Tag Archives: Critical Thinking

News

Professor concerned by students who are unable to consider alternative views

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UVA students following their leftist masters
UVA students protesting a rape accusation that was later revealed to be a hoax

Consider this clip:

This is a post by Dr. George Yancey, and he’s writing about the 5-minute video clip above.

Dr. Yancey writes:

Here is a great example of what I term education dogma. Note that the students are chanting about not being silenced while they are obviously silencing the speaker. My understanding of this situation is that the speaker published something that challenges some of the assertions about a campus rape culture. Such a challenge is an affront to the dogma of the students. Therefore, these students do not feel that the speaker has a right to speak on a different topic. The violation of beliefs they accept without question or doubt creates their incentive to shut down the proceedings.

[…]For the dogmatic, ideas that violate the notions defended by education dogma are deemed “dangerous” and too much for the tender ears of our students. So in additional to shouting down speakers there have been calls for “trigger warnings” and “safe spaces” so that individuals do not have to listen to dangerous ideas. The true danger of these ideas is their threat to certain dogmatic beliefs of our students. These students are unwilling to consider the possibly that they are wrong, or perhaps not as right as they might believe. .

[…]As I watch that video I did not see intellectual powerhouses but I symbolically saw individuals who were yelling nonsense with their hands over their ears so that they would not hear an idea that may confront their presuppositions about reality.

Here, Dr. Yancey compares the secular leftist students to religious fundamentalists: (links removed)

For all practical purposes the students saw the speaker as a heretic. The use of the term heretic can bring up images of torturing, imprisoning and killing of those who disagree. This is not occurring. However, it is reasonable to ask whether the seemingly restraint of the students from such drastic actions is due to their moral compass or to the fact that they do not have the social power to engage in such actions. Education dogma has led to attempting to kick offending businesses off campus, attempts to fire professors, and the official “shunning” of students who hold the “wrong ideas.” Those with education dogma do punish those who violate their beliefs to the highest extent possible given their current level of institutional powers.

So if the holding your hands over your ears and screaming doesn’t work, there is always calling the police, or using other means of coercion. Scary, especially when you consider the history of the secular left in communist countries where God is dead, and the state is all-powerful. How far would these leftist students go to silence people who disagreed with them?

More:

[…][H]igher education occurs in a specific social institution that promotes certain subcultural values and beliefs. Participants in these institutions are expected to accept these values and beliefs without question. These beliefs are not the result of gaining more facts but instead are the dogmatic adaptation of certain social values provided to them by this subculture.

The trouble here is that they don’t want more facts – that’s why they are holding their hands over their ears and screaming.

It makes me think of my own intellectual journey… the way I got started in apologetics in college was by reading transcripts of William Lane Craig debates that I found on the Leadership University web site. What was exciting was reading both sides and seeing what each person would say to respond. Would you go to a football game where only one side showed up? What if you already knew the score in advance, would you still go? What if one team didn’t play very hard, would that be worth watching? What makes intellectual inquiry fun and interesting is that two sides show up and play their best. Otherwise, it’s just brainwashing, not a search for truth. When I write a summary with a good atheist like Peter Millican, I actually feel like I have learned something – I have learned how far I can push each of my arguments, and what I need to study going forward. I care to learn more about what is discussed in a real debate.

This is the striking part of his essay:

Students are responsible for seeking out alternative perspectives and developing an attitude of inquiry allowing them to interrogate their own presuppositions. But their college and university teachers should be held to account since more than a few college professors have done a horrible job introducing critical thinking skills. These teachers come in with a certain set of assumptions and if students agree with those assumptions then they can leave college without any disturbance to their pre-college ideology. Then we have the gall to call that critical thinking. It is anything but critical thinking. It is confirmation thinking and we do our students a disservice with such an approach.

This is why I get so frustrated by non-STEM disciplines. I think those non-STEM areas are the places where what he described is most likely to happen. When you walk into a computer science classroom, you are there to learn something that you will be doing for money in a couple of years. You can go home and use what you just learned to write a sorting program, or improve the speed of your database queries, or write a mobile application and put it out for use. I just don’t get that feeling of usefulness from non-STEM disciplines, aside from maybe analytical philosophy, which is just computer science anyway (symbolic logic). The critical thinking in computer science comes from trying things yourself and seeing what works and doesn’t work in real life. Where is the testing against reality in non-STEM disciplines? There is none.

And then here is something hopeful for conservatives:

Ironically a conservative Christian Republican has a better opportunity to learn critical thinking in college than a progressive humanist Democrat because of the opportunity he/she gains to consider new ideas. When we allow students with certain perspectives to go through college without challenging them we not only promote dogma, we also do those students the disservice of never helping them to engage in the critical thinking necessary to intellectually grow. They are reduced to being a sounding board that regurgitated the latest expression of political correctness.

