How Fake Subjects Invaded Academia

By Professor Doom

     Youtube is such an awesome resource for knowledge, it’s a shame they’re consigning videos with “alternative” points of view to concentration camps, no longer easily accessible to the public. It really is amazing what those alternative videos have accomplished, literally dissecting false media narratives in real time, completely shutting down the worst of the lies our political class and mainstream media try to foist upon us.

     If Youtube had been as operational before the first Iraq war as it is today, the American public would have had reams of information regarding the ridiculous “babies ripped from incubators by Iraqi soldiers” hoax, would have been told repeatedly how Saddam Hussein was a CIA asset for decades and asked permission from the US (cluelessly granted) before invading Kuwait, would have been told the truth of any number of lies that were drumming up war fever before we attacked Iraq the first time around (“in retaliation for 9-11” being perhaps the most ridiculous lie that could have been easily dispelled). But I digress. Youtubes’ days as a source of “alternative” information are drawing to a close…though you can still find the information if you know where to look.

     I saw a short video with a title I liked, so I had to click on it:

Roger Scruton: How Fake Subjects like Women Studies Invaded Academia

     Regular readers of my blog know my take on how this happened (the quick summary: unscrupulous administrators, eager for every student loan dollar and not caring a bit about students, allowed bogus courses to fill the catalog, racking up sales but exploiting kids as they come out of high school). I am, of course, open to alternative opinions, so let’s address some of the things he had to say in this 5 minute video:

“One of the things that happens when a totalitarian government takes over is the universities are cleaned up.”

--I don’t have a transcript, so I may be off a word or two.

     It’s no secret that on many campuses, a “cleanup” has occurred. What happened to the kid who wrote the Google memo happened to conservative faculty en masse, years earlier. Oh, we saw the bulldozers and tanks coming, and I assure you some faculty, at least, tried to stand up and stop it…it accomplished nothing. If you dared to question the madness, you were removed. Even if you had tenure, life was made so miserable that you’d leave on your own. I saw it enough with my own eyes. Even if you wanted to stay, you still had to attend “re-education camps,” interminable multiculturalism seminars that, I promise the gentle reader, are extremely painful and insulting. There are still flare-ups by remaining faculty who’ve tolerated all they can, and how these events are treated today serves as examples for what happened a few decades ago, before information could be so quickly disseminated.

“…new subjects in the university, in which the pursuit of truth seems to be secondary to something else…political conformity.”

     I certainly agree about these weird new subjects which are clearly more about ideology than academics, but I feel the professor neglects the college coursework on Game of Thrones, Gilligan’s Island, Sex, Sexuality, Sexualism, Sexual Activity, Deviant Sex, and other courses whose titles suggest more about appealing to student interest than pursuit of knowledge.

“…perhaps it can be talked about freely in this room, but you can’t talk about it freely in America…”

     He’s obviously knowledgeable, but I do wish he’d addressed how what he just said explains the growth of these courses. Actual professors, actual academics, have been silenced on campus, and this silence is itself a factor in how all fake courses made it onto the curriculum. We had no way to stop it.

“…conformity to an orthodoxy takes precedence over an intellectual method…”

     He’s referencing Women’s Studies, and other ideological courses in the above, and while I again concede there’s truth in it…it’s only a sliver of reality. Open up the blinders a bit and you’ll see our campuses have wide swaths of coursework little different than what students already “learned” in the 6^th grade. It’s not about ideology nearly as much as it is about sales and growth. Gotta pay for those administrative raises somehow, after all, and there’s always another Vice President of Diversity position opening up for a friend of the Governor, at $225,000 a year.

“We are going through a time when truth itself is being marginalized from academic scholarship…”

      Again, this is true. The recent big gender studies hoax, along with strong evidence that huge amounts of published research is completely bogus, certainly reinforce his point but…how did it happen? What changed?

      It used to be that research was judged by faculty in the same department, and departments were their own little communities. The only way a fraud could operate in a department was if the whole department was fraudulent, and that’s tough to pull off. Departments aren’t communities anymore, and many campuses don’t have departments at all. Instead, you have a Dean wh controls the hiring of dozens of adjuncts who rarely even talk to each other.

      When it comes time to look at the research, the Dean has no interest or understanding of that research. She simply counts the number of published papers, and if it’s high enough, you get kudos. What’s actually in those papers is irrelevant—half of published papers are never read by anyone, 90% are never cited.  Just get published, past that it’s irrelevant, and that’s what Admin makes the job requirement. If you don’t get published, you’re fired. We have published papers with 1,000 authors now, with the record being over 5,000 authors for a 33 page paper…admin just can’t discern how this stuff works. Back when admin and faculty were the same people, it was possible, but those days are long over.

