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Video: Mizzou Protest Shuts Down First Amendment
A young photojournalist tried to do his job today and take pictures of a protest movement roiling the University of Missouri. The protest, named #ConcernedStudent1950, complains of institutionalized racism at the Mizzou campus and society at large. Their disruption has gotten so bad, the university president decided to resign earlier today. Since this is obviously news, sympathetic reporters are there to spread the protesters’ progressive message. Unfortunately for the journalists, Mizzou doesn’t seem to teach its students about the First Amendment.
Published in Education
You’re missing the point of the conversation. This is about basic research. Totally different thing from product innovation.
And therefore…public goods don’t exist?
Hmm. You like your internet? You like your microwave? You like jet engines? You like your computer? You like your military? You like satellites? You like GPS on your phone? You like your phone? You like modern medicine?
How did all that happen? Somewhere along the line, someone invested money in totally useless and pointless basic scientific research with no clear goal in mind and no particular utility.
Again, how does that happen?
And this is the fundamental problem with “conservatism” run amok. It’s turned into a caricature of anarchism, instead of a mature argumentation of the proper roles of government, or a mature understanding of economics.
And then we are surprised why there are no intellectuals on the right. Well, because it is fundamentally an anti-intellectual ideology. Or at least, it’s become as of very late.
You can ask that question to the POLITICIANS in the state of Missouri, including Republicans, who called for his resignation. He didn’t resign due to a few dozen moronic students. In fact, he said he had no intention to, until the politicians told him to.
Godwin’s law.
What has been happening at the U of Missouri doesn’t seem right to me. I believe many here at Ricochet think as I do that there are some very serious things amiss in our higher education system, probably not all thinking it’s the same thing that is wrong. Examples: Cost too much; Curriculum problems; Excessive numbers of Administrators; Tenured faculty teaching too little; Too much PC; Faculty leans too left; Too many social justice warriors and too much time spent on social rather than education issues; just to name a few.
Are we mistaken? How can we get a handle on this? Maybe we need some conservative university types to enlighten us so we are able to have more discussions that are fact-based instead of opinions. Thoughts?
You no play-a da game, you no make-a da rules!
Yes. Well, yes on most things.
Costs too much? Average net cost of 1 year of college is about $6k. Costs peanuts.
Curriculum problems? I don’t know what that means.
Excessive numbers of administrators? No. What’s the “optimal” number of administrators?
Tenured facility teaching too little? No. At least, depends on institution. For research schools their main job is research, not teaching. For teaching schools, 4-4 or 5-5 loads are hardly “too little”. Tenured faculty don’t teach any less than non-tenured faculty. For research schools, non-tenured faculty (but tenure track) teach very little too. But again, their main job is research.
Too much PC? Compared to what? More than the average company?
Faculty leans too left? Some faculty in some department. What’s the optimum left leaning that you would want? Maybe if “conservatives” didn’t treat universities like the Devil incarnate, and didn’t retreat from any intellectual debate, you wouldn’t have this.
Too much SJW? Compared to what? Society in general? Probably not.
Too much time on social issues rather than education? Absolutely not.
You really think “conservatism” is more fact based than opinions than its leftist counter-parts? I’d say no way.
Names please. I’d like to know who you think told him to go and why you think they did this.
Regards,
Jim
The big assumption you’re making is that, absent govt support, innovations in basic research don’t happen. Just be clear that that’s an assumption, not an argument.
As long as we can point to people like Thomas Edison, I’m confident that private enterprise can do a fine job creating technologies that raise the quality of life.
Wikipedia: Edison’s major innovation was the first industrial research lab, which was built in Menlo Park, a part of Raritan Township, Middlesex County, New Jersey (today named Edison in his honor). It was built with the funds from the sale of Edison’s quadruplex telegraph.
This is a man who ended up with over a thousand patents to his name.
By the way, the story of the Wright Brothers is an excellent example of how private enterprise can often succeed where government fails. One case; yes. How you wish to incorporate it into your worldview is up to you.
When your position is being compared to mid-century European fascism, and your only response is “Godwin’s Law,” well, then you have lost the argument.
