Friday’s Friday

The Whores of Academia

Have you been following the events surrounding the report on how forests recover after a forest fire in Oregon?

About-face restores OSU study money
Research - The BLM reverses after lawmakers raise the issue of censorship over findings on logging after fires
Thursday, February 09, 2006
MICHAEL MILSTEIN

I guess I better begin by admitting that I do have an axe to grind because I wanted to teach and I wanted to do it at the college level. I thought that there was a need for good teachers and that I had those qualifications, which included a good sense of humor and an out-going personality. What I ran into, however, was what I called “Academic Arrogance” at the time but I have since learned that it is more like prostitution since money is involved.

Here is the cycle that exists in the college teaching profession;
A PhD is required in order to apply for a teaching position. This is not a PhD in teaching but in some discipline through which the University can acquire research funding.
The graduates from Engineering schools are in such high demand that the salaries offered for just a BS degree are more than one can earn as a teacher after an additional three or four years, so the only ones that seem to go on to graduate school are foreign students that get to stay in the USA on student visas.
These PhDs then have to carry some sort of class load in addition to their research and they, therefore, usually have freshman undergraduate classes with Teaching Assistants that are also foreign graduate students and the net result is that the lowly freshmen are exposed to hard to comprehend Professors that would rather be working on their research.
Whereas, I, a person more interested in teaching has to find employment at the two-year college level with just a Master’s Degree.

The article about the forestry grad student just shows how far the professors are willing to go for their research money because they don’t want to “bite the hand that feeds” them. When the government, the Bushmen, ask the PhDs to write a conclusion that supports their political agenda it goes completely un-noticed. But this grad student had the nerve to conclude otherwise and all hell broke loose with the Professors trying to suppress the publication of the research and then finally, Big Brother said, “We will cut your funding…”. That’s what I call prostituting your profession.