Graduation Stories

[Dill]

(05-20-2019, 11:24 PM)bfine32 Wrote: No doubt, we all can't be experts on everything. But to me one of their implied duties would be to attend the school's graduation ceremony. Pence gave pretty much the same speech at Liberty the week prior. Do you know why that one wasn't political?

Members of the staff and student body didn't make it so. 

But you've already indicated you're good with educators sharing their political bias while on the clock. Perhaps that's part of what their job "really is".

Unless Taylor university has a specific (and unusual) policy requiring attendance (written into contracts), only a few professors would actually be "on the clock" at a graduation, namely those tasked with introducing the speaker or otherwise saddled with administrative duties, like a dept. chair who introduced his/her department's students. 

But the administrators who invited Pence to speak were certainly on the clock when they did so.

Do you think that walking out of a Pence speech shows bias, while inviting him does not?  No politics if "staff" and students don't protest? 

If so, then you have defined any behavior other than quiet submission to an administration's choice as "biased" and "political."

If Taylor University is indeed a university, then its mission quite exceeds vocational training and includes imparting to students a capacity for critical thinking, for questioning the status quo rather than reflexively upholding it.

So sharing "political bias" while on the clock can indeed be part of what a professor's job "really is." 

Inculcating blind submission to authority is not.