Wednesday Morning Reads
Posted: November 24, 2010 Filed under: morning reads | Tags: Barney Frank, Ben Bernanke, Bobby Jindal the Terrible, C Street Fundamentalist threat, Milton Friedman, Monetarist approach to the Great Depression, QE2, TSA hates pat downs 65 Comments
Good Morning!!!
I thought I’d give you reason to be glad that Bobby Jindal the Terrible isn’t your governor. He’s tearing around the country trying to start up his presidential wannabe campaign and we’ve just about had it with him. This is from Baton Rouge’s The Advocate. He singled out some woman professor as the poster child for unnecessary research in his new book. He’s been out pimping for the book ala other Republican Governor Presidential Idiot Wannabes that want to be independently wealthy before they take the plunge to New Hampshire. The poor anthropology professor was doing a longitudinal story on Russian Mail Order Brides and their U.S. husbands. It turns out the research was funded by a grant and not tax payers too. That didn’t stop Jindal from tearing into the article in his book or fact-checking his words or reading the article for that matter.
Read the entire Op-Ed piece and be appalled that some one with so many educational opportunities in his life wants to deny so many others that opportunity and force them into oil rig serfdom. Baton Rouge is not exactly a bastion of liberalism so this piece may be a good sign that he’s wearing out his welcome here. The article even sneakily mentions the one university that should be shut down and a trio of universities that should be merged because they are all in the middle of nowhere and have fewer students than most high schools. Jindal would never man up and do that. Instead he’s just draining ever useful and viable university by 1/3 of their budget a year. He’s sucking the life out of LSU, the med centers, and the law school. LSU has consistently rated among the top public universities in the country. Jindal obviously prefers we all go to community colleges instead.
Stop this man before he can do more damage any where else!!
Gov. Bobby Jindal’s machine of aides, bloggers, talk radio hosts and boutique publishers has turned its focus on college professors and what they do.
They attacked sabbatical study last week as a waste of money that takes teachers out of the classroom. The governor criticized scholarly study as unworthy of taxpayer dollars because such research fails to “create better lives and more job opportunities.”
At the base of this hubbub is Jindal’s apparent desire that higher education’s top officials just shut up and accept deep cuts he has planned for public college and university budgets
It all has the absurdity of season ticket holders dictating that the LSU Tigers no longer hold huddles because the quarterback’s primary job is to throw touchdowns.
If you haven’t ventured into Jindal’s ‘scholarly work’ at the New Oxford Review, please do so!!! It’s called BEATING A DEMON ; Physical Dimensions of Spiritual Warfare. It’s all about participating in an exorcism.
”The crucifix had a calming effect on Susan, and her sister was soon brave enough to bring a Bible to her face. At first, Susan responded to biblical passages with curses and profanities. Mixed in with her vile attacks were short and desperate pleas for help. In the same breath that she attacked Christ, the Bible’s authenticity, and everyone assembled in prayer, Susan would suddenly urge us to rescue her. It appeared as if we were observing a tremendous battle between the Susan we knew and loved and some strange evil force. But the momentum had shifted and we now sensed that victory was at hand.”
Maybe Jindal the Terrible should consider signing up for the new recruiting effort by the Catholic Church for exorcists and leave those of us that prefer science, rational thought, and education alone. This is what you get when you vote for people without researching them carefully.
So, just when you think politicians couldn’t get any more elitist and just plain whacked, this brings me to something BostonBoomer, Pilgrim and I have been discussing. The book is called ‘C Street: The Fundamentalist Threat to American Democracy’ by Jeff Sharlet. It’s the follow-up to a book called ‘The Family’. Both let you know how many of our country’s most important institutions–like Congress and the military–have been invaded by crazy people. Bart Stupak, John Ensign, Tom Coburn, and Jim Inhofe are among the resident nutjobs of this frat boyz for jeezus club. This group of good ol’ boys supports some of the most villainous, heinous murders in the world you could imagine because they believe being rich is a sign that you are chosen by god. They helped Papa Doc. They helped Suharto. Here’s a bit from the author about David Coe, one of the C Street Family.
