SUNY-Albany cut its French and Classics programs this year.
What are they up to up there?
For me, French is a valuable language. I've probably read several thousand books in that language, and lived in Paris for a year. I loved that city! When you learn a language, it's to read the literature and travel in that culture, I should assume.
Now of course dead languages don't offer the physical capability of actual travel, other than mental. But that's significant. The ancient Greeks wrote tremendous things. Even the Romans wrote good things.
A friend of mine suggested that far more valuable than French would be Arabic. But if you were a woman, why on earth would you wish to study Arabic? What would it offer you? Upon graduation, would you get a burkha and a clitorectomy, and move to Saudi Arabia, where you couldn't go outside without supervision?
I grant that someone needs to study that language so we can monitor the situation. But what aesthetic pleasures would the language offer?
If you were a woman, you could only speak with other women, or else you'd be considered a whore, and get yourself raped and killed. That's value added education.
If you were a man, you could only speak with other men, and your job would be to not get converted.
The men would either convert you or kill you. That sounds like fun. From the basic conversation book:
"Infidel, you must convert!"
"I won't!"
"Then die!"
(Muffled screams.)
Ayaan Hirsi Ali says there are fewer than 300 books published in the entirety of Islam every year. So what would you read if you could read that language? this would presumably include Pashto, Farsi, and all the other languages of Islam.
Are there newspapers with diverse viewpoints?
Do they publish comic novels by women in Tehran these days?
Do they publish comic novels anywhere in the Islamic world?
Who is the Wodehouse of Islam?
I assume that if you're going to learn to read another language, you would first fall in love with the culture, and then by way of deepening and intensifying that love, you'd learn to read their literature, just as you would have a long conversation with someone you loved. A big part of love is sharing laughs.
I can't see how you would do this with Arabic.
I could see how you would do this with French.
Or even with Classics. Aristophanes is a hoot. Plautus was a hoot.
Since there are so few books published, why would anybody want to enter the Arabic world? Ali claims that most of the books are just commentaries on the Koran. sounds like a barrel of laughs.
If you became a Muslim, of course you'd want to do this, since you'd fallen in love with the one who can't be drawn.
Seriously, I'm sorry they scrapped the French program at SUNY-Albany. Apparently, there weren't many people taking the program. They were graduating just a few students every year. I don't know why. Maybe there wasn't enough outreach.
So let's replace it with Arabic?
I can imagine millions of women students lining up to take COMIC NOVELS OF SAUDI ARABIAN WOMEN WRITERS, PART II.
I see the closure as part of the damnation of the west by the so-called postcolonials. The west is evil. Hey ho, hey ho, western civ has got to go, as the Maoists chanted on the ramparts of 1968.
So let's study Arabic, and see if we can get in on their comic literature. Seems like a great idea. Still, before we leap in and commit ten years to the project, who is their Jane Austen?
Tuesday, December 14, 2010
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
89 comments:
Sadly, the teaching of the classics is right out because someone might get the idea that history or art are valuable in and of themselves and not as propaganda.
Kirby,
I've done a bit of hunting around.
State governments are facing grave financial difficulties, e.g., I found an article that claims that NY State is facing an $11B deficit for this fiscal year. State governments can't run deficits, and there's no help coming from the federal government, due to policies you favor, and because of politicians you've helped elect. So cuts are going to be made, and of necessity they're going to be deep and painful. The SUNY system will suffer, along with other public university systems.
The standard responses of Universities under financial duress include staff cuts, faculty hiring freezes, and lots of pressure on anything that resembles "discretionary" spending. This is a nice way of saying that you should expect to have to buy your own pens and paper clips this year, and don't be surprised if the departmental Xerox machine goes away. Cut deep enough, and even this doesn't work. The only way to get out of tenure commitments absent faculty misconduct is to close entire programs. This is rarely done for lots of good reasons, but it appears to be what's being done here. I assume (and I haven't found arguments to the contrary), that the usual cost cutting has proven insufficient.
This is part of the reason for the "counter-cyclic lean" that characterizes competent government (i.e., the kind you oppose) at the federal level. It's a lot easier to destroy infrastructure (and I would argue that the State University systems are critical infrastructure in terms of our future economic competitiveness, and this includes French programs) than to build it, and it's often worthwhile accepting a short term loss to preserve infrastructure. But "worthwhile" loses to "impossible."
As for the particular programs that got cut, it's not clear to me whether (a) the President of SUNY Albany is a knuckledragger who doesn't appreciate the true importance of French, etc. (your thesis), (b) a competent manager who forced to take the least damaging from a menu of appalling alternatives (this seems most probable to me), or (c) a riverboat gambler who's betting that the outright cut of a high-visibility program at a high-prestige campus is going to result in legislative response that will enable him to preserve the asset. If (c), I'm thinking he's going to lose.
And when the time comes to rebuild, it's going to be a hard job. The disciplines will remember who got shoved off the boat first. History can make rebuilding harder than the original "green field" build.
In the meantime, your blathering about Arabic shows a lack of understanding of what's happening here. As I understand it, all languages except Spanish are getting the axe, and this presumably includes Arabic. Theater's going too. This isn't a French vs. Arabic issue. It's the Department of Language, Literatures, and Cultures vs. the Department of Anthropology vs. Department of Chemistry, etc., issue.
Funding has been difficult in this state since 9/11 when NYC was hammered by the jets that hit the WTC. We lost 500 billion in that one day.
Not sure what Democrats or Republicans had to do with that, except that Clinton had the chance to take out OBL and passed.
Business has been moving out of NYC into NJ and other areas since we took that hit. We need tax revenues to make funding, and without business going strong, we don't have needed revenues. So the Democrats have the tax and spend policies that do give us short term funding.
That is, they believe in the colleges and the parks and everything else, including children, and paying for the poor, and on and on, but ultimately the coffers are depleted and the business community departs, tired of being fleeced, and simply wanting to make a profit.
So there has to be a balance, but the balance has to be on the side of business revenues first.
The Romans ran out of money as did the Athenians from time to time.
Similar issues?
خيام اگر ز باده مستى خوش باش
با ماه رخى اگر نشستى خوش باش
چون عاقبت كار جهان نيستى است
انگار كه نيستى، چو هستى خوش باش
If with wine you are drunk be happy,
If seated with a moon-faced girl, be happy,
Since the end purpose of the universe is nothing-ness;
Hence picture your nothing-ness, then while you are, be happy
It's Persian not Arabic, but still.
Langauges are fun, but are they practical. If you are an emergency service worker in the US I suppose Spanish may be practical. Go with Mandarin if you think this continent is no longer the place to be. Arabic and farsi could help you get a job at the NSA. Such jobs have very good benefit packages, I hear.
Me, I'm learning French, but on the cheap (free).
Kirby,
Funding has been difficult in this state since 9/11 when NYC was hammered by the jets that hit the WTC. We lost 500 billion in that one day.
This is what is called a secular term, and it's the sort of thing that policy makers have to adjust to. The WTC is not coming back. If there is long term revenue decline, this has to be reflected in statewide budgets. I suspect that policy makers (of both parties, see below) believed that the NYC economy would rebound in time. They may still prove to be right, but the gamble looks worse with each passing day.
Not sure what Democrats or Republicans had to do with that, except that Clinton had the chance to take out OBL and passed.
You really don't want to try this. GWB had actionable intelligence too, not such as to enable the assassination of OBL AFAIK, but instead specific intelligence regarding commercial airliner flight training by al Qaeda operatives, and he passed on it. This is all spelled out in bitter detail in Richard Clark's book.
No, I was referring to opposition to further stimulus, which supported state budgets until this year. And yes, this did increase the federal deficit. The fundamental policy question is whether the forces that drove the deficit increase were secular (i.e., long term) or ephemeral/periodic (i.e., short term). I.e., do we believe that the US economy will recover from the financial crash or not? Deficit spending at the government level makes sense in the second scenario because it enables a faster/fuller recovery, but not the first because it amounts to digging a deeper hole. Of course, your economists see us as being in the "deeper hole" scenario, which is why LLC is getting the axe at Albany. What makes me angry about this is that there's a stronger correlation between what conservative economists believe and the party currently in power, than there is between what conservative economists believe and the objective state of the economy. Democrats are in charge now, so deficit spending is bad. They'll sing a different song if Republicans are ever in charge again, even if there is no objective change in the economic conditions. This is why I view them as contemptible hacks. Because they are.
Anyway... cause, effect. Kill the stimulus, kill LLC. This is the sort of cutting of federal deficit spending that you're supposed to be applauding. After all, if French really is that important, surely some rich patron will step forward to support it out of the money they saved by extension of the irresponsible and unsustainable Bush tax cuts. Let me know how that works out for you, ok?
Business has been moving out of NYC into NJ and other areas since we took that hit. We need tax revenues to make funding, and without business going strong, we don't have needed revenues. So the Democrats have the tax and spend policies that do give us short term funding.
This is a secular issue. And perhaps the Democrats in State government have some responsibility, but my recollection is that the NY Senate was under Republican control prior to '09, and action by both houses is necessary to pass the budget. So it might be more honest (if less palatable) to say that both parties conspired to maintain unsustainable expenditures, and so share responsibility. The reasonable inference is that you're thinking that LLC should have been cut years ago, right?
The Romans ran out of money as did the Athenians from time to time.
I don't know the Roman example. The Athenian? Sure, I've read Thucydides. Starting wars you can't pay for is a bad idea, then as now. To the best of my recollection, states haven't made war in this country since 1865, as the making of war is a power reserved to the federal government. So I don't see what the Athenian example has to do with NY state's current difficulties.
Similar issues?
No.
William, there is a terrific language program in French called The Capretz Method. It was on public TV about twenty years ago with a somewhat fun TV series where you learned phrases in comic scenarios set in Paris. It got criticized because the conversations had you picking up women, and feminists got very mad about it, so the program was shut down on some campuses.
But I liked it, and didn't mind the pick up lines (though it would have been awkward in an actual class, I just learned it on my own, as you are doing).
If you could somehow find that method (maybe parts of it are online), I'd recommend it.
Bonne chance!
what system are you using at present? For me, there has to be a lot of humor when I'm learning a language.
One of my favorite sentences in French:
Mon chauffeur a ete frappe par an eclair!
Very useful!
Kirby, there's quite a variety of opinions about the SUNY-Albany administration's decision to terminate their French, Italian, Russian, and Classics programmes at the "Inside Higher Ed" site (http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2010/10/04/albany#Comments).
Of the hundred or so commentators (some SUNY-Albany faculty members of the afflicted department) stu's crude "[k]ill the [federal]stimulus, kill [a state university] LLC" formula doesn't seem to be attracting much attention. Perhaps he might consider contributing the views of a devoted Krugman (who a decade ago was cheering on the disastrous housing bubble) and "scapegoat-the-R's-for-everything-though-we're-in-charge" acolyte to the mix.
At any rate, in the IHE exchange some point out the costs of SUNY-Albany departments like "Media Relations," "Diversity and Affirmative Action," "Office of Environmental Sustainability," "HIV/AIDS Information Center" (separate from the U's Health Center), etc. as more worthy of elimination as mere ancillaries to the central teaching and research missions of the school. Several others think intercollegiate athletic programmes (which in their view are not even ancillary to a higher education mission) should first be eliminated; others think sociology, education, ethnic and gender "studies," social welfare, etc. might first be dropped to save the languages.
I do think that language programmes at mid-size universities (if they're still worthy of the name without a robust array of classical and modern language departments) suffer from the miserable lack of pre-college emphasis and requirements in foreign languages. In this European and East Asian students are far ahead of ours. In spite of all the multi-culties' blathering about diversity, serious study of another culture begins with language study.
