Bullshit!: Part One of Two: College
if you can't take colorful language, probably you shouldn't watch this. Lots of good stuff in this episode considering the recent discussions in the Gulch
SOURCE URL: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hUDAxWlNrQ4
Please pardon me for not responding more frequently. Providing value for my students takes a lot of time. My Gulch activity will be primarily in the summer time, almost like going to Atlantis for a month in Atlas Shrugged. Very recently my parents have both gone downhill very quickly. I had to take power of attorney, and so my "free time" is pretty much gone. Thanks in advance to any of you for your concern.
We'll get through the crisis, just like you did recently.
I am sure there are quite a few exceptions to the general perceptions. Generalizations can sometimes do an injustice to the innocent. I have no doubt about the integrity of the institution you work at. I hear good things about several universities, like Hillsdale etc. As is typical, bad news gets the headlines...
Sorry about the news of your parents condition. I was wondering why we have heard less from you of late. You were missed.
Best wishes,
O.A.
My mom broke her hip and two neck bones. Dad has virtually no short term memory left. In 2.5 months, he went from early-stage Alzheimer's to late-stage, just like his dad did 30 years ago. I am considering changing my Gulch name to either Alzheimer or NoMindLeft. My parents certainly have renewed interest in a couple of projects that had ended a couple of years ago when the grad students working on them graduated.
Strength and best wishes for all concerned,
O.A.
If there is anything I can do... At this point all I can think of is to offer assurance that though difficult, one can carry on one day at a time.
Best of luck on your research and your Mother's rehab.
As for Alzheimer's disease, I had a project that ended a couple of years ago. The grad student had a lot of good data on how materials self-assemble / aggregate, including chicken egg lysozyme, which an earlier grad student of mine had shown was a really good model of amyloid beta protein misfolding.
I have a pretty poor grad student finishing up a thorough analysis of the protein misfolding literature related to Alzheimer's. In fact, I was editing that chapter of his thesis yesterday. In some respects, I feel like I am writing much of it, but I need to get a couple of papers out on this to get promoted.
lost her father a few years ago to Alzheimer's and
complications from a stroke, and it is no fun. -- j
done in private, stashed away, just 'cuz. I treasure
a tape from my dad, recorded in ~1990, before he
died in '91....... -- j
Been there, done that.
Hopefully your family is "functional" and there aren't any created wars for you to battle through as well.
My conclusion on today's higher education: it is not designed to teach you to think, be independent, to grow personally, it is designed to get you to conform.
I agree with you, btw.
I remember in the late-seventies before mandatory drug-testing truck drivers were often on uppers.
It is very tempting to lie, because the money can be very good, but we don’t have the type of crashes that we use to get a few decades ago. I remember one summer the beltway around Washington was shutdown like every other day for some serious trucking accident.
Want to play soccer?
Now remember what happened when BLM tried to shoot it out with the rancher in Nevada. Well the Dakota, Montana & Wyoming 'Bad lands' are twice or three times as bad. That's why the Bikers go to Sturgis. The FBI and their HRT got chased off the Rose Bud Reservation when they went after Russell Meeks of AIM, and the Dakota National Guard, many of whom are Sioux, made an obscene suggestion when asked (Meeks gave himself up and I think, but I may be wrong, Dr. Alan M. Dershowitz got him off on time served. .
One thing I particularly detest here in Florida is how many of the state senators and representatives (particularly the Republicans) get themselves appointed as part-time adjunct faculty at the state universities and community colleges for when they are not doing government business. Needless to say, now I am forced to subsidize my competition!
Just to be clear, I never vote for Democrats, but more often vote for libertarians or conservatives. In Florida 90% of the elected Republicans are RINOs.
Most people don't realize what they are buying when they choose a university. Almost everyone is buying an undergraduate degree, whereas at most major universities (not Florida Tech), the emphasis is on research because more money comes in that way. National rankings are based much more on the quality of research and graduate education, so people are buying something other than what they think they are buying. Some places like Florida Tech will tell you that. I provide High Tech with a Human Touch, primarily at the undergraduate level. Yes, we benefit from the student loans, but we give value for value.
My comments about being akin to a racket are more the perception that college is just what you do after high school, with no regard to price or what you get. If people look at the price and what they get, I'm fine with that, even if they just want to party. My problem is with consumers rightly deciding things like education, getting married, having a baby are important and then turning off their brains and writing a blank check.
When I got here, the number of administrators was a lot lower than it is now. I think we have about 2000 employees on campus, of which about 350 are faculty. I would estimate that the ratio of administrators to faculty has doubled in my 16+ years, mostly to comply with lots of new government regulations. However, much of the increase is in our recruiting and fundraising efforts, both of which have more than recouped their costs.
