Michigan’s Attorney General Backs Student Dismissed Over Views on Homosexuality

Good for the AG.

This is not Wisconsin, it is Michigan. There should be no exemption for this student, who, as a professional, will have to treat all persons regardless of sexual orientation or gender or anything else. The AG is wrong is submitting a friend of the court brief and is wasting the taxpayers’ money.

This is an interesting announcement. While there is a part of me that would agree with the basic fact that as clinicians, counselors must be aware of where we cannot be objective and be ok with referring clients to other professionals for assistance. However, where I find myself torn is in my wondering how such consistant behavior can impact the client’s mental health; particularly if Ms. Ward is pursuing the degree to work within a school setting. Ethically, she recognized that she could not be objective about affirming a sexual orientation other than heterosexual and chose to refer out the client. However, it doesn’t negate the fact that such a situation/practice leaves a bad taste in my mouth as a professional in education with a Counseling degree.

Quite a sweeping statement from cbres that the plaintiff “will have to treat all persons regardless of sexual orientation or gender or anything else”. Referring a client or patient to another professional for any number of reasons is an established practice in every professional field. Why this situation should be any different belies the common daily practice of sending a patient/client to someone who can better serve the person’s needs.

Quite so. If I am not slim and beautiful, I rule out being a model. If I cannot lift 60 lbs, I rule out physically demanding occupations. And if I cannot bring myself to accept/value/deal with people with beliefs or behaviors that violate my personal ethical standards, I do not become a counselor.

(And if my ethics won’t allow me to dispense medication of which I disapprove, I do not become a pharmacist.)

Probably every occupation involves some ethical compromising, at some point, but why seek out an occupation for oneself in which such compromises are sure to be frequent and painful?

I’m not a lawyer but I see a flaw in your reasoning. Freedom of religion is protected under the Constitution, while the idea of disliking smokers is not. Therefore, a person has no protection under the law to refuse to treat a smoker, but does have the right to practice his or her religious beliefs, in this case the ability to refer someone (a homosexual) to a counselor better able to treat that person. It seems very like Catholic health services refusing to offer abortions–anyone wanting an abortion can just go to another medical office.

As an aside, why would a homosexual WANT to be counseled by this woman–it is clear someone else with a different set of core values could better help him or her. Referrals are not at all uncommon.

Given her marked prejudices against substantial classes of people, I wonder why Ward would want to be a school counselor in the first place. It’s a job in which all kinds of students come into your office, and lots of them need a sympathetic and thoughtful hearing.
She might prefer going to some place where she could learn to be a cockfighting referee,

drtlegg-
Your comment is totally inappropriate! And read the article, it says MICHIGAN. Further, to generalize about an entire state is out of line. Don’t comment unless you have something intelligent to contribute.

This student chose a future career that is not in line with her values. This situation is the result of her poor judgment, not discrimination on the university’s part. Did she expect to be able to do this in her professional career? The article says she is in school counseling; what if the school she works for only has one counselor? Would she say to the student, “Oh sorry, I can’t help you because you’re gay. And no one else can either because I’m the only one here”?

She is entitled to her religious beliefs, but she is obligated to follow through in the expectations of her as a student, and as a future counselor.

Of course, this assumes there is such a thing as academic freedom now. That’s a dubious proposition. I would also question the notion that academics are society’s experts. Some are, most aren’t.

Agreed — but remember that not all knowledge can be reduced to equally “valid” political opinions that one can choose from. Since no one person can be an expert in everything, on what basis do you sort through all the information?

I’m not sure I understand the point these prof’s are making. They think that because information is available publicly that they will become redundant??? That’s like the catholic priests in the middle ages who forbade the commoners from reading the Bible so that they could have control over religion. More FREE knowledge is a good thing. period. I think the real problem is that a lot of the info on the net is crap – unsubstantiated, illogical or just pure gossip and lies.

I think the point was curation. Knowledge is just massive data. Not everyone is equipped with the training or the inherent talent to make sense of it, or to make inferences from that data, or, basically, to do anything with the data. Scholars are not quite priests. Scholars are simply people who work toward specialising in a certain area of focus within broader fields, with the aim of becoming an authority on that topic by virtue of extensive research, experience, etc. Priests on the other hand do not possess such autonomy, do they? In my view, the proliferation of information threatens to mask the nature of inquiry in that it presents information as something readily available, rather than something that needs to be delved into and worked out. To that, of course, we add your point regarding the unstable nature of publicly available information on the internet.

Whether the internet is responsible for the erosion of trust in expertise is an interesting question.

I believe, however, that your article raises a related, but different claim: “The notion that professors’ jobs depend, essentially, on society viewing them as smarter than everyone else is novel, and likely to be more than a little controversial.”

