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Wednesday, July 25, 2007


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Time To Think

Kim du Toit
July 25, 2007
6:23 AM CDT

From George Leef at NRO (writing about this essay), comes this suggestion:

I think that academic research ought to have to pass the test of the marketplace. That is, rather than assuming that all professors have plenty of brilliant ideas in them that they will be able to research and write about when given a sufficiently light teaching load, the assumption should be that professors will devote their time to teaching unless an outside party thinks highly enough of some research proposal to buy their time from the university.

I don’t think so.

Longtime Readers of this website will know that I have little truck with a large majority of what passes for the academic elite these days—and I’m especially scornful of the entire concept of collegiate tenure—but there is sufficient intellectual spark in the ashes of my brain to believe that the expansion of knowledge should not have to be commercially attractive in order for it to be nourished and nurtured.

I am fully aware, as is Mark Bauerlein in the above essay, that a tremendous amount of “research” is in fact no such thing—“academic padding of the CV” is a perfect description thereof—but when I stand back and look at the whole concept from a distance, I think that this is no reason to subject intellectual curiosity to “the marketplace” either.

Sometimes, knowledge gained seems irrelevant, but its relevance becomes incredibly valuable when applied to later research, or even to a parallel field. (Much of economic theory, to give but one example, is made more understandable by physics—I once wrote a paper on the topic, and the results of my research astounded me—and to think of music theory without mathematics is impossible.)

And in any case, I’m not against the concept of knowledge for its own sake, regardless of its utility.

In any field of human endeavor, there is bound to be wastage—or apparent wastage. The story of Alexander Graham Bell is indicative: when asked about his ninety-nine failed experiments leading to his final successful one, he exclaimed that he had discovered ninety-nine ways not to do something—which makes nonsense of the entire concept of “waste” when applied to research.

I recall that 3M’s Post-It Notes, one of the greatest product success stories of all time, came as a result of a failed chemical experiment to find a specific kind of glue, and to deny that this kind of happy outcome could likewise occur in a philosophical or theoretical process would be a grievous mistake in logic, not to say experience.

So yes, some academics will abuse the privilege of unconstrained research to pad their resumes, or avoid teaching classes, or whatever. In every field of human endeavor, there are also many who abuse the process.

But those nuggets of actual achievement are too precious to be denied, even if a majority of the process is worthless. “Babies” and “bathwater” come to mind here, and I for one am sufficiently appreciative of human achievement to want it to continue. I am also sufficiently skeptical of “commercial approval” to say that this should never be the sole, nor even the most important criterion for support. “Commercial value” has also given us far too many “Titanics” and far too few “Elizabethtowns”, far too many “Backstreet Boys” and far too few Eric Johnsons.

Good ideas, and true genius, will always spring forth from the human imagination, but let’s be honest: there’s no reason to pour concrete over the fertile soil of the imagination, either. Without financial patronage, Mozart would have starved to death at an early age, especially as some of his music was counter-cultural at the time. The patronage system of the time no doubt carried its fair share of pedestrian “Salieris” too [gratuitous Amadeus reference]—but that was no reason to dump the entire system.

Imagine if Mozart had been a tenured professor of music at the University in Vienna—would you have insisted on him teaching freshmen students the principles of harmony and composition for three hours a day? And let’s be honest again: brilliant people are often lousy teachers. Why burden them with a task which, in the end, benefits nobody?

I’m generally in favor of finding a decent compromise between two extremes; but in this case, between the extremes of “commercial appeal” and “academic navel-gazing”, I’m tugged far more towards the latter than to the former.

No matter how much the system is abused by the mediocre, the slothful and the incompetent.




Comments

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  1. Actually in a way the nondeterministic factors and optimalization that are the driving forces behind the market forces already exist in modern science. It is called peer review. The hard sciences produce a lot of irrelevant papers, but most have to pass standards and pass or fail based upon analysis and usage as references by other scientist.  If the paper or topic is poor or worthless it won’t be referenced more than ten or twelve times in teh future while a successful and well done paper will be referenced and mentioned thousands of other times. 

    As far as tenure, that is a political decision academy was granted years ago but it is like anything, the trend has gone to far.

    NOTE: I do not tend to consider social studies and most humanities as sciences, so peer review as a process pretty much fails in those departments.

    grayburst | 7/25/2007 07:24 AM CDT | #96100
  2. “Peer review” that mysterious concept that has most lay people thinking that there is proper vetting of scientific works.

    It’s a crock.

    Do you know how it REALLY works?  One post doc writes a paper in whatever his native language is… it goes to a lay editor who proofs it.  It is passed around to others who haven’t met their writing quota for the year, who add their names to it as part of the deal to get X number of papers published that year.  Then it is sent to the “prestigious” scientific journals for consideration, generally 2-3 years after it is first written.  If they pass on it, it goes to the 2nd level of journals, and is eventually published in “Our papers are crap, but academics need to publish to get tenure.”

    I worked near academia for the first 10 years of my working career.  The peer review thing is pure bunk.

    IF publishing was no longer required for job security or to make tenure, they wouldn’t write a damn thing, and there wouldn’t be collusion among academics to help everyone else get their papers published, with 10 names on each one, with all but one of them doing little more than proofing it (unless they’ve hired a secretary who proofs their papers).

    Connie du Toit | 7/25/2007 07:32 AM CDT | #96101
  3. Part of my job deals with higher education and I say that funding for a vast majority of projects and research is extremely dependent on that research ultimately generating commercial results.

    While there are many merits to this approach, we should be cautious about strictly tying research to economic outcomes.

