This is what the past decades have wrought. The federal student loan program has been an unmitigated disaster for almost everyone, except (so far) the university administrators.
Category Archives: Education
Lindzen Versus Grijalva
More thoughts on the climate witch hunt:
How would the mainstream media react if a Republican congressman lobbed threatening inquiries hounding seven university presidents regarding the funding of professors’ research? Or if Republican congressmen sent threatening letters to the heads of left-wing think tanks? They would summon the ghost of Joe McCarthy. The Times would lead the pack and we’d still be hearing about it.
Yeah, but those Republicans are evil.
Millennials’ Tech Savviness
They don’t have that much.
This is the result of decades of terrible public schooling, thanks to the teachers’ unions.
The Department Of Education’s Office Of Civil Rights
“Liberal” Academia
Kurt Schlichter has a modest proposal:
Understand that the purpose of modern American “education” is not to educate students. It is primarily to provide cushy, subsidized sinecures for liberal administrators and faculty while, secondarily, providing a forum to indoctrinate soft young minds in the liberal fetishes du jour. Actually educating students is hard, and a meaningful education is anathema to liberalism. In the liberals’ ideal world, the universities would simply fester with leftist nonsense and not even bother with trying to teach their charges anything at all. And today, it’s pretty close to being the liberals’ ideal world.
…As I discuss in my book Conservative Insurgency, and as others like Glenn Reynolds have observed, with modern academia we normal Americans are paying to support a suppurating abscess in our culture that, left untreated, will kill its host. We need to lance this boil and drain the leftist pus.
Except there’s nothing liberal about them.
[Update a few minutes later]
This is the kind of thing he’s talking about: Leftists outraged that a university won’t police the attire of students off campus.
As I said, there is nothing liberal about this. It’s totalitarian.
The Value Of College Degrees
Anyone who talks about the ROI of a degree without talking about the type of degree, or the relative value of one school over another, is either profoundly ignorant, or fraudulent. The fact is that there are a lot of degrees for which one would have to be a fool to put themselves deep into undischargeable debt to obtain. Unfortunately a lot of people don’t understand that, and are the most likely to get those worthless degrees.
A Defense Of The Humanities
This is not what Chad Orzel wants.
I think that he misses another point — that what “the humanities” have gotten badly watered down over the decades, since the New Left took over campi, lacking rigor and polluted by all the “studies” majors.
[Afternoon update]
This seems related: Ten questions for Camille Paglia. She is a national treasure.
Climate Skeptics
Are you now, or have you ever been one?
Don’t know why I didn’t make the cut.
[Update a few minutes later]
Related: Climategate, and the smearing of Willie Soon:
…the New York Times and other pro-government sources assume that government funding of research is lily-white, while corporate funding is inherently suspect. This is ridiculous. Put aside, for a moment, the fact that the American environmental movement is funded by Russia’s state-controlled oil company. Also the fact that Greenpeace gets money ($203 million) from the American Petroleum Foundation,
with another $214 million coming from the Chamber of Commerce. [This has been reported, but the Chamber says it is not the case.]That isn’t the real scandal. The real scandal is that the overwhelming majority of money spent on climate research comes from governments. Governments, most notably ours, fund climate hysteria to the tune of billions of dollars per year. Why? Because the whole point of global warming alarmism is to persuade voters to cede more control over Western economies to government. (No one actually cares about CO2 emissions from India or China, which together vastly exceed ours.)
Governments fund climate research–but only climate research that feeds alarmism–because they are the main parties in interest in the climate debate. Governments stand to gain trillions of dollars in revenue and unprecedented power if voters in the U.S. and other Western countries can be stampeded into ceding more power to them, based on transparently bad science.
Yup.
[Update a couple minutes later]
Thoughts from Judith Curry:
This is the first time I have been ‘attacked’ in a substantive way for doing my science honestly and speaking up about it. Sure, anonymous bloggers go after me, but I have received no death threats via email, no dead rats delivered to my door step, etc.
I think Grijalva has made a really big mistake in doing this. I am wondering on what authority Grijalva is demanding this information? He is ranking minority member of a committee before which I have never testified. Do his colleagues in the Democratic Party support his actions? Are they worried about backlash from the Republicans, in going after Democrat witnesses?
I don’t think anything good will come of this. I anticipate that Grijalva will not find any kind of an undisclosed fossil fuel smoking gun from any of the seven individuals under investigation. There is already one really bad thing that has come of this – Roger Pielke Jr has stated:
The incessant attacks and smears are effective, no doubt, I have already shifted all of my academic work away from climate issues. I am simply not initiating any new research or papers on the topic and I have ring-fenced my slowly diminishing blogging on the subject. I am a full professor with tenure, so no one need worry about me — I’ll be just fine as there are plenty of interesting, research-able policy issues to occupy my time. But I can’t imagine the message being sent to younger scientists. Actually, I can: “when people are producing work in line with the scientific consensus there’s no reason to go on a witch hunt.”
Punch back twice as hard.
Asians Are Figuring Out The Score
When it comes to discrimination against them in academia, they’re the new Jews.
Blatant Anti-Semitism
…at UCLA.
There is nothing “liberal” about this in any way.