In some sense, the idea that anyone’s job depends on her expertise is totally uncontroversial. People will continue to go to doctors when they are sick and mechanics when their car needs repairs. But will they continue to go to college if they doubt the expertise of the professors?
Perhaps not – though this overlooks the fact that people go to college (or university) to become certified as experts of one sort or another themselves.

Expertise is about more than having information that others do not. It is also about, as your article comes close to suggesting, being PERCEIVED as having knowledge that others lack. The question of an expert’s job security, however, also depends on the perceived NEED for that expertise – and so relevance is also an issue.

Academic freedom has to be tied to academic responsibility; and the latter ought to include a consideration of whether the expertise academics are “selling” is something that society needs. Otherwise, we will have only ourselves to blame if society no longer “buys” the need for
academic expertise.

I discuss these issues in terms of peer review in my chapter in The Oxford Handbook of Interdisciplinarity, published last year.

” for example political or social opinions masquerading as fact,”

Unfortunately, there are some experts in some fields in academia that are also open to this charge.

The primary challenge to academic freedom and tenure isn’t public access to knowledge. If one of the central missions of academia is to better educate the public, then experts should laud the access the Internet provides and focus on developing learners who can critically analyze content, and do the kinds of fact-checking and assessment needed to separate valid from invalid information. This is the proper course, instead of settling on some narrow and self-serving definition of academic freedom (as opposed to “expertise”).

Or, as the saying goes, “If you hold on to something tighter, you’re that much more likely to lose it.”

Certainly, educational institutions aren’t going away anytime soon. Certification is still an important part of the higher education mission – verifying that graduates are themselves expert to the level indicated on their degree. Experts, who have been certified themselves, will be a necessary part of that process.

One of the primary challenges to academic freedom is the politicization of the academy. Where it has occurred it has endangered the kind of objective expertise that most commenters here have placed value in. It’s not only jeopardized the privileges of the professoriate, it has weakened the academic authority of institutional education. But those to blame are those who have indulged in or encouraged the practice or turned a blind eye to it.

As for academic freedom, it cannot be limited to “experts.” If academic freedom is a privilege of experts, then what of the freedoms of students to challenge and question and decide? Any professor who believes that their non-expert students don’t have some fundamental academic freedom might ought to reconsider teaching as a profession.

This is, or should be, a non-issue. The Internet waters down and pollutes (and commercializes) ideas and serious information at least as much (if not more) as it makes such information “available.” Making such information available to a layman accomplishes a modest amount compared to that individual, say, having a paid stipend from a 48-month fellowship to pursue expert knowledge with specialists, conferences, mentoring, etc., for that field.

To be sure, there is more chattering and more Wikipedia-type facts out there for people to pull at a fact-checking or price-checking level. More people can know when Rousseau or when Hegel were born, and the titles of their works, but that doesn’t mean those same people will be able to do anything interesting or actually intelligent with those writers ideas, i.e., meaningfully extending and adapting them to other thinkers or problems.

The threat of course is that articles like this one in the Chronicle will popularize the idea that professors are now not needed, and then that will accelerate the commodification of knowledge in a self-fulfilling prophecy that will result in the exploitation of the ignorant with the idea that there is an easy and illusory sort of expertise, deep knowledge of a subject, that they can have by reading a few Wikipedia articles and blogs. (Cf. the University of Phoenix and the crackdown on it by the Federal Government for fraud.)

I see a similar phenomenon in sophomore research papers: Students, despite belabored warnings from me, attempt to write history papers, biographies really, of writers whose prose they should simply be content to analyze while engaging other scholars about the analyses within six to eight pages. Instead I get naive and hopeless attempts at serious literary history that require more scholarly maturity and more reading of history than can be had in ten weeks.

 i am skeptical of the angle this post takes. the internet is a great tool to open up the doors of academia! i can publish my work online instantly and allow people, whoever they may be, to read my work. instead of crafting myself as an expert or one that holds special knowledge, i seek to share it! and the internet has much more to offer than “crowdsourcing.” we can work to change the publishing industry that stalls timely projects, charges students way too much for books, and keeps our writing in very particular spaces—unreachable by larger populations. if one is worried their position of professorship is threatened by the internet, well then, you got a lot more to worry about…long live open source publishing!  spaces—unreachable by larger populations. if one is worried their position of professorship is threatened by the internet, well then, you got a lot more to worry about…long live open source publishing! 

