Posted on 07/25/2006 7:36:41 PM PDT by Niuhuru
I think it is time to close the universities, and perhaps prosecute the professoriat under the RICO act as a corrupt and racketeering-influenced organization. Universities these days have the moral character of electronic churches, and as little educational value. They are an embarrassment to civilization.
I know this. I am sitting in my office in Jocotepec, consorting with a bottle of Padre Kino red—channeling the good Padre if you will. It is insight cheap at the price. A few bucks a liter.
To begin with, sending a child to a university is irresponsible. These days it costs something like a quarter of a million dollars, depending on your choice of frauds. The more notorious of these intellectual brothels, as for example Yale, can cost more. This money, left in the stock market for forty hears, or thirty, would yield enough to keep the possessor in comfort, with sufficient left over for his vices. If the market took a downturn, he could settle for just the vices. In the intervening years, he (or, most assuredly, she) could work in a dive shop.
See? By sending our young to college, we are impoverishing them, and ourselves, and sentencing them to a life of slavery in some grim cubicle painted federal-wall green. Personally, I’d rather be chained in a trireme.
Besides, the effect of a university education can be gotten more easily by other means. If it is thought desirable to expose the young to low propaganda, any second-hand bookstore can provide copies of Trotsky, Marcuse, Gloria Steinem, and the Washington Post. These and a supply of Dramamine, in the space of a week, would provide eighty percent of the content of a college education. A beer truck would finish the job. The student would save four years which could more profitably be spent in selling drugs, or in frantic cohabitation or—wild thought—in reading, traveling, and otherwise cultivating himself.
This has been known to happen, though documentation is hard to find.
To the extent that universities actually try to teach anything, which is to say to a very limited extent, they do little more than inhibit intelligent students of inquiring mind. And they are unnecessary: The professor’s role is purely disciplinary: By threats of issuing failing grades, he ensures that the student comes to class and reads certain things. But a student who has to be forced to learn should not be in school in the first place. By making a chore of what would otherwise be a pleasure, the professor instills a lifelong loathing of study.
The truth is that universities positively discourage learning. Think about it. Suppose you wanted to learn Twain. A fruitful approach might be to read Twain. The man wrote to be read, not analyzed tediously and inaccurately by begowned twits. It might help to read a life of Twain. All of this the student could do, happily, even joyously, sitting under a tree of an afternoon. This, I promise, is what Twain had in mind.
But no. The student must go to a class in American Literatue, and be asked by some pompous drone, “Now, what is Twain trying to tell us in paragraph four?” This presumes that Twain knew less well than the professor what he was trying to say, and that he couldn’t say it by himself. Not being much of a writer, the poor man needs the help of a semiliterate drab who couldn’t sell a pancake recipe to Boy’s Life. As bad, the approach suggests that the student is too dim to see the obvious or think for himself. He can’t read a book without a middleman. He probably ends by hating Twain.
When I am dictator, anyone convicted of literary criticism will be drawn and quartered, dragged through the streets as a salutary lesson to the wise, and dropped in the public drains.
Why is the ceiling spinning? Maybe I’m caught in a gravitational anomaly.
The truth is that anyone who wants to learn anything can do it better on his own. If you want to learn to write, for example, lock yourself in a room with copies of Strunk and White, and Fowler, and a supply of Padre Kino, and a loaded shotgun. The books will provide technique, the good Padre the inspiration, and you can use the shotgun on any tenured intrusion who offers advice. They tend to be spindly. A twenty-gauge should be sufficient.
Worse, these alleged academies, these dark nights of the soul encourage moral depravity. This is not just my opinion. It can be shown statistically. Virtually all practitioners of I-banking, advertising, and law began by going to some university. Go to Manhattan and visit any prestigious nest of foul attorneys engaged in circumventing the law. Most will have attended schools in the Ivy League. The better the school, the worse the outcome. Any trace of principle, of contemplative wonder, will have been squeezed out of them as if they were grapes.
Perhaps once universities had something to do with the mind, the arts, with reflection, with grasping or grasping at man’s place in a curious universe. No longer. Now they are a complex scam of interlocking directorates. They employ professors, usually mediocre, to sell diplomas, usually meaningless, needed to get jobs nobody should want, for the benefit of corporations who want the equivalent of docile assembly-line workers.
See, first you learn that you have to finish twelve years of grade school and high school. The point is not to teach you anything; if it were, they would give you a diploma when you passed a comprehensive test, which you might do in the fifth grade. The point is to accustom you to doing things you detest. Then they tell you that you need four more years in college or you won’t be quite human and anyway starve from not getting a job. For those of this downtrodden bunch who are utterly lacking in independence, there is graduate school.
The result is twenty years wasted when you should have been out in the world, having a life worth talking about in bars—riding motorcycles, sacking cities, lolling on Pacific beaches or hiking in the Northwest. You learn that structure trumps performance, that existence is supposed to be dull. It prepares you to spend years on lawsuits over somebody else’s trademarks or simply going buzzbuzzbuzz in a wretched federal office. Only two weeks a year do you get to do what you want to do. This we pay for?
What if you sent your beloved daughter to a university and they sent you back an advertising executive?
I think we’re having an earthquake. When the floor stops heaving, I’m going to send out for more Padre Kino.
Fred Reed rules.
College and education ping.
I'm still traveling. :)
Get rid of the universities eh?
