28 Replies to “What’s The Opposite Of Diversity?”

  1. Awh, the poor university has to make do with less!

    Isn’t that what the profs and students have been preaching; make do with less?

    Gee universityites, when the taxpayers lose their jobs, and their money gets diverted to carbon taxes and higher electricity bills, guess what? There is no more money to pay you.

    So my advice is:
    – learn to code
    – go to a trade school
    – start a business. How about Uber Rickshaw? It’s the truly green way to go.

    1. Exactly. While I was finishing my Ph. D., my supervisor constantly whined about how he needed someone else to pay for his research.

      Bull tweet, I told him. Being a professor, he was well-educated and, supposedly creative and clever. (As it turned out, he was neither, but that’s another story.) What was stopping him from making do with less and making do with what he had on hand. His lab was filled with idle, though older, equipment. What was stopping him from using some of it? I had to when I worked in industry–it’s called a budget and I had to keep within it, as once the money was spent, that was it.

      I paid for my research myself. I bought my computer and the money for the software I used came out of my pocket. I figured that if I could do that, he could, too.

      But, no, that wouldn’t do for him and his well-paid, tenured ego. He had a privileged opinion of himself and told me that the general public was obligated to fund what he was doing. And using older equipment would simply not do. His results would have more credibility if he used the latest, shiniest new toys for what he was working on. (“Voltages will be more voltager! Temperatures will be more Kelvinized or Celsiuser!”)

      That’s one reason universities have become money-harvesting machines. Assuming that one manages to jump through all of the white-heterosexual-men-need-not-apply hoops, one still might not get hired as a professor if one isn’t bringing in outside loot.

      And, no, just because one gets a grant, it doesn’t necessarily mean that one gets to spent any of it, let alone on what. The last head of the department where I did my Ph. D. insisted that any money coming in had to go into a common pool. I wasn’t privy as to how that cash was distributed, but I’m sure that there as a song and dance associated with that.

      Universities hate creativity, initiative, and independence. I’m sure one reason I never got a faculty position was that I was going to pay for my research myself. All I needed was a computer and paper and I could buy those using my own money. The department would have had no say in how I spent it.

      I don’t feel sorry for academe or academics any more. There’s a word for what that system is nowadays and that word is freeloaders.

      1. “Voltages will be more voltager! Temperatures will be more Kelvinized or Celsiuser!”

        I’m totally stealing that. i used to work in chemical engineering; now I’m a software engineer, where New Toy Syndrome is even worse.

        1. You’re most welcome.

          I live next to a shopping centre which has an Apple store. I see the New Toy Syndrome every time I pass by there.

          I remember an old Bloom County strip in which Opus is raving about his new thingy (a turnip twiddler or some such thing). Milo enters and tells him that the latest one has racing stripes or something like that, so Opus tosses the toy he as into the dustbin with a comment like “‘Tis trash!”

      2. So true. I worked in a physics lab at UBC one year, and it was embarrassing how hard the prof had to work to spend the stupid amounts of money he was given access to.

        A simple, yet typical example: In one case we needed a hammer drill for a particular task on some equipment we were building. We could have walked downstairs to the machine shop to borrow one for the 10 minutes it was needed. Instead, we put the project on hold while the prof searched out the most expensive hammer drill money could buy. Then he went and ordered two of them, just in case one broke. A week later the drills arrived and we resumed work. The drills then sat on a shelf for the rest of my time there.

        That’s how they rolled. When I asked him if he felt guilty spending taxpayer money like that, he replied “no, not really. If I thought the money would go to a women’s shelter if I didn’t spend it them maybe. But no, if I don’t spend it then it will just get wasted”

      1. The supervisor I had when I started grad studies 40 years ago acted as if his students were paid out of his own pocket. That allowed him to treat us like hired help and exploit us to no end, often resulting in never-ending times for completing our degrees.

        One foreigner came to study for his Ph. D. He already had a master’s in our discipline but he was torpedoed in his thesis defence and ended up with another one. The story I heard was that he eventually did get his doctorate…. 12 years after arriving in Canada.

