Posted on 03/23/2016 2:10:08 AM PDT by Cincinatus' Wife
This past June, American academia went into an uproar over Gov. Scott Walker’s new budget in Wisconsin,....Specifically,any professor in the system—tenured or not—could be dismissed or laid off by the 18-member Board of Regents using maddeningly vague criteria:“when such an action is deemed necessary due to a budget or program decision requiring program discontinuance,curtailment,modification or redirection.”
This,when combined with the faculty’s diminished role in governing the university—and thus determining such things as which programs should continue, be curtailed, or get modified—basically meant that these regents—16 of whom were appointed by Walker—could fire anyone,at any time, for any reason.
[SNIP]
Professors do not want research limited by the whims of 18 people appointed by a governor with an anti-education agenda.
What’s at stake here is the total loss of the public research university. Anyone with functioning eyes and a pulse knows that most U.S. states barely fund their universities anymore,...
But the situation in Wisconsin is worse than your garden-variety corporatization. You might assume it’s no big deal for superstar researchers to be competed for,hired,and fired like executives—and for everyone else to “just get a better job” if they don’t like what they’ve got. That might be how it works at your job,if you are lucky enough to have one. I understand this impulse to look around at your own likely weak labor protections,and wonder why those obnoxious hoity-toity professors think they deserve better..
But academics don’t want tenure because they think they’re better or smarter than you. Academics,whether they have it or not,want some form of tenure to exist to protect the integrity of the knowledge that is produced,preserved,and disseminated.
[SNIP]
.. Hundreds of technological and social advances that you depend upon have been made thanks to the research of some brainiac at some university somewhere:what kind of cities to plan;how (and where) to alleviate poverty and hunger;...
(Excerpt) Read more at slate.com ...
A Whole Field of Psychology Research May Be Bunk. Scientists Should Be Terrified. (Slate article)
[SNIP]
The diminution of the Big Idea isn’t easy to accept,even for those willing to concede that there are major problems in their field. An ego depletion optimist might acknowledge that psychology studies tend to be too small to demonstrate a real effect, or that scientists like to futz around with their statistics until the answers come out right.(None of this implies deliberate fraud; just that sloppy standards prevail.) Still,the optimist would say, it seems unlikely that such mistakes would propagate so thoroughly throughout a single literature, and that so many noisy, spurious results could line up quite so perfectly. If all these successes came about by random chance, then it’s a miracle that they’re so consistent.
And here’s the pessimist’s counterargument: It’s easy to imagine how one bad result could lead directly to another. Ego depletion is such a bold, pervasive theory that you can test it in a thousand different ways...Different versions of the standard paradigm all produce the same effect—that’s the nature of the Big Idea. That means you can tweak the concept however you want, and however many times you need, until you’ve stumbled on a version that seems to give a positive result. But then your replication of the concept won’t always mean you have a real result. It will only show that you’ve tried a lot of different methods-that you had the willpower to stick with your hypothesis until you found an experiment that worked.
..the two-task method...invented 20 years ago now appears to be in doubt. As a result, an entire literature has been rendered suspect....
If it’s not much fun for the people whose life’s work has been called into question, neither does it hearten skeptics in the field. “I’m in a dark place,”[Michael] Inzlicht wrote on his blog earlier this week. “I feel like the ground is moving from underneath me and I no longer know what is real and what is not.”...
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February 20, 2016 - Speech delivered at the Council for National Policy by Dr. Everett Piper:
The State of American Higher Education
"....The bottom line is this: Education is in peril. Run by the State and its thought police, colleges across the land have become indoctrination camps more than campuses of open inquiry. Propaganda and power now reign where there used to be a pursuit of truth.
An event this past summer that is now old news is very instructive and should not be forgotten. It was when Howard Dean questioned then candidate Scott Walker’s qualifications to be President because of Walker’s lack of a college degree. “Were (Walker) to become President,” said Dean, “(he) would be the first in many generations that did not have a college degree … The issue is how well-educated is this guy? And that’s a problem.”
For the sake of argument, let’s admit that Dean’s premise has some merit: that one’s education does matter and that, as Richard Weaver wrote in 1948, ideas do have consequences; that it all starts with education; that good ideas lead to good beliefs, good behavior, good culture and good government; and that bad ideas lead to bad beliefs, bad behavior, bad culture and bad government. Let’s assume that education does have a consequence and a predictable outcome. Let’s assume that we, therefore, would be wise to take a look at the ideas our colleges have been teaching over the past several decades and evaluate the results. For the sake of argument, let’s just look at education’s track record for the past 68 years since Weaver’s seminal publication; which was, ironically, the same year of Howard Dean’s birth.
For example:
For 68 years, we’ve sent our kids off to sit under the tutelage of faculty who have panned a Judeo-Christian ethic and praised its antithesis.
For 68 years, we’ve taught our next generation “it doesn’t matter what you believe as long as it works for you.”
For 68 years, we’ve told our youth that there is a “moral equivalency” between America and its enemies and implied that our nation is bad and the rest of the world is right to hate us and we have instructed our students to laugh at those who warned of Communism and government largesse.
