College devalued by dumbing down 8.23.01

"The most beautiful thing we can experience is the mysterious. It is the source of all true art and science."
-Albert Einstein
"Dreamer. You know you are a dreamer. But can you put your head in your hands? Oh no!"
-Supertramp

Albert Einstein did some of his early work on atomic energy at Iowa State. It's true and ISU has the pictures to prove it. I used to walk right past a memorial to some of the early uranium purification tests and think to myself, "My god, I wonder how much radiation this big rock with the plaque on it is cranking out?"
Not too many people know this, but the Big E, as he was called by the members of Alpha Sigma Phi when he invented the beer bong in their spanking room, was a whimsical, philosophical, creative dude.
Unfortunately, his kind are no longer welcomed at universities these days unless their whimsy can rake in the dough.
With that in mind, I thought I would continue an ongoing series I know folks around here get a kick out of and I don't mind talking about either, which is to say giving more reasons why many people should not go to college.
Previously I said that public universities are more technical schools than places of higher learning today especially the ones that are starved for cash.
As recently as last year at Iowa State, many professors in the arts and sciences felt not only short shrifted by the university, they felt the university was giving a raw deal to undergraduate education in favor of research. This has been an ongoing concern since the 1980s.
The theory is that research brings in money whereas educating undergraduates takes time away from research that brings in money.
Professors in the "soft" sciences and the beneficial but unquantifiable areas of communication, literature, philosophy and performing arts (a.k.a. liberal arts and sciences) complained vigorously and even attempted to draw attention to their plight by starting a faculty petition. Many LAS faculty members complained about the difficulty of working in an environment of fear and repression. Takes quite a bit for middle-class profs to admit they work in the same kind of atmosphere as the average meatpacker (see current issue of Mother Jones, now available online at motherjones.com and at speciality bookstores).
Money, as people with money are always eager to tell you, makes the world go around. So logically if you are not "all about" making money or not at least slavishly inclined to defer superiority to those with it or those who are killing themselves to become those with it, you are often dismissed as naive or "a dreamer." Why? Because it is cheaper than locking you up.
This is standard in "the real world," but college is not "the real world," it is supposed to be better than that. It is supposed to be a place for ideas, the kind of ideas that ultimately enrich the lives of even those with wads of money who buy Picassos to hang in their living rooms or over the craps table at a casino in Vegas.
Ideas cannot flourish in an environment where the bottom line is all that matters and it is unethical and immoral to continue to perpetuate the myth that ideas are flourishing in an environment when they are not. Oh sure, patents are flourishing. Grants are coming in, but again, these are bottom line details, meanwhile I graduated with people who could barely form coherent sentences let alone think for themselves, write a poem that didn't suck, create a truly artistic community for the betterment of mankind.
Buyer beware. You can't legislate morality, at least you can't legislate morality when really freakishly huge sums of money are involved, that is free enterprise. Legislating morality when little or no money is involved is called upholding community standards.
We might well poo-poo the people who are a little out of step with their time and place, those freaky-deaky ones who see things from a slightly different perspective, the ones who take time out to create things that do not have a readily available market, but I assure you, their worth, though not easily estimable is great.
Who creates the music and movies? Who writes the books and TV shows? Who invented the jalapeño popper? Freaks, geeks and weirdoes, people with the ability to step outside the everyday and look not into the future that probably will be, but into the future that might be, that could possibly be.
Even the personal computer was created by Steve Jobs of Apple, a man more artist than techie.
Universities, far from unleashing the human potential, have started to become the places artists and thinkers USED to hang out at.