    I am a big believer in basic research from personal experience. It is from this component that virtually all commercial applications of technology arise from. If we just focused on market research, then we would not have the the Theory of Relativity. Remember at the time, there was a very strong movement in the world that suggested that we had really learned as much as science had to offer and we should move in other directions. In the same vein, we would have never had much of the great literature had it strictly been dependent on commercial appeal. Would Tolkien have ever written “The Lord of the Rings” or “The Hobbit”, which were extension of his research into Norse Mythology (which is pretty arcane).

    Similiarly, after the Apollo moonshots, a growing number of people in the US decided that this basic science research - ie. vast expenditures of dollars in pursuit of goals that had no practical commercial application - was a bad idea and that we needed to turn inward and “solve” social problems. Well, we all see where that has taken us. What actual benefits did the Apollo Program bring us? It is hard to tell but we have materials, machines and ideas that we would have NEVER had before. What replaced Apollo? In a very real sense, the ghettos we have now because we shifted funding to more “practical” applications like welfare and entitlement programs. A lot of the high tech products we have now, like the internet, were direct offshoots from Cold War research where science did not have to justify itself the way science does now.

    Britain’s fall from the top of the heap is traced by some to a lack of trained scientists that were involved in basic research after the initial Industrial Age. Parents wanted their kids to go into “business” that did not involve getting their hands dirty so they could better emulate the “upper classes.” Since the vast majority of the advances of the IR came from such “working class” smart and hardworking people, this focus set up a long term decline in the basic sciences all the way down to the English equivalent of elementary schools.

    However, science for the sake of science can be taken too far as it was in the former Soviet Union which never developed a proper social infrastructure to deal with high technology. One wonders if China is headed in the same direction.

    What we have to avoid here is basing scientific funding on ideologically driven agendas.

    Achilles | 7/25/2007 07:34 AM CDT | #96102
  4. Think about it… “Women’s studies” academics publish and have been “peer reviewed.” Do you think ANYTHING they have to say would pass TRUE scientific scrutiny?

    Connie du Toit | 7/25/2007 07:35 AM CDT | #96103
  5. “Womens Studies”, “Diversity Studies” and “Gender Studies,” are all bullshit.

    Achilles | 7/25/2007 07:45 AM CDT | #96104
  6. There’s been an shift in focus here; Leef started it, but Kim carried it farther, by bending Bauerlein’s talk of /humanistic/ studies into a review of all forms of research, including that most commercial of all activities, materials development.  Recall that “scientific research” is an invention in itself, one usually credited to Thomas Edison; the universities seem to have picked it up almost by accident, much as they found themselves sponsoring ball teams.  The academy is the natural home for scholars of the arts and philosophies, but it has no deeded claim to investigations of the phenomenal world - Western Electric, in its short existence, probably did more to further human understanding of the universe than MIT.  And it never gave tenure to a Chomsky.

    stencil | 7/25/2007 08:09 AM CDT | #96107
  7. On this very topic and a bright note as well.

    This morning’s Dallas Morning Fishwrap reports that Prof. of Native American Studies, Ward Churchill has been fired by the Univ. of Colorado/Boulder. He, you may recall was the twit who likened the victims of 9/11 to Nazis. Plagiarism, faulty research, inadequate credentials, and sh*tty attitude were cited as justification.

    Fast Eddie | 7/25/2007 08:16 AM CDT | #96109
  8. Concur w/ Kim & Tech Suppt. in many ways

    1) Peer reviews, if one must think of them as “market forces”, are degenerate/perverse market forces. (Briefly: you can always tell which products have evolved in an environment of degenerate/perverse market forces. They’re the ones that look like a gooey star trek transporter accident)

    1A) Waaaay too much that passes for “science” is in fact “crap”.

    1B) Peer reviews & science teams are massively incestuous. It’s all right there in the papers, all you have to do is read, think, and cross reference the names.

    Yes, markets will invest in bets that look like they’re going to pay off, but if we ultimately accept a suggestion along the lines of “no research unless commercially sponsored”, the unavoidable consequence is that we will limit our imagination, knowledge and capabilities to what our business models support.

    This is the achille’s heel of the whole thing: As a human race, our abilities and our aspirations far outstrip out ability to pay for them. There are a vast number of things we *can* do, but don’t because it’s prohibitively expensive, and it’s prohibitively expensive because we don’t have a business model to support the activity.

    Ultimately, from whence should such funding come? Patrons? Taxes? Government? Voluntary contributions?  Unfortunately, we’ve gone about as far as we can go with 18th & 19th century technology, which anyone could make on the cheap in their garage. Big science calls for big machines, and big machines cost big bux.

    geekWithA.45 | 7/25/2007 08:37 AM CDT | #96110
  9. And, Fast Eddie, the most important aspect of the Ward Churchill matter to remember/consider (especially given this topic) is the Ward Churchill was TENURED… which means he had the required number of papers published, which were “peer reviewed.” The reason it was difficult to fire him was because he HAD (supposedly) passed peer scrutiny.

    There is collusion among academics for peer review and continuing to suggest that peer review has any merits at all, leads to the Ward Churchill’s of the world becoming tenured.

    True academics, such as Camille Paglia, have been a lone voices complaining about all the crap that is published as “science” and attempting to spill the beans on the whole “peer review” nonsense.

    Connie du Toit | 7/25/2007 09:11 AM CDT | #96116
  10. “Commercial value” has also given us far too many “Titanics” and far too few “Elizabethtowns”, far too many “Backstreet Boys” and far too few Eric Johnsons.

    Kim, after reading the above quote, and knowing of your personal fondness for the Arts as well as your distaste for government waste/growth/spending outside the limits of the Constitution, I have to ask:

    Do you feel that it is appropriate for the federal government to fund the Arts?  Should we have to tolerate the Crucifix in Urine in the hope that we’ll discover a Renoir? 

