| Contents |
|
Wealth
& Power
Assets or
Addictions?
Dan Mahony, M.Phil.
|
Chapter 4 Plato's Denial? The University Corporation
Plato's Denial: The Academic-Industrial Complex Was Plato's objection to the Sophists' money-making merely addictive denial about his own wealth? Or did he foresee what would happen if wealth replaced veritas at the bottom line of education? The university corporation suffers as any ASCO with its chronic need for more and more money & power. Its intellectual employees (codependents) compulsively avoid confronting issues around wealth the addictor. [1637. The newly-ordained and newly-wed Reverend John Harvard arrives in Okamakammesset, the land of many hills. It is a wonderful place, not a utopia, but its people are rather free of compulsion. The Rev is steeped in a religious tradition claiming to be distrustful of money & power, but he has with him a "charter" from a "king" commanding him to found the College at Cambridge. The King further declares that the Rev has the right to take whatever land he wants for the new college and to rid the land of its rightful occupants. The king claims that Harvard's right to do so is derived from the king himself. And from where does the king get that right? From God himself. And a wonderful spot Rev. Harvard takes too, right there on one of the few straight segments of the Quinobequin ("long and winding") River. The Okamakammessets must think it something of a failing of the Coat People that their king claims divine right. Have they still not learned the difference between god and king? The Okamakammessets politely move to another spot, probably recording the matter in their wampum records.] [Veritas? A year later Rev. John Harvard died at the age of 37. Construction of Harvard College's first building began two years later in 1639, and its first students began study. It was not until 1642 that the first class of nine men was graduated. Yet Harvard College claims that 1636 is the year of its founding―a year before John Harvard had even arrived. (See Waters "John Harvard and His Ancestry" in New England History General Register, July 1885, and October 1886.)] [1984. "Hoechst, A.G., the giant West German pharmaceutical combine, has given $70 million to the Harvard-affiliated Massachusetts General Hospital. In return, the corporation will be allowed to market any discoveries made in Harvard's Department of Molecular Biology, which Hoechst's largess created. Monsanto has signed comparable $23 million contracts with the Harvard Medical School. "At Yale, the Celanese Corporation has funded $1.1 million in enzyme research in exchange for exclusive rights to resulting patents. Exxon has underwritten an $8 million combustion project at M. l. T. and will obtain irrevocable, worldwide, nonexclusive, royalty-free license to ensuing inventions. At least 16 corporations, including GE, TRW, IBM, IT&T, Honeywell, and Texas Instruments, have bought into Stanford's Center for Integrated Systems at a cost of $750,000 each. Purdue is working on computers for Control Data, Carnegie-Mellon on robotics for Westinghouse, and Rensselaer Polytechnic on automation for IBM, GE, Grumman, Lockheed, and Bethlehem Steel. And approximately 300 other firms are spending millions on the application of bioengineering to agriculture and plant breeding. In fact, almost every major university, and many of lesser stature are currently engaged in some form of research for industry (Irwin Stark in Thought and Action a National Education Assn. Publication, 1984)."]
This Business of Degrees
[RAND CORP. FINDS MORE THAN HALF OF US COLLEGE STUDENTS DROP OUT—Rand Corporation's Council for Aid to Education says: "Currently, fewer than 50% of students who enter four-year colleges and universities actually graduate source (pdf)."RAND ALSO FINDS HALF OF COLLEGE GRADUATES CAN'T DO SIMPLE ARITHMETIC—"One recent report indicates that more than half of college graduates could not calculate the change from $3 for a $1.95 sandwich and a 60-cents cup of soup source (pdf)."] We offer the following diagnosis: "(1) The university corporation is an ASCO that inflates its degrees so that more and more Students will "earn" them; (2) It pays its intellectual employees less and less; (3) and then there’s plain old price fixing (see below). All of these are familiar symptoms of inflation. The costs of attending college grow ever more enormous adversely affecting the entire industrial world's social economic and political systems. Let us name this condition Credentialosis, a dysfunctional credential syndrome, one of the many usually surrounding compulsive wealth.
