Posted on 07/25/2011 1:16:04 PM PDT by Cincinatus' Wife
I’m underwhelmed by conservatives who quote Robespierre in an approving manner.
There are solid studies that show that leftist “indoctrination” in the universities fails. Folks leave with pretty much the same politics they enter with, and yet, you’d complete the desired effect of the long march of the left through the institutions, and destroy one of the institutions on which Western civilization rests to get rid of the tenured radicals.
I suggest a bit of Edmund Burke and Russell Kirk to tone up your conservatism.
Preserving peculiarities is conservative. Making a monoculture where everything looks like commerce is not.
I always keep learning R_R_D.
Why is it academics and elites take such a condescending tone when imparting advice?
Do you think they even notice that trait in their character?
I’m afraid I only sound condescending when I’m peeved, and one of my pet peeves on FR is folks whose conservatism appears from their writings here to consist of a love for the free market that then makes them think everything should be run like a business.
Your quoting Robespierre just made it worse.
To me conservatism involves conserving not just the American Founding, but all of the goods of Christian civilization (and those inherited from Greek and Roman pagan civilization before that) on which the American Founding rested. And the university, as it grew organically from the middle ages onward, is one of those goods. Academic freedom was the original freedom of speech, when none existed elsewhere in Europe or indeed the world, and tenure is its guardian. Attacking it, whether with leftist speech codes or by remodeling the university as a business, seems to me to be an attack on all freedom, and the sort of unconservative behavior that amounts to moving the boundary markers of our ancestors.
I quoted Robespierre?
You know everything I feel about education and free markets from this thread?
Goodness. I guess you’ve called up the guillotine for me without any proof.
The THREE BIG anti- Rick Perry groups:Well... there's an anti-Rick-Perry group here in FR but admittedly they're not BIG... unless you judge by mouth-size.Big Education
Big Law
Big MSM
AND the ENVIRONMENALISTS
Yes, the eggs and omelette remark was Robespierre. And approving of Perry’s plan is sufficient to bring out my peeve about remaking education as business.
And, no, I’m not a Jacobin, I don’t even propose the guillotine for Obamaites, much less my fellow conservatives, even if they are less Burkian than I.
Yes, the eggs and omelette remark was Robespierre. And approving of Perry’s plan is sufficient to bring out my peeve about remaking education as business.
And, no, I’m not a Jacobin, I don’t even propose the guillotine for Obamaites, much less my fellow conservatives, even if they are less Burkian than I.
=^D
“Unfortunately, Perry is on the wrong track. The cost of higher education has risen chiefly because of the expansion of administration, both in numbers, salaries, and number of staff. And administrators, by and large, are also enamored of the university-as-business, student-as-customer model.”
That is not the cause, that is the effect. The cause is government grants and low interest loans from the government to pay students to get educated. These student grants and loan guarantees allow universities to give teachers and administrators more money. This increases the cost in a vicious cycle. It doesn’t matter if college is expensive if the government will pay people to attend anyway.
TRD I think the point you are missing is running a University as a business means efficiency and turning out a product with an education that creates both breadth and meaning. Liberal Arts is a catch all for I learned nothing of any real marketable value to the marketplace but I expect companies to hire me because I went to a school for 4 years.
Sure, if they want to take Art History or other in high demand majors let them, but then don’t whine if you cannot make a living with it.
In China approximately 10% of ALL University graduates have the requisite skills required by multi-national corporations who do business in their country. This also explains why they flood to US schools to at least have a chance at getting the skills needed to meet the market. Why spend 100K and get a degree and end up driving a txi because you cannot do anything?
BTW China is planning to spend billions of dollars to reform this and make their workforce more marketable in their workforce, education is my passion but it has become a repository for hoary old theoreticians ho have never had a job in their lives or mills to indoctrinate Liberal entitlement thinking into young minds.
JMHO of course
Do remember that “liberal arts” was named long before the left stole the word “liberal”. It meant “arts appropriate to free men”. The sentiment often attributed to Churchill (who may have quoted at second or third hand) expressed by James Alexander Smith, a Professor of Moral Philosophy at Oxford, “Nothing that you will learn in the course of your studies will be of the slightest possible use to you in after life, save only this, that if you work hard and intelligently you should be able to detect when a man is talking rot, and that, in my view, is the main, if not the sole, purpose of education,” is still the prime point of acquiring a liberal education (remember that’s the uncorrupted use of the word “liberal”).
Unfortunately the reform needed, a return to the classical model of the university, is not the reform which will occur by adopting a business model.
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