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>Admittedly, most regents and administrators are orders of magnitude less
>ethical than most scientists.
That's frightening -- I know a whole lot of unethical scientists!  But in 
general, you are correct from my experience . . . .
>and fees. Why has the level of service and the quality of education not
>gone up with the astronomical increases in tuition in the last 10-20
>years? 
Because little of that money makes its way into the classroom; increasing 
burdens are being placed on TA's and adjuncts at slave wages while few 
professor's salaries keep pace with the rise in the cost of living.  
Because most of the money  gets funneled off to administrators and various 
administration-related impedimentia, for the care and feeding and hiring of 
more administrators.  Because much cash goes to the various politically 
correct and socially correct grants/programs/causes of the year, or gets lost 
in expanding sexy infrastructure and programs peripheral to instruction.  
Because much of education is overseen by educators, and not teachers.  
Because the curriculum is continually dumbed down in order not to fail too 
many of the barely literate who are gaining entrance into universities in 
droves, since universities are forced to maintain high enrollments by fiscal 
necessity and since high schools are churning out legions of the brain dead
in ever increasing numbers.  Because our society is producing more and 
more young people who do not accept the fundamental idea that, in the end, 
THEY are responsible for their education -- they must have an interest in 
learning, they must come to class, they must study, and that most heinous 
thing of all -- they must think!  Because too few professors are really 
interested in teaching, and because in many universities the tenure system 
actually *penalizes* those who focus on teaching.
Perhaps as the above rant indicates, the tenure problem is only one part of a 
whole range of systemic woes that are killing college and university education 
in many places.  A small part.
>Tenuring professors is not the answer to protecting them from
>administrators - collaring the administrators is the answer.
Absolutely.  Can it be done?  I doubt it.  My experience (and I am not as 
cynical or bitter as I sound!) is that, increasingly, universities and 
colleges are run by administrators, for administrators, under the scrutiny of 
yet other administrators.  The most important product to be produced by a 
higher academic institution is not outstanding students, but rather a really 
good report to federal and state agencies.  All too many universities exist 
now not to provide an education or even foster research -- they exist as 
degree mills, designed primarily to create $$ and bring the state or 
organization that funds them prestige and public acclaim.  They are far more 
concerned about courting wealthy alumni and private industry, pleasing all the 
governmental authorities to which they must give tribute, and fielding 
top-notch athletic programs . . . .
There are, of course, exceptions.  Very few of them.

There is really nothing wrong with the idea of permanent jobs
for everyone. If one is not planning to put people to death
to save costs when times are hard, then those people are still
going to need food and shelter. Whatever difficulties there
might be in providing for them are artifacts of the allocation
of responsibility for and control over monetary and other resources.
Early in the 20th century, the notion of having an employer provide
a guaranteed annual income was an innovation. This innovation did
not come from unions clamoring for better working conditions. It
came from one of the leaders of industry, namely Proctor, of
Proctor and Gamble. Before his innovation, his soap factory would
routinely lay people off when orders slacked off and bring them back
when orders picked up again. One day, Proctor realized that the actual
demand for soap is fairly constant and that what made the number of
orders fluctuate was the fact that the jobbers who served as middlemen
would from time need to fill up their warehouses again with soap
and would then, and only then, buy soap. He realized that the
appearance of good and bad times was entirely illusory, an artifact
of the distribution system.
Once he realized that, he decided it made more sense to keep his
workers on the job even when the orders slacked off. He realized
that in this way, he could retain his skilled workers as well
as their loyalty. In Japan, they have been wise enough to realize
this also.
He wanted to be able to discuss this with his workers, in order
to work out a system for annual contracts, and asked them
to form a union so that he would have a representative group
to negotiate with. I learned about this in a book entitled
"Guaranteed Annual Wages", or something like that.
In my opinion, a similar illusion leads us to jettison and waste
our most valuable human resources whenever there is a fluctuation
in the business cycle. In such times, meanness tends to gain in
popularity. We live in such times now. But the problems are really
problems of the distribution of control of and responsibility for
resources in our society. I don't think that highly skilled educators
and researchers ought to be wasted for such a stupid reason.
We need more teachers, not fewer. We need more scientists. We need
more educated people. The reason we are able to draw the conclusion
that we can do with less is that we have redefined, for example,
teaching to mean a certain perfunctory chore performed on
large groups of students. It is because we have defined learning
to be something that takes place in institutions called schools
under bureaucratically controlled conditions, instead of viewing
society itself as the arena in which education must take place.
No wonder education looks like a temporary aberration to the people
who are being asked to pay for it. But the truth is that everyone
has a unique way of learning and what is needed is more teachers
and smaller contact groups and individual attention given to students
and a larger pool of educated people from whom they can learn, both
formally and informally. Therein lies one of the most pernicious
effects of the present system of education: people who pass through
it may or may not learn what it was intended for them to learn,
but they all emerge with an essentially bureaucratic definition of the
word "education". This greatly complicates the task of getting
anyone to pay for any other concept, since the very language needed to
discuss it has already been coopted.
The very fact that the notion of money has to be injected into
any discussion of things that are inherently unquantifiable is
fundamentally destructive. Where is the notion that things can
and ought to be done simply because they are good things to do?
It is good to help other people learn things and it is good
to use one's brain to understand the world better and to invent.
It is good to feed people who need food and to provide shelter
to those who need shelter. How did we ever buy into the idea
that it is better not to do these things because of some
computation about a legal fiction such as money?
As Ted Koppel explained last night on Nightline, if the Simpson
jury finds for the plaintiff, the jury will have to figure out
how to put a monetary value on the alleged murder by computing
the value of the clothes the victims were wearing, the monetary
compensation equivalent to deprivation of love from those deceased,
and innumerable other charges that will figure into the bill that
Simpson will receive. But this shouldn't shock us: indeed,
we put a value on human life whenever we sell it by the hour.
The role of money in our society serves to make priceless things
worthless.
Allan Adler
adler@pulsar.cs.wku.edu

