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My Criticisms of Academe

The tenure system and widespread liberal views in academia prevail partly because of the horrid history of our society and government in the McCarthy era, when liberals could be persecuted as "commies" and fired from faculties at universities and all faculty members were required to take loyalty oaths. Liberals never legally persecuted conservatives as Nazis and fascists even when those conservatives were Nazis and fascists, but conservatives persecuted liberals as communists even when they were not, and the result was that quite a few brilliant professors were forced out of their positions. The disgrace still stains the Republican Party, after more than 50 years.
 
If competition works so well to incentivize university professors to do the best research, why couldn't it work to incentivize university professors to do the best teaching?

Because, ordinarily and however much lip-service is paid to it, good teaching doesn't necessarily lead to tenure and promotions.
 
Please show evidence that there are race and gender quotas. You have yet to do that.

Semantics. Certain hopeful students are given preference based on race and gender, taking spots from those with higher marks.
 
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Because, ordinarily and however much lip-service is paid to it, good teaching doesn't necessarily lead to tenure and promotions.

You're helping me make my point. What incentives do professors have to be good teachers?
 
So you're not able to... as usual... show any evidence for your positions.



No... I guess you don't.

Way to drag up an old quotation of mine, where I said I don't need any evidence to believe in God, and misapply it to the current debate about a completely different topic. LOL.

 
Peter Grimm said:
1. Tenure - Lifetime job security is the antithesis of competition. Competition leads to productivity and higher job performance.

Example: The University of Colorado professor who taught his students that the United States provoked the 9/11 attacks. CU refused to fire him, citing tenure, until the public scrutiny just got to be too much for them to bear. Ward Churchill September 11 attacks essay controversy - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

University presidents have no power - all the major decisions are made by faculty. Collective decision-making by hundreds of prima donnas, none of whom can be fired or even demoted for being wrong, is not a system that any other institution has adopted anywhere else in the world. It is like Congress without elections -- a formula for total irresponsibility and self-indulgence.

I think this is not the right way to look at it. Suppose we get rid of tenure, and university presidents and deans become able to fire whom they wish, whenever they wish. Given human nature, how would you propose to protect free academic discourse, which is the only mechanism by which we advance knowledge. Look at it this way: get rid of tenure, and the few professors who do have conservative sympathies or sentiments will be out of a job in a year, and it will be very, very difficult for conservatives to ever get a foothold in academia. Imagine, if you will, the fate of conservativism in this country if 100% of College professors, under fear of losing their jobs, found reasons to fail students with any conservative leanings. What future do you see for conservativism when no conservatives are able to get anything more than a high school diploma? See last point for more...

Most people are unaware that there are grounds for firing tenured professors. It's not especially difficult, even. The best way to get fired, even if you have tenure, is to start sucking at your job. If you stop publishing, or stop teaching, you'll get fired. Even tenured profs are reviewed periodically.

Most people are also unaware of what you have to do to get tenure. It's recognized that once you get tenure, so long as you don't start sucking, you've got a guaranteed job for life. So you really have to earn such a privilege. It usually takes 7 years, and you have to demonstrate that you're not faking either your love for your profession, or for teaching. The big universities are quite demanding on this point.

Peter Grimm said:
5. Grad Students- But let's get off the topic of coverups, and get back on the topic of slave labor. Big-name universities will lavish six-figure salaries on deconstructionist professors whose chief claim to fame is that other deconstructionist professors like them, while freshmen are being taught by low-budget graduate students, many of whom are from foreign countries and do not speak intelligible English.

That is why hundreds of students can be packed like sardines into a huge lecture hall for Economics 1, taught by some junior faculty member without enough clout to get out of teaching anything so elementary.

Meanwhile, some senior professor in the same department may hold a little boutique seminar for six in his pet sub-specialty, far off the beaten track from anything that undergraduates need to know.

When budget-crunch time comes, two classes of Economics 1 with 400 students each may be more likely to be combined into one class with 800 students than is the big-name professor's seminar to be touched.

I've never seen or heard of a class with literally 800 students. 200 is usually considered to be pushing it. And that said, I'm not sure why the recent hubbub about this: classes of that size have existed in higher education nearly since universities were invented. At the 101 level, the understanding needed to pass a class is fairly minimal. It can be tested by routine methods. Someone who is unable to earn an A in such classes probably shouldn't be going to college.

Those "boutique" seminars (I've never heard such a term) are, by contrast, extremely demanding. They may feature thousands of pages of reading per semester (and by reading, I mean the kind of reading that permits near-verbatim recall of obscure passages two months later). They require in-depth discussion of narrow but integral topics. If knowledge advances, the beginings of such advances happen in those small graduate seminars.

Graduate seminars are usually run by both "big-name" and "small-name" and even "no-name" professors at Ph.D. granting institutions. They typically cap enrollment at 20 people, though far fewer usually sign up, because typically only 5-8 people per semester have the requisite levels of interest and preparation. Your criticism seems very off-base to me.

Peter Grimm said:
University Admissions- They are just plain unfair, and do not reward achievement. For example, why do universities have legacy admissions? Who cares if your uncle attended Harvard, or if your mother attended Princeton? That should have nothing at all to do with whether you are admitted.

It's not really possible to accurately guess, based on grades, letters of recommendation, admissions essays, or SAT/ACT scores, how well a person will do at a particular institution. Legacy admissions arose because it was presumed that if person X went to, say, Harvard, and did well, their son or daughter probably also has what it takes to do well, even if their resume doesn't necessarily reflect that.

That said, I agree there are other reasons, some of them corrupt. However, you seem to have this idea that schools like Harvard or Princeton have a set number of students they're going to admit each semester, decided before they begin looking at applications. They have a range. Top candidates are admitted regardless of other factors. Statistically, admissions committees know that this will get them about halfway to where they want to be. Then they sift through the remainder, balancing a number of factors. See remarks below.

Peter Grimm said:
Then you have race and gender quotas. Rather than being admitted purely on academic merit, students are admitted due to the melanin count in their skin or their genitalia.

This is mostly a myth. Universities these days admit who they want to admit, and this typically results in a good and balanced range of students. If a particular university is found consistently to be admitting mostly white male students, where applicants are more balanced, then government controls will be imposed.

Peter Grimm said:
I haven't even mentioned the number of foreign students. Why should American taxpayers subsidize the education of a student from India or Korea?

This does sometimes happen (it's more rare than you'd probably think). But when it does, the idea is two-fold: first, academic study benefits from diversity. This is especially true in my own field (philosophy). Students from different parts of the world bring different ideas to the table, and sometimes, those ideas bear fruit. Second, and more importantly, when those students go back to their home countries, they become ambassadors for us in a way. The benefits of this are hard to quantify, but they are there.

Peter Grimm said:
Next, you have people with money. If you have money, you can get in anywhere, regardless of how dumb you are.

This seems simply false. I've never heard of anyone buying their way past an admissions committee. A committee-person who accepted a bribe would be fired if discovered, and possibly sent to jail, depending on what they were to do in consideration of the bribe.

Peter Grimm said:
Who gets the public money and why? As a taxpayer, I feel this process should be transparent and that I should have some input, along with other taxpayers. Instead, this process is farmed out to various government agencies who clearly have political agendas.

Notice that there's an equally powerful argument against this: the average person doesn't possess the requisite knowledge to judge whether a given proposal is a good one. There are plenty of instances each year of people applying to repeat experiments already done a thousand times with homogenous results. But most people wouldn't know that.

I agree, however, with your remark about political agendas.

Peter Grimm said:
Left-wing Politics - Universities are the nerve center for liberal thought and liberal politics. The vastly disproportionate presence of leftist professors on university campuses across the United States has been well documented.

The obvious counter-argument is that becomes increasingly difficult (though not impossible) to hold on to consevative opinions as you gain education. One feature of conservative thinking is that it tends towards exclusivism. This seems to be true by nature; conservative principles want to preserve tradition, and tradition isn't diverse. The problem is that education exposes one to diverse ideas. If one manages to remain a conservative after such a program, it must be because some principle retains its clarity and force in the mind. While certainly not impossible, it becomes quite difficult.
 
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I've never seen or heard of a class with literally 800 students. 200 is usually considered to be pushing it. And that said, I'm not sure why the recent hubbub about this: classes of that size have existed in higher education nearly since universities were invented. At the 101 level, the understanding needed to pass a class is fairly minimal. It can be tested by routine methods. Someone who is unable to earn an A in such classes probably shouldn't be going to college.

I never had a college class with more than about 25 students. My son's classes have ranged from as many as 250 to as few as 6 or 8, and he litterally has one class where he meets once a week with the instructor for an hour on a private lesson bases.

Those "boutique" seminars (I've never heard such a term) are, by contrast, extremely demanding. They may feature thousands of pages of reading per semester (and by reading, I mean the kind of reading that permits near-verbatim recall of obscure passages two months later). They require in-depth discussion of narrow but integral topics. If knowledge advances, the beginings of such advances happen in those small graduate seminars
.

I guess that may describe my son's one on one class. It meets for two hours a week (20 students in one meeting and one on one lessons in the other), and requires 20+ hours of individual study per week. He gets 4 credit hours for it.


That said, I agree there are other reasons, some of them corrupt. However, you seem to have this idea that schools like Harvard or Princeton have a set number of students they're going to admit each semester, decided before they begin looking at applications. They have a range. Top candidates are admitted regardless of other factors. Statistically, admissions committees know that this will get them about halfway to where they want to be. Then they sift through the remainder, balancing a number of factors. See remarks below.

Many colleges do have a preset number of students that they accept. They have to, because they only have a limited amount of qualified instructors, classroom, etc. My son's college sets a target of 4500 freshmen for the fall semester. The school knows historically about what percent of new applicants actually enroll, so they base the number of acceptances using that number in order to hit the target of 4500. A lot of students are waitlisted and only get a spot if the class of 4500 doesn't pan out. The school also knows about how many students return after each semester, so they will give a lot of marginally accepted students admissions only for the winter term, just to keep each class at 4500 students.

This seems simply false. I've never heard of anyone buying their way past an admissions committee. A committee-person who accepted a bribe would be fired if discovered, and possibly sent to jail, depending on what they were to do in consideration of the bribe.
I don't think he was suggesting a direct bribe to an individual on the committee. But if Dad gave ten million bucks towards the building fund for the new library (or whatever), you had better believe that the Dad's children will be accepted. Regardless of anything. Now surely you don't think that "W" got into Harvard on his own merit do you?
 
Semantics. Certain hopeful students are given preference based on race and gender, taking spots from those with higher marks.

And you have yet to show evidence of that.
 
Too little democracy, and professors under the thumb of top heavy administration. Then there is the textbook and lecturer indoctrination of students issue.
 
My problem with Academia us that they produce worse results with increased funding and viciously oppose any Michelle Rhee type actually fixing problems & firing ineffective educators. You cannot even try to help without administrators scolding you for "suggesting that the system is failing these kids" when pointing out a failure or bad idea.

Their standards are terrible, according to Academia proficiency is being years behind. They treat tracking like a bad thing, as if the bad students who will amount weren't hard to identify and aren't ruining the educations of those interested in learning. What pisses me off most is when my teacher friends, who already had tenure before age 27, complain about being underpaid despite having my wage, plus benefits unheard of in the private sector @ such a pay grade, and more time off a year than I will have in my lifetime.
 
There are many, many things wrong with the way universities are run. Below are a few thoughts I had earlier, please feel free to chime in with an opinion.


1. Tenure - Lifetime job security is the antithesis of competition. Competition leads to productivity and higher job performance.

Example: The University of Colorado professor who taught his students that the United States provoked the 9/11 attacks. CU refused to fire him, citing tenure, until the public scrutiny just got to be too much for them to bear. Ward Churchill September 11 attacks essay controversy - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

University presidents have no power - all the major decisions are made by faculty. Collective decision-making by hundreds of prima donnas, none of whom can be fired or even demoted for being wrong, is not a system that any other institution has adopted anywhere else in the world. It is like Congress without elections -- a formula for total irresponsibility and self-indulgence.


2. College Athletics - If you want to see slave labor in action in 2012, look no further than college football. These student athletes bring in billions of dollars of revenue to the schools, to the television networks, yet they are entirely unpaid. Why? So that college athletics can keep its tax-exempt status. Unlike baseball, the NFL does not want to run a minor league. So they farm the work out to the universities, and everybody makes money. Everybody except, of course, the kids doing the actual labor.

Example: O'Bannon v. NCAA could impact more than video games - Michael McCann - SI.com


3. Scandals in College Athletics - The last point reminds me of this point. College athletes are not subjected to the same academic standards as other students. The University of North Carolina was recently found to have been giving out free "A's" to football players in an African American Studies course. Too bad the players never actually attended the courses.

But what really takes the cake is the Penn State scandal. Here you had nearly a decade of disgusting child abuse, which was knowingly covered up by the university. The Freeh Report on Pennsylvania State University | Judge Louis Freeh investigation on PSU

I know of only two elitist, closed societies capable of such a coverup.... academia and the catholic church.


4. Other coverups - It doesn't begin and end with athletes. A study conducted in 2009 found that many colleges were covering up the number of rapes on campus in order to make their campus appear safer and more attractive to parents. This is, in fact, a pattern: Campus Rape Victims: A Struggle For Justice : NPR


5. Grad Students - But let's get off the topic of coverups, and get back on the topic of slave labor. Big-name universities will lavish six-figure salaries on deconstructionist professors whose chief claim to fame is that other deconstructionist professors like them, while freshmen are being taught by low-budget graduate students, many of whom are from foreign countries and do not speak intelligible English.

That is why hundreds of students can be packed like sardines into a huge lecture hall for Economics 1, taught by some junior faculty member without enough clout to get out of teaching anything so elementary.

Meanwhile, some senior professor in the same department may hold a little boutique seminar for six in his pet sub-specialty, far off the beaten track from anything that undergraduates need to know.

When budget-crunch time comes, two classes of Economics 1 with 400 students each may be more likely to be combined into one class with 800 students than is the big-name professor's seminar to be touched.


6. University Admissions - They are just plain unfair, and do not reward achievement. For example, why do universities have legacy admissions? Who cares if your uncle attended Harvard, or if your mother attended Princeton? That should have nothing at all to do with whether you are admitted.

Then you have race and gender quotas. Rather than being admitted purely on academic merit, students are admitted due to the melanin count in their skin or their genitalia.

I haven't even mentioned the number of foreign students. Why should American taxpayers subsidize the education of a student from India or Korea?

Next, you have people with money. If you have money, you can get in anywhere, regardless of how dumb you are.


7. University Tuition - College tuition is just ridiculous. It is the most expensive thing most families will ever pay for aside from their home. It's the number one reason young people will go in to debt when they're starting out. In the past year alone, tuition for four-year public universities rose 8.3 percent for in-state students and 5.7 percent for out-of-state students. Why is that? Because they are run so inefficiently.

Ronald Ehrenberg, a labor economist at Cornell, cited “the shared system of governance between trustees, administrators, and faculty” at many universities, which “guarantees that ... institutions will be slow to react to cost pressures.”

http://net.educause.edu/ir/library/pdf/ffp0005s.pdf


8. Research Grant Funding - Research grant funding is a must to keep a scientific projects advancing. It costs money for materials and equipment in addition to personnel to undertake a research project.

Now, private money is private money, and I'm not really concerned about that.

Who gets the public money and why? As a taxpayer, I feel this process should be transparent and that I should have some input, along with other taxpayers. Instead, this process is farmed out to various government agencies who clearly have political agendas.

Funding of science - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia


9. Wasteful Spending - This goofy grand funding process leads to a lot of studies being done that are simply a waste of money. But don't worry, Americans aren't the only ones. A group of Japanese scientists, led by a professor Yuki Sugiyama of Nagoya University, recently determined the reason commuters are occasionally caught in traffic jams is because there are too many cars on the road.

Groundbreaking stuff.

10. Left-wing Politics - Universities are the nerve center for liberal thought and liberal politics. The vastly disproportionate presence of leftist professors on university campuses across the United States has been well documented. One of the more significant studies on this subject was conducted in 2003 by the Center for the Study of Popular Culture (CSPC), which examined the ratio of registered Democrats to registered Republicans on the faculties of 32 elite colleges and universities nationwide.

In its examinations of more than 150 departments and upper-level administrations at the 32 elite colleges and universities, the CSPC found that the overall ratio of registered Democrats to registered Republicans was more than 10 to 1 (1397 Democrats, 134 Republicans).

I can't agree with any of this. You're obviously not a college graduate. And there is no competition in college, as there are tried and true courses taught, with the professors competing with each other to get the most students.

What is a "liberal" education? That all men have the opportunity to advance in life? That we take care of the earth on accounta we live here? That human rights are human rights and that religion has created more dark ages than science?
 
Colleges get busted cooking their admissions scores to get a bump up in the US News rankings periodically. It is big business and they want to make their freshmen admits look smarter than they actually are.
 
The obvious counter-argument is that becomes increasingly difficult (though not impossible) to hold on to consevative opinions as you gain education. One feature of conservative thinking is that it tends towards exclusivism. This seems to be true by nature; conservative principles want to preserve tradition, and tradition isn't diverse. The problem is that education exposes one to diverse ideas. If one manages to remain a conservative after such a program, it must be because some principle retains its clarity and force in the mind. While certainly not impossible, it becomes quite difficult.

Not really. Exposure to diversity is quite the ticket for strengthening one's own intellectual work. The work has to meet the test and be generally accepted by most of the Academy, so being challenged by diverse and oppositional viewpoints is a great opportunity.
 
nota bene said:
Not really. Exposure to diversity is quite the ticket for strengthening one's own intellectual work. The work has to meet the test and be generally accepted by most of the Academy, so being challenged by diverse and oppositional viewpoints is a great opportunity.

I agree with everything except the "Not really," because I'm not sure how what you've said is an argument against my point. Could you elaborate?
 
Certainly. What I meant is that it is not even necessarily difficult (much less impossible) to hold onto conservative opinions as one gains an education. I'm more educated today than I was ten years ago and also more conservative in some ways.
 
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