    Government sponsorship of the visual/performance arts is certainly not one of the responsibilities that the founding fathers built into the Constitution, but if not government sponsorship, who is left but the marketplace?  The “patronage” system that you refer to in your post, alas, no longer exists in any real sense.

    morningglory | 7/25/2007 09:21 AM CDT | #96118
  11. In academia there are teaching schools, research schools, and balanced schools that try to split the difference. Research schools are the prestigious private and the land-grant (for the most part) public universities. Teaching loads are lower (2-4 classes per academic year) and publication requirements for tenure higher. (They tend to pay a lot better, too.)

    Teaching schools, usually smaller public and private colleges and universities, feature higher class loads (6-8 per year) and more relaxed (occasionally absent, I believe) publication requirements for tenure.

    Balanced schools are harder to classify, but figure 4-6 classes and publication requirements for tenure not quite as rigorous as research schools (many “balanced” or “professional” schools aspire to the status of the plum research schools, though, and may jack up their publication requirements accordingly).

    One hopes that academics find a position suited to their skills and temperament. I also believe that research in business ought to be accessible and useful to practitioners as a matter of obligation, but I can tell you that a lot of what I’ve read doesn’t adhere to that standard (not surprising--there are differences of opinion on the purpose of research).

    MiddleAgedKen | 7/25/2007 10:04 AM CDT | #96124
  12. Ahh, TS, you might also want to note that Churchill got his position after teaching ONE course. He was offered a full professorship in “Native American Studies” and within six weeks named department chairman. All of this with only a Master’s degree from a no-name left-wing diploma mill. No PhD!

    Last year, upon moving to TX, I applied for a teaching position at Austin College in Sherman. They had a Political Science opening. With two master’s, two books, extensive writing, eight years teaching experience, 23 years military experience, eight years corporate experience, ten years living out of the country, and now residing locally, I didn’t get the job--it went to a “soon to graduate” PhD from the East Coast who had done nothing in life but go to school.

    Ahhh, academe....the humanity…

    Fast Eddie | 7/25/2007 10:09 AM CDT | #96127
  13. A marketplace test has nothing to do with this anyway. That’s not the only choice. If one cent of taxpayer money is involved, then it had better be for a specific and legitimate government purpose, such as a better way to roast the enemy while he’s kneeling toward a rock in Mecca. Government support for pure research is generally a scam. It couldn’t really be otherwise. Go back to the Civil War era crock of land grant colleges and reverse that, and this country would be much freerer, and more wealthy, because billions of dollars a month wouldn’t be subsidizing the enemies of liberty and justice. And of course the property the Feds didn’t own but “granted” to states for such purposes would be in productive rather than malicious hands.

    One reason basic research at schools has popular support is that the government has done such harm to the natural processes of creativity in this country since adopting fascistic ideas in the so-called Progressive Era. They spend more of our money than we can afford, they regulate us out of our productivity while we work, and they threaten lawsuits so we hire worthless layabouts instead of being able to properly discriminate among the labor pool. They steal, in all, several trillions of dollars each year from the productive class in America, all of which comes out of research and profitability (making millions of businesses uneconomic, by the way, further reducing productivity by putting their owners and employees in less useful positions) and then to paper over what they’ve done to a small extent, they spend our money directly on things that would (rarely) be researched naturally, but mainly on ways to harm us and enslave us.

    If we didn’t have government taking such a murderously large share of output, patronage would exist to a greater extent than it ever has. It is the size, scope, and threat of government which has limited the arts, basic research, and every other fortuitous, wonderful discovery and achievement of mankind. It is fear and the low quality of what passes for education these days which closes the mind to recognizing that.

    TraitorHater | 7/25/2007 10:38 AM CDT | #96130
  14. MG,

    I don’t generally have a problem with any government funding of the arts… as long as the artists understand that, in our country at least, the “government” means “the people”, which means that if they produce art which “the people” find objectionable, then they should not be surprised if their funding is withdrawn.

    Yeah, that’s curtailing their blah blah blah. Occupational hazard.

    Kim du Toit | 7/25/2007 10:51 AM CDT | #96136
  15. Peer review when applied to pseudosciences like Diversity, and other social “sciences” fail miserably.  However, peer review in the hard sciences (e.g. Physics, Chemistry, etc. but not climatology) do provide thorough fact checking and experimental review.  IIRC 15 years ago or so there were two researchers who claimed they had discovered a method of providing cold fusion.  When no one else could reproduce their experiment, they were immediately discredited and their research torn apart.

    What passes for peer review in the social sciences is simply reading the paper and saying “I agree”.  The whole notion of peer review in these areas is ludicrous because there is no experimental evidence that can be reproduced.  Its why I refuse to use the honorific of Doctor when talking to someone whose sole claim to the title is nothing more than an extended blog entry.  Their research limited only to those positions that corroborate their preconceived notion or cherry picked quotations from dissenting opinions that are dismissed out of hand. 

    I’ve had the honor of calling some professors Doctor.  Men and women who had actually expanded the boundaries of human understanding (one worked on the Hubble Telescope).  As for the rest, well their PhD stands for Piled Higher and Deeper as a reference from their BS degree.

    Jon | 7/25/2007 10:56 AM CDT | #96138
  16. Hey, I’m working on getting one of those degree mill degrees!  So don’t disparage all of us… in one blow.

    I figure that way I can actually work on my doctorate, which is what I want to do anyway.  Actually, it isn’t what I want to do, but what I to do requires that hurdle.  So it is a hurdle I will attempt to jump.

