Saturday
Jan222011
by 
Bishop Hill
Bishop Hill Ignorance in academe
Tim Worstall has a lovely post looking at a new Campaign for the Public University. The campaign, featuring the cream of UK academia says it is "seeking to defend and promote the idea of the university as a public good".
As Tim explains, they seem to be a bit mixed up about what a public good is though. Which is not very impressive for the cream of UK academia.
Reader Comments (27)
I see the already ludicrously overpaid University vice chancellors including the likes of Edward Acton of UEA are proposing to raise their already bloated salaries by another 10% to 20 %.
Come on you students here is something that you really should be out in the streets protesting about.
I see the already ludicrously overpaid University vice chancellors including the likes of Edward Acton of UEA are proposing to raise their already bloated salaries by another 10% to 20 %.
Come on you students here is something that you really should be out in the streets protesting about.
CAGW climate scientists targeted by fraudsters:
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-12219472
Well, these fraudsters sure know where to find the gullible and easily led.
You don't even have to wade through first-year economics textbooks as Worstall modestly suggests. This definition of a public good is in Chasing Rainbows which is a non-threatening 104 pages of text and can be read in an afternoon.
The public good will be something which preserves their own ends.
Generally the public good will be something which can be made to sound altruistic but can be guaranteed not to impoverish whoever is promising to further it, at least not on the terms within which they are attempting to frame the argument.
I guarantee you that if you select any Labour policy, you will easily be able to find 1,000 academics who'll support it, but if you select any Conservative policy, it'll be hard to find even 10. The reason is simple: there's a general left-wing bias in academia. Whether or not they understand John Dewey's philosophy is neither here nor there. The left have taken over the asylum.
The left have taken over the asylum.
'Tis no accident nor recent. I left academia 45 years ago because it was obvious then
From this 'cream' campaign to the students in occupation at Birmingham U, words of an impassioned radical ?
'The entire history of widening participation, which saw the expansion of a system of universities that served only 4% of young people to nearly 50%, has been marked by a nearly symmetrical decline of funding for that education, and increasing demands from universities themselves to be given the authority to privatize in the wake of abandoned socialist possibilities....
During a previous period of crisis here at Birmingham in the 1980s, which involved a solid round of closures, mergers and ‘restructuring’, Stuart Hall reminded us that moments of closure in a particular phase of political and cultural struggle are also moments of possibility. He argued that his generation of students, academics and workers faced a historic choice: to ‘capitulate to the Thatcherist future, or find another way of imagining’. There have been other ways of imagining, but I think this also true for us today. Despite the tendency towards despair, we have deep resources of theory, feeling, experience and desire to nurture sustaining projects of radical imagination. And it seems clear that the reclamation of time, space, autonomy, collectivity, agency, humanity and democracy is often a necessary condition for these projects to be possible.'
http://publicuniversity.org.uk/2011/01/17/to-the-students-in-occupation-at-birmingham-university/
"The left have taken over the asylum"--Robinson
Oy! It wasn't an asylum before they took it over!
jorgekafkazar says:
I think humanity has always been collectively a bit mad. Just look at history...
jorgekafkazar
You are right, we get the insanity from our children!
Ciaio
John in Milano
Damn
I have been here a while and I can't spell Ciao?
John in Milano
Yes. Yes it was.
All a bit tautologous here. Any publicly funded institution will tend to have staff that are on balance more left wing than a parallel privately funded one, as the inmates have signed up to the proposition that the state should be their master, and wish to make their careers as apparatchiks rather than creating wealth by engaging in commerce. Nothing new or sinister, just human nature.
"seeking to defend and promote the idea of the university as a public good".
Surely they're pushing on an open door here. Are they that disconnected from the general public that they believe there is any other notion in the mind of the public that it is a good thing. Or are they confusing the public's unerstandable outrage at the way some scientists in universities, or government departments, are pushing a religious agenda to destroy western capitalism.