It is the billy clause within Godwin’s Law.
LOL. Ok Billy. When your argument against basic research is “Mussolini”…
I don’t know why. You can ask the Republican chair of the Higher Ed Committee in Missouri who called for his resignation.
It’s not an assumption. It’s a fact. All of those things came about due to basic research funded by the government, for no other customer than the government, because no other practical utility of any of those things existed.
Which is not a counter-point to my argument. Again, there’s a difference between product innovation and basic research.
If you’re not going to acknowledge the basic…economic…facts of life, the difference between certain types of goods, the different characteristics of these goods, then there is nothing more to say on this.
And it’s not a normative argument of who should or should not do this type of research. It’s an empirical one: this type of research does not get done by industry.
When “conservatism’s” best argument is a snide remark akin to a kindergarten kid’s, then, you have no argument.
Another example of why this is not an “assumption” but just fact.
I know someone who just graduated with a Math PhD from my university. Super nerdy kid who spend 6-7 years doing stuff of utter uselessness and incomprehensive to me.
Along with a team of other mathematicians he wanted to solve some obscure math theorem, or whatever. I don’t know the details. Eventually he was able to solve it, and write his dissertation on it. Eventually what he developed was used by Exxon as a mathematical tool to predict fracking lines in rocks with greater precision than their previous systems. Which then leads to greater yields for oil fields.
The kid got hired by Exxon as a mathematician, with obviously very high salary.
Now, why didn’t Exxon invest in this type of research themselves? Well…they didn’t. And they don’t. That’s an empirical fact.
Why, is because Exxon specializes in one thing. It doesn’t specialize in spending countless money on hiring a bunch of kids to spend 6-7 years playing around with useless math, that they can’t recognize any value in.
Universities specialize in precisely that. And then Exxon specializes in picking what ends up being useful, without incurring the cost of what doesn’t.
That’s kind of funny, given that yesterday I made a statement about funding of basic research and you came up with a counter-point consisting of data on funding for R&D.
That’s probably because you didn’t read the headline of the chart: university R&D.
Not total R&D in the economy.
Most of what is done in universities is basic research. Not all of course.
For basic research overall:
Pretty much the same picture. Industry does do some, but overall pretty little. And overall, only about 5% of total industry R&D expenditures are in basic research.
Now your original claim was “if only it led industry do even 10%!” Well, industry does about 20% today actually.
But there’s still that 80% that it doesn’t do, and as you can see from the bottom chart, industry never spend more than 5-8% of its total R&D expenditures on basic research anyway.
So it’s a matter of degree. Will SOME get funded in the absence of government? Yes. Will there be FAR less than today? Absolutely. Would that be a “good thing”? Well, only if one thinks that science and technology don’t matter to a nation’s economy.
I know you don’t think that, but I’d guess a good chunk of “conservatives” do.
You missed my point: the fact that they happened with government money does not prove that they would not have happened without govt money.
More likely it’s because I read what you wrote and you didn’t.
Here is the relevant conversation:
Me: Even if private funding accounted for as much as ten percent of basic research, that would make a huge difference.
You: …And a lot more than 10% of it is currently funded by non-government agencies, about 35-40% in fact:
And then you threw up a chart showing R&D spending.
I wrote about basic research and you countered with words about R&D. And today you complain that somebody else is confusing basic research with product innovation.
I think that’s funny.
Hey, you provided an argument. Thanks. Provide more, please.
I think you’re getting closer to the truth here, but in fact, we can’t say for sure that private funding of universities–many of which which don’t even need tuition to function anymore–can’t pick up the slack created by a lack of govt funding.
That’s for you to prove, not for me to prove.
On page 4 there’s more.
Throughout history, basic science has been funded through the same mechanism: some very rich and singularly-minded institution that funded it for the purposes of pure discovery and curiosity.
Prior to government it was the Catholic Church. Or some super rich King or Prince. But for the most part it was the Church, which set up universities and monasteries where such things were funded.
