Free Republic

BE HERE, OR BE NOWHERE!

Peter Beckway spent six years working toward a Ph.D. in English literature, racking up nearly all A's, winning a prestigious teaching assistantship, and earning a 3.88 grade-point average. All that remained were the final exam and oral presentation, each to be scored by a panel of professors he chose. So Beckway was "devastated" when that panel ridiculed his written work and said he wouldn't get the chance to deliver his oral presentation. And, they added, he wouldn't be getting a Ph.D. from the University of Illinois at Chicago or anywhere else. Now, Beckway is suing the five professors on the...

Auerbach, portrays Greenspan as a real-life Professor Marvel -- who, through double-talk or "garblement," transformed himself into a mighty economic wizard à la Oz. Auerbach strongly implies that Greenspan's 1977 Ph.D. from New York University was obtained in a few months with little more rigor than a matchbook-cover art degree and that Greenspan has kept his Ph.D. thesis secret in order to protect his vaunted academic reputation. Although Auerbach's evidence is circumstantial, it certainly is provocative. For years, NYU told the public that, at Greenspan's request, the thesis was locked away from public view in a vault at its Bobst...

A study by two conservative researchers attempting to determine why conservatives are underrepresented on college and university faculties. The conclusion is while some portion of this imbalance can be traced to "bias" and "discrimination", a large part results from a decision by students with conservative values not to pursue a career with limited economic potential that also requires sacrifice of family commitments to achieve academic advancement. "Since conservatives place an especially high priority on financial security and raising a family, the academy needs to make efforts to adopt more family-friendly policies... "As graduate school is not financially lucrative and pre-tenure...

College students are getting a raw deal, a recent New York report asserted. The problem is they're taking too many classes from part-time, or adjunct, professors. But that same report unwittingly revealed something about how higher education is more culpable than it likes to admit when it comes to creating the problem. The issue is a huge one in higher education far beyond New York, with about half of the nation's college faculty now on part-time contracts. Adjuncts are cheaper for colleges, but they often lack the time and resources for focused teaching, and research shows students' performance suffers if...

Why do PhDs in academia tend to be politically liberal? A paragraph in Science magazine’s feature “Random Samples” on December 21 suggested a reason: conservatives value other goals, like going into business to make money, or choosing to stay home and raise a family... ... It appears that conservatives are the fittest, working hard to pass on their genes, while liberals are like parasites, advancing primarily by taking over the host (the classroom) and churning out clones to infect other cells. A university setting is a contrived, unnatural environment where the parasites thrive. In the open air of true academic...

One myth dogging the immigration debate is that employers are fibbing (or grossly exaggerating) when they claim that hiring foreign professionals is unavoidable because U.S.-born Ph.D.s are hard to come by. But a new report on doctorates from U.S. universities shows they're telling the truth, and then some. Foreign-born students holding temporary visas received 33% of all research doctorates awarded by U.S. universities in 2006, according to an annual survey by the National Opinion Research Center at the University of Chicago. That number has climbed from 25% in 2001. But more to the point of business competitiveness, foreign students comprised...

In his Sept. 2 National Post column, George Jonas noted that if universities had been eliminated around 1900, we'd have been spared the devastating effects of many toxic ideologies, which needed mass production and distribution vehicles -- those vulnerable empty vessels known as students -- to sow their ruinous messages amongst the general population. He cited, amongst others, the scourges of anti-Semitism (in the guise today of anti-Zionism), Communism, National-Socialism, eco-fascism and militant feminism, all of which have depended on universities for transmuting ideology into laws, social policy, foreign relations, and cultural identity. I'm inclined to agree with Jonas; but...

China, number one again; it has turned out more Ph.Ds last year than any other country in the world. But a Ph. D. does not a good teacher make. Quality of teaching is being seriously questioned in China. Professors are caught up in 1. The publish or perish mentality 2. Raising funds and 3. Attending conferences, making them absent from class. Gee, it sounds like the same problem there is with traditional colleges in America, no? As a result, China has had some problems with plagiarism in the recent past. In the near future, the Chinese universities are likely to...

BEIJING – The stunning revelation of fraud and fakery in the heart of China's R&D industry has vindicated a feisty set of scholars who are gaining traction in exposing a culture of fraud and corruption in China's colleges. Just days ago authorities revealed that the Hanxin digital signal chip, a so-called "Chinese chip" designed to enhance home-grown computer technology, is not an original. Chen Jin, "father of the Chinese chip," evidently used a product from a foreign firm to win a lucrative bid in 2003 - ironically, to spearhead a much publicized patriotic national drive to create a Chinese For...

