I've long had a love-hate relationship with academia. What I love is the philosophical intellectual rigor that's supposed to characterize true expertise. What I hate is that a doctorate in yoyo building makes some people an expert on everything.

A nice example today in the LA Times.

NO ONE seems to care about the upcoming attack on the World Trade Center site. Why? Because it won't involve villains with box cutters. Instead, it will involve melting ice sheets that swell the oceans and turn that particular block of lower Manhattan into an aquarium.

The odds of this happening in the next few decades are better than the odds that a disgruntled Saudi will sneak onto an airplane and detonate a shoe bomb. And yet our government will spend billions of dollars this year to prevent global terrorism and … well, essentially nothing to prevent global warming.

*Sigh* Daniel Gilbert is a psychologist--at Hahvad no less, which means of course that he's an expert on everything, even when he says stupid things like this. I have no doubt that his description of human psychology is accurate, but his context is risible. The seas are not rising and in fact Antarctic ice is increasing in volume, not melting

Does Dr. Gilbert know more than Dr. Claude Allegre? Probably about psychology, but not about climate change. On the other hand, does he really know all that much about psychology?

It seems to me that Gilbert is actually recommending that Americans adopt a very psychologically unhealthy mindset--quench our alarm over immediate threats like Islamic terrorism, and replace it with an existential threat from climate change. Don't we put people like that in straight jackets?

Generalized anxiety disorder (GAD), which affects about four million Americans (2.8 percent), is characterized by at least six months of a more-or-less constant state of tension or worry not related to any event. If you suffer from GAD, you may always expect a catastrophe to happen. Though you may know your feelings are unrealistic, you cannot control them. The worries that accompany GAD are non-specific; nor are they obsessive as are the thoughts and worries experienced with obsessive-compulsive disorder. However, more than half the people who suffer from GAD also have another anxiety disorder or depression.

Bad science AND malpractice.

Jeb Bush isn't going to get an honorary degree. I doubt he'll lose any sleep over it.

Al Gore is going to get an honorary degree. I won't be losing any sleep over that.

Al Gore will still be a goof ball in my eyes (and in the eyes of many others), the only difference being that he got an honorary degree from a bunch of academic goofballs--the same kind of people who thought Ward Churchill was eminently qualified to head his department.

Its no accident that the ritual of getting a degree--honorary or otherwise, involves strange vestments and funny hats. Local legend recalls the words given by the irreverent, fabulously intelligent Hugh Nibley during an invocation at a 1960 graduation at Brigham Young University:

"We have met here today clothed in the black robes of a false priesthood . . ."

Years later he sought to amplify that comment:

Why a priesthood? Because these robes originally denoted those who had taken clerical orders; and a college was a "mystery," with all the rites, secrets, oaths, degrees, tests, feasts, and solemnities that go with initiation into higher knowledge.

But why false? Because it is borrowed finery, coming down to us through a long line of unauthorized imitators. It was not until 1893 that "an intercollegiate commission was formed . . . to draft a uniform code for caps, gowns, and hoods" in the United States.1 Before that there were no rules. You could design your own; and that liberty goes as far back as these fixings can be traced. The late Roman emperors, as we learn from the infallible DuCange, marked each step in the decline of their power and glory by the addition of some new ornament to the resplendent vestments that proclaimed their sacred office and dominion. Branching off from them, the kings of the tribes who inherited the lands and the claims of the empire vied with each other in imitating the Roman masters, determined to surpass even them in the theatrical variety and richness of caps and gowns.

When I read this again, I occurred to me that this described precisely the dynamic we are witnessing with Al Gore--his credibility shattered, his allies seek to add "another ornament" to bolster his authority.

The real irony is this comedy is that the process of conferring an honorary degree has always been about transferring some of the luster of an accomplished and esteemed individual, to the institution itself--"Here is excellence, this is what we honor and strive for..." By implication, the acolytes are impressed with the idea that such accomplishments are possible through the auspices of the institution--after all, won't the students share in common with those so honored, the same vestments and sashes?

Somewhere along the line, the provosts started believing their own propaganda, and now, rather than incur prestige from those that they "honor", they diminish themselves by dismissing the accomplished and brilliant and gilding the fool and liar.

