. . .
K “I love ideas. I think there are others who also like them. But not many others.”
J “Finding a critical mass of folks who are interested in ideas is challenging. Everyone is too busy struggling desperately to make it through the day economically, emotionally and physically. Unrestrained contemplation is an unaffordable luxury today.”
K “College is that rare, brief and fleeting period of time when one is free to think.”
J “Sometimes it seems that only a few folks are actually thinking in college. And it sure is far from free.”
. . .
K “Does even one percent (1%) of the money spent on the American Schooling Industrial Complex (S.I.C.) get spent on the creation and transmission of ideas?”
J “Between foot/basketball and bureaucrats, surely not much more than two percent (2%) of the money is committed to ideas.”
K “Someone should calculate the historic ratio of dollars spent on bureaucrats versus students and calibrate a percentage ceiling on expenditures for ballers and bureaucrats. Some Assistant Provost Dean may need to go back to teaching or go.”
. . .
K “‘Adjunktification’ is the new paradigm. The adjunkts now carry the burden of transmitting ideas, although they may not have enough free time to create ideas. They are not junk, but they are treated like junk.”
J “Academia is replicating life. A bloated mass of overpaid bureaucrats at the top exploit a small underpaid cadre at the bottom doing the work.”
K “When you reflect on it, perhaps academia does prepare one for life.”
. . .
K “In the election, so many voters for Trump realized that those who pass themselves off as the intellectual elite in America are a fraud.”
J “The apparatchiks and the nomenklatura are the errand boys and the errand girls with gilded certificates serving the interests of the gilded class.”
K “And making a little gold. The S.I.C. is parcel and part of the carefully calibrated system of checks and balances that advances the obedient and the compliant through the system.”
. . .
K “So many departments of academia today are not even about ideas. They are about credentials from top to bottom. The only realistic and economically viable solution is to bestow a Ph.D. on every citizen at the age of eighteen. Particularly in economics which is a religion calculated to obscure the truth and protect the wealthy.”
J “Would they have to show up to get it?”
. . .
[See “The 2016 Nobel Prizes in Economics Go to those Who Pushed Criminogenic Policies” in “New Economic Perspectives” by William K. Black dated February 27, 2017 and the e-commentary at “First Annual Noble Prize In Eco-nomics (October 10, 2016).”]
[See the e-commentary at “Unionizing Athletes And Adjuncts (And Sherpas) (April 21, 2104)” and review the previous e-commentary on “Education” and “Schooling.”]
Bumper stickers of the week / Foam Fingers of the week:
The Federal Reserve is “checkmated” by moves it alone commandeered and engineered. The “king” now is in check with no way to remove the threat. The Fed cannot maintain rates and cannot raise rates and cannot lower rates. . . . If you are the only one who can make the moves on a board you control, how can you maneuver yourself into checkmate?
We’re Number 1 (at something)
March Madness seems like a delightfully ironic phrase.
Do you fill in your brackets?
“There is a cult of ignorance in the United States, and there always has been. The strain of anti-intellectualism has been a constant thread winding its way through our political and cultural life, nurtured by the false notion that democracy means that ‘my ignorance is just as good as your knowledge.’” Isaac Asimov, “A Cult of Ignorance”, Newsweek, January 21, 1980.
e-commentary 