This is where all my hope lies. I really hope that the leftists educate their next generation into imbecility by refusing to let them consider different points of view. We conservatives must be the ones who consider both sides, and then rise above the mob of fools. To innovate, you have to do things better, and to do things better, you have to do things differently.

Videos

96% of political donations by Cornell University faculty go to Democrats

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Donations by Cornell University faculty
Political donations by Cornell University faculty

I’m going to introduce a lecture by Dr. George Yancey by linking to an article from the Cornell University campus newspaper. (H/T Dennis Prager)

It says:

Of the nearly $600,000 Cornell’s faculty donated to political candidates or parties in the past four years, over 96 percent has gone to fund Democratic campaigns, while only 15 of the 323 donors gave to conservative causes.

The Sun’s analysis of Federal Election Committee data reveals that from 2011 to 2014, Cornell’s faculty donated $573,659 to Democrats, $16,360 to Republicans and $2,950 to Independents. Each of Cornell’s 13 schools — both graduate and undergraduate — slanted heavily to the left. In the College of Arts and Sciences, 99 percent of the $183,644 donated went to liberal campaigns.

OK, now with that out of the way, let’s watch a 28-minute lecture from Dr. George Yancey about bias against religion in academia:

If you watch 5 minutes, then you’ll definitely stay and watch the whole thing. It’s fascinating.

Details:

Join Dr. George Yancey in an in depth discussion of the bias taking place within academia against religion in general, but more specifically Christianity. Within the discussion Dr.Yancey uses brief explanations of his previous book, Compromising Scholarship and many other excerpts of his past research as well as his forthcoming research to give us a new viewpoint on academia and religion.

I found a quick description of Dr. Yancey’s work in this New York Times article from July 2011.

It says:

Republican scholars are more likely than Democrats to end up working outside academia,as documented by Daniel Klein, an economist at George Mason University. Dr. Klein, who calls himself a classical liberal (a k a libertarian), says that the university promotes groupthink because its system of “departmental majoritarianism” empowers the dominant faction to keep hiring like-minded colleagues. And when a faculty committee is looking to hire or award tenure, political ideology seems to make a difference, according to a “collegiality survey” conducted by George Yancey.

Dr. Yancey, a professor of sociology at the University of North Texas, asked more than 400 sociologists which nonacademic factors might influence their willingness to vote for hiring a new colleague. You might expect professors to at least claim to be immune to bias in academic hiring decisions.

But as Dr. Yancey reports in his new book, “Compromising Scholarship: Religious and Political Bias in American Higher Education,” more than a quarter of the sociologists said they would be swayed favorably toward a Democrat or an A.C.L.U. member and unfavorably toward a Republican. About 40 percent said they would be less inclined to vote for hiring someone who belonged to the National Rifle Association or who was an evangelical. Similar results were obtained in a subsequent survey of professors in other social sciences and the humanities.

Dr. Yancey, who describes himself as a political independent with traditional Christian beliefs and progressive social values, advises nonliberal graduate students to be discreet during job interviews. “The information in this research,” he wrote, “indicates that revealing one’s political and religious conservatism will, on average, negatively influence about half of the search committee one is attempting to impress.”

Dr. Yancey’s research was a survey, not a field experiment, so it’s impossible to know how many of those academics who confessed to hypothetical bias would let it sway an actual decision. Perhaps they’d try to behave as impartially as the directors of graduate studies in Dr. Gross’s experiment.

The lecture is a real eye-opener. It turns out that in academia, you are likely to be viewed the same way as blacks were viewed by slave-owners, and Jews were viewed by Nazis.

We have a lot of work to do to correct these perceptions, but that’s not going to happen unless churches and Christian parents start to take the life of the mind more seriously.

UPDATE: Papa Giorgio posts the Dennis Prager audio:

Podcasts

Zack Kopplin debates Casey Luskin on science education

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Two Rams butting heads: may the best ram win!
Two Rams butting heads: may the best ram win!

The Michael Medved show is a national radio show broadcast out of Seattle, Washington. According to Talkers magazine, he has the fifth largest radio audience.

The MP3 file is available for download. (38 minutes)

The description is:

On this episode of ID the Future, the Medved Show hosts the CSC’s Casey Luskin and student Zack Kopplin, a leading activist in the effort to repeal the Louisiana Science Education Act. Luskin and Kopplin debate the implications of the Louisiana law for science education standards and whether or not the law promotes the teaching of creationism.