      And it’s supposed to be a puzzle why the pursuit of truth disappeared from campus?

“You can turn all the subjects of the university upside down, and rearrange them as part of the agenda of liberation…”

      Again, he’s correct here, as old academic courses like “English literature” are tossed, and replaced with “Women’s English literature,” with a clear ideological bent superseding academics. Absolutely, I’ve seen many courses like that (mercifully, there hasn’t been a “Women’s calculus” course yet…), and once you’ve added a few dozen such courses to the catalogue, you may as well just form an Institute of Women’s Studies on campus, to fill with highly paid vice-presidents.

      These courses do have a veneer of academics to them, but are mostly about ideological nonsense. Once you have enough of them, then you start to get those “experts in nonsense” to preside over the fake coursework.

        I totally concede there is some truth to what he’s saying, but I still think I provide a broader view of the reality of many universities today. Having acknowledged that our campuses are filled with fake coursework, even if he and I disagree on how it happened, I’m certain we agree it needs to stop.

       But what’s sustaining all the fake classes? Once again, the student loan scam is a big factor. We just wouldn’t have the money for campus palaces filled with Vice Presidents of Women and Diversity without the student loans.

     And so here I am, once again, doing what I can to educate the public, because it’s their money paying for all this fraud, and hopefully once enough people learn about the reality we can do what must be done:

     End the student loan scam.

www.professorconfess.blogspot.com

PhDs UP, Jobs Down.

By Professor Doom

Hairdresser: “Didn’t you used to teach at that community college, about 10 years ago?”

Me: “Yep.”

Hairdresser: “I had a class with you there, even graduated. I hear it’s a scam now.”

Me: “Yep. I’d like it short in the back, please.”

--I had this conversation about a month ago. I hope she enjoyed her time at the community college but…please don’t tell me education is even remotely a path to riches.

     We’re coming to a critical point in higher education: way too many of our college graduates are finding out that there simply isn’t a job waiting for them after they get that degree. Granted, it’s been that way for years, but the critical issue now is people are catching on to the rigged game.

     One solution to the “no job for the recent college graduate” problem is to go back for more school. It should be obvious on the face of it that this is a sucker’s game—if education doesn’t get a you a job, more education isn’t likely to help, right? The only advantage is, since you’re going back to school, you don’t have to make payments on your previous student loans, payments you’d have to make if you keep looking for a job, a job you can’t find.

      I imagine merely a tiny percentage of the population suspects that the situation described above is not a coincidence. I hope the percentage is growing, as I sure wish fewer people would double down on education by going to graduate school.

      Before going further, allow me to talk about my own “getting into graduate school” experience:

     My undergraduate GPA was just barely above 3.5 (that’s “below average” by today’s standards, but still respectable). My general GRE scores quite good (98^th percentile or so, if memory serves), and I’d won a national award for mathematical research (2^nd place was awarded to someone from a school called “MIT”). I always wanted to go to graduate school, and so naturally I applied after spending some time “in the real world” working as a stockbroker.

     I was rejected from the majority of graduate schools I applied to. It wasn’t that I was all that weak an applicant, but the recent collapse of the USSR (at the risk of giving things away) meant the US was being flooded with high quality, famous (in their field) mathematicians, and this was going to continue for years…there weren’t going to be many jobs for new Ph.D.s anytime soon, and so grad schools did the right thing and cut back enrollments.

      The point of this backstory? I didn’t have an easy time getting accepted to grad school, because the grad schools operated with integrity, responsibly only taking as many students as the job market could bear.

      Higher education has changed quite a bit since then, especially in the less technical fields where you can easily get hundreds of kids with 4.0 GPAs looking to sign up for more debt. If schools were still run by people with integrity, then the graduate schools wouldn’t be bloated out with way too many students, looking for far too few jobs when they graduate.

     Unfortunately, admissions, like most everything else on campus, is run by the administrative caste (on most campuses), and all they want is growth.

      A recent article addresses in detail the incredible disparity between jobs and graduates going on here, but I’ll provide a few numbers highlighting the insanity:

English Ph.D.s Awarded in 2016: 1400

Faculty Positions in English Available in 2016: 900

         Hmm, so over 35% of the Ph.D.s last year are mathematically excluded from getting a job in academia…the only place where a Ph.D. in English is worth anything. Isn’t it a little bit irresponsible to do this? I’m surprised there isn’t a lawsuit. It’s really worth pointing out that a Ph.D. in the social sciences, much like English, can easily take 6 to 10 years, so it’s a pretty huge investment considering the low chance of even minimal payoff, and it isn’t just this one subject.

