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Said the French republican....
You know, the monarchs ultimately lost that debate. :2razz:
Said the French republican....
You know, the monarchs ultimately lost that debate. :2razz:
The interesting thing is that the monarchy has a better reputation than the republicans.
How very convenient.
Libraries exist to protect, nurture, and celebrate information. Don't you see that universities have a different and more active role in society?
Accrediting agencies are part of the problem, as is the federal oversight you discussed. Such things are inherently bureaucratic. That's a difficult concept to explain, really, but I'll try it with an analogy: A fence at the zoo is not meant to keep the animals in as much as it's meant to keep the people out. Similarly, degrees, issued by universities and given their stamp of approval by accrediting agencies, are not meant to reward the efforts of the person who earned the degree so much as they are meant to segregate out the people who did not earn that degree from any academic discussion.
The problem is that some of the smartest people I know don't have degrees.
Simple Answer: Yes. Everything we can do in a traditional classroom we are increasingly able to do online.
Well it's reality. You want to demand that something which isn't a business should run on free market business principles, we don't even have businesses which do so.
All I can really see is that you have some personal axe against academia and University for some reason, you belittle the people who go through it, try to make it into something its not, all so you can herald its fall; that's it. Create cogs and nothing more; you'd make a great Cyberman.
I never "demanded" anything. I don't know whether you create straw men on purpose, or you just have trouble with reading comprehension. Either way, I shouldn't have to keep backtracking to repeat what I actually said, as opposed to what you want to think I said.
Some of the smartest people I've ever met didn't have much formal education either, but that's not really the point here.
You seem to be coming from a defensive and bitter place, and for that I'm sorry. If you think that a degree's purpose is to segregate, you are mistaken. Your take on academia is one of an outsider with only partial understanding. You asked whether I understand the role of universities in society, and the answer is yes, I do.
Backtracking is all you can do. You've said what you've said and it's been picked up by others. Your aggression against academia is well documented.
How is it off point to mention that some of the smartest people I know don't have degrees? Degrees come with benefits. The world is full of capable, deserving people who won't ever see those benefits. The process of getting a degree also increases knowledge. The world will never see the benefit of some of its most capable people being in possession of that knowledge.
Given that the topic of this thread is the role in which technology can play to bring access to education to a greater pool of people, I think pointing out that many of the world's brightest don't currently have a degree is very much on point.
Second, both you and Ikari seem to want to take this from being a debate on the issues to being a personal evaluation of my motives and feelings. It's disappointing, because two supposedly well-educated people shouldn't be lacking in logical debate skills to where they would resort to such mindlessness.
Since you brought it up, though, I certainly have no love for academe. It's a shady world of self-aggrandizement and resting entirely on one's laurels rather than on one's accomplishments, and it exerts entirely too much influence on the rest of society based on nothing more than smoke-and-mirrors. Academe is the Wizard of Oz behind the curtain - seemingly great and powerful, but the actual people running it are feeble and ordinary. The biggest problem I have with academe is that it is exclusive, rather than inclusive. It's an old boy's club in the worst way.
Like it or not, though, the internet will end that.
You don't see a problem relying on a mechanism constructed by the elite? That's the internet, however democratized it has become.
That's incidental. :2razz:
Hardly so. It demonstrates whatever point Ikari pointed out or has pointed out numerous times in similar threads. Your progress, your ideas, your view of the world is built upon the efforts and works of the elite.
Actually, most inventions come from small businesses.
And the internet? You can thank the US military for that, not academe.
And you think the academy was no large part of that development? How ignorant and naive.
I'm sure it was. Regardless, that's incidental, given that the vast majority of inventions come from outside academe.
The real thinkers and innovators in this country are small business owners.
Yet the center for commerce, and you say, education, relies on a construction by the very people you think are not "real thinkers." It's amusing you don't see how ludicrous you sound.
I never said academics weren't "real thinkers."
Ikari drew a contrast between the "thinkers" produced by academia and the "cogs" created outside academia. I was alluding to that - taking a jab, if you will.
Academics are, for the most part, smart people.
And innovators?
Your disdain for the university has a hard time explaining why it is academics should be seen as a cancer to society, when in many respects, you rely on them from the ideas you have to the products you use.
And you think the academy was no large part of that development? How ignorant and naive.
Don't confuse the people with the structures. I have no problem at all with the people who work in academia. My problem is entirely with the system and the way in which it's structured. We essentially take the greatest resource this country has, intelligent people, and we waste their talents.
What's wrong with the general structure of the Academy?
Oh my goodness, where to begin? I'll throw out a few, but there are many, many things wrong with the way universities do business.
1. Tenure - Lifetime job security is the antithesis of competition. Competition leads to productivity and higher job performance.