Could we imagine that such an institution could re-emerge again in the absence of government funding for basic research. Anything is possible. But this is science fiction, not reality. And in either case, it would still be the same sort of institution.
What would be the point? None that I can see. The current system works more then well enough. And science fiction of what “could happen” is useful only for entertainment value.
And in either case, it wouldn’t be “industry”. Industry specifically…doesn’t…want to invest much in this. It wants to wait and pick the winners.
Sigh.
I specifically said university R&D.
Ok, whatever. See I told you, you COULD have explained yourself at the very beginning instead of just playing word games.
Fine, now you have your “basic research spending” charts in post #104.
Did anything in my argument change as a result? No. It’s the same picture.
Indeed. But somehow I had got the impression that you knew the difference between basic research and R&D. If you don’t, well, never mind then.
I put this comment in another post on the Member Feed, but I’ll copy it here for the amusement of people old enough to remember National Lampoon’s High School Yearbook parody.
‘This story is redolent with a million ironies. Seems — from what I can piece together — that the alumni and board caved owing to the threat of a strike by the football team:
It also seems — according to the Times’ reporting, for what it’s worth — that “Mr. Wolfe, 57, was hired in 2012 from the corporate world, an outsider brought in to cut costs in the four-campus system.”
It also seems the university plans to address the problems thus:
Now, I’d have to see the budget and crunch the numbers myself, but off the top of my head, I’d guess that’s going to cost as much as a million bucks. So giving in to blackmail is going to be (as usual) penny-wise and pound foolish.
All this said, the Tale of the Poopstika is the part of this that makes me wonder just what on earth is going on. Apparently, they found it in a restroom. Am I the only one old enough to remember National Lampoon’s College Yearbook? Because — just maybe — the right guy resigned, if you get my drift. I’m wondering if maybe we’ve got another Dr. Humphrey C. Cornholt on our hands.’
Just thinking out loud …
First off, WELCOME BACK, AIG! Really missed you.
Second, I presume folks who think there might be too many administrators base that assumption on assessments like this:
“For example, the military’s budget is about 1.8 times higher today than it was in 1960, while legislative appropriations to higher education are more than 10 times higher.
In other words, far from being caused by funding cuts, the astonishing rise in college tuition correlates closely with a huge increase in public subsidies for higher education. If over the past three decades car prices had gone up as fast as tuition, the average new car would cost more than $80,000.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/04/05/opinion/sunday/the-real-reason-college-tuition-costs-so-much.html?_r=0
Do you have any thoughts on why higher education costs have been rising so fast?
So it was football & money that was at the heart of this nonsense. Makes perfect sense because nowhere in any of this ridiculous shenanigan could education be possibly involved.
cont.
cont. from #114
I still say shut the whole damn thing down. If they want football let them field a pro team. If they want revolution let them start a real revolutionary movement and get imprisoned doing it. After that if anybody is left who wants an education then maybe you can re-open. The University system thinks it’s too big to get a failing grade.
Give them a huge F.
Regards,
Jim
Mizzou’s football team is overrated, anyway.
Translation: Let’s not do anything that would reform our universities.
Ret,
I’m all for reforming our Universities but to start the process you’ve got to bring garbage like this to a standstill. Guess what, I think the poop swastika is going to turn out to be the latest SJW hoax. If nobody can turn up a photo of the poop swastika, as virtually everyone on campus has a smart phone easily capable of a quick snap of recorded evidence, then I think we are going to realize this is just one more phony story that everybody bought into.
THE MISSOURI POOP SWASTIKA IS THE MOMENT SOCIAL JUSTICE JUMPED THE SHARK
Once we can slam the SJW crowd to the ground we can get started with the reforms. Till then a University campus is an insanity factory.
Regards,
Jim
Well, yes, I’m in favor of bringing the current garbage to a standstill, and doing so with great vigor. But that’s a lot different than saying we should shut the whole thing down.
If you aren’t willing to hold onto that option then you will always cave to blackmail. What if the “incidents” all turn out to be hoaxes. Given the last couple years there is a very good chance that it’s all pure invention.
Regards,
Jim