    Connie du Toit | 7/25/2007 11:06 AM CDT | #96140
  17. Thre is a good argument for the Government funding basic research.  One of the best examples is the work done by the National Advisory Committeed on Aeronautics...the predecessor to NASA, except that NACA did more useful research and less TV interviews.

    NACA did an enormous amount of testing...wind tunnel research into airfoil characteristics, research into supersonic flight, stability and control work, probing the problems associated with digitial flight control systems.  Massive amounts of work, with no direct commercial application.

    At the time, that is.  What NACA did was classical pure research...figuring out the basic ground rules, so that commercial enterprises could take it and adapt it to the needs of the military and commercial sectors.

    It’s something we need to bring back.

    Mike of the Duelling Pistols | 7/25/2007 11:09 AM CDT | #96142
  18. The extent of the government’s involvement in the arts (and sciences) is copyright/patents:

    Article I: Section 8:

    To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries;

    Of course Congress has difficultly with all qualifications in the Constitution, such as “by securing” meaning, THAT IS THE ONLY WAY YOU MAY “PROMOTE.”

    Hey, these are the same people who think “provide for the common Defence and general Welfare of the United States” means “provide welfare monies to the lazy.” The concept of an adjective and a noun seems to be lost on them, discounting the adjective when any noun is present.

    They can’t even get “shall not be infringed” and it has “shall,” “not,” “be,” and “infringed” in it.

    Connie du Toit | 7/25/2007 11:15 AM CDT | #96143
  19. Funding for the sciences at least used to have the fig leaf of “national defense” on it, with the objective of finding new and improved blastTheEnemyToChum() processes.

    geekWithA.45 | 7/25/2007 11:55 AM CDT | #96145
  20. There’s a huge difference between academic and scientific research.

    Normally, I agree with Kim, but on this, I don’t. Why not subject the academic research field on a economic model? This idea that we’re somehow served by professors getting paid to write a paper that will benefit no one- it just doesn’t pass muster.
    If someone can’t teach, they shouldn’t BE A TEACHER. If said professor sucks at teaching a classroom of young minds, the solution is not to let him research a paper...it’s to get him out of the education environment.

    The sticky notes thing is interesting, but no one has ever figured out a cure for a disease, or made a new contraption to improve life while writing an opinion piece on Shakespeare.

    WolvenBear | 7/25/2007 11:55 AM CDT | #96146
  21. I think that academic research ought to have to pass the test of the marketplace.

    I don’t think so.

    Interesting, and not quite what I would have expected.

    The elephant in the room is that academia -universities- receive large direct and indirect government subsidies to begin with, and may receive further government subsidies in the form of research grants. 

    It seems to me that “passing the test of the marketplace” might mean keeping that subsidization and grafting on an approximation of a free market test at the back end.  Which I concede could be an awkward construct, with unforseen consequences.

    Would you accept simply reducing government research subsidies to universities and letting the market decide what to keep at the front end, or do you believe that this is an appropriate use of taxpayer funds?  Also, is funding the multiplying fields of literary analysis and social theory an acceptable cost for continuing to fund the harder research?

    The examples of Alexander Graham Bell and 3M post-it notes, did not come out of academia.  They came from private industry or a private inventor, willing to take a short term loss for the chance of a long term gain.  Its not clear to me that university research is necessary for such a trade-off, or even that peer-reviewed published articles by university professors are the most efficient vehicle for such research.

    A nominal purpose of universities and professors is to educate enrolled students.  An effect of the loop from publishing research papers to get tenure, which guarantees job security, is that many full professors spend relatively little time teaching, passing that off to graduate students and teaching assistants with relatively basic qualifications.

    If Mozart had been hired to teach, then yes, I would want him to waste his time teaching freshmen.  If that were a waste of his talents, then it would be better to hire a less brilliant musician, but a better teacher than a young undergraduate.  “The market” as a whole might not fund him, but I don’t see why some individuals might not pay him, just as some individuals funded him in his day.

    Saladman | 7/25/2007 01:04 PM CDT | #96151
  22. “They can’t even get “shall not be infringed” ”

    Give them a break, infringed is a multi syllable word.
    They don’t know what the definition of “is” is. confused

    R.L. Hunter | 7/25/2007 01:08 PM CDT | #96152
  23. I think the issue, Saladman, is complicated (to say the least).

    We are a Capitalist nation.  We’re proud of that and we’re all Capitalists in the way we approach earning our daily bread.

    But earning money isn’t what we’re about as people, in the grander scheme of things, right?

    We don’t love money, as much as we all might understand the need for it.

    What defines the word “civilization” is not “commerce,” of which Capitalism fulfills.  Civilization is defined by its practice and proficiency with language, arts, and science, and (of course) how well we set boundaries for socializing with our fellows in the realms of culture and manners.

    At one time we all understood that the definition of a University was a “center of knowledge.” Only one aspect then of a University’s mission is teaching.  The other mission is to create more knowledge.  The third is community service.  Universities and the great academic institutions of history have had that trilogy of missions:  education, research, and community service.

    How does one vet “worth to mankind” in the marketplace, using economic terms such as “free market”? 

    There is more to us (I hope, or I’m moving to a cave and never coming out) than money and value more broadly defined than just “will it make a buck”?

    For a long time (before the damn socialists took control of the Universities and research institutions) they did an excellent job of vetting themselves.  So I can agree, in principle, that it isn’t what it should be, but fixing it?  Oh my.  I just can’t think that turning things over to the Fords and Dells of the world as moving in the right direction.  Those are money men, which is all fine and good.  We need money men in the world.  But can’t we also have education and knowledge and the arts, simply for the intangible benefits it provides, if for nothing other than the health of our minds and souls?

