk of what separates management from labor even in the highest tech.

 

[bshole]

It's pretty obvious that improved rhetorical and thinking skills inherent to liberal arts would provide a world of benefit to many here.

Um...... you do realize what positions people from liberal arts go on to fill don't you? It is a degree requiring little to no effort and everybody realizes that. There is an extremely strong case to be made that NO degree is better than a liberal arts degree.

http://www.forbes.com/sites/susanad...tter-than-a-liberal-arts-degree/#1473a6b01c2f

A new study by Forbes contributor Dan Schawbel, who runs Millennial Branding, a one-man research and consulting firm in Boston that’s focused on millennials (born between the early ‘80s and the early 2000s), released a study today that comes to some conclusions I find startling. The most unsettling: If you are in the millennial generation and your goal is to find a job, it may be wiser to get no college degree at all than to spend four years and hundreds of thousands of dollars earning a humanities B.A. In a survey of nearly 3,000 job seekers and HR professionals, Schawbel, together with career website Beyond.com, found that a striking 64% of hiring managers said they would consider a candidate who hadn’t gone to a day of college. At the same time, fewer than 2% of hiring managers said they were actively recruiting liberal arts grads.

 

[agent00f]

Um...... you do realize what positions people from liberal arts go on to fill don't you? It is a degree requiring little to no effort and everybody realizes that. There is an extremely strong case to be made that NO degree is better than a liberal arts degree.

http://www.forbes.com/sites/susanad...tter-than-a-liberal-arts-degree/#1473a6b01c2f

I'm talking about the skills conferred, not whatever degree recruiting wants.

 

[pauldun170]

Nah, we understand the purpose of non-STEM, non-practical career curricula. It gives you a nice four year break between asking if we want fries for spending money and asking if we want fries as a career.

With globalization and outsourcing, I get to see more and more folks with STEM degrees serving my coffee.At least making big plans to "Become a teacher or something..."
The Economists, Accountants and Finance majors (Silly little precious non stem fields) who run the show discovered that all those precious little STEM majors can be had for half price overseas.

 

[HamburgerBoy]

If you believe that practice improves skill level and the ceiling here isn't exactly low, reading/writing and the linguistic thinking process inherent to both is literally what students do for many of those fields.

If we're to be cynically realistic, language skills are a bulk of what separates management from labor even in the highest tech.

A person can also practice those skills just arguing on internet forums for four years. While formal classes on deductive reasoning, symbolic logic, etc are great, unless one majors in philosophy, the average social work or political science major isn't going to be routinely tested on that. They'll be expected to memorize a lot of information, pass exams, and write term papers, requiring some base level of reasoning and independent research, but I'm doubtful that's a liberal arts degree is a cost-effective way to accomplish that. It was sad sitting in my own PHIL 101 class, seeing seniors in a variety of majors, presumably people that had taken and passed upper-division credits in their own fields, struggling to translate basic arguments into conditional statements and analyze them for validity.

imo, kids should be exposed to symbolic logic and the basic construction of arguments as early as elementary school though. It's an excellent and fundamental skill, especially for an increasingly white-collar workforce, but the "critical thinking" mantra among liberal arts majors is about as validated as "Knowledge is power". Sounds nice as an ideal, lacks rigorous evaluation afaik.

 

[agent00f]

A person can also practice those skills just arguing on internet forums for four years.

The success rate of autodidactic learning evidently varies.

While formal classes on deductive reasoning, symbolic logic, etc are great, unless one majors in philosophy, the average social work or political science major isn't going to be routinely tested on that. They'll be expected to memorize a lot of information, pass exams, and write term papers, requiring some base level of reasoning and independent research, but I'm doubtful that's a liberal arts degree is a cost-effective way to accomplish that. It was sad sitting in my own PHIL 101 class, seeing seniors in a variety of majors, presumably people that had taken and passed upper-division credits in their own fields, struggling to translate basic arguments into conditional statements and analyze them for validity.

imo, kids should be exposed to symbolic logic and the basic construction of arguments as early as elementary school though. It's an excellent and fundamental skill, especially for an increasingly white-collar workforce, but the "critical thinking" mantra among liberal arts majors is about as validated as "Knowledge is power". Sounds nice as an ideal, lacks rigorous evaluation afaik.

