Posted on 06/29/2011 4:27:55 PM PDT by Texas Fossil
Rick Perry is waging an undeclared war on higher education—in particular, on the state’s two flagship institutions, the University of Texas and his own alma mater, Texas A&M. He has delegated higher education policy to the Texas Public Policy Foundation, an Austin-based conservative think tank, which has produced an ideological blueprint for how the state’s universities should be governed. The objectives are accountability, transparency, and productivity. Several of the TPPF’s recommendations have already been put into practice at Texas A&M. UT has resisted so far, but the administrators I spoke with believe the battle is likely to be a losing one.
(Excerpt) Read more at texasmonthly.com ...
Where and how? Seriously.
Hairwise, Rick beats ‘em all!
Someone like Joe Perry, who has long black and white hair with a low hairline could have him beat. He would cut his hair, and could dye it to any color. You really don’t know these things. What would his hair look like shorter?
Nobody can beat Rick’s overlapping parting of his hair in front.
How does he do it? It must be his beautician’s secret!
I have heard of Rick’s “good hair”. I have heard of Romney’s “good hair”. But I haven’t taken a very close look at Rick’s hair.
Here is the deal. He had taken 3 really bone headed stances that I remember. GARDASIL, Trans Texas Corridor and supporting “Rudy” Giuliani for President.
Past that and his “good hair” he had done a lot of things that helped the State.
His family lives in my county. They were Dems until Rick changed parties. (I have always been registered and voted as a Republican) His family farms, they have always been fiscal conservatives. They have been in Haskell County a very long time, my family has been here since 1889.
I have never met Rick, but know his father and mother. I was a delegate at the Texas Republican Convention the year he was first elected to be Governor on his own. I voted for him then and voted for him each time he ran. And would do so again under the same circumstances.
If that displeases you, sorry.
I agree with your sentiments, TF, but must disagree on specifics.
I don’t like UT anymore than you do. A snottier bunch of bloated mirror-gazers has never looked down its collective reading glasses at people who don’t fit the “correct” worldview. But the problem is public funding. Accreditation is just a barrier to entry and has given us the University of Phoenix and other edufactured disasters (I coined that term year ago in a book I copyrighted, but no one will publish it so it doesn’t matter much). The only reason why anybody bothers with accreditation is federal money. “Acccountability” and “transparency” sound grand until the person checking the books, looking inside the operation and writing the checks is a statist moron. The Trans-Texas Corridor convinced me that Perry is just that, a statist who cares not for the Constitution or anything else that can curb his power. As for his think tank, they would have everybody learn exactly the same material in exactly the same way because they are convinced that the content or subject matter of courses is unimportant: only process matters. Therefore, in their view, a monkey that initiates a class discussion about nuclear physics among a group of individuals randomly picked off the street has contributed more to society than has a Nobel laureate who delivers an inspiring lecture to college students. We have John Dewey to thank for that mindset.
The reason why so many UT professors publish drivel is because they receive no royalties from its dissemination. I have authored dozens of articles, too, but hardly anybody reads them. Half of them or so are really pretty good. Two were written about the potential of a particular agricultural crop for our state’s economy and were in response to a request from a banking executive for more information. It took a lot of data gathering and careful analysis to write those two separate articles. My co-author and I sent the links for the articles to the executive, but I doubt he even read them. Now, he might have read them had they appeared in a “top” tier journal such as those in which most UT professors publish. But a “top” journal in my field wouldn’t dream of publishing the articles (not sexy enough, referrees can’t understand them, etc) so we didn’t bother sending them there. We sent them where they could be disseminated in a period shorter than 2 or 3 years. Because of the long turnaround time in “top” journals and lack of breadth of understanding on the part of research school professors, originality or innovation need not apply. Now here’s the ironic thing: Both UT professors and Guv. Perry’s thinktank buds would roundly conclude that my research was crap because it didn’t appear in a venue they had heard of. Go figure . . .
The other half of the articles I’ve penned were thrown together so the school I was teaching at could keep its ACCREDITATION. Now I write only books. Sure, no one will likely ever read them, but at least they will have to pay me some royalties if they like my work enough to print it. The accreditors may not like it, but so what? (I got tired of having to pay royalties to “good” journals whenever I wanted to access my own articles. It was particularly tiresome because I received absolutely nothing in the way of royalties for my own work.)
The goal of the Texas republicans seems to be to reduce UT and TAMU into very large community colleges in which each student is taught exactly the same thing about each subject, probably by someone with Education credentials rather than expertise in the field. In fact, that seems to be the goal of the US Department of Education and state universities around the country. As a lifelong Republican, I shake my head in wonder: who is going to write those standardized textbooks and control the education agenda? It sure won’t be those who value freedom and small government.
Diversity of thought and research in higher education has been about the only thing that has kept conservatism alive in this country. Remember Lino Graglia? Freidrich Hayek? I could name several dozen more. If Perry and his “Republican” henchmen have their way you won’t have much in the way of conservative idealogy or teaching in our universities. It will all be the standard socialist line.
I thank God for the private university I teach at now, where the marketplace is the judge of what I teach and write. If I want that executive I mentioned earlier to read my work, then it is up to me to get off my tail and convince him. Governor Perry seems to be the unwitting architect of the plan for dismantling state universities. Even grad schools will be at the level of high schools with a few more iterations of government funding.
...and they would probably be correct unless perhaps the research was in the hard sciences. Little does the world care or need research on the public's dime on the farting characteristics of a literary figure in the 1700's!
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