1 Vote
RE: How to review books
Matt, My opinion of you has taken a dive. No teacher of adults that I know would react like that. It appears that you could not be fair to a student who shared Clark’s views.
Everyone is entitled to their own opinion, but my opinion of your “shock-jock” mentality is that you are trying to equate apples and oranges. If someone doesn’t offer something new and doesn’t cite their work, you’re damn right in my class they’d get a C at best. I may have opinions which in the military leadership sense I would call convictions, but I’m not so closed minded like you have suggested to take it out on future Army Officers…but again, that’s your opinion. As an aside, I won’t be teaching Social Sciences, I’ll be teaching Electrical and Computer Engineering. And again, I do agree with the anon that the “Sosh” department has it’s liberal leanings but not as much as your everyday college; I know many in the department. But alas, I’m not a “real academic” so I guess to you it doesn’t matter where I teach.
RE: How to review books by Stig
OK Matt. That explains a lot.
Computer Engineers tend to see things in a binary fashion: all right or all wrong. Social Science and history majors understand that life is more complicated than that. There are all kinds of nuances and influences that need to be taken into account, whatever are our own convictions.
For example, many of us in Britain still believe you Americans gained your independence in a war that the French won for you. No doubt that is a biased view from the loser, but a strong case for it can be made on the basis of the final battle. My point is that you have to look at the courage of the leaders of the thirteen colonies in standing up to a superpower who they could not defeat alone, in order to get the full story. I would still be very interested in Lord Nelson’s view of that war even though he was a junior officer in a different service, was no doubt very biased, and did not play an active role.
It is probably a good sign when an American SoH department is regarded as having a liberal bias, because the political spectrum in the USA is skewed to the conservative side. You have two conservative parties and no real left in Congress. An even handed view of history would therefore always appear biased to the left when viewed by the majority from somewhere on the right.