One question taken up in the past few years by commentators like Glenn Reynolds (Law prof at the U of Tennessee) and others is whether there is a higher-ed bubble about to burst, given the astonishing rise in tuition rates (now over a hundred schools charge over 50K a year for undergrad tuition). One reason for this Reynolds and others give is, pace stu, the ever-increasing federal school loan programme that funds those tuition rises.
It's a very broad story. I am not so much lamenting or second-guessing the decision (I don't have the facts, and wasn't part of the process).
I'm just reporting it.
& I love French!
I like some of James' ideas.
http://www.cbs6albany.com/articles/university-1278894-programs-suny.html
There's a bit more there.
JADL,
stu's crude "[k]ill the [federal]stimulus, kill [a state university] LLC" formula doesn't seem to be attracting much attention
Doesn't mean it's not valid. No one is disputing that there have been very deep cuts (22%-ish) from the state, nor that deeper cuts are looming. This reflects decreases in state tax revenue.
No, the debate on the web site you cited took the cuts for granted, which struck me as deeply sad. Sure, you can cut media relations, thin the herd of VPs, and cut intercollegiate athletics. I'm certainly sympathetic, but it does little good to argue which finger to stick in the hole in the dike when the water's coming over the top. The fund part is that we'll get to argue this all over again next year, with the next tranch of cuts.
You wanted small government, now you're getting it. This is what it means--that the programs that government supports via tax revenues are going to loose their funding. When you starve the beast, not only does it die, but so too do the institutions that are dependent on it. If they can't make it on their own, then they don't make it. You and I might value a classical education, but that doesn't mean that Albany can run a French department at a profit. So away it goes, whether this year, next year, or the year after hardly matters. The market has spoken.
I can't for the life of me understand why you're running from this. This is just the first taste of the working out of your principles in practice, a down payment on the destruction of the SUNY system (and most state university systems). Your signature accomplishment. You should own it, and take pride in it, and not whine about it like some pathetic sentimental advocate for the poor.
The Capretz method has a wikipedia page.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/French_in_Action
Thanks for pointing it out. They say the film has a cult following.
Since I live now in a French speaking city, I have been picking up vocabulary from signs, labels, menus, and interactions with store clerks. When I encounter a new word I look it up.
This site from U-Texas has been helpful for simple grammar.
http://www.laits.utexas.edu/tex/
When driving I listen to Learn French by Podcast, which can be downloaded for free.
I have also been reading random French wikipedia pages. It is not so hard to work out what the words I don't know have to mean if I have a little context.
If the government were to cease subsidizing education, this is just a fortaste of what would happen. I am crazy enough to suppose that most formal education is simply a waste of time and money, and would like to see the grip of the BA on the job market loosened. I think the future of education will be far less formal than it currently is. At the end of my Bachelors, I thought, this could all have been accomplished with a list of books and problem sets, which would have costed a few hundred dollars tops, and not a few 10's of thousands.
Despite years of schooling, the idea of forking money over to take a class in something just seems like a foolish way to learn. I'll try to obtain the knowledge for free somehow else.
This is just the first taste of the working out of your principles in practice, a down payment on the destruction of the SUNY system (and most state university systems). Your signature accomplishment. You should own it, and take pride in it, and not whine about it like some pathetic sentimental advocate for the poor.
Sheesh. Really?
Of course departments and classes are going to get cut. They get cut all the time.
The argument here is about what is getting cut--not the "silly" classes, but those that have a long history of contributing to knowledge.
And one can hardly make the argument that this is the intention of a cry for "smaller government" while a program like DHS bloats and gropes its way out of control.
Having said that, if one simply cries for "smaller government" but is not specific, this (and similar situations) is not an unlikely result.
Much like those who cry "why won't someone think of the children" or "let us help the poor" are responsible for the sorry state of our over-privileged underclass.
The instruction, now as always, is to be specific when you are giving instructions.
Also, it is dire fallacy to "argue" for smaller government.
Logical arguments are the joy and territory of the rational thinker. The rational thinker is the lover of bureaucracy, rules, and structure.
It is the reasonable thinker who craves simplicity and organic sense. But the reasonable generally loses to the rational because words are so easily used in the cause of rationality--wheres reason generally has only "yes, this is true, why can't you see it?" as its rallying cry.
Downsizing is going to happen, but it doesn't mean that government itself should disappear. I don't think anyone is arguing for that. The SUNY system is enormous and important. Some of the arguments against French, among others, is that there are other French departments available, and that this particular one wasn't graduating very many students.
Similar arguments were made in Britain under Thatcher that books that hadn't been taken out in a while should be removed from the major university libraries and sold at auction.
This notion of learning as a kind of business, and that the bottom line should be the only deciding factor in whether or not something is retained, is quite barbaric. While there is a business is the only business of America mentality in business schools and in management areas (that history for instance already happened and so is no longer of any importance) is quite bizarre and alien to probably all of us who come here to argue, while not making any direct profit out of it, but doing it only to learn new things.
But Stu's weird assessment -- if you want to stop the redistribution of wealth from those who've worked hard for it to those who've done nothing, then you should accept that no one should learn Greek or French at SUNY-Albany seems also to be an erratic causal chain that I for one just couldn't follow.
I do think government should maintain parks, libraries, schools, and other places that hold the beauty of our culture.
It's very hard to make distinctions and to be clear about our instructions, but without that government can become a blind Cyclops, smashing institutions into the ground, without any rage, but just willy-nilly, and perhaps using cost as the only criterion.
So we smash hospitals, and universities, and parks?
There ought to be cost-studies, but also some care to thinking about the symbolism.
I personally think that France suffered quite a loss of prestige over the last twenty years due to their non-supportiveness of our strikes in the Middle East (Britain went along, but France largely did not).
Now that they have Sarkozy, hasn't that changed? The French have been our allies since the Revolutionary War. They are not JUST cheese addicts.
I personally find Foucault and Lacan and many other postmodernists to be simply appalling. But there is also the France of Sarkozy, of Maritain, and Etienne Gilson, and of Rene Girard and more decent people, with actual brains and a sense of judgment.
The west needs to keep its allies, and to keep its links of communication open with them.
I don't think on the other hand we can be friends with the Arabs. To my mind they are at least as bad as the Nazis. The Jews are our friends, on the other hand. They are a small people numerically, but they are worth their weight in sacks of gold.
We might be able to be friends with the Sufis.
But we can never be friends with the Osama Bin Laden crowd.
Or Hamas.
Or any other terror-driven group that would cut our throats at the first opportunity.
we also need to maintain our links to classical Greece and Rome, and of course to Hebrew and Yiddish.
This requires some thinking about symbolic importance.
If we only thought about the bottom line, everyone should learn Chinese.
I reject Maoism, and Mao, and everything to do with Marxist secularization.
stu, I think Kirby was right to suggest that the LLC funding/allocation problem at SUNY-Albany is complex. It's simplistic to blame only free market or limited-government advocates for this problem, for political conservatives, along with like-minded political liberals, have ever been among the staunchest defenders of the traditional liberal arts curriculum that includes classical and foreign languages. For example, one political conservative and traditional liberal arts advocate, Candace de Russy, once chaired SUNY-Albany's French department.
And that includes encouragement for linguistic autodidacts like William Barghest--bonne chance et meilleurs voeux, Guillaume!
It seems the lack of a sufficient internal "market" for classical and foreign languages at SUNY-Albany has in great part prompted the cuts. Their study requires a steady application and discipline to which too few students there seem willing to submit. In the IHE discussion one student who minored in Latin there contrasted a challenging and enlightening Latin class she took with only two others with her sociology class of 300 in which she says she learned "not one thing." Too often colleges and mid-size universities have become welfare programmes for otherwise idle and unemployed youth, and the lack of adequate preparation in languages (even in their own) combined with the dropping of language requirements in a watered-down, unfocused curriculum allow many students to seek the low easy road to degreed and all too costly ignorance.
GM,
The argument here is about what is getting cut--not the "silly" classes, but those that have a long history of contributing to knowledge.
Right, but it's the wrong argument to have. Fighting one another over the few remaining crumbs is simply a way of deciding who gets to starve last. It's all going, the silly with the substantial, the ephemeral with the eternal.
The fights we have with one another weaken and distract us from the fight we should have.
And one can hardly make the argument that this is the intention of a cry for "smaller government" while a program like DHS bloats and gropes its way out of control.
The Republicans have been making a big deal about elitist liberal professors. Their hatred for education generally, and public education specifically, has been on public display. Their animousity specifically to France and the French likewise. Remember "American Fries." Yeah. The cutting of French specifically is no accident, but a message, and a trial balloon. If this flies, women's studies will go next, and then geophysical sciences. Eventually, all education will be vocational, and you'll have a choice between private seminaries or public business schools: God or mammon, in clear juxtaposition, with no humanistic departments standing in between. That's the vision, and it's been perfectly explicit.
BTW, "DHS" is an ambiguous reference. Human Services? Homeland Security? Good cases could be made for both in terms of bloat, although Homeland Security clearly leads the pack when it comes to groping.
Having said that, if one simply cries for "smaller government" but is not specific, this (and similar situations) is not an unlikely result.
I can't comprehend how you, and even more so Kirby and JADL can be so blind. Smaller government is a reasonably philosophical position, but it's hardly the case that all small government advocates share a coherent vision about what what should be cut and what should be retained. Yet you've entered into an alliance with anti-intellectual small government types whose vision about what should be preserved is essentially disjoint from your's, and you've provided your good names to give legitimacy to their efforts. Now they're doing what they said they were going to do all along. Surprise, surprise.
My point is that you can't have it both ways. If you're not proud of the decision to shut down LLC at Albany, then you should be embarrassed for your lack of foresight and your gullibility in your choice of allies.
GM and Kirby: Thanks for your sorting of stu's reductive polemic. I'd intended to follow with another posting, but I think I'll wait a bit, for you've anticipated several of my thoughts on this.
I thought I read in The Caged Virgin by Ayaan Hirsi Ali that the Islamic world published only 300 books a year. I did some research and found that in Iran itself there were 65,000 books published in one year alone. So that can't be true.
Maybe she meant in one country, or maybe I had this fact wrong.
Here's a list by country from UNESCO:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Books_published_per_country_per_year
At the bottom, there is Nigeria, with only 5 books.
Still, that's better than Cambodia under the Khmer Rouge?
(Did the Khmer Rouge keep written records of anything? If not, how did they do any administrative work? Or do any planning? That's another conundrum!)
Oh, now I remember the number was TRANSLATED books was 300. That's what this report argues, too:
The figures for translated books are also discouraging. The
Arab world translates about 330 books annually, one fifth of
the number that Greece translates. The cumulative total of
translated books since the Caliph Maa'moun's [sic] time (the
ninth century) is about 100,000, almost the average that Spain
translates in one year. (AHDR 2002, p. 78)
This is from a foot note in the article that I just gave about the Arabic world.
I don't know if French was specifically slated because of their lack of support for the Bush interventions in Afghanistan and Iraq.
You'd have to argue that that was the same for Theatre and Classics.
Just because the Actors' Guild was not gung ho, the Theatre Department got cut?
Just because there was not a rousing cheer from Ancient Greece, Classics got cut?
I can't see the logic in this.
If it's numbers of students, that makes more sense. But what about all the programs that didn't get cut? HIV Awareness, for instance, or Office of Environmental Sustainability. how many students have they got?
Difficulty is another area that James mentions.
That's probably associated with the number of students, but it also has to do with employability at the other end?
Where do you work if you majored in Latin or Greek (those societies being long gone).
It's not as if you can be a translator for the UN.
I knew a woman at the UW who had a Ph.D. in Tibetan.
She was a secretary in a program where I once worked as her assistant.
