Reply #34: I worded my response carefully and said pretty precisely what .. [View All]

[struggle4progress]

.. I wanted to say about the potential credibility of the student; in particular, quoting a half-sentence out of context may be a jolly nice trick for writing a politically tricky judicial opinion (Marbury v. Madison, say), but in some circles, it's regarded as intellectually dishonest.

I never taught at any institution where I felt I had unlimited power over students, even after receiving tenure; whether the students thought I had unlimited power over them is a different question. A tricky apect of education is teaching late adolescent students to take responsibility for their own behaviors and their own learning: in my experience, instructor insistence on this point is a major source of student complaints that the instructor is "unhelpful" or "doesn't care."

Gate-keeping, per se, is not wrong: I always adjusted my expectations so that almost anybody could earn a passing grade in my class, but typically a quarter to a half of the classes flunked. The students who flunked BTW were not necessarily the least intelligent: most people who put in a meaningful effort learned the material; some of the more intelligent kids who didn't pass had wasted their intellectual talents playing stupid political games.

Older jackasses are, of course, more skillful at being jackasses than younger ones, having had more years to practice, and therefore the older ones are typically more irritating and humiliating to encounter. But I see no reason to think that jackasses accumulate preferentially in tenured university faculty positions, and my experience suggests that people who are less intellectually secure are more likely to act crappily in an academic setting than people who are more intellectually secure. Based on my experiences with students, I'd guess a few percent of that population are real jerks; I don't think the figure for faculty is much different.

And do feel free to deride the mathematical or statistical abilities of people with whom you have only the most rudimentary familiarity ...