Comments: Political Correctness In The Psychology World
Gender studies, oh my. The pc world is bizarre. I recently saw a democratic presidential candidate laughed off of stage by folks in the gay community for saying he didn't know whether or not people were born gay - Richardson I think - and then he was lambasted on The Daily Show, as if its an established fact that being gay is genetic and as if this proposition helps gay rights as many people wrongly think it does, in my unpc opinion. The part of the pc movement that has allowed more freedom for women, people of various races and sexual orientations is wonderful, but in terms of hypocracy and inequity, the new boss is the same as the old boss. I wanna here about Berkeley.
Posted by Sally at August 21, 2007 05:54 AM
Thanks, Philip, for bringing this to our attention.
I want to point something out from this Times article:
"But days after the book appeared, Lynn Conway, a prominent computer scientist at the University of Michigan, sent out an e-mail message comparing Dr. Bailey’s views to Nazi propaganda. She and other transgender women found the tone of the book abusive, and the theory of motivation it presented to be a recipe for further discrimination."
Why is it that when you have nothing to really argue about, you trot out the Holocaust?
I work on evidence-based medicine (EBM) topics at an academic medical institution (heavens!). We are routinely attacked by folks (usually supported by the pharmaceutical industry) for being "rigid" and anti-intellectual, promoting doctors to behave like automatons when prescribing. One recent article claimed that EBM stemmed directly from Nazi thinking, and that, like a train driver taking people to Sobibor or Auschwitz, "anti-intellectual" EBM was directly responsible for people not getting their life-saving medications.
Oh, give it a rest.
Unfortunately, folks in this country have not learned how to argue. You may not like the views of others, but others who don't think like you are not, therefore, Nazis.
In health care, unfortunately, what it generally boils down to is this: if you try to inject some reason into decision-making, and you trod on the pocketbook of somebody making a ton of money off their stumpwater solutions, then you're going to get it.
Posted by Liz at August 21, 2007 09:00 AM
I am so glad that the PC crowd didn't exist when I was in college. I only had one prof in grad school who was PC.
I don't think I would have lasted too long if i was a teenager in school today.
Live and let live if you are all over 18.
Posted by susan at August 21, 2007 10:52 AM
The reason why Nazi's are brought up, is because the founding psychiatrists believed in torture,sterilizing and killing the mentally ill.
Action_T4
not much on torture and sterilization, but the history of psychiatry
Dr DAVID HEALY
Posted by mark p.s. at August 21, 2007 11:23 AM
My brush with PC-ness. Due to onset of PTSD symptoms my math research career fizzled and by 1980 I was teaching math at community colleges around Seattle. I got a tenurable position at Shoreline. To get tenure I had to convince them to want to keep me after one year. It was mostly basic math and precalculus. In one basic algebra class the first quarter I had about 20 females to 5 males. The presentation of the book wasn't working. I got the idea that it was a learning style problem. The book was geared to graphical presentation. The students needed a more verbally-oriented approach. I knew I couldn't veer too far from the syllabus but I saw no point in teaching without anyone learning. So in each section I put a verbal explanation up front and brought the book's explanation in after it. It worked. The class took off.
I hadn't met all the math faculty yet. One day a guy who looked like he could be one of my students sat down with me at lunch and told me he was, in fact, a co-author of the basic math book, and he had used his youthful appearance to sit in on my class, and he said he knew what I was doing. I said, what am I doing? He said, "You're gearing your teaching to the girls. I don't want you doing that. I want you teaching it the way I wrote it." He also said, "All the girls here are studying to be nurses while looking for husbands. They don't need to learn math."
When I suggested taking the issue to the woman who chaired the math department then, Mr. Boyish Looks said, "Go ahead, and I'll say that you're changing your teaching approach because you think girls are incapable of following it the normal way. You'll never be able to teach anywhere again."
At that time the PC view was to deny that there could be any gender correlated differences in learning styles. The fact is that basic algebra is actually better understood verbally than graphically (algebra is, in essence, language) and therefore that a preference for the verbal approach could not be taken as evidence of inferiority, but actually shows a need to have the subject taught in accordance with its nature. But I knew that was too nuanced to get across in a PC fight. I was screwed. I had increasingly crushing symptoms of PTSD, and now a sexist pig was cynically using PC to threaten what was left of my career. I never enjoyed teaching after that.
Posted by Wes Browning at August 21, 2007 12:20 PM
Ah! The PC crowd at Berkeley! I have had my clashes with them. I lived in a coop, the nursery for PC-police at Berkeley, and apparently I didn't fit in.
Posted by Anders at August 21, 2007 03:48 PM
Fitting to my self-imposed air-head description, my fondest memory of B -erke -lee was the bell tower and listening to my friend tell me she ground her coffee beans w/out electricity. Then I went to a book store and ate carrot cake with a guy.
All 3 of my daughters excelled in math and science as did I, and it is because I made sure that happened.
Girls=science and math classes!
Posted by Stephany at August 21, 2007 06:41 PM