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PaperclipPerfector  6d ago (text post)   18771 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of December 1, 2025

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If you disagree that this is likely to be a case of unconstitutional discrimination, I'd be interested to hear your reasoning.

To my mind, the possible reason starts with the fact that there are different types of shitty essay that may be equally shitty in terms of their writing quality, structure, and reasoning, but that are different in terms of what they herald about what's next for the student. This essay would likely make me as a professor think, "Oh dear, they so misunderstand what we do here that they are unlikely to be able to get anything out of this course. It seems probably they cannot engage with psychology as it is studied." A different, equally shitty essay, perhaps a non-religious-fundamentalist one – but not necessarily – might make me think, "Okay, this is terrible work, but perhaps with time this student is open to being shepherded through to a likely still bad but passing grade." The latter type of essay might simply contain less evidence of close mindedness.

Now is a grade the right language to communicate a message like this to the student? No. A conversation this delicate should be done separately. Nonetheless I sympathise with the professor, and find the idea that the low mark was necessarily about the specifically religious nature of this student's dogmatism to be unproven.

It would by psychology throwing stones. Gender theory is religious belief.

I think the student would have similar things to say about all kinds of areas of psychology though. If they think dysphoria=possession by demons, they're likely to have the same reaction to all kinds of psychological disorders and phemonena, which makes vast swathes of the subject unstudy-able. Now it's a position to say 'most of psychology is religious belief', but if you think that, we are back to the original question of whether red tribe should try to influence academia or just destroy it instead.

This essay would likely make me as a professor think, "Oh dear, they so misunderstand what we do here that they are unlikely to be able to get anything out of this course. It seems probably they cannot engage with psychology as it is studied."

Is there a canon of things Psychology students are expected to know? Or is it just people's personal opinions and models all the way down?

My impression of Psychology is that it's more like Education than it is Psychiatry. Like in Education, the professor apparently thought it reasonable to ask students for their own personal reactions to an article, rather than a summary, or how someone might use the information in a clinical setting, or (heaven forbid!) a test where they had to reproduce some of the findings from memory. Like in Education, there seem to be a number of different frameworks, and someone can talk about Freud or Jung or Pieget or someone who once did a study with 40 boys, some of whom were less gender conforming according to surveys than others, or Rat Park or whatever, there doesn't seem to be a specific body of knowledge that's expected to be learned.

In Education, some professors want students to say that they will put aside merely teaching the standard Rs in favor of spending more time and energy on Radicalization, whereas other professors think that is a bad idea and it's a red flag if students say they will focus more on Radicalization than on 'Rithmetic. But they don't want to cause a headache for themselves, and give everyone a passing grade on personal reflection essays, no matter what they say.

Maybe I'm wrong, and there are more concrete and agreed upon areas of Psychology, but choosing a mediocre paper about an extremely contested culture war topic, asking for a student to react to it, and then punishing her for writing out her actual reaction, doesn't suggest so.

Probably girls like Samantha study Psychology at the state university so they can find a husband and become a Christian women's counselor, endorsed by the pastor's wife. This is a silly state of affairs, but I also went to Baptist Women's Group at my state college, and it is how things are. Since the TA was punished by the university and legislature, not the student, it's apparent that they were the one who misunderstood their role.

Is there a canon of things Psychology students are expected to know?

Psychology students are expected to know anything?

If there's anything that should be canon in Psychology, it would be the subfield of IQ and psychometrics due its reproducibility, reliability, and predictive power. It's basically the only area of Psychology that has been immune to the replication crisis. Yet, instead of being celebrated like a crown jewel and shouted from the hilltops, it's treated like a red-headed step child due it being unflattering to low achievement minorities and ruining people's sense of Just World egalitarianism.

So instead we get stuff like implicit bias, stereotype threat, priming, and "big, fun things" such as power poses signal-boosted and propagandized.

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