    We don’t make money as the end all or the goal of our existence.  Money is a means to a greater goal--more time for enjoyment of the arts and our fellows.  If all we’re about is making money as the goal, then I think we’ve become something less than a civilized society.

    Connie du Toit | 7/25/2007 02:18 PM CDT | #96157
  24. I consider Capitalism as our political system, if we understood it properly.

    As for the civilization, not to be too flippant about it, but, you haven’t gotten around the problem of funding and supporting universities, nor what their proper role should be. The current setup is a catastrophe. We’ve seen more than 60 years now of Communists, socialists, and other collectivist pukes brainwashing kids who enter them for technical degrees, business degrees, and other types of learning, and leaving as drones in the war against Western civilization. An example which made that obvious was the sudden rise in anti-free-trade imbeciles turned out by their failed professors all over the U.S. and Europe during the 1990’s. They have no idea what they’re wailing about, but they’re good at vandalizing businesses and making a stink during trade meetings.

    That such people could so easily be produced in such short order should have shocked and horrified any friend of civilization. Yet we’ve had not one hearing about these criminals and their lawless sources.

    The system which allowed them to be produced so quickly is a cancer. It must be forced to survive not on stolen booty as the taxpayer-supported systems of today can, but instead they must justify their existence based on merit. As for modern businessmen being the source of money, they’re one source. With all of us free to do with the vast majority of our income what we may, many more people will be sources of funding, and many will doubtless do as they did in the 19th century before the rise of the land grant colleges, leaving their assets to schools they admire. The fact, though, is that liberty doesn’t have to justify itself. It’s the Constitution. The system they’ve overthrown our system with is what has to be justified, and it can’t be. It is an obvious failure. Economic growth is more than 3/4 slower than it was before they replaced it with their tyrannical system, and the moral and intellectual quality of our educational institutions has collapsed.

    (And by the way, as stencil implied, it wasn’t Alexander Graham Bell, but Thomas Edison who said that 99 ways not to do it thing.)

    TraitorHater | 7/25/2007 02:45 PM CDT | #96160
  25. (Whoops. Replace 3/4 with 2/3, sorry about that.)

    TraitorHater | 7/25/2007 02:48 PM CDT | #96161
  26. My wife was once an author of a paper with over 100 people on the author list.  In the hard sciences.  I could have been an author too, if I wanted.  The whole experiment took 3 weeks of experimental work and 2 years of analysis.  I stood in the room where the experiment was happening for 2 days.

    It is pretty well understood that unless you are #1, #2, or #3 on the author list, you had little to do with the actual work.

    ScottS | 7/25/2007 02:55 PM CDT | #96162
  27. Their proper role is what it was until we mucked with it, “institutions of knowledge” the creators, keeper, and passers on of it.

    They are not, however, “trade schools” where people learn a skill to make a living.  They are bastions of education/knowledge, not training.  Those are best accomplished purely through the private sector.

    As for how they should be supported… a state can decide (We, the People of the particular state) if they want a state University and choose to support it with their State taxes.  The Feds have no role in that, whatsoever.

    Personally, I think there is a benefit to some public subsidy of the institutions, but feel that should primarily come from private donations and pay-as-you-go tuition.

    This should not in anyway, however, disregard the tremendous benefit federally funded research has had.  We wouldn’t have the microchip had there not been a NASA, and certainly wouldn’t have been cheap ones on the market that enabled the Apple I to be assembled from spare parts.  That is an example of specific funding for one thing, having tremendous benefit to the general welfare of all.  Had someone like Ford patented it and owned all rights to them, we would never be able to afford a microcomputer, and that calculator you got as a bank giveaway would STILL cost $500.00.

    Of course that also meant that we funded some idiot’s research on “women’s studies” or graffiti as an art form (oxymoron alert), but how can you eliminate one without eliminating all?

    Connie du Toit | 7/25/2007 02:58 PM CDT | #96163
  28. “It must be forced to survive not on stolen booty as the taxpayer-supported systems of today can, but instead they must justify their existence based on merit.”

    And who decides what constitutes acceptable “merit”? I hope not just “the market”, or else we’re doomed to a future of short-term invention. That’s fine, but it’s not the Theory of Relativity, either.

    My point, and my only point in all this can be encapsulated by the last sentence in TS’s comment: ”...how can you eliminate one without eliminating all?

    And lastly: Bell, Edison, whatever—if you’ve seen one worthless Dead White Male, you’ve seen ‘em all.

    rolleyes

    Kim du Toit | 7/25/2007 03:52 PM CDT | #96170
  29. Tech Support, I don’t know where you got your experience with peer review, but I bet it was in the social sciences, not the biomedical sciences. A hard science paper that takes years to be submitted to a journal is usually very hard to publish; the field typically is very competitive, and nobody sits on good data for years before publication.

    I write scientific papers and participate in peer review regularly, for some prestigious journals (as well as some not-so-prestigious journals). Although everyone who tries to publish in the best journals suggests peer reviewers that are favorably disposed to the authors’ viewpoint, in the end there has to be data to answer the question. I have bounced papers written by friends and former colleagues back for further work on many occasions. I am sure that they have done so to me in the past, though I can’t be sure.  I have never heard of a peer reviewer getting their name on a paper that they are reviewing. It is almost always an anonymous exercise where the authors often guess at who their critics are, but have no way to know for sure. You may be thinking about passing a paper around for critical comment before submitting to a journal; in that case, if someone doing a critical read of the paper adds something to it before submitting it to a journal, that is entirely appropriate.

    It is quite another thing when department heads get their names on papers that are written by their junior colleagues where they don’t have any real contribution. That is more typical of Asian universities (especially Japan) and some old school European institutes where the boss gets on all the papers, but it is much less the norm in the US (though it happens occasionally).