You'd think that French would still be a decent livelihood but even at the UW you had the sense that French was falling apart. there just weren't going to be any jobs in anything but Spanish.
So I'm not questioning the decision itself so much to cut these programs, but lamenting that this is the way the world is going.
The local high school offers only German and Spanish.
French and Latin used to be possibilities in my high school, which was smaller than our local high school.
Why have we turned against French and Latin?
Is this part of a larger trend? If so, what exactly is the trend?
away from intellectual endeavor for its own sake, and toward a purely business ethic?
Kirby,
This notion of learning as a kind of business, and that the bottom line should be the only deciding factor in whether or not something is retained, is quite barbaric.
I couldn't agree more. So the question I have for you is why you've allied yourself with people who think that education can and should be reduced to dollars and cents. We have a culture, and it includes and indeed is magnified by activities whose impact is undermeasured if we count only dollars changing hands. Likewise, our culture is in continued contact with other cultures, and whether this contact takes the form of war or commerce, we need to speak their languages, and understand their literatures.
But then, the question becomes, how can these activites be supported, if the direct economic activity that they themselves generate is inadequate to sustain them? There aren't a lot of good answers. Disbursements from the government. Patronage of the rich. Are you ready to put in hours working the phone bank at the poetry fund-drive?
These verses that you so enjoy,
do not the poet yet employ,
So if you value his words so fine,
please pledge today,
at one, eight-hundred, seven-two-six, thirteen seventy-nine.
Or perhaps not. And good luck with the rich.
It seems to me that the founders did get this part right. We are the people, the government of us, by us, and for us. It is our responsibility as a people to preserve our culture, and historical this has been acted out through liberal (in the old-fashioned sense) governance. Which you're working to destroy.
What's the moral of all of this? When arsonists get burned, they cry. I'm playing a little violin for you, right now. Can't you hear it?
GM: stu's "qui m'aime, aime mon chien" ("who loves me, loves my dog") appeal is simply ludicrous.
Thus according to stu's reductio, if you think Latin or French worth keeping at university you must also support social and political advocacy clubs like women's or "queer" or "transgender" or ethnic "studies," social warfare--er--welfare departments, environmental studies, "disability studies," education, communications, "peace studies," film and pop culture "studies,"--to name just a few higher-ed sinkholes--then you "hate education." That's simply barking.
As for the silly versus the substantial, Jane Austen's Anne Elliot's reply to Captain Wentworth is apropos for stu: "You should have distinguished."
JADL,
Thus according to stu's reductio, if you think Latin or French worth keeping at university you must also support social and political advocacy clubs
I have said no such thing, nor do I believe such a think. Have you even read my arguments, or just scanned every twelfth word and assumed from that that you knew what I was saying? Let me cordially suggest that you actually read what I've written, and let my words rather than your hallucinations speak for me.
You should have distinguished.
And you should have read. Or at least demonstrated the reading comprehension that befits your education and standing.
It seems that our most productive argument might be: what constitutes the term "liberal"?
Marxism is NOT liberal.
We also have a further problem with the concept of "liberal" arts.
What are they for?
In 1880 it was something for the elite to gather up, as talking points, as conversational guideposts, sort of like the notion of the picturesque in Jane Austen's novels.
Conversation was VALUE-ADDDED.
I would argue this is still a plus, and is still the real reason for the liberal arts.
But I would also argue that the Republicans (since Lincoln) have understood this better than the Democrats.
the Democrats want unanimity on every topic, or else they punish.
The Republicans want conversation on every topic.
I don't see Republicans as the ones wanting to close the minds at the universities.
I grant that there is a wing of the Republican party that might want that (far-right evangelicals), but there is also a wing of the Democrats that might want that (far-left zombies).
In the middle, there is still room for a conversation, but the far left and far right don't really want that to continue.
Still, it is we few in the middle who decide elections, and so far, neither of the fringe groups have managed to make this country into a one-party state, except in certain institutions.
omission: ". . . if you don't, then you 'hate education.'"
Contra stu, conservatives especially have deplored the crude political utilitarianism behind the proliferation of many new departments and the corruption of more traditional ones. Leftists have rejoiced that sensible taxpayers are shaken down in order that their sons and daughters can be relentlessly propagandised by irresponsible higher-ed radicals, all the while holding legitimate contributors to a liberal arts and sciences curriculum (like classics and foreign languages) hostage. Unfortunately for schools like SUNY-Albany, it appears the hostages have been slain.
JADL,
You ascribe politics as the driver behind the proliferation of disciplines, but I see each as being driven by its own distinctive community. Disciplines driven by ephemerical political or cultural forces will die out, because there will come a generation of students for whom that discipline does merit engagement. But sometimes new disciplines stick. There was a time when Latin and Classics were upstarts. There was a time when even mathematics was young, albeit a thousand years before the founding of Rome.
The life and death of departments often parallels the life and death of their disciplines, but not always. Sometimes departments are closed because the rest of the University no longer sees them as relevant. An excellent almost-example was the attempt by the University of Rochester to shut down its graduate program in mathematics in 1995. As in the case of Albany, the immediate crisis was initiatiated by financial pressure on the University. Sometimes departments are closed because they've lost vigor, and no longer measure up to the standards of their University. This was the case in the closings of the geography and education departments at Chicago, the later of which had a celebrated history. And sometimes, Universities decide that a particular endeavor is outside of their core compentency, and they're better off without the distraction. My grandfather, for example, received an engineering degree from Gettysburg College. There was even a meat packing institute at Chicago in the '20's. Not a core competency.
You speak of crude politicial utilitarianism, yet a cursory examination of the facts of at Albany reflects not crude politics, but instead a crude business calculation made under financial duress. I think we'd agree that the priorities of the administration at Albany are entirely wrong and shortsighted. As much as I hate to see the support arms of the Universities suffer (and I tend to think more of departmental secretaries, who outnumber media people and even vice presidents, as representative of the class who will suffer most under cuts of support staff), it's easier to hire a new secretary than to build a new department. A lot easier. But this misses entirely the point I was making.
The point is that the notion that state governments should support post-secondary education is under attack these days, attack which is coming from your side, without subtlety or pretense. Ephemeral financial shocks are being used to justify permanent cuts in educational capacity and diversity, at a time when our country is falling behind the world in both educational and economic competitiveness. I see these as linked. In the meantime, your side is pursuing an attack on "liberal" academe as crude political payback. That's why French. That's why it's happening at the SUNY campus that just happens to be located at the seat of government for the state of New York.
Unfortunately for schools like SUNY-Albany, it appears the hostages have been slain.
And whose hands are have blood on them? Your proxies.
Having been around the academic block a few times, I'm here to tell you that LLC was chosen for three reasons. Once is the financial crisis, which is not imagined, but which could have been allievated through stimulus/block grants/etc. The second is the desire to send a message to academia, through a visible attack on the tenure system. And the third is that the killing the department filled the hole. Had the cut been half as large, women's studies would have been cut, and French would have survived. Next year, it probably will be women's studies. And far from seeing this as exposing how worthless your hypothesis is, you'll just applaud it and move on.
stu, your answer (in short, take the bad along with the good or the humanities are doomed) to GM's sensible call to distinguish the silly from the substantial (courses, programmes, degrees, departments, etc.) after your initial "Right . . ." is where you veered ludicrously into hyperbolic denunciations (Rs "hate education" and the French, there'll be no humanities left, it's, it's your and your kind's fault, you should be embarrassed, you're hallucinating, etc.). Know that such venting does have its humorous side, and I mostly take it cum grano salis at any rate. It does have its biblical (the jeremiad), anti-patristic (Manichaeism), and classical (the "denunciatio") antecedents in the rhetorical tradition. And Kirby's initial posting was in great part a humorous serio ludere ("to play seriously") treatment of the subject.
Kirby, as you know, the liberal arts (artes liberales) consist of a course of study (a curriculum or "running") that befits a free person who desires to know for its own sake and not simply for gain, profit, or power over others. Josef Pieper's "Leisure: The Basis of Culture" is a little book worth its weight in gold on this--I know jh is quite keen on it as well.
Pieper looks great!
There are apparently lots of Arabic language programs, plus there are new ones opening all over the country. It's a real growth industry, apparently.
Here's one just opening up at the U. of Arkansas at Little Rock:
http://ualr.edu/minors/mest/index.php/home/arabic-classes/
Some people are saying these end up as terrrrrroorrrrist recruitment centers.
I wouldn't know. I'd never thought anyone would study Arabic. What are their comic novels like? I've yet to discover anything about the comic tradition among their women writers. Anyone know anything about this?
Kirby,
There are apparently lots of Arabic language programs, plus there are new ones opening all over the country. It's a real growth industry, apparently.
Indeed. The military has been bemoaning the lack of qualified speakers of Arabic and Pashtun. We have big armies in foreign lands, and it helps if someone can chat up the locals. Likewise, there are huge support businesses, and they need local speakers too. Learning Arabic is very practical these days. It's not about culture, it's about getting a paycheck.
Kirby,
Oh, and I should add... The folks who are starting Arabic programs are indulging in the oldest of military sins, which is to say, they're preparing to fight the last war. The smart places are adding programs in Farsi and Korean. If you want French to come back, all you have to do is convince them to attack us, so that it becomes a military necessity.
Years ago there was a Peter Sellers movie called The Mouse That Roared about a Ruritanian country that attacked the US and lost in order to get redevelopment money sort of like what we gave to Germany and Japan after WWII.
Similar thinking, I guess.
We're rebuilding Afghanistan now at a tremendous cost, pouring in resoures but also destabilizing the traditional power hierarhy esp. w regard to the women (9 million of whom c
Stu:
There's a disconnect between the forces who seek to rein in big government, and the decisions about what kinds of programs to cut, when hard times ensue.
The rational response to fiscal disaster is to put one's house in order first. Increasing spending during a budgetary crisis is defensible only if the "investments" are clearly going to produce a favorable result. There's no conclusive evidence ever been brought forward to show that "giving money to the rich" produces expansion in manufacturing, or increases in employment--that's a clear disconnect.
But the decisions about what programs to shrink or eliminate in state funded schools is really a separate issue from how much money may be available at any given time.
In the sphere of education, Mr. DeLater's concept of a traditional classical education derives from the old European system, built around the privileges of the rich, who had the time and means and leisure to refine their sensibilities through a study of classical culture. American university systems adopted this "classical" model, but fitted it to our "universal" education initiative. For a long time--maybe 75 years, the public college and university system in this country continued to expand, and our comparative wealth enabled us to have practical and ideal curricula side by side. All kinds of opinion were concocted to "prove" why studying Latin and crop failures in India and feminist counterculture were all absolutely crucial to America's well-being and prosperity.
Clearly, at least 80% (if not more) of the population has no need of a bachelor's degree, no use for foreign languages, higher mathematics or science, etc. What it needs, and has always needed, is the three R's. The kind of employment we need is middle class, semi-skilled and unskilled factory and production jobs. Those who tell us that unskilled factory work is passé, and everyone needs a college degree, and we need an "educated workforce" etc., are simply ignorant.
At least 75% of our college educated population is overqualified and underpaid, based on this formula. And yet you hear cries for more foreign students--because they're hungry and will work for less. For them, the American dream is a century back. But present day Americans live in the present, and don't understand why we need to turn back the clock to a time when everyone was literally hungry, and would work under any conditions. That's why we had the social unrest of the 1930's, and the unionization and workplace protections and minimum wage and Interstate Commerce Commission and so on.
But now we've got "Globalization" and NAFTA and Chinese companies (like Wal-Mart) running things. Because they stole the jobs, and now are accepting our investment money, and buying our debt.
You want French classes at SUNY? Slap tariffs against cheap Chinese goods, and you'll hear the piggy squeal.
