[Richard]

I'm certainly no academic and must say that my university experiences have - with the exception of a few of the entrenched bureaucratic Herrn Professorn Doktorn at Friedrich Wilhelms Universitat - been positive. On the other hand, and for this discussion, I think the following comments from Victor Davis Hanson might offer more insight into the issues and be of more interest to everyone.

Richard's $.02

What I Have Seen - Wisdom from a higher-ed career
Victor Davis Hanson, National Review, 25 Oct 2005

The lament about our failed schools and universities is by now familiar. From the left, the complaint is that they are underfunded, even ignored by a shortsighted and heartless public. The pay of teachers and professors supposedly remains poor in comparison with similarly educated private-sector professionals. Schools are asked to educate troubled youth and thereby rectify societal ills, all the while seeking a broad equality of result among departing graduates; universities must also accept students who in the past were simply not college material.

Conservatives answer that the schools and universities have adopted a therapeutic curriculum in pursuit of political objectives. Teachers and professors — through powerful unions, archaic tenure protocols, and easy legal redress — are largely unaccountable, and the incompetent among them are immune from removal. While the cost of administration has grown, the quality of education — as measured by either test scores or the ability of students to meet traditional course requirements — has declined over the last four decades. The problem is not too little money, but rather how much money is misspent.

I recently retired from a 20-year career in the California State University system — the world’s largest public university, with over 400,000 students. The Fresno campus where I taught was roughly representative of the system’s other 22 campuses, which dot the state from San Diego in the south to Humboldt and Chico up north — a good cross section, in other words, of public education in the nation’s bellwether state. Looking back, I think CSU is symptomatic of how vast is the problem of higher education in America — and how unlikely it is to be resolved anytime soon.

(cont'd) http://www.victorhanson.com/articles/hanson102505.html