    As for author proliferation, it is a problem that has been lamented thoroughly time and time again, but the nature of modern biomedical science is collaboration between multiple labs with different, complementary approaches that involve complicated technical analysis. So it is typical for a collaboration to have one first author, who writes everything and does most of the work, a senior author at the end of the author string who thought of the idea and got the grant to fund the work and administers the project (not a trivial task, by the way), and intermediate authors who contributed variously to the writing, analysis, or technical execution of the work.

    As for the fifty author papers, these seem to come up in experimental physics where there are multiple large institutions with elaborate (gigadollar) instruments that take literally dozens of technicians, analysts, statisticians, etc., to keep the operation running. Nobody thinks the 29th author had much to say about the writing of the paper.

    In the current circumstance, the first authored paper, published in the top journals is the coin of the realm for a beginning scientist, and without a sufficient number of these kinds of publications, the career is over (or doesn’t even start).

    The funding of biomedical research by NIH and to a lesser extent the National Science Foundation, is extremely competitive, even pathologically so. Currently, it takes a grant score that puts you in the top 15% of all applicants to get a grant funded. The decision to fund is based largely on research productivity judged by (you guessed it) peer reviewed publications.  That is why nobody sits on publishable data in the biomedical sciences.

    As an aside, it was pointed out to me by people at NIH that they seldom have “scandals” like the ones that plague the social sciences where a Senator Proxmire hold up a grant or a paper on why frogs fall in love, or the like. That is because the funding is driven by the demand that they support studies of diseases that Americans get or care about. If you write a grant to study something that is not really relevant to a public health issue, it just won’t get past the study section that prioritizes grants. It is very cut-throat, both for those who are applying for grants, and those who try to convince Congress that heart disease or AIDS or cancer or X dread disease should have more money. The NIH budget is something like $30 billion, which sounds like a lot, but there are tens of thousands of fairly worthy applicants making their pitch every year.

    People also know quite well which journals are hard to publish in and which are easier to get your results published in. It is now a science with an industry devoted to measuring the impact of the papers in the journals and the impact of the journals themselves.

    By the way, a ratings system for journals had to be invented due to the practice of some people of publishing lots of minor papers on small increments of knowledge, and coming up for tenure competing with people who published fewer, but more meaningful papers in tough journals. This has also been complicated especially in China by the practice of duplicative publication in Chinese language journals that nobody except the Chinese read and in Western journals that have a broader audience.

    It is not perfect, but it is reasonably good system, and frankly, if you want a better system, you need to invent it and fund it, because this is what has evolved in the last 50 years.

    I can’t speak to the social sciences, but I am pretty clear about what is going on in biomedical journals.

    indianadoesntwantme | 7/25/2007 05:34 PM CDT | #96178
  30. This issue is not that cut and dried. Industry and university are combining more and more to conduct research and bring new products out. ASU, a perennial top-listed party college, has an incredible amount of joint research ventures with various companies, and they get a cut of any profits.
    DoD funds research projects in every major university. These are not earmarks, this is a long-standing Pentagon program that doles out research dollars to many different disciplines. Only a few percent pan out, but those few successes are more than worth it to the military - how many have the blood-clotting bandages saved?
    The ‘soft’ sciences are indeed an issue. However, even these are ‘tainted’ by industry and the military and in the oddest places. Advertising, political science, psychological profiles, etc. are areas that are far from perfected, and the possible payoffs are enormous.
    These programs aid both the university and the outside entity, and they are becoming increasingly important to both. The professor gets to work in his field instead of teaching (a thankless task), the company gets top talent at a part-time rate, and the university gets a cut. The tenured slug is still a common phenomenom, but university administrators can be counted on to pay attention to money and the reputation of their institution. Tenured slugs do not enhance either, and so are less sought after. The various faculty groups can be counted on to protect and even try to get more useless members, but the situation is changing (very slowly, but it is changing).

    tweell | 7/25/2007 06:13 PM CDT | #96182
  31. Elizabethtown is, indeed, one of the best movies to come out in years.

    I saw it on an overnight flight back from London in early 2007 and though I was going to die laughing.

    I assumed it was the high altitude and lack of oxygen, but it was just as funny when I rented it and watched it with the wife at more or less sea level.

    indianadoesntwantme | 7/25/2007 07:40 PM CDT | #96187
  32. No, my experience was with hard sciences, especially in the medical field.

    My ex husband was the editor who shuffled the papers around for the largest department of medicine in the world.

    Anything could get published.  It was just a matter of where or when.

    Keep in mind that this was the top 5 research institution in the nation, ranked by dollars/prestige.

    There are some fields that have not been as tainted as others, the really difficult science departments, such as engineering, are competing for the money, as you say.  But cancer research?  They have more money than God.

    Connie du Toit | 7/25/2007 10:00 PM CDT | #96196
  33. Someoe suggested that the Post-It example contradicted Kim’s claim as being entrepreneurial.  In fact, it was not initially that way.  The facts actually support Kim.

    Scientists at 3M were trying to develop a new adhesive and fialed miserably.  It was sticky, but also had a low sheer point.  In the minds of the scientists, it was a bust.  Along came another scientitst who worked as a lay preacher at his church.  He was faced with a problem.  Between services on Sundays, the bookmarks would fall out of the hymnals, making it harder for the congregants to quickly find the enxt song.  When he heard about the failed adhesive, he came up with a solution to his problem.  He misappropriated the adhescie and made his own bookmarks.

    When others in the company heard about the notes, they wanted some.  As they atrted being used around the company, they came to the attention of the muckity-mucks and the rest is history.

