To limit
LUBBOCK — In a first for Texas higher education, the Texas Tech University System has ordered faculty across its five universities to limit classroom discussion of transgender and nonbinary identities, but gave little guidance on how academic endeavors or instruction should proceed.
What guidance is needed? Trans and nonbinareee idenninies are not academic endeavors or instruction. They’re political/ideological as opposed to epistemic or academic, so banishing them makes room for academic endeavors as opposed to hindering them. If students were insisting on talking about football or ballet in physics classes and faculty were cheering them on rather than teaching physics, the bosses would be within their rights to say stick to physics in physics classes. It doesn’t take any particular guidance to figure out how academic endeavors or instruction should proceed in that scenario. The usual way is how they should proceed.
The vague directive rattled Texas Tech students and professors, many of whom expressed fear that they will face academic or professional repercussions for pushing back. Free speech groups quickly characterized the unclear limits as unconstitutional censorship.
Really? It’s an attack on free speech for universities to teach the advertised subject matter? I’m assuming that the order to limit classroom discussion of transgender and nonbinary identities applies to classes in subjects other than trans ideology. If the class is a trans ideology class it’s a different story, but it seems unlikely that all or most Texas Tech classes are trans ideology classes. The Tech part must get in somewhere.
And LGBTQ+ advocates said the move will only further marginalize already-vulnerable trans and nonbinary students and faculty.
No it won’t. It doesn’t “marginalize” people to talk about other things. It doesn’t “marginalize” people for tertiary education to focus on specific subject matter instead of chatting about personal idenninies. It doesn’t “marginalize” people to stop talking about themselves for the length of a college class.
“Everyone is terrified,” said a professor at the flagship Tech campus in Lubbock, who asked not to be named over fear of losing their job.
Terrified of what? Being told to limit discussion of irrelevant subjects is not a death threat.
Texas Tech Chancellor Tedd Mitchell late Thursday said that when faculty are acting as employees and instructors, they must follow President Donald Trump’s executive order recognizing only male and female genders as assigned at birth, Gov. Greg Abbott’s letter directing state agencies to “reject woke gender ideologies” and House Bill 229 requiring a strict binary definition of gender for the collection of vital statistics.
Oh honestly. I don’t see how Trump’s EO has anything to do with it at all. Surely teaching the advertised subject matter is a basic expectation. The liberal arts are more squishy that way, because they can be said to apply to almost anything, but a tech school?
“This is an egregious attack on academic freedom,” said Chloe Kempf, a staff attorney with the ACLU of Texas. “The bottom line is that the Constitution requires — and Texans deserve — free and open learning environments in institutes of higher education.”
So students at a tech school can sign up for tech classes only to find that they all use class time to chat about social issues instead of their purported subject? Because that’s their civil liberty?
By continuing to talk about “genders assigned at birth”, and failing to talk abot sex, they give genderists home field advantage in framing this. Robust, clear, materialist language would put transactivists on the defensive. Instead, by unwittingly adopting and parroting genderist terms, they’re diluting and obscuring their message. There aren’t “two genders”; there aren’t any genders at all. It’s not a “free speech” issue so much as it’s a “cut out this bullshit” issue. After all, they’re trying to remove delusional beliefs, not supress and hide something that’s real. Of course it doesn’t help that this runs counter to almost everything else the Trump regime is pushing.
“talking about football or ballet in physics”
That would actually make some sense.
The trajectory of a thrown ball or the change in moment of inertia of a spinning ballet dancer pulling in her arms, has some relevance.
For Jim Baerg:
George Costanza
It makes at least as much sense as some of the assessment nonsense out there, where we are instructed to ‘let the students decide how they will be assessed; they know what’s best for them better than you do’ and ‘give them options on their testing, like using modern interpretive dance to demonstrate their knowledge of mitosis’.
Now, I am as big as anyone on combining arts and sciences for a better world, but…that is nonsense. Let the teachers decide the assessment; they’re the experts. And…yes, they’ll get it wrong sometimes, but the students will get it wrong every time!
And by the way…the options I did give my students (which were just extra credit for the most part; I’m not switching science for ’21st century pedagogy), none of the students chose to do any of it. They preferred the tests. And it made no sense when our Executive VP told us ‘they’re even doing this at Harvard!’ Harvard is Ivy League; the students in a community college in rural Nebraska might just have different needs and abilities.
It all makes me want to swear like a pirate, but swearing wasn’t allowed at our school, so I retired instead.