Posted on 11/13/2011 1:10:57 AM PST by Maelstorm
Laying the groundwork to revamp higher education in Florida, Gov. Rick Scott has questioned the value of liberal arts degrees, dissed anthropologists, proposed ending tenure for professors and posted salaries of all state university employees on the Internet.
Scott also recently sent a letter to state university trustee boards pushing for change on campuses. He included excerpts from a Wall Street Journal op-ed piece by Ohio University economics professor Richard Vedder, "Time to Make Professors Teach." Vedder derided much academic research as "obscure" and "trivial," noting there have been 21,000 scholarly articles on Shakespeare since 1980.
"Wouldn't 5,000 have been enough?" Vedder wrote.
Among those who received Scott's letter: Ayden Pierce Maher, a senior at Florida Atlantic University in Boca Raton who serves as the student representative to the school's trustee board. Maher called the governor "misguided."
"Isn't a university supposed to be a place for emerging minds to ponder new ideas?" said Maher, of Coral Springs, the FAU student body president.
Longtime FAU mathematics professor Fred Hoffman said Scott's actions have left a bad taste with faculty: "We assume he has some kind of ax to grind."
Boris Bastidas, an FAU senior and political science major, said, "It's almost as if the governor is saying some of these areas are a waste of taxpayer money. But it's not right to cut arts, sociology, psychology. It goes against what conservatives are supposed to stand for — individual choice and the belief that with hard work you can get a job and succeed."
They all say that Scott, a former health care CEO, is bringing too much of a bottom-line business mentality to a place where the pursuit of knowledge and development of student intellect is supposed to be paramount.
(Excerpt) Read more at sun-sentinel.com ...
To “round out” our education engineering students were required to take liberal arts courses. It was a requirement that these courses be entirely academic with “no practical value.” That quote was from the dean of engineering, as I wanted to take a few biology labs in lieu of “art.”
When I got to that side of campus I was appalled. Students were so stoned in the film class they couldn’t tell you that Humphrey Bogart had starred in the “Maltese Falcon” five minutes after we’d seen it. I talked to quite a few students trying to determine why and how they were there. Many were on grants or student loans. They were obviously there to party, not work.
The degrees the liberal arts majors were getting were useless. I talked to one guy who had been working on his PhD. in Russian Art Literature. I asked what that would prepare him to do and he said, “Teach Russian Art Literature.” It was a narrow field and he said he’d have to wait for his major professor to retire.
Yes, but Liberal Arts courses are fun - I found out all you needed was an opinion and the ability to express it in order to do well in Philosophy. Some of my most fun (but useless) courses were Liberal Arts "fillers". The need for them also extended my time and costs in order to get the degree....
“As more and more money is spent on education, illiteracy is increasing. And I wouldn’t be at all surprised if it didn’t end up with virtually the whole revenue of the western countries being spent on education, and a condition of almost total illiteracy resulting therefrom.” - Malcolm Muggeridge
For every grant dollar that is given to a faculty member, the university receives additional money from the government for ‘overhead’. At Stanford, for example, for biomedical grants this overhead rate is 100%. So, if a faculty member is awarded a 1 million dollar grant, Stanford gets an additional 1 million. So 2 million dollars goes to Stanford.
Further, in many departments at many universities around the country the faculty are expected to pay a significant chunk, and sometimes all of their salary from grants.
So, the universities pay cut-rate salaries and get ‘overhead’ money from the government. This means that there has been little reason for universities to limit the growth of their faculty. It also means that they would rather their faculty spend their time writing grants than teaching.
They hire faculty, hope they'll publish something or do something that will bring kudos and money to the university, jettison them if they don't, and then just start the cycle again. Whatever kudos they do get they use to fish for philanthropic funding - to compliment what they get from the government. They use some of this philanthropic funding to build new buildings, allowing them to attract more faculty who hopefully will bring them more grant money.
How does one get grants? Publishing, for one, which is why there has been such an explosion in the number of publications. This in turn leads to lots of published chaff being added to the wheat.
The problem is that grant funding is shrinking, because the government is broke. They system is broken. It will be interesting to see what happens.
If he is, I admire him for it.
It would be nice if in Pa. there was someone who was.
All a piece of paper does is get you in the door. The problem with the people that hold these mostly worthless (today) pieces of paper is they have to actually PERFORM if they manage to get the job.
My personal feeling is businesses both large and small do themselves a huge dis service by not looking to fill positions with anything other then college graduates. Some of the most intelligent people I have met and the best managers I have had never even went to college.
I learned long ago that intelligence is what you are born with and smart is what you become by using this God given intelligence. The problem for many is they don’t have the first clue how to USE what they have. This is what college is supposed to teach but instead they waste the kids time by filling their heads full of revisionist Left wing crap and charge the family of the kid $50-75,000a year to do it to them.