Symptoms of Credentialosis I. Impaired Cognition: The Authority Myth ["That their dictates may pass without inquiry (Thomas Cooper, I830)."] An assertion must be judged on its truth or falsity regardless of the speaker's credentials. Credentials do not assure that a particular assertion by a Doctor, Master, Bachelor, or Associate is correct. A degree is not even assurance that a Doctor of Xology ever utters a single xological truth, no matter how authoritative he may sound. Credentials only assure that those credentialed have studied a number of matters in the field of their degree. Most states require professionals to pass a state examination in the field of their expertise. Apparently, award of university degree is not sufficient proof of competence. The problem runs even deeper. Past history shows that the great contributions to the arts and sciences are mostly made by those who could not find enough reason to remain academics after their student years. They preferred instead to work outside the walls for financial support. Notable were Albert Einstein (patent clerk), Sir Isaac Newton (Chancellor of the Exchequer), Rene Descartes (artillery advisor to the Crown), and W. J. Sidis (entry-level accountancy). Most of the great poets, writers, painters, inventors, and industrialists were not academics. The greatest American composer Charles Ives (insurance), who decided against completing a Yale Ph.D. program, said that his business life enriched his compositions. Aaron Copland (academic) at first suggested Ives would have been a better composer had he stayed in Academia, but later took it back. The greatest American philosopher, Charles Sanders Peirce, was never given a university position because he lacked collegiality, i.e., he too often disagreed with colleagues. [Master of Philosophy in Psychology? Neither philosophy nor psychology can be mastered. This particular degree is granted to doctoral students who meet the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy (Ph.D.) save having written their "thesis." The degree is virtually unknown in most circles. An almanac list of college degrees does not include it.] II. Pad Power Another example of credentialosis is the utter failure of psychiatry to help solve the problems of addiction, or crime, or basic human relationship. In the final analysis, psychiatrists serve as mere ceremonial chemists (Szasz, 1974)." They engage in a minimal amount of psychotherapy, and fix problems by prescribing drugs. How to they know which drugs to prescribe? Trial and error. They rule because of their pad power, i.e., the power to dispense powerful chemicals. Clinical psychologists are doctors without pad power. They command lower fees. Do they fix fewer problems? III. The Soup A degree is in the field it is in and no other. Expertise does not transfer from one field of study to another simply because the fields are logically related. For example, chemists do not necessarily make better chefs: knowledge of the precise ins and outs of molecular activity will do little for the soup even though soup is a complex molecular system. Similarly, expert knowledge of subatomic physics does not assure us that a particular physicist's "Big Bang" theory of the universe is correct. Nevertheless, enabled by this long-standing fallacy, academic credentials are compulsively over-generalized by the codependent public. IV. Bureaucratie a L'Academe "I find that the three major administrative problems on campus are sex for the students, athletics for the alumni, and parking for the faculty (Clark Kerr, 1958)." The Doctor of Philosophy is the highest degree awarded by a university. A college becomes a university only when it has sufficient faculty and courses to grant a Ph.D. The Doctor of Medicine (M.D.) is a degree awarded by a school within a University. It is a technical degree, lower down the hierarchy than a Ph.D. In most corporate structures, however, the M.D. rules over the better-educated Ph.D. The source of such distorted priorities can only be the impaired cognition all too often associated with addiction. By controlling the flow of powerful chemicals, the patients of Doctors of Medicine confuse the genuine power of chemicals with their personal wealth & power. The M.D.’s power derives from the substances he deals. The better-educated Doctors of Philosophy, who merely dispense knowledge, end up lower down the ladder. Pity not the poor Ph.D's, however, they have considerable sway farther on down the hierarchy, especially over those with "masters" degrees. In addition bureaucrats who control the purse strings act as if the money in the purse is their own. The employed intellectuals easily fall in line The result is that the merit-based hierarchy intended by the degree structure is made moot (academic). ["For millennia, opium has served as mankind's, and as medicine's, best―most effective and safest―pain killer and mood elevator. But opium, like the indigenous healer, is simple and unpretentious: the dried juice of the poppy. No chemist, no pharmaceutical industry, no physician is needed to produce it or to administer it. This, I submit, is one of the most important reasons why modern medicine has turned its back on the poppy, just as it had, earlier, on the wise woman: each reminds the arrogant 'doctor’―aspiring to control rather than to cure his patient―of his lowly origins; and worse, each threatens him with displacement by the indigenous healer, by folk medicine, and by the efforts of the sick person to cure himself through self-medication―all this making the physician dispensable and insecure (Thomas Szasz, M.D., 1974)."]
