Category Archives: Media Criticism

“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

High risk, high reward.

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.

Willie Soon

Strikes back against the inquisition.

[Update a few minutes later]

Here’s the full statement
:

I have never been motivated by financial gain to write any scientific paper, nor have I ever hidden grants or any other alleged conflict of interest. I have been a solar and stellar physicist at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics for a quarter of a century, during which time I have published numerous peer-reviewed, scholarly articles. The fact that my research has been supported in part by donations to the Smithsonian Institution from many sources, including some energy producers, has long been a matter of public record. In submitting my academic writings I have always complied with what I understood to be disclosure practices in my field generally, consistent with the level of disclosure made by many of my Smithsonian colleagues.

“If the standards for disclosure are to change, then let them change evenly. If a journal that has peer-reviewed and published my work concludes that additional disclosures are appropriate, I am happy to comply. I would ask only that other authors-on all sides of the debate-are also required to make similar disclosures. And I call on the media outlets that have so quickly repeated my attackers’ accusations to similarly look into the motivations of and disclosures that may or may not have been made by their preferred, IPCC-linked scientists.

A double standard in the media. What a shock.