LOSS OF UNIVERSITIES TO INDUSTRIAL GREED

The president of the University of Minnesota tells Washington how he sold out his university to big business and I am sure was applauded for it.  The epigraph of a speech normally is a throw away. A person read them but then discards them. They usually say what follows is a speech and that is about it. This time it was different.

I encountered an epigraph of a speech that caused me a sleepless night. It said that I have lost a fight I have been fighting for years. I published a book on Amazon Kindle entitled University Industrial Complex: Erosion of Higher Education about why I voluntarily terminated my career as a Professor of Clinical Pathology after losing the battle over the exact same thing in the College of Veterinary Medicine at the Univ. of Minn. over 28 years ago.  No one would listen to me then; therefore, I do not expect anyone to listen to me now. Our universities have been sold out to big business: they no longer are teaching institutions but are research institution—they hire researchers not teachers. If you think the University of Minnesota is there to teach your sons and daughters, you are wrong.  University president Eric Kaler is there to help business and do it by using student tuition and taxpayers money. He is a disgrace and what he is doing is an outrage but you as parents of university students can do nothing about it. Big business controls who is President of the University and what his policies are.

Here is the epigraph. President Eric W. Kaler delivered the following remarks at the U.S. Department of Commerce in Washington, D.C., on the occasion of a conference, “The Innovative and Entrepreneurial University: Higher Education, innovation and Entrepreneurship in Focus.” President Kaler’s panel addressed issues on the topic, “University Technology Transfer and Industry Collaboration” The bold letters are mine.

Kaler and his cohorts is so driven by greed that he can not see that with an un-educated  populations there will nothing to “innovatively transfer”. The University of Minnesota President is a big business sycophant; he sold out education to big business for research money overhead he gives us higher tuition huge class sizes and foreign born teaching assistants and not professors teaching students. Business is there because it is profitable for them to be there and are not there to education anyone.  The myth that an excellent researcher is an excellent teacher is wrong. If you want a teacher hire a teacher; if you want a researcher hire a researcher.

 Dr. Kaler said of land grant universities, “We were established to serve the state.” There is nothing in the1865 legislation saying taxpayers should pay to do anything but teach. There is nothing giving them responsibility for marketing research findings.  He referred to the time lapse between the results of university research and the marketing of the idea as the “valley of death”. University professors should not be doing research because it is marketable; he or she should be doing it to teach students how to do research in an industrial laboratory.  The real “valley of Death” should refer to industries hiring foreign graduates because ours cannot do the job. Frank H. T, Rhodes, retired president of Cornell University (The creation of the Future: Cornell Press, 2001) wanted businesses to take over university administration of personnel hiring and firing, which is exactly what Eric Kaler has done.  His speech was an abomination. The fact that it was given in the Department of Commerce and not the Department of Educations is scandalous.  As a reminder, the man who wrote the speech for Eisenhower’s warning about the military-industrial complex; big business taking over our military, was president of a university. Would it surprise you to know that he, Malcolm Moos, was president of the University of Minnesota when big business started to take over our Universities?