     This situation is only going to snowball: the 500 people that couldn’t possibly get a job in 2016 are going to try again in 2017, making the gap between “Ph.D.s looking for a job” and “jobs for Ph.D.s” more like 1,000 recent graduates in 2017…a year after that and you have more people unemployed for a year (a two) trying to get the job than you have recent graduates trying to get the job.

      Because we’ve been running surpluses for years, getting the Ph.D. in English today sets you up for years of unemployment. Ok, English isn’t exactly a discipline known for doing the math, perhaps other departments are being responsible?

History Ph.D.s Awarded in 2016: 1000

Faculty Positions in History Available in 2016: 600

     History is even more self-destructive, with 40% of the graduates mathematically guaranteed for unemployment. Again spending 6 to 10 years getting the degree (after the 4 to 6 years getting the undergraduate degree) is a disaster, right? It’s only going to be a few years of this before we hit a traffic jam of more Ph.D. Historians entering the job market than the market could possibly absorb even if there were no new graduates.

      The chart lists a number of disciplines, but the trends are very clear: even as the number of jobs opening is stable, the number of graduates trying to get those jobs are increasing dramatically. I should mention, most of those positions accounted for above are sub-minimum wage adjunct jobs: our best and brightest in the humanities literally are spending 10 or more years of their life to qualify to wait several years to get a job paying less than minimum wage…and they’re going deep into debt for the privilege.

      The number of Master’s Degrees being awarded is dropping, but this is more than absorbed by the Ph.D.s. I take this as a sign people are catching on: they at least realize the glut means a Master’s Degree is a terrible investment in time. Yes, they’re moving on to Ph.D.s but that’s the end of the rope, past that point reality has to set in.

     Please, let reality set in.

     It’s obnoxious how admin wins coming and going here. We’re talking big, big, student loan money pouring into administrative pockets in exchange for growing the graduate schools. After graduation, the flood of applicants for any job at all means admin can get another bonus for lowering faculty pay. Hey, I understand supply and demand well enough…but I also understand that it’s pure evil for admin to grow their graduate schools when they know they’re setting people up for financial ruin.

     A number of comments show that the faculty, at least, know what’s happening:

The academy used the recssion excuse to double-down on "shedding" full-time faculty positions. That will NEVER stop. The shift to part-time labor among faculty is as permanent as outsourcing in the manufacturing sector. PERMANENT.

And yet institutions keep churning out new phd's because they themselves are in the race: more head-counts among their doctoral students means more funding for their own dept's. They won't stop. They will never stop.

     The adjunctification of higher ed has done no good for education, and is a big part of why the “real” jobs are drying up. I do believe, however, that at some point it has to stop.

     When will it stop? When there’s a guy with the story “I’m 40 years old, have a list of degrees as long as your arm, and there literally is no place for me except serving coffee, which I can’t do because my student loan payments if I had a paycheck would be more than my paycheck” living on every block. We’re not there yet, I admit.

      That said, we are at the stage where a kid with the story “I’m 24 years old with a degree in Psych, and work at Starbucks…” is basically on every block, and we’re already seeing considerable backlash against higher education for creating such commonplace victims. Granted, the response right now is to try to offer “free” college to everyone but…the degrees will still be worthless.

      I can hardly conceive how people have such confusion of ideas to believe “We’ll start giving away degrees for free, then they’ll be worth something!”

     Another commenter highlights the problem:

Right now, my English dept employees 45 adjuncts in composition, to whom it pays $2500 per course at 23-student cap classes, and another 20 adjuncts who teach Enlish classes of 35 students at $3000 per course. The ten tenure-track people make the typical $60-90k a year.

Meanwhile, there are two administrators here for every yenture-track (sic, should be “tenure-track”) faculty member, college-wide. Starting salary for those is $90k.

   

     This is the part that I find so disturbing about higher ed right now. Sure, supply and demand means we shouldn’t be paying faculty much, I accept that. But those savings should be passed on to the customers, giving them a better product (eg, smaller classes) and lower tuition.

     Instead, the savings just goes to pay for ever more administrators. There are many eyewitness accounts in the article, again saying nothing I haven’t already said regarding what’s going on in higher ed.

      The only thing the comments lack is a true solution. Allow me to provide one:

      The legion of administrators and the glut of graduate students, are both paid for by the student loan scam. Destroy that, and there would be hope for integrity, and possibly even sanity, to return to higher ed.

www.professorconfess.blogspot.com

Antifa Investigated: Arrest Made

By Professor Doom

     Antifa is a menace; the mere knowledge that these maniacs are near is more than enough to cause classes to be cancelled, as has happened numerous times on campuses throughout the country. Everywhere they show up, violence ensues…it’s so weird that it’s taken so long for Antifa to be considered as, possibly, a terrorist organization.

