Before I wrote about Second Amendment stuff most of the time, I wrote a lot about education. From Title IX abuse to woke administrators and teachers, I covered a lot.
Then I came here and started writing about this, which is at least as important as reforming our educational system.
Yet I always knew there would be some opportunities to return to talking about colleges. After all, they’re notoriously anti-gun, too, as we see from a situation in Maine.
A Christian student in a class apparently talked previously about finding Jesus. So far, so good, apparently.
Yet the student wanted to talk about the Second Amendment for her next assignment. The teacher’s response, though, is just bonkers.
A professor at Eastern Maine Community College (EMCC) attacked and discriminated against a Christian conservative student for writing an essay about gun control with which the liberal professor disagreed.
The EMCC student, Katherine Parker, joined WVOM’s George Hale and Ric Tyler Show on Wednesday to discuss the incident, which resulted from a rough draft for an essay she submitted for an English class at the college taught by the English department head Carol Lewandowski.
The assignment was meant to be a persuasive speech in response to an editorial, and Parker chose one written by columnist Douglas Rooks and published in the Portland Press Herald entitled, “Maine Legislature derelict in its duty on ‘red flag’.”
…
Lewandowski told Parker in the feedback to “avoid proselytizing with logical fallacies in a college class,” before referencing the student’s previous essay regarding her Christian faith.
“Wasn’t your former speech a testimony to finding Jesus [sic]. Did Jesus pack heat?” Lewandowski asked, in an apparent attempt to argue that the student’s religious beliefs are incongruous with her views on the red flag law.
Now, I have no issues with admonitions to avoid “proselytizing with logical fallacies” in class. That’s absolutely fair.
But then he engages in some of that himself.
First, let me explain that there are two different responses to that comment. One that a friend of mine likes to use is to say that Jesus owned every gun in existence at the time.
My own take is that no, he wasn’t “packing heat.” He was also killed by the government because he was inconvenient to the ruling regime.
Lewandowski then went on to try the whole “guns do kill” argument, citing various mass shootings, but failed to understand that those were the acts of deranged people, much like how Oklahoma City was.
Basically, Lewandowski told Parker to find another topic because she’s so vehemently anti-gun that she couldn’t grade the paper fairly. I guess that’s a nice admission that the professor was so hoplophobic that she couldn’t do the subject justice, but Parker argues that a college professor should be able to grade the assignment without having to approve of the subject matter.
She’s right.
The problem Parker ran into here is that academia is the proverbial ivory tower. They don’t live in the real world and don’t understand what it’s like for the rest of us. Professors generally live in nice neighborhoods and work on well-patrolled college campuses. They’re generally insulated from the ugliness of life.
They don’t think about anything beyond that and the trivial navel-gazing that infests so much of the research academia produces.
So no, they’re not going to recognize the realities of guns for millions of Americans; that they’re necessary means to protect ourselves from an ugly world that doesn’t give a damn about academic theory.
The problem isn’t that the professor just left it at, “This is a topic I feel I’d be unable to judge fairly due to my own personal feelings. Please select another topic.”
No, this was an attack on a student who doesn’t share her sentiments and a pathetic attempt at swaying her.
For someone who is teaching students to write a persuasive argument–and I distinctly remember this assignment in English 101–it’s clear the professor doesn’t know how to craft one, and it’s clear that she tried.
Read the full article here
