<p>Mitch Daniels observes that (among other things):</p>
<ul>
<li><p>"College costs too much and delivers too little."</p></li>
<li><p>"Administrative costs, splurging on 'resort' amenities, and an obsession with expensive capital projects have run up the cost to students without enhancing the value of the education they receive.</p></li>
<li><p>"Rigor has weakened. Grade inflation has drained the meaning from grade point averages."</p></li>
<li><p>"Too many professors are spending too much time 'writing papers for each other.'"</p></li>
</ul>
<p>I would suggesst that Daniels needs to get his own ‘house’ in order before trying to fix Purdue. He should start by getting rid of that really bad comb-over. After that, we can talk.</p>
<p>“Too many professors are spending too much time ‘writing papers for each other,’ researching abstruse topics of no real utility and no real incremental contribution to human knowledge or understanding.”
“Diversity is prized except in the most important realm of all, diversity of thought. The academies that, through the unique system of tenure, once enshrined freedom of opinion and inquiry now frequently are home to the narrowest sort of closed-mindedness and the worst repression of dissident ideas.”</p>
<p>How true are these points? Think about much of the research that is done. While some and perhaps quite a bit research is good for us all, lots of things are studied that could be determined by having a roomful of middle school kids raise their hands in response to questions. </p>
<p>In the little college where I work, it is clear that people do not want to explore many new ideas. </p>
<p>It does seem odd that the governor is now the president. </p>
<p>Basically he means that public colleges are librul communist fascism and should be replaced by ITT Tech and DeVry, where there’s no such thing as tenure and professors don’t spend time researching and writing those stupid socialist “papers” and “journals” and other useless treasonous drivel. Everyone knows university research never created anything useful.</p>
<p>The president of a public university more or less has to be a politician, so I don’t think it’s a mistake to cast an effective politician in that role. </p>
<p>I don’t know that much about Daniels. If he’s the sort of political leader who is used to giving commands and having his minions scurry off to carry them out, then he will likely have a tough time at Purdue. If he is the sort of political leader who is good at involving other people, cutting deals, and nurturing successful things his subordinates have started, he could be a great university president.</p>
<p>“The president of a public university more or less has to be a politician, so I don’t think it’s a mistake to cast an effective politician in that role.”</p>
<p>He is a political leader who steam rolls his way through things. He doesn’t care who gets knocked over in the process. Purdue could be in for a rough ride…they’ll be lucky if he doesn’t privatize it, like he did with many things in Indiana…</p>
<p>Empty rhetoric. I would challenge him to name names. Who is doing worthless research? Most funded research is in science, medicine, and engineering with a bone for education. Very little goes to non-science liberal arts. Most of the new academic/research buildings and dorms used little public funding. Grade inflation I agree–too much of it.</p>
<p>Wow no wonder why my parents and grandparents and relatives are so fearful of him being the next Purdue president. Considering it was he himself that proposed to cut funding for all public institution and now he is the president of one of the biggest in the States. </p>
<ul>
<li>“College costs too much and delivers too little.”
Obviously.</li>
<li>"Administrative costs, splurging on ‘resort’ amenities, and an obsession with expensive capital projects have run up the cost to students without enhancing the value of the education they receive.”
Resort? Dorm rooms and dining courts I presume. I seen a lot of gourmet foods when I visited Purdue. Personally better food and living qualities can enhance the value of education. </li>
<li><p>“Rigor has weakened. Grade inflation has drained the meaning from grade point averages.”</p></li>
<li><p>“Too many professors are spending too much time ‘writing papers for each other.’”
This is new…</p></li>
</ul>
<p>He’s right about administrative costs. In the UC system the number of administrators has gone up 125%, the number of additional students is a fraction of that.</p>
<p>Who is doing worthless research? Nobody because it obviously benefits the insiders and grant whores who spend most of their days pursuing that noble art of academic research and … grant writing. Now if you were to use a different set of adjectives such as useless or unwarranted, you might find that the overwhelming majority of academic research ends up gathering dust on shelves --or cloud space somewhere-- after having been read by very few outside the peer gang of more insiders and the editors of all those obscure journals. </p>
<p>Only 40 percent of the articles published in the 4,500 top scientific journals are cited within the first five years after publication. Yet the number of academic journals double every 20 years to satisfy the circular addition of more researchers. And does that come at a cost to our education system? You betcha! From 1978 to 2001, libraries at the University of California at Los Angeles, for example, saw their subscription costs alone climb by 1,300 percent.</p>
<p>More? Over the past five decades the number of language and literature academic monographs has risen to 72,000 from 13,000 while the audience for such scholarship has diminished, with unit sales for books now hovering around the fantastic total of … 300.</p>
<p>In many cases, it would be less expensive to turn all those researchers loose after 20 years of sinecural service in the same way the Armed Forces do, or stop pretending they should be above being … educators who have to spend time justifying their salaries. </p>
<p>Some day we might realize that there is a finite amount of resources available to keep all that illusion --and academic deadwood-- alive, and that the argument that research does not cost money because it is funded by someone else is entirely faulty. That day will come sooner than later as the entire economic charade of higher education is coming crashing down. Not a day too soon, if I may add!</p>
<p>This is well-written, but I think it is off-base.</p>
<p>In science and technology, one of the criterion for funding is significance of your proposed research, and I’d say the standards are pretty high. It is judged by your peers. Some researchers are more groundbreaking than others, but it does take a lot of work by other competent but perhaps unspectacular scientists/engineers to flesh out those ideas and make them more workable and thus beneficial to society. Also, people who do science in industry need to be trained in an academic setting by doing professor’s research as a PhD student–there’s no way around it.</p>
<p>Going beyond just science and technologies, I think the ability of people to teach well at a university level will erode if they are no longer trying to gain new insights in the field and are not on the cutting edge (the latter of which is more relevant to science). This is not to say that being a great researcher is necessary or sufficient to be a great teacher at a university level, but it does have value. The president emeritus of MIT, who values teaching enough that he continued teaching recitation sections after he stepped down, thought being on the cutting edge was important to being a good teacher. He didn’t think MIT should employ lecturers which didn’t also do research at a high level.</p>
<p>That claim is likely more relevant in advanced courses about stuff close to the cutting edge, as opposed to relatively stable courses on well-established topics like many freshman level courses.</p>