Will they ban “Arabic” numbers? Back to the good ol’ western I, V, X, L, C?
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You reminded me of one of my kids’ favorite songs when they were little. They became experts at Roman numerals because of this song! We would do Roman numeral mental math on long road trips. My daughter tried to start a Roman numeral math club at her elementary school but no one wanted to join (except her brother). 
Everyone else was too busy with the sleek Arabic numerals.
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Diversity of thought isn’t a bad thing. It can only help.
There are some other interesting things in the plan like this
His plan would require schools to “prioritize graduating students with degrees that lead to high-wage jobs, not degrees designed to further a political agenda.”
What does this even mean?
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Things that make us uncomfortable and don’t want to talk about won’t be allowed.
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I dont know. I think the schools are trying to expand in-demand courses in engineering, cs and business as quickly as they can due to student requests for those courses
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This is being done already at pretty much every university. Demand is already driving expansion of availability of those programs.
So, when I see a statement like that - it seems to be more for political points than a reasonable policy statement.
There’s also a great statement by John Adams "“I must study politics and war that my sons may have liberty to study mathematics and philosophy. My sons ought to study mathematics and philosophy, geography, natural history, naval architecture, navigation, commerce and agriculture in order to give their children a right to study painting, poetry, music, architecture, statuary, tapestry, and porcelain.”
When I read statements like the one from DeSantis, and in general when people talk about college as only for career development (denigrating philosophy degrees, or art history, or yes, even gender studies) - I feel like they are missing the point of what we should be trying to achieve as a society. As humans we ought to have more to live for than just making money. The beauty of having a wealthy society is that we should then be able to pursue and fund arts, and music and poetry. We should be able to have people who study philosophy or challenge conventional thinking, and so on.
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I haven’t seen anyone suggest abolishing the philosophy, art, or music departments. Those courses are still available to the best of my knowledge. If they are not heavily subscribed, there is not much to do about that except impose some gen ed requirements in those areas.
It aligns with your morals, not your ethics. And that’s a problem. For example, students at Michigan protested and walked out during a professors speech at their graduation because she is pro-life. Removing DEI bureaucracies does not stop colleges from teaching different perspectives. It does prevent colleges from forcing hires to submit political DEI statements.
But I digress - I would like to see colleges teach and challenge students on all issues - even those that don’t align with the morales of a 54 year old hispanic POC like myself. In 2020, The Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (FIRE) recorded 136 instances of punishing or firing professors for airing their views. Many of these cases were professors who did not agree with prevailing public health policy on lockdowns. Regardless of what you believe, it is a travesty to not allow all voices, opinions, etc to be heard. For example, Dr. Jay Bhattacharya, a Stanford professor, has stated publicly how he received death threats, lost funding, lost speaking engagements, etc, because he publicly stated he was against lockdowns.
The college experience should be about hearing and allowing all debate, even if it’s controversial and not aligned with morality. And that’s where DeSantis gets it wrong. The prevailing voice in most universities today is identical - but you don’t fight that by stopping any voice.
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I don’t know… purely anecdotally during the whole student loan forgiveness debate, my feeds were filled with people criticizing useless degrees and such, implying that those are things we should not be funding. From my overall perspective, and I have not done an in-depth analysis of this, it seems to me that the arts and philosophy and so on are being defunded, from primary school all the way through university.
I’m an engineer and I love STEM. I find it beautiful, and I’m happy there is more emphasis being placed on it. But I don’t think it should come at the expense of other things. Reading statements like the one from DeSantis, seems to miss the point of what are we even doing all this for anyway.
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I presume at least some of the faculty in art, music and philosophy are tenured, and thus will continue to be employed regardless of how few students are enrolling. Many kids take an intro course in these areas to satisfy some requirement. I dont think students are finding courses unavailable in these areas in college, just choosing not to pursue them.