University presidents have no power - all the major decisions are made by faculty. Collective decision-making by hundreds of prima donnas, none of whom can be fired or even demoted for being wrong, is not a system that any other institution has adopted anywhere else in the world. It is like Congress without elections -- a formula for total irresponsibility and self-indulgence.
2. College Athletics - If you want to see slave labor in action in 2012, look no further than college football. These student athletes bring in billions of dollars of revenue to the schools, to the television networks, yet they are entirely unpaid. Why? So that college athletics can keep its tax-exempt status. Unlike baseball, the NFL does not want to run a minor league. So they farm the work out to the universities, and everybody makes money. Everybody except, of course, the kids doing the actual labor.
Example: O'Bannon v. NCAA could impact more than video games - Michael McCann - SI.com
3. Scandals in College Athletics - The last point reminds me of this point. College athletes are not subjected to the same academic standards as other students. The University of North Carolina was recently found to have been giving out free "A's" to football players in an African American Studies course. Too bad the players never actually attended the courses.
But what really takes the cake is the Penn State scandal. Here you had nearly a decade of disgusting child abuse, which was knowingly covered up by the university. The Freeh Report on Pennsylvania State University | Judge Louis Freeh investigation on PSU
I know of only two elitist, closed societies capable of such a coverup.... academia and the catholic church.
4. Other coverups - It doesn't begin and end with athletes. A study conducted in 2009 found that many colleges were covering up the number of rapes on campus in order to make their campus appear safer and more attractive to parents. This is, in fact, a pattern: Campus Rape Victims: A Struggle For Justice : NPR
5. Grad Students - But let's get off the topic of coverups, and get back on the topic of slave labor. Big-name universities will lavish six-figure salaries on deconstructionist professors whose chief claim to fame is that other deconstructionist professors like them, while freshmen are being taught by low-budget graduate students, many of whom are from foreign countries and do not speak intelligible English.
That is why hundreds of students can be packed like sardines into a huge lecture hall for Economics 1, taught by some junior faculty member without enough clout to get out of teaching anything so elementary.
Meanwhile, some senior professor in the same department may hold a little boutique seminar for six in his pet sub-specialty, far off the beaten track from anything that undergraduates need to know.
When budget-crunch time comes, two classes of Economics 1 with 400 students each may be more likely to be combined into one class with 800 students than is the big-name professor's seminar to be touched.
6. University Admissions - They are just plain unfair, and do not reward achievement. For example, why do universities have legacy admissions? Who cares if your uncle attended Harvard, or if your mother attended Princeton? That should have nothing at all to do with whether you are admitted.
Then you have race and gender quotas. Rather than being admitted purely on academic merit, students are admitted due to the melanin count in their skin or their genitalia.
I haven't even mentioned the number of foreign students. Why should American taxpayers subsidize the education of a student from India or Korea?
Next, you have people with money. If you have money, you can get in anywhere, regardless of how dumb you are.
7. University Tuition - College tuition is just ridiculous. It is the most expensive thing most families will ever pay for aside from their home. It's the number one reason young people will go in to debt when they're starting out. In the past year alone, tuition for four-year public universities rose 8.3 percent for in-state students and 5.7 percent for out-of-state students. Why is that? Because they are run so inefficiently.
Ronald Ehrenberg, a labor economist at Cornell, cited “the shared system of governance between trustees, administrators, and faculty” at many universities, which “guarantees that ... institutions will be slow to react to cost pressures.”
http://net.educause.edu/ir/library/pdf/ffp0005s.pdf
8. Research Grant Funding - Research grant funding is a must to keep a scientific projects advancing. It costs money for materials and equipment in addition to personnel to undertake a research project.
Now, private money is private money, and I'm not really concerned about that.
Who gets the public money and why? As a taxpayer, I feel this process should be transparent and that I should have some input, along with other taxpayers. Instead, this process is farmed out to various government agencies who clearly have political agendas.
Funding of science - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
9. Wasteful Spending - This goofy grand funding process leads to a lot of studies being done that are simply a waste of money. But don't worry, Americans aren't the only ones. A group of Japanese scientists, led by a professor Yuki Sugiyama of Nagoya University, recently determined the reason commuters are occasionally caught in traffic jams is because there are too many cars on the road.
Groundbreaking stuff.
10. Left-wing Politics - Universities are the nerve center for liberal thought and liberal politics. The vastly disproportionate presence of leftist professors on university campuses across the United States has been well documented. One of the more significant studies on this subject was conducted in 2003 by the Center for the Study of Popular Culture (CSPC), which examined the ratio of registered Democrats to registered Republicans on the faculties of 32 elite colleges and universities nationwide.
In its examinations of more than 150 departments and upper-level administrations at the 32 elite colleges and universities, the CSPC found that the overall ratio of registered Democrats to registered Republicans was more than 10 to 1 (1397 Democrats, 134 Republicans).