In article <32E5070C.428D@gold.chem.hawaii.edu>, Dettol
 writes
>> 
>> As to academia, the US has won more science Nobels since WW II than the
>> rest of the world COMBINED.  Most of these were by academic scientists.
>> If it's not broke, why fix it?
>
>Germany won more Nobel prizes than anyone prior to World War II (hmmm, I
>think I'm right about that).  What has winning Nobel prizes got to do
>with academic accountability?  
>
>The US government put alot of money into basic research after WWII. 
>Commentators that I've heard or read attribute this in part to the cold
>war.
>
>Throwing money at a problem (ie. the need for advancement in science)
>did not mean that the current system was well structured. In other words
>it is broke but funding levels may have hid the problem to some extent
>in the past.
>
>
>Mike
Except the Jews; 12% for 0.5 % of the world's population. What a goof
Hitler made by exiling/slaughtering them since many of them were
patriotic Germans - more German than the Germans - and could have given
him mastery over Europe. The absence of a World Jewry was not just self-
evident - it was also immensely regrettable!!
 As Asimov wrote "Violence is the last refuge of the Incompetent". Few
people demonstrated this more vividly than Adolf Hitler.
-- 
Michael Martin-Smith

In article <2g7ml3msi3.fsf@pulsar.cs.wku.edu>, adler@pulsar.wku.edu (Allen Adler) writes:
>
	... snip ...
>We need more teachers, not fewer. We need more scientists. We need
>more educated people. The reason we are able to draw the conclusion
>that we can do with less is that we have redefined, for example,
>teaching to mean a certain perfunctory chore performed on
>large groups of students. It is because we have defined learning
>to be something that takes place in institutions called schools
>under bureaucratically controlled conditions, instead of viewing
>society itself as the arena in which education must take place.
>No wonder education looks like a temporary aberration to the people
>who are being asked to pay for it. But the truth is that everyone
>has a unique way of learning and what is needed is more teachers
>and smaller contact groups and individual attention given to students
>and a larger pool of educated people from whom they can learn, both
>formally and informally. Therein lies one of the most pernicious
>effects of the present system of education: people who pass through
>it may or may not learn what it was intended for them to learn,
>but they all emerge with an essentially bureaucratic definition of the
>word "education". This greatly complicates the task of getting
>anyone to pay for any other concept, since the very language needed to
>discuss it has already been coopted.
>
>The very fact that the notion of money has to be injected into
>any discussion of things that are inherently unquantifiable is
>fundamentally destructive. Where is the notion that things can
>and ought to be done simply because they are good things to do?
>It is good to help other people learn things and it is good
>to use one's brain to understand the world better and to invent.
>It is good to feed people who need food and to provide shelter
>to those who need shelter. How did we ever buy into the idea
>that it is better not to do these things because of some
>computation about a legal fiction such as money?
While I agree with most of what you write above, you do, IMO, err on 
the issue of money.  It is not a legal fiction but a measure of human 
labor.  Talking how something is so important that it needs to be done 
regardless of monetary considerations sounds very enlightened.  The 
fact that's being ignored, however is that things aren't just "done", 
somebody has to do them.  This somebody, or somebodies, in turn, have 
their own needs such as food, shelter, clothing etc. which must be 
provide by yet somebody else.  All of this needs to be taken into 
account.
It is but a short step from the notion that "something must be done 
regardless of means available" to comandeering slave labor from the 
individuals doing this "something". 
Mati Meron			| "When you argue with a fool,
meron@cars.uchicago.edu		|  chances are he is doing just the same"