     Part of the reason for the slow understanding of the terroristic nature of Antifa by our citizens is because the media just puts such a warm fuzzy spin on all things Antifa-related. If you don’t have friends who were exposed to the violence, or don’t carefully look around for live videos from YouTube, you have basically no way to actually know what a menace to your physical well-being Antifa is.

     My blog post today has a nice title…but it’s not a title of an article you’d find in a typical mainstream media newspaper. The paper will tell you the reason no such title can be found there is because Antifa is harmless, nonviolent, peaceful even, and it’s only because of “Nazis” that Antifa seems to be connected to violence.

     But is this true? Let’s consider the following video:

#UnderCoverAntifa: Louder with Crowder Exposes the Dangerous Truth of Antifa

      A quick summary of the video: an independent journalist (i.e., someone who wants to show we’re not being told the truth by the mainstream media) spent weeks infiltrating an Antifa outfit. He has them on tape discussing plans for violence, discussing bringing weapons (including AKs) to their peaceful protest, in short, acting just like the violent organization they appear to be. He even has a woman with a taser (which she threatens to use), and she passes out knives to Antifa members (including the infiltrators).

     The actual full video of the investigation is hard to find on YouTube. “For some reason” it keeps disappearing from YouTube, so you have to poke around to find snippets of it in other videos discussing the evidence.

     The investigators tried to get various official media to cover the story, but none of them would touch it. However, the woman with the taser was eventually arrested for assault at an Antifa protest in Utah.

      So, yes, Antifa was investigated, and one of the people identified in that investigation was arrested. How did the media cover this? Let’s take a look:

University of Utah Police evaluated undercover video of protesters at Ben Shapiro speech; determined no credible threat

--I repeat: “no credible threat” for video showing Antifa planning to bring shotguns and knives to their protest.

     Wow. That’s…a pretty extraordinary spin, eh? The article doubles down:

The University of Utah is crediting a coordinated, multi-agency approach to security…

      Now, a “coordinated, multi-agency approach” means they must have talked to the FBI, the local police, and possibly other organizations familiar with terrorist behavior, and determined that the video showing people planning to bring shotguns, tasers, AKs, and knives to the protest was not particularly threatening.

     Does that ring true to the gentle reader? If so, I want you to reconsider that the next time you’re forced to throw away your water bottle and take off your shoes before passing through airport security. Yeah, a government terrified of people wearing shoes is probably going to have some concerns about people bringing that kind of weaponry to a protest.

“…two people were arrested when scuffles broke out between protesters and counter-demonstrators.”

     That word, “scuffle,” sure is fascinating how it's used. Has anyone noticed when a police officer is attacked, words like “attacked” and “assaulted” are used, but when police officers attack someone, it’s always a “scuffle”?

     I really want to point out: an Antifa brought a taser with the express purpose of using it on someone, and used it one someone. In what universe is attacking someone with a taser fairly described as a “scuffle”? People die every year from taser scuffles…I reckon it’s too optimistic to think she’ll be charged with attempted murder, here.

     The school doubles down on the taser attack as a scuffle:

According to court documents, a female protester featured in Crowder’s video was later arrested for aggravated assault during one of the scuffles.

     Steven Crowder, who made the video and risked his life for the investigation, is surprised by the spin. He checks with the police and FBI, and they have no evidence of any contact by University of Utah asking about credible threats. Hmm, that’s rather different than what the news article implies, eh? He decides to take the university to task:

CAUGHT: University and News Lie About #UndercoverANTIFA. Confronted LIVE ON TAPE!

     Investigative journalism is pretty dead nowadays, but I remember when journalists, real journalists, would do more than just read off statements from the government, or recite whatever the company line was. So, while I don’t completely approve of Steven Crowder’s methods, I concede what he does is necessary.

      First, Crowder investigates the university admin responsible for this ridiculously spun piece of crap. He sees that this guy is heavily invested in Leftist ideology, was a big time Hillary supporter…he couldn’t be more of a Bolshevik if he spoke Russian. Crowder knows full well the guy won’t talk to him under any circumstances.

      So, Crowder calls, and leaves a message, posing at a Left wing Hate media outlet. The admin calls back shortly. Crowder then toys with the guy, making him look well, like the buffoon and hack that he is. Eventually Crowder takes him to task for his fake news report: no police were actually spoken to regarding the investigative video, the admin made that up out of whole cloth.

     Admin lies all the time but there’s a big problem with this particular lie: it was printed as truth. So, Fox News covers that police see no credible threat…and then every other organization repeats the lie ad infinitum. They do this because, as I said, investigative journalism is dead, and all our mainstream news organizations do nowadays is read off what other people have written.  

