tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1812431336777691886.post6110544783508697233..comments2024-02-29T03:57:00.088-05:00Comments on The Mermaid's Tale: The Knowledge Factory Crisis: A different, anthropological way to view universitiesAnne Buchananhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09212151396672651221noreply@blogger.comBlogger3125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1812431336777691886.post-7323408958014692332017-11-22T03:10:30.733-05:002017-11-22T03:10:30.733-05:00> they are just like religions or political cla...> they are just like religions or political classes or corporations!<br /><br />They are not 'just like' corporations. Legally they ARE corporations. <br /><br />If you want to start a new college/university in any of the 50 states, you will first have to register a corporation. Then that corporation may choose to sign-up as a non-profit with the IRS (non-profit college) or not (for-profit college).<br /><br />One condition for getting non-profit status is that the corporation cannot use its resources to promote one political party or candidate over another. We know how well that is working out.<br /><br />http://edition.cnn.com/2017/02/01/us/milo-yiannopoulos-berkeley/index.html<br /><br />It is clear that universities are defrauding the society in many different ways, ranging from pushing kids to student debt that cannot be discharged in bankruptcy and non-profit abuses to discriminating against smart Asian students. Your suggested changes are too little, too late. This entire system must (and will) go.<br /><br />http://www.unz.com/runz/asian-quotas-in-the-ivy-league-we-see-nothing/<br /><br /><br />homolog.ushttp://homolog.usnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1812431336777691886.post-15822645224861283732017-11-21T10:03:10.661-05:002017-11-21T10:03:10.661-05:00Illich was on our faculty here for some years, tho...Illich was on our faculty here for some years, though I never met him.<br />It is frustrating to look at universities and current research industries from their own professed ethos, because we fall so short. I can't say whether had I been senior and with a career's experience, say, decades ago when I started out in the game, how I would have felt. After all, elders always groan about how bad the new generation is doing.<br /><br />Maybe all the money for research, all the journals, and less teaching 'load', and the powerful equipment and computing power &c are making science much, or much much, better than before. We gripe about the imperfections from inside the system, not realizing its positives (which doesn't deny or gainsay the negatives). From the more distanced perspective I tried to express in this post, we can see more of how the system actually works, rather than how it claims it works, and we can either become cynical or try to see a different viewpoint.<br /><br />Cynicism always works for human society because we're so vain and flawed a species. But the kind of 'energy based' viewpoint I expressed above, about this aspect of human culture and its role in the physical universe as an engine of resource consumption and so on, maybe it makes more sense. In a sense that has been noted in various ways before, human culture (as life itself) is an entropy generator. Universities are but one part of the system that works this way, and it does in through hierarchies, consumption, and so on. That, at least, is one way to think of things--though it does not in any way dispel the internal hypocrisy.Ken Weisshttps://www.blogger.com/profile/02049713123559138421noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1812431336777691886.post-56914386563503954382017-11-21T09:27:24.403-05:002017-11-21T09:27:24.403-05:00The Henry Ford method of mass production was so su...The Henry Ford method of mass production was so successful that it had been applied everywhere ranging from McDonalds to schools and colleges. You may take a look at the books by Ivan Ilich. He discussed these ideas in early 70s. <br /><br />https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ivan_Illich<br /><br />He also noticed similar harmful mass production in the medical system. One of his books - "Medical Nemesis" covers this topic. In a mass-production or industrialized medical system, doctor's goal changes from healing the person to giving the person maximum number of mass-produced units of "treatment", namely tests, pills, etc. You need to be in India to see this system taken to an extreme.<br /><br />Biomedical research being the child of mass-production academia and mass-production medical racket gets the worse of both.homolog.ushttp://homolog.usnoreply@blogger.com