{"id":21980,"date":"2013-09-05T00:01:52","date_gmt":"2013-09-05T05:01:52","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/?p=21980"},"modified":"2013-09-04T13:36:49","modified_gmt":"2013-09-04T18:36:49","slug":"qotd-an-important-lesson-for-university-students","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/2013\/09\/05\/qotd-an-important-lesson-for-university-students\/","title":{"rendered":"QotD: An important lesson for university students"},"content":{"rendered":"

You could find a dozen websites offering more trenchant progressive political analysis in five minutes.<\/p>\n

Yet Professor Penn’s lesson has value to his students. They can learn the following important things:<\/p>\n

1. In the course of your life, people with power will act badly with impunity.<\/p>\n

2. People with power over you will use that power to indulge themselves in droning, whether or not their droning offers any value.<\/p>\n

3. People can be tremendously talented and knowledgeable about Subject X and be useless louts about Subject Y. Often they’ll want to talk about Subject Y.<\/p>\n

4. People think others want to hear their opinions about politics, and think their opinions about politics are insightful.<\/p>\n

5. A significant part of developing as an adult is deciding how you will deal with points 1 \u2013 4.<\/p>\n

6. Huge amounts of government money pay for absolute shit.<\/p>\n

7. People who nominally favor freedom of expression will drop it like a hot coal when their political biases are aroused<\/a>. Case in point: many angry conservative people saying that Professor Penn should be fired for a banal political rant, even though he’s a professor at a state university enjoying First Amendment protections<\/a> that are rather broad<\/a>. Check the comments on the sites complaining about Professor Penn if you don’t believe me.<\/p>\n

I submit those are all valuable lessons.<\/p>\n

I think that it’s pathetic that these students are paying to hear Professor Penn indulge himself like that even for ten minutes. I think his calling out a student in class for seeming to disagree displays low character and an excellent reason to avoid his class. But I don’t see anything that merits firing from his position at a public institution, and I am not enthused about a system in which public universities will be policed for insipid partisanship by other partisans.<\/p>\n

But how enthusiastic do you suppose Professor Penn’s students are about faculty free speech rights after sitting through that<\/em>?<\/p>\n

Ken White, “William S. Penn of Michigan State University Teaches Important Lessons To College Students”, Popehat<\/em><\/a>, 2013-09-04<\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

You could find a dozen websites offering more trenchant progressive political analysis in five minutes. Yet Professor Penn’s lesson has value to his students. They can learn the following important things: 1. In the course of your life, people with power will act badly with impunity. 2. People with power over you will use that […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[79,10,53,41],"tags":[186,764],"class_list":["post-21980","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-education","category-liberty","category-politics","category-quotations","tag-freedomofspeech","tag-university"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p2hpV6-5Iw","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/21980","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=21980"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/21980\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":21981,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/21980\/revisions\/21981"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=21980"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=21980"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=21980"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}