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If I’m a Republican legislator and I’m seeing my kids enroll at a state college where gender and queer studies classes are a requirement to get a computer scien

by wincy 7y ago

If I’m a Republican legislator and I’m seeing my kids enroll at a state college where gender and queer studies classes are a requirement to get a computer science degree, I’m going to want to defund too. I remember my Republican high school peers arguing with our liberal debate coach, and he’d just laugh and say “wait until you go to college, then you’ll get it”. Sure enough, she went to Harvard Law and became a Democrat. The indoctrination is there and if monetary compensation isn’t the reason professors get into teaching, what is? If you have a mission to “educate young minds” to reject their “problematic” notions, that can be a strong motivator. There’s a strong culture war aspect to defund colleges, because you’re essentially funding the opposition if you’re a conservative and you’re paying the salaries of the extremely liberal college professors. Then people say obnoxious, arrogant things like “well reality has a liberal bent” and other platitudes to explain away why conservatives voices have been systematically excluded from college campuses over decades.

ThrowawayR2 7y ago
Universities are also the place that turn out STEM graduates and Ph.Ds: engineers (the non-software kind, where you actually need and use the education), physicians, scientists and researchers of all flavors (like the kind trying to find a cure for COVID-19), and so forth. These people are the pillars of progress and innovation necessary for a country to be great. Ironically, by defunding universities, culture warrior conservatives are effectively slitting their own country's throat. (Personally, I had no use for the ideologues either but managed to avoid them by simply not taking any of their classes; foreign language courses are a great way of filling humanities requirements with something actually useful.)
sysbin 7y ago
Did you find anything in the previous comments for needing to write this nonsensical opinion?
eli_gottlieb 7y ago
"Crippling the young with lifelong debt to win the campus culture-wars and own the libs."
JadeNB 7y ago
"Educated people become liberals" isn't the knock against liberals, or education, that you seem to think it is.
N1H1L 7y ago
State schools in US are often the best STEM schools. I have cried myself hoarse on HN trying to make this simple point - but except for Cornell, every Ivy League is ordinary in engineering and the hard sciences.
- dmoy 7y ago
  Do we include math and physics in there? If so there might be a couple other exceptions there.
  - N1H1L 7y ago
    Basically Harvard, and maybe Columbia and that's it. UIUC, Wisconsin-Madison, Berkeley, Michigan-Ann Arbor are orders better schools in the sciences than Dartmouth or Brown.
    - JadeNB 7y ago
      In math, Princeton tops all the non-Ivy's you list, and UPenn has at least a fighting chance, maybe depending on speciality.
      - N1H1L 7y ago
        Specialty fields yes. But Princeton engineering is ordinary, and the state schools often have exceptional faculty across multiple departments - leading to way more collaborative, cutting-edge work.
      - thomashobohm 7y ago
        Once you're at that level, the differences are marginal. It matters if you want to go to graduate school, I suppose, but we're talking about people who just want to get a degree and go into the workforce here. For them, Princeton vs. Michigan won't matter a bit if they're studying to become an engineer.
        JadeNB 7y ago
mattkrause 7y ago
Can you name a major college or university where "gender and queer studies classes[0] are a requirement to get a computer science degree?" [0] Specifically, please. Two semesters of English, which is pretty standard, doesn't count unless few other options.
dctoedt 7y ago
FWIW, I was a lifelong conservative Republican but in recent years have slowly become a liberal independent (leaning very much Democratic) because of A) the gradual takeover of the GOP by fact-scorning white nationalists who used to be banished to the fringes of the party; and B) what I've experienced and seen in life over the decades, which has made me much more sympathetic to others who didn't get the breaks that I and my ancestors did. As just one, powerful example: Go visit the National Civil Rights Museum in Memphis sometime, at the Lorraine Motel where Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated. They have life-changing exhibits about the Jim Crow system; about the civil rights era — which I remember from childhood; and especially about slavery. I was fighting back not just tears but sobs. Twenty years ago I scoffed at the idea of reparations for African Americans; now I'm very much open to the idea because of the corrosive compound-interest effect of what was done to their ancestors. To be sure, neither I nor my forebears kept people enslaved, AFAIK — in fact, one of my ancestors was crippled in the Union Army, according to family lore — but all we whites are still benefiting from what was done to the A-As. (Yeah, yeah, I know, other minorities were treated badly too, including some of my recent ancestors; none, none, were treated as badly as enslaved Africans and their descendants.) That's just one example. I could go on ....
acbart 7y ago
Perhaps if the conservative voices would stop saying stupid stuff like this, they wouldn't be systematically excluded from the conversation. In my particular subfield of CS, there's a "self-identified conservative" who's been more or less utterly rejected from the community because, in addition to their bonkers political opinions, it turns out they also have bonkers scientific opinions. In fact, I'd go so far as to say that they reject the scientific process. It's hard to find that compatible with doing science. Perhaps I have many secret conservative colleagues in my field, but the only one I've seen is not someone who I would ever wish to collaborate with.

