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There was a shooting at Brown University yesterday. Two people were killed. This is of course a tragedy, the kind of tragedy that has been well-litigated both here and everywhere else on the internet.
Brown decided to follow this up with another tragedy: canceling all outstanding exams and operations for the remainder of 2025.
One of the issues with our education system is that it is fundamentally unserious. Final exams are, or ought to be, a big fucking deal. Ten thousand of our supposedly best and brightest students will now pass an entire semester of advanced classes without a comprehensive examination of their skills and capabilities. Medical classes. I hope the physician you visit to get your unusually yellow skin checked out didn't take hepatology at Brown University in Fall 2025.
I mean I get what you’re saying, in that maybe it would have made more sense to do it case by case rather than a blanket pronouncement, but there’s really not much time (in fact it’s the 12-20th so they were ongoing) so there’s not a very fair way to handle it in nearly any direction, and I think you are weighting things wrong. Feels callous. It’s not like everyone will be getting A’s - almost definitely just whatever grade they have had through the other x-1 weeks of class (they aren’t even missing class, so they’ve mostly already learned what they set out to learn, and it’s strange you jumped to an “everyone will pass” conclusion). All in all I fail to see anything even slightly resembling “unseriousness”. Wrong battle, dude.
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I find it kind of disappointing how reliable this board has gotten for discussing culture war events. This guy appears to be a woke gender equity guy, he was a former soldier, he attacked the class of a Jewish professor who taught about Judaism and US/Israeli relations… There are many CW angles here.
We talked for so many years about the culture war turning into real violence. Now it’s happening and we want to talk about education? It’s a fair angle but it shouldn’t be the only thing being discussed here.
Edit: And here’s the real juice: one of the victims was prominent campus conservative Ella Cook, and some believe she was the target. If leftwing extremists have truly graduated from assassinating not just Trump or famous right wing voices like Charlie Kirk, but to beautiful young not-famous white women with the “wrong” views, this would be a quite significant development and escalation.
McLuhan's famous adage, "the medium is the message" applies in this case. We've moved beyond the information era into the narrative era supported by a vast and all-encompassing media blanket. You literally cannot belive anything because everything is the story that someone wants to tell. Actual facts and information are at an extreme premium. That's the real tragedy.
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The concept of political violence has historically remained largely an academic discourse, yet recent developments suggest it is increasingly entering mainstream consideration.
Historical precedents demonstrate instances where the execution of heads of state preceded significant national advancements. For example:.
King Louis XVI in France.
Charles the 1st in the UK.
Anastasia Somoza Debayle in Nicaragua
Here’s an example of a violent act that could change the course of our country. Before the Dobbs decision, there was a leak of a draft version and it showed the votes were 5-4. Now a crazy guy drove across the country with a gun but was apprehended on Kavanaughs street. Had he prepared better and accomplished his goal, it would’ve fucked Dobbs. If Kav dies before final ruling then he doesn’t count and that abortion ruling gets stuck at 4-4. There’s no mechanism for him to vote in any other way such as the grave or his clerks.
Individuals often sacrifice their lives for various causes, ranging from personal grievances to ideological pursuits. The prospect of achieving political impact through such an act could appeal to those seeking recognition or purpose. As an African proverb states: “The child who is not embraced by the village will burn it down to feel its warmth.”
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That guy was a person of interest but he’s subsequently been released. The shooter is still at large.
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The identity of the shooter was hidden by media and LE up until after this OP was posted, at least as far as I can see. There were several RW people doing the usual "haha this guy is obviously a leftie or a Muslim" thing for a significant period of time up until the ID was released for that exact reason. However, "woke leftie attacks other woke lefties on a woke leftie campus in perhaps an old school leftist's classroom" doesn't have the culture war salience this would have if he was a Muslim in a Synagogue. That the professor is Jewish and teaches Israeli relations just means he is basically Brown's Chuck Schumer or the like.
Both my comment and your comment aged poorly, in that 1) the person of interest was released, and 2) one of the victims was a prominent campus conservative, and there are reasons to believe that she was the target. Culture war juice still available.
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University Administrator Try-Not-to-Find-An-Excuse-to-Avoid-Upholding-Academic-Standards Challenge: Impossible
Feature, not a bug for most at Brown.
This is like an inverse-9/11 for those at Brown who weren't friends or family with the two deceased and the nine injured (and you know, and the deceased and injured themselves). For students, especially the weaker ones, this means getting past a semester without the toughest stretch of papers, projects, and exams. For academic faculty, this means time and energy that would had been spent teaching, grading, and fending off grade grubbers can now be applied toward research. For administrators, fewer students around means less work to do—plus this is good for Equity, as canceling the semester's remaining papers, projects, and exams means reducing some of the dispersion in grades and graduation rates between Asians, whites, latinos, and blacks that would had otherwise occurred.
The biggest victims (other than the deceased and injured, and their friends and family) are academically strong students in easy/gen pop. courses, who are now deprived of an opportunity to further improve their relative GPA positioning against their peers, as I imagine it'll be likely that (whether by university/school decree or Professorial discretion) everyone just gets 100% for the canceled papers, projects, and exams, especially in easy/gen pop. courses. Or some high X%, where X% can help but not hinder a student's grade in that course.
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This happened in my neighborhood. The streets are empty and dead. People are scared.
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I wonder if this shooting is connected to the one that happened in Australia this morning. The timing seems suspicious and we haven’t heard anything about the Rhode Island suspect.
The attack in Bondi seems to have been father/son and all about killing Jews. Regarding the shootings at Brown, don't have a lot of faith in US media to not immediately cloud over actual motives, so at this point, it's still hard to say. Probably just coincidental.
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Well don't worry about that, Christmas vacation is one of the few times off that Medical Students get, so they won't be missing too many classes. Additionally exams will be actively rescheduled or effectively rescheduled (students will need to learn independently for the boards).
Clinical rotations are long enough (usually, 4,6,8,10 weeks) that it won't make a difference. Some schools will have a student miss out on scheduled elective time but that's a meh.
In terms of missed coursework...actual classes have been functionally replaced by professional teaching resources that the students pay for separately.
What are these? Does this mean there are no teachers teaching in med school?
The preclinical (academic classroom instead of clinical rotation) portion of U.S. medical education involves getting together a knowledge base for several very very large all encompassing standardized exams in which ANYTHING is fair game (and a mix of non-core learning things like group activities, cultural competency building and kinds of other stuff that is a mix of reasonable and bullshit).
Just like many academic professors in less specific institutions are often better at research or writing than teaching, many teachers in medical education are more researchers or clinical staff. Historically they were also quite bad about adding useless details about their specific research into the curriculum.
For this reason students have switched to high quality, battle tested, well taught and high yield online materials.
These are so good that some of them have near 100% utilization rate by U.S. MDs and for some schools its possible to never look at your school's course materials and still get a great outcome of school.
The teachers are still there though, and they are annoyed at being replaced which has resulted in things like an increase in problem/case/team based learning.
Before this recent bump in those modalities it would not be uncommon for literally zero students to show up to lecture, the forward thinking schools have stopped standard lecture and just provided online lectures.
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One of the really serious structural issues with universities is that they are primarily research institutions. Academic staff didn't come to teach, hate doing it, and are actively incentivised not to do it because it takes up time you need for grinding papers and citations. Exams are a massive nuisance that come every year and all the people nominally in charge of them desperately wish someone would cancel them.
Don't they replace finals with essays as often as they can get away with?
Depends on the institution and the degree. The courses I was involved with (on both sides) were >70% finals.
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