What was the concept? “Men who are picked by God!” Not the many, but the few. Under Coe’s guidance, Family politicians embraced the idea that God prefers the services of a dedicated elite to the devotion of the masses. “I have had a great and thrilling experience reading the condensed version of The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich, ” one of Coe’s lieutenants wrote him after Coe had given him a reading list for “the Work,” as their mission was often called. “Doug, what a lesson in vision and perspective! Nazism started with seven guys around a table in the back of an old German Beer Hall. The world has been shaped so drastically by a few men who really want it such and so. How we need this same kind of stuff as a Hitler or a Lenin.” That is, for Jesus, of course
You don’t get to call it a Godwin when a group does it to itself on its own, do you?
Okay, so those poor little put out TSA staff are now speaking out about all the trauma that they have to endure. People actually yell at them!!! Poor babies!!! This is from the Daily Mail.
‘It is not comfortable to come to work knowing full well that my hands will be feeling another man’s private parts, their butt, their inner thigh,’ one told the BoardingArea blog.
‘Even worse is having to try and feel inside the flab rolls of obese passengers and we seem to get a lot of obese passengers!’
Another said he had a huge problem dealing with a ‘large number of passengers… daily that have a problem understanding what personal hygiene is.’
Well, that’s a thought. If you’re going to travel, don’t shower for days and that will certainly raise a stink for them! What, they thought they were only going to get to feel up super models? Was that in the recruiting ads some where? Maybe they should consider quitting or complaining to their boss, John Pistole.
Just a quick heads up. Wikileaks tweeted that Wikileaks said, “Next release is 7x the size of the Iraq War Logs. Intense pressure over it for months,” and asked supporters to continue donating to the cause. We need to start up an Ellsberg Prize for Truth.
The always outspoken Congressman Barny Frank defended Ben Bernanke and the QE2. Additionally he called Republican detractors to be more in line with China than U.S. interests.
Frank said that in the absence of additional fiscal measures, the Fed’s asset purchases are an appropriate response.
“I wish we had some more fiscal stimulus,” said Frank, a Massachusetts Democrat. “In the absence of that, given unemployment, given the complete absence of inflation, he is doing a very reasonable thing.”
The Fed has been making speeches before congress and exercising monetary policy in concern of both inflation and unemployment since the Humphrey-Hawkins Full Employment Law was passed in 1978. I wasn’t really aware that there was anything questionable about that goal until Bostonboomer called my attention to this over at the NYT.
It seems that some Republicans want to limit the Fed’s policy scope to inflation fighting only. This further convinces me that they have no interest in putting Americans back to work. I’ve pretty much decided that most of the hoopla over QE2 is from financial interests who really don’t want to lend money at reasonable rates any more. This also brings me in mind of that thought.
The Fed’s being using a modified Taylor rule for some time and has very much taken a stand in keeping with Anna Schwartz and Milton Friedman’s seminal work on the Great Depression. That’s the CONSERVATIVE economist Milton Friedman, remember him? He basically said that the FED botched monetary policy and let deflation ruin the economy. What most conservatives don’t get these days–probably because they never actually both to read anything factual–is that Friedman’s analysis owes a lot to Keynes.
Read this and see if you see any similarities.
FDR was inaugurated on March 4, 1933, and two days later he declared a “bank holiday,” allowing banks legally to refuse withdrawals by depositors; it lasted ten days. With his famous phrase, “The only thing we have to fear is fear itself,” he intended to dissuade depositors from running on their banks, but by then it was far too late. In 1929 there were a total of 25,000 banks in the United States. As the bank holiday ended, only 12,000 banks were operating (though another 3,000 were to reopen eventually). The effect on the money supply was equally dramatic. From 1929 to 1933 it fell by 27 percent—for every $3 in circulation in 1929 (whether in currency or deposits), only $2 was left in 1933. Such a drastic fall in the money supply inevitably led to a massive decrease in aggregate demand. People’s savings were wiped out so their natural response was to save more to compensate, leading to plummeting consumption spending. Naturally, total economic output also fell dramatically: GDP was 29 percent lower in 1933 than in 1929. And the unemployment rate hit its historic high of 25 percent in 1933.
