University suspends lecturer in racism row

[Caligula]

Gosh. What a bizarre man. \link{http://education.guardian.co.uk/racism/story/0,,1738570,00.html\guardian story here}

How did he manage to get a post as a lecturer in the first place ?

I was wondering how this would pan out. I forst read about him during the cartoon furore, when he was making a big issue over his right to free speech. I think he should be allowed to say these things - but also he needs to appreciate that holding views like that seriously compromises his ability to do his job!
I wouldn't pay fees or take on a student loan to be taught by him!

Quite, Blu. Freedom of speech and all that, but it's really hard when you are able to espouse your views with apparent authority to loads of potentially susceptible minds.

I have mixed feelings on this one. I think that his views are sexist, racist and all sorts and that he needs a good slapping. However we live in a society where he IS entitled to them.

If he does not express them during his lectures should he be prevented from teaching? He may still be a fantastic teacher. Where do you draw the line on who should be teaching due to their personal opinions?

Can I object to someone who believes in scientology, darwinism (is that a word) or satanism teaching?

Erm, if you objected to Darwinism there'd be no biology teachers left :) I do know what you mean though, it is hard to judge. A well-known and respected geneticist was suspended a few years ago because he refused to take someone on in his lab because the applicant had served in the Israeli army.

With respect to this comment

"The British National party is the only party in Britain that has consistently attacked the scandalously high levels of legal and illegal immigration."

Do these people ever attack the white immigrants from countries like Australia, New Zealand, USA, Canada, France, Swedan etc? Of course not. Also, are they raging about the large number of white people who emmigrate from this country, and in so doing, become immigrants themselves? Of course not. What they despise is the darker pigmentation of the skin of non-white people like me. However, as soon as the sun is out, I bet they are the first ones out there topping up their tan.

I find it incredulous that Leeds University has someone like this teaching young, impressionable students.

We pay academics to think non-standard thoughts.
As for "suscetible minds", these students are over 18, and Leeds is a respectable university.
Cerainly the idea that a lecturer muight be seen as great moral authority is more than a little optimistic.

Of course being a Powellite tells us this guy, like Mr. Powell is an arts graduate. Powell believed that West Indians would dominate Britain through force of numbers, because quite obviously he no understanding of numbers. Lots of things you can say about WIs, but they aren't dominating this country.

The points about women and blacks are based upon solid facts. You can choose which interpretation you like, but before you do, ask yourslef why you want to believe a particular interpretation.
Is it because it fits the facts, or because you want it to fit the facts.
I educate some over 18's and I regard it as my duty to put to them ideas that clash with their preconceptions. That sometimes means arguing for a position that I don't hold. That being said, my stuff could not be explained to a Guardian journalist any more than my toilet can appreciate theology.

Though at a detailed level. He has failed to understand the defect in multiculturalism.
The practitioners of this doctrine aren't aiming at "integration", but at defending distinctive cultures. Essentially you are "allowed" to be a member of any "acceptable" culture, but they don't like cultural pollution any more than a 1930s German would.

As for the BNP he has a point. They represent a genuinely held politcal view on the nature of our society. The media does not accord them the same consideration it does to other minority political groups, like the greens. If you look at (say) Greenpeace, they are regularly on the TV commenting on things even when their view of the situation is even more out of touch with reality than that of the BNP.
Ironially of course they have almost identical policies on the environment, and both are bitterly opposed to globalisation.

It's tempting to say the BNP are bad guys. But do you really want the media doing that ?
As it happens the illiterate and hopelessly inaccurate ramblings of their publications are to me a compelling argument agains the idea that white people are inherently superior.

But if you force them underground, you will get an underground organisation that can point to a "conspiracy" against it.
The ponit of democarcy is to give poeple an non-violent way of getting their position into decision making and you break that at your peril.

I heard him on radio 4 a couple of weeks ago, the student union guy did a really bad job debating with him.

DC, Hitler and his party were not an underground organisation. They won the election because they said what people wanted to hear and he promised to make life for the true Germans better. The rest is history.

I'm in two minds about him. Of course he should be able to think and say what he wants, but not to the degree where it affects his ability to do his job.

If he's a lecturer in Russian literature or whatever it is, you can say what he thinks of the intelligence of women or black people is irrelevant; but if he's actually marking essays, he may well mark down students he considers intellectually inferior because he's subconsciously underestimating the quality of their work.

