Funding & Student Fees
The thread about NCAA funding has led to much doom & gloom.
1) Who has the most impact per dollar? Forget the Bubas Cup, where the 6 traditional track events each weigh as much as football. For visibility, who currently leads the 'Belt?
2) There has been a lot of talk about students paying "more fees." Ever since the Jindalian Disaster,* the bulk of our money comes from tuitions. Direct fees may be low, but indirect fees through tuitions are among the highest in the 'Belt.
3) Someone brought up the 'workforce development' argument, that we should get rid of degrees and courses that don't directly train workers for the workforce.
..a) Which workforce? The data is clear that in the future workers will change, not just jobs, but careers, repeatedly, and at an accelerated pace. The point is, we need to stop thinking in terms of the 'applied' disciplines, because they don't train us to re-train. We don't even want to talk exclusively about the sciences, because the sciences teach us to work within a paradigm. Only the liberal arts train us to be perspectivalist in our thinking. (For those of you interested in Kuhn v Popper, Popper sounds better, but the evidence-- the *ahem* data-- shows Kuhn was right.)
..b) Dictators want workforce development, because broad mental training (again, perspectivalism) produces people who question the tyrant. In a democracy, we need more, we need citizen-force development, to produce people who can use the different approaches of different disciplines to analyze the world around us. Again, the sciences don't do that.
....i) Trust me, I'm a doctor.
....ii) Back off, man, I'm a scientist.
4) I haven't checked in the last few years, but as of about 10 years ago, most politicians in Louisiana were no longer lawyers.
5) All of this demonstrates a major pitfall of the 'football mentality': everything has to be ranked, and we must be highly ranked in everything... which, ironically, is a good example of why we need perspectivalist thinking. Example: We want to say we have the most faculty, right?
Or do we want the lowest faculty, so that our funding per faculty, and our PhD production per faculty, go up? Again, we need to think flexibly, analytically, perspectivally.
5) We're blowing off the lid in research, and remember, we aren't here to play ball games. Intermural athletics exist, and only exist, to further the University's mission. So do we really want to argue that we should put more money into auxiliary concerns, rather than invest in our core industry?
Would you run your own business that way?
So again, despite the many poor role models we find around us, UL ain't here to play ball games.
Nor to make up for the feelings of inadequacy in our own lives (and yes, I suffer from the same inadequacies... )
*For any of you Roman History buffs, see 'the Varian Disaster.'
Quote
Re: Funding & Student Fees
Originally Posted by RaginCajun77