Curtis,
There's a disconnect between the forces who seek to rein in big government, and the decisions about what kinds of programs to cut, when hard times ensue.
There is a zeitgeist, and the decision to abandon sound fiscal policy (i.e., the counter-cyclic lean) which was made in '01 and reasserted in '10 is part of this, as is hostility to France specifically (because they had the good sense to see that the justification for war in Iraq was fabricated, and the character not to go along with the US for old times sake). Given also that the President of SUNY Albany is an MA with a history as a money manager rather than an academic, it seems to me that the decisions that have been made at Albany also reflect the same zeitgeist, even if there is not a chain of handshakes that leads from De Later through Boehner and McConnell to Philip.
The rational response to fiscal disaster is to put one's house in order first. Increasing spending during a budgetary crisis is defensible only if the "investments" are clearly going to produce a favorable result.
"Clearly" is too stiff a test, since there's limited room for certainty in economics, either predictively or postdictively. "Probably" is likely the best we can hope for, and should be a sufficient justification for action.
There's no conclusive evidence ever been brought forward to show that "giving money to the rich" produces expansion in manufacturing, or increases in employment--that's a clear disconnect.
The issue I've raised stimulus in the form of block aid to states, which is exactly what would have been required to avoid cuts in state university systems. Moreover, economic analysis of stimulus alternatives indicates that expenditures on infrastructure are more efficient than tax cuts, which as you say, constitute "giving money to the rich," which they'll bank at a high marginal rate.
I see the issue of the education in America very differently than you do. When we've grown economically, that growth has been driven by new industries, enabled by a strong domestic marketplace and a flexible workforce that can adapt to new technologies and new work situations. The most important thing that most people get out of their BA/BSs is the ability to learn independently, which facilitates flexibility and adaptivity. The specific disciplinary knowledge they learned in earning the BA/BS is a small fraction of what they should learn going forward, and so it matters a lot less than most people think. Where we have fallen down is in not conveying to our students that lifelong learning is an obligation both to themselves and to their nation, that graduation is a milestone on a lifetime journey, not a final goal.
The idea that we can return to universal prosperty by re-creating the economy of the 1950's and 60's (when unskilled trades and manufacturing dominated) is a fantasy because the world has changed around us, and what was novel and valuable then (e.g., the ability to operate a lathe or milling machine, and the capital sufficient to purchase them) are common and cheap today. An educated, and indeed, self-educating workforce is a big part of what differentiated us in the past, but while the bar for that has been raised, our performance has not.
Stu:
I still disagree about how that old-fashioned prosperity worked.
Do we hear promotion of some new Chinese model of universal education? Of course not, because what they now have is a manufacturing infrastructure that's built out of the same conditions that existed in America and Western Europe in 1910-1930--mass employment with an accompanying relatively "uneducated" workforce.
My theory of society is that there is a technocracy of educated, at the top (professional classes), with a large middle class made up mostly of people with a high school education. Most people don't need a college education, because we only need so many doctors, lawyers, scientists, professors and administrators. I'm not against everyone knowing everything, but am against the idea that it's society's responsibility to educate everyone up to some absurdly high (ideal) standard. Public education shouldn't include learning Latin and logarithms and business cycles and how to deconstruct Finnegans Wake. Those are things society doesn't "need" and so shouldn't have to pay for.
China today looks almost exactly like America in 1920, economically. Obviously we can't ask Americans all to get computer science degrees, especially if all the computer companies insist on hiring Indian and Chinese immigrants. And if we want better employment figures, we shouldn't be welcoming in more cheap labor from Central and South America. We've already sent them enough of our jobs--they don't deserve any more.
We want everyone to get a college degree, but why? We already have a surplus of overqualified grads who can't find work. College is great, but it's not the answer to our economic woes.
Since few of us are wealthy enough to be idle, college has to be a pipeline to a job. And colleges and universities are themselves businesses that have to watch their bottom line just as all of us have to watch our weight.
There's a neat article by Gary Olson (no relationship) in the latest Chronicle of Higher Education. I think it has a lot of good sense in it.
http://chronicle.com/article/Why-Universities-Are/125556/?sid=ja&utm_source=ja&utm_medium=en
I'm not sure you can open it if you don't have a subscription, but I don't have a subscription and was able to open it. His argument is that if a department isn't turning out students it is still using up resources. Three Serbian profs might be garnering 250 grand collectively, he writes, and yet only turning out twenty students a year into a market for which their knowledge of Serbian has no use until the next war crimes' tribunal is assembled at the Hague.
But even then, how will that affect the business world?
We probably do need to learn Spanish.
We probably do need more knowledge of Arabic.
We probably do require, as we once required Russian scholars to put up with the great dark imperialism of the communist juggernaut, at least a few thousand Arabic specialists to help us track down and kill terrorists, and perhaps assemble comedic texts to float their way through the net, and into their homes via sit-coms or what have you in which women doctors are not getting killed but are valuable members of their society.
I don't know. This is an enormous question, and probably really does require all of us to think more about.
Anyone who really wants to learn a language can do it on their spare time, as William is doing. I learned French almost entirely on my own. I just started reading books with a dictionary.
And then started translating poems, and took classes but only up to 103 (already by 103 I was spotting errors that the prof was putting on the board, and politely correcting her).
I wish I had had three solid years of it, with the writing exercises, too.
But I put my time into other things.
As for classics, I still hope to be able to read ancient Greek before I am dead.
With Arabic or Chinese, you probably really need serious help, especially with the tonal variations, and with the cultural implications of various utterances.
But there remains the whole question of what the humanities are about. Are they meant to teach us critical thinking? Are they meant to be a form of entertainment or amusement?
Do they teach us about society and perhaps lead us toward a Democratic vision of the world?
Another thing that's happened in the SUNy system is that they deregulated the curriculum. This means that we used to have ten different areas that any and every BA student had to have at least one course in. Now there is only one math and one composition course, and then a certain number of credits.
Each campus is allowed to set its own guidelines with those two necessities as non-negotiables. So you used to have to do one language, one art course, science with lab, THREE history courses (older, current and foreign), and a few other things.
So many SUNY campuses are discussing this, too.
We're trying to be flexible, and trying to remain a leader in the education world.
I think it's an interesting conversation and I don't want to demonize any particular president or dean or anyone here, either. I just think it's interesting to think about what education is, and what it should be.
I went to an alternative school that would give you credit for basket weaving, and there were no set necessities (Evergreen State in Washington). I turned out fine, albeit lacking in math and sciences, which I didn't like (vegetables).
Now I go through Cliff's Notes of Algebra and geometry and read up on these things, and find them amazing.
I also watch Science programs, and try to read up what I can.
I don't think anybody has a perfect answer. It's more of a conversation, about valuable things, perhaps the most important thing.
After all, I have spent my whole life in education, and really believe in it!
I love it! I even love reading student papers, and watching how some of the students actually improve from draft to draft. I think it's possible to inspire a student to take philosophy seriously (one of my students recently got a Ph.D. in philosophy at SUNY-Albany, and others are doing philosophy in Binghamton and other area schools).
Next semester I'm teaching creative writing, and nothing would give me a bigger kick than to have one of my students go on to write a good book.
It's almost very important to continue to talk about these things!
I think what passes now for a college education is oversold, though I'll agree many do learn study techniques useful for later independent learning.
I'd like to see earlier tracking of pupils in order better to prepare them for a more rigorous university education or for vocational training. For those selected for university preparation, the six years prior to university could consist of two or three languages (including Latin, certe!), mathematics, science, history, and English.
What first drove me to learn languages was simply the shame of not knowing them. Since I never attended a private or prep school (I'm from a poor single-parent family in which one parent finished a high-school vocational course and one had only a grade-school education), my classical languages had to be acquired at university while I held a full-time job. It was Latin that "animo rudi et aspero primos urbanitatis sensus installavit" ("instilled the first senses of refinement in my rough and rude cast of mind").
To Benthamite utilitarians and vulgar Deweyists this will sound like an unlearned foreign tongue, but a true liberal arts and sciences education (even if imperfectly acquired as an autodidact like Hardy's Jude) liberates one's mind from ignorance, no matter how one earns a living. Otherwise we're relegated to mental lives of "banausoi" ("mechanics" in the old sense) or human tools, synonymous in classical Greek with those who are low, vulgar, or illiberal.
My chief complaint about the humanities is that it was overtaken by a simplistic politics and this was then driven down the throats of students in the aftermath of the 60s when the personal became political.
I don't know how much of that remains the case in many of the ethnic studies programs, some of which are mandatory.
The problem with understanding the archipelago of 6000 colleges and universities is that they are so different, so diverse.
I remember at Scranton U. in the 70s my friends who went there had to take theology courses. That seemed like a drag at the time, but it might be liberating over time.
You never know what you'll get in an education that might be useful later, or in fact might even hold you down, and keep you from thinking for yourself. I got such a terrific case of hatred for the right in college that I almost couldn't speak to righties for thirty years. Then, on 9/11, I get some sense knocked into me, and started listening to them on Fox, and now think those guys are far more liberal in many ways than the nuts on MSNBC or the pseudo-liberals on CNN or in the White House now.
Think of how education was used in the Soviet Union as a mere adjunct of political indoctrination.
Education at Naropa Institute in the 70s was a very strange conglomeration of ideas: basically, you were introduced to Ginsberg's worldview: Zen, Burroughs, Corso, laughter, more Zen, etc. I liked it.
But you wondered.
It was odd how many things the people of the 60s decided weren't worth much: monogamy, Christianity, America, liberalism, cleanliness, ancient languages, sanity...
The new gods became sex, drugs and rock n roll.
And then the CDC was supposed to fix all the problems.
The seventies became another problem. Feminism became a problem as it tore families apart, and meant you didn't have a mom in the house any longer. And the eighties was ... nineties, and here we are in the new century, with people just confused.
I went back to the old church and found that by God it was still there, but they had just voted in gay pastors.
Who knows?
Everything changes, but it's hard to know what changes are good ones.
All that Obama promised was Change.
Now most people can't stand him any longer, and want him to change, so he's trying to be more business friendly now.
There was the Great Books notion in the 60s.
There was periodization in the English departments.
There was the linguistic turn, when people decided that policing language was the way to make society better.
Now there's tolerance as the great buzzword.
What is the one thing that absolutely everybody should be able to do coming out of college?
I think everybody should be able to think for themselves.
But what does that even mean?
Maybe everybody should be able to crack a joke.
Maybe everybody should understand the government, geometry, and the stuff that the Greeks taught.
Or maybe it should be what Jesus taught.
It's hard to know. Not everybody can write a poem. I don't think it's possible for many people to do it. Why not?
They can feed themselves. Why can't they write a poem?
My dad was a Ph.D. in physical education. I think he thought everybody should know how to play baseball, basketball, football, badminton, etc. You should be able to be a good sport. Those were his main things.
My mom taught reading to kids. That was her main thing. Reading.
My older brother is a banker, and thinks everybody should be financially literate.
I care mainly about literature, and think everybody should be able to read poems.
There are many other things to know: automobile mechanics, nutrition, carpentry, plumbing, how to make aluminum foil and silly bands.
Greek, Latin, French, Arabic, mathematics, philosophy, geography, it's almost infinite and we can't understand it all.
I like history a lot, but I wish I knew more about business.
Curtis,
Do we hear promotion of some new Chinese model of universal education?
No, although China has invested in building a 1st class university system, intended to compete with the best of the west, c.f., Tsinghua University. The Chinese are not standing still in terms of education—far from it. They intend to beat us there, as they do in every other respect.