A friend is a professor at a public university in Florida (not tenured). They teach graphic art, and I am very interested in following what happens to them. They come from a contemporary art background, and considering alternative points of view is part of their teaching. Time will tell whether they will be pressured to change what they teach or will make the choice to leave. They grew up in Florida, leaving for grad school but returning to live near family. I feel like I have a front seat to witness the fallout of what is happening.
Do not assume this. If a university decides to get rid of a department or program, even tenured professors lose their jobs. This is a career-ending turn of events, and it’s happening more and more across the country.
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So is your answer to force students to take more of these courses even when they do not want to do so? Or have public funds support large academic departments with no students enrolling? Neither is a great solution.
So, I don’t disagree with a lot of your overall sentiment, but the trouble always comes down to the details.
For example, what do you mean by a “political” DEI statement? I think it’s not controversial to day that different students have a wide variety experiences that have had an effect on not only their current knowledge but on how they approach learning, right? I also don’t think it should be controversial to say that historically, we have created our learning syllabus to cater to the experiences to the dominant demographic. There are a number of studies that indicate socio-economic backgrounds have an effect on how a student learns math.
So, why should it be controversial for a university to ask that their aspiring professors to consider their student’s backgrounds when crafting lesson plans?
Also, I agree that students should be challenged with uncomfortable ideas, but that also doesn’t mean that every idea should be given a platform. To go to an extreme, I don’t think a university should fund a speaker to give a talk on the merits of forcing women to have sex with lonely men to prevent incel related shootings (to be clear, no one is doing that, I’m using an extreme example that I think everyone agrees has no merit and should not be funded). So, there is some line that we don’t go beyond… the trick is finding that line, right?
And also, students protesting and walking out of talks is their own expression that should be free to do, as well. So it seems odd to criticize that in the name of free speech.
I do agree with you Dr. Bhattacharya getting death threats or being threatened with losing his job for expressing a different opinion on how to deal with a pandemic is clearly wrong though.
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I don’t think I said that those courses are unavailable, so I’m afraid I’m not articulating my point very well.
I’m saying I have noticed a societal trend to denigrate and mock “useless” degrees in favor of pushing degrees to make money. And there absolutely are budget cuts in arts and music at the primary, middle and high school levels, which will of course affect the number of students enrolling in those programs in college.
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I agree with you about K12 education, but I really don’t think we can tell adult college students what to spend their own money and time in studying. We can tell them what we will subsidize their studies in with public funds, which should address areas of great public need-nursing or education for example. I dont think one can justify using public funds to justify further entrants to oversubscribed areas-perhaps those funds could be diverted to title 1 schools instead.
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I said neither of these things. Often, underenrollment is not the problem. I’ve seen cases in which a philosophy department (to take one example) is maintaining satisfactory levels of enrollment, but the administration has decided to shift to a more vocational focus for university curriculum and decides to axe the department anyway. I’ve seen proposals to get rid of foreign language departments, and even history departments. None of this has much to do with enrollments but rather faulty assumptions (contradicting actual research) that certain majors will not prepare students for careers.
As far as forcing students to take certain classes – never said that, either. But distribution requirements are pretty common, and the reason for these requirements is to encourage students to challenge themselves with with new perspectives and new ways to think in classes they might not otherwise have chosen. And yes, I think that’s good for them.
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And that’s exactly the issue - the details. What exactly is being required in these DEI statements? In the case of the Michigan professor, she was giving a congratulatory speech at a graduation - not one on her pro life views. So though I agree that students should be allowed to peacefully protest, why were her personal views on abortion an issue? There’s also a lesson about respecting opposing views that this incident doesn’t sit well with me. But that’s my morality.
Good chatting.
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Well, private universities are free to do what they wish. I havent seen such proposals at public universities,but there certainly may be some. I do understand the proposal that not every public university needs to offer every possible department-maybe some should offer certain subjects and students interested in that area should apply there rather than to other state universities. Universities do not have to offer everything to everyone all the time.
For the record, one of my kids majored in an esoteric subject, in which there was literally 10 faculty for every single undergrad major. Her school could afford it, so it did not matter, and that faculty got a lot of grant money as well. Otherwise, that may have been an issue.