Rot in The Groves of Academe

Actions must have Consequences, in Physics Politics or Law.

The Statute of Limitations, which guards against persecution and the introduction of unverifiable or tainted evidence as well as some forms of corruption, is not the same as granting wrongful conduct a veil of oblivion if it is not punished within two news cycles. We need a prominent regularly updated running tally of outrages and most importantly their consequences if any. In the below case from three years ago do we know what happened? Is Thomas still employed at U Miss or at any college or by any government?

Part of the problem may be the relentless pressure on faculty to fill more than one role. Faculty at major universities are expected not only to perform research and mentor graduate students but also to engage with undergraduates and to act as public intellectuals, as personalities and advocates. That may have begun as a patriotic contribution to the government when it needed Experts to assist in crisis such as the Great Depression and then WW-II and The Cold War but it also was recognized as a gold mine in bringing to the schools not only direct federal money but also publicity that payed off when raising funds for the endowment. Famous faculty proved almost as valuable as a good football coach.

The other side of that is the pressure on faculty at small and state colleges to also produce and publish original research. Continued publication by senior faculty, Full or Associate Professor, at state colleges should not be a requirement for job retention, even if tenure rules change as they well may. Publication by junior faculty seeking tenure should be subject to much more critical review, separate from that of the journals they publish in. The current system has become a self licking ice cream cone with a frequently inedible product. Real scholarship may be drowned out by the white noise of those who have nothing to say and who say it aggressively. This has been exposed by the placement of hoax articles.

Teaching faculty at state colleges who wish to participate in the life of scholarship beyond their classroom duties should be afforded opportunities to do so as Affiliates at regional Research Universities. While publishing as an Affiliate might generate some prestige and a small possibility of advancement to a research position at a university the expectation of a financial benefit proportional to the labor involved should be limited. The job of the college teacher should be to teach. This is a step back possibly to the concept of separate college and graduate faculties, although with the colleges largely on separate state school campuses, similar to that of the Hutchins era at the University of Chicago.

Teaching in a non-vocational program at a Community College is probably worse than teaching in a decent high school, and there is no reason to support dubious publishing opportunities in questionable journals and an inflated graduate system to manufacture the doctorates that are not needed for the small number of genuine scholarly positions available. Without a doubt there are good people who can't get into a position at a top tier university. This is a tragedy and sometimes even an injustice. But the cost to society, especially in the opportunity cost of wasted resources, of pretending that those in the non-scholarly positions are producing work that is as valuable as scholarship should stop. Einstein may have done his best work while he was a patent clerk but we don't expect every patent clerk to publish and we don't create redundant journals to handle the produce of tenure hungry patent clerks. We would be better off if those who are not going to prosper as scholars, which in most fields like Anthropology means all but a handful a year, are told to focus on teaching and to drop the SJW theatrics. An Affiliation program would allow the leading faculties of the Research Universities to work with and find those who do belong in a top tier scholarly setting, without duplicating the graduate program at every state college. Of course I am generalizing. That is needed to generate testing.

The problem is that after WW-II with the GI Bill the number of college students expanded dramatically, that created the demand to increase the number of graduate students, which created the demand to increase the number of graduate programs, all with federal funny money, and then the baby boom followed, increasing the demand ad infinitum or at until the students decided that hetero-sex was a bad thing. 60 years ago a small liberal arts school or a state college could boast of one or two serious scholars, often Jewish refugees, who were relieved of the burden their colleagues had at the research universities because at the small schools they did not have to teach graduate students. That reduced some of the perks of Academia but it worked. Now the vast overgrown network of 2nd and 3rd tier schools is flooded with faculty like the character at the original link for this thread and the students, many of whom do not belong in a liberal arts school, are ill served. For those faculty who aspire to something better it must be depressing. How can we get back to what worked?

The state colleges were established under the Land Grant system as Normal Schools (Teacher's colleges) and Veterinary schools. Those are important functions. A few other similar professional programs, such as Accounting and Engineering, may be considered of direct benefit to the states, as determined by th state legislatures.

BTW an Uncle of mine was a great scholar of French literature and became Dean of graduate studies at UMass, Amherst. Under his guidance that school became a great Research University. He was proudly Liberal and hated Eisenhower. When he was a graduate student at Columbia he was on a committee of graduate students, all but my uncle were I think veterans, who went to see Eisenhower, then the President of the university, to ask for a $25 raise. Eisenhower threw them out of his office.

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Privus Sapo

October 17, 2018  · 

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The University of Mississippi has this to deal with:

“Don’t just interrupt a Senator’s meal, y’all,” James Thomas, an assistant professor of sociology, tweeted from his @Insurgent_Prof account on Oct. 6, the day Justice Brett Kavanaugh was sworn into the Supreme Court.

“Put your whole damn fingers in their salads,” he wrote. “Take their apps and distribute them to the other diners. Bring boxes and take their food home with you on the way out. They don’t deserve your civility.”

This untenured Assistant Prof is probably around 38 years old and spent the half of his life since high school working into his current position. If he gets fired, as I hope, his record should be amended to ensure that he does not find employment at a secondary school. He is quite literally unemployable. What can he do? Write Stand Up LGBT comedy reviews? The Village Voice has folded.

The larger issue is the bloat in America's education system. There are tens of thousands of people with graduate degrees that there is no market for except for taxpayer created jobs where they manufacture more students, who spend 4 to 15 years in the same fields and then expect employment. How many graduate programs in Sociology and Anthropology producing how many PhDs does America need? Probably fewer than a dozen, with all but the top 3 producing 1 to 3 new PhDs a year. The best may generate up to 5. How many undergraduate programs in those fields are justifiable? More than the graduate programs but still fewer than now exist. Almost all state university graduate programs in the Social Sciences and Humanities, which grew as an unintended consequence of the post WW-II GI Bill, should be shut down.

All government scholarships should be tied to some period of prior active or concurrent reserve military service.