Quote Originally Posted by wiggin View Post
I had a very limited number of non-technical classes that I could fit into my schedule; I picked each with care, researching the professors and past course evals. 'Easy' was never my criterion. Frankly, if you're at a top tier university you're paying $50k+/year for the privilege - the least you could do is get a lot out of it. I have no doubt that the students you're talking about exist (and may even abound), but frankly that wasn't the majority of my classmates who I associated with in engineering/science or the humanities. Pretty much everyone was overloaded with coursework/reading/labs/problem sets/research projects... and a good chunk of us were also holding down part time jobs and various extracurricular commitments. Some people were more hardcore than others, but outside of some jocks I knew, few people were looking to coast through.
A) I get the impression that you went to one of the top colleges in the country. Not that UNC is far below.
B) Different majors attract different personalities.
C) Hard-workers attract other hard-workers.

Most people I knew in grad school were different. Which is why they ended up in grad school.

That being said, I would never have taken a humanities course taught by a random grad student anyway...
Depending on the university you went to, you might not have much of a choice.

Theoretical frameworks having trouble accounting for once in a century kind of problem? Shocker. There's a difference between 'not fully understanding/explaining a situation' and 'having a dogmatic belief that my position is the One True Reality and refuse to teach other perspectives'.
Is the grad student not simply using a different framework for understanding the conflict.

I am not an expert on constitutional law, but I am not sure that this is an accurate understanding of free speech protections (nor that assigning a different teacher would qualify as 'punishment'). Totally agreed that it would violate academic freedom.
You think a public university can punish someone for their viewpoint on the Israeli conflict? Separate from academic freedom.