CORRUPTION OF HIGHER EDUCATION

Greed is the dominant factor in what we could describe as the modern American personality array of traits. “Survival of the fittest” in its most primitive form contribute mightily to survival; the strongest, the most aggressive, and the most persistent personality types are the most likely to survive.  Those who are willing to put aside other “moralistic” traits such as shame, guilt, fairness, empathy, and sympathy among other learned propensities perhaps indications of learned cultural accumulations. In other words, we are learning how to shed the raw cruelty of bestial survival and to survive with a good quality of life. Given all these good things, we still have glaring evidence that greed sets aside all of this humanization—in this context, perhaps avarice is a better term.  We see it in “big business” every day where we see the line between good business and thievery erased.

One complicated examples is in our Universities. Big business has corrupted the system of higher education in several ways: professionalizing college sports, using taxpayers’ money to run commercial businesses under the university umbrella, but nowhere is it more obvious then in patentable research; something I have labeled the University Industrial Complex. Books have been written about but only one of them warns of the erosion to higher education. The others have fallen in line with the failed “greed is good” at any cost philosophy. Grant money is the seed of the corruption. A company awards a grant to a university professor to do research that will benefit that company. The fallout from that simple step has racked havoc on the entire system. University administrators love it, politicians love it, professors love it, and most of all CEO’s love it but students and their parents suffer. The universities hire many more professors then they really need to teach (student teachers ratios), they corrupt the teaching mission to promote research (hire researchers and not teachers), tuitions go up, class sizes enlarge, State appropriations (taxpayers’ dollars) are used to build more buildings to house the research so the companies benefit. The proof; if they did not profit from this activity they would not give the grants.

The degrees from research universities are becoming less and less meaningful. CEO’s are hiring foreign engineers because they cannot find enough well trained U.S. engineers. Apparently, the circularity of their logic has not dawned on them.  My message in this blog is simple; the university cannot and should not try to be all things to all people. It should be first and foremost be an institution for higher education. Return private research to company property and government sponsored research institutes. Stop funneling taxpayers’ money into private company research projects while calling them “education dollars”.