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Jack comments on The things we know that we know ain't so - Less Wrong
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Why was crystal healing brought up? What context? This is fascinating.
It was in a sidebar article about how modern scientific medicine is male-centric, and female holistic/alternative healing practices are marginalized and treated as hokum in our society. But in other cultures, female holistic healers are valued members of society. Then it talked about different New Age healing rituals. The only one I really remember was crystal healing, which they said was an ancient Japanese ritual.
When was this? Do you remember what the book was called?
I took the class in 2007 I think.
Bizarre. Did the text book present this as fact or was it a point raised for consideration and debate?
Depressing because a good gender studies class would be such a great thing for schools to offer.
I think that Gender Studies classes are hard to find decent instructors for. I am having to file a complaint of discrimination against mine. Rather than raising things as points for consideration, she raised all manner of things as fact (without room for discussion), and when I began to call her on these "Facts" (A simple wikipedia entry usually sufficed to show that her "Facts" were completely bogus)edit she forbade me to fact check her work in class (on my laptop)/edit. When I later spoke to one of the UCSC gender studies instructors, she said that this was a problem in Gender studies. That often the instructors are militant feminists with bones to pick... So sad.
Interdisciplinary fields are always a bit wooly anyway. There's no reason why a smart, motivated person couldn't do sociology with an emphasis on gender, or philosophy with an emphasis on gender, or so on. And if you don't have an established field for your line of inquiry, you're not going to have rigorous standards for what constitutes good work. So gender studies ends up with standards hovering somewhere between sociology and postmodernist critical theory.
I completely agree. A UCSC professor named Donna Haraway, who wrote A Cyborg Manifesto: Science, Technology, and Social-Feminism in the late-Twentieth Century is an excellent example of a professor who is capable of putting a gender emphasis upon the issues of sexual roles in society, sociology, and history.
It was she to whom I went to discuss the issue after discovering she was at UC Santa Cruz (I had already read the book a few years prior to the Class with the crazy teacher).
I had taken a women's studies class because my ex-wife died from being sexually exploited while strung out on crack cocaine (typical crack whore story), and I figured that I might have something to learn from it. Dr. Haraway informed me that I was expecting too much, as most women's studies teachers are incredibly biased and emotionally driven and don't take to facts too well.
I don't agree with much of Dr. Haraway's politics, but at least she has sound arguments for her position, rather than appeals to emotion or ignorance. Now, some of the premises of her arguments I would question, but that is the whole point isn't it. That we argue the premises and from those we attempt to form a sound argument, rather than throwing together an argument that consists of "It would be horrible if it were any other way!"
You write these brief comments that are incredibly intriguing. Please post more about your life.
Maybe some day after I have made more in-person acquaintance of more people on the list.
I think you didn't finish a sentence. What happened when you started correcting her?
Duh! She forbade me to use my computer to fact check in class... And, she got really, really pissed off at anything I said (now arranging my facts before class by listening to what she was harping on about in the class prior to mine) that contradicted her rather bizarre world view.
I later discovered, from the dept. chair, that she had a paranoid episode right after she had been granted tenure. She's been under pretty intense pressure to retire since then...
I've never received a grade below a B in English or Composition classes since the 6th grade, yet she gave me a D, simply because I objected to her irrational world view where we needed to give up all technology and return to nature. She was very much one of those "We must honor the Noble Savage" types.
I've found this sort of attitude common in any class with "Studies" in the name.
My worst experience was the communist teacher of East Asian studies (not himself East Asian) who knew nothing of Asia besides Communist China and spent most of the course on propaganda. This was 2006.
The professor took to blatantly ignoring any student with a comment or question after a single questioning word about Communism.
The world is indeed full of insane people.
All such stories of academic delirium I've heard so far took place in the US. Indeed, while all of today's nations produce their share of bogus pseudoscience in the soft fields, Americans shouldn't despair so much; their academia appears to be in an uniquely bad situation here.
How did the rest of the class react to you?