But neither do we have reason to believe that the standard of living among Chinese factory workers approaches even that of US factory workers circa 1920. Indeed, news stories about the suicide rate at Foxconn argue very much to the contrary, and there's good reason to believe that Foxconn is relatively enlightened by the standards of PRC manufacturing. So I do not believe that the model you describe (of desperate, largely interchangeable unskilled and semi-skill labor) represents a basis for the society we should be trying to construct, nor do I believe you'd be happy with it if you got it.
Moreover, we do not educate solely to adapt people to the workplace. We educate to form citizens who are capable of meeting their responsibilities in a democratic republic. China is a totalitarian state, and it requires only service and submission from its citizens, and not their independent and collective judgment.
China today looks almost exactly like America in 1920, economically.
I'm going to call you on this. I don't believe it for a second. China today has much greater rates of urbanization than the US had in 1920, and a far greater "urban pull." At the same time, as a totalitarian state, there is no meaningful union movement to balance labor against capital. If you want a US model for contemporary China, it is the 1906 economy of Upton Sinclair's "The Jungle," but absent the political freedoms that eventually made the labor movement, and the attendent expansion of the US middle class, possible. Why you think we should be headed in this direction is a mystery.
Obviously we can't ask Americans all to get computer science degrees, especially if all the computer companies insist on hiring Indian and Chinese immigrants.
You're a bit behind the times. The golden era of Indian outsourcing is pretty much at an end—the difference in cost between an American and an Indian sitting on a tech-support line has fallen from 10-1 to 2-1, and the flows have started to reverse. Twenty, and even ten years ago, Indian and PRC students dominated US CS Ph.D. programs, and typically sought to remain in the US post graduation. These days, there are are far fewer of both, and they are much less likely to want to stay here: there opportunities enough in Indian and China proper. My department (UChicago CS) has 44 Ph.D. students currently. Of these, we have only 4 from China, 3 from India, whereas 18 are from the USA, assuming I've done the assignments correctly. This is a sea change from '02. And while hardware manufacturers may use a lot of Indians at call centers, the folks I'm seeing going into Microsoft, Apple, Google, etc., these days are overwhelmingly American or European.
We want everyone to get a college degree, but why? We already have a surplus of overqualified grads who can't find work.
This is a depressingly utilitarian view of education, and one that entirely ignores the political responsibilities of citizens within a democratic republic.
Like Stu, I hope education is more than training someone to be a cog in a wheel. One of the many things I loved aboiut Finland is that even people who worked in factories knew literature and were highly educated. One of their greatest novelists was a man named Vaino Linna, who actually worked in textile mills most of his life.
His book The Unknown Soldier is considered a masterpiece of world literature.
I wanted to mention the TV sit com Outsourced, set in an Indian call center. It's quite charming, about a young man who has been sent to run the place from Kansas. He's got all kinds of adventures and mistakes in Mumbai waiting for him.
I like this show a lot.
I am also glad the students in Stu's program are Americans and Europeans, too. We need those degrees, we need those people.
China is a horrid dump. They shoot anybody who says anything against them. They actually imprison people who speak against them, just for speaking against them. It's wild. Note the Nobel prize winner's absence.
They are even worse than the Russians. Only North Korea tops the Chinese for sheer savagery.
North Korea has universities.
Kirby,
I think it's an interesting conversation and I don't want to demonize any particular president or dean or anyone here, either.
Demonize? Of course not.
But it worth recognizing that SUNY has chosen to bestow the authority to lead a major research University on an individual who is not an academic, a person who has not participated in research, nor taught in a classroom. This doesn't make him a demon, but it does mean that he is unqualified for the responsibility that has been entrusted to him, and this is sadly evident in the decisions he's made. And for this, I fault the Trustees of the University that offered this responsibility to him, and him for accepting it.
Stu, where did you find the information on the president?
We need to know several more things. Did he make the decision single-handedly?
There are many college presidents without Ph.D.s. Are they all bad? I would assume that a business degree might not be all bad if you want to maintain the bottom line at an institution.
It is so difficult to think competently about these things, since even the educational mission of universities is so evanescent. Is it to produce citizens? Is it to produce people who can use leisure to find beauty and meaning? Is it to produce people who can perform jobs? Or is it a combination of all three?
What percentage of taxes are people willing to pay to support education?
One thing I don't support is one political faction grabbing the universities and forcing students into an indoctrination of their viewpoint. This is worthless, and is an actual danger to the community.
The universities need to be policed, and safeguards need to be put in. FIRE does some of that, and that's good.
Accreditation committees also help us, I think, if they themselves have good ideas about what a university is. At any rate, it's an enormous conversation, and I think it is a valuable one.
The best situation is a pluralistic one in which various factions talk, and let students talk, without taking students as prisoners or hostages, letting them speak for themselves, and think for themselves. A situation in which one group controls the educational process and forces students into Procrustean beds of political or religious correctness is the worst of all possible situations, resembling a cult more than an educational institution.
I realize the humanities are somewhat different from the sciences in this regard.
Sciences have something objective to teach (water freezes at 32 degrees) but still the larger parameters of whether or not there is global warming should be something that students are allowed to think about for themselves, and ideally there should be at least some skeptics on every faculty.
At Pyongyang University in North Korea we would have a worst case scenario in which the difference of opinions are so slight as to constitute the .9999999... of Zeno's paradox.
We need true conversations in which adversarial and yet open-minded and friendly groups and charismatic leaders can converse over time and learn from one another. This is quite hard because people take sides, and tend to want to commit genocide against other viewpoints.
But creative friction is still better than monotonous hegemony of one group. Even within a rock band like the Beatles it was the creative friction between the members and yet the ability to honor and listen that made them great.
I think this is possible to achieve, but it requires a certain faith in one's own abilities rising above the genocidal nature of a nitwit like Kim Jong-Il or a Ceausescu who think they are geniuses as long as they suppress all the real geniuses, or steal their work and publish it as their own.
Kirby,
There are many college presidents without Ph.D.s. Are they all bad? I would assume that a business degree might not be all bad if you want to maintain the bottom line at an institution.
Yes, they're are all bad. Is their expertise relevent, important, even critical? Yes. There's a reason why well run Universities have CFOs, VPs for Administration and Finance, etc., as well as Trustees to provide finacial oversight. But Universities have missions, not just budgets, and those missions are understood only by those who have been involved in actually pursuing them: in advancing human knowledge, in preparing human minds. Finances are means, not an end.
Trustees who chose a CFO type to lead a University as President do so because prefer to abdicate their own responsibilities to provide financial oversight, rather than to bear their fiduciary obligation to discharge them personally, and they're guilty of serious maladministration thereby.
Sciences have something objective to teach (water freezes at 32 degrees) but still the larger parameters of whether or not there is global warming should be something that students are allowed to think about for themselves, and ideally there should be at least some skeptics on every faculty.
Your desire to have global warming skeptics on every science faculty is an effort to politicize science, exactly the sort of thing you decry in the humanities. Global warming is not a political question within science, it is a question of atmospheric chemistry, of heat transfer, of circulation, of computational modeling, of albedo, of solar evolution, etc. We need to chose faculty for their expertise, creativity, and research productivity in these areas, not because they're for or against a particular hypothesis in question.
Kirby, there are senior staff biographies of SUNY-Albany administrators here: http://www.albany.edu/president/executivebios.shtml
President Philip also earned a JD in law. A senior VP, Dr Alain Koloyeros, a physicist and nanoscientist, is the second-highest paid state official in NY for 2009--about 3/4 of a million); he earns more than four times the salary of Governor Patterson (see
http://www.businessinsider.com/meet-the-899-ny-state-employees-who-earn-more-than-david-paterson-2010-3?slop=1).
Of the senior staff at SUNY-Albany, several have only undergrad degrees.
Head football and basketball coaches (mostly with bachelor's degrees only) at SUNY schools also reap greater salaries than the governor.
As you've reiterated, Kirby, the budget issue is complicated, and many different solutions have been proposed. I'd favour the cuts to other programmes at SUNY-Albany that would eliminate whole departments certainly other than languages and theatre. For the oldest and "flagship" SUNY school--and whose bywords are "The World within Reach" and that vaunts a "Globalization" special emphasis--these proposed cuts should be a deep embarrassment.
At one school I taught at two of the members of the German department were PhDs from SUNY-Albany, whose German programme was axed in the 1990s.
Kirby,
Stu, where did you find the information on the president?
Here
There are 6000 colleges and universities in America. What percentage of their presidents has a Ph.D.?
How many of them can speak or read a second language?
(I think I would propose a second hurdle -- how many have learned a second language at college? Because if you're growing up bilingual, it's easier to be bilingual.)
How exactly were the choices made at SUNY-Albany?
I think there is some kind of judicial review of the funding cut that has yet to take place, but I don't know when that will happen, or who will decide it. These things often move in a glacial splendor, and then suddenly crash into the sea, and it's over, permanently.
Speaking of which, James once gave us a list of about 50 prominent scientists who doubt global warming and who do work at prominent universities.
I think a president has to do two things -- they have to run the ship of state -- but hopefully not on to any serious funding shoals that make the whole university go under, while also maintaining top research standards, and making sure students graduate in a timely manner, and things like safety have to be monitored.
There are a lot of things on their plate.
A program that is underperforming, or that no one wants to enter, may be a significant sign of rot within that department. If you have only three students a year, and you and your staff are pulling down a half a million dollars a year that could go somewhere else, what then?
You don't want a Kim Jong-Il who doesn't listen to reality at the helm. That way lies the titanic mess of North Korea.
Somehow, reality does have to enter the picture of a president, if we can think of him or her as an admiral, with many missions.
Safety of students would be at least as important as the educational mission. A campus is unsafe would get sued, and would then unravel. You also can't have faculty ganging up on students as they did at Duke, without losing millions in lawsuits.
Maybe a president is closer to being a mayor of a small town than it would be to being an admiral of a giant ship.
You also have staff, as a mayor does.
It's hard to understand what a university is. It's easier to understand what they were, about a hundred and fifty years ago.
Ideally, students should come out interested and excited about sciences, arts, and citizenship, but also have the ability to usefully perform some high-level job (not just make coffee).
It's hard to make the case that Classics directly prepares a person for work. But it would be a useful preparation for being a lawyer, for instance. We need good lawyers. There are never enough of those!
One of my best students ever want on to a prominent music school and studied jazz. So he now makes coffee during the day, and plays jazz in a very small bar in the middle of nowhere on Wednesday nights.
I think this is the downfall of many programs that insist on the 19th century model of the leisure value of a degree.
You really need to do more than that with students. I try to steer them into a paying position, if I can, as their advisor.
Kirby,
One of my best students ever want on to a prominent music school and studied jazz. So he now makes coffee during the day, and plays jazz in a very small bar in the middle of nowhere on Wednesday nights.
I think this is the downfall of many programs that insist on the 19th century model of the leisure value of a degree.
You really need to do more than that with students. I try to steer them into a paying position, if I can, as their advisor.
Is he living a satisfying, fulfilling life? You note a discrepancy between his ability and success, but the later only as you measure it. By what right do you impose your metrics on him?
Think for a moment about us, academics. I live a comfortable life, but I could make more money in industry than in academe. This is true for many of us. My choice doesn't reflect an absence of ambition, but instead a love of discovery, a love of teaching, a desire to be self-directed.
Would you have viewed him as a greater success if he worked for six-figures in a soul-draining advertising shop? If so, you have much to learn from your students.
Health care and things like that get more expensive as we age. Hippies didn't think of that, but I think young people really should, because they won't be young forever.
You need to think about where you'll be when you're fifty.
And if you have kids, etc. you need to have insurance. It looks like the government will not be able to mandate it because it's unconstitutional (one judge so far has decided that way in the Virginia case, and another judge looks like he'll go that way, too).
So Obamacare will be slapped down.
This means that individuals will continue to have to provide for themselves in an economy that will work toward higher and higher pricing for healthcare, among other issues.
