wrt the invited speaker, he’s not as mild as the article linked above would let you think: it should be noted that his party is in favor of illiberalism in the political/philosophical 18th century sense, ie., against separation of powers, freedom of speech, freedom of the press, and has tried to pass a law making denunciation of antisemitism or nazi crimes more difficult including revising history textbooks (originally some aspects of speech indicating a link between antisemitic persecution and polish people was actually criminalized). ‘Should you have speakers on campus who advocate against democracy as we know it and are in favor of “cleansing” the memory&history of the holocaust’ is an actual issue, not a sign Middlebury has a special problem.
It’s entirely irrelevant to the chemistry professor’s case and tying the two cases doesn’t really shed light on what happened.
Agree completely. That invited speaker situation has nothing to do with the Chemistry professor.
Follow the link in post #3 to see a photo of the question. The second one about the Klan was characterized by the school. But the first one was bad enough. It’s wasn’t “Hogan’s Heroes” are anything like that. He basically made a joke about one of the most horrific events of the 20th century.
Don’t think anyone is tying the two events together. Just observed that Middlebury had has a few issues surface lately.
The chemistry student’s defense of this professor may be an interesting perspective (the professor sounds so sincerely contrite that I do feel sorry for him) but it remains the clueless defense by a clueless kid of a clueless middle aged man. The kid may be excused. The middle aged man should have known better.
I am honestly, truly happy that a Jewish kid having grown up in the US in the 21st century feels so safe in his environment that being asked to calculate the amount of gas needed for the industrialised murder of Jews in a Nazi gas chambers does not give him pause and merely makes him think “historical relevance”. It means some things have been going right since World War II. Things to be proud of.
However, it SHOULD have given him pause. The only people for whom doing this calculation was ever historically relevant were the Nazi mass murderers. No kid should be asked to dispassionately replicate their thought processes.
More historical relevance: the people who actually made these calculations, dispassionately, were not the vicious Nazi monsters that come to mind first, the ones spitting about their visceral hatred of Jews. For every Joseph Goebbels whipping up the masses, for every Amon Goeth like figure running a concentration camp, there was a lowly chemical engineer who made these calculations, dispassionately, in order to murder the maximum amount of Jews. And it didn’t give them pause. It was this mindset, civil servants just doing their murderous duty, for which Hannah Ahrend coined the phrase: “the banality of evil.” Being asked to do this, even as a purely disconnected theoretical exercise, SHOULD give students pause, whichever their background. (Not to mention the professor formulating the question). It doesn’t make them snow flakes.
More historical relevance: the only people who have tried to replicate these calculations since have been historical revisionists, who have been trying to show, very dispassionately, that the holocaust couldn’t have happened the way it’s commonly accepted because war time Germany would have been unable to come up with enough cyanide/enough gas chamber capacity/whatever reason under the sun they could come up with. The implication being of course, that the holocaust must be a monstrous conspiracy designed to keep the hard working non Jews down and swindle them out of their hard earned money. A calculation intimately connected to an age old anti Semitic trope.
I’d expect a professor and the students at a premier liberal arts college to be able to make these connections, or, in the students case, to be open minded and historically woke enough to learn how to make them. I think that a professor who could not do this should not be teaching young people. I do not know enough about the disciplinary procedures at liberal arts colleges to say whether he should be reinstated after sensitivity training or something similar. But I would not frame it so much about whether particular students, Jewish or not, were offended, but about the capability of teaching critical thinking and ethical thinking throughout the curriculum, even in science classes.
Tigerle makes excellent points. I would like to think that my daughter, faced with that exam question, would have refused to do the calculation and would have explained why. I think there is a reasonably good chance that she would have refused. The point about the “banality of evil” is spot-on.
(We are not Jewish, but have partial German ancestry.)
I apologise for misspelling Hannah Arendt, the edit window was closed when I noticed.
@tigerle: thank you.
Sadly, the professor might have tried to do something in fashion nowadays: to “contextualize” calculations, to make them more real to students. In several textbooks I’ve seen this attempt spectacularly backfire. One involved counting how many limbs had been chopped off based on a literary except describing a battle. The text went all the way to printing before someone “pinged” on it. The worst part of it is that, often, the lengthy stories distract and confuse students, because they are no less abstract to them (since it’s very hard to find actual, concrete, relatable stories that match a math problem past elementary arithmetics/statistics.)
I used to have my business students read in praise of disobedience's introduction. You meet the perfect employee who becomes an executive… then realize he’s a nazi who was part of the final solution. The book goes with A specialist: portrait of a modern criminal by Eyal Sivan and Rony Brauman, a documentary made entirely with footage from Eichman’s trial where Arendt coined the concept “Banality of Evil”.
http://www.eyalsivan.info/index.php?p=fichefilm&id=11#&panel1-7
That is not new. I remember a physics instructor decades ago mentioning an old textbook example involving calculating where a bomb dropped from an airplane would land relative to an enemy target, and that a later edition of the textbook changed it to dropping a rescue package to someone stranded in a remote area. The bomb version of the example might not go over well today, even if the target were something that used to be universally despised like Nazis.
In high school physics, in the early 80’s, we used to calculate the trajectory of a catapult to hit a falling monkey.
As a high school chemistry teacher, I was required to contextualize chemistry and draw connections to history and current events. A lot of disasters in history were caused by chemical reactions.