I used to regularly be over-marked by my history teacher because she thought I was wonderful and intelligent (and of course she was right ) but she failed to notice that my history essays just weren't up to the mark because it didn't tally with her image of me. My A level grade was a terrible surprise and disappointment to her, but I completely expected it because I knew she'd been over-marking me. It was the same grade as another pupil whom she had expected to do much worse, who she'd been consistently undermarking. I can imagine a bloke with loony attitudes like this would fall into this trap.

I am a university lecturer and I don't think lecturers should be suspended for beliefs that don't affect their teaching any more than I think I should be allowed to refuse to teach someone on the grounds that I don't agree with their views.
If there is any question of this man actively harassing or discriminating against any students that's a different matter.

If this guy believes that the average intelligence of women is less than that of men, well, that's probably rubbish but it's his prerogrative as it needn't affect the way he will approach individuals. On the other hand, if he believes all women are lacking some element of intelligence that men have then it's difficult to see how he could teach women without his approach to them being affected by that.
(I'm discussing his approach to women here rather than the racial issue because as a woman I feel more qualified to comment, but there may be parallels.)

DC - an awful lot of begged questions in there.

WE pay academics to research and / or develop new ideas - which are by definition, then non-standard. the basis of this guy's opinions are a disporven, dicredited, outdated theory.

IS there a 'problem with multi-culturailism'?: is there a problem with a society in which it exists?

The points about women and blacks (sic) are based on silid facts? Starting with a fact like the invention one doesn't make your conclusion fact. you need MartianBishops lecture on spurious correlation / conflation. (she is a science graduate, so obvioulsy not a powellite).

LOL at the impressionable students, though. I get the picture that they are more than clued up to him, and that the problem is rather that they are of more sound academic ability than this man!

I thought anonymous marking was standard now - it is in my dept. The only identification is a student id number ..so his marking shouldn't be affected by his views

You can have a system whereby marking is anonymous but if eg group size is small you can still end up knowing who they are.

Quite, Kathy. DC, I realise you are posting from the position of Man With Very Important Job, but I am also a university lecturer, and the Bell Curve is most certainly not based on facts.

Ah yes I see.. and I spose russian would be a fairly small group

Re Bell Curve (which I have not read) I was under the impression that it was rubbish because:

1. IQ tests are now thought to be culturally biased and are therefore no use for comparing intelligence between different groups of people
2. it also argues that differences in average IQ between groups would mean different ways of teaching the groups were necessary, ie they want black kids to get a non-academic education , but the differences are so tiny that this is ridiculous

I think even some non-racist types argue that there are tiny average IQ differences between groups. The point is that the Bell Curve people think that this is enormously important and proves white superiority, others say that it probably just proves the tests are rubbish and in any case teeny tiny average differences don't mean a thing when the differences between individuals within the groups are way greater than differences between groups.
(Have to go and get a train now - will check thread later )

Actually Hitler's gang was an underground organisation at first, and he did time in prison.

I'm all for sacking this guy for being too stupid to teach, but not for his political views.

speeling errors aside, women and black poeple do have lower rates of attainment. Those are facts, and the issues are what they mean and what if anything you should do about it.
My point however was the intellectual discipline about how you interpret any set of data.
Just because you want some set of the population to be the same as the resat except for errors in the experiment, doesn't mean that this is true.

Women's brains are known to have different properties at several levels. It's not entrialy implausible that this makes them better or worse at some things.
Intelligence of black people is a bit harder to deal with. Big problem is that from a genetic point of view they are vastly more diverse than the rest of humanity put together. Even the nature of the blackness is highly variable.

We picked the school for the gang of two because they appreciated that boys need diffrent methods of education than girls. However of course many poeple use "different" and "more appropriate" to mean "set them up for crap meniual jobs". Certainly that was the view of my Catholic junior school, even though I happened to be white, so I'm more sensitive to this than the average person.

There is however in the USA a movement to try and reduce the amount of sport done by black boys. Not because of any bell curve idea, but the fact that too many teachers encourage them to spend too much time persuing a stupidly unrealistic path for their lives at the expense of learning things that might help them get a job.

To give a person the best set of opportunities, a certain degree of customisation obviously makes sense. I have no drawing skills at all. None. All the time spent doing that was utterly wasted.