I think the academy is a good place for those of us who like teaching. For shy people who don't like to be in front of people, teaching is not an option, or is only one that will destroy them to an extent.
So, there has to be other options.
Kirby,
It looks like the government will not be able to mandate it because it's unconstitutional (one judge so far has decided that way in the Virginia case, and another judge looks like he'll go that way, too).
And several have found it to be constitutional. The problem with the Virgina ruling is that it knocked down the requirement that individuals purchase insurance without knocking down the requirement that insurers offer universal coverage. So this hardly knocks down HCR. What it does is to create a problem for the health insurance companies: the individual mandate was in place to protect them. I'm sure that FOX never made this point. Anyway, you can be sure that the Virginia ruling is not the final word on the subject.
It would certainly help the small-time creatives if there was universal HC. Nancy Pelosi, who represents SF, argued for it specifically on that basis.
I feel for those people -- poets, jazz players, and others devoted to arts that nobody wants, and nobody much cares about. Fewer than one person in a thousand buys a poetry book every year. I once read that even fewer attend modern dance. In a city of 200,000 then you have 200 people interested in poetry or dance (generally speaking, probably the same people).
I appreciate these arts.
The French National Ballet does have health insurance, and they are permitted to retire at age 35 with full benefits.
Poets can still write well into their 80s but very few ever have a hit book. Billy Collins was one of these. Ginsberg, another.
But even then, they have to teach or do something else.
Novels of course can pay the rent, but only about 200 serious novelists can pay the rent. John Irving, a very few others. I would guess it's about 200 in America (I'm not counting mystery novelists, which might add another 2 dozen to the pile).
all these people need healthcare.
But what about the thousands of people who want to write novels and poetry but just don't have the talent? Should we subsidize them, too? Pelosi wants to do so.
There are probably 100,000 people in America who imagine themselves to be poets. All but 100 of them will never write a single line that anyone cares to remember.
Only about five dancers will ever float like a butterfly across the stages of NYC and make it into the collective imagination even of the small dance audience.
Should every would-be ballerina in Peoria be subsidized, whle they work on their fading dreams?
Happiness has to be a match between external and internal conditions. You can't just exist on internal happiness. You need to eat, have a roof over your head, and pay for things like health insurance, and in rural areas, you need a car, and in urban areas, a bus ticket, and warm mittens on days like this one.
If no one wants a service, but you insist on making it available, should you be subsidized?
The poets would all scream yes, and make it a nice house with a jacuzzi, and hopefully, a pretty maid and a butler, thanks so much!
This is sort of besides the point, but I watched a movie once on TV called "In Search of Comedy in the Muslim World." Or something like that.
The joke was that there isn't any.
By what right do you impose your metrics on him?
Lord, Stu--really?
If someone "makes coffee" all day and then plays the music they love (and got a degree in) ONE NIGHT a week (Wednesday no less) in nowheresville, they are not likely to be happy with their music.
Now, that's not to say that the guy can't be happy--maybe he found some girl--maybe he realized that he's not going to be the top of the pops--who knows?
But it's certainly within Kirby's "rights" to see the condition of the fellow and think "yeah, he's probably not happy with this."
You coming along and saying "you can't judge him" is equivalent to
"you're not my father you can't tell me what to do" and equally purposeless and destructive.
Stu:
You've misunderstood one part of my diatribe.
I'm not advocating we imitate the Chinese model. I believe, however, that nations should look to the interests of their own people first, before considering those of other countries. In America, conservatives will say "well, if capital wants cheaper wages, it will find them, wherever they exist, and will exploit disequilibriums--it's just the efficient motive at work."
But encouraging capital (and jobs) to leave is inherently destructive to a country. It can't pursue policies like this and still remain competitive.
China isn't an ideal. But they've picked up that countries which structure their trade and economic relationships in a selfish way, can efficiently exploit countries that are playing "fair." There's no fairness in economics--it's dog eat dog.
Education in America has been conceived as a public duty, and a public good. That's fine, as long as we restrict it to providing each citizen with the basic tools--literacy, the means to balance a checkbook and transact commerce, the basic information about democracy and our governance. But beyond that, every citizen isn't "owed" an advance degree, especially in fields that are cultural refinements.
American high schools used to graduate students with a well-rounded suite of skills. Colleges today complain that high school seniors entering college as freshman, are 1-3 years "behind" where they expect them to be. That's because American grammar, middle and high schools have fallen steadily behind in their performance. American colleges and universities are superior to all others in the world, or at least they were in the recent past.
I can't see any justification whatever for "privileging" foreign students living here on visas. Paying tax money to educate foreign nationals may be good foreign policy, and may foster improvement abroad, but it's a luxury we can't afford in more difficult times. If American graduates can't find work, it doesn't make sense to spend money educating foreigners.
I was in that guy's boat for a long time (portrayed in my novel Temping). It gets worse when you pass thirty and are still working in a deadend job.
I got out. I'll try to help him get out, too.
There was a neat article in the weekend WSJ by Alain de Botton, who argues that literature gives us stories to reflect on the reality of things, like maps. He said that Anna Karenina and Madame de Bovary can help us think about what an ideal marriage is, some other stories can help us think about what is a good job.
Etc.
And get students to start to reflect on these real world concerns.
I know there is a side of literature that isn't practical and has to do with the aesthetics of narrative as Aristotle puts it in his Poetics. Beginning, middle, end, moments of revelation, moments of catharsis, but there is a practical side, too.
Even Homer is meant to tell us how to live: how to win a war, how to get home from the war, what to avoid, etc.
Presumably some languages are defective in their narrative tradition which misleads their whole population and throws them off a cliff. The classics were meant to give us access to excellent stories.
French has excellent stories, too.
Since the 1001 Nights, not sure about Arabic. Their culture seems to suck, especially for women. In Afghanistan, they've been denied access to writing or reading stories, rather like the Cambodians under the Khmer Rouge.
That's always a disaster.
It means some kind of Cyclops is in charge.
Like in North Korea. Read any good novels from North Korea lately?
Curtis,
I believe, however, that nations should look to the interests of their own people first, before considering those of other countries.
I'd be cautious here, as this kind of thinking also justifies aggressive war in the model of "grand theft, writ large." The world as a whole has to work, and we should not base our prosperity on the suffering of others. I say this in the spirit of general agreement, though, that government needs to look to the welfare of all of our citizens, and not just to advancing the welfare of one section (the rich).
But encouraging capital (and jobs) to leave is inherently destructive to a country.
Amen to that. I can still remember the day GWB said that he thought outsourcing was a good idea--the air went right out of the US IT market, and out of admissions to our MS program. It's only been in the past year and a half that signs of life have started to return to both.
Education in America has been conceived as a public duty, and a public good. That's fine, as long as we restrict it to providing each citizen with the basic tools--literacy, the means to balance a checkbook and transact commerce, the basic information about democracy and our governance.
I'm entirely in favor of sound fundamentals: reading, writing, and arithmetic. Consider the conversation on this blog about global warming, where the skeptical side is pursued by people who don't understand science, and so assume that it is somehow just like humanistic fields, and is subject in the same way to the same pressures. This leads to all kinds of ridiculous views, foremost among them an unhealthy focus on the occasional skeptical authority, rather than on any attempt to understand and evaluate the scientific arguments themselves.
But beyond that, every citizen isn't "owed" an advance degree, especially in fields that are cultural refinements.
Of course not. Who thinks they are? What is your argument here? Is it that you don't think that state governments should provide support for academic programs where a cost-benefit argument can't be made? This would give rise to Cornell-style semi-public education, in which there are distinct "statutory" and "non-statutory" divisions, separate tuition schedules, etc. Cornell's not a bad model, although I've heard that there are significant administrative head-aches associated with the structure.
American high schools used to graduate students with a well-rounded suite of skills.
As the economic conditions of the world have changed, the notion of what constitutes well-rounded has changed too. Technology plays a huge role in today's world, and we expect our students to have well-developed technological skills. Necessarily, this has displaced time devoted to "traditional" topics.
JADL argued for earlier identification of a smaller cadre of university bound students, and training specific to that purpose. I'm skeptical of his specific proposal, but I believe that high-schools specifically have tended to de-emphasize vocational alternatives in recent years, and instead are trying to track everyone into a generic college-prep sequence. This has given rise to a number of ills, ranging from for-profit technical colleges (which are a swamp), to college-prep courses that struggle under the weight of students for whom they're a waste. I am also concerned that NCLB has advanced a theory of education that eliminates exceptional opportunities for exceptional students, as the sole metric for every course has become the extent to which it prepares its students for standardized tests.
As for "paying for foreign nationals," I don't see this. Evidently you've never had to pay out-of-state tuition, which is intended to reflect the unsubsidized cost of education.
Kirby,
Like in North Korea. Read any good novels from North Korea lately?
Can't say that I have. But I can recommend "The Sorrow of War" by Bao Ninh, a Vietnamese author writing from the perspective of a North Vietnamese soldier. It wouldn't surprise me if there were great novels to come out of North Korea some day, too. Consider the great writers who came of both Czarist and Soviet Russia, from Dostoevsky and Turgenev to Pasternak and Solzenitzen.
Extraordinary circumstances give rise to great novels, it just takes time.
The problem with science is the same as the problem with anything else: who pays the piper calls the tune.
In the Soviet Union there was a politically correct science that leaned heavily toward forerunners of Darwin. It was formulated by a scientist named Lysenko. If you fell afoul of that, you were out of a job.
In climate science there is money on the table if you join up with the bandwagon, otherwise you are out in the cold, so to speak.
But independent scholars like Bjorn Lomberg (The Skeptical Environmentalist) have argued that the tiny bumps in temperature are well within 1000-year norms (he's a statistician from a Danish university).
Gore isn't a scientist, but he sees global warming as a way to create a world government.
I think scientists are trained to think empirically, but not necessarily to have the larger picture, and certainly, they need funding as much as everyone else. If you get funding by saying the sky is falling, you say that the sky is falling.
That's human nature.
It's only outsiders and children who will tell the truth. Witness the Emperor's New Clothes.
No one wants to damage their funding. So you have professors emeritus, and professors who don't stand to directly gain from global warming who stand against it.
There may be something to global warming, but there are enough skeptics to make me wonder.
People sign on when there's money involved. Many many signed up with the Soviet Union, and never denounced it until the checks stopped coming. Then they signed on with whatever else. There are very few Solzhenitsyns in any field, and science is no different.
There are scientists in North Korea. Are they standing up to Kim Jong-Il at a rate higher than the rest of the population?
Kirby,
The problem with science is the same as the problem with anything else: who pays the piper calls the tune.
This is less so than you'd think, Lysenko notwithstanding. He could, after all, arrange for his opponents to be murdered or sent to the gulag. As far as I know, Monckton remains free.
In climate science there is money on the table if you join up with the bandwagon, otherwise you are out in the cold, so to speak.
No, otherwise you suck the oil company's teat, instead of the government's. There's plenty of money on both sides, the biggest difference is that the government's comes with an independent review.
There are scientists in North Korea. Are they standing up to Kim Jong-Il at a rate higher than the rest of the population?
Obviously, you've never heard the rest of the sentence, "Workers, arise!"
"So that we may more easily gun you down."
GM,
>> By what right do you impose your metrics on him?
> Lord, Stu--really?
Geez, GM, are you really saying that there's no role for hyperbole in the comments section of Kirby's blog?
Terror is a question of degree. On the playground, it might mean that all the children refuse to talk to one child. That's the method also preferred by the Amish. It's fairly brutal if you're on the other end of it, and is very effective.
Murder is more forthright.
But simply the implication that you'll never work in this university, or in the university system, again, would be enough for most researchers to not cross any boundaries.