Topics:

  • Medved: Should teachers be forced to teach creationism in public schools?
  • Luskin: The Discovery Institute has never advocated that creationism be taught in public schools
  • Medved: Does the Louisiana law mandate that creationism be taught in public schools
  • Kopplin: Yes, the bill does because Bobby Jindal said that the bill teaches creationism
  • Luskin: (Reads the actual text of the law) the law EXPLICITLY STATES that teaching creationism is forbidden
  • Luskin: Governor Jindal is misinformed about the law, but if you look at the law it says NO CREATIONISM
  • Kopplin: I don’t care about what the law actually says, I’ll just repeat that Bobby Jindal thinks it’s creationism
  • Kopplin: Thirty years ago, there was an attempt to mandate creationism, therefore this law is doing the same thing
  • Medved: Are there any complaints that creationism is being taught in any schools after this law has been passed
  • Kopplin: No, I don’t know of any, but that’s not because there are none! Maybe there are some that I haven’t heard about yet
  • Medved: If you are taught something that you think is stupid, then is that automatically a violation of your rights?
  • Kopplin: Because you cannot allow the progress of science to call the religion of naturalism into question
  • Luskin: About that Jindal quote – he was talking about what he wanted to pass, not the law that actually passed
  • Luskin: (reads the text of the law again) The law explicitly says that teaching creationism in the classroom is prohibited
  • Luskin: Intelligent design is not creationism. Creationism starts with the Bible. Intelligent Design starts with science
  • Luskin: The law only supports teaching both sides of things that are already in the curriculum
  • Luskin: ID is not already in the curriculum, therefore, the law does not allow it to be discussed
  • Medved: Take Stephen C. Meyer’s book on the origin of life, could that be used in the classroom?
  • Kopplin: I am not very familiar with Meyer’s book, but if it is critical of Darwinism and naturalism, then it should not be taught. I don’t need to read it before I can censor it
  • Luskin: Meyer’s book advocates for ID, so it should not be taught in science classrooms
  • Luskin: non-ID science papers that are critical of Darwinism should be allowed in science classroom so students get both sides
  • Medved: Consider this brand new Oxford University Press book that is critical of Darwinian mechanisms, authored by Masatoshi Nei who is at Penn State University professor (written up on Evolution News)
  • Medved: Should this research critical of Darwinism be allowed in science classrooms?
  • Kopplin: I don’t know if this book should be allowed in science classrooms
  • Kopplin: I already know without reading anything though that there will never be evidence that supports intelligent design
  • Kopplin: There is no evidence against Darwinism and there is no controversy and there is no disagreement among scientists
  • Luskin: There are hundreds of papers in mainstream science peer-reviewed publications critical of Darwinism
  • Luskin: (lists a stack of papers critical of core tenets of Darwinian theory from respect science journals in the last few years)
  • Luskin: Masatoshi Nei recently posted a comment critical of the usefulness of the mutation-selection mechanism
  • Luskin: The real issue is whether students are allowed to hear mainstream scientific criticisms of Darwinism in the science classroom
  • Medved: Is it OK for a teacher to admit that on a specific issue in science, that there is no credible naturalistic explanation?
  • Kopplin: I am a history major, so I don’t want to comment on whether it is OK to admit that naturalism doesn’t explain everything
  • Luskin: A Harvard chemist says that the origin of life is an open issue in this peer-reviewed journal article
  • Luskin: Teachers should be allowed to say that there is no accepted naturalistic explanation for the origin of life
  • Luskin: teachers should NOT be teaching religion, or creationism, or even intelligent design in science classrooms
  • Luskin: but teachers should be allowed to say what the Harvard chemist said in that peer-reviewed article in the science classroom
  • Kopplin: there was a creationist woman who sat next to the Discovery Institute person when the law was being debated
  • Kopplin: so based on that there is a scary hidden creationist agenda behind the law which is not reflected in the actual text law
  • Luskin: Um, that woman has no connection to the Discovery Institute
  • Luskin: seating arrangement at the hearings were pre-determined, not selected by those in attendance
  • Luskin: what about people who are pushing Darwinism, who are anti-religious atheists and humanists? should they be disqualified?
  • Luskin: we should not discredit the arguments of either side based on speculations about their motives – what counts is the evidence
  • Kopplin: but I have a letter signed by lots of Nobel-prize winning scientists that opposes the Louisiana science education law
  • Luskin: but that letter never actually quotes from the law, it is critiquing views that have nothing to do with the actual law
  • Medved: Summarize your views
  • Kopplin: Criticism of Darwinism and naturalism using mainstream scientific evidence SHOULD NOT be allowed in the science classroom
  • Luskin: Criticism of Darwinism and naturalism using mainstream scientific evidence SHOULD be allowed in the science classroom

And there is a period of questions from the callers.

This episode features a debate, so it is not to be missed. it is always a good idea to hear both sides. Unfortunately, ID people are the only ones who think that both sides should be heard.

I subscribe to the ID the Future podcast, and I really recommend that you do as well!