Friday, March 31, 2023

Where tenure should end

An anthropology professor claims, absolutely falsely, that there are no ways of determining whether a skeleton is male or female.   Now in the article, swimmer Riley Gaines is incorrect about men having an extra rib, but she is 100% correct that anthropologists have been differentiating male from female skeletons based on pelvic structure for over a century.  It's also well known to doctors.

And my take on this matter is that if a professor says something that demonstrably false in what is supposed to be his area of specialty, that's cause for his employer to revoke tenure.  There is academic freedom, yes, and then there is "I'm going to deny the differences in bone density, head size and shape, femur and humerus length, and the sciatic notch and auricular surface differences between men and women."

And if one falls in that category, yes, one is not competent to teach anthropology at any level.  

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