Maverick Philosopher

Footnotes to Plato from the foothills of the Superstition Mountains

Category: Academia

  • The Decline of American Liberal Education

    LInda Chavez here reports on a study, What does Bowdoin Teach? put out by the National Association of Scholars a few days ago. Chavez: Bowdoin College is a small private "liberal arts" school in Brunswick, Maine. Its admissions standards are demanding. Bowdoin accepts fewer than one in five who apply (though the school admits about…

  • Has College Become a Scam?

    I am afraid it has, for many if not most.  It will depend on your major, of course.  Here is a list of seven institutions at which total annual costs hover around $60,000.  You read that right: annual costs.  What do you get for that $240 K?  It is obvious that you do not get an…

  • The Abysmally Ignorant Jerry Coyne

    Jerry Coyne complains: Another problem is that scientists like me are intimidated by philosophical jargon, and hence didn’t interrupt the monologues to ask for clarification for fear of looking stupid. I therefore spent a fair amount of time Googling stuff like “epistemology” and “ontology” (I can never get those terms straight since I rarely use…

  • The Academic Job Market and the Gentrification of the Professoriate

    John Pepple makes a good point about gentrification, one that I didn't mention in my recent job market post.

  • Academic Malpractice: The Case of Grover Furr

    If you are not reading Ron Radosh, you should be.  In this piece, he refutes a fool who denies the crimes of Stalin.

  • The Academic Job Market in the ‘Sixties

    Robert Paul Wolff tells it like it was: . . . I reflect on the ease and endless rewards of my career, moving from comfortable position to comfortable position, and compare it with the terrible struggles of young academics trying to gain some sort of security and time for their own scholarship in an increasingly…

  • Is College a Lousy Investment?

    This piece by Megan McArdle is required reading. The role of government in causing the college bubble cannot be gainsaid. On my view, government is practically necessary.  Anarchism is for adolescents.  Some of what government does is good, some bad.  Governments in the free world defeated the Nazis; communist governments murdered 100 million in the 20th…

  • Observations on the Joys of Teaching

    Teaching is the feeding of people who aren't hungry. Teaching philosophy is the feeding of people who are neither hungry nor know what food is. Teaching is like agitating water in a glass with one's forefinger. As long as the finger is in motion, the water is agitated; but as soon as the finger is…

  • Academic Philosophy (with an addendum on Human Corruption)

    Academic philosophy too often degenerates into a sterile intellectual game whose sole function is to inflate and deflate the egos of the participants.  But this is no surprise: everything human is either degenerate or will become degenerate. …………………….. Addendum: 2:45 PM Long-time blogger-buddy and supplier of high-quality links and comments, Bill Keezer, comments: Academic anything…

  • Political Correctness and Left-Wing Bias in the Universities

    Liberal profs admit they would discriminate. Captive Minds: Conformity and Campus Intellectuals  Excerpt (emphasis added): Working for four years at this prairie college, I had many opportunities to see political correctness in action: in our so-called “equity” hiring practices, in changes to our course offerings to highlight racial and sexual diversity, and in the unfailing…

  • Philosophy is a Useless Major; All Praise to Philosophy

    Here is a list of the most useful and useless college majors: The top 10 most useful college majors:1. Nursing2. Mechanical engineering3. Electrical engineering4. Civil engineering5. Computer science6. Finance7. Marketing and marketing research8. Mathematics9. Accounting10. French, German, Latin and other common foreign languages. The top 10 most useless college majors:1. Fine Arts2. Drama and theater…

  • Jonathan Haidt Awakens from his Dogmatic Liberal Slumbers

    Conservatives have broader moral sense than liberals.  All praise to Haidt for having the openmindedness and courage to change his view, but I marvel at how incurious and bigoted he was before his metanoia.  What sort of person ignores whole swaths of the intellectual terrain without any desire to explore at first hand?  That sort…

  • Subprime College Educations

    Another chapter in the decline of the West.  Excerpts (emphasis added): In his Encounter Books Broadside "The Higher Education Bubble," Reynolds says this bubble exists for the same reasons the housing bubble did. The government decided that too few people owned homes/went to college, so government money was poured into subsidized and sometimes subprime mortgages/student…

  • The Case of Morris Starsky

    Quite by chance this morning I stumbled upon materials relating to one Morris Starsky, a professor of philosophy at Arizona State University who was fired from a tenured position for his political views in 1970.  Here is the Wikipedia article; here is something from the Phoenix New Times; this is from The Militant.  All of…

  • Is Graduate School Really That Bad?

    100 Reasons NOT to Go to Graduate School is now at #79.  Despite its unrelenting negativity, prospective applicants  to graduate programs may find the site  useful.  I cannot criticize it for being negative since that is its implied purpose: to compile 100 reasons not to go.  But there is something whiny and wimpy about it. Suppose you are…