$ecrecy and Power 101 [“A strong suspicion prevails in that the human intellect has been kept in fetters by men who have boldly assumed superior wisdom, that their dictates might pass without inquiry―men who professedly deal in concealment, darkness, and mystery, and who fatten upon human ignorance (Thomas Cooper, 1830)."] [Academicals. Those long dark robes and
square hats still seen at graduation ceremonies symbolize academia's origins in
secret medieval religious enclaves, i.e., cults of men who controlled and
privatized the spread of knowledge. They would have had Copernicus killed had he
publicized his discovery of the true structure of the solar system.
Three-hundred years later, their robed descendants tried to have Galileo
killed for proving Copernicus correct. [Many colleges have secret societies.] [Accreditation Secrets. The Chronicle of Higher Education (Dec. 12, 1990) reports that the Middle States Association of Colleges and Schools has adopted a new policy that would make public many, but not all, of this accrediting group's secret policies. Two years later, Science reports that a lawsuit is underway to force the President's Council on Science and Technology not to have secret meetings regarding their study of research institutions.] [Prof. Thomas Sowell writes: "One of the things for which 1991 may be remembered is the revealing glimpse it provided of the moral dry rot in American higher education. Early in the year, news came out of Stanford University's free-spending ways with government research grant money. Thousands of dollars of the taxpayers' money were earmarked for all sorts of personal amenities for university president Donald Kennedy, including a wedding reception. Even larger sums went on the books for depreciation on a yacht and the expenses of a shopping mall owned by Stanford. "More revealing than these self-indulgences was the response of the university administration when confronted with these unsavory facts. With three federal investigations closing in, President Donald Kennedy said that he would eliminate expenses that are ‘easily subject to public misunderstanding' and re-examine Stanford's policies in order to avoid any confusion that might result.' "In other words, the only problem was that the great unwashed masses beyond the campus might not be able to understand what the noble Olympians were doing in academia. "Unfortunately, neither the self-indulgences nor the brazen loftiness was confined to Stanford. When the federal investigators announced that they were planning to go to Massachusetts to look into academic institutions there, Harvard and M.I.T. suddenly announced big cutbacks in the amount of government money they were claiming as research expenses―$500,000 in the case of Harvard and $73I,000 by M.I.T. Duke University also discovered "inadvertent errors" in what it was charging the feds. "Cal Tech decided that it would no longer charge the government for its country-club memberships. The taxpayers would no longer be hit with the costs of opera tickets or airline tickets for the president of the University of Pittsburgh and his wife to go to Grand Cayman Island. "Although the United States has some of the finest research universities and postgraduate education in the world, many of its own college graduates cannot qualify to go on to do their graduate work in these institutions. In field after field, the proportion of Ph.D.s going to foreign students has been rising, simply because the foreign students are better prepared. "As the academic standards of American schools and colleges sink slowly in the west, inflated grades and lofty talk soothe the public enough to avoid trouble, and―most important―keep the money coming in. The spending scandals at Stanford and other elite institutions are less important for the sums of money involved than as a symptom of a deeper moral failure. Only public outrage and institutional changes are likely to stem the tide (Thomas Sowell, Boston Herald, Wed., Jan. 1, 1992, p. 19)."] [Update. Sept. 2, 1992. Boston Globe reports MIT indicted, charged with price fixing over a period of thirty years. The others cited above settle out of court. MIT vows to fight on.] [Update. Sept. 2, 2002. Has anything changed re the fixing of fees charged by university corporations?] [$ecrecy and Power 102. Prof. Ralph Nader. "The corporate mentality views colleges and universities as valuable testing grounds for business-defined technology, as