Thoughts from VDH:
So what did I learn in the university? I’ll try to be a bit less specific than I was in Who Killed Homer? written over a decade ago.
First was the false knowledge — odd for an institution devoted to free inquiry. The university runs like a 13th-century church in which the heliocentric maverick is a mortal sinner. So too on campus the Rosenbergs never spied. Alger Hiss was a martyr. Mao killed only a few who needed killing (see Anita Dunn on that one).
Che was not a murderous thug, but a hair-in-the-wind carefree motorcyclist. Minorities supposedly died proportionally higher in Vietnam — as they supposedly do now in Iraq and Afghanistan. Women are underrepresented as both undergraduates and as humanities graduate students. Anyone with an accented name obviously had picked grapes or was denied voting rights. Adlai Stevenson was an American saint, even more so than George McGovern. Only the unhinged even discussed doubts about global warming. Don’t question any of the above; it was all gospel — as we see now in D.C., from Keynes to Gorism to Cordoba as the beacon of Islamic tolerance during the Inquisition. (Doubt any of that, and that laid-back elbow-patched joking prof who told the class “Call me Bill,” in a flash, Gollum like, turned into a snarling jackal, screaming, “I am Doctor Jones, with important publications on climate change and a doctorate from Berkeley! How dare you question me!”)
The last time we had a college professor for president, almost a hundred years ago, we had our first fascist dictator. Maybe we need an inoculation every century or so. Of course, Wilson didn’t fend us off from Roosevelt.
Read the whole thing, especially about the chainsaw-wielding decapitating criminology professor.
Great piece by VDH. The academy is long overdue for an overhaul, but that time won’t come until we stop worshiping the educrats. It will be especially difficult because the cultural gate keepers know how important the government education complex is to the collectivist left remaining in power.
Rand,
[[[The last time we had a college professor for president, almost a hundred years ago, ]]]
You forget President Obama 🙂
http://www.factcheck.org/askfactcheck/was_barack_obama_really_a_constitutional_law.html
Mr. Matula isofficially inducted into the League of the Usual Suspects.
By last time, our esteemed host and generous provider of bandwidth for the forum Rand, means, “last time before this time.” See, President Obama has worked as a “college professor” (OK, not a full-fledged tenured “made-guy” “button-man” Mafiosi, but as you point out in your link, close enough, and everyone around here accepts that). Mr. Obama is the “this-time college professor President” and Mr. Wilson was the “last-time-there-was-a-college-professor President.”
Rand, I really don’t mind the “trolls” around here as it prevents this place from becoming and “echo chamber” and it really livens things up, but can you work on getting, say, some smarter people over here?
Google “human brains are shrinking”, it explains a lot of what one reads online.
🙂
Anti-academia bashing will lead nowhere. There is a lot that could be done to reform academic institutions, but the author merely points out things which have been so since the dawn of time.
If you want to read about the scorn of academia versus businessmen you need to go no further than read Plato’s Republic. People in academia often think of businessmen as petty swindlers. This scorn works both ways, since businessmen usually see people in academia as a bunch of lazy parasites.
The truth is academia has never ruled alone. It is merely one part of the ruling segment of society. As is business. There may be verbal abuse but in the end they know they need each other. Businesses are little interested in spending money and time training people, when these people could be working instead, while academia is little interested in engaging in for profit schemes (in fact their charter often explicitly states that).
You are mistaken to think that a professor gets tenure for doing nothing. Often college professors are selected for promotion not just based on time of service, but on their capacity to attract funding to the school. I know few tenured professors who are not CEOs or ex-CEOs. Then again I am only inside how engineering colleges work, not people in the “classics” like this gentleman.
The truth is academia has never ruled alone. It is merely one part of the ruling segment of society. As is business. There may be verbal abuse but in the end they know they need each other. Businesses are little interested in spending money and time training people, when these people could be working instead, while academia is little interested in engaging in for profit schemes (in fact their charter often explicitly states that).
I have to disagree with this paragraph. First, my business like many others has to spend a lot of time and money training employees. The work we do is specialized and technical. To date, we’ve never found anyone off the street who knows how to do the work so we typically spend 12-18 months on training and mentoring someone before they become qualified. This isn’t uncommon. Most college graduates may have a piece of paper but they don’t have much in the way of job skills. For our work, we prefer to hire veterans who have a proven work ethic and technical knowledge that we can leverage.