by wincy 7y ago

ThrowawayR2 7y ago

Universities are also the place that turn out STEM graduates and Ph.Ds: engineers (the non-software kind, where you actually need and use the education), physicians, scientists and researchers of all flavors (like the kind trying to find a cure for COVID-19), and so forth. These people are the pillars of progress and innovation necessary for a country to be great. Ironically, by defunding universities, culture warrior conservatives are effectively slitting their own country's throat. (Personally, I had no use for the ideologues either but managed to avoid them by simply not taking any of their classes; foreign language courses are a great way of filling humanities requirements with something actually useful.)

sysbin 7y ago

Did you find anything in the previous comments for needing to write this nonsensical opinion?

eli_gottlieb 7y ago

"Crippling the young with lifelong debt to win the campus culture-wars and own the libs."

JadeNB 7y ago

"Educated people become liberals" isn't the knock against liberals, or education, that you seem to think it is.

N1H1L 7y ago

State schools in US are often the best STEM schools. I have cried myself hoarse on HN trying to make this simple point - but except for Cornell, every Ivy League is ordinary in engineering and the hard sciences.

dmoy 7y ago
Do we include math and physics in there? If so there might be a couple other exceptions there.
- N1H1L 7y ago
  Basically Harvard, and maybe Columbia and that's it. UIUC, Wisconsin-Madison, Berkeley, Michigan-Ann Arbor are orders better schools in the sciences than Dartmouth or Brown.
  - JadeNB 7y ago
    In math, Princeton tops all the non-Ivy's you list, and UPenn has at least a fighting chance, maybe depending on speciality.
    - N1H1L 7y ago
      Specialty fields yes. But Princeton engineering is ordinary, and the state schools often have exceptional faculty across multiple departments - leading to way more collaborative, cutting-edge work.
    - thomashobohm 7y ago
      Once you're at that level, the differences are marginal. It matters if you want to go to graduate school, I suppose, but we're talking about people who just want to get a degree and go into the workforce here. For them, Princeton vs. Michigan won't matter a bit if they're studying to become an engineer.
      - JadeNB 7y ago

mattkrause 7y ago

Can you name a major college or university where "gender and queer studies classes[0] are a requirement to get a computer science degree?" [0] Specifically, please. Two semesters of English, which is pretty standard, doesn't count unless few other options.

dctoedt 7y ago

FWIW, I was a lifelong conservative Republican but in recent years have slowly become a liberal independent (leaning very much Democratic) because of A) the gradual takeover of the GOP by fact-scorning white nationalists who used to be banished to the fringes of the party; and B) what I've experienced and seen in life over the decades, which has made me much more sympathetic to others who didn't get the breaks that I and my ancestors did. As just one, powerful example: Go visit the National Civil Rights Museum in Memphis sometime, at the Lorraine Motel where Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated. They have life-changing exhibits about the Jim Crow system; about the civil rights era — which I remember from childhood; and especially about slavery. I was fighting back not just tears but sobs. Twenty years ago I scoffed at the idea of reparations for African Americans; now I'm very much open to the idea because of the corrosive compound-interest effect of what was done to their ancestors. To be sure, neither I nor my forebears kept people enslaved, AFAIK — in fact, one of my ancestors was crippled in the Union Army, according to family lore — but all we whites are still benefiting from what was done to the A-As. (Yeah, yeah, I know, other minorities were treated badly too, including some of my recent ancestors; none, none, were treated as badly as enslaved Africans and their descendants.) That's just one example. I could go on ....

acbart 7y ago

Perhaps if the conservative voices would stop saying stupid stuff like this, they wouldn't be systematically excluded from the conversation. In my particular subfield of CS, there's a "self-identified conservative" who's been more or less utterly rejected from the community because, in addition to their bonkers political opinions, it turns out they also have bonkers scientific opinions. In fact, I'd go so far as to say that they reject the scientific process. It's hard to find that compatible with doing science. Perhaps I have many secret conservative colleagues in my field, but the only one I've seen is not someone who I would ever wish to collaborate with.