We have a big online program at our off-campus sites (mostly military bases). I have no idea how many people are at those sites.
We run a pretty tight ship financially. The faculty would tell you pretty much unanimously that we would benefit substantially from at least one more building for experimental research. Space is pretty cramped. Part of the problem is that zoning laws have changed to eliminate construction of very tall buildings (due to hurricane risk). We have the tallest building in the county except for the Vehicle Assembly Building at Cape Canaveral. It was built prior to the zoning changes.
Class size is typically 30-50. No class is allowed to be over 60 except for one of mine. I got an exemption after a few teaching awards because I teach the same students in a companion lab course. If we were to get much larger than that, we couldn't honor the "human touch" part of our motto and be sufficiently different from the state university factories to justify the additional cost.
Brick and mortar is expensive. There is a lot of competition for first-year courses with community colleges and online programs. While we have to offer those courses, we get a lot of transfer students who have already taken those courses at much lower cost before coming to FIT.
I should have your friend contact me and our chief development officer. Most universities call their fundraising arm either "Development" or "Advancement". We have a pretty small endowment because of our youth, but it is increasing rapidly.
In order to perform the profession of Medical Technologist, you need to have a lot of information. One of the ways to acquire this info is to go to college; another is OJT, and read a lot on the side. There are a lot of professions that are in this same class - you can go to college and get the info (and some extraneous stuff) dumped into your head in a compressed format, or you can work your way up through the profession (in states that do not require a license) and learn it on your own. College is worthwhile in such cases.
But. When I was at college, I did not give a hoot about the 'culture' of the college: I went to school, went to class and came home again. What the excellent Penn and Teller video is about is the culture of colleges, not whether or not they teach calculus. From people of my own age group and younger, it seems to me that college is regarded as a social venue rather than a place to learn.
My heartfelt sympathies to you, jbrenner. That is a tough place to be in. For your dad, the best that can be hoped is that once in a while a cheerful 'stranger' will visit and chat with him and make him laugh. I am glad your mother is on the mend and is able to sit for even a few hours per day.
If 'education' is what people are concerned about, then why are there not really hard tests that use secure identification procedures: If you pass the test, you have the degree, irrespective if you have ever crossed the threshold of a school/college or not? In an age where a lot of information is available online, perhaps this is the 'competitive' element that is needed to drive colleges back towards being institutions of learning.
Jan
I love this idea! I've heard MIT has all their classes online free. And there are always books, the internet, apprenticeships, and on-the-job training. It's the knowledge that's important, not where an individual received it.
There's that joke about it being a huge year-long party with a $25k cover charge. There is some truth to it. There are cheaper ways to party and hang out and make connections.
Why do I consider scholarships even worse than loans? They are cost shifting, pure and simple. I often lament that I don't have a problem with paying for my children to go to college, but I sure hate paying for the other children who are not my responsibility - and that's what scholarships actually are. There's a certain cost that every school has each year. That cost, if distributed equally across the student body would be X. Since a good portion of those students receive "scholarships" and thus a reduced bill, they pay X - Y. That Y cost must come from somewhere, and so the students not receiving scholarships (increasingly a smaller number) ends up with X + Y , and where those not receiving scholarships is smaller than those who are then they are actually paying some multiple of Y.
FAFSA is a joke.
This is simply to true. Even more so in the public school system. Political correctness is destroying us on so many fronts.
Also so many people seem to need to understand the definition of diversity.
dictonary.com
Diversity
noun, plural diversities.
1. the state or fact of being diverse; difference; unlikeness:
Diverse
adjective
1. of a different kind, form, character, etc.; unlike:
Where in that definition does it say we must tolerate a difference that is destructive to ourselves? Where does it say we have to like someone who has a values opposed to our own? Where does it say we can sue because someone else says something about their preferences that we do not like? Where does it say that we cannot offend or be offended and still go on in our lives?
I must miss understand that definition because it certainly seems it has a lot more to it than the dictionary says it does.
To me Megan got it right. The exposure to others and others ideas is a good thing. Developing your own ideas and philosophy is a good thing. The issue is accepting or developing any particular philosophy is not viewed as being diverse, taking a position and standing by it is thought to be an error; perhaps this is the biggest error of all that is peddled in our TV shows, movies and at our public school and college classrooms.
We should be exposing and challenging our kids and young people to develop and defend a point of view. To stand by a value system and learn of its worth by the fruits that value system produces. Constantly exposing themselves to other ideas and seeing if they fit into the value system they find to work. Its philosophical development and something we no longer value or teach.