Good luck finding doctors, dentists, lawyers, engineers, writers, programmers, etc etc :)
The Nazis felt much the same.
But really, RICO? Why is there lately this rush of "conservatives" demanding the government do what we are perfectly able to do ourselves, namely, not go to a university?
I still believe universities have a role in teaching the next generation. Most of the leftist garbage is absent from engineering, science, and math courses. I also had excellent philosophy, communications, and literature courses 20 years ago at Purdue. I also took an outstanding graduate engineering globalization course last semester off campus from Iowa State.
My MBA classes in general where taught by instructors without political axes to grind. My Law professor, a somewhat liberal lawyer, was one of my best teachers, and he appreciated thoughtful arguments on both sides of questions.
I know both conservative and liberal professors. My father in law, a Taft Republican, taught math for over forty years, and his students received valuable instruction in different math classes without being exposed to ideology (whether conservative or liberal).
I suspect poor teaching and lack of attention for critical thinking will be self correcting over time. In general university degrees are mostly vocational in intent (preparing the student for a career using the knowledge gained from the university). Employers and prospective students will force some changes I think. Reduction in alumni support or fleeing states whose taxes go to support universities without reasonable curriculum will also help.
Critical literature studies have been in vogue for quite some time; and, while I don't buy into all of it, I think understanding an author's situation at the time of writing, the sources and influences that the author had in his/her life, and the purpose/intent of the writing are all very valuable. I don't go in for the psychological garage like the id or collective unconscious though.
That's fine, as long as we don't mind becoming a nation of technological serfs, serving scientists and engineers from other countries. As if we aren't already well down that road...
Read Albert Jay Nock: "Memoirs of a Superflous Man." (1943)
"It is one of my oddest experiences that I have never been able to find any one who would tell me what the net social value of compulsory universal literacy actually comes to when the balance of advantage and disadvantage is drawn, or wherein that value consists.
The few Socratic questions which on occasion I have put to persons presumably able to tell me have always gone by the
board.
These persons seemed to think, like Protagoras on the teaching of virtue, that the thing was so self-evident and simple that I should know all about it without being told; but in the hardness of my head or heart I still do not find it so.
Universal literacy helps business by extending the reach of
advertising and increasing its force; and also in other ways. Beyond that I see nothing on the credit side. On the debit side, it enables scoundrels to beset, dishevel and debauch such intelligence as is in the power of the vast majority of mankind to exercise.
There can be no doubt of this, for the evidence of it is daily spread wide before us on all sides. More than this, it makes many articulate who should not be so, and otherwise would not be so.
It enables mediocrity and submediocrity to run rampant, to the detriment of both intelligence and taste. In a word, it puts into people's hands an instrument which very few can use, but which everyone supposes himself fully able to use; and the mischief thus wrought is very great."
It is a book you will return to time and time again. Witty and conservative.
rottndog wrote: "I don't think we need to abolish universities--most all the nonsense would stop if we just removed public funding."
You sure hit the nail on the head! Why does tuition at most Universities keep shooting up? It's because they have a steady supply of government funding in the form of low interest loans, tuition assistance, and grants.
It's self perpetuating, too. If you go through the process of earning a degree (and many degrees are total hogwash these days), you aren't going to hire someone without a degree. Right? So, even if a reasonably intelligent, non-degreed person could master the job with on-the-job training in a short period of time, the business won't even talk to them.
A college degree is helpful for people who need one to get a job, and various certifications are becoming a requirement for almost everything. Most colleges are incredibly wasteful in their spending. One local college spent over five million dollars acquiring a ranch with horses and llamas, all while complaining that the level of state funding wasn't as high as they wanted.
Keep the universities, replace 85% of the faculty members, and cut tuition by 2/3rds and you would have a good education system (we need to keep some of the current faculty on board for educating the students regarding the lunacy of liberalism).
I've sacrificed the most important things I wanted in my personal life, but folks who are more interested in fitting into regular society (nothing wrong with that, just not for me) go to college and find a way to have security of some kind and have a family. Those are the folks college is for--the ones who want a degree in a trade, for example. And if they are primed to be liberals, school will make them liberals. But the three most conservative people I know went to some of the most liberal schools (harvard and RISD among them) and emerged MORE conservative.
Thanks for the link, Intolerant. I thought much the same thing as the two professors, but I wasn't able to express it as well as them.
This was one of the most enjoyable rants I have read in years.
On the RICO thing, I hope you don't think he was serious, and there is a 'perhaps' preceding it. He's just making a point, and only once. Possible government intervention is only mentioned that one time.
I went to his website. The first thing that caught my eye is his book Brass Pole in Bangkok (A thing I aspire to be). Being a resident of Thailand I can particularly relate to that!
Then there was this: "The Church of Fred. A faith you can believe in. We are applying for a license permitting use for religious purposes of psilocybin, slurs, stereotypes, and .45 ACP." More seriously was a very good article on the 'boy crisis' that was linked on FR but did not get much attention - http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-bloggers/1664271/posts.
Anyway, the guy is a gadfly and his complete irreverence will probably turn off some of the grumpier Freepers but I enjoyed these writings a lot, and will keep an eye on his website.
Thanks again.
Let Republicanprofessor, JamesP81, eleni121 or McVey know if you wish to be placed on this ping list or taken off of it.
AND like Republicanprofessor, this McVey is out of here for the next week.
Happy Freeping all!
McVey
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