    Post-Its came about not because of profit but because if need.  When you add that to the attitude of 3M which encouraged its people to innovate (in fact, at the time, 3M assumed that 20% of the company’s time and resources would be misused, but they understood the benefits that could come from it.)

    Steve L. | 7/26/2007 05:09 AM CDT | #96205
  34. Well, you’ve done it now; you’ve gotten ME cranked up, and I’m already feeling cranky this morning!

    FIRST OF ALL: Research ALWAYS pays off, REGARDLESS of WHAT field the research is done in. This is true whether it is physics, chemistry, biology, sociology, politics, literature, or any of the various Arts. It always HAS, it always WILL, and any damn-fool-IDIOT who says otherwise is so Luddite that he makes AL GORE look positively INTELLIGENT! And PROGRESSIVE! And if any IDIOTS here feel they just HAVE to take umbrage with my labeling them as such, they can consult with Kim and he has MY AUTHORIZATION to tell them where to find me!!

    SECOND: The “Land Grant” colleges that some jackass decried here were intended for the purpose of generating a U.S. Army Reserve Officer Corps; EVERY “Land Grant” college that was formed included a COMPULSORY ROTC-Style Corps of Cadets, for @50 years. After that, it was considered an ELECTIVE course except in Wartime, when it again was mandatory. And the land that was granted was considered Federal property due to the U.S. Cavalry having taken it from the Native Americans who were the former occupants. So, unless you are either a Native American or one of their MANY “Advocates”, shut up; you have no voice in the matter. Besides, it was a long time ago.

    THIRD: It takes a LOT of money to run ANY Government, ANYWHERE, ANYTIME. Regardless of whether said Gummint is the most detached, or the most intrusive, in history. And NO, the Government of the United States of America is NOT the absolute best government possible. But it’s WAY ahead of whatever’s in SECOND place! If you don’t LIKE it, get enough like-minded people together, form a PAC, find a candidate, and get her/him elected. Or shut up. (I seem to be saying that a lot this morning; guess I’m a bit more grouchy than usual. My apologies, Kim, TS.)

    FOURTH: Supporting the Arts IS a valid function of Government, although it IS rightfully a side-issue, not a mainstream matter. About the only exception I would make there is Public Broadcasting, because it takes MAJOR-LEAGUE MONEY to run a TV Network, and they DON’T have advertisment time to sell. All the ‘ad time’ they get is telling you who sponsors “This Old House” and other shows like that. So lay off there - unless YOU want to contribute a few bazillion dollars.

    Now, again, I suspect there are quite a few people on this blog forum who would like to argue with me on these matters. Well, that’s up to Kim; it’s HIS blog, not your’s or mine. And HIS decision WILL rule - unless YOU want to sponsor him!

    The Mad Yank | 7/26/2007 06:59 AM CDT | #96207
  35. I doubt I’ll remember every difference I have with your response, but…

    I’m surprised at your allowing for taxpayer supported higher education. You’ve already agreed that taxpayer funded, or at least government provided, schooling for children is unacceptable, and rightly so, if only because of the impossibility of resisting the temptation to produce results desired by a particular faction. How does it suddenly become acceptable for those in later schools? We know Harvard was already rather vile by the Founding Era with Unitarian socialists starting to dominate, and it didn’t have state support. That tends to indicate the likelihood of it happening no matter how they’re funded. But with state support, they’re also defended against the possibility of future competitors, while in a free system competitors can spring up when interested parties decide they’re necessary. Without state support schools stay inexpensive enough that the poor can afford to attend them while holding jobs, as was the general case before the massive post-WWII changes, and of course the more perverse examples of dishonesty tend not to be produced since their output fails and their attendance, not being subsidized, is held down. Right now we have the entire Humanities departments of close to every single school in the world pushing totalitarianism, and that would not be possible to the extent it is if not for taxpayer support.

    As for the states supporting schools, the Constitution’s guarantee of a republican form of government to the states obviates that. That should mean they can’t socialize anything at all. Especially now that 14th amendment incorporation has come to pass (whether we agree with it or not, that’s the way things have been for a long time, so you have to abide by it in everything), and since the Feds may not support one person with the property of another, then the states can’t either. And again I will point out that we had a system which worked long before there was any state support for such schools and their output. We’d become the richest people in the world by the 1730’s as I remember, which was because we were little interfered with. After the establishment of the Constitution we rapidly became even more wealthy as a nation and people, though some complained about that. smile

    So I can agree, in principle, that it isn’t what it should be, but fixing it? Oh my. I just can’t think that turning things over to the Fords and Dells of the world as moving in the right direction. Those are money men, which is all fine and good. We need money men in the world. But can’t we also have education and knowledge and the arts, simply for the intangible benefits it provides, if for nothing other than the health of our minds and souls?

    As much as one may wish people sought higher ends, etc., the fact is it’s nobody else’s business what one does with one’s time, and most people spend most of their time seeking income. We’re talking about governance here, not religion or philosophy of life. Since government is supporting schools by stealing property from those barely making a living, we know there’s something immoral going on. That must end. Once it is ended, then we can think about what else should be done by private parties. Coercion (slavery) is lawless, though, and it should never have been allowed in the first place. The point is that government has no role in these matters, and that if something is valued it will find sources for its support. We know it will, because it had lived long before the corruption. We must have hope that our constitutional system actually works. I’m troubled at the idea that some fear it may not.

    Kim:

    And who decides what constitutes acceptable “merit”? I hope not just “the market”, or else we’re doomed to a future of short-term invention. That’s fine, but it’s not the Theory of Relativity, either.