     So, how bad is Antifa? You certainly can’t tell from news reports, because, as we see here, we can have “taser scuffles” that are lightly addressed, if mentioned at all. Are Antifa members shooting off heads in “shotgun scuffles”? Are they taking baseball bats to cars in “baseball bat scuffles”? How much is being buried? I suspect quite a bit, since the general public considered Antifa a terrorist organization long before such a concept was even whispered by the mainstream media.

     We really are at the point now where a reasonable and fair headline of “Antifa investigated, arrest made” is instead presented as “nothing to see here” by every news site. How useless are they now?

     Incidentally, when I heard about the Las Vegas mass shooting, I didn’t go to CNN, MSNBC, AOLNews, or any other news organization. Instead, I went to message boards and contacted friends in the area who might actually know something, because our “news” services are so corrupted now that expecting them to give me any real information, much less the truth, would be idiocy on my part. Only after all other sources were exhausted did I even consider one mainstream site—there’s no reason to look at more than one, since they’re all on the same team.

      The mainstream news didn’t fail to disappoint, as they breathlessly told me that, after a mere 12 hours, the FBI had ruled out any political connection between the shooter and his mass murder.

     The dog not barking keeping me awake here?

     The FBI has been investigating any political connection between Trump and Russia for 10 months now, and still can’t rule it out, for some reason.

     Why can’t we get the guys who investigated the shooter to investigate Trump, and finally clear up that issue in half a day? Hmm…

www.professorconfess.blogspot.com

The Deplatforming Epidemic

By Professor Doom

     It used to be controversial speakers were controversial, and that was it. Now controversial has been defined down to the most meager of offenses.

     As faculty, even to say something as “controversial” as “Trump doesn’t get a fair shake in the media” is enough to get you fired. Heck, even in chatting in forums, I can call Trump a war criminal (based on his attack of Syria), I can call him a windbag (based on his speeches), and I can call him a Neanderthal with thick orange skin (based on his ability to withstand endless baseless attacks).

       I can do all these things, but if I dare to also say “Trump doesn’t suck in every way,” I’m labelled a “Trumpite.” It’s a strange world we live in, where nuanced views of political figures are simply beyond the capacity of much of the general public.

      Anyway, I’ve certainly covered how conservative (which nowadays is defined as anyone to the right of Stalin) speakers cannot get a platform on campus, but it goes much further than that. There’s a general assault on anyone and anything which challenges the mainstream media narrative that I find very disturbing.

       Fox News is banned in the UK, for example. The claim is “low viewership” but considering CNN rates below 30 year old reruns of children’s cartoons, it’s a pretty obvious lie. The sub-story points out the real issue:

Unlike newspapers, broadcasters are expected to maintain strict impartiality and can be fined if they knowingly disseminate misleading information.

In the 10 years Fox has fallen foul of the regulator 22 times for breaches of its licence and the Ofcom code, seven of those were for breaches by Fox News.

     CNN is pretty one-sided as well, and yet doesn’t fall afoul of rules violations. I don’t dispute Fox News is pretty biased, but shutting a news organization out of a country is pretty hefty de-platforming.

       On an individual level, former presidential candidate Ron Paul was de-platformed. To clarify, he was de-monetized on YouTube. Oh, YouTube still makes money off his videos but he gets nothing…it’s an insult meant to drive him away. I grant Ron Paul doesn’t exactly need the money, but quite a few other people with “alternative” views have found themselves suddenly without income, and also without viewers because their videos have suddenly become hard to find.

     These de-funded people are trying to survive, but it’s clear there’s a concerted effort to “protect” citizens from ideas not approved of by the mainstream (whatever that is). It’s not just YouTube that’s cleaning house, Google is forever changing their changing their search engine to keep people away from “offensive” sites.

      Something happened in the search algorithms a few months ago, to steer people towards mainstream sites, or at least sites “approved” by Google. Even my own blog has lost around half its readers in the last few months, a surprising drop considering I’ve hardly changed the tone of my blog, higher education certainly hasn’t changed, and it really seems like events on campus have been more newsworthy than in years past. I’m hard pressed to believe I’m relevant enough to be targeted by Google directly but…it’s clear something is up.

A Google spokesperson said in an email to the WSJ: "From the beginning, our approach to search has been to provide the most relevant answers and results to our users, and it would undermine people's trust in our results, and our company, if we were to change course." According to Google, their results are "determined by algorithms using hundreds of factors" and "reflect the content and information that is available on the internet."

     It could just be Google searchers have a liberal bias, but it seems there’s something more to it than that. I know they say they mean well, but Google fired their engineer for daring to say such “controversial” things as human males might have physical differences from females. I’m more inclined to judge Google by their actions then their promises of well-meaning.