Friedman and Schwartz argued that all this was due to the Fed’s failure to carry out its assigned role as the lender of last resort. Rather than providing liquidity through loans, the Fed just watched as banks dropped like flies, seemingly oblivious to the effect this would have on the money supply. The Fed could have offset the decrease created by bank failures by engaging in bond purchases, but it did not. As Milton and Rose Friedman wrote in Free to Choose:
The [Federal Reserve] System could have provided a far better solution by engaging in large-scale open market purchases of government bonds. That would have provided banks with additional cash to meet the demands of their depositors. That would have ended—or at least sharply reduced—the stream of bank failures and have prevented the public’s attempted conversion of deposits into currency from reducing the quantity of money. Unfortunately, the Fed’s actions were hesitant and small. In the main, it stood idly by and let the crisis take its course—a pattern of behavior that was to be repeated again and again during the next two years.
According to Friedman and Schwartz, this was a complete abdication of the Fed’s core responsibilities—responsibilities it had taken away from the commercial bank clearinghouses that had acted to mitigate panics before 1914—and was the primary cause of the Great Depression.
Okay, what exactly is the QE2 then? It’s large scale buying of treasury bonds. Why are they doing it? Because the Federal Government is not doing it’s job with the fiscal policy end. We had a stimulus that was way too weak and way too loaded with stuff that doesn’t stimulate very well and now we’ve got these idiots around talking about deficits and inflation. It’s like their trying to actively sabotage the economy!
Alright, well, I think I’m hitting MABLUE’s limit for being long winded so I’ll stop now. I need to go to the grocery store and see a man about some trade statistics.
peej
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Sky Dancing 
Good Morning! Nice round up. I was most appalled by the Jindal story. Do republicans in general know that their policies are directly contributing to the failing scores we have here in the US in comparison the the rest of the world? Bush II said he wanted to be the education president when he was campaigning in 2000. That was a lighter moment from his campaign (that is until I found out he was serious). And we got no child left behind from that guy! I appreciate, more and more each day, my foreign education….
I think I would be up for a body scan at the airport, IF the TSA agent doing it gives me a copy of their scan done right there on the spot in front of everybody.
North Korea is acting up because they are preparing for a regime change and a weakling is in the White House. Kruschev tried it, JFK’s intestinal fortitude and executive skillz won the day. We have Obumbles. Damn.
http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20101123/ap_on_an/as_koreas_clash_analysis
Speaking of which, his national security team was in the Sit room while he was campaigning after this thing happened. Attack of the ‘present’ votes. But I was called a racist for pointing that out 2 years ago.
Asshats.
Hillary 2012
Reading about Jindal makes me feel better about only being stuck with Deval Patrick.
It doesn’t matter if the president is a “weakling” or not. In terms of things that can be done to North Korea, there’s pretty much nothing in between “sanctions” and “total war.”
BTW, No-one 2012!
Salon.com is doing a countdown of the 30 worst political pundits and columnists. They conveniently waited until after Joan Walsh went on book leave. I suppose it’s so she won’t have to do damage control with her TV buddies, although Tweety and Ed “The Shill” Schultz haven’t shown up yet. The list so far (I love the paste function):
7. Jonah Goldberg
8. Maureen Dowd
9. Laura Ingraham
10. Peggy Noonan
11. George Will
12. John Fund
13. Roger Simon
14. David Ignatius
15. Mort Zuckerman
16. Michael Barone
17. Bill Kristol
18. Tina Brown
19. Joe Klein
20. Howard Fineman
21. S.E. Cupp
22. Tucker Carlson
23. Howard Kurtz
24. Dana Milbank
25. Mickey Kaus
26. Jeffrey Goldberg
27. Pat Caddell
28. Andrew Malcolm
29. Matt Bai
30. David Brooks
http://www.salon.com/news/war_room_hack_thirty/index.html?story=/politics/war_room/2010/11/24/
If budgets have to be slashed…I suggest we start with these worthless denizens of the pundit nation .
Finishing it out:
1. Richard Cohen
2. Mark Halperin
3. Thomas Friedman
4. David Broder
5. Marty Peretz
6. Marc Thiessen
It looks like TV and radio hosts weren’t considered. A lot of people were still left out, though. Off the top of my head: Charles Krauthammer, Ross Douthat, Dick Morris, Charles Blow, Ann Coulter, Pat Buchanan, Cokie Roberts, Ruth Marcus.