    2. Yes, I saw that one too. It’s a beautiful idea: i.e. put your money where your mouth is and stand behind the quality of your product. If you’re turning out trash, you’ll be on the hook for it. If you’re turning out a high quality product, you have nothing to fear.

      1. Candidates for political office have to pay a financial deposit as a sign that they’re serious about their campaign. I’ve long advocated that academic researchers should bear some of the costs of their work for the same reason.

        Needless to say, a lot of academics start whining when I suggest that to them. They want somebody else to foot the entire bill, even if their research turns up nothing or meets a dead end. Bad results are as valid as good ones, but they decrease one’s chances of continuing the gravy train.

    3. The FACT is that Obama put the Federal Government is complete control of ALL college loans for one primary reason … to establish “student loans” as a quasi welfare system, where “students” could obtain Government GUARANTEED Loans for their entire living expenses while “going to college”. Nevermind that the first year of any college career was spent in remedial education … teaching what should have been learned in high school. Obama made student debt into a temporary welfare program for poor people with no prospects.

      And at least 30% of student loan debt holders … have NO college degree. Thanks Obama!

      1. And at least 30% of student loan debt holders … have NO college degree.

        I encountered the same thing while I was teaching. I had a student who started my course and, after a few weeks, disappeared. I assumed that she had dropped out but, later on, I found out that she skedaddled and became a mother after she got her loan.

        I don’t think she ever completed her studies in our department. I have no idea of how she ever hoped to pay back the money she borrowed, assuming she ever intended to do so.

        I’m sure that she wasn’t the only one who saw their loans as free money and were more than willing to default on them.

  4. Why must the lecture theatre be bricks and mortar. Other than lab time, most can go online for a fraction of the cost. almost all of the existing liberal arts professoriate can lobby for $15.00 per hour minimum wages for their true calling while perfecting their “would you like fries with that?” more appropriate limited customer interaction.

  5. one lesson I learned, ironically in the maligned university environment, is that once a given qty of funds is spent it is
    GONE FOREVER. too many in society merely assume more is on the way. I think in this situation the reality is now
    setting in.
    good.
    they ALL need to take some economics courses beginning with the classical supply-demand models.

  6. once a given qty of funds is spent it is GONE FOREVER. too many in society merely assume more is on the way.

    And many of those are academics, who think that the tax paying public is an endless cornucopia of funding for whatever they want to investigate. And those same academics behave as if the taxpayers will buy them a new toy in case they break the one they already have. Fixing it never enters their minds.

    I think in this situation the reality is now setting in.

    Not fast enough. What I described in my posts on this thread happened 20 years ago.

    Now here’s a thought: can anyone tell me how a university professor is worth a salary well into 6 figures? Someone I was in grad school nearly 40 years ago was getting around a quarter million dollars a year at a certain institution. He doesn’t do anything that involves financial risk or requires knowledge or education that only he has.

    In industry, one can be well-paid if one does something that results in more revenue for one’s employer, or does a university figure that bringing in sackloads of grant money count as income?

    1. The Sunshine List in Ontariowe is sickening. There are cops and firefighters on it but they take some amount of personal risk as well as see a lot of shitty stuff. But university profs make far more, work far less, enjoy controlled environments, have summers off. Its obscene.

      1. I agree that police, firefighters, and the military should be well-paid. We expect them to do dangerous things that we can’t or won’t do, often putting their lives on the line so that we can sleep safely at night.

        Professors, on the whole, don’t deserve their high rates of pay. I’m reminded of one departmental member of my thesis committee who happened to be a senior member of the faculty. He turned out to be a useless lump. He wasn’t terribly helpful, frequently told me he’d help me when I ran into problems and didn’t, and liked to sit around chewing the rag and telling stories.

        1. “I agree that police, firefighters, and the military should be well-paid. We expect them to do dangerous things that we can’t or won’t do”

          Wrong. It isn’t that WE can’t or won’t do cop work, it’s that THEY have Disarmed us and will arrest us if we defend ourselves and our property.
          The cops are functionally the ENABLERS of the criminals(see Justin Trudeau) and they have put us at the mercy of the criminals.
          Whatever the cops are being paid, it’s too much. They are petit-Tyrants and the Agents of Tyrants. Police State Delenda Est.