     Stumbling back to education, it’s long been known that “academic freedom” only applies to faculty with tenure. Around 70% of faculty have no hope of tenure now, and will likely end their academic careers as sub-minimum wage adjuncts.

      Now, it’s scary that “one side” can no longer question what’s going on. It’s downright terrifying that the other side is also under fire:

Similarly, just weeks after appearing on Tucker Carlson Tonight to defend the exclusion of whites at a Black Lives Matter event, communications professor Lisa Durden was fired from Essex County College.

     Now, I don’t agree with what Professor Durden had to say…but the rapid firing for her saying it was over-the-top. If she wasn’t an adjunct, she’d have a little protection, at least.

       Here’s another example:

Professor fired over Harvey ‘instant karma’ tweet for Texas

     Honest, the guy is something of a monster for saying something like this. It…really is bad form to wish the Wrath of God against a whole state because a majority of it didn’t vote for your candidate. I’m sure Miss Manners has a whole chapter in one of her books devoted to this very topic. Still, the instant removal from campus has a chilling effect. 

     We’re now at the point in higher ed where “keep your head down, say nothing of what you see” is simple career advice. The de-platforming of half the country is a bad thing happening today, but I promise it all started years ago, when “academic freedom” was stripped from faculty while they were turned into adjuncts.

      I strongly suspect that the de-platforming of free speakers today is a consequence of the enslavement and stripping of the academic freedom of our academic class.

      I may be wrong, but the fact remains: soon, only the independently wealthy will have the means to speak out against what’s happening today…and only the independently wealthy are benefiting from our current political/economic system. I suspect they won’t say much in the way of criticism.

     We don’t want a system where only the people at the top can talk about policies, because then the only discussion will be about how to set policies to benefit the people at the top.

     To what extent do we have that now?

www.professorconfess.blogspot.com

   

Attention NFL: Learn From Mizzou

By Professor Doom

     The whole country is a’twitter (see what I did there!) about players kneeling in protest of the national anthem. It’s amazing how quickly people forget…do we not remember Tim Tebow?

      Actually, it’s quite understandable that we’ve forgotten Tebow, since the mainstream media, for some reason, won’t remind us. Anyway, wayyyyyy back in history past, around 2011, there was this football player, a quarterback even, Tim Tebow.

     He knelt at football games. And the media shredded him, poured endless hatred upon him.

Talking Head: “If Trump were an NFL team, he’d be 0-16…”

--I watch Bill Maher’s Left Wing Hate show every week on HBO, and of course they’re losing their mind over this fracas. It’s amazing the bubble they’re in, nobody on the show pointed out possible inaccuracy here, and the audience cheered at the "correct" analogy. My memory isn’t the best, but it really seems like he won something…

     But now the media is praising football players who kneel…I really don’t like the different response here. Tebow knelt in prayer and homage to God, and was destroyed for it, while our football players are kneeling for…what, exactly?  Protesting the flag? I think it’s a protest for Black Lives Matter, or against America, or something. My best guess is they’re protesting police mistreatment of certain citizens. Hey, I think our police are grotesquely overreaching their powers, and concede protests should be made. But those football players are paid $50,000 an hour to play football, not protest. They should do it on their own time.

     Tebow and the other players’ kneelings are protected as free speech even if some disagree with it, and while I make no assertion of approval for one or the other, it’s very striking that media hates Tebow and loves the other kneelers. Free speech is a great ideal, and I’m all for it but…reality is an issue, too.

     Bottom line, your average football fan, you know, the guys who ultimately pay the multimillion dollar contracts of the players, are getting ticked off at making politics a part of what should merely be an ultraviolent game. The fans cheered Tebow, but the media screeched him off the field. The fans are booing the kneelers, but media doesn’t cover that.

     The media ignores the people, and is puzzled that the people are tuning them out.

      Trump is something of a successful businessman, and so he gave the owners a bit of business advice: get rid of employees who insult the customers. The media has twisted his message a bit, but ultimately Trump has a point because infuriating your customer base is bad for business. The media naturally poured hatred on Trump for the unsolicited advice but, I dunno, that seems like a pretty basic idea. Even if Trump was a failed businessman, I’d have to consider this as a decent suggestion.

      The owners of the NFL, the guys who are trying to run their sports business to make a profit, are really puzzling over what to do. For the most part, it looks like they’re going to stick to the media-suggested plan and continue to annoy their fans, but I’d like to think they’re still open to input.

     Their main options here are either a) more appeasement of players or b) realize they’re a business, and no business can survive by insulting and thereby eliminating the customer base. What to do, what to do?

