Now, with the FBI investigating the university’s research institute (it’s “the contracting arm of the university, farming out millions of dollars in research work to professors and others on behalf of all manner of clients, including NASA, Boeing and the U.S. Army”), presumably for theft, things at A&M have gotten so chaotic that the situation is simply impossible to follow. It obviously involves conflict of interest, incompetence, and cover-up, but who really knows? The university doesn’t seem to have an actual president at the moment… or, rather, the pro tem guy in the job seems all messed up in the conflict of interest and as a result lacks authority… Whatever. If anyone cared about, say, the students at that school, they’d shut it down and send them all somewhere else.
November 25th, 2010 at 7:03AM
UD, you have a sort of general lost paradise critique for crookedness in academia. And I think you are likely right – that the university in the 30s and 40s, 50s was a place where less crookedness happened. Not innocent – a prof of mine wrote the first piece on vitamin K, the journal to which he sent it was friendly to another guy, they held my prof’s stuff up with rewrites, the other guy got priority, bang! the other guy got the Nobel for it. But that was unusual.
There’s a lot more at stake, more widely, than there used to be. If you’re thinking about relatedness of microbe families, and eleven other guys in the world care, and you want their good opinion, it’s easier to act honorably than if big pharmaceutical money is riding on predicting which strains will be susceptible to which drugs.
I’m expressing doubt that there is a way back to paradise: we have decided we want to use universities to do the research function as well as the teaching function. And the teaching function itself has a teaching and a credentialing output. There’s a lot of money riding on the research function. People get hired for swell jobs based on their credentials. Disinterested community of scholars is not gonna just HAPPEN. And enforcement mechanisms are going to make the universities less fun.
I love reading your scorn heaped on these dweebs. Maybe, probably, it helps. But I don’t see an obvious path to something better. Constant vigilance, maybe.
November 25th, 2010 at 8:07AM
dave s. – Thanks for the thoughtful comment. I don’t really have a lost paradise model in play — just a sense of what a good university might be. Some universities, in the past and the present, have been good, are good, and these, in a rough sense, should be our models… But I’m also working with a sense of what a good college is, and this differs from the research university you’re describing.
On the matter of places like Alabama A&M – I have no university or college model in mind for them. Their educational mission is close to vanishing (six-year grad. rate at this school is 33%). I’m merely working with a sense of how they might function as collectivities if they were not corrupt.
October 17th, 2015 at 2:09PM
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