valuable trade schools for corporate recruits, as valuable research centers for future corporate products, as valuable instruments for legitimizing corporate ethics, and as valuable terrain to possess in the drive against challenging alternatives to corporatethink (Thought and Action, 1984, op cit)."] [$ecrecy and Power 103 (Honors in Accidental Research). A certain graduate student at Columbia University, happened one day to be in a Wall Street office building. He was surprised to notice a conference room for the Trustees of Columbia University. Back on campus, he asked around if anyone knew why there was a meeting place for the Trustees on Wall Street and not on campus. No one seemed to know. Or care. The Columbia University corporation claims to be a private institution. Yet, "Chartered by the People of the State of New York" is etched in stone on its main building. That certain student had wondered if Columbia was supposed to be under taxpayer control, i.e., a public university. He'd heard from a retired professor that Nicolas Murray Butler, a Nobel Laureate and a past president of the University, had managed to sell the school's library books to the people of the State of New York for a fortune and then bought them back a year later for a dollar. The books never left the shelves. The codependent public―whose kids'll never go to Columbia―got to pay the bill. By the way, Columbia's magnificent library is the birthplace of Melvil Dewey's book classification system used around the world. But the library is named after Butler. "An educated proletariat is a constant source of disturbance and danger to any nation (Nicholas Murray Butler, 1862-1947)." "Columbia, n. from Christopher Columbus; United States feminine symbol (Webster’s Dictionary)."] [Practicum. Harvard, Yale and other universities have long aligned with the compulsive secrecy of the academic-industrial complex. But it is not often that we get a glimpse of the relationship. There were academic personnel at the University who were liaisons to the F.B.I. One was H. B. Fisher. "Originally hired to handle students problems with women and booze, Fisher took on more political duties during and after World War II. By the early 1950s he was coordinating Yale’s contacts with the loyalty-security apparat, clearing prospective employees as well as giving out information about past and present Yale men. Fisher was not unique. The University of California also had such an employee…In Seattle, a local F.B.I. agent met weekly with the president of the University of Washington (Ellen Schrecker, The Nation, June 7, 1992)."] [Addenda. "Corporate holds on universities and university-based science present dangers both to liberty and to the public interest alike (David Noble, Thought and Action, op.cit.)"; "The business concepts of secretiveness and proprietary control, are an anathema to the academic community (Dir., Nat. Committee on Research, in "Campus Cementing Business Alliances," New York Times, Nov. 11, 1980. Quoted by Stark in Thought and Action , op cit.); "New forces―most notably an overall decline in federal support―are driving universities toward closer and tighter ties with the corporate world (Irwin Stark., op cit)"; "We have reached an entirely new level of corporate control. The profit motive now dominates the consciousness of professors and students alike (Leonard Minsky, Thought and Action, op cit.)."]
Of Mice and Mead: Academic Scandals Money and power are at the bottom line of academic scandals. [Sir Cyril Burt, knighted for his research, falsely claimed that he had verified his theory that persons with black skin have lower IQ's as a group. He even cited non-existing studies to bolster his claim. Worse, many academics believed him.] [Margaret. Steeped in Freudian theory,
Columbia University professor Margaret Mead, Ph.D., created an entire school of
thought―career―based on the idea that the ‘primitive’ Samoan
culture she had studied and lived within had virtually no social problems. On her
research rested an academic dynasty. She became an academic superstar, and in
later years often entered her lectures sporting a staff like Moses, accompanied
by an entourage of drivelling graduate students, and wearing a coat made of a
hundred small animal skins. [See more cases of academic false claims in The Mismeasure of Man by Stephen Jay Gould.] [See also Martin Anderson's Impostors in the Temple: The Decline of the American University.]
