the type of personality who is drawn to be a professor of creative writing is rather different than that of one who becomes a professor of electrical engineering, and I suspect the first is far less inclined to fail or treat people harshly.
Now that is an interesting consideration. You could well be right in general. But my anticipation of personal experience is of getting treated more harshly from a professor of creative writing than of engineering. This is because I can far more easily elicit the desired behavior from the engineering professor. That is, the desired behavior of giving me top marks and interfering too much with my education. If all goes well I may even be able to avoid him learning my name.
With a professor in something less objective I expect harsh marking for not optimally conforming to the (possibly flawed) positions that I was supposed to have guessed in the assessments. I am also more at risk of harsh treatment for political reasons. Given that their way of thinking is less like mine I am less able to predict what sort of things will piss them off and so provoke grudges more easily. I may say something that seems obvious to me but incidentally undermines something they care about. Once that happens I am not all that talented at making bitchy people not be hostile. My instinct is to avoid situations where I am potentially vulnerable to capricious whims.
(Yes, my personal anticipation is different than that of most people!)
That has less to do with professors’ personalities than with the nature of their teaching.
An engineering professor may very well be a fanatical Nazist who would gladly fail any students he discovered harbouring pro-democracy views, but he’s not going to discover them unless you wear a political t-shirt while handing over your home assignments. If he taught History of contemporary literature, however, the issue would be all but guaranteed to emerge.
Not that conflicts over personal views are limited to the humanities, of course. Imagine if Andrew Tanenbaum had been teaching at Helsinki in the early 90s...
An engineering professor may very well be a fanatical Nazist who would gladly fail any students he discovered harbouring pro-democracy views, but he’s not going to discover them
That reminds me of the biology teacher who, when asked to write letters of recommendation, demanded that his students swear allegiance to evolution. A student sued in 2003. Some time between February and April, he added a little disclaimer. That form remains today. Of course, this was only for letters, not grades, and it was all put forward in writing ahead of time.
That has less to do with professors’ personalities than with the nature of their teaching.
The nature of their teaching matters but I place specific emphasis on the professor’s personalities:
I am also more at risk of harsh treatment for political reasons. Given that their way of thinking is less like mine I am less able to predict what sort of things will piss them off and so provoke grudges more easily. I may say something that seems obvious to me but incidentally undermines something they care about. Once that happens I am not all that talented at making bitchy people not be hostile. My instinct is to avoid situations where I am potentially vulnerable to capricious whims.
The effect of personality is real. And I am not merely talking hypothetically here. It can bite me in the arse if I’m not careful. It is all too easy to overestimate how similar people are to ourselves and doing so comes at great price.
I may be biased on this issue, based on personal experience. But it seems to me that someone teaching English Literature is unlikely to be inclined to fail you, or even give you a low mark, if you’re at least making a concerted effort. The idea that professors fail you for ideological differences is conceivable, and probably more prominent at lower-quality institutions. I’ve disagreed very strongly with professor’s views before without it harming my grade, so long as able to state the grounds articulately. If you do have a professor with a clear bent, it’s usually pretty easy to figure out what they want to hear and thus easy to get a good grade. I just think that because it’s so much easier to be clearly wrong in harder subject matter, it’s more tempting for professors to set a higher bar for a good grade. People who teach softer subjects are simply less concerned about right and wrong, and thus less inclined to punish people who make any kind of effort.
I can envision someone from LW writing a humanities paper that unintentionally raises red flags, leading to either a poor grade or an ugly disciplinary action, while it’s hard to think of how that would happen in a quantitative course (except for in personal interactions with other students, but that’s a danger either way.)
That sort of disaster is quite unlikely, but not entirely negligible. However, I tend to think the benefits of a humanities course in a topic of interest can vastly outweigh this sort of concern.
I did rather poorly in an ethics class because I realized moral relativism was rather obviously right and any form of realism logically indefensible (without an axiom—if you admit you have an unprovable assumption underlying your moral framework, then it’s morally real-ish, but it isn’t totally objectively correct, because of that assumption). There is also a real risk of relying on concepts that the reader is not familiar with, but that’s usually pretty easy to screen, especially if you have a friend to read a draft.