Research that takes place under the leadership of a central department figure -- as most research does -- must comply with the stated paradigm. If that paradigm is bringing in cash, then no one would buck it. Why would they?
JF Lyotard, in The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge (U of Minnesota, 1984) writes about this.
"Countless scientists have seen their 'move' ignored or repressed, sometimes for decades, but it too abruptly destabilized the accepted positions, not only in the university and scientific hierarchy, but also in the problematic. The stronger the 'move," the more likely it is to be denied the minimum consensus, precisely because it changes the rules of the game upon which consensus has been based. ... Such behavior is terrorist, as is the behavior of the system described by Luhmann. By terror I mean the efficiency gained by eliminating, or threatening to eliminate, a player from the language game one shares with him. He is silenced or consents, not because he has been refu8ted, but because his ability to participate has been threatened (there are many ways to prevent someone from playing). The decision makers' arrogance, which in principle has no equivalent in the sciences, consists in the exercise of terror. It says: 'Adapt your aspirations to our ends -- or else.'" (63-64.
I think you think science is open-ended, but terror can be enacted at many levels and from many sources: the funding source, the institution, leading faculty, peer reviewed journals (peers can hide behind anonymity like the peers of the Spanish Inquisition).
Terror can be practiced in many subtle ways in addition to the pure judicial murder of the Stalinist systems.
Not signing on to a reigning paradigm that has a figurehead the size (and girth) of Al Gore could very easily bring on an Inquisition. The fact that only fifty or so heavyweights whose careers are in their twilight mode makes one wonder if there aren't younger people who disbelieve too but don't want to stick their necks out for fear of finding themselves in the unemployment line, or shunned by other researchers.
It takes a very strong personality to buck an entire system that is operation on a charade that no one dares to question, because there is so much money in it.
Darwinism is a similar operation. It is true by definition.
Challenge it, and you are secluded, and no longer a member in good standing, and all your research becomes dubious.
Science has a very dubious moral history. Mengele in Nazi Germany is a characteristic figure, but Faustus or Frankenstein are the archetypes.
Outside of science itself, most people look at the field with lots of questions, and wonder how they could have made the atomic bomb, or how they could calmly participate in stem cell research, or genetic manipulation of vegetables.
There are good scientists, but science is not in itself good. It operates like everything else: groupthink tends to coagulate around a given paradigm, and outsiders are relentlessly attacked, funding denied, friendship denied, laboratories denied, etc.
Science is a weathervane, pointing not so much to the prevailing weather, but to whatever the richest funding sources want to hear.
I transferred this to the correct thread, as I did my own comment.
Kirby
Kirby,
This is in the wrong thread, but so it goes...
But simply the implication that you'll never work in this university, or in the university system, again, would be enough for most researchers to not cross any boundaries.
Now you're being silly. This is why there's a tenure system. Consider all those skeptics that JADL likes to cite. What are their affliations? How many of them have been fired from academic positions because of their beliefs? I'm thinking that the number is zero, but if you can come up with flesh and blood examples, I'm willing to consider them.
Research that takes place under the leadership of a central department figure -- as most research does -- must comply with the stated paradigm.
Uhh. This isn't the way it works in the physical sciences, although it is to an extent the way it works in the biological sciences and some of the social sciences. This isn't to say that the chair is without influence, as the chair is often a bottleneck in the hiring/promotion process, but influence isn't control. Do exceptional claims meet skepticism? You bet. Exceptional claims require exceptional evidence. The former is a lot more common than the later.
It takes a very strong personality to buck an entire system that is operation on a charade that no one dares to question, because there is so much money in it.
Absolutely! But most of the scientists I know have strong personalities. And the surest way to recognition and fame in the sciences is to overturn the existing order. But since science works under strong evidence and review constraints, such upheavals are pretty rare. Anyway, there are huge incentives to be in the "tiny, but ultimately correct" minority on any issue, at least within the sciences.
Darwinism is a similar operation. It is true by definition.
No, Darwinism (which is to say, evolution by natural selection) is not true by definition. There is a creationist critique that makes this claim, but they're wrong. Indeed, the creationist view of the world (that it consists of a number of static "kinds") essentially contradicts that claim. You've been duped again
Challenge it, and you are secluded, and no longer a member in good standing, and all your research becomes dubious.
There are all kinds of challenges to darwinism, most of which are internal to the sciences, and can be thought of as refinements of the basic theory, e.g., the Eldridge-Gould punctuated equilibria theory. You are right though, there are theories which, if you hold them in all seriousness (e.g., the world was created by the flying spagetti monster) will get you read out of the scientific community. At issue here is that any new theory must be able to deal with the existing evidence as well or better than the current theory, and be falsifiable (at least in principle), or the scientific community isn't going to be bothered considering it.
I transferred this to the correct thread, as I did my own comment.
Kirby
Kirby,
This is in the wrong thread, but so it goes...
But simply the implication that you'll never work in this university, or in the university system, again, would be enough for most researchers to not cross any boundaries.
Now you're being silly. This is why there's a tenure system. Consider all those skeptics that JADL likes to cite. What are their affliations? How many of them have been fired from academic positions because of their beliefs? I'm thinking that the number is zero, but if you can come up with flesh and blood examples, I'm willing to consider them.
Research that takes place under the leadership of a central department figure -- as most research does -- must comply with the stated paradigm.
Uhh. This isn't the way it works in the physical sciences, although it is to an extent the way it works in the biological sciences and some of the social sciences. This isn't to say that the chair is without influence, as the chair is often a bottleneck in the hiring/promotion process, but influence isn't control. Do exceptional claims meet skepticism? You bet. Exceptional claims require exceptional evidence. The former is a lot more common than the later.
It takes a very strong personality to buck an entire system that is operation on a charade that no one dares to question, because there is so much money in it.
Absolutely! But most of the scientists I know have strong personalities. And the surest way to recognition and fame in the sciences is to overturn the existing order. But since science works under strong evidence and review constraints, such upheavals are pretty rare. Anyway, there are huge incentives to be in the "tiny, but ultimately correct" minority on any issue, at least within the sciences.
Darwinism is a similar operation. It is true by definition.
No, Darwinism (which is to say, evolution by natural selection) is not true by definition. There is a creationist critique that makes this claim, but they're wrong. Indeed, the creationist view of the world (that it consists of a number of static "kinds") essentially contradicts that claim. You've been duped again
Challenge it, and you are secluded, and no longer a member in good standing, and all your research becomes dubious.
There are all kinds of challenges to darwinism, most of which are internal to the sciences, and can be thought of as refinements of the basic theory, e.g., the Eldridge-Gould punctuated equilibria theory. You are right though, there are theories which, if you hold them in all seriousness (e.g., the world was created by the flying spagetti monster) will get you read out of the scientific community. At issue here is that any new theory must be able to deal with the existing evidence as well or better than the current theory, and be falsifiable (at least in principle), or the scientific community isn't going to be bothered considering it.
Tenure is a fifteen year process. Most are weeded out or brainwashed by the process.
The only recalcitrants were people who already had tenure, when we look at the global warming deniers (the list that James provided a while back).
There is some incentive in every system to go for the long-shot and reap the benefits of winning.
But most will play the safe bets.
Even within evolutionary theory itself, the few mutants who win out (white moths that turn black just as Manchester is sooting up the hillsides) pay out, but it didn't work out for most, at first.
The safe bet pays better in evolutionary terms.
If we go to war with Iran, those who went wild and studied Farsi will get great jobs. But most people won't.
This is the Black Swan phenomenon.
But safe bets are safer.
Kirby,
Tenure is a fifteen year process. Most are weeded out or brainwashed by the process.
Fifteen? It's seven in my experience. But I do agree in part, although I say it a bit differently: by the time you get tenure, you're a trained rat.
The only recalcitrants were people who already had tenure, when we look at the global warming deniers (the list that James provided a while back).
Let me make a point here. From time to time, the geezers in science say something of interest, and everyone is suitably impressed. But if you want to know where science is heading, listen to the kids (i.e., the post-docs and assistant profs). Figure out what they're excited about. If global warming skepticism doesn't have serious backing among junior faculty, it's dead. As Max Planck said, "Science advances funeral by funeral."
Even within evolutionary theory itself, the few mutants who win out (white moths that turn black just as Manchester is sooting up the hillsides) pay out, but it didn't work out for most, at first.
So you half know that story? Interesting. What this shows is how natural selection can drive the relative abundance of alleles within a population. The most interesting part of this is that in an era of effective pollution controls, the white form is coming back.
All the stuff I don't know or have already forgotten could fill the universe. It's nice to think about the white form coming back. I had heard that, or at least have an inkling of having heard that. I talk with the biologists now and then, who tell me that BY DEFINITION Darwinian logic is the only logic in terms of biological progression.
I find it amusing.
No Stu--I'm just saying when the hyperbole is already indistinguishable from the common conversation, I get all itchy.
Thanks, James. I think Stu believes that the process is fair and balanced. I doubt if it ever is. Scientists down in the labs don't set the directions of research goals for the society.
Think for instance about the IQ debates. If you're not on the side of everybody is equal, you're dead meat, and you are in a lot of trouble.
Think of Larry Summer's comment at Harvard, and what it cost him.
There are many shibboleths you're not permitted to question.
If you do, you're done.
It's probably even more true in the sciences than in the humanities.
Still, these are impressive lists. Thanks for forwarding them!
Kirby,
I think both you and James have missed the point. Proof by authority is not proof in the sciences.
And I'd ask a few simple questions of James: Do you have children? Are you close to them? Do you understand what it might mean to them if you're wrong? Do you understand how self-serving skepticism is? You see bravery in skepticism. There are contexts I'd agree, but not here. I see cowardice.
Think for instance about the IQ debates. If you're not on the side of everybody is equal, you're dead meat, and you are in a lot of trouble.
This is a profound misunderstanding. Clearly, people differ in intelligence, both in quantity and in character. The political hot-button is the extent to which intelligence (both in quantity and in character) correlates with gender, race, etc. There is an old statistical koan: the causes of between group variation differ from the causes of within group variation. If you don't understand this, you shouldn't be debating IQ, race, and gender.
Think of Larry Summer's comment at Harvard, and what it cost him.
I don't know Larry, but I know people who do. A problem with really smart people is that they assume that mere intelligence is an adequate substitute for knowledge. Consider, e.g., my remarks on poetry ;-), not that I'd put myself in Summer's league. He pontificated in an area of ignorance. Hubris, simple hubris.
There have been many stories about researchers doing IQ research whose work has been shut down, and their labs closed. Some woman at the U. of Delaware was the most blatantly abused, but there have probably been others. Research follows basic paradigms, and has to be following trendy themes.
That's true even in areas such as Kinesiology. I worked for guys who wanted to do whatever research would get funding for their labs. Heart research was their ticket. This would support them. When they wrote up their research, they had to appeal to funding agencies.
It has to be part of whatever's fashionable.
This is common knowledge, I think. You buck trends you do it on your own dime.
The humanities are a lot cheaper so we're actually a lot more free in some ways to follow our own curiosity.
It's true I'm way outside my area of competence but I did work in Kinesiology (as a secretary) for several years in my twneties. I typed up proposals.
You need your colleagues, and you have to be part of a team. There's no way around that.
IT's like a Guild. You just can't buck it, or you're out.
There are things you can overturn, but they can't touch upon shibboliths. If you touch equality or reassert any kind of hierarchy, you're dead meat.
Global warming is a massive fraud. It's being pushed because many people correctly perceive this will also push green technology, provide more reasons for governmental oversight of energy production, and reduce dependence on foreign oil.
It will also supposedly save animals, which people like to get all up in arms about. So there's a lot of things riding on the fear of global warming.
But I think it's a positive trend. Greenland will turn green again, and it's name will once more be apt.
