University Science is Dead

By Professor Doom

“You don’t understand science!”

--I’ve tried to explain to friends that much of the “global warming” movement doesn’t follow normal scientific principles, and several times I’ve received this response.

     I know tenure is much maligned in the public eye, and I openly acknowledge “job for life” has real potential for abuse…I feel such concerns are irrelevant, however, as tenure is basically dead in the United States. Most faculty are part-timers now, and most tenured faculty are approaching Social Security age, if not a decade or two past it. There’s no new crop of young scientists and scholars coming up behind them, or at least none in any position for honest science. The annihilation of tenure means the new guys must choose to follow the party line or starve…there’s no possibility of tenure protection.

     Bottom line, tenure does have enough positives to it that, despite the theoretical abuse that can exist, the actual evil that the destruction of tenure has done makes me wish we had enough tenured faculty left that whatever abuse that exists of tenure would be enough for me to rant about in this blog, instead of regularly discussing what the removal of tenure has done.

     The end of tenure has been a factor in the debasement of higher education. No tenured faculty means that administration can do whatever they want on campus. When admin orders faculty to eliminate course material, make fake courses, or look the other way when bogus degrees are passed out…faculty have no choice but to do so. Any faculty who refuse are simply fired, and replaced. No tenure means no job protection, no chance of maintaining integrity in the face of the rapacious plundering caste that rules over much of higher education today.

     The annihilation of tenured faculty has led to another issue, one I don’t often discuss: the destruction of honest research. Tenured faculty were given a somewhat blank check to conduct their own research, and no matter what these scholars found, they weren’t penalized for it. Yes, there was (and is) a massive pursuit of grant money to pay for much of that research…but the fact still remains, faculty weren’t afraid of losing their jobs if they discovered something politically or otherwise unpopular.

     Now, of course, faculty must toe the party line in all things, and we’re generally afraid of publishing unpopular results. This is why so much of today’s science is so questionable: the lack of tenured faculty means there’s no pursuit of truth, just pursuit of the favor of the powers that be, as such is the only reliable source of funds.

      We see this time and again today, where “big” university sponsored science (sic) just can’t seem to contradict what the government wants. I’m hardly the only one to notice:

Professor Who Exposed Flint Crisis Says Greed Has Killed Public Science

     The professor above is talking about “public science,” but the gentle reader needs to understand that the most independent science used to come from the universities. It does no more, as even very legitimate scholars don’t dare do anything that might lead to their own starvation.

Edwards explained how the pressures put on academics to secure funding are forcing scientists to abandon work done in the public interest and that similar financial motives are causing government science agencies to ignore inconvenient truths—like high levels of lead in public drinking water.

     A quick summary for those that don’t follow mainstream media (usually a wise choice): the government in Flint knew that they were poisoning their own citizens with the water, but the government made sure that government employees were getting their own special water supply. And the government insisted that the government scientists were saying there was nothing wrong with the water (but no, they were not going to demonstrate they believe what they say by drinking that crap…).

     Only after much complaining did the government of Flint generously decide to stop billing Flint residents for the poisoned water. Honest, trusting government to protect you is a bad, bad, bad, idea. Government really will poison you and send you the bill for the poison.

“…the failure of government scientists to acknowledge a problem, coupled with academia’s refusal to question their judgement, can drive serious public health crises…”

     There are two types of faculty in higher ed: primarily teachers, and mostly researchers. I have to put the qualifiers for each type because there are few pure research faculty (nor should there be, as they should have an interest in training the next generation of researchers). Many faculty are primarily teachers—perhaps a paper or three, but mostly such faculty are content to teach.

     Both types are subdued now. The teachers are adjuncts that don’t dare speak out. The researchers? Well, the government is the primary supplier of research money…we’re not going to risk offending that customer any more than we risk  having integrity in the classroom.

“…When was the last time you heard anyone in academia publicly criticize a funding agency, no matter how outrageous their behavior? We just don’t do these things.
If an environmental injustice is occurring, someone in a government agency is not doing their job. Everyone we wanted to partner said, Well, this sounds really cool, but we want to work with the government. We want to work with the city. And I’m like, You’re living in a fantasy land, because these people are the problem…”


     So, we do have this one faculty…he is, of course, tenured, and secure. So he can afford to speak out against what’s really going on in government-sponsored science.
     But for the vast majority of our scholars? We’ve been silenced. Many of us know, and know well, of the frauds being inflicted on America today, but only a scarce few dare to say even a word…and fewer still can even afford to do so.