The significance of the term 'public good' is not whether it is open to the public, nor that it is good. A public good is a distinct concept meaning something that should be maintained by public money because it is good for everyone, yet no-one can afford to provide that thing as a business. Of course this is not necessarily true of universities, but be assured that this initiative is all about UK public funding of universities and possibly students. Or keeping those academics in the style to which they have become accustomed.
It's safe to say that all the academics are truly the smartest people on Earth. It's just they all lack intelligence. Something along the lines of asking Einstein to be your investment advisor.
Robinson
Not just academia is it??
Insiders view of the BBC here from Peter Sissons
http://climaterealists.com/index.php?id=7074
I don't just see it as left or right, because many who are party to it don't think of themselves as left-wing. 50 years of government getting bigger have left (sorry) many thinking that the UK has enough money to support them. They don't see it as a welfare handout, but that is what it is.
Personally, I think Tim Worstall is being not only elitist, but a bit if a twit.
He has assumed that he knows for certain the the narrow usage of a specific terminology in the field of economics has permanently hijacked a simple English phrase, "public good", and that henceforth nobody can use these words for the plain English meaning.
Had they said "for the good of the public", which to any normal person would have meant exactly the same thing, I assume he would have quite happy.
Yes, I read that too Retired Dave. Basically, wherever you have people paid by the state, you have people in favour of the state. This was the trick Labour pulled from 1997 onwards. A client state is kind-of self-reinforcing; nobody who benefits from it will vote it out of existence. Don't get me wrong, I'm not a right-winger - it's just that there is a line beyond which rather than a public "good", it becomes a kind-of malignancy, and I think we crossed that line some time ago.
As James Dellingpole allready explained, it is a marxist strategy of theirs to overtake the institutes to win their class war. Whether this was "organised", or a "spontaneous" evolution is irrelevant: Our institutes have been smothered into libtardo delusion by a 1000 squeezes.
There has never been a social contract to allow for this bias to happen. There never will be.
What happened, slowly, innocuously over the years, is borderline illegal.
The libertarian movement should make it a focus and main theme to make our institutes unbiased, and efficient again.
Not quite OT, as it hinges on ignorance (or worse) in academe:
Sir Paul Nurse has a terrible piece in the Sunday Times (section 1 p25, Think Tank). It’s all about how climate science has been getting a kicking from ‘polemicists’ with ‘strongly argued’ opinions ‘not backed by robust scientific evidence’. He points to bloggers and users of ‘social media’.
Early on, we get this:
Now even the consensus admits that temperature forcing by CO2 would not be evident until post-1950. So all the rise in GAT 1850 – 1950 is natural variation including recovery from the LIA. What is left is about 0.4C, which isn’t quite as frightening, is it? Especially as a postulated ongoing recovery from the LIA at the rate of 0.5C/century would reduce that figure even more, perhaps to ~0.25C.
Have you noticed that everyone pulls this trick, all the time?
He then goes on to prove that he has not learned from recent events:
How about that. First, he knowingly misrepresents the science (he is the president of the Royal Society – surely he knows), then he demonstrates no awareness of where the role of science stops and that of politics begins.
Science doesn’t tell us what we ‘need’ to do, or how to run the global economy. That’s what politicians and economists get up to.
In short, he is another great-and-good activist.
There’s more, and I could go on, but I can’t face it.
Does this mean that all those universities in history did not exist because they were not Government funded? An academic sort of medieval warm period?
And this might be ignorance in academe but could be something much worse:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2011/jan/19/false-climate-change-study
False alarmist claims by a body associated with the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS). Silly AAASes indeed.
"He has assumed that he knows for certain the the narrow usage of a specific terminology in the field of economics has permanently hijacked a simple English phrase, "public good", and that henceforth nobody can use these words for the plain English meaning."
The distinction is between a public good and the public good.
Academics should know the difference.
Is there a linguistic problem here?
Are the academics using public "good" in the sense of "benefit", or in the sense of a good as opposed to a service?
"Are the academics using public "good" in the sense of "benefit", or in the sense of a good as opposed to a service?" There's little chance that they are thinking as analytically as that. What they really mean is "Observe the heart upon my sleeve; am I not a fine fellow?" combined with "Gimme the money".