It's amazing how motivated reasoning and a poltics poisoned mind can be used to make obvious points out to be unreasonable. Institutional neutrality is simple, the organization does what is ncessary to operate, but doesn't prescribe anything unnecessarily over that.
It does not mean that professors are not allowed to talk about disagreeable things that are required for teaching the subject. If anything, it makes it easier for them to do so, as they can teach whatever is necessary to produce well-functioning members of society.
Eg you don't need to endorse a specific candidate to fulfill your duty of teaching students. You don't need to avoid talking about research that runs counter to the organization's politics. You don't need to openly pick sides on protests besides advocating for enough civilty to allow your institution to keep operating, and so on. I'm fairly certain that a good portion of the neutrality statements from universities have been coming from the difficult ideological situation presented by the flaring up of the Israel-Gaza conflict, where picking sides opens them up to either being islamophobes or antisemites.
I'm not really sure what you're getting at with the tension about creationism as part of science education. In my schooling the early science education often covered the history of the topic, which would inevitably talk about the local religious ideas, working it's way through them, sometimes even with brief readings of some associated stories, through to major discoveries that provided the evidence for the modern consensus. That's just part of providing a comprehensive education and connecting it to the culture kids are exposed to?
Calling an important aspect of most cultures as "propaganda" is rich. You don't have to be religious (I'm not religious and wasn't religious at that time either) to recognize that it's useful to understand those beliefs and how we worked our way to the modern age. That's how you help students to learn our current understanding of the world such that they are less susceptible to eating up blatant lies and believing that school was just indoctrinating them.
Creationism is an American protofascist phenomenon, it actually is propaganda and does not need to be taught in a science class in order to nurture and develop critical thinking skills.
If you are referring to traditional cultures, they have creation myths which are better suited for social sciences classes.
Showing both sides of the debate is itself a worse form of indoctrination. Haha, look at how creationism is pseudoscience! Now you will be tested on the reasons why. No, let's just not platform propaganda as if it deserved any fair footing in good-faith context of discourse.
It never made it into science class, but only because institutions had (and have) the power to set rules and not be neutral on important issues of the day. It was our choice at the museum that received tax payer funding to not be neutral that kept creationism out. That's picking a side. And that is absolutely essential is my point, because the truth is, unfortunately, not neutral, and we all need to do our best to find that truth. Just saying "be neutral" is abdication of responsibility.
Well said. There's are several sayings, such as "neutrality is the both-sideism fallacy", which is one of the most obvious critical thinking examples that humanities students are taught early on, but it is not so easy to convey this to people without exposure to these ideas.
I was a volunteer at a US science museum that received some taxpayer funding back in the mid-aughts when "Scientific Creationism" was still a thing. Our museum had (and still has) an institutional commitment to the scientific consensus on the age of the universe and earth. If we had caught a volunteer providing visitors with creationism they would have been asked to hand in their badge and not work any more shifts, because that was our institutional position and everyone had to respect that.
Trying to throw that away because of Israel-Palestine is much more threatening to the value of truth than it helps it.
It does not mean that professors are not allowed to talk about disagreeable things that are required for teaching the subject. If anything, it makes it easier for them to do so, as they can teach whatever is necessary to produce well-functioning members of society.
Eg you don't need to endorse a specific candidate to fulfill your duty of teaching students. You don't need to avoid talking about research that runs counter to the organization's politics. You don't need to openly pick sides on protests besides advocating for enough civilty to allow your institution to keep operating, and so on. I'm fairly certain that a good portion of the neutrality statements from universities have been coming from the difficult ideological situation presented by the flaring up of the Israel-Gaza conflict, where picking sides opens them up to either being islamophobes or antisemites.
I'm not really sure what you're getting at with the tension about creationism as part of science education. In my schooling the early science education often covered the history of the topic, which would inevitably talk about the local religious ideas, working it's way through them, sometimes even with brief readings of some associated stories, through to major discoveries that provided the evidence for the modern consensus. That's just part of providing a comprehensive education and connecting it to the culture kids are exposed to?