I do like the opening description of the beyond-belief Cohen, whose opinion I actually looked forward to reading 20-25 years ago:
Salon needs to make this an annual event.
Richard Cohen as number 1 is a good choice, but David Brooks should be at least in the top ten, not number 30.
Jindal, and so many who think like him, are the result of “low information voters” who do not question or have a clue as to who these people are. Name recognition? Good backstory? I’ll vote for that.
Having read “The Family” last year, I was surprised that it did not garner the attention it deserved as they are intent on a one world order under the domination of Christian rhetoric. Inhofe has made many trips to Uganda carrying that message to leaders of that country who consider homosexuality a crime, proposing death as an outcome.
With the nation floundering in one crisis after another, the time seems ripe for a bible thumping voice to emerge from this crowd as the seeds and money are being used to bring this insanity to the forefront.
Scary times indeed when panic has replaced critical thinking.
Oboy. Glenn Greenwald takes on The Nation over their hatchet job on John “Don’t Touch My Junk” Tyner.
http://www.salon.com/news/opinion/glenn_greenwald/2010/11/24/tyner/index.html
He starts by likening it to the efforts of Michelle Malkin and other GOPers to smear Graeme Frost’s family after they spoke about the benefits of the CHIP program.
When someone starts getting smeared, it’s a pretty good indication that something they have to say threatens the existing power structure.
I’d note in this regard a certain politician who saw entire answers edited out of a rebroadcasting of a debate by Fox.
That is one of the best posts I’ve ever read by Greenwald. And thanks to Jeremy Skahill for standing up to his editors. Katrina V. should be fired immediately.
Hi Dakinikat!
Great round up. I am going to write more about the family once we get through Thanksgiving. In the meantime, I’m trying to focus on things to be thankful for.
I look forward to reading what you have to say.
What happens to Family members when they aren’t re-elected, I wonder? John Ensign is such a moral abomination, but is anyone planning ethics hearings on his behavior or are they just for people like Charlie Rangel?
Jindal might be interested to know that Yale University still requires its Liberal Arts students to complete two courses each in arts and humanities, social sciences, language, quantitative reasoning, and writing before they can graduate–regardless of chosen major. But hey, who needs humanities or languages unless they lead to a job, right Bobby? Those folks at Yale obviously don’t know what they’re doing.
I was talking to a German last night and educational standards were mentioned. I think adopting something like Germany’s standards would be a good idea. At any rate, a better one than what we have now, which is basically (at least for intro classes) that if you can show up every day, stay long enough to get your name on roll, and then manage to guess the correct answers to about 150 scantron questions in a semester, you can get an A.
What we have now is not higher education, but rather an obscene parody that utterly fails students. As Nietzsche said of the education system of late-nineteenth century Germany, there may be /motives/ for defending this state of affairs, but there are no /reasons/.
if you can show up every day, stay long enough to get your name on roll, and then manage to guess the correct answers to about 150 scantron questions in a semester, you can get an A.
That isn’t the case in the universities where I’ve taught.
That’s also why Nicholls State needs to go ….
I think Ensign is scheduled for an ethics hearing.
These cuts to higher education come at a time when men have been wringing their hands and lamenting over how awful it is that there are more women in colleges than men these days. He’d no doubt like to condemn some (men) to “oil rig serfdom”, but is probably a lot more interested that others (women) be condemned to serfdom in more “traditional” female areas, such as housewifery and prostitution.
I also think it’s awful that a huge number of men crash and burn.
What sort of civilized, humane person would think otherwise?
These cuts to higher education come at a time when men have been wringing their hands and lamenting over how awful it is that there are more women in colleges than men these days.
Do you have any evidence for that? Links?
He’d no doubt like to condemn some (men) to “oil rig serfdom”, but is probably a lot more interested that others (women) be condemned to serfdom in more “traditional” female areas, such as housewifery and prostitution.
That sounds like mindreading. Do you have evidence that Jindal wants women to be only housewives and prostitutes?
You could be right about both of these assertions–I’m just curious about your evidence.
The majority of college students have been women for a while now.
As to men wringing their hands about it, I don’t have a link offhand. It is based on a discussion I heard on the radio a few years back in which some men were talking about how there were more women than men in college, it could lead to a majority of professionals being women, women might be the leaders, blah blah and they were clearly worried about it. I am going by what I heard on the radio, and I think the ruling class monitors these kinds of things and attempts to take corrective action when they think it’s needed even if they do not publicize their motives.