As for the educrats, due to court rulings on hiring practices, you have a hard time testing someone to determine if they’re qualified so many companies have made a college diploma part of the hiring criteria regardless of whether the job actually requires a degree. That gives the colleges a lot of leverage and is in part what is driving the debate about an education bubble.
As for the “for profit” desires of colleges, most may be non-profits on paper but they have no hesitation about making money. Professors, especially those at research institutions, strive to supplement their incomes by writing textbooks that they then require for their classes* and by applying for research grants. All a “non-profit” means is that they must make sure they spend it all instead of reporting a profit**. That’s a contributing factor in the bloat seen in college administrative departments.
* My son starts graduate school tomorrow. For one term, he had to buy 18 books (6 for one class alone) costing $900. He overheard the parents of a freshman asking why a required book that was only 0.25 inches thick cost $75. The book store employee explained that it was a “special text” written by the professor and required for the class. If nothing else, those parents got an education about college costs.
** Too many people seem to think that a “non-profit” is morally superior to a “for profit” enterprise. All too often, those “non-profit” organizations simply spend their money on high salaries and benefits instead of reporting a profit. For example, according to this source,
“Marsha J. Evans, President and CEO of the American Red Cross, was paid $468,599 in salary and benefits in fiscal 2003. (Source: BBB Wise Giving Alliance)
Brian Gallagher, President and CEO of United Way, was paid $432,709 in salary and benefits in fiscal 2003. (Source: Charity Navigator)
Most college presidents are not exactly underpaid, either.
The biggest advantage of being a not-for-profit is that you can solicit money from anyone and everyone, with no restrictions. You don’t have to promise anything in return, and don’t have to tell anyone the use to which you’ll put the money.
With a for-profit, soliciting investment in the manner non-profits do it is a federal crime, the penalties for which are staggering.
So if you are offering people the potential for return, it’s a crime to ask them for money. But if you promise them they will get nothing, that’s just fine.
Perhaps that’s why Obama’s first commencement address urged the graduates to consider a career in non-profit organizations. It’s much more moral, don’t you know…
You forget President Obama
No, I didn’t. I meant prior to him (not that he’s a real tenured professor — he just has the attitude).
Rand,
OK, but that wasn’t clear.
Paul Milenkovic,
[[[Mr. Matula isofficially inducted into the League of the Usual Suspects.]]]
Thank you for including me in a order you have long belonged to 🙂
Some remarks need ‘splainin, and Usual Suspects is a reference to the movie Casablanca. The Humphrey Bogart character, who is cynical, care-worn, love-lost, and a bunch of other Hollywood cliches, and certainly not one to take any kind of stand on the basis of morals or principle, because he has “seen it all”, has just shot dead a German officer, who was going to thwart the plan of Bogart’s long-lost love interest and her hapless husband to escape to freedom in Portugal or some such thing. The Claude Raines character, who is equally cynical, but in a different kind of Vichy French way, has just come across Bogart standing there in front of the dead German, holding a revolver, which, is still smoking.
Just as Bogart has “taken a stand”, i.e. taking a side in the war by shooting a German soldier, the Raines character then takes a side in that war that he was avoiding doing, by without missing a beat and keeping in the “French siding with whoever is in charge” cliche, orders the police under his command to “round up the usual suspects.” Not only does he issue this order, but in the very next scene, we see taken into the police station a line of Hollywood-cliche rough-looking French persons, you know, berets, dangling cigarettes, neck scarves, etc..
The movie then closes with Bogart and Raines walking away together in the fog, with both of them “having burned their bridges”, at the very least, each committing themselves to be combatants fighting the Germans instead of going on in their respective roles as observers of the war going on around them.
The Usual Suspects is a term I have coined, for persons wandering into Rand’s fine electronic salon, where if Rand says the sky is grey, someone will immediately step up to the plate and insist in several iterations of comments that Rand is mistaken and the sky is blue, and the Usual Suspects is plural as often time a tag team develops of people supporting the notion that the sky is blue.