    My point, and my only point in all this can be encapsulated by the last sentence in TS’s comment: ”...how can you eliminate one without eliminating all?

    Everyone in the world decides. Heck, that’s the theory of the current system, too. (Honest. rolleyes ) But they’re protected from reality. Let the wonderful people who keep telling me how much wiser they are with my money and everyone else’s do with their own money, and let them see if they can gain adherents enough to support these grant schemes of theirs. I’m tired of paying taxes to support some Democrat whore who promotes the fraudulent ideas that have murdered hundreds of millions of people over the last century and continue killing people all over the world, and indeed kill millions annually to this day when you realize their lack of honor and their personal habits result in the deaths of their recently procreated offspring. That I have fund my political opponents and because of that am less able to support those with whom I agree is an obscenity so immense that even the hypocrite Thomas Jefferson’s memorial features a quote from him denouncing it.

    I really don’t think I have to come up with the final state of all situations in the world once the major evils that exist today are ended. Just end the evils, and let’s see how the world is then. After a period of time, we can decide what to do.

    (My memory is that Relativity was invented by a patent clerk working bureaucrat’s hours. No state institution was involved in supporting it. But I’m just being a jerk in pointing that out. The point is that things worked before, and I don’t see any evidence of faster or greater invention and a higher sort of existence since the servile state began supporting these institutions. What I do see is an exponential growth in tyranny and wickedness.)

    TraitorHater | 7/26/2007 09:59 AM CDT | #96221
  36. I doubt I’ll remember every difference I have with your response, but…

    I’m surprised at your allowing for taxpayer supported higher education. You’ve already agreed that taxpayer funded, or at least government provided, schooling for children is unacceptable, and rightly so, if only because of the impossibility of resisting the temptation to produce results desired by a particular faction. How does it suddenly become acceptable for those in later schools? We know Harvard was already rather vile by the Founding Era with Unitarian socialists starting to dominate, and it didn’t have state support. That tends to indicate the likelihood of it happening no matter how they’re funded. But with state support, they’re also defended against the possibility of future competitors, while in a free system competitors can spring up when interested parties decide they’re necessary. Without state support schools stay inexpensive enough that the poor can afford to attend them while holding jobs, as was the general case before the massive post-WWII changes, and of course the more perverse examples of dishonesty tend not to be produced since their output fails and their attendance, not being subsidized, is held down. Right now we have the entire Humanities departments of close to every single school in the world pushing totalitarianism, and that would not be possible to the extent it is if not for taxpayer support.

    As for the states supporting schools, the Constitution’s guarantee of a republican form of government to the states obviates that. That should mean they can’t socialize anything at all. Especially now that 14th amendment incorporation has come to pass (whether we agree with it or not, that’s the way things have been for a long time, so you have to abide by it in everything), and since the Feds may not support one person with the property of another, then the states can’t either. And again I will point out that we had a system which worked long before there was any state support for such schools and their output. We’d become the richest people in the world by the 1730’s as I remember, which was because we were little interfered with. After the establishment of the Constitution we rapidly became even more wealthy as a nation and people, though some complained about that. smile

    So I can agree, in principle, that it isn’t what it should be, but fixing it? Oh my. I just can’t think that turning things over to the Fords and Dells of the world as moving in the right direction. Those are money men, which is all fine and good. We need money men in the world. But can’t we also have education and knowledge and the arts, simply for the intangible benefits it provides, if for nothing other than the health of our minds and souls?

    As much as one may wish people sought higher ends, etc., the fact is it’s nobody else’s business what one does with one’s time, and most people spend most of their time seeking income. We’re talking about governance here, not religion or philosophy of life. Since government is supporting schools by stealing property from those barely making a living, we know there’s something immoral going on. That must end. Once it is ended, then we can think about what else should be done by private parties. Coercion (slavery) is lawless, though, and it should never have been allowed in the first place. The point is that government has no role in these matters, and that if something is valued it will find sources for its support. We know it will, because it had lived long before the corruption. We must have hope that our constitutional system actually works. I’m troubled at the idea that some fear it may not.

    Kim:

    And who decides what constitutes acceptable “merit”? I hope not just “the market”, or else we’re doomed to a future of short-term invention. That’s fine, but it’s not the Theory of Relativity, either.

    My point, and my only point in all this can be encapsulated by the last sentence in TS’s comment: ”...how can you eliminate one without eliminating all?

    Everyone in the world decides. Heck, that’s the theory of the current system, too. (Honest. rolleyes ) But they’re protected from reality. Let the wonderful people who keep telling me how much wiser they are with my money and everyone else’s do with their own money, and let them see if they can gain adherents enough to support these grant schemes of theirs. I’m tired of paying taxes to support some Democrat whore who promotes the fraudulent ideas that have murdered hundreds of millions of people over the last century and continue killing people all over the world, and indeed kill millions annually to this day when you realize their lack of honor and their personal habits result in the deaths of their recently procreated offspring. That I have fund my political opponents and because of that am less able to support those with whom I agree is an obscenity so immense that even the hypocrite Thomas Jefferson’s memorial features a quote from him denouncing it.

    I really don’t think I have to come up with the final state of all situations in the world once the major evils that exist today are ended. Just end the evils, and let’s see how the world is then. After a period of time, we can decide what to do.

    (My memory is that Relativity was invented by a patent clerk working bureaucrat’s hours. No state institution was involved in supporting it. But I’m just being a jerk in pointing that out. The point is that things worked before, and I don’t see any evidence of faster or greater invention and a higher sort of existence since the servile state began supporting these institutions. What I do see is an exponential growth in tyranny and wickedness.)

    TraitorHater | 7/26/2007 09:59 AM CDT | #96222

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