On 7/26/06, graywolf <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > Then you would not object to paying me to teach a course about Perpetual > Motion Engineering at the University of Toronto? Or how about a couse > about how Jackie had Marilyn murdered because John was going to devorce > her and marry Marilyn (which is no where near as far fetched as the 9/11 > conspiracy stuff)?
Our universities are more heavily funded with tax dollars than yours are in the States, IIRC, and no, I wouldn't mind if anyone here taught those courses, partially funded by the public purse. Universities teach all sorts of things that I don't believe in, like sociology, psychology and (white male's) history, but I don't complain about that. I remember the very first university lecture that I attended: it was intro psychology. Within the first 5 minutes the prof said, "The first thing you must understand is that we live in a deterministic universe. Every thing is predetermined. The reason we can't predict the exact path of a boulder bouncing down a hill is that we don't know all the variables. If we knew them all with perfect accuracy, and if we could calculate the effect of all of them, we could perfectly predict the path of the careening boulder. The universe is like that, and so are human beings." That was presented as fact, not opinion. To me it was as much folly as teaching Marilyn Munroe conspiracy theories or teaching that US Gov't bombs helped fell the WTC. I didn't try to muzzle the prof, get that course off the curriculum or anything like that. I dropped the course, changed majors, and took philosophy (and look where it got me today!! <g>). cheers, frank -- "Sharpness is a bourgeois concept." -Henri Cartier-Bresson -- PDML Pentax-Discuss Mail List [email protected] http://pdml.net/mailman/listinfo/pdml_pdml.net
