Archive for October 2007
The AAUP released a new statement on freedom in the classroom to respond to many concerns over faculty indoctrination of students to specific political views. The protection from indoctrination and for faculty to pursue divergent perspectives without fear of being removed from their posts is the genesis for the AAUP. However, freedom for faculty to present their views of things in the context of the classroom is a continual source of debate.
Peter Wood recently posted an article on Inside Higher Education in response to this AAUP statement that is somewhat misleading of the problems even though he does hit a couple of issues square on. His usage of some terms and how he relates them in his rhetoric is misleading. The problem here is that the terms “postmodernist” and “indoctrinate”, and “truth” are used in direct competition with one another as if this is the case.
First, is the problem the espousal of a postmodernist reasoning in the disciplines? Why is this a problem? Continue Reading “The AAUP: Freedom in the Classroom” »
From the Rev. C. Welton Gaddy, president of the Interfaith Alliance:
‘We’re not electing a pastor-in-chief, we’re electing a commander-in-chief,’ he told reporters on Tuesday (Oct. 30).
This was part of a piece on a poll that shows people (although with an N of 1000 which people is an issue with the statistic here) do not want candidates to use religious pitches to lure voters - which they clearly are on the side of the dems.
I have been listening to a series of podcasts by Paula Fredriksen lecturing on Christianity as seen through the lens of the development of sin entitled “Sin: The History of an Idea”. She gives some fantastic connections between some obvious historical facts that I had not thought of before. I am not sure if she is going to go in this direction since I have not finished her second lecture, but this is what I thought going up the hill to work this morning amidst the awesome display of autumn colors in the Alleghenies of Pennsylvania…
The connection that struck me today is how the early Ptolemaic concept of the universe envisioned purity. The structure moves out from earth and humanity which is viewed as the center of the universe. But this is not the humanist sense where humanity is somehow an idealized center of the universe. Rather, the material world that we experience as humans is a model of imperfection and impurity. As we move out in concentric circles from this center, we attain to higher levels of perfection up to the dome in the sky and then to the stars which are literally heavenly beings more perfect that anything in our material realm.
From where do our motivations and passions to know the world and our experience of it come? Do these motivations and passions affect how we experience the world? Is one way of experiencing the world more legitimate than another?
Knowledge is a clear product of one’s motivation for learning which is essentially axiomatic in theories of learning and cognition. That is to say, if you have a completely unmotivated learner, while they may be able to articulate the meaning of something, the chances of that meaning affecting their personal structures of cognition go down exponentially unless something happens to that learner’s motivation to assimilate that knowledge. This is confirmed in the degree to which a student can succeed in a course of study, test or other means of measuring a learning outcome. It is also clear in literature on memory and cognition. Hence, learning is not a static procedure, but one that is intimately associated with motivations and passions of the learner.
We may qualify knowledge so termed “motivated knowledge”. This is not a new concept at all, but one that hearkens back to the Greek notion of knowledge as something dynamically personal and embodied rather than as an object floating in the container of the mind. But what seems to have happened is a divorce in educational theory between the motivations of the learner and the learning outcomes themselves. Paradoxically, or stupidly as the case may be, we know this to be the case, yet programs of standardized testing such as No Child Left Behind continue to ignore motivation as a factor in how we assign meaning to what we learn. So for clarity of terms I am referring to learning and cognition as that ability of the mind to quickly apprehend and discern patterns and sequences of data in order to infer predictions of future events and data.
Knowledge is the process by which one assigns meaning of some sort to what one has learned. The relation of the two is not a static process or sequence, but a dynamic interaction with both terms acting in a more or less synchronous relation. Belief then follows from this meaning-making process inherent to knowledge so understood. Two epistemological issues follow from this that are at least tangentially related to issues of faith versus knowledge in a scientific sense of that to which we can bring material proofs to bear.
Continue Reading “God or Science?: The Impact of Motivated Belief on Experience” »
Sports Illustrated has two little departments that I love to read each week. One is called Sign of the Apocalypse which is a short anecdote of absurd behavior. The other is called They Said It which points to absurd, selfish, or irrational statements that some folks in the sports world make from time to time.
I just found a quote that takes the cake for this kind of thing in a different arena. This was said by Colorado Christian University president William Armstrong in reference to fired faculty member Andrew Paquin who taught in his course that capitalism is not an essential part of Christianity.
“There is no connection between free markets and Christianity,” Armstrong said. “But we teach other things that aren’t rooted in Scripture, like that H2O is water.”
This is such an odd statement that clearly misses the point. Paquin was not teaching his students that which clearly went against the statement of faith to which one would have to submit as part of their contract, but was arguing for something quite reasonable - that an economic system is not an essential component of Christianity (check your Confessions if you need to validate this). The definition of water as H2O is not essential to Christianity either so can someone be fired if Armstrong says that it is? Looks like this type of stuff is why an AAUP exists in the first place - to defuse ideological executions such as this in order that knowledge and freedom of conscience may actually prosper. Anyone who is adamantly against tenure should keep this in mind since this is a big reason for it as inherited from the German model of higher education and its relationship to the production of knowledge.
I read a rather disappointing argument waged against Richard Dawkins’ the God Delusion written by Nicholas Lash in Blackfriars. The link was provided on the blog of Dr. AKM Adam (worth a visit or two). The problem is that the article comes off as a poorly argued diatribe rather than a clear argument contra the precise points that Dawkins does make regarding two core issues: the nature of God and the nature of faith in God. I have also argued on different grounds that Dawkins has not got it right. But Lash skirts the issue of answering the question: If what Dawkins says is not so, then what is so? Simply saying he’s wrong without unpacking an alternative is simply unhelpful and leads Lash to clear logical fallacies. Continue Reading “Another Dawkins Delusion Argument” »
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