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 My favourite saying, even if it is one of my own, is: any so-called fact that’s not intuitive to my dog (the sun rises, rain is wet etc) is just someone’s opinion. That’s my mantra, if you like. Which translates to: question everything, especially facts presented in the most earnest ways by those who seek to assert themselves via the vehicle of ‘pedigreed authority’. This applies particularly to facts presented by experts from academia...
I was inspired to paroxysms of fury yesterday watching a newspiece (on Australia’s ABC 7.30 Report) wherein a bunch of dour-looking, be-suited chief academic pontificators decided to put their own hat into the ring for government bailout funding. Feeling, I guess, all lonely and unloved in the face of bailouts to the car industry and the like, the academic set was not going to keep their begging bowls out of the ring for long. But the arguments they used! They were even less credible than the spiel the car boffins used on their private jet propelled bail-out begging visit to Washington DC last week... The key point of contention here is: who said that what the universities do is so fundamentally essential to economic, technical and social progress? The answer is: the universities. As a person who spent 22 years in academia, I have seen arguments of this kind time and time again. It is a remarkable exercise in self-referentialism; very much like the argument that sustains a particularly arcane religious cult. Think about it. The elites of academia are generally promoted via (exclusive) peer review. The inner circles are the judge and jury of what is regarded as good or not; on who is worthy of accolade or not... The benefits proposed to be bestowed on society from the towers of academia usually manifest as knowledge and invention. As a one time benefit cost analyst, I can’t help wondering what the benefit cost ratio might look like for the products of this enterprise. Yes, there are some worthwhile inventions to be bestowed, and yes, there are some training skills to be imparted to the workplaces of government and industry. But what we, the general community rarely get to see is the wallowing river of sludge through which those befits manage to ’seep’ into the currency of community relevance... I do think that some lateral thinking is needed by any government listening to bail out pleas from the academic establishment. There should be some strategically devised strings attached to any and all funding provided to that sector. The best one I could devise would be to insist that all teaching and research endeavour should be subjected to independent, external (non-peer) review from those communities that that endeavour apparently seeks to service. Let the people judge the worth of the work these people do at our (the tax payer’s) expense ... I mean a total immersion in taking the case for funding right into the core of those communities that academics of all disciplinary persuasions seek to serve. Read the full article on enviroblog . |
I continue to be astounded by the lack of criticism directed back to the true source of the global market collapse. Apart from simple, eternal human greed, there is one big shadowy figure lurking at the bottom of this pond, escaping accountability and inquiry. 
In my view, we tend to look too much into the search for solutions to and the quantification of climate change and not anywhere near enough into the causes of the problems involved. I look into the wonderfully titled theory of Technological Somnambulism in the search for insight into the persistence of technologies that we know are destructive and ultimately lethal to life on Earth. Or, in other words, I provide yet another rant on how cycling is the future and cars are the evil past for poor old gassed out Gaia. Click 
