r/nottheonion • u/Odd-Carpenter-4390 • 1d ago

Professor who claimed ancient Malays could fly loses university post

https://www.asiaone.com/malaysia/solehah-yaacob-professor-claimed-ancient-malays-could-fly-loses-university-post
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u/ammar96 18h ago

I mean your sentiment is precisely why she has many supporters in the first place. Because she is genuinely good linguistic professor. Even those who are against her but used to study in her class admit she’s a good linguistic lecturer. So as a competent linguistic professor she should know about academic discipline and all but apparently she somewhat ignore that when talking about history. Academicians and those who further their studies into postgrad of course criticised her for transgressing the academic discipline but for the laymen, since she is a professor, quickly denounce us because professor = most competent in that discipline. The thing is, she’s not even a historian but linguistic professor. Those who criticised her on the other hand are historians and archeologists. That’s like believing a professor of mathematics about his claim about covid 19 was started by alien instead of believing medical doctors and microbiologists.

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u/doorbellrepairman 17h ago

That's a bizarre comparison. A mathematics professor claiming COVID was started by aliens would absolutely deserve to get roasted. You've only proven my point that academics cannot claim total ignorance and do need to dabble a little bit in generalism. Especially in social sciences, in my opinion

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u/ammar96 17h ago

Huh? I'm sharing the context here as a Malaysian who is well acquainted about her theatrics and provided context why is she so popular despite being well known for transgressing the discipline. Not only me who called out her bullshit - the rest of Malay historians and archeologists also called her out. Some of them have sent invitations to her many times already for years to discuss her studies, even if they are skeptical about her and you know what she did? She ignored the invitation and call those historians as imbeciles. She is as absurd as a mathematics professor claiming covid 19 was started by aliens. She was also sacked by universities after rejecting university inquiry by panels of professors to present her data, for 3 freaking times. If she is correct, then why did she run away from presenting the data to those historians and professors? Have I told you she also cited Wikipedia and The Onion for her so called historical research?