Professor Unfairly Treats A Christian…Admin Pleased?

By Professor Doom

    Previously we had a professor fail an entire class because of their cheating and wildly disrespectful behavior…admin stepped in and will pass the students, because administration feels the professor is being unfair. Ok, the professor was being unfair…but that actually is how it works.

    As a great counterpoint, I would like the gentle reader to consider what happens when a professor treats a student unfairly because of that student’s Christian beliefs. What, pray tell, will admin do in this case?

     The suspense!

     But first, the heart of the story:

“…professor at Polk State College has allegedly failed a humanities student after she refused to concede that Jesus is a “myth” or that Christianity oppresses women during a series of mandatory assignments at the Florida college…”

     Ok, the article may be a little one-sided, but the basic idea is a 16 year old student enrolled in the class of a rabid Marxist (at the risk of being redundant) professor.

In other essays where G.L. refused to concede that Christianity was false, violent, or oppressive to women; that Martin Luther’s motivations for the Reformation were wholly secular; and that Michalengelo’s sculptures and paintings communicated that “same-sex relationship is NOT A SIN,” Mr. Russum gave her a total of four straight zeros.

      Before going on, I want to focus a bit on the age of the student, 16, a good two years younger than usual. “Open admissions”, and “growth over all” policies mean that, at many institutions, we have under-age students regularly attending class, often as part of high school “dual enrollment” programs. This shouldn’t be a problem, but, bottom line, there really are some faculty (and some administrators) that really shouldn’t exposed to children, and with the disturbing interest in sex-amusement workshops on campus, campuses really aren’t a place for the young. Now, the sensible thing would be to either put an age restriction on campus OR to get rid of the sex-amusement courses and workshops (I favor the latter, for what it’s worth).

      Unfortunately, doing either one of those would cut into growth, so don’t expect any sensible decisions from admin.

     I can’t help but conjecture the student was home-schooled; I’ve had many under-age homeschooled students in my classes. This is because their amateur educator/parents can get kids through the public high school curriculum much more quickly than our “professional educators” of the public system can—does anyone else think it’s a problem that the “amateurs” are quicker and more efficient than the highly trained professionals? I digress.

     I can tell instantly when there’s a home schooled kid in my class. I probably should write an essay or two on home schooled kids in college, but for now, I’ll be brief: it’s borderline child abuse to trust your child to public school. Yes, I understand that the government’s economic and tax policies have impoverished most people to the point that both parents must work, but it’s still a bad thing to put a child in “public” school. Here’s the difference: they’re alert, polite, involved with the class, and able to write at the high school level or better. Always. Only the top tier public school kids even hit two of those four standards. Outside of extraordinary parents, it’s night-and-day between home schooled and public schooled kids, honest.

     Yes, home schooled children tend to have strong religious beliefs, but I’m fine with that, even if I don’t agree with every belief out there. A home schooled child can read and discuss Darwin’s The Origin of Species. Many public school kids are incapable of reading, much less discussing or writing about, the book…all they’ve been trained to do is agree with it, or at least agree with whatever their teacher says is in it. In public school you’re mostly just trained to nod your head and agree…to some extent, college isn’t much different.

     Her willingness and ability to disagree with the professor, along with her age, is another flag that she was a homeschooled student, and thus not yet indoctrinated into the professor’s ideology. No wonder he lashed out against her.

      So, we have underage kids coming to campus, unaware of the extreme goofiness in departments more interested in indoctrination than education. Obviously, such indoctrination is seldom explicit, and usually covers itself in a thin veneer of putative fairness. The course description:

The course description for the class, “ Introduction to Humanities,” claims that students “are under no obligation to agree with classmates, authors, or the instructor, in fact, the instructor will often occupy the space of ‘Devil’s Advocate’ for the purpose of lively discussion.”

      Hey, that sure sounds like a fair course, you can even disagree with the instructor (hint to students: don’t disagree with the instructor in the pseudoscience courses. You’re free to disagree with your professors in the actual sciences…provided you can demonstrate you’re right).

      As I’ve mentioned before, what’s actually going on in college classrooms, on many campuses, is totally unhinged from whatever is put in writing. The reason for the widespread fraud is because on many campuses there is no longer any actual observation of what actually goes on in the classrooms. Administration took that over, and found that it was easier to not care, provided pass rates are very high…the Education departments were the first to understand how to play the game, but others learned quickly enough.

     Anyway, the student signed up for the course, didn’t realize what was going on, and did the coursework in good faith. Assuming good faith with ideologues is a bad idea.

In her essay, the student, who Liberty Counsel identifies as “G.L.,” argued that “it is a logical fallacy to make the assumption that Christian humanism’s goal was to ‘blend mythologies and make man the center’ simply on account of Michelangelo’s artwork or because Renaissance artists incorporate classicism.”

     Consider that sentence written by the student. Whether you agree or not with her claim, one must concede that it’s a well formulated sentence with high level diction. One can only conjecture the rest of her work was comparable, right or wrong.

     And the student received zero after zero for her work. Wow. I’ve seen student papers, 1000 word essays, where nowhere in the essay were five consecutive words written properly, still get A- grades. That’s an average college grade, nowadays. Heck, I’ve seen wholesale cut-and-paste jobs get an A, even when the professor knows full well it’s not the student’s own work. Administrative support of cheating is a big factor in this.

     But this student only received zeros, four times at least. Now, seeing as the professor put in writing that it was allowable to disagree, awarding an outright zero for disagreeing seems a bit harsh, right? Doing it once, is stunning; four times sends a clear message the professor totally doesn’t want to be exposed to the diverse view of the student.

      I really feel the need to include some samples of the professor’s own writing:

“…You are to only answer the above three questions. SECOND, and this is VERY important, I DO NOT want you to write about how wonderful you think Christianity is now because women can do A, B, or C. History is history and facts are facts and your opinion on if it is better now or not is irrelevant for this discussion….The pieces your are reading a from some of the greatest expressions of mythology by women ever”

---I’ll leave out the “sic” references, and the reader is welcome to see with his own eyes the professor really writes like this. The professor does like to use caps for emphasis in lieu of any other method; I’ve noted before the practitioners of this sort of ideology seem to be far more interested in yelling than in discourse.

      Just one more quote of the professor’s point of view:

Why did Christianity, and its male gods, want to silence these women?

     Ouch. Sure looks like the professor is being a little “in your face” about his belief system. I mean, lots of folks consider Christianity to be a monotheistic religion, a religion with just one god, so by referencing “the male gods” of Christianity, the professor is either deeply ignorant or daring any poor fool student to disagree with him.

     Poor kid, she should not have to be exposed to this as one of her first college experiences. She saw that line about “male gods” and figured the professor was just throwing a softball question to encourage students to disagree with him, instead of a demonstration of, well, the “thinking” that dominates some ideologies.

     “In this age of grade inflation it is difficult to earn a grade of zero much less four consecutive zeros. Professors who do so are likely to be sending a message,” Dr. Mike Adams, a professor at the University of North Carolina Wilmington and no stranger to religious bias in academia, told Campus Reform. “A cursory examination of this professor's test questions leaves little doubt about what that message is. “

     Obviously, something is going on here beyond just a bad student who can’t write. Next time, we’ll look at what other students had to say, and then we’ll see just how quickly administration leaps to the rescue of a student being treated unfairly for religious belief, as opposed to cheating, belligerence, or disrespect. Since the latter three behaviors merit instant administrative protection, we can be optimistic, right?

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