The Current State of the University

#2
#2
Well well, long time no see....how's things going with therealUT? You haven't been around these parts in a couple years. You still writing a book?
 
#4
#4
Life is good. Had a forced retreat from VN. Must play nice, now.

TRUT, good to hear from you. You’ve been missed around these parts. If you haven’t been lurking, we’ve got some real winners in here now.
 
#6
#6
We are fully invested in this approach through HS in the US. I would say between 50% and 75% in college and higher. Not sure our college instructors are on a quota system yet.
 
#9
#9
second paragraph is about the only one worth anything. the rest of it seems to be rehashing the same couple points ad nauseam with out advancing the plot. guy may be a professor but he doesn't understand how to get his point across. even in the academic world you have to stay in a grove, as it is a lot of the paragraphs sound like whining to me which lead me to tone them out.
 
#11
#11
second paragraph is about the only one worth anything. the rest of it seems to be rehashing the same couple points ad nauseam with out advancing the plot. guy may be a professor but he doesn't understand how to get his point across. even in the academic world you have to stay in a grove, as it is a lot of the paragraphs sound like whining to me which lead me to tone them out.

Being in academia, while I see some of this as unnecessarily redundant, it strikes me as so true and so very terrifying.
 
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#12
#12
Wondered what happened to you TRUT. Welcome back.
 
#13
#13
Yo TRUT

You didn’t take a part time job as a fork lift driver just to troll us, did you?

Welcome back Brother.
 
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#14
#14
Being in academia, while I see some of this as unnecessarily redundant, it strikes me as so true and so very terrifying.

I agree its true. but if you are trying to convince someone of something repeating yourself too often doesn't help. its almost like he had to have a 3000 word essay, or however many, so he just rewrote the same paragraphs and points again and again.

short, sweet, to the point. once you get the initial buy in then you can launch into monologues like this.
 
#16
#16
This rings so true.

..."If you think I overstate the consequences of this erosion of the university curriculum, consider the 2016 US presidential debates as barometers of the culture. Many people were horrified by the debates, regardless of partisan interests. But if you want to appreciate the full extent of the horror and understand just how far we’ve fallen, watch the first ever televised presidential debate between Kennedy and Nixon in 1960. The extent of our new barbarism becomes immediately apparent in the contrast and it’s quite a shock, and this without even claiming that Kennedy and Nixon were themselves in any way high-water marks of political culture. If you think this decline has nothing to do with the decline of genuine liberal arts education, through which students are taught to think deeply and meaningfully about the real human problems of government, justice and reason, and the rise of the all-administrative university in which they are not, think again. As one Canadian university president I know said to a colleague who had expressed an interest in Montesquieu’s political thought, “Why study him? He’s dead.” So much for history. So much for political wisdom. And so much for magnanimity and breadth of understanding. We now have intellectual philistines settling the matter of what our children need to know. Where in this miasma of deculturation will they ever find an image of a genuine statesperson or citizen or of a truly just human being? Nowhere, if the modern administrative university has its way."...

The take over of institutional management by administrators having a shallow depth of understanding of the diciplines they are given responsibility to manage is happening across the board, not just academia. It's happening in heavy industry, medicine, design/construction engineering, to name a few. It's all about efficiency and meeting the projected quarterly profit margin as determined by a Six Sigma Black Belt. The deconstruction of the culture and intellectual base of western civilization is in full swing by MBA's proud of their abilities in a system of management ranked by names appropriated from the ancient martial arts.
 
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#17
#17
This rings so true.



The take over of institutional management by administrators having a shallow depth of understanding of the diciplines they are given responsibility to manage is happening across the board, not just academia. It's happening in heavy industry, medicine, design/construction engineering, to name a few. It's all about efficiency and meeting the projected quarterly profit margin as determined by a Six Sigma Black Belt. The deconstruction of the culture and intellectual base of western civilization is in full swing by MBA's proud of their abilities in a system of management ranked by names appropriated from the ancient martial arts.

Sometimes it's really too bad you can't click thumbs up more than once. MBAs and the schools of "business" churning them out are killing this country - killing as in making dead.

When I was forced into early retirement (engineer), I went and never looked back - never want to fight again with incompetent fools who are incapable of understanding anything they are told. A product can fail catastrophically, maim, kill, but that's tomorrow, this is today. If it makes money in the short term, it's good; that's it. It can all be summed up in the old "buy low, sell high philosophy" - put as little into the component parts - including labor - and sell as high as possible.

Everything you want to know about the wonderful world of business was summed up very neatly in the failed world of Robert McNamara. Ruthless genius (perhaps) and absolute belief in self with a trail of failures and destruction in his wake - blindly incompetent in seeing and analyzing failure in his inept policies and decisions.
 
#23
#23

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