This right here needs to be shown to the little 99%'s on Wall Street bitching about their student loan debt and the fact they can't get jobs to pay it. According to the 'academics' who taught them, higher education isn't about that.
The “student” “protestors” are also demonstrating that their “pursuit of knowledge” and “development of intellect” has been an Epic Fail.
It’s one thing to get an economically-worthless degree, yet have gained knowledge of something interesting. I know a man in the local political scene who has a Masters in Modern Irish Literature. Fascinating to hang out at the polls with on a slow primary day ... he does something in the insurance business to pay the bills.
It’s something else again to have spent $100,000 in borrowed money on a degree, but be unable to read, write, or reason at the level of my 10-year-old.
I think what Scott is saying is that if the STATE IS PAYING for part (or most) of the tuition, then the state HAS A RIGHT, and obligation, to try to make sure that money isn’t being wasted - because it is TAXPAYER MONEY. It is not the school’s money, until Florida gives it to them.
So, as I see it, if the majors are basically useless, then the kids pay their own way. They can still major in Shakespeare...but it’s on their own dime. If there is enough demand for that at the state schools (with people willing to pay the full cost), then they can keep the program...if not, then those students can go to private schools (or the University of Phoenix, LOL).
As to those Vagina Monologue majors that wind up doing really well in corporate management, no one will be able to convince me that their VM degree was the reason, and that if they had a math or physics degree they would still be in the mail room.
Agreed. Perhaps academics define ‘development of intellect’ in the ethereal sense. In that case, they’re succeeding.
He should be. Academia is filled with morons.
More power to ya! It is nice to meet an artist who is conservative. You like red.... You know that red is a power color that women sometimes try and pull off in certain business and social situations. Dittos for guys (businessmen & politicians) and red oriented neckties. The traditional Chinese with money....They would bundle up in red robes in the winter. They felt it made the person warmer.
I think this is great news. I taught previously at the State College of Florida, and the system is incredibly stupid. The senior profs do little teaching and suck in huge amounts of money. Administrators likewise make a mint. Most of the teaching is pawned off on adjuncts like myself, who make $1800 a semester and receive no benefits.
Talk about a rigid class system! If it were a company, the unions and Dems would be freaking out at the injustice.
End tenure, cut down the number of bureaucrat administrators, and focus colleges once again on teaching. Good for Governor Scott!
A conviction from one of the most brilliant and insightful men who ever lived..The Ivy League institutions are the greatest scam in the history of our nation. The power mongering of the rich elites who fund their endowments knew if they could get hold of the government reigns in this country, their children would not need knowledge to enslave the populations..They would only needed a piece of paper from Harvard, Columbia, Yale, etc. They now populate our media and our government and, though small in actual numbers, they have their people in all the powerful positions. Did families like the Kennedy's actual earn their degrees or were the degrees just a legacy for them?..Did they actually attend class?..I would love to know. Bill Buckley knew what was going on and he spoke up. In my mind, the revelations coming out from Penn State right now are cut from the same kind of mind set which is that the "elite" institution must be protected from the public at all costs to the public..Political correctness, begun behind those ivy league walls, have brought us this hedonism and I hope and pray people will wake up and demand investigations of power elites wherever they are found.
Right on! bttt
Yes, it is a far different thing to subsidize the education of people we cannot do without, such as doctors, nurses and teachers, engineers and people who have the REAL skills required to keep us running..People such as plumbers and electricians. I am just looking at my own life and in the past year, the above mentioned folks are the people I have needed to keep my family going. And, what about farmers and our food producers? Instead, our colleges and universities seem most committed to turning out government “masters” who would shackle those required to keep our basic needs met. How about the schenanigans of the EPA which have raised the cost of everything for us, impoverishing us everyday of our lives, so they can more quickly usher in their socialist system with themselves as the masters. It is time to bring the educational institutions under control..It can be done if the people demand it.
A major problem in this area is that the general population thinks that the function of a university is undergraduate education.
At the prestige universities and most large state schools, undergraduate education is actually a minor function, at least by some specific criteria.
For example, in schools such as those most of the tenured faculty will teach one undergraduate course a year - that might be thirty or so one-hour lectures for the entire year. (They might also teach a graduate course or a seminar or some such thing). Teaching assistants will do the grading and run the labs, if there are any.
Now that doesn’t mean those folks don’t earn their keep - they just do so in other ways (or not, as is often the case in some of the b*llsh*t disciplines).
In a similar context, if you go onto the campus of a big state school, most of the space in the educational buildings is devoted to research, not classrooms.
Now there’s not necessarily anything wrong with that approach, as long as you know what you’re paying for - there’s a reason Harvard and Stanford are Harvard and Stanford, and it’s got little to do with what’s going on in the classroom.
But taxpayers who are paying for State U think they’re paying for undergraduate education. They are - but *most* of what they’re paying for is NOT undergraduate education.
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