     Even though I honestly don’t care what happens to the NFL, I do care about rational decision making. Ignoring Trump strikes me as a poor idea (ignoring him failed spectacularly during the last presidential election, after all), but I concede that maybe Trump’s words are wrong here.

      Words are one thing, but how about empirical evidence? Well, as luck would have it, I rather follow higher education, so I have some data here the owners of the NFL should consider.

      Mizzou university was one of the first schools where racial incidents were becoming a regular thing, wayyyy back in 2010 . Admin got in on the act in 2011 by forming fiefdoms filled with Vice Presidents of Diversity whose express purpose was to make things worse. Years of work by these highly paid professionals succeeded in keeping racial issues a huge problem on campus.

      The football team rose to prominence in one of the more recent waves of protests, around 2015, when they used extortion to get rid of the Poo Bah there, among other concessions. Now, here’s the thing: as soon as the football team started their shenanigans, the administration there should have recalled the core purposes of the institution: education and research.

      Based on this understanding, rather than appeasement, the administration should have simply gotten rid of the football team. Football teams are as irrelevant to higher education as political protests are to a football game.

     (Digression: those protests should be irrelevant to the game, but what if the protesting players allow their quarterback to become injured because he didn’t join the protest? The mainstream media blackout on this story is predictable.)

     In addition to not following the mission of higher education, there’s also the issue of keeping your customers happy. Mizzou, like the NFL owners, doesn’t seem to get this point. By making their school famous for race riots, the school has basically destroyed its customer base. They’ve closed 7 dorms now because students don’t want to go to a school with race riots and a system of appeasement which can only debase education further is likewise unattractive to potential students.

      Mizzou killed their customer base…are you paying attention, NFL owners? Now, maybe the owners aren’t really businessmen, and are instead football purists. This would explain their reluctance to get rid of the employees angering their customers: the owners want great football players, and are willing to sacrifice the NFL for it. I again point out that letting the players have their way might lead to them throwing games as they escalate their protests…the “sport” will definitely die then.

       A ridiculous thought? Perhaps, but Mizzou also has a football team they were unwilling to eliminate, at the expense of their customer base. How’s football at Mizzou working out?

Two Years After Embracing Racial Protests, Mizzou Football Is A Dumpster Fire

     Again, I don’t particularly care for college football, but “dumpster fire” should be a pretty strong indication that whatever Mizzou is doing, the NFL owners should do the opposite.

As for the football team, which saw millions in donations disappear overnight, well, it's now a full-fledged dumpster fire.

     Part of the customer base in Mizzou is the donors…making them angry is just bad business. You don’t need Trump to tell you that. The Mizzou “leadership” doesn’t know the basics of how to run a business despite all those (bogus) Ph.D.s in Leadership and Leadership Awards it grants itself. Nevertheless, admin is trying to make some lemonade from the lemons it gave itself, and it bears comment:

Meanwhile, the seven dorms the university can no longer fill with students are now being converted into makeshift hotel rooms for the fans still willing to show up to the games. “We had a total loss of about $5 million, so you’re talking zero (dollars) if we do nothing versus $60,000 (three games in) …

     Now, absolutely, Mizzou should try to get some money off all those abandoned (and in some cases, never been used) dorms, but I want to point out how infuriating this is. The administrators responsible for building those useless dorms? They received all sorts of money for their “leadership” and “vision” even as they’ve stuck the taxpayers with millions in unpayable bills leading the university down a path any chucklehead could have seen would fail. Yes, getting $60,000 from hotel fees helps a little, but realize the fiefdom of administrators who came up with that brilliant idea will receive several hundred thousand in pay raises and bonuses for their cleverness.

     We really, really, need to re-think how we run our institutions.

      In addition to losing students and losing donations, the football team is losing games. Appeasement really is a lose/lose/lose decision. We now have empirical evidence for the wrong thing to do in the face of these inappropriate protests.

    Will the NFL owners heed empirical evidence? Seeing as one NFL player was actually forced to apologize for respecting the national anthem, even though his actions made the customers happy…I suspect not.

     Now, I won’t be broken up if the NFL owners’ irrational behavior leads to great harm, possibly even the annihilation, of the NFL. But it is curious that there is no widespread pointing and laughing by the media at their strange decisions…even as the media has no trouble laughing at the idea that “don’t enrage your customers” is good business advice.

www.professorconfess.blogspot.com

Waitress With A Ph.D.

By Professor Doom

     Employer: “Kid, everyone has a high school diploma. What else you got?”

---over a century ago, a high school diploma meant something, but this is what it’s worth today.