As most of the students who won’t get higher education due to cuts will be women, and women probably aren’t going to work on an oil rig instead, it just makes more sense to say Jindal “wants to deny so many others that opportunity” (of a higher ed) in order to condemn them to more female forms of serfdom rather than to a form of mostly male serfdom such as oil rigs as Dak said. Don’t know Jindal’s personal thoughts, but I doubt that he is unaware that the majority of college students (“tomorrow’s leaders”) are female. I know that that does not necessarily mean women will take over but many males have a huge dose of paranoia about any hint of that, and they have the power to engineer the outcomes they want behind the scenes while not being forthcoming about their underlying motives.
Here’s a link about college students being mostly women, which you may already know.
http://education-portal.com/articles/Leaving_Men_Behind:_Women_Go_to_College_in_Ever_Greater_Numbers.html
So your evidence for the attitudes of all men is based on anecdotal evidence from a radio show you heard a few years ago. OK.
I wasn’t questioning the make-up of the population of college students, but thanks for the link.
The link doesn’t work for me. Here it is in tinyurl form:
http://tinyurl.com/2ak4m27
Hey, I don’t know if it’s the attitude of all men or not. Please don’t do that to me. It’s the attitude of many at the very least. I do know that all men do not have to monitor everything if some men are doing it for them, and you can be sure some are.
Anyway, why would a link be more compelling evidence than a radio discussion? I just don’t get it.
Am I correct in assuming that you just dismiss everything I said above?
Branjor,
I’m not able to monitor this site 24/7. Sometimes I’m involved in other activities.
No, I didn’t dismiss everything you said. I do think you might be letting your own feelings color some of your judgments of other people.
I work in a field where we rely on empirical evidence. That is how I tend to think. I don’t think making generalizations about entire groups of human beings is very useful.
“why would a link be more compelling evidence than a radio discussion?”
I didn’t hear this radio discussion, so I can’t evaluate it. If you linked to a study that demonstrates that a majority of men are agonizing about there being too many women in colleges, that would provide some empirical evidence for your claims.
If you linked to, e.g., an interview with Bobby Jindal in which he said he was concerned about women going to college instead of being housewives and prostitutes, that would be evidence for what you said about Jindal.
My god, Jindal would never say that. He’s not stupid.
I don’t know if there have been any studies on whether the majority of men are “agonizing” over there being more female college students. I know the guys on the radio were discussing it with a view towards the balance of power between the sexes in future years.
I know that the guys on the radio are not the only ones like that. Like Jindal, I’m not stupid. Men didn’t get to be the dominant group by playing fairly, and they don’t stay that way by playing fairly either.
I guess this doesn’t meet your standards empirically, but I wouldn’t just throw it out the window.
I don’t think generalizing about groups is always a bad thing. Men as a group are different from women as a group because they are the ruling class (like whites). When you say some men aren’t thus and so it has the unfortunate effect of getting men as a group off (the hook), even if 98% of them are. It shouldn’t be that way, but it is. If, OTOH, you say that some women *are* thus and so, it has the equally unfortunate effect of damning women as a group, even if only a small number of them are. To the point where it’s seen by some and argued effectively that there is no real difference between men and women, for instance in rates of perpetrating dv. This is an injustice to women. Again, it shouldn’t be that way, but it is. I’m not accusing you personally of the above distortions
I also thought that this (part) of what Dak said in her post was sex biased in favor of males and against females:
Since the majority of students affected by the cuts are female, they will not likely enter into “oil rig serfdom”. It will be the males who do. The females will likely enter into different, “female” forms of serfdom. Dak’s statement above only expresses concern about the males. I am sure the bias was unintentional in her case.
Since we are so concerned about empirical evidence here, was there an interview with Bobby Jindal in which he said he wanted to force young Louisianans into oil rig serfdom?
I didn’t mean to imply anything sex biased in what I said. We have men and women that work oil rigs down here. I don’t think Jindal cares who he is hurting. He just would prefer to fund job training over higher education. There was no intention to make any statement further than that on my part. There is no one that isn’t being hurt by this policy if they seek a degree.