     Legitimate science is mostly dead now, I tell people it’s better to flip a coin than to trust the “experts” of mainstream/government news. Key to the scientific method (i.e., the core method of science) is the results can be replicated, but much of published results cannot be replicated. The “peer review” system, a system where scholars were supposed to review and approve other scholarly work,  is so loaded with fraud now that such papers are meaningless. Even mathematics is bizarro-land when it comes to research awards.

      I could go on, but let’s get back to the point: back when faculty had tenure, and no longer had to fear for their existence every year, we had far more legitimate and respectable education and research systems. I think having such beneficial systems again is well worth the risk of some dead wood hanging around.

www.professorconfess.blogspot.com

California: Free Diplomas for Dropouts

By Professor Doom

     I focus on higher education, but it’s a simple fact that what goes on in the public (more accurately, government) schools before college has a major influence in what happens in college.

      There are many reasons 90% of the coursework in community colleges isn’t college work, is generally 9^th grade or lower material, but the sad fact is: if high school graduates really learned 9^th grade material, we wouldn’t be teaching (nearly so much)  9^th grade work in “higher” education. Most students in higher education are high school graduates, after all.

     The government schools have been failing, and failing extravagantly, since their inception, not simply by failing to teach the things that used to be commonly known, but by graduating even the students that fail to learn under the ever reducing standards. Depending on what one means by “illiterate,” a large percentage, likely more than half, the students moving on to community college are illiterate…and these illiterates are all high school graduates.

     Part of the justification for the ever lowering of standards is the public schools complain they “have to take everyone,” including problem students, often students with very serious problems which drain resources from the system, making it hard to do a good job (those rising autism rates, combined with parents of such children consistently saying their kids were fine before the vaccinations, are placing an ever higher drain, by the way, as my friends in public education assure me). I can’t help but laugh a little at this excuse—before public education got serious in the 20^th century, literacy rates were much higher, and a casual examination of popular written works in the 19^th century shows we were generally far more literate before we turned education over to government professionals.

     Anyway, “everyone goes to school” is the justification for the miserable standards to the point that a high school diploma doesn’t even mean the graduate can sign his name.

      Despite these essentially non-existent standards, there are still plenty of high school dropouts. It’s a bit of a problem. Although a high school diploma is basically worthless, not having one make it tough to get a job, or so I’m told. Most folks lie rather than admit such a lack, and it’s no big deal…as long as the employer doesn’t check up.

     California, ever the source of stupid-crazy ideas, is leaping to the rescue here:

California Will Give Free High School Diplomas To Kids Who Flunked Out

     On principle alone, this is just more California-crazy, and reading the explanation for the thinking behind this doesn’t help:

“…to counter the phenomenon of students receiving passing grades while learning almost nothing. The test is hardly complex. The math test, for instance, only covers 8th grade-level material…”

     Honest, there’s a reason our “colleges” start at the 9^th grade now, what’s happening in California, academically, is comparable to the rest of the country: what a high school graduate knows today is comparable to the 8^th grader of decades ago (outside of the exceptional students).

      The gentle reader really needs to understand how minimal the standards are now, and how many of our victims in the public schools are gaining nothing despite the kind of tax dollars spent:

249,000 students failed to pass the test by the end of senior year from 2006 to 2014.

     Now back to today’s regularly scheduled blog. You can’t get into college without a high school diploma. Well, legally, you can’t, but admin overlook this law as well as they overlook every other law that would cut into growth. It’ll be a moot point soon, as dropouts can just get a California diploma in short order.

      Now let’s connect the dots. There are no standards in the public schools, so we graduate illiterates, and this is justified because these schools have to take everyone.  Seeing that isn’t even good enough, we’ll be awarding diplomas to anyone who wants one, and this is justified because people “need” a diploma to succeed in today’s world (or so they say).

    “I look at my framed degree every day. Then I go to work and deliver pizzas…”

--a smart friend with a supposedly jobs-related degree said this recently.