I related (sadly and somewhat personally) to the misappropriation of the thought: "If you are different then you are a child and hence unable to handle your own life."
That was in ELEMENTARY school.
Despite decades as an educator, there is a SET of reasons I home school my daughter.
But lets just say that you are interested in pure science and knowledge, where are the schools of hard knocks for those disciplines. How many of us would be dead if Jonas Salk had not graduated from NYU. How many would have gotten sick and possibly died if Louis Pasture hadn't graduated E'ccole de Paris.
Sure, there have been many without degrees and education who've done well, the list presented by P&T is only a small start. But reality must enter the program because the odds of you or I being one of them tomorrow, is so far beyond binary odds (50:50) that it is ridiculous.
Salient, statistically viable fact says that an individual who attends college will earn 25 percent more in a lifetime. A person who graduates will earn 33 to 45 percent more, and a person with an advanced degree will earn, depending 45-70 percent more than a high school graduate. Life is full of personal choices, we all have to make them.
Your references to Edison are, at best, uninformed, no colleges or universities offer a degree in Engineering in 1867 when Edison would have been 20, except West Point and that was Civil Engineering Degree. Rensselaer Polytechnic (RPI) and Cooper Union were both founded in the late 1820's, but they were 'Trade Schools' not degree granting universities. The Accreditation Board for Engineering and Technology, Inc. (ABET) did not grant accreditation to the first University, RPI until four years after Edison's birth. Further it is likely that Edison, was a hyper-intelligent individual, kids like Gates and some others who were among the many who were too smart to benefit from standard public education when special education for gifted kids didn't exist.
sit down son.
I never saw this perversion of diversity when I was in school 20 years ago.
I didn't get what Chomsky was getting at WRT home. Was he saying the whole campus is their home? Their dorm room/suite is their home. Then there are classrooms, labs, lounges, and "public" places. It almost seemed like Chomsky was expanding the notion of home, so that we're all roommates and have to get along and decide which posters, language, foods, etc are offensive. People sharing an apartment do have to agree on things or move out. But he sees the whole college that way. In other words, he's anti-diversity. I wish they had politely asked him if that's what he meant.
I couldn't tell if the protestors were trying to silence the counter-protestor. I think it's a good idea for protestors and counter-protestors to be physically separated, just far enough to avoid a fight breaking out.
I strongly agree with what he said at the end about going to college for something specific, even if you're going to take an easy major, hand out, and drink beer; at least admit that.
If I'm right, he's being tricky. "Campus is their *home*," he says. At first that sounds nice. But it's not technically true, and it's the starting point in his argument that we all have to agree on things.
Go FedEx and fight the bastards.
!. myth ruling reality (as does Chairman Obola)
2. cultural audit
3. the altar of do not offend
Anyone else love the 90's movie "PC"
Another great post.
About "diversity"-- The concept represents a midpoint between polar extremes. It's the two-edged sword wielded by those who want their own ideas accepted when competing against others more firmly established. So in the name of diversity, under the protective umbrella of tolerance, they want to get a foothold in the culture... until, that is, they are established and feel their creeds threatened by opposing ideas. Then they'll be first to decry giving equal weight to other beliefs--in effect an antitrust maneuver. Here's an example:
The Christian Homeschool Association of Pennsylvania runs an annual educational convention. Heaven help me, once I actually attended one of those to sell my (mathematics-based) puzzles. Their current prospectus includes these guidelines:
"CHAP asks our vendors to review their materials for items which are restricted by CHAP or which might be offensive to our primarily Christian attendees. Please eliminate such items from your display. Examples of such items would include: stories or art work containing immodesty or occult material; New Age or overtly humanistic material: "Values Clarification" curriculum; "Multi-Cultural" curriculum (material which treats all cultures and religions as equal with Biblical values); fantasy role-playing games or curriculum; or any material that portrays the Bible as merely mythological, or Christianity as untrue or as one among many equal religions. Display and sales of vitamins, herbal supplements, essential oils, and other medically oriented products or services, or down-line or multi-level marketing ventures are prohibited."
So these Christians are against humanism and against multi-culturalism. Hah! They see humanism as the camel's nose of atheism; they see multi-culturalism as giving equal recognition to other religions. Here, nakedly, we can see how ideas have a life of their own and hijack human emotions to grow their control. I find this a fascinating example of Darwinism in the realm of human software. Extrapolate to what philosophies teachers promote and what knowledge humans preserve. Then observe which belief systems have humans by the throat and drive humans to murder and mayhem in their defense.
Under these dynamics, objectivity is a rare and beautiful thing, and itself in grave danger of being subverted with rationalizations. We do have one safeguard: Check the premises.