Gilmour on Turning Stomachs

[jimhines]

ETA: I should also link to this follow-up, wherein Gilmour responds to the criticism of his comments. I’ve done interviews before where my verbal comments were rephrased or edited in ways that distorted their meaning. On the other hand, the apology (which he says he normally wouldn’t give, but he’s got a book coming out) and his other comments …

Comments

[beccastareyes]

You know, I'm an astronomer. The professors in my department have the ability to teach seminars on special topics, and those are usually on specific things near and dear to their hearts, like 'Comets' or 'The Results from New Exciting Mission'. But most of them grok that there's a place for depth and a place for breadth -- that courses designed to expose students to all of astronomy can't focus entirely on evolved stars or planetary rings or whatever your One True Research Love is. Because then your colleagues get frustrated if the students who move on in the program have no breadth -- they are more than good on Martian surface geology, but you have to re-teach everything they should have learned about orbits instead of building on their foundation.

This might be a Two Cultures (Humanities versus Sciences) gap, but I don't think it is.

Now, maybe Dr. Gilmour is senior enough that he can get away with teaching Depictions of Masculinity in 20th Century American Literature*, but that course shouldn't be taught when the course title is Intro to Short Fiction.

* Though even then, I think his reading list is a bit narrow. Including some women writers for an outside view on masculinity, or minority writers to show the diversity of the American male experience might be interesting.

[icecreamempress]

The thing about his whole canon that's especially ridiculous is that he's a Canadian writer teaching at a Canadian university, so under his rubric he couldn't teach his own stuff.

[beccastareyes]

That is especially silly, especially when I remember what a big deal about local writers my university made.

[mrissa]

This this this yes this. Unless his university is more staggeringly huge and wasteful than I am imagining, a great many students take his section of Intro to Short Fiction not because they desperately want to learn from him but because it's the section that fits their schedule, or because they wanted to learn about short fiction and here's a way. Universities cannot afford to have enough sections offered at every time slot to please every set of student passions, because invariably if they did that, they'd have three instructors teaching sections of five students what is supposed to be the same course when they want one instructor teaching one section of fifteen and the others doing something else useful.

I didn't take Shakespeare with the professor I had because I thought it would be keen to learn from an unfocused person who could not manage computers but insisted on bringing the topic into every lecture anyway, and whose first language was not English (although honestly that might have been a positive factor if I'd been weighing positive factors--a point of interest at least). I took it because I wanted the upper-division Shakespeare course at some point, and that one didn't conflict with my labs. So if he had started blustering about how clearly I had wanted to have an entire semester's course on Titus Andronicus or why had I chosen him, it would have been ridiculous. This is equally ridiculous.

[julieandrews]

One benefit of online courses I hadn't considered. I can choose my profs without having to consider conflicting schedules. (Except for a few classes which do have synchronous meeting.)

[lenora_rose]

Like this. I only once specifically fit my schedule around a particular history professor's class, and that meant taking ALL OTHER COURSES that term from "I dunno who this is, the topic looks interesting/fits my degree requirements".