 

     The justification had some truth in it back when college degree holders were pretty scarce. But now college degrees are worth about as much as a high school diploma, which is to say…not much at all.

     Hmm. Standards in college are in free fall in our higher education system, to the point that many campuses, even the ones that are not outright frauds, are still academic jokes…this is justified because “we need growth” says the administration. We’ve been trained as children to believe that we “need” a college degree to succeed in today’s world. We already award degrees to people that can barely read nor write (nor do arithmetic, at the risk of overplugging my book).

      The only question that remains is how long until one of our governmental leaders decides “hey, why don’t we just give college degrees away” as well?¹ I do suspect there’s a big difference between giving away college degrees and high school degrees.

      Student debt is well over a trillion dollars now, and those dollars bought a whole lot of worthless (or nearly worthless) degrees. If a state, or worse yet, the Federal, government starts just awarding college degrees, all these indebted graduates are probably going to complain, loudly, that their own degrees are being debased.

      Sanders’ insane “free college for everyone”  idea has already received some negative observations, but does anyone think our government would really care about screwing over citizens? 

      Will anyone make the connection between printing up a bunch of degrees debases the value of current degrees, and realize it works the same way with our fiat currency system?

       I suspect the answer to both questions is “no”…but I sure hope I’m wrong.

www.professorconfess.blogspot.com

    

1.    Actually, there’s a politically-connected graduate school that seems  poised to do this to/for the connected already, perhaps I’ll touch on what this place is doing soon.

    

More Engineering Students Than Jobs…No Kidding!

By Professor Doom

“College degree holders make a million more dollars over a lifetime…”

--the above is thoroughly debunked, but still advanced as truth by college administrators.

     Every month or two, I get an angry e-mail, saying something like the following: “How DARE you tell people not to go to college! Don’t you want people to improve themselves?”

      I concede a very casual reading of my blog might lead people to think I have something against education. I promise you, however, I believe in education, I believing the act of learning is helpful for a human being, and is, indeed, the best way for self-improvement.

     Today’s higher education has little to do with self-improvement, however. The entire system has been taken over by a plundering mob of mercenary administrators, whose reckless irresponsibility is leading to the failure of higher education.

     Their primary irresponsibility has been an irrational focus on growth, over everything else. Every campus policy, from massive remedial programs to cheating to grade inflation, has been made by figuring out what promotes growth, and deciding accordingly.

      So, it doesn’t matter that over 90% of remedial students get nothing out of higher education, and merely end up being victims. Vicious administration decides growth is achieved by offering mostly 9^th grade or lower courses…and “higher education” is debased into sub-high school on many campuses.

      It doesn’t matter that cheating is so out of hand that surprise checks on cheating can reveal 50% or more of the students are not submitting their own work. Admin decided that getting rid of cheaters would cut into growth, and so cheaters are encouraged to stay on campus, and faculty are punished for catching cheaters. What few checks on cheating that remain are announced far in advance, and students are warned exactly how they can be caught…and still many are caught. There are at least a dozen companies that will write your academic papers, even doctoral thesis for you, and will even take your online courses for you. Degrees become increasingly worthless as anyone with a clue what’s going on in higher education knows how little the degrees represent.

  Admin decides that failing students cuts into growth, and pressures faculty to keep those grades high. And so GPA becomes increasingly worthless as well, and whole graduating classes are awarded Cum Laude or higher. How do you value an award everyone gets?

     All of this could be considered harmless navel-gazing, little different than a massive cosplay convention, except for the huge sums of tuition/loan money on the line.

     Admin’s reckless pursuit of growth has been woefully irresponsible, and they’ve exploited the “degree holders make a million bucks more” rubbish to justify allowing hordes of students to flood not just the marketplace-worthless fields like Urban Studies, Women’s Studies, and Queer Musicology, but also the actual fields like engineering, where a hard-to-get technical degree can actually pay off.

     Well, it could pay off, but not when you bloat the size of the program to the point that it’s not even theoretically possible for your graduates to get jobs:

More Memorial University engineering students than work placements during economic slump

MUN continuing to up enrolments, as engineering faculty expands

--note: still upping enrollment despite the lack of jobs.

