Appropriateness

Saturday I went to a graduation ceremony to see a friend get her PhD. I was looking forward to see the little differences between American "Commencement" ceremonies and the one I had but I felt quite at home with the new university president being and Australian and having Michael Kirby as the keynote speaker.

I've often said how much more I prefer when department colloquia are given by people who make bold claims because it means I don't fall asleep at 4.30 on Friday afternoon. This is even more true when their bold claims are things I disagree with, that way I can sit there trying to work out what exactly is wrong with their claims, rather than just sitting passively.

Apparently most people are not like me because Kirby's speech pissed off a lot of Mid-Westerners. He started off talking about how we need to continue to think more and more globally and told the graduates that an IU education was a good start. He argued that the good work at Indiana University was known around the work and gave the example of Alfred Kinsey. (That was when I knew he was going to mention his own homosexuality.) He emphasised scientific empiricism as the source of all human knowledge (possibly the weak point of his argument) and how Herman B. Wells showed intellectual integrity by standing up for him. At the end of the speech we saw on the screen a lot of people in the audience not applauding, while others gave him a standing ovation (not such a rare thing in the States). I was pleased that he spoke well and managed to make his experiences relevant to IU.

But then in the student newspaper there was an article saying how many people were annoyed by Kirby's address. The thing that stuck me the most was how so many of them were misusing the word "inappropriate". They were using it as a euphemism to mean "don't ask, don't tell". I found it a bit disappointing from a grammatical perspective because there wasn't anything inappropriate: as you can expect, there was no discussion of sex (which might have made me squeamish); there was no advocating for same-sex marriage, which many in the audience could have legitimately disagreed about; the only thing mentioned was the empirical fact that a significant proportion of humans are attracted to members of the same sex. If people can't handle that, they should stop pretending that they disagree about what's appropriate and just admit that they don't like his kind.

Parents of Students

One of the most noticeable things about American undergrads compared with Australians is how all Americans leave home to go to uni whereas (I'd estimate) only around half of Australian students do, yet so many American parents still want to have so much say in their (adult) children's lives.

I've never experienced it myself I've heard other tertiary teachers saying that you occasionally get parents wanting to know their children's grades. When they're told that it's against privacy laws to tell them, they get quite irate and tell the teacher or registrar about how much they're paying in fees etc. I don't understand why they can't just see it as an issue between parents and their kids. Why should the registrar suffer if the kids don't want to fess up to their parents?

But here's another example that I found more surprising. Apparently there is a gender-neutral room-sharing policy in some Stanford dormitories. At first I was on her side, the university admin not being sufficiently frank about what was going on, how much choice students would have etc. The mothers worries seemed reasonable, asking, "How well do you know these boys? Can you trust them even if they've been drinking?"

But then the author mentions that the daughter was actually ok with the situation and didn't want to inconvenience the other people that she'd made the arrangement with. The mother's reaction:

We, like many parents, do not consider a “gender neutral” housing arrangement morally acceptable. We don’t consider such an arrangement consistent with common sense. We would never have consented to pay for our daughter’s enrollment as a freshman if we had been aware that she might be placed in such a rooming arrangement. As we told the president of the university, if Stanford had informed us that it was allowing such housing, we would have required her either to transfer out or to find another source of funding. Perhaps, since she was a senior, we would have made an agreement with her concerning acceptable off-campus housing. But Stanford never gave us the chance...

If parents don’t want “gender neutral” housing for their children, they need to talk with their money, the only voice the university will allow them.

The thing is, the attitude that parents should be informed of their adult children's behaviour is not rare.

But this bit is less common:

I could talk about conspiracy theories, and how the modern university is trying to change society’s norms. I could talk about how the university caters to the “edgy” — whatever that is at the moment. I could talk about how I have new sympathy for my parents’ concerns about rooming arrangements at Yale when I arrived there 30-some years ago. I could talk about mother-guilt, and how I have failed to convey my moral values to my daughter...

Stanford and at least 50 other colleges and universities are promoting through their dormitory arrangements an ideology of gender that we personally reject and oppose. There will probably be plenty of families willing to bet their children’s happiness on the prestige of a Stanford degree. We, however, are not among them. We told our daughter that we would not pay for her final quarter — if she wanted to stay at Stanford, she would have to take out a loan. When she protested that we were changing the terms of her attendance at the university, we told her that as far as we were concerned, it was Stanford that had changed the deal. Our morality is not for sale.