Links for 11/16/10

Ed Dante

I'm a hired gun, a doctor of everything, an academic mercenary…

You would be amazed by the incompetence of your students' writing… They couldn't write a convincing grocery list, yet they are in graduate school…

I live well on the desperation, misery, and incompetence that your educational system has created…

From my experience, three demographic groups seek out my services: the English-as-second-language student; the hopelessly deficient student; and the lazy rich kid…

maintaining the front of competence from some invisible location far beneath the ivory tower…

Penelope Blake

In my thirty years as a professor in upper education, I have never witnessed nor participated in a more extremist, agenda-driven, revisionist conference, nearly devoid of rhetorical balance and historical context for the arguments presented…

I honestly felt ashamed of my profession and my government for sponsoring this travesty…

The NEH is requesting an operating budget of 161 million dollars for 2011, including over 71 million to support conferences like the one I have described. I ask that you do everything in your power to delay approval of this request…

Jake

1. the cost of many / most private school undergraduate educations are (insanely) over-inflated relative to their intrinsic value; simply compare the cost to similar, yet more affordable alternatives (i.e. schools that don't cost more per year than GDP per capita)
2. the perceived benefit of these schools is in many cases focused on the resale value of the education (i.e. the value a corporation may perceive of that brand, which may be re-sold in the form of higher compensation, rather than what was actually learned)
Based on the above, I am comfortable claiming that private school tuitions are now in a bubble.

Amazing (to me) is that these schools have not only been able to raise the price of tuition / room / board to levels that are ridiculous in both absolute ($50k a year x 4 = $200k!!!) and relative (the national average is a still unreal $21k / year) terms, but they have done it in the years directly following the worst economic downturn since the Great Depression.

D.D. GUTTENPLAN

news that Alexandria University in Egypt had placed 147th…

Alexandria’s surprising prominence was actually due to “the high output from one scholar in one journal” — soon identified on various blogs as Mohamed El Naschie, an Egyptian academic who published over 320 of his own articles in a scientific journal of which he was also the editor…