I didn’t think you really intended it that way, but it came across that way to me.
I know some women have entered into “male” jobs in recent years. I was a chem lab tech at an electrical generating station myself once, a very “male” job. I was the first woman hired for it. I still guessed that there were not many women on an oil rig though, as that job strikes me as very macho and dangerous. I’m not surprised there are some women. Any idea of the percentage?
Great post . I depend on your on the ground reporting to know anything about LA besides the Mardi Gras excesses that the MSM offers ….Jindal basic wants the state to become a labor camp..I wish I was kidding. And generally why would the powers that be want an educated citizenry? Sucking the life blood via budgets is all the rage…. Somehow schools improve with less money…but failed weapon systems need more. Amazing . If they could rename LSU , to ” LSU rocket launcher systems Inc world group ” …it would have a better chance of keeping some money…
China, Russia quit dollar
http://www.chinadaily.com.cn/china/2010-11/24/content_11599087.htm
Dak, what does this mean for the US?
Dak is pretty busy today working on some academic stuff. I hope she’ll check in sometime.
It looks like China and Russia are just going to use their own currencies for trade between the two countries. They would still have to use the dollar to trade with us.
But obviously, I’m no expert!
Yes, it seems to just be trade flows between each other which should give their currencies deeper markets. The issue is if there are severe currency fluctuations in a currency, there have to be markets where you can hedge the risk. If your currency doesn’t have a lot of global markets behind it, that limits what you can do to offset currency risk. That’s just from the viewpoint of Russian and Chinese exporters/importers.
My guess is they’re doing this to try to get at black markets for their monies and their dollars. Both have areas where banking systems aren’t deep so people tend to trade in shadow markets and black markets. This should increase the use of their currencies in their countries which could influence the flows of ‘hot’ currency too. That is money leaving and entering their country that their respective central banks can’t control easily.
Of course–despite what folks like Ron Paul Say–money supply is important and prudent monetary policy is important. Your money is your exchange medium and the amount of it should be just enough to facilitate trade of goods and services at current prices. Too much money and prices increase unnecessarily. Too little money and prices decrease unnecessarily. Both are destabilizing to commerce. Central banks have less control over money supply when there is hot money, shadow markets, and black markets and therefore they have less control over how effective monetary policy is on their real markets (i.e. markets for goods and services). Hot money disrupts interest rate targets, as an example.
and again, Milton Friedman wrote most of the seminal work on this while I was in graduate school back in the 1980s and even before that. His first work was in 1957 … it’s still THE work on pricing mechanisms in an open economy.
Thanks Dak. That is interesting about the black markets and the “hot” currency…So this is a good thing for China and Russia, obviously, but as for the US…it makes our position in the global economy, less secure? It seems like if two big countries like China and Russia are doing this, other countries could start to do this as well?
I think most of the world’s economies would like to be less reliant on the dollar. There are really about 4 important currencies now. I doubt that most businesses will stop using dollars, however. A lot of what goes into making a currency ‘universally accepted’ has to do with behavior things. Most folk still trust the dollar. It’s importance will be muted over time and I think that means once less way we can influence other countries and their economies.
Thanks, I really appreciate you taking the time to explain this to me…
No problem …thanks for bringing the article to my attention!!!
Let me go look if they’ve quit it as a reserve currency or not.
Thank you Dak…I know that you have been discussing the possibility of this happening, but honestly I must have some sort of mental block thing about what it meant if it did happen.
well, depending on the extent of this, it lessens our influence on our economy and others …
1 – The Louisiana higher educational system should be reduced to Louisiana Tech, ULL, Nicholls, LSU, UNO, and community colleges. Of course, none of this will matter until academic standards are raised.
2 – The purpose of a university is to educate students. Nothing less, nothing more. Those who don’t care to teach can always go hunting for work in think tanks.
3 – I can’t imagine what would be wrong with favoring China over the US. One is a senescent empire teetering on the edge of obsolescence and a severe and constant threat to international peace, the other is …. well, China. China is the Augustinian pirate to America’s Alexander.
4 – “I’ve pretty much decided that most of the hoopla over QE2 is from financial interests who really don’t want to lend money at reasonable rates any more.” Because you don’t encounter conservative people in your daily affairs, perhaps? There never was any astroturf, you know.
