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Freddie deBoer and Matthew Yglesias offer contrasting viewpoints on the business model of universities. DeBoer states that:

“[T]he purpose of the university has never been solely, or even primarily, or even largely to deliver information, that this is not why they are funded, and that this is not why students attend them.”

Well, I think he’s right. But given that, what is their purpose? As best I can tell, it is to offer people a way to prove they have information. The degree which a university sells you is a certificate that verifies the nature and extent of the information you possess. (Yes, this is a way of looking at it which ignores sentimental and intangible effects, but I’m just thinking about the business model here.)

So what this makes me wonder is:

  1. Is there anything that competes against them already? 
  2. Is there any alternative way of providing the same service more cheaply? 
  3. Are there other “goods”  like academic degrees?

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That question has been asked much recently, and articles like this one by Taylor Branch (via Andrew Sullivan) are gaining more and more prominence.

The arguments on both sides are all obvious and familiar: Pro: “they are being exploited by the universities, which make millions off their play”, “they are risking injury”, and so on. Con: “they are paid in that they get a free education”, “money would lead to corruption and a betrayal of the idea of ‘amateurism'” etc. The above article goes through all this in detail, particularly focusing on the last argument.

Personally, while I love watching collegiate sports, I do think it is a very bad sign for society that educational institutions are dedicating so many resources to them. And although I think it is true that, as things stand now, players deserve compensation for their efforts purely as a matter of fairness, I also think it is an ominous sign that matters have come so far as that.

I should also say that, if players were paid, then college athletics would be simply a pro sports league that doubled as an academic institution and thus one hampered in competing with professional organizations dedicated entirely to sport.

I would feel much better if major athletes played professionally immediately after leaving high school and bypassed college altogether. Then college athletics would be reduced back to their rightful status as something students do for amusement in their spare time.

I know that some will object that major programs, such as football and basketball, provide revenue for the University to spend on other things related to academic pursuits. I concede that this is true, however, I believe that in this instance the matter of ideals plays a role.

It’s well and good to claim the money will be used for some academic pursuit. But the universities are now using major athletic competitions as to raise funds to enable them to pursue other things. And just as people in an economy such as ours are defined by their income-earning activities, so too are institutions. If a university raises money for itself through football, then by football it is defined. What it does with its money is secondary.

This may not seem terribly important. But in my opinion, it indicates a shift in attitude which may be unhealthy, a focus upon sport at the expense of scholarship. (It is quite an irony that the means by which most of these athletes come to the university is called a “scholarship”.) The focus of the university administrators’ minds, even if not their money, is upon sport.

I repeat: I love sports. But I do not see a need, when highly successful professional sports leagues already exist, for colleges to interfere in the market.

However, this is just my opinion. It may be wrong, and regardless the existing system won’t go away. So, as matters stand now, I favor paying college athletes.

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Mike Huckabee will not be running for President. Instead, he is apparently going to devote some of his time to selling videos such as this to educate children about American history:

All I can say is that, when I was a lad, it would have been my natural instinct to rebel against any message conveyed in such an obvious fashion as that. Certainly, every children’s program I watched that had a message made me viscerally want to contradict it. (Most of the messages, incidentally, were what the Conservatives would likely call Politically Correct, Liberal messages.)

In general, I suspect kids aren’t quite as malleable as people think, and more than ready to resist ham-fisted techniques, regardless of the message. I suspect that such efforts as the one you see above will be counterproductive.

But, as the title suggests, these seem like such poor efforts that I almost wonder if it’s a joke…

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I try to write well. No doubt I fail a good deal of the time, as I’m sure anyone who searches this blog will be able to prove, but I do try.

I used to think that things like spelling and grammar were measures of intelligence, but now I don’t believe that is necessarily true. There are intelligent people whom I could easily see writing sentences kind of like this: “i could of don with more newance in the caracterization of the protaganist.”  (Note: this is a made-up example. I’ve never actually seen this particular sentence.)

These kinds of sentences I find fascinating, because they show that there are people who are thinking intelligent thoughts, but who are not capable of translating them into words in the agreed upon way.

In some sense, this is not that big a problem. After all, thinking hard thoughts is the tough part. Writing them down is something you can learn easily enough if you want. And to some extent, I suppose, there is a trade-off involved. If you want to spend time thinking deeply about important issues, you probably will have to spend less time learning what order the symbols go in to write them down.

And yet… well, I worry sometimes about the extent to which writing skills seem to have degraded these days.

P.S. I know that somewhere in this post, I have made at least one grammatical or orthographic/typographic error, perhaps even in this postscript. I can’t find it, but I know it’s there. I know this because anytime you write something bemoaning poor writing, you are guaranteed to have such an error. So, I know that I have it coming. I can accept that.

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Concerning politics, it is often said that “reasonable people can disagree”.

Why?

After all, when it comes to most political issues, it would seem that one side must be right and the other must be wrong, since they appear to believe the exact opposite things on all issues. Presumably, therefore, reasonable people will all be able to figure out what the correct policy is, leaving only unreasonable people to oppose them.

The answer to this, however, is that most people are not (and maybe nobody is) totally sure what the best policy is in most cases. Often, two opposing policies may have different pros and cons and it may not be clear which (to borrow a term from economics) maximizes societal welfare.

However, because this sort of thing is very hard for the average person to understand–no one really has time after a hard day’s work, to examine political nuances–this sort of thing is up to experts to discuss. Unfortunately, it takes a long time to discuss them, so their explanations must be succinct.

(This, in turn, leads to simplifying the issue into terms which make political polarization virtually inevitable, i.e. “It’s impossible to explain all the details–all you really need to know is that [whoever] is bad.”)

