re: #393 Gus 802

Joe the Plumber the international foreign policy expert. Hard to believe but they actually asked that bonehead questions on foreign policy.

They been brainwashed to think that everybody that’s a bonafide expert has been trained in academia which itself is a “breeding ground for leftist Communist thought!” You know, they talk funny and almost sound British and use them there highfalutin words and such.

Stanley Fish on something relevant today:

Jeff Sandefer, whose presentation at a 2008 meeting with Governor Perry and the university Board of Regents established the tone and contours of “reform,” makes no bones about it. Professors, he complains, seem to believe “that our colleges and universities belong to them” (“Public Universities Belong to the Public, Not the Faculty,” Texas Public Policy Foundation, May 6, 2009). It’s time, he says, to stop writing “blank checks” to faculty members who occupy themselves “writing academic journal articles that few people read.”

That of course is an accurate description. Senior faculty members do in fact write articles that only their peers at the top of very rarified disciplines can read.

That is what academic research is all about: highly qualified scholars working on problems that may have no practical payoff except the unquantifiable payoff of advancing our understanding of something in philosophy or nature that has long been a mystery.

Who do these perfesser types think they are anyway, writin’ stiff that yer average college dropout and meth dealer in Wasilla can’t reed too gud?