UHCL professor moonlights as blogger for Huffington Post
Keith Parsons, UHCL professor of philosophy, has recently taken up blogging for The Huffington Post, a Pulitzer prize-winning Internet newspaper owned by AOL.
Parsons has an extensive list of books, articles, reviews, book chapters and Internet publications that have been published throughout his career. His areas of expertise are Darwinism, history of philosophy and logic, and critical thinking. Parsons engages in various professional activities, researches and writes for different colleges and papers in the country, including blogging for Huffington Post. The first blog Parsons wrote for The Huffington Post was published Oct. 15. It was titled, “How Did We Become a Society Suspicious of Science?”
“I am happy to participate,” Parsons said. “I think it is important for academics not to be purely ivory tower types. All too often experts talk only to other experts about arcane topics in their field of their expertise. I think it is important for academics to play the role of the public intellectual, that is, to draw upon the skills and knowledge gained in academic experience to comment on important public issues. Some of the most academically qualified scholars have also been prominent public intellectuals. Noam Chomsky, Bertrand Russell and C.S. Lewis come to mind.”
When deciding on blog subjects, Parsons said he has a wide variety of subjects that are of interest to him. Recently his interests have been in the status of science in society, how public interests –such as politicians, people with authority and big businesses– influence our beliefs and, as a professor, higher education.
In an Oct. 30 blog titled, “Why I am a Better Teacher than a Computer,” Parsons voiced his concern about online classes replacing traditional classroom settings. Parsons believes that technology is an important addition to education, and using it should benefit how the educator teaches instead of replacing it all together.
Parsons demonstrates his concern borrowing from a famous “Hamlet” quote.
“The good teacher has to ad lib, improvise, read body language, deal with unanticipated questions, and change the pace, tone or content depending on how the class is responding,” Parsons wrote in his blog. “In other words, the teacher has to interact with a class far more than an actor with an audience. It is therefore even more absurd to think that an online course can capture the experience of having a great teacher than to think that you could text a performance of ‘Hamlet’ (I guess it would go like this: ‘2B or not 2B. OMG. LOL’).”
Parsons began his career as an educator in philosophy as a graduate assistant at the Queen’s University in Kingston, Ontario, Canada during the summers of 1984 and 1986. Parsons was hired as a teaching fellow in three different disciplines at the University of Pittsburgh from August of 1991 until April of 1996, when he earned his second Ph.D., which is in History and Philosophy of Science.
It was then that he came to Texas and took a job with the University of Houston-Clear Lake. Currently Parsons teaches courses in Darwin and His Critics, Theory of Knowledge, Ethics, Philosophy of Religion, Logic, Texts and Images, Philosophy of History, Metaphysics, History of Philosophy I and II, History of Exploration, Philosophy of Mind, Science and Pseudoscience, Science and Religion, and History of Science.
“Dr. Parsons is without question one of our most esteemed scholars and teachers,” said Daniel Silvermintz, associate professor of humanities. “To give you a sense of his uniqueness many faculty struggle for years and years to complete a doctoral degree, yet amazingly Dr. Parsons has two of these! He is currently completing two book projects to add to his already prodigious list of publications, and somehow he still finds the time to apply his vast erudition to comment on political affairs as a public intellectual.”
Keith Parsons Biography via Huffington Post
Some of Parson’s previous UHCL The Signal contributions:
- Letter to the Editor
- Letter to the Editor: Mr. Chips or Computer Chips?
- A word from the sage on stage
- Professors defend academic research
- Letter to the Editor: Sacs of what?
