The founder of the new university that can charge only $10,000 a year and deliver a better education, less overrun with leftist pap, filth, and wasting of everyone's time with the latest French navel gazing exercise...
and mo wrote:
Colleges....in the face of world wide web information availability, may well be anachronisms...captitol cost and investment outweighing the return.
You folks must want to abdicate the sciences and engineering to other nations. Do either of you have any idea what it costs to train a competent scientist to do research at the state of the science in chemistry, physics, or materials science?
For example, a research grade field emission transmission electron microscope, required to study virus structure at atomic resolution or nanoparticle structure at atomic resolution costs approximately $2M (or more, depending on attachments.) Other instrumentation (e.g. a secondary ion mass spectrometer or x-ray photoelectron spectrometer) to study surface composition or a nuclear magnetic resonance spectrometer to study chemical composition have similar price tags. Do you really want students to graduate with a BS or higher degrees without ever having touched this kind of instrumentation? Currently, such instuments are funded by government grants, alumni donations, and tuition.
Not all of the university's money goes to support profs like Ward Churchill... Is there largess without return on investment? Yes. But let's not "throw out the baby with the bath water."
I work for a software company that does basic research, and we hire real scientists all the time. There is no reason real research can't be done in the real world rather than the let's pretend world of academia. But no company on earth would put up with the social sciences peddling Foucaultean nonsense year after year.
If a university can subsist on what it really earns teaching, without subsidy, I will still want to get in their face for the nonsense stuff, but that the rest of us are forced to pay for it is beyond outrage.
You can go kick them all out tomorrow if you are worried. Instead half the hard scientists are reading the editorials against the Bush administration and paeons to socialist regulation that even half the pages of Science and Nature have become.
You've got an image problem. And for the best of reasons - you are overrun with socialist quacks and enemies of human civilization.