Tag: Tenure
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Cargo cults
Following on the unsurprising Newsweek disappointment… When dinosaurs grow big and arrogant, mammals will take over one way or another. After sensing the threat, a dinosaur will try two different responses, both of which will ultimately fail. One is suppression, and the other is fake adaptation. Fake adaptation has a cargo cult flavor. The dinosaur…
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Dovetailing histories
Last month I featured an IEEE journal from 1962. Here’s the journal itself at Google Books. Along with the looking-forward articles, the journal included some plain history pieces. An article on p 752 by Colin Cherry tried to cover the ENTIRE history of mass communication, with a unique insight that our modern propaganda has wiped…
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More passionate truth
More passionate truth from Jeffrey Tucker: = = = = = START QUOTE: The signers of the original Yale letter were hardly the only ones. Academics, think tankers, authors, and major public pundits all over the world changed suddenly. Those who should have opposed lockdowns switched to favor them once every major nation in the…
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Misses a stage of history
This is an important insight. I think it misses some history, but it’s basically valid. Thesis: College is our only initiation rite. We lost the earlier religious rites of manhood, and college was offered to replace it. Now that college is fading, we need to return to churches. This replacement is very recent. College has…
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Witch hunts end…
When the torches start burning the igniters. This applies to all sorts of evil fads and trends, not just witch hunts. Harvard seems to have broken the long-term wildly destructive trend of credentialism when its highly credentialed president and Chief Inquisitor foolishly inquisited Correct Persons. Now the broad movement against college is accelerating, which is…
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Cute trick.
I was always suspicious of the “free” university UATX. It’s NOT based on skills. It’s centered on ideas, which necessarily means it will enforce orthodoxy and avoid truth. Skills are intrinsically true and unalterable, facts are arbitrary and controllable. UATX advisers and organizers include several unreformed Deepstaters like Bari Weiss and Richard Dawkins and (former…
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Finally a bit of sanity!
Elle Griffin writes some SANITY about college. Even better, she’s writing about a FEW colleges that have reverted to the Anderson model. They’re not tiny startups; they’re big universities with lots of money available. = = = = = START QUOTE: BYU is followed by a dozen colleges and universities hoping to do the same—among…
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Pile of crap
Crap: The Catholic Church created the first universities. They were beacons of light, preservers and defenders of timeless truth. It is difficult for us to even imagine. = = = = = No. From the start universities have been defenders of orthodox doctrine. That was part of their intended purpose, and it’s still part of…
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Understated but true
Wesley Smith describes Francis Collins as a “disappointing” leader. Well, “disappointing” in the same way that Herr Hitler turned out to be a “disappointing” Chancellor of Germany. Smith grasps the basic problem accurately. Academia has the habit of promoting good researchers into management, following the myth that teaching and research and management are all the…
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Proper science
Greenwald is doing what all journalists and commentators SHOULD be doing. He pulls together facts and asks the one critical question, the question that explains the facts, the question that nobody else has asked. Glenn is performing proper journalism and proper science. Gather facts, form a testable question that hasn’t been asked before, try to…
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In the groove, Japan style
New research from Japan via Eurekalert. As usual, the Japanese academic setup with fungible annual funding PER LAB gives more flexible and creative results than the US system of funding PER PROJECT APPROVED BY DEEPSTATE. We used to have a more Japanese style in our industrial labs like Bell, but they’re gone now, LBOd by…
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Since I’m always…
Since I’m always yammering about tenure, I should mention this story, even though I don’t have enough info to mention it intelligently! News this week includes a university chancellor in Wisconsin who was fired for making porn videos with his wife. He’s suing on free speech grounds. I doubt that the suit will succeed. He…
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Good clarifier
Nate Silver, the meta-pollster, writes a great clarifier on the current positions, and the current trends, of political labels. He does an especially good job describing the Woke category. Here he gets close to a major fact about universities but doesn’t see it or doesn’t say it: = = = = = START QUOTE: Social…
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Proves my point
The Christians are bashing the pres of Harvard for doing EXACTLY WHAT THEY WANTED HER TO DO until right now. Before October they were bashing university presidents for opposing free speech. Now the Harvard pres is supporting free speech as the Christians wanted, but supporting it for people the Christians hate. This idiocy proves my…
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Bigger point
Anton Howe writes a VERY long and detailed critique of the failed process of peer review in tech history. The specific paper in question deals with an obscure aspect of iron work. The writers were clearly aiming for a standard elite political goal, and the journal, following modern practice, amplified the political goal instead of…
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