Wednesday, January 29, 2020

Is there anything the government can't destroy?

Also known as "Tell me about how important and mighty those universities are again, eh?"

Thus, our nation’s institutions no longer perform their role as Eisenhower’s fountainhead of free ideas and discovery. Instead, American universities often produce corrupt, incompetent, or scientifically meaningless research that endangers the public, confounds public policy, and diminishes our nation’s preparedness to meet future challenges. 
Nowhere is the intellectual and moral decline more evident than in public health research. From 1970 to 2010, as taxpayer funding for public health research increased 700 percent, the number of retractions of biomedical research articles increased more than 900 percent, with most due to misconduct. Fraud and retractions increased so precipitously from 2010 to 2015 that private foundations created the Center for Scientific Integrity and “Retraction Watch” to alert the public.
One reason non-government organizations lead the battle to improve science is that universities and federal funding agencies lack accountability and often ignore fraud and misconduct. There are numerous examples in which universities refused to hold their faculty accountable until elected officials intervened, and even when found guilty, faculty researchers continued to receive tens of millions of taxpayers’ dollars. Those facts are an open secret: When anonymously surveyed, over 14 percent of researchers report that their colleagues commit fraud and 72 percent report other questionable practices. The problem goes well beyond the known frauds. 
The list of elite institutions at which high-profile faculty commit misconduct is growing rapidly.
The days of a college degree being worth something just because it's a college degree are going away, and it's because of crap like this.  An undergraduate education is becoming worthless because the institutions producing them are worthless.  And if I'm being honest, a whole lot of graduate degrees are equally worthless in the real world.  I can't tell you how many essays I had to correct for grammer and spelling from graduate degree students when I was in recruiting.  Look folks, it's a single page essay, one-inch margins, twelve point font, DOUBLE SPACED, so we're talking two paragraphs at most.  Some could do it.  Some couldn't.  GRADUATE DEGREES HERE, PEOPLE, AND THEY CAN'T WRITE TWO FUCKING PARAGRAPHS WITHOUT HELP.  Help from non-college educated me.

Colleges and universities, by and large, no longer function as systems of higher education.  They're Marxist indoctrination centers designed to close a person's mind permanently so that they produce a good little drone with credentials.  It's the credentials that are important, you see.  The credentials let you know who you can trust. 

Give me ten grunts with honorable discharge papers, and I'll move a city.  Give me ten graduates of a liberal arts program from any public university, and I won't be able to do crap because they're pretty much worthless.

2 comments:

p2 said...

Notice how you don't see protests at trade schools?

Ragin' Dave said...

They're too busy figuring out where they want to work.