The thing is, when I say, “rather poorly,” I mean a B (possibly +), and this was at a top public university. In a math class (having not taken math in five years), I realized shortly before an exam that I had been taking derivatives when I should have been integrating. This would have had a rather more pronounced effect on my grade had I not caught it.
Now that is an interesting consideration. You could well be right in general. But my anticipation of personal experience is of getting treated more harshly from a professor of creative writing than of engineering. This is because I can far more easily elicit the desired behavior from the engineering professor. That is, the desired behavior of giving me top marks and interfering too much with my education. If all goes well I may even be able to avoid him learning my name.
With a professor in something less objective I expect harsh marking for not optimally conforming to the (possibly flawed) positions that I was supposed to have guessed in the assessments. I am also more at risk of harsh treatment for political reasons. Given that their way of thinking is less like mine I am less able to predict what sort of things will piss them off and so provoke grudges more easily. I may say something that seems obvious to me but incidentally undermines something they care about. Once that happens I am not all that talented at making bitchy people not be hostile. My instinct is to avoid situations where I am potentially vulnerable to capricious whims.
(Yes, my personal anticipation is different than that of most people!)
That has less to do with professors’ personalities than with the nature of their teaching.
An engineering professor may very well be a fanatical Nazist who would gladly fail any students he discovered harbouring pro-democracy views, but he’s not going to discover them unless you wear a political t-shirt while handing over your home assignments. If he taught History of contemporary literature, however, the issue would be all but guaranteed to emerge.
Not that conflicts over personal views are limited to the humanities, of course. Imagine if Andrew Tanenbaum had been teaching at Helsinki in the early 90s...
That reminds me of the biology teacher who, when asked to write letters of recommendation, demanded that his students swear allegiance to evolution. A student sued in 2003. Some time between February and April, he added a little disclaimer. That form remains today. Of course, this was only for letters, not grades, and it was all put forward in writing ahead of time.
The nature of their teaching matters but I place specific emphasis on the professor’s personalities:
The effect of personality is real. And I am not merely talking hypothetically here. It can bite me in the arse if I’m not careful. It is all too easy to overestimate how similar people are to ourselves and doing so comes at great price.
I may be biased on this issue, based on personal experience. But it seems to me that someone teaching English Literature is unlikely to be inclined to fail you, or even give you a low mark, if you’re at least making a concerted effort. The idea that professors fail you for ideological differences is conceivable, and probably more prominent at lower-quality institutions. I’ve disagreed very strongly with professor’s views before without it harming my grade, so long as able to state the grounds articulately. If you do have a professor with a clear bent, it’s usually pretty easy to figure out what they want to hear and thus easy to get a good grade. I just think that because it’s so much easier to be clearly wrong in harder subject matter, it’s more tempting for professors to set a higher bar for a good grade. People who teach softer subjects are simply less concerned about right and wrong, and thus less inclined to punish people who make any kind of effort.
I can envision someone from LW writing a humanities paper that unintentionally raises red flags, leading to either a poor grade or an ugly disciplinary action, while it’s hard to think of how that would happen in a quantitative course (except for in personal interactions with other students, but that’s a danger either way.)
That sort of disaster is quite unlikely, but not entirely negligible. However, I tend to think the benefits of a humanities course in a topic of interest can vastly outweigh this sort of concern.
I did rather poorly in an ethics class because I realized moral relativism was rather obviously right and any form of realism logically indefensible (without an axiom—if you admit you have an unprovable assumption underlying your moral framework, then it’s morally real-ish, but it isn’t totally objectively correct, because of that assumption). There is also a real risk of relying on concepts that the reader is not familiar with, but that’s usually pretty easy to screen, especially if you have a friend to read a draft.
The thing is, when I say, “rather poorly,” I mean a B (possibly +), and this was at a top public university. In a math class (having not taken math in five years), I realized shortly before an exam that I had been taking derivatives when I should have been integrating. This would have had a rather more pronounced effect on my grade had I not caught it.