Republicans Target Social Sciences to Curb Ideas They Don’t Like - eviltoast

Conservatives in Florida have moved from explosive politics to subtler tactics to uproot liberal “indoctrination” in higher education by removing classes like Sociology from core requirements.

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  • microphone900@lemmy.ml
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    1 month ago

    Tania Cepero López, a faculty union leader, isn’t a caricature of a leftist university professor. An English instructor at Florida International University, she has voted for Republicans and is married to a conservative Republican.

    She has watched in horror in recent years, she said, as she saw the same government interference into education in the United States that she experienced in her native Cuba.

    I hope Tania and her husband learned something from this. Who am I kidding, they’ll probably support and vote for Republicans down ballot and wonder why things are getting worse. Good luck to the students of conservative run states.

  • prole@lemmy.blahaj.zone
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    1 month ago

    This has to be crippling our future, right? I mean, I know the GOP needs to keep people stupid to sustain a voting base, but at some point, sabotaging your own country’s education seems like an absolutely awful idea in the long term.

    Depressing that we are failing these kids so bad…

    • FundMECFSResearch@lemmy.blahaj.zoneOP
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      This has been a problem for far longer, especially with relation to massive inequality in between school districts and hypereligious education in the south

      • Skyrmir@lemmy.world
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        1 month ago

        It’s not much better in the North. Self segregation is alive and well, along with massive funding disparities in school districts.

    • ramble81@lemm.ee
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      The oligarchs are perfectly fine with a lower quality of life for everyone else if it means their bottom line goes up and they can still afford what they want. In fact it benefits them by reducing the cost of one of their biggest line items: labor. You have heard billionaires repeatedly bemoan that they would prefer Americans cost the same as 3rd world countries so they can get their cheap labor.

      That’s a long winded way of saying “this is working as designed for them”

      • leftytighty@slrpnk.net
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        1 month ago

        I guess it’ll be good for the environment if the US becomes a developing country and starts producing things at home for poverty wages instead of needing to ship stuff

    • DominusOfMegadeus@sh.itjust.works
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      It maintains the population of uneducated slave labor for the Oligarchs to pull into their business schemes. Because they don’t have enough money yet.

    • Phoenixz@lemmy.ca
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      1 month ago

      The US will fall into a hole which it will take decades to claw it’s way out off and all we can hope for is that it won’t drag the entire world down with it.

      We’ve been saying for decades that dictators could happen in any country, nobody was listening

      • nickwitha_k (he/him)@lemmy.sdf.org
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        We’ve been saying for decades that dictators could happen in any country, nobody was listening

        And they still aren’t listening despite it barreling towards us.

    • AA5B@lemmy.world
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      1 month ago

      When I hire someone in a different country, I have to wonder what their college education means. Is that degree from someplace similar to my local community college or closer to MIT? I always thought i had some idea for colleges in my own country, then we had the scandal of diploma mills, now we have partisan education from formerly accredited schools

      If I ever see a candidate from New College, or whatever, it’ll be hard not to put that resume in the same bucket as “Bell and Howell University “

  • Kichae@lemmy.ca
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    1 month ago

    Quick, someone tell them that economics is a subfield of sociology!

    • satanmat@lemmy.world
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      1 month ago

      Oh yeah?!! Then why is it always taught in the business department??!!

      Checkmate libtard!!!

      /s

      • Kichae@lemmy.ca
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        1 month ago

        That just sounds like a 3rd year course, possibly cross-posted to the poli-sci department.

  • Flying Squid@lemmy.world
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    The 22 courses that trustees marked for removal at Florida International University are heavily focused on social sciences, including Introduction to East Asia, Intercultural/Interracial Communication and Labor and Globalization. More than two dozen other courses updated their descriptions to comply with the law. Similar efforts — though the exact number of courses affected wasn’t immediately clear — played out across the state’s public universities.

    Yeah, we wouldn’t want today’s college students to learn about China. What use is that in today’s world?

  • Riskable@programming.dev
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    1 month ago

    Is there such a thing as a conservative sociologist? Does that even exist? It sounds like a myth, like a conservative professor of ethics (not a self-described “professor of ethics” 🤣)

    • RunawayFixer@lemmy.world
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      I’d imagine that a conservative professor of ethics would be the one telling doctors in training that when faced with the dilemma of saving the life of the mother or that of her unborn child, that they must then save the life of the child because it is without sin.

      This was taught in a Catholic university near me to doctors of my parents generation, but I suspect they stopped doing that here since about the 1990s. In other places of the world the Catholic church is still at it though.

    • anon6789@lemmy.world
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      It’s interesting when you can find articles from some of these walking contradictions. I read a few articles by an anti-woke, pro-timber industry environmentalist a few weeks back and made a post about them. Reading them ticked me off so much, I revised my opinions on a lot of things I had been feeling mixed about. Hearing some pretty icky things in support of one side of the argument solidified that wasn’t the choice for me.

      The guy who wrote them has credentials that are legit. He’s been in the job and related ones forever, and he has lots of awards and commendations. I don’t think there’s any one of us though that hasn’t worked with someone that we wonder why they’re or how they’ve been promoted to where they are over the years. Just because someone has a job doesn’t always mean they’re good at it or that they should be doing it.

      The articles I shared are pretty thought provoking, for what I felt were bad reasons though, but if you’d like to read a conservative expert’s opinion on logging and what should be done with Spotted owls, it will really give you some things to think about.

  • raynethackery@lemmy.world
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    1 month ago

    And lazy kids will flock to these schools because they now have less prerequisites. Other Universities should stop accepting transfer credits from Florida schools.

  • octopus_ink@lemmy.ml
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    1 month ago

    This would have been a great article to run vs one more sane-washing piece regarding Trump the past few months.