5 – The Fed also stood idly by in 1921, which faced a crash of comparable magnitude but which only lasted a year or so. Perhaps it had more to do with the federal government working desperately to cartelize industries and keep prices at ridiculous levels?
I teach with profs in business schools. I’m not really typical at all. I’m surrounded by conservatives. Especially given I’ve taught in la and ne. My last two department heads are evangelical xtians and are true to form politically. Academic freedom exists at uno. It doesn’t at slu. And I always thought nicholls shoud be folded into Lafayette.
Fair enough. I think even my shortened list is excessive, but they have to have at least those because of regional considerations.
Houma and Lafayette are two seperate metro areas.
Besides, Houma-Thibodaux has about 202,000 people. So, basically, one outlying university and the rest in the populated part of the state.
I think in order to support an administration infrastructure, the university needs to have minimum enrollment numbers. If it doesn’t meet that, it should just be considered a satellite campus of another university and let the administration handle it as a campus. That leaves the teaching and most of the campus facilities there. It just eliminates athletic programs and consolidates the administrative functions like enrollment, bursar, etc. You don’t need the upper tires of an administration in a small school at all. They’re a waste of money. Just let it stand as a satellite campus with a campus VP and subordinate campus functions.
Actually, the purpose of a university is often more research than teaching. There wouldn’t be much point to having large universities if they only educated students. I hate to say this to a student, but students just provide the money and they get an education in return. As professors become more experienced, they spend less time teaching per se, and do research.
Graduate students provide much of the labor for research, and in the process they learn how to become academics with the guidance of a faculty mentor. Much of the teaching is done by graduate students and beginning academics. Nowadays adjucts do a lot of teaching. Teaching undergrad courses doesn’t require the background of a full professor–they work with grad students.
Yup. Research is expected at real universities. Publications, cites and contributions to the body of knowledge. That’s why a lot of places even separate their master teachers from their master researchers. Researchers are paid a lot if they bring in grants and things. Most hard scientists have to be funded by grants. Universities also make a lot of money off of patents by said researchers in many areas. It’s not just all esoteric research. But, that being said, there is a lot of value to pure research. A good example of that is game theory. When it was research by a Math Phd, it was esoteric. It took a few generations for it to be recognized as having significant applications. But that is also the same for something like the laser. They couldn’t do anything with it at first. It takes a few decades for things to have spillover impacts. Just think of the printing press as an example.
True. I should have said students provide *some* of the money.
My degree is from a very large research university, and I can say that teaching is a very small part of what happens there.
It amazes me that while Jindal is defunding the Med Center he’s also tearing down historic neighborhoods and ignoring Big Charity to get a new medical research zone up and running. For some reason, he doesn’t connect that any company that moves into it is going to need well educated and trained **RESEARCHERS** for employees. Let alone the folks required to manage the places. From what I’ve heard, he knows all this, but it’s all secondary to his search for higher office.
My local state university has these statistics on spill-over benefits (granted, it has a medical school and hospital/clinics too):
http://www.washington.edu/externalaffairs/eir/
BB Aren’t you the bacon fan?
Gross
One day I want to try turducken. I’m not fond of eating anything that looks back at me though. Even fish have to be beheaded before I’m comfortable eating them.
Pywacket
Well, you’re safe with turducken then. Although, I won’t guarantee your cholesterol count will be.
Here’s another one for you:
Everyone who can stand it should read these descriptions of TSA experiences at the ACLU website.
http://www.aclu.org/passengers-stories-recent-travel/
Warning, very graphic descriptions of innocent Americans being sexually assaulted by disgusting perverts. It is even worse than I thought.
jeezus.
We were planning to surprise my mom by flying from Toronto to BC this Christmas. Given the number of complaints filed in Canada, which mirror the very complaints US citizens are expressing….
it’s SORRY MOM, no can do.
No WAY would I ever submit to this abuse, no WAY in hell.
Neither will I. If they start doing it in subways, then I’ll never again use public transportation either.
Jindal needs to take a remedial course in …well, to start with, how “basic” research is so basic and the source of an incredible number of other spin-offs and more new knowledge, which will lead to jobs. But it’s not an obvious straight line that happens overnight.