When you teach crap like “intercultural communication” instead of real courses in real disciplines, you invite this kind of sorry crap:
A New Jersey community college investigates a professor for cursing at conservative student who argued that men are sexually harassed, too.
Note that this is a community college. These are not over-privileged rich kids who can waste their pampered lives on discussing such ridiculous subjects.
If course, a professor can turn out as mentally unstable as anybody else, but you increase the chances of bringing cuckoo people on campus if you offer cuckoo subjects.
Intercultural communication seems like a skill needed primarily by diplomats. I remember reading a book by anthropologist Edward Twitchell Hall fifty or so years ago that said that the U. S. negotiators ended up losing the Aswan Dam building project to Russia because the Russians were more skilled in communicating with Egyptians and other Arabs. I remember that one of the specific things mentioned was that the Americans thought the Egyptians did not take the negotiations seriously because they were always at least an hour late to every scheduled meeting. To thE Egyptians, this was considered to be merely proper courtesy.
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This professor can’t even productively communicate with a person from his own culture who has a different opinion. I’m guessing he’d have a fit if he needed to face the true variety of opinion and norms among different cultures.
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To study intercultural communication you need prerequisites in history and foreign languages, etc.
But now everything is content-free. One of the things I like least, that is now done, is teaching writing without reading or actual content, so people just write “a narrative,” etc. Another is these English courses on topics the instructor isn’t trained in, such that they just become sessions where students argue with each other and dept. says that’s fine because it is “interactive” somehow.
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A student asked me the other day to provide a resumen for a 2-page short story. This must mean that somebody somewhere taught him that you can read literature through the medium of resumenes.
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Yes, they are very shocked at the idea of reading the whole book. Even professors are sometimes.
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OK, I can’t resist. See my post, including the comment, on a conversation among English professors I saw yesterday. The comment is the choice one, as it is a quotation of the OP. The thread kept going on about “morally panicked literature professors.” https://profacero.wordpress.com/2018/04/18/marc-b/
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OK, I just read it. Hilarious. Such folks think they are being super edgy and liberating by not teaching students to read and catering to the lowest common denominator.
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