         I’m not just picking on this one university, this sort of thing is happening everywhere else: the “jobs training” programs have way too many butts-in-seats to legitimately expect the graduates to find work. It’s especially bad in schools with programs that create workers for the oil industry (like petroleum engineers).

"We currently have only 14 students in work terms in Alberta, and seven in Houston. In the past we've had more than 65 students on work terms in both of these areas."

     Yes, I know the oil bust of the last year has devastated oil companies…but I knew it was going to devastate the oil companies last year, even a few years before that. The Poo Bahs that run our schools get paid millions of dollars along with huge benefits, so should be far more astute than I. How come they don’t know the things a chucklehead like myself can figure out just by reading a bit?

“The annual number of undergraduates will climb from 2012's graduating class of 170 to 250 graduates by 2020. The number of grad students will nearly double from 360 to 700 over the same period.” 

      Administrators might well have known for years also, but this is irrelevant: they don’t care. All these guys want is butts-in-seats, because administrators are mercenaries, caring nothing for education with no interest in helping people. They don’t even care if the school gets a vile reputation (hi Penn State!), as long as they can sell out quickly and move elsewhere in the system.

      In times past, administrators at a school weren’t professional mercenaries, and didn’t have self-awarded Administration degrees. The dean wasn’t just some overblown bureaucrat with a Ph.D. in Niceness, and didn’t plan to spend 30 years debasing school after school before cashing out with a nice golden parachute.

      No, it used to be administrators at schools were the same as the faculty, faculty that didn’t want to work at a school with a crap reputation. The dean? He was the chemistry professor, teaching one less course a semester while covering the administration duties (honest, most administrative jobs really aren’t full time affairs); the dean/chemistry professor would leave the deanship after a year or two, to be replaced by a history professor or something.

     Bottom line, you don’t really need a Ph.D. in Administrative Leadership to be an administrator. What you really need is to actually care about education. This is why “growth over all” wasn’t a huge deal in higher education decades ago, even though it’s the only thing today. Administrators were just faculty, and so years ago higher education wasn’t an endless procession of student loan victims, sex scandals, social justice lunacy, and athletics scandals like today.

      When you talked to the history professor/registrar about majoring in history, he would tell you “Uh, you’re not going to be able to get a job with this kind of degree, are you sure that’s what you want?” That’s what it was like years ago, and I sure remember my advisor (faculty then, of course, but it would be a professional administrator now) warning me: “It’s not a good idea to major in math, almost nobody makes it and the job market is terrible with all the competition from the failed USSR—we’re flooded with veteran Russian mathematicians willing to work for peanuts.”

      Now when you go to the professional bureaucrat and say you want to take out a $200,000 loan to major in Comedienne Tuba Players? You’re told “That’s a great idea! You should get 20 of your friends to sign up as well.”

      For the most part, this lunacy was overlooked when the majors were in fields where it was clear there would be no jobs waiting for the graduates—“the suckers deserve it” was the mantra, though I strongly feel an institution that acts with integrity would not allow people to hurt themselves by also taking out huge loans. But the jobs degrees are now turning into a huge embarrassment as well. Does anyone think the Poo Bahs will admit their mistake, and scale back a bit? Nope:

As it becomes harder to find work terms in oil and gas, as well as mining, Naterer said the university has reached out to new sectors.

"The way we've made up for this shortfall is we've pursued other new employers," he said.
"For example, we have over 40 new employers, including Apple, Tesla and others outside the province."


     This is so much easier when you don’t care who you hurt. Translate the above as “We’re sorry we sold you on 4 years of training for jobs we knew weren’t going to exist when you graduated. Hey, tell you what: how about you buy 4 more years of tuition and a degree in another field where maybe there’ll be a job in 4 years?”

      Look, I know mistakes happen, but before the student loan scam, this sort of bungle was no big deal. Yes, the student might not get the job he wanted, but the school focused on education, not on indebting students, and so the graduate at least left the school with an education, and without life-crushing debt. Nowadays, our students are leaving schools deep in debt, and, all too often, with no education in any form, much less in a form that would pay off that debt.

      Again: I’m for education, I honestly am. I’m just not for indebting our children for a slip of paper that represents nothing and won’t cover the debt.

www.professorconfess.blogspot.com