I don't follow all this too closely, but I do enjoy how the temperature of liberals goes into low boil.
There are quite a few things that cause this.
Mention Sarah Palin.
Mention The Bell Curve.
Mention that Bush 2 was human, and spread human rights far more effectively than BO.
There's probably a list of some hundred things that drive a liberal out of their minds.
There's probably equally a hundred things that are guaranteed to drive a conservative out of their gourd.
A few things drive both sides crazy: child molesters, sex trafficking which features abduction of young women, -- I can't think of much else, but there are a few things in the Venn diagram that actually exist on both lists.
You'd think that those few things could be things we could actually fix.
Kirby,
Global warming is a massive fraud. It's being pushed because many people correctly perceive this will also push green technology, provide more reasons for governmental oversight of energy production, and reduce dependence on foreign oil.
No. It's being pushed because of observational evidence. And it's not subtle observational evidence -- look at the Alaskan glaciers, look at the beatle-killed trees between Juneau and Anchorage, consider the destruction of the ice shelves on the Antarctic peninsula, or Ellesmere Island. Indeed, look at Thoreau's journals, and compare the onset of spring (as indicated by the blooming of various flowers) then as compared with now.
You've put the cart before the horse. Green energy is being pushed because it can ameliorate global warming, and also because we're past peak production on oil, whereas the demand is accelerating. Even if global warming were off the table, we'd need to be finding alternatives to oil.
I don't see any great push to government oversight. Indeed, government oversight of green energy seems to be as lacking as government oversight of fossil fuels. Evidently you haven't read about windmills and birds :-(. None of this is easy.
But I think it's a positive trend. Greenland will turn green again, and it's name will once more be apt.
Do understand that if Greenland is green, that means a 7.2 meter rise in sea level? That's 22 feet. Do you understand what that means for coastal cities?
stu, I do have a grown son and young grandson currently in need whom we're assisting this Christmas season, and my scepticism is directed at strong AGW advocates (including many non-scientists like IPCC Chairman Pachauri--on your side you mentioned Lord Monckton) who at once demand developed countries reduce their GNPs all the while providing massive growth-killing transfers of wealth to developing countries. I think this the greater danger we're all facing at present.
The long report I linked also provides numerous excerpts indicating the experts' specific problems with the AGW advocates' evidence and arguments the former are scientifically qualified to assess. It's not simply a list of names, titles and credentials.
Granted that science doesn't advance by authority, but nor does it advance by personal appeals such as you've made to me. Nor does disinterested research inform public policy when "enhanced" by "irreversible tipping-point" scare tactics in argument.
What I think I know of the Summers affair is that rather than pontificating about sex differences in IQ, he merely suggested the possibility of studies that might investigate them, about which he received "bloody shirt" vituperation from some academic feminists.
Interesting that the first woman in the US to earn a PhD in meteorology, Joanne Simpson (who taught at various schools and worked for NASA) joined the lists of AGW skeptics I linked (she passed only recently).
Kirby, there's a recent article on a prominent science journalist and AGW warmist (George Monbiot) who writes on climate issues for the UK Guardian. His AGW-theory-fueled "no more snowy winters in the UK" claims have induced some curious argumentative calisthenics on his part of the last few years, considering actual UK weather patterns.
Dr Richard North's article on him is here:
http://eureferendum.blogspot.com/2010/12/warmer-means-colder.html
I remember Mr Bonbiot distinguished himself in left circles by attempting a citizen's arrest (thankfully, unsuccessfully) upon former UN Ambassador John Bolton for his role in the Iraq war effort. By the way, Bolton, a Lutheran, may run for president next election cycle.
Kirby: "Global warming is a hoax, and it's happening and I'm glad that it is."
huh?
There is no question that global warming is taking place. The differences in opinion about its causes are important, if it is indeed within our means to ameliorate the trend, or its effects, through some kind of intervention.
The fact that curtailing our dependence upon oil--BEFORE we use it all up in a hurry--doesn't suggest that those who have a vested interest in it deserve some kind of special treatment. Exploiting energy isn't a zero sum game in which capital keeps moving forward forever. There are limits--the earth only holds so much fossil fuel, and when it's gone, it's gone forever. Our present technology doesn't suggest that we have any other real alternatives at this juncture.
Ultimately, we know the earth can't support its present population, let alone the projected expansions being predicted. We will either have mass die-offs and privation at unprecedented levels, or we will contract at a sensible rate to fit the limits of what there is. The equation isn't something you can argue with. Religion and economic theory and discussion of "freedom" won't help.
If we can reduce our numbers--and our appetites--our descendants might have a chance at the good life, but the signs all point to devastation. Mankind doesn't show much moderation.
Brett, I was attempting to bypass the either/or and to institute the both/and! Yes, global warming might be happening, but if it is, it's about time.
I still want Greenland to turn green again.
The problem is that if you start to look for patterns, then you have to step back and look at the really big patterns. Is it "natural" for Greenland to turn green again after a thousand years?
When Greenland was green in the year 950, it can't have been due to global warming caused by human agents.
If the glaciers are melting in Greenland, and Greenland is once more warming up, is that necessarily bad, or something we can stop by destroying western industrial processes that include the release of vapors??
There are so many variables.
I have my own issues, on which I try to function. Aesthetics itself is in such a mess that I've spent years trying to understand the Marxists and what they are on about.
I have to try and think about global warming simply because it's yet another front in the Marxists' takeover attempt, or so that's how I see it. World government needed to monitor industrial development? Yes, that's what we need, the Marxists scream.
So I occasionally surface from my other endeavors to perform a minor intervention if only to become another bang in the whack-a-mole process.
Let Greenland be Green!
Even if we have to get out hairdryers to help it along, I hope Greenland will be green again in our lifetime.
Greenland is part of the Lutheran citadel that includes Iceland, Norway, Finland, and Sweden. If global warming continues, that will be hot real estate.
I think that's good for Lutherans.
If God chooses to roast the equatorial regions in revenge for the people not wearing enough clothes, who am I to object?
Gore tried to get us up in arms in favor of polar bears. What have polar bears done for me lately?
I don't see them as a cause. I think he's counting on people having adored them as a children, but I never did.
What does get me going is the prospect of a green Greenland. I would just like to see it green again. I used to color it green as a child, and always wondered then why is it white?
This would add coherence to my world.
I can imagine endless grass lands, for biofuel!
I'm not sure that I care about the larger predators.
I'm not sure that they aren't perversions of nature in the first place. The tigers, the lions, the wolves.
I'd just as soon see pink gerbils, and zebras, and giraffes, as I would see a polar bear.
I'm not sure why thee is even the existence of teeth. I'd like to see the lion lie down with the lamb and play Parcheesi.
i am presently typing on a laptop in montana
and i have perused this conversation with relish
which may say something about
the level of derangement to which a mind is willing to go
but the thread is amazing it is like a group thesis a long dialectical rhetorical three or 4 way sword fight with blunt tips and padding of course but be that as it may this is stupendous all the ideas are clear and descartes would love this i remember waking up intellectually when an english professor was explaining the epistemological turn around in modern thinking as exemplified in poets how the existential world view tended to place being before essence or something like that and i remember trying most dilegently to figure out what in god's name that meant and it lead me to the library where i hung out for hours
let me say a word or two about catholic education since none of you heathens not even jadl himself has stated anything about the foundations of western education theory except i think it was in this thread didn't i read james referring to josef pieper yes well take note it's important
tadatadatatatdata
whatdya say?
catholics have the long tradition that education is of value in and of itself that is the founding and motivating principle that if people are educated if they think about something if they solve a few problems in the laboratory well the chances are greater that that person could contribute to society in a productive way this didn't always work out however some bastards got a little rowdy and had to be burned and hung but efficiency knows itself vain doesn't it anyway as i was saying the thing was to read the thing was to hold to the highest attainment the understanding of the search for god the highest intellectual goal is to study theology and write poems it has been this way since before jesus and the catholics adopted this very pattern except they opened it up to everyone...still it explains why in the jewish world the high percentage of people with great minds and extensive learning is so impressive i thank god almost every day for nathan millstein and isaac beshevis singer yet i shall always maintain that john kenneth glabraith is an economist with a heart while milton friedman was a lunatic with a brain
enter the jesuits ignatius of loyola was genius he decided that the best thing to do with all these bored nobleman's sons is to ply their minds with all the knowledge of the world provide put them on ships around the world give them with the ability to interpret all languages give them the resources to write books and write they did...ignatius created a caste of intenseley well read pilgrims adn missionaries basically what the church did in ignatius is systemetize the troubadour adn the wandering jew gave those roles status adn directed them into to structures which became schools so we have all these brains out there doing ministry doing astronomy doing philosphy doing business doing preaching educating the world because it is a good thing to do
the prods if you will followed the rc pattern at first theiri higher institutions placed theology as the summit of discourse but then they got all pragmatic and shit and had to be so rational and shit and well now we have systems everywhere and systems analysis and analasysis management and interfacing of pragmatics with the spirit world a la yoga ladies who stretch
and this is a bit wierd
there's nothng to do in the world adn there is plenty to do but young minds need time ample time to read big books it is the only hope i don't care which big books but read them adn talk about them it is the only meaningful psychology and the only meaningful history because the writers depict something historians couold not flaubert offers insight the bossouette might only allude to
we must teach the young peopel to carry tattered books in their back pockets again
i hear a train moaning
time to go
another year passes
i appreciate all you've done here kirby
nobody will notice
and of course it's almost very important
but you've created a masterpiece of cognitive interplay that is unsurpassed
A+ dude
liesure or is that leisure provides the context for good conversation
for a lutheran you're not bad at it
you could try to be a little more openminded when it comes to valuing the inestimable value of valuable roman values
but hey i think you'll get there
blessed season of incarnation to all of you blokes
stu gm
james craig curtis brett and the various girls who chime in
i never imagined i'd be so grateful for people i've never met
i'm just presuming you all exist
although the questiones poised by the great minds of the 20th century are nothing to scoff at
still
we must presume that
the people we talk to do exist
even if we cannot objectively prove that they exist
now these kinds of questions should occupy people throughout life don't we think???
big books long boring liturgies the best music good food what else is there
cheeriO
jh
JH, it is good to hear from you.
For the longest time I wasn't sure that you existed, either, and then I thought you might be very young. It was hard to place you.
Now I know you're in Montana for the christmas season.
It's snowing hard here, and just went out and did some last minute Christmas shopping and got a haircut. Chagrined to see a bit more gray up there.
All real learning is hard work, at least as hard as laying bricks, and at least as easy to mess up.
Btw., the A+ you gave me really boosted my spirits. Of coiurse, I couldn't have these dialogues without all of you, you, Curtis, James, his wife Em, Craig, Brett, Stu, GM, Sally, and many others who are gracious enough to come here and deal with my issues on a daily basis or at least once in a while. It's quite neat that we have this tiny community, spread out over the world, and can open up new ideas.
I think if I were to develop a curriculum for students there are a few things that I think everyone should know:
French
Vegetarian cooking
Algebra
A half-hour workout routine to stick with every day
The highlights of philosophy:
Aristotle, Aquinas, Luther, Schopenhauer, Nussbaum.
Highlights of surrealist literature:
Gorgias, Soupault, Breton, ...
I don't know, maybe these are just things I'd like everyone to know, but maybe only the people I'd like to talk to should know about them.
Corso, Ginsberg, whatever you can make of Godel, the highlights of Calvin Coolidge's presidency, Reagan's presidency,
I suppose this could go on forever.
I'd like to know more about India, more about Finland, and more about the law, to name three quick things off the top of my head.
Oh, I don't know enough really about anything at all.
Another thing I think is important to study is longevity:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I-jk9ni4XWk&feature=related
Post a Comment