What’s the Best Strategy With a Biased Professor?

This morning I posted a ridiculous assignment given to students in U.S. History to 1877 at the Ammerman Campus of Suffolk Community College in Selden, New York. A student in that class wrote to ask me for help, so I posted his situation and invited comments.

I myself can’t decide quite what the proper course of action is. Saying what the professor wants to hear is an option, since after all the F he’d give you otherwise won’t have an asterisk next to it when it appears on your transcript. It’ll just appear as an F.

The other part of me thinks it might be worth writing a very solidly argued, well-written dissenting paper, and when I get graded down on it I publish it all over social media with my professor’s name, the grade I was given, and contact information for the dean of faculty.

Here is another suggestion, taken from the comments section of that blog item:

Write a paper superficially accepting the premises and not demurring from the professor’s built-in conclusions, but citing the strongest arguments possible against them. By which I mean something like “so and so argued the following [good argument]” but of course from the perspective of this paper, we can’t accept that for [bad reason]” – in other words, present the argument you really agree with as “the counter-argument” that you ostensibly “reject,” but present it in the strongest way possible. Present in the paper “the other side’s argument” (including the argument that the centralizing state is, far from a protector and guarantor of people’s human rights, its foremost violator, especially when unchecked by any competing political & pre-political authorities). In other words, be like Thomas Aquinas in presenting the “strongest arguments of the other side,” then “rebut” them by regurgitating the professor’s own arguments (made in class lectures or wherever), but in a way that demonstrates – without openly stating – that the professor’s arguments are weak and miss the mark, do not actually address the other side in any substantive way. Do not outright *write* that. Indeed, pretend to agree with the false premises, but let the substance of the paper speak for itself contrariwise. (Be sure to footnote citations for the best arguments, present them as quotes wherever possible.)

And another:

Just write the paper as if you’re presenting one theory among several others, but focus on the angle your professor is looking for. Meanwhile, write your own paper the way you really want to and use it as your first blog entry on WordPress. Then you can get good grades and graduate, and have an awesome blog to work on.

http://www.facebook.com/james.ruhland.7 James Ruhland

Btw when citing good arguments a professor doesn’t agree with, they might come back with something like “well, that wasn’t the reason most people were [for/against] X” – an unfalsifiable claim. But one that tries to rig the case from the start by promoting tendentious mismatching: the “best” arguments of the professor’s preferred side against the weaker arguments of the side the professor does not share. (Even good professors – by which I mean ones that aren’t overt ideological hacks like this one, but ones that will grade you fairly, often make assertions of this sort in commenting, even while they grade honestly). So it’s worth incorporating a line in your paper’s thesis paragraph that you’ll be presenting the academically strongest arguments of both sides, not just the academically strong arguments of one side up against the “general public” arguments of the other. (This is one way they present straw men to knock down. Another is the invidious comparison, a favorite formulation being “at a time when in the West [something bad], in the non-west [something good]” – when in reality history is not a morality tale of this sort; there are always good and bad things going on in all places, and selective presentation of evidence, time period selection, and the like, creates invidious comparisons. Note these do not actually have an academic intention, they have a therapeutic intention: to “uplift” groups that the progressive-professoriate believe need uplift, and “puncture” those the progressive-professoriate believes need to be put back in their place and scolded into reject their own heritage).

I digressed a bit because I’m trying to make this advice generally useful rather than just directed at this specific case, but what I mean is that even if you follow my advice that Dr. Woods has kindly highlighted, expect a lot of irate red scribbles on your paper because professors of this type often do not want to see any good arguments from the other side and like to use the rationalization described above as a reason to exclude them from consideration. If you need a fair grade, be prepared to file a complaint on the grounds of viewpoint discrimination *even* *if* you do not present the good arguments vs. the professor’s preferred position as your own. And, as I said, work into the paper the reason why you’re using ‘the best arguments of both sides,” as it is an academic paper rather than a polemic, not “the popular arguments of one side opposed by the arguments of specialists on the other.” Something to the effect, again, that in a scholarly paper it is appropriate to deal with the strongest objections rather than straw men to be knocked down. That way, when you get a bad grade anyhow, you can point to this – within the paper-as-written-itself – as sound reasoning for why you wrote it as you did, and deserve a legitimate grade.
http://www.facebook.com/people/Zebram-Zee/100002539017006 Zebram Zee

Good points again. At the end of the day, there is no guarantee. if the professor is a hack, he can fail you for whatever reason he wants. And going to the dean or whoever is not really going to change that. They usually don’t override grades for anyone.
Harry

Nowhere in your two articles on this matter has the student stated an objective for this exercise, and the results are telling. (E.g., “I myself can’t decide quite what the proper course of action is.”)