The point and definition of liberal arts are those supposedly useful to citizens in a democracy---you know, the ones deemed fit to undertake some responsibilities. I suppose there isn't any need for that many to specialize in becoming the best citizen, but that's the side-effect of kids need some credentials to make it in an increasingly competitive world, a portion just never branch out into any trade. In any case the discrepancies are highly exaggerated: https://cew.georgetown.edu/cew-reports/valueofcollegemajors/, eg:

Notice the gap between humanities and liberal arts vs no degree.

Speaking of philosophy, it's one of those original arts and its majors are consistently among the better spoken folks I've met along with law. It's actually what implored me to read some and figure out how that came to be.

 

[pauldun170]

The success rate of autodidactic learning evidently varies.



The point and definition of liberal arts are those supposedly useful to citizens in a democracy---you know, the ones deemed fit to undertake some responsibilities. I suppose there isn't any need for that many to specialize in becoming the best citizen, but that's the side-effect of kids need some credentials to make it in an increasingly competitive world, a portion just never branch out into any trade. In any case the discrepancies are highly exaggerated: https://cew.georgetown.edu/cew-reports/valueofcollegemajors/, eg:

Notice the gap between humanities and liberal arts vs no degree.

Speaking of philosophy, it's one of those original arts and its majors are consistently among the better spoken folks I've met along with law. It's actually what implored me to read some and figure out how that came to be.

LOL@ Biologists
Losers of the STEM world.
When Geologist can laugh at you...you know you are rock bottom

 

[zinfamous]

Nah, we understand the purpose of non-STEM, non-practical career curricula. It gives you a nice four year break between asking if we want fries for spending money and asking if we want fries as a career.

For one thing, Brietbart and their ilk would not have an easily-exploitable audience if more students understood the value of textual analysis and critical thinking. Far smarter and far more successful people than you and I waltz out of college with liberal arts degrees, and have for generations. These days, some of them do end up serving your coffee while plenty more find a nice gig at a hedge fund or self-employed writing novels or publishing/researching history, maybe as journalists, whatever.

But, when an audience is conditioned to assume journalists are, by default biased and possibly evil, it is easier to take a disparaging tract against such disciplines. It's a vicious circle of thought that traps your mind into never considering the reality behind your unfounded prejudices. One thing you can say collectively about the coffee servers or authors: none of them are soulless cubicle monkeys jumping from spirit-crushing job to the next, chasing pointless salary bumps and stocking their driveways with M3s every 2 years, because they have to for some reason. They are probably, in aggregate, much happier in the end.

 

[HamburgerBoy]

The problem with charts like the above is that "high school graduates" include horrible students that barely graduated, and have no chance of ever being accepted into even the lowest-tier universities. Although the income gap between high school and college graduates has increased, it's more due to high school grads earning less than college grads having increased value:

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2014/05/27/value-college-degree_n_5399573.html

(Usually I'd refer to the direct source but can't find it immediately, gives the general idea though)

Basically, it's hard to deconvolute 1) people becoming more valuable by graduating college, 2) more valuable people increasingly graduating college due to its greater availability, 3) high school grads being left behind due to changes in the global economy and surplus population to perform menial labor. All three scenarios are real depending on the individual, but there's a reason that niche liberal arts degrees are hard to find employment in, especially relative to non-STEM.

LOL@ Biologists
Losers of the STEM world.
When Geologist can laugh at you...you know you are rock bottom

tfw biochemistry

Geologists actually make pretty good money iirc, better than the other physical sciences, very relevant field to the oil industry.