 I’m all for the democracy of the autodidact, and saying that one has a better chance of delving into Heidegger because one is at Berkeley studying with Herbert Dreyfus doesn’t mean that Jane Doe at some mid-tier school–or learning as an independent scholar who works part-time selling widgets and teaching at a community college–can’t buy the right books and listen to Dreyfus’s podcasts on Being and Time and find ways to make contributions to the scholarship on Heidegger or continental philosophy.  Maybe Jane is really smart and dedicated and will find a way to make sense on her own of texts that have taken Dreyfus himself decades of state subsidized time to master and to be recognized as one of the foremost interpreters of Heidegger.  But you know it is more likely that the Internet will contribute to obfuscation and misconceptions as Jane pursues her quest for deeper understanding of Heidegger.  Many Janes will crash and fail where a few succeed.  And isn’t college all about focusing the intellectual and educational efforts of members of our society so as not to waste time, talent, and lives pursing haphazard courses of study?  

Is there a suggestion that the university shouldn’t exist as a place that cultivates long projects like Dreyfus’s (and a host of other scholars’ and academics’ ideas that can fuel critical perspectives toward the broader culture)?  The flattening of culture may be inevitable, and it may seem terribly conservative and T.S. Eliotesque to suggest that higher forms of culture be preserved, but we should not be herded into deserting all vestiges of academic privilege in our culture under the misapprehension that the Internet has created a utopian space of pure democratic learning and expertise where now academic freedom is no longer needed and universities can be dismantled.  The elites will likely not be convinced to drop plans to send their progeny to Philips Exeter and Harvard just because the Internet has free online courses at MIT or Stanford.  And why won’t they be convinced?  

To me the promise of the Internet is great with crowd-sourcing and open source materials, but attacks on tenure and academic freedom seem less aligned with such things than with corporatizing and privatizing forces in society.  Those are decidedly not democratizing forces. The paradox many posters here labor under is that the public funded incubation of free ideas is under attack and the Internet is the proverbial camel’s nose under the tent being used to shut such freedom down in the name of…freedom and democracy.  

I have to agree with mbelvadi. While I strive to make my students comfortable enough to express themselves in discussions, a level playing field implies that we are equals in the classroom. If that were the case, what would be the point? I’m not facilitating a book club, but rather teaching a course in literature. Students should respect their professors as authorities, not simply another point of view.

Professors simply need to teach and demonstrate what is a “good” source of information and what is junk. It’s more obvious in the hard sciences, but even “soft” areas like Woman’s Studies or Sociology have ways of separating a developed, useful theory from a mere opinionated rant. think the abundance of informational available makes the sort of higher order reasoning one learns in higher education all the more valuable. 

Seems to me that the faculty is concerned about degradation of their jobs, either being required to do more work, or what they view as lower-quality work, or else being required to do work that makes them less likely to get tenure, so the administration is trying to slip it in “under cover of night.”  

The truth is the critics have a point: in many disciplines, today, with the available learning support systems, it is uncommon to have even a remotely similar learning experience in an online class, compared to an in-person class*.  Hopefully, each attempt advances the state of the art a little (or a lot), but without transparency and meaningful evaluations, we might have the same dismal state of affairs in 50 years.

As long as the economic arguments are compelling, there will always be a temptation to push for online courses, and to ignore their shortcomings, which means there will be diminished opportunity and incentive to improve them.  This is not a desirable state of affairs, no matter how you look at it.

* What I mean by not remotely similar: many evaluations are highly problematic (see the discussion on this topic earlier this week in CoHE), “class participation” and other aspects of the grade are often based on trivial or extremely game-able metrics, and knowing this causes student effort towards learning the material to be, shall we say, highly variable.  Plus, the extemporaneous parts of a lecture-format class (where the prof will add an aside, based on a student’s comment, that illuminates the topic in an entirely different way) are largely lost; I have often found these to be the most valuable parts of a lecture-style presentation, as the rest of the material is generally available in the textbook (if there is one).

A lesson for avoiding conflict in the workplace.  Leaving out people who should be part of the process is a sure recipe for problems.  If only the administrators had “looped in” the faculty they could have avoided this pitfall. 

Although I agree that many universities are degrading the quality of classroom education, online education in itself will not fill that gap, and certainly not as a cost-saving measure.

Most evidence suggests that the cost of providing effective online teaching is at least as high, or higher, than the cost of regular classroom teaching. Course design, feedback, interaction/participation and feedback are all going to be completely different and someone has to develop that and maintain it all through the course.

In addition the people who can best take advantage of online learning as students are people who have time, peace & quiet to be online, a fast internet connection, a decent computer, the skills to use and maintain those things, and generally the technical and social skills to take advantage of online learning and also lots of self-motivation. So they are not the people currently struggling or left out of the system, they are people who are already probably better situated anyway.

Education needs to be funded, seriously. Instruction, not administration, capital construction projects, or bonuses/pensions for top executives. Anything else is a distraction.