For 68 years, college professors have said that Marxism has its merits and that liberation theology is the only “good religion,” that socialism is better than free enterprise and that capitalism is the cause of crime.
For 68 years, we have fomented class resentment and racial animus.
For 68 years, we’ve diminished excellence while extolling entitlement.
For 68 years, professors have preached that pastors and priests are stupid.
For 68 years, we have fed our kids a diet of moral nihilism and instructed our boys and girls to use a condom rather than obey God’s Commandments.
Why are we surprised in what we see in today’s news? Our judges can’t find the word “marriage” in the dictionary. Our state department thinks the way to stop terrorists is to give them jobs. Our President says he appreciates the “legitimate grievances” of Muslims who stone women, behead journalists, and crucify children. Our congress has lost its consciences, our kids have lost their character, and our culture has lost its soul.
Yes, education is “a problem.” Ideas do have consequences and the lousy ideas we have been teaching in our colleges and universities for the past seven decades are bearing themselves out daily before our eyes. But with all due respect to the good Governor Dean, I would rather have a President who hasn’t been indoctrinated by this vacuous nonsense than one who has. I would rather have a President with no degree who knows he’s not God than one with a degree who thinks he is.".....
The libs always use the science and engineering departments to protect them while the humanities and social sciences professors propagandize leftist insanity behind the shield.
Good try, Slate. Go find another sucker.
Don’t separate out science - the Left has destroyed science.
Oh’ this is from Slate....never mind....
Welcome to the real world, leftist Ivory Tower knotheads.
They’re getting their due.
The truth of the matter is that the University of Wisconsin now has the freedom to let certain “professors” go.
For now (seeing the writing on the wall) they’ll find safe haven at other institutions of academic indoctrination and will be happy to blame their departure on Scott Walker.
The college/university bubble is gonna pop.
“I’ve worked in the private sector, they expect results.”
Dr. Ray Stanz
Teach dang it, that is what the tuition is for.
Contact me off line if anyone wants to know about a Hidden Gem of a State College.
* Where something like 78 to 80% of all teachers are Professors.
* Where their is no publish or perish.
The school has 25,000 kids and it is such a gem they have raised the requirements to get in and they are turning students away.
* Great Accounting, Pre-Med/Nursing and Engineering and is a Div 2 athletic powerhouse, no basket weaving or other BS degrees...
* Old money is donating big bucks before they kick the bucket to modernize the campus, which is stunning btw.
* And that Money has created the State of the Art Library possibly in the world, it is robotic...
* Located in an area that is pretty politically and religiously conservative...
Thank you for posting the articles. Lots of meat to chew on in both of them.
Many Profs and courses should be dropped from most colleges/universities as being non-beneficial to the students and society as a whole. If a curriculum/degree doesn’t aid students in obtaining a job and career...drop it!
I worked for a major defense contractor in a mgt. position with hire and fire powers. I would never have hired someone with degrees like Women/Black Studies or any of the other worthless subjects. ...Where do those grads get jobs? Maybe as staffers for Democrats in the House and Senate?
good.
i’m all broken up about no “tenure” whatever the #### that was/is
My private sector job has tenure. I’m ensured a job till my boss walks out of his office, up to my desk, and says “#### you, your fired. These four men will escort you out. Leave the computer alone”
I call them ‘Academia Nuts’ (as in macadamia).
Wife, glad you have begun to post things of substance and concern for all Conservatives again. The Cruz fangirl stuff was getting annoying.
“We pigs are brainworkers...”
Good...
They’d have a lot of money if they didn’t squander it on “gender modality studies”, “cultural appropriation studies” and muslime foot toilets.
Those criteria don't sound very vague to me. If a program is discontinued, why *should* the university keep the personnel running that program on staff? If they aren't doing anything, they are costly dead weight. Period.
” ... Academics,whether they have it or not,want some form of tenure to exist to protect the integrity of the knowledge that is produced,preserved,and disseminated.”
Yeah right, huge wages and benefits has absolutely nothing to do with it. They only want tenure to protect knowledge.
Well they can take their “knowledge” and shove it where the sun don’t shine.
No, it hasn't. The "hard" sciences are as solid as ever. The left may try to subvert them for their own ideological purposes, but it is incredibly difficult to subvert a hard science.
For example, look at the current insane push of "transgenderism." As much as the left would love to have you believe that someone can become the other gender simply by pretending, it cannot happen. The traits that make one male or female are encoded in the DNA, in the very blueprints that our bodies use to remain functional every day. No matter how fervently the left pretends that Bruce can become Caitlyn, he cannot. His biology is rigid in that regard. The left cannot change science to make biology or any other hard subject mushy and subject to personal whims.
Look at how the Left has manipulated the scientific method.
Exhibit 1 - global warming, climate.
Much of the funding for these “professors” comes from government grants shopping for a study to back up their policies or from private industry shopping for a study that makes their product the best or some other product bad.
These studies are marketing machines and universities happily gobble up grant money.
Previously respected scientific review journals are now fully in the tank (at the bidding and behest of) with Leftists and their ideology.
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