          Firefighters and the military? I totally agree. They should be paid more, especially the military. Firefighters are actually paid pretty good. They have a pretty good lifestyle too. Yes, fires are dangerous. No, firefighters do not take unreasonable risks.
          The military needs to be a well equipped, well respected class to Win Wars because there are few things in the world WORSE for a nation and a People than to be on the Losing side of a War. see the Treaty of Versailles

          1. The cops are functionally the ENABLERS of the criminals

            I don’t think all of them are.

            I grew up with someone who joined the RCMP soon after finishing high school. She retired after about 30 years and had risen high in its ranks.

            After she left the force, she became involved with the educational system. I’m sure that during her time as a constable, she probably saw what a lack of proper schooling could lead to and, perhaps, continued to fight crime by helping to prevent it and giving people a future.

            Sadly, I’ll never know if that was her reason or, if it was, whether she was successful. She was killed in a car accident about 15 years ago while on school-related business.

          2. “I don’t think all of them are.”

            If God made half of them honest tonight, they’d arrest the other half tomorrow.

            “I grew up with someone who joined the RCMP”

            I lived at CFB Penhold Alberta which was a special RCMP training base and which guarded a DiefenBunker.
            During WWII, it was a major RCAF and USAAF training base. The RCMP which were trained and stationed there were the finest in the nation. Many of them shared the hospitality and dining table in my parent’s home.
            I was there during the 1970 FLQ terrorist crisis. The RCMP and soldiers used the streets we lived on for training, including training to be provocateurs for Pierre Trudeau’s regime.
            My father would have to jump out of bed in the middle of the night when the Air Raid sirens went off. My bedroom faced toward the spotlight beacon that illuminated every night sky searching for intruders or acting as a beacon to guide politicians in for landing in case of a nuclear war so they could get to the NBC bunker.
            The RCMP we knew all quit because of the corruption. My parents were devastated. Dad was a highly decorated WWII veteran. This was the late 1960s-early ’70s.

            Do you think standards and things are getting better? No, entropy. Society and this nation are unraveling like a cheap sweater.

    1. Thank you Bubba
      Wish I had known about this guy when he was running for the leadership

  8. Universities are a microcosm of what the left wishes on society at large. And, as Margaret Thatcher said, eventually you run out of other people’s money.

  9. They aren’t dying….they are committing suicide. Outside STEM, they provide very little value these days. The sooner they die, the better.

  10. There are more PhD’s than pilot’s licences in North America.

    The best students have been suckered into getting their PhD’s, we all know the type, unfortunately that includes my niece, smart, but not traditional PhD smart, just very good students.

    1. I have a similar niece. She’s now a college instructor after spending a decade getting an advanced degree in wildlife biology. She was always happy to go on research trips, eyc., but openly despises her students, because they’re “stupid.” Meanwhile, she’s not very happy that being an instructor doesn’t pay as much as she thinks it should. She’s been taught, for years, that credentials automatically confer higher pay. She can’t understand how a plumber, welder, coiled tubing supervisor, or even a good equipment salesman might earn more than her. That they can, and do, strikes her as unfair, despite the absence of commercial value or profit in her field. Ironically, when it came time to monetize her education, she did have an opportunity to apply her degree for an energy company. She refused to even apply because she hates oil companies.

  11. On the hard science side equipment can make a difference.

    Out in liberal arts, all you really need is a seminar room, a library and a smart person in front.

    While people will slag liberal arts degrees the fact is that learning things like History or Literature or Philosophy for four years after highschool, while it will not equip you for a job, will make you less susceptible to bullshit. Or, at least it should. Unfortunately, the “Woke” have made actually learning those subjects very nearly impossible by dropping a fog of post-modernism, gender, race on top of quite useful disciplines.

    My home schooled kids are looking at trades and start-ups. College, maybe. But first, get a saleable skill.

    I once had a chat with a very respected Philosopher of Education named Joseph Tussman. He suggested that anyone getting a PhD in Philosophy should, as a degree requirement, get a trade ticket. Made sense thirty five years ago and even more sense now.

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