Maggie's Farm

We are a commune of inquiring, skeptical, politically centrist, capitalist, anglophile, traditionalist New England Yankee humans, humanoids, and animals with many interests beyond and above politics. Each of us has had a high-school education (or GED), but all had ADD so didn't pay attention very well, especially the dogs. Each one of us does "try my best to be just like I am," and none of us enjoys working for others, including for Maggie, from whom we receive neither a nickel nor a dime. Freedom from nags, cranks, government, do-gooders, control-freaks and idiots is all that we ask for.

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Friday, August 31. 2012

Academia: The World’s Leading Social Problem

Can entrepreneurs combat the narrow-minded ideologies on our campuses?



...the truth needed to make the world a better place is a "public good" that private markets cannot easily supply. Foundations have spent many millions of dollars financing private, market-oriented think tanks in an effort to compensate for the damage being done by academia. But while these think tanks have had an influence at the margins, the vast majority of college-educated Americans continue to rely on the information provided by elite universities and mainstream media rather than the think tanks that espouse classical liberal thought.


Can market forces provide the creative destruction needed to solve this problem? 


Posted by The Barrister in Education, Our Essays, Politics at 14:05 | Comments (4) | Trackbacks (0)

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It's the incestuous thing with faculty. The 60's draft avoiders went on for PhDs, selected more of their kind to follow them, and before you knew it, there wasn't a Republican/Conservative or Libertarian on the faculty. My alma mater got rid of their last Republican about 8 years ago. They still have their windmills, speech codes, organic gardens and residence devoted to climate change. Sigh.

Excellent, and very pleasurable books Alvin Kernan: Crossing the Line{/i]. The author graduated from high school in small town Wyoming and joined the Navy just before WWII, and managed to miss Pearl Harbor by a day, but didn't miss much of anything else. He has a wry sense of humor.

When the war was over, he talked his way into Williams, Oxford, Yale and became a Professor of English, administrator, and as he did in the Navy, managed to be right in the heat of the transformation of Academe. One of the great American academic memoirs of our time. [i]In Plato's Cave I loved these books.
#1 The Elephant's Child (Link) on 2012-08-31 19:32 (Reply)
Think tanks won't cut it. Same thing that's been going on for centuries: replace them. Religious schools were formed for each denomination. We need new schools.

Today's academies use big dollars to train people in the skills that the market truly desires: engineering, nursing, accounting. That's tough to compete against, especially if you're starting from scratch. But, the rise of on-line courses will help a great deal.

The other thing is for business owners to hire students w/o degrees. Maggie's Farm has pointed out before that many college students in the 18th C didn't graduate. This needs to be more widely accepted: hire students who have the engineering training, and don't worry if they didn't take the indoctrination brainwashing classes they needed to graduate.
#2 DrTorch on 2012-08-31 21:36 (Reply)
This needs to be more widely accepted: hire students who have the engineering training, and don't worry if they didn't take the indoctrination brainwashing classes they needed to graduate.

Because of the high number of required STEM courses that they are required to take, engineering students take relatively few of the "indoctrination brainwashing classes."
#2.1 Gringo on 2012-09-01 03:18 (Reply)
It's important to remember that only a minority of Americans complete a college degree. I think it's less than 1/3 and the number has not changed.
#3 lhf on 2012-09-01 08:27 (Reply)

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