The reason the Usual Suspects are the usual suspects is that the Usual Suspects have highly predictable responses to anything Rand says, namely, the opposite, regardless of whether Rand is right or not and regardless of whether a Usual Suspect is right or not. Hence, the identification of a Usual Suspect is a cliche around here, i.e. a reflexive contradiction to any remark Rand makes, much as the usual suspects in Casablanca, were a broad cliche of a criminal in French culture — beret, cigarette, 3-day beard, neck scarf, and so on. In other words, the Usual Suspects are not people with the beret, dangling cigarette, 3-day beard, neck scarf, etc., rather, the Usual Suspects have responses that are readily identifiable.
Am I a Usual Suspect? Could be, for in nominating another guest around here to being a Usual Suspect, I have engaged in the kind of snarky commenting characteristic of Usual Suspects — to be a proper Usual Suspect, not only do you have to contradict Rand, but you have to do it in a particularly snarky way. I think I promised Rand recently that I would refrain from snarkiness when using is bandwidth here in the comments section and I guess I have gone back on my promise. But for suggesting that someone is a Usual Suspect and getting back “as are you too”, I guess that is not the worst rejoinder or putting-me-back-in-my-place I could be subject to, but Rand, can’t you do something to get a higher grade of critic on this site to elevate the level of the inter-personal repartee?
It isn’t anything Rand’s done, but I’ve been commenting less. Does that count?
Paul,
The first rule of inside jokes is that you do not explain the inside jokes.
The second rule of inside jokes is that you do not explain the inside jokes.
I’m with ak4mc, I guess I’ll just have to do less posting too.
I’m sorry, and I have also violated the rule is that one should not attempt to explain anything in Casablanca. So much for elevating the level of discourse, I guess.
Hold up, that depends on your metric, no?
To date, we’ve never found anyone off the street who knows how to do the work so we typically spend 12-18 months on training and mentoring someone before they become qualified. This isn’t uncommon. Most college graduates may have a piece of paper but they don’t have much in the way of job skills. For our work, we prefer to hire veterans who have a proven work ethic and technical knowledge that we can leverage.
So you prefer people who already know how to work. Surprise surprise. You say you train them for 12-18 months, but I suspect you do that as on the job training. I doubt you would be willing to teach someone linear algebra before they could do their work properly.
Even for research grants every item must be budgeted. Most money is usually spent on salaries, some may be used to purchase equipment, or publication expenses. For items such as salaries it is common to have a pay grade system in place (the wonders of statal funding) so you cannot change the value of the salary as much as you think. Salaries in the private sector are higher than in the public sector in the beginning of your career. You only get a high salary in a public sector job when you are near retirement age. Assuming you have not died yet. If you do the math on your whole lifetime I suspect you get paid the same.
What you do have in the public sector is many small fringe benefits compared to a job in a private sector enterprise. I have worked on both. In the public sector job I got “free” car parking, lunch, and other things like that. In the private sector job I had no benefits, but got paid lots more, which covered those small perks and then some.
Regulations for non-profits vary widely. I have known some non-profits where there is widespread stealing by the board members, and I have seen the opposite. Sometimes even in the same non-profit under different management I saw both things happen. When the accounts are not transparent and there is no accountability that sort of thing happens. You say the CEO of Red Cross earns too much, but the truth is if you compare his salary with that of a CEO of a for-profit enterprise with a similar number of employees, he probably earns a lot less. It can be pretty hard to convince a bunch of volunteers to do a task. Even more than a paid employee. It is akin to herding cats.
As for the donors getting knifed, you would be surprised. The truth is no “donor” gives money for free to a non-profit. They always expect something in return. It may be advertising, it may be to increase their expenses report for that quarter, it may be for recruiting people to work for them, but it never, never is solely out of the goodness of their hearts.
Some professors do earn a lot of money selling books. But most of the profit goes to the publisher. Which is a for-profit enterprise. Let us say the teacher has 500 students per year (hah). Even if the teacher earned $20 per book, which he does not, he would get $10000 per year from the book sales. Not bad, nice supplement to your regular pay, but you are not going to get to millionaire like that. The richest professors I know are founders of for-profit enterprises. Not book writers.