But that's so hard to do, and anything less than perfection will often be far worse than treating everyone the same.

I read a bit of the Bell curve, didn't seem worth finishing. Never saw anything that was provably wrong, just very poor understanding of reasoning under uncertainty.

Tamaman, I'm not sure I would count my job as more important than yours, don't think I said or even implied that it was.
I had hoped that my posts were clear about education being very important. I just don't think that many students would go and join a racist organisation if you told them to.
Indeed, such is youth, that they might do the opposite just to prove what free thinkers they are.

You say you know that the Bell curve is not facts because you are a lecturer, might I ask what in ?

DC
"speeling errors aside, women and black poeple do have lower rates of attainment. Those are facts, and the issues are what they mean and what if anything you should do about it".

Well as someone who is black and female with a PhD in chemistry, I have attained far more academically than many of the white men I come across. That does not mean I am more intelligent. Similarly, David Beckham has high intelligence when it comes to spatial awareness (I think that is what it is called) but academically, he is average.

I would also like to point out than when I was at school, I and some of black friends threaten to take our school to court for racism because they tried to force us to do CSEs rather than GCE O'levels, despite the fact that there were white girls who were achieving less academically than we were but who were allowed to do O'levels. In the end, they allowed us to take our O'levels and we passed. How many girls and black pupils have been deliberately held back and marked down by the entrenched racist/sexist views of their teachers?

I don't know anything about this Bell curve but no doubt it is based on data gathered by white people using parameters based on white european standards (most white people in US descend from Europeans).

The relative attainment of women and black people has to be considered in the context of the social order of European society which, for hundreds of years as been set up to favour white men. If women and black people had the opportunities that the white male inventors had, things would have been different.

I would also add that there have been many black inventors but their achievements have been largely overlooked or ignored but thankfully, things like Black History month are starting to address this travesty of history.

At my uni, the highest achievers are female mature students. Bath Spa also has figures to show that students who did Access (and therefore are mature) are something like 20% more likely to get a first.

Good post, speedymama. Completely agree about the parameters. I would be very interested to know what and where these facts are, that women have lower rates of attainment?

I would never actually write something as facile as "I know the Bell Curve is rubbish because I am a lecturer", and I didn't if you read my post. Since you ask though, I lecture on Human Genetics.

I do seem to remember reading stats to show that women get fewer firsts nationally than men do. They also get fewer thirds, I think. Not sure what that tells us, tbh.

I have been following this with interest because I do find it shocking in a kneejerk way that someone could face disciplinary action for stating an opinion. But, and it's a big but, there doesn't seem to be much scientific discussion going on in the debate -- it seems more like the clash of two belief systems. And in fact the quotes from him in the Guardian article reinforce that: he says 'The Bell Curve theory has demonstrated to me'. Well, excuse me, but a theory doesn't demonstrate anything, only evidence can do that. Or the one on feminism, 'Well, if you believe that, you're entitled to believe it.' But science isn't about what you believe. There either is evidence for a proposition or there isn't. And if there is, then one can legitimately debate the validity of that evidence.

The man clearly keeps some very unsavoury company, and conmes across like an ideologue rather than an academic. But it would be interesting to eavesdrop on the debate in Leeds University Senate room, rather than have it all filtered through media simplification.

I have not read the Bell Curve, so I cannot comment on it. I do know that there is considerable racial bias (for want of a better word) in IQ tests in general. Many make cultural assumptions that are not helpful.

Re correlation you can make correlations between just about anything. It doesn't mean that they are causal. For those interested the Flying Sphagetti Monster website has a wonderful correlation bettween global warming and the number of pirates. As Global Pirates have fallen, temperatures have risen (I lust after one of the mugs BTW.....any child getting the gag would be immediatly put on the G and T regester!

Hasn't stopped me, hmb :o

frogs, you're right, it is a very difficult road to go down, and one that makes me very uneasy. Despite all the scoffing though, I do think a lot of new students are quite impressionable, and I know I wouldn't want my daughter being taught by someone who felt that it was a proven fact that women were intellectually inferior.

I wonder about the data on firsts and how up to date it is? I honestly can't remember the last time we had a male first, there's always a big female excess. That's just one course though, so not very statistically valid. I had a feeling that the data you mention were based on Oxbridge, but I could be wrong.