Dean: The mathematics department at our university has said that it should be given sole responsibility for teaching the course Statistics for the Social Sciences. But this course has no more mathematics in it than high school algebra does. The fact that a course has mathematics in it does not mean that it needs to be taught by a mathematics professor, any more than a course approaching its subject from a historical perspective must be taught by a history professor. Such demands by the mathematics department are ttherefore unjustified. The dean's argument is most vulnerable to criticism on the grounds that it ['presumes, without providing justification, that any policies that apply to history courses must be justified with respect to mathematics courses', 'purports to refute a view by showing that one possible reason for that view is insufficient', 'presumes, without providing justification, that expertise in a subject does not enable one to teach that subject well', 'presumes, without providing justification, that most students are as knowledgeable about mathematics as they are about history']