     Part of what made a college degree valuable was scarcity—not everyone had one. Once government made high school “free” for everyone, our kids left high school to go get a college degree, and we opened up our campuses to everyone. A natural consequence of sending everyone to college is degrees are commonplace now.

     So now we have a bunch of college graduates going out in the world, being told their degrees are worthless…and heading back to school to get a more advanced degree—this lets them delay payments on the student loans, if nothing else. Alternatively, they could flee the country or become prostitutes, but for the sake of argument let’s assume these aren’t good options for everyone.

     The same irresponsible leaders who bloated out our undergraduate degree programs have irresponsibly bloated out the graduate degree programs. How’s that working out?

Today, I applied extra lipgloss, perfect eyeliner, and blow-dried my hair. I went to ask a restaurant manager for a waitressing job. You see, the stakes are high – I’m desperate for even a minimum wage job…

…I have degrees in economics, sociology and politics, research skills in qualitative and quantitative methods, teaching experience at universities, a decent publication record, and a significant conference list of presentations. But now I need lipgloss and cafe connections to get a job.

     All those years in school, paying for that precious, precious, education, and it amounts to no more than a high school diploma at the end. A Ph.D. is a research degree. It has some usefulness in “the real world,” but mostly it’s for places which only care about research, i.e., universities. Thus, the “real world” isn’t going to pay for it:

Employers external to the university don’t want a PhD, they want five years of industry experience. Other employers consider me overqualified for basic research tasks. They don’t want to pay the higher rate of employing a PhD.

     I got the “overqualified” line too when I tried to get a full time job in the real world, endless government harping about the value of a mathematics degree notwithstanding.  Now, don’t get me wrong, studying mathematics as an end was fine for me, I’m ok with being “trapped” in higher education, and I can still get contracts even if I’m overqualified for real work.

     The problem here is bigger than just the huge glut of Ph.D.’s we’ve created with our inflated education system. I’ve mentioned before about how our academics are being exploited in the massive teaching system, where they bring in millions of dollars via tuition for classes…while getting paid pennies.

      They also get exploited in a different way:

The truth of it is what the university doesn’t tell you. You learn along the way that research, including that produced by PhDs, brings in cash for universities. More PhDs are beneficial for an institution reliant on government funding. But they compete on graduation for fewer jobs in what was an already competitive field. The time spent on producing our PhD effectively renders our previous degrees useless – no graduate employer wants a degree from four years ago.

      All those graduating Ph.D.s generate research which the (state) school uses to get more government money, but that too goes to admin, only a few percent of the tax loot trickles down to the people doing the actual work.

In Australia, where I study, the emphasis on research production increased….

Those wishing to retain an academic job were required to conduct their research in their own time, without a funding budget to support it. 

     The incredible emphasis on research production is why we have massive frauds in research publishing now, with very clear evidence that wide swaths of research in medicine and psychology are quite fake, and it’s almost certain any field which uses (easily fabricated) statistics also has a huge fraud problem. I assure the gentle reader the reason for this is admin determines the validity of research now, and not academics…and we honestly don’t care about lying to an administration which lies to us at every turn. They don’t know anything about research, and so have no means to determine frauds.

      Since the author has given up on academia, she’ll confess to things every other academic who’s had enough of higher ed confesses to:

The pursuit of more funding is also evident in the way universities chase more student enrolments, perpetuating the notion that a degree will guarantee a good job in spite of the oversupply of education. Students are encouraged to select specific majors which will benefit the university. I’ve been requested from the higher ups to grade on a curve since easy grades encourage retention, and I have been prevented from failing students.

--is anyone else concerned that everyone in higher ed makes these complaints, complaints that can only occur in institutions without integrity?

     We really, really, need to reconsider having higher education run by pseudo-academics, self-proclaimed titans of industry who only concern themselves with growth at all costs, who view our kids as mere sources of revenue, and who view the academics as even more sources of revenue.

      It’s truly fascinating watching our institutions turn into Marxist utopias. First the lowest level workers get exploited as much as possible…but as the money runs out, the system moves further up the ladder looting as much as possible for the people at the very top of the system. Always, however, these systems collapse as they destroy their own base.

      The hardworking Ph.D. finishes her essay with a rant:

More perniciously, my mentor also considered that all academics are already aware of the failures of the system, the exploitation that occurs, and the mental health crisis that accompanies it. Aware, and yet so embroiled in the system that action is not only not taken, but actively discouraged in favour of adhering to the status quo.

So, here I sit, a disgruntled graduate of the system. A PhD turned waitress.

     Naturally, the waitress makes her complaints and observations anonymously, because that’s another feature of Marxist utopias: you can’t speak out, lest you be considered an enemy, and be destroyed.

www.professorconfess.blogspot.com