Apparently there's an 'influential author' who is no longer required to be studied for English degrees at most US colleges. Of the influential Ivy League colleges only Harvard considers this influential dead white male compulsory reading for a foundation in English. Well, it would be perfectly apt for this influential dead parrot. this passe' penman to be dropped from English courses altogether. He wrote about honour,duty,kingship,good,evil,the sense of tears in things and the sense of mirth in things; stuff which critical advances have revealed as mere semiotics. Brave new world.

Is the lesson to be learned here it doesn't take a degree to be an effective dean of admissions at MIT?

The dean of admissions at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology was forced to resign today after the school confirmed an anonymous tip that she had lied about graduating from college herself.

...She attended college for one year, as a part-time student at the Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in 1974, but never received the bachelor's or master's degrees that she claimed from RPI. Nor did she receive a degree she claimed from Albany Medical College, the university found.

... And Abe Lincoln rode a mule.

Looks like embarrassing ignorance isn't confined to Columbia students. One at my Alma Mater, BYU, doesn't fare well in basic U.S. history (you'll need to click the quick-time presentation).

This is a comment on Dave's comment - "the invite should never have occurred" - on my comment on Mick's post 'Bollinger Bollixes his Brief' to the effect that confronting A'jad was a decent deed performed by a hypocrite who should not have invited this A'hole to speak. It's a post so as to include the video:

Reasonable men (and we too) can disagree whether Bollinger got his multiculti knickers in a twist with the invite. I do agree he's a hypocrite because he opposed the ROTC at Columbia, but I'm glad that he invited A'jad and I'm glad at his take-down which was wholly effective. Suppose Hitler, Stalin or Mao, with the world watching, had been confronted to their faces with a similarly levelheaded summary of their scumminess. That would have brought them into ridicule and consolidated resistance. It would also be an inspiration in history. No invite, no takedown, no autobeclowning, no inspiration.

"I am only a professor who is also a university president. Today I feel all the weight of the modern civilised world yearning to express its revulsion at what you stand for. I only wish I could do better."

The practical upshot of Bollinger's invite has been to break the liberal meme that BigBad Bush must be deterred from attacking the tolerant, Islamic, more-sinned-against-than-sinning resistance-fighters in Iran so as to steal their oil (tho I would be happy to steal their oil). By speaking against homosexuality in PoliticallyCorrect-i-bad U, NYC, A'jad committed a mortal sin on liberal soil and that's cooked his goose with the bien pissants far worse than his implied threats to nuke Israel.

Bollix (American); Bollocks (English); Cojones (Spanish).

From the Volokh Conspiracy:

It turns out, according to the study, that 17.6 of professors in the social scientists consider themselves Marxists. Only academics doing a survey of other academics could possibly think that this is low (actually, the authors use the term "rare"!). The next time someone tells you that conservatives avoid academic positions in the social sciences because they believe in nonsensical superstitions with no empirical or logical support, while liberals believe in the scientific method, remember that 17.6% figure. (Update: See also Freud and Freudianism, whose time thankfully seems to have largely passed.)

UPDATE: Among actual scientists, in the physical and biological sciences, the percentage who identify themselves as Marxists is zero.

What's really remarkable about this survey is that while socialism is at least a somewhat practical implementation of Marxist ideals, to be a Marxist you really have to be out in La La Land (Marxism has no government, everybody just takes what they need and sings Kumbaya...)

Of course, people who actually embrace socialism deserve what they get--when a government owns everything and the people own nothing, that's pretty much the definition of fascism. I believe the more common acceptance of socialism is that its a good idea for "you" as long as I'm part of the power-elite.

Well it is four years older.

USA Today reports:

The idea that more time in school produces better results could get a small boost today with the release of international data from the Brookings Institution. The study finds adding 10 minutes of math instruction to an eighth-grader's day translates into a jump in math skills…

…Most U.S. eighth-graders got 45 minutes of daily math instruction in 2003, down from 49 in 1995, but their scores on the Trends in Mathematics and Science Survey improved slightly.

Come again?

Researcher Tom Loveless says that is an anomaly, and more time in class could help boost scores.

Tom needs to be sure his definition of an anomaly isn't a fact that runs counter to a pre-ordained conclusion (see also Global Warming ...)