My husband jokes that I should have been an electrician. In this age of outsourcing and job insecurity, the trades seem to us to be the best professions of the future. To be sure, most aren't glamorous and are often physically demanding. But a number seem to have financial security and stability, and their job portability doesn't hurt, either. Many of us white-collar employees don't get to choose where we will live; we must go wherever our employer requires us. Many folks in the trades can command a good income, choose their own hours, and put down roots in a...

Egypt: Honorary PhD to Prince Charles from al-Azhar University MENA Tuesday, March 21, 2006 CAIRO, March 21 (MENA) - Al-Azhar Univeristy on Tuesday granted British Crown Prince Charles an honorary PhD degree. President of al-Azhar University Ahmed Mohammed al-Tayib granted Prince Charles the degree at a ceremony attended by Grand Imam of al-Azhar Sheikh Mohammed Sayyed Tantawi and Minister of Awqaf Hamdy Zaqzouq. Tayib expressed appreciation of the stance of Prince Charles towards Islam and Muslims and his intensive efforts for realising rapprochement among civilisations. (Description of Source: Cairo MENA in English -- government news agency) -------------------------------------- For more translations...

The number of Americans earning doctoral degrees has declined in recent years, renewing worries that the United States is losing its dominance in Ph.D.-level education to rapidly developing nations like China and India. The National Center for Education Statistics recently reported that 44,160 Ph.D.s were awarded by U.S. universities in 2002, down from the high-water mark of 46,010 doctorates awarded in 1998. All other education degrees are up dramatically. The Census Bureau reported that the number of Americans who obtained a bachelor's degree increased from 32 million in 1990, or 20 percent of the population then, to more than 44...

When I graduated from college, one of my old high school friends said that a B.S. degree stood for "B.S." When I got my M.S. degree, he said it stood for "More S...". When I got my PhD, he said that stood for "Piled Higher and Deeper." At the time, I just thought he was just jealous. But recent events in higher education have caused me to rethink my position. For example, I learned this week that Olga Gershenson, a professor of Judaic and Near Eastern studies at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, and Barbara Penner, a professor of...

A federal judge ruled on April 18 that 24-year-old William Jensen Cottrell should serve more than seven years in federal prison and pay more than $3.5 million in restitution for an August 2003 firebombing spree that damaged or destroyed some 125 sport utility vehicles at dealerships and homes outside Los Angeles. Cottrell will be required to serve at least 85 percent of the eight-year, four-month sentence handed down by U.S. District Judge R. Gary Klausner. Cottrell was convicted in November 2004 of seven counts of arson and one of conspiracy. He was acquitted of the most serious charge, using a...

Others may have sympathized on learning that Hamid Dabashi, a professor of Middle East studies at Columbia University, felt threatened by a graduate student at his own university, but not me. The incident began late on Sept. 27, 2004, when Victor Luria, a Ph.D. candidate in genetics and a former soldier in the Israel Defense Forces, wrote Dabashi an e-mail taking strong exception to what Dabashi had written about the IDF in an article, "For a Fistful of Dust: A Passage to Palestine," he published in the Egyptian newspaper, Al-Ahram. In response, Luria wrote to Dabashi: I have rarely seen...

Why Morality Matters by Steven C. Bonta, Ph.D. It is my conviction that the greatest threat to our free republic is moral decline. It is becoming fashionable nowadays to discount or ignore completely the relationship between morality and political liberty. Perhaps this is because the deteriorating moral culture in the modern United States of America seeks to be its own justification. Freedom, some believe, can flourish independently of moral standards, as long as we allow every man uninhibited license in his so-called “personal lifestyle choices.” This badly flawed notion is going to be the death of our republic, unless...

U.S. Is Losing Its Dominance in the Sciences By WILLIAM J. BROAD Published: May 3, 2004 The United States has started to lose its worldwide dominance in critical areas of science and innovation, according to federal and private experts who point to strong evidence like prizes awarded to Americans and the number of papers in major professional journals. Foreign advances in basic science now often rival or even exceed America's, apparently with little public awareness of the trend or its implications for jobs, industry, national security or the vigor of the nation's intellectual and cultural life. Advertisement "The rest of...

Can any freeper help me to find a document that once crossed my email, containing a list of superhuman questions which demonstrated qualifications for a PhD? As I recall it was purportedly from a midwestern university and contained questions such as "What is the total weight of snow that falls within the confines of the campus in a typical winter?"... Saw it, smiled, then trashed it. Someone else must know where it can be found...I hope... TIA, Boris