But, especially in America, there has always been a separate, populist, strain [of conservatives]. For those in this school, book knowledge is suspect but practical knowledge is respected. The city is corrupting and the universities are kindergartens for overeducated fools.
The elitists favor sophistication, but the common-sense folk favor simplicity. The elitists favor deliberation, but the populists favor instinct.
This populist tendency produced the term-limits movement based on the belief that time in government destroys character but contact with grass-roots America gives one grounding in real life. And now it has produced Sarah Palin.
Wednesday, September 17, 2008
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4 comments:
Do you mean more so than in the degree-less population ? I don't think so.
Town-gown - no. whodat?
No, no. I mean that university lifers are more idiotic than, say, people with ordinary jobs. At the univ, people think that doing their research is really to someone's benefit when in almost all cases it is a stupid hobby gone pro.
Think of a history department, for example. What is it that it really produces? Ideally (and that is extremely rare) it is really producing former students that are better than absolute ignoramuses when it comes to history. The profs there think they are producing scholarship that is worth something to the taxpayer that is feeding them. That is false. Almost never is a historian doing anything the consumer of his services would buy.
The same is true in math and most other fields outside engineering and applied sciences.
This disconnect is certainly felt by the profs that are applying for grants they know well people that care nothing for their 'work' are ultimately paying for.
This makes the disconnect even moreso, needless to say, when the prof encounters another planeload of cretins every school year.
Academia becomes more isolated, speaking its own lingo until finally it is even talking about nothing. Its views on everything are tinted by this disconnect and the opinion on campus of off campus is that of New York to Zimