You said, 'The funding for the real sciences can be kept' this is the only thing that I disagree with. Public funding is what has turned the sciences into garbage. The takeover of science by government since World War II has ground all science to a halt. Inspiration has a horrible fear of crowds and money and disappears as soon as either of them shows up.(much like Christ in the Gospels interestingly enough) Somehow, Science needed the buildings full of old rat turds and mold. It can only be done by the obsessed old coot. When the high dollar government labs staffed by well paid normal people came in, the Truth left and only the grant writing remained.
It's hard to trust "science" when we have situations like:
- The NIH controlling $30 billion in grants essential being a monopoly over what research gets done. Combined with the incestuous relationship with big-pharma means all research is profit-driven and not always objective.
- Evolution is real but race differences aren't
- Same sex attraction being removed from the list of mental illnesses for purely political reasons
- Global warming alarmism for 40 years with no noticeable changes in real life
- The global warming people don't seem to care about all the poison we are spraying on crops
- "Sciencey" people are very smug and annoying even though they usually know way less than they act like
"Higher Education" has always been awash with PhDs who think that because they've mastered some arcane bit of one particular field, that they can opine and make policy in completely unrelated areas.
Now, however, since "Higher Education" has devolved (rather rapidly) into mere credentialism, their idiocy has become more and more apparent.
There's an Instapundit quote that I can't find right now that goes something like "When conservatives start defunding the sources of liberal idiocy, the professors will blame it on anti-intellectualism."
There is a certain academic whose educational materials I have used extensively with my children. She seemed to be a very down-to-earth person, using classical educational methods that removed all the fluff of modern pedagogy and gave a reasonably balanced view of the different empires, refusing to force fit all of them with modern morality. Imagine my shock when I read her Twitter and found her to be an absolute loon when it came to politics. Talk about a disappointment.
The lesson is academia should be more like something in Hesse's The Glass Bead Game. Let them obsess about their niche interests and stay out of the real world.
Even absent the socialist front aspect of other parts of academia, there is also substantial unprofessional behavior in the sciences, at least in the biological sciences. Example: Territoriality motivating negative reviews of manuscripts submitted by persons previously unpublished in the subdiscipline, especially if they are offering novel ideas. Example: Territoriality by a graduate professor regarding whether a student in the same department can investigate an organism that the professor has merely considered investigating himself. Example: A professor using the students in a general graduate seminar to do a literature search within his personal research program. Outside of H-indices and grant funding, there is little accountability, particularly regarding moral behavior.
Not to put too fine a point on it, but when I reflect on the damage they've done to once functioning institutions, I come away thinking I won't be satisfied until the last of these Leninists has been pushed out of a helicopter (in minecraft).
Make the admittance a competition and select only the top IQ & conscientious, make it (almost) free for the winners and make professorship tenure for a fixed period, say 10 years. It should be short enough for them to find a good job in the industry and are incentivized to do so. Focus universities on (fundamental) research and mentoring, not mass education. Fund the professors well so no time is wasted on a highly skewed grant competition that is rigged anyway and puts lots of bureaucrats in power.
The education for the rest of the population should be managed by much smaller & more topic focused vocational schooling that should refrain from doing research.
Universities should become academia again and not breeding farms for an apparatchik class. The sorting by IQ (ok, maybe less today with affirmative action and *-studies), the homogeneous political indoctrination, an almost perfect virtual world they live in that is almost perfectly shielded from the vagaries of nature, and the IQ breeding effect by putting together the sexes at prime mating age is creating a ruling class that imho will destroy what the enlightenment gave us.
There is your kind of obsession about leftism and socialism. Who knows? Maybe you will send leftist scientist to concentration camps if you could. You defended mccarthyism. Scientists are largely leftist. Because socialism is smart people ideology. Cold and painful fact.
My preferred method of cutting back on university education is to reduce the availability and subsidy of subsidized student loans based on how much of the student’s course load is outside of non-remedial STEM courses. For example, require the student to immediately start paying interest on a percent of their total loan equal to 100% minus the percent represented by non-remedial STEM courses that the student has passed.
Also, it seems to me that, as a matter of consumer transparency, the federal government ought to produce statistics that predict the additional earnings that a student can expect by graduating with each specific major from each specific university. I’m pretty sure that the government already gets individualized data about loan recipient, so adding major to that wouldn’t be hard. And they already get earned income data at the IRS. They can correlate them by SSN, then produce a regression analysis. That would be really interesting.
I think there is definitely something to be said about scientists getting involved in politics. Perhaps it is wrong, and reduces trust in the institutions.
But were they wrong about Donald Trump? As far as I could personally tell, Mr. Trump was an incredibly anti-science president who's tenure was damaging in many regards. Should a different organization have been the ones to issue their disapproval? Or were they wrong about Donald Trump?
You said, 'The funding for the real sciences can be kept' this is the only thing that I disagree with. Public funding is what has turned the sciences into garbage. The takeover of science by government since World War II has ground all science to a halt. Inspiration has a horrible fear of crowds and money and disappears as soon as either of them shows up.(much like Christ in the Gospels interestingly enough) Somehow, Science needed the buildings full of old rat turds and mold. It can only be done by the obsessed old coot. When the high dollar government labs staffed by well paid normal people came in, the Truth left and only the grant writing remained.
It's hard to trust "science" when we have situations like:
- The NIH controlling $30 billion in grants essential being a monopoly over what research gets done. Combined with the incestuous relationship with big-pharma means all research is profit-driven and not always objective.
- Evolution is real but race differences aren't
- Same sex attraction being removed from the list of mental illnesses for purely political reasons
- Global warming alarmism for 40 years with no noticeable changes in real life
- The global warming people don't seem to care about all the poison we are spraying on crops
- "Sciencey" people are very smug and annoying even though they usually know way less than they act like
"Higher Education" has always been awash with PhDs who think that because they've mastered some arcane bit of one particular field, that they can opine and make policy in completely unrelated areas.
Now, however, since "Higher Education" has devolved (rather rapidly) into mere credentialism, their idiocy has become more and more apparent.
There's an Instapundit quote that I can't find right now that goes something like "When conservatives start defunding the sources of liberal idiocy, the professors will blame it on anti-intellectualism."
There is a certain academic whose educational materials I have used extensively with my children. She seemed to be a very down-to-earth person, using classical educational methods that removed all the fluff of modern pedagogy and gave a reasonably balanced view of the different empires, refusing to force fit all of them with modern morality. Imagine my shock when I read her Twitter and found her to be an absolute loon when it came to politics. Talk about a disappointment.
The lesson is academia should be more like something in Hesse's The Glass Bead Game. Let them obsess about their niche interests and stay out of the real world.
Even absent the socialist front aspect of other parts of academia, there is also substantial unprofessional behavior in the sciences, at least in the biological sciences. Example: Territoriality motivating negative reviews of manuscripts submitted by persons previously unpublished in the subdiscipline, especially if they are offering novel ideas. Example: Territoriality by a graduate professor regarding whether a student in the same department can investigate an organism that the professor has merely considered investigating himself. Example: A professor using the students in a general graduate seminar to do a literature search within his personal research program. Outside of H-indices and grant funding, there is little accountability, particularly regarding moral behavior.
Not to put too fine a point on it, but when I reflect on the damage they've done to once functioning institutions, I come away thinking I won't be satisfied until the last of these Leninists has been pushed out of a helicopter (in minecraft).
Yes! Defund universities.
Make the admittance a competition and select only the top IQ & conscientious, make it (almost) free for the winners and make professorship tenure for a fixed period, say 10 years. It should be short enough for them to find a good job in the industry and are incentivized to do so. Focus universities on (fundamental) research and mentoring, not mass education. Fund the professors well so no time is wasted on a highly skewed grant competition that is rigged anyway and puts lots of bureaucrats in power.
The education for the rest of the population should be managed by much smaller & more topic focused vocational schooling that should refrain from doing research.
Universities should become academia again and not breeding farms for an apparatchik class. The sorting by IQ (ok, maybe less today with affirmative action and *-studies), the homogeneous political indoctrination, an almost perfect virtual world they live in that is almost perfectly shielded from the vagaries of nature, and the IQ breeding effect by putting together the sexes at prime mating age is creating a ruling class that imho will destroy what the enlightenment gave us.
There is your kind of obsession about leftism and socialism. Who knows? Maybe you will send leftist scientist to concentration camps if you could. You defended mccarthyism. Scientists are largely leftist. Because socialism is smart people ideology. Cold and painful fact.
Subscribe to Retraction Watch (https://retractionwatch.com/) and see how bad current science, or really current academia generally, really is.
Amen
My preferred method of cutting back on university education is to reduce the availability and subsidy of subsidized student loans based on how much of the student’s course load is outside of non-remedial STEM courses. For example, require the student to immediately start paying interest on a percent of their total loan equal to 100% minus the percent represented by non-remedial STEM courses that the student has passed.
Also, it seems to me that, as a matter of consumer transparency, the federal government ought to produce statistics that predict the additional earnings that a student can expect by graduating with each specific major from each specific university. I’m pretty sure that the government already gets individualized data about loan recipient, so adding major to that wouldn’t be hard. And they already get earned income data at the IRS. They can correlate them by SSN, then produce a regression analysis. That would be really interesting.
I think there is definitely something to be said about scientists getting involved in politics. Perhaps it is wrong, and reduces trust in the institutions.
But were they wrong about Donald Trump? As far as I could personally tell, Mr. Trump was an incredibly anti-science president who's tenure was damaging in many regards. Should a different organization have been the ones to issue their disapproval? Or were they wrong about Donald Trump?
Colleges that secretly, and illegally, discriminate against hiring Republican Professors and admin workers should lose tax exempt status.