It’s not that people are stupid–it’s just that you need an advanced degree in economics to understand whether the Fed ought to print money in a recession or not. And if you go and get that degree, you won’t be able to get the necessary degree in climatology to understand climate change. Add in all the other issues we face and, well, nobody has the time for all that.

This means that we must rely on experts in these fields to make policy recommendations, but this inherently makes people who are not experts in any of these fields feel annoyed, especially if the experts are (or even appear to be) wrong at any time.

This sort of thing, of course, leads to populism and anti-“elitism”. It’s understandable, really–who would want to feel they were being controlled by a bunch of (mostly well-to-do) people who appear (to the layman) not to know what they are doing half the time?

Now, we seemingly have a solution to this problem ready-made in the form of the internet. Unfortunately, so far, it doesn’t seem to be working. Most people don’t seem to use the internet for the purpose of gaining access to more knowledge on many of these difficult subjects.

Two questions:

  1. Is my assessment correct?
  2. If so, what could be done about this problem? 

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So, in case you haven’t heard, they’re planning to release a new edition of Mark Twain’s Huckleberry Finn that replaces the “N-word” with the word “slave”.

The reason for this is that apparently some teachers and schools won’t teach the novel because of the controversial and difficult nature of discussing this word with students. So, this edition is proposed as an alternative to not teaching the book at all.

To an extent, this is sound logic. After all, exposing people to the story (minus a few details) is better than if they couldn’t read the thing at all. On the other hand, is anyone really capable of preventing people from reading Huckleberry Finn (or any out-of-copyright work) these days? It’s on Wikisource.

Besides, students are notoriously bad at following what teachers tell them. Therefore, I would guess that the best way to get students to read the book is to expressly forbid them from reading it, or at least emphasize its taboo content.

In my experience, the people who want to read and understand literature will go and do so on their own. Those who do not, meanwhile, will not learn even if forced to. I’d say the easiest thing is to write down the name of the book and the author and then tell everyone they shouldn’t read it because it is offensive. This way, only people who don’t mind the risk of being offended will bother to read it. Those who do mind can read some inoffensive book.

Then, when test time comes, the teacher can offer the students a choice of which book to write about.

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National Review praises Sarah Palin:

“During an episode of her reality show, the once (and future?) candidate cooked up a mess of hot s’mores and a side of even hotter politics, declaring: ‘This is in honor of Michelle Obama, who said the other day we should not have dessert.’

Palin was being over-generous in her paraphrase. What Mrs. Obama in fact said was considerably more worrisome: ‘We can’t just leave it up the parents’…. If her vision leaves any room for limitation on government interference in family affairs, it is impossible to detect it. Palin… later expanded on her views: ‘Instead of a government thinking that they need to take over and make decisions for us, according to some politician’s — or politician’s wife’s — priorities, just leave us alone, get off our back, and allow us, as individuals, to exercise our own God-given rights to make our own decisions.'”

National Review and Palin appear to have not realized that if your kids are in school, then they will be fed by the school. You can maybe send a lunch in with them, but some children–not that I suppose NR really cares about this–come from families who are too poor to do so. (Besides which, if the lunch is paid for by taxes, most people will probably wish to take advantage of it.) Therefore, unless you are actually opposed to the concept of school lunches, you must ask: do you want the school to feed them healthy food or unhealthy food?

If they were Libertarians, they might make the argument that we ought to abolish school lunches–and, for that matter, government schools–altogether. But they won’t make this argument here, because to do so makes them look, frankly, like unfeeling jerks to many people. So, they take the easy way out: griping about the system without actually putting forward an alternative system which might address the alleged problems.

(I should mention: although I am not a Libertarian, I was one in the past. And, perhaps out of a sentimental sympathy for some of their beliefs, I feel a need to make it clear that the Republicans of today are not really Libertarians; they just act like it sometimes to get what they want. This is not to say the Libertarians are right–which I obviously don’t believe–but rather in the interest of clarity in discourse.)

But I digress.

Now, if a parent wants to have this degree of control over their children, then they should not send the children to school. But, since many parents cannot (or in some cases, will not) actually educate, feed and care for their own children all day every day, they do send them off to school. And that carries with it certain costs and benefits. But essentially, what the National Review crowd wants is all the benefits of parental control with none of the costs.

But then, as they ought to know, there’s no such thing as a free lunch.

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I said I’d post my thoughts on the Texas curriculum issue, so here goes:

My opinion is that whatever they teach kids in schools is going to have less and less relation to what kids actually learn and do. The reason is the internet. Back in the old days, public school had a real chance of shaping a kid’s outlook on the world. Now, a student can just roam around on Wikipedia and learn whatever it is he/she wants to know.*

I’ve long thought that our whole model of public education is being rendered obsolete by this fact. So, it doesn’t really matter if you teach only your “Conservative” or “Liberal” or whatever biases–anybody who actually cares about it will eventually read about it online. And when you go to read about, say, Friedrich Hayek, you’ll end up finding out about a lot of his critics, too.

The real danger is that schools will eventually figure this out, and try to keep students from accessing the internet at any time and  from any place. But people won’t tolerate that.

So, while this decision speaks volumes about the character and integrity of those who made it, I personally don’t think it will end up being that damaging. Most students are smarter than we give them credit for, and they know when they’re being lied to or misled.

FOOTNOTE:
 *Some will point out that Wikipedia is unreliable because it is edited by anonymous people who don’t have to provide credentials. To which I can only quote William F. Buckley’s line “I am obliged to confess I should sooner live in a society governed by the first two thousand names in the Boston telephone directory than in a society governed by the two thousand faculty members of Harvard University.” and add that it applies equally to the Texas State Board of Education and its ilk.