Merely Academic: Word Abuse "If every word or device that achieved currency were immediately authenticated, simply on the ground of popularity, the language would be as chaotic as a ball game with no foul lines (Strunk & White, Elements of Style, 1959)." Strunk & White not withstanding, a dysfunctional word abused long and loud enough officially functional. Dictionary judges regularly suspend the sentence of word abusers to the house of correction. Over time and by slow operations, language is losing its logical distinctions. At the same time, the history of many academic subjects such as psychology is little more than a series of passing fads and fancies. Past knowledge is rarely absorbed and synthesized by present-day knowledge. ["The history of our time is a history of phrases, which rise to great power and then as suddenly pass away: the 'merchants of death', the 'malefactors of great wealth', 'monopoly', reactionaries', 'liberals', the 'labor power', 'America first', 'cash and carry', 'unconditional surrender', 'peace in our time', 'collective security', 'bring the boys home', 'disarmament’, "'the Red menace', 'the 'atomic potential', etc., etc. At the time of their currency, few men have had either the courage or the resources to stand up to these tremendous shibboleths...Men are destroyed by them, others are raised to power, and others are rallied to a fighting cause, and wars are declared, and others are driven from their homes. And after all this havoc has been wreaked, suddenly the phrase disappears and is powerful no more―indeed is lost and forgotten and replaced by something else, very likely its exact opposite…It is terrifying, not just that the phrases result in so much blood and suffering, but because they raise an awful question. They raise the question of truth. Where in all of this is truth? Or is there any such thing at all? (Russell D. Davenport, 1955)."] [Most Abused: agenda; data; less; genius; February; criterion; i.e., nuclear.] [Cases of sub-par professorial and administrative language skills are compiled in The Graves of Academe by Richard Mitchell.] [The word academic has become synonymous with trivial and moot.]
Schools of Thought "From the death of the old, the new proceeds, and the life of the truth from the death of creeds (Whittier, 1859)." While luxurians stroll the ruins of Veritas, we ignore the side effects caused by comfortable schools of thought and academic creeds. [In a rare case of an academic taking a public stand on a matter, a professor emeritus (retired) claims nuclear power is safe.] [Security is the mother of danger and the grandmother of destruction (Thomas Fuller, 1642)."] [How much leisure time is too much? The academic "year" = 150 days, what with summers, semester breaks, holidays, etc. Then there are the sick days and sabbaticals.]
Compulsive Argument and Compulsive Skepticism Disagreement and skepticism, while healthy at first, become compulsive in the ASCOs of Academe as leaders divide and conquer (convince) followers. The main problem with the Sophists wasn’t that they needed money from their students in order to survive as teachers. It was their compulsive argument. They taught their students that the most important thing is to win arguments, not seek the truth. ["lt's naive"; "It's an old theory"; "It’s too simple," are examples of dysfunctional argument. These are all versions of the Ad hominem fallacy of rejecting a theory or argument for reasons other than its truth or falsity.]
Ivied Walls of Silence "Truth is not only violated by falsehood, it may be outraged by silence (Henri Amiel, 1856)." "The usual conspiracy of silence is inevitable to all thought which demands new thought-machinery (Henry B. Adams, 1907)." Silence can be deadly. Faculty's compulsive avoidance of taking public stands about, for example, environmental problems and their consequences, especially when these matters are their areas of expertise, is possibly Academia's greatest sin. Theirs should be the loudest voices.
College $ports Passing athletic $tudents. Passing the costs along too. [One college player in a hundred will become a professional athlete. Still many colleges make big money on those who dream of pro-sports careers.]
In Conclusion "The present state of the western world was brought about by college graduates (Will Rike)." This chapter, taken with the understanding that some of its arguments are not sufficient, nonetheless suggests serious consideration of the impairment of Veritas by the addictions of Academe. Knowledge, not money or getting a job, is the bottom line of education.
Thank you for your visit.
|