If the student doesn’t know where he/she wants to get to (i.e., the objective), then any road (i.e., action) will do. In addition, unless and until he/she states the objective, then adopting [courses of] action recommended by the attendant virtual community can only achieve their [unstated] objectives.

What does this student want to accomplish in this context? This is paramount, not trivial.

– Harry
http://TheInterventionistParadox.wordpress.com/ Bharat

The second quote is a great idea. Write the paper the way the professor wants it to be written. And to sooth your conscience, destroy what you’ve written on your blog.

It’s a great learning experience. You can learn a point of view you disagree with by writing a paper based on that point of view, then through a blog post learn and explain WHY you have the point of view you actually have.
devo

.if you wanna go 100% by your beliefs and principles, write the paper you want. If you want to cater to the establishment (which i know needs to be done from time to time), then i like the idea “write a paper superficially”.

to deal with the climate crisis part, you could argue that no government intervention is necessary. not only because of free market principles, but because at the same time government has been growing exponentially, so has the problem of “global warming”. be it fabricated physically or intellectually by them. also you could say that if the sun goes up by a couple degrees, we would feel that on earth, and since its a natural cycle out of our control, the government cant do anything anyway. maybe expanding on his ideas or goals while taking a different road to them then the one he suggested wouldn’t hurt. depends on the prof though.
Jason B

You do not need to agree or believe there is an “impending climate crisis” in order to explain how Federal checks and balances would deter implementing a response to said hypothetical. I would make a statement within the thesis paragraph to cover that, perhaps in an offhanded manner to convey that there are many different views with regards to whether an “impending climate crisis” is eminent. But it should not necessarily factor in to the thesis, which is the checks and balances notion. So you can work along the grounds the Professor set while still letting the Professor know it is not necessarily the case that there is an “impending climate crisis”.

With regards to #2, the directions there assume a boatload of ideological beliefs. So again, I would initially make some statements acknowledging that these assumptions are in fact partisan assumptions, but then would try to make a case along the grounds the professor set. You’re just going to have to think along much more ideologically rigorous assumptions unfortunately.

Once you get the graded paper back I would go to the Professor’s office and ask him about some of the particular assumptions built into the guidelines of the assignment. At least this way it looks like you are intrigued, engaged, and not overtly confrontational or unduly critical prior to grading.
http://twitter.com/RiskManage41 Steve

This just shows why basically everything except engineering and sciences are BS in college. Secondly, I’ve never heard of anyone getting an F at a community college. I’m sure this kid will pass no matter what he writes as long as there isn’t too much drool and crayon on the paper.
Evgeny

Let’s be fair.
Huge list of options that exists for unlimited government, doesn’t exist for limited.

* Killing and repressing people that produce more CO2 than allowed.
* Birth control to limit population growth, which will reduce CO2 emission created by
new generation
* Euthanasia for people over 60, can also help to reduce CO2 emission created by elders.
* Limiting temperature in the houses and hospitals during the winters (again to limit CO2 emission).
* In planetary scale govt can resettle people from cold zones to hot zones to limit CO2 emission, or send them back to the Poles if it will be necessary to increase CO2 emission.

Now limited govt can’t even censor those “climate change deniers” and other skeptics.

So many additional options to fight with climate change missed. How can you argue for limited government after all?
Anonymous

When I was in AP History in high school, my teacher was pretty leftist, but he was pretty fair about grading my papers for structure, proper documentation, supporting my reasoning, etc instead of whether or not I agreed with him. I remember we had an assignment that was to basically to explain how the friendly family & Puritan oriented new england settlement when contrasted with the single male, greedy capitalist settlement of Virginia laid the groundwork for the War Between the States…
Robert Roddis

There’s always the option of promoting my theory that it is Hamiltonian internal improvements and Keynesian expansionism that result in sprawl and thus “climate change” to the extent that such is real and is man-made. It’s all the fault of the “progressives” and their insistence upon the violation of property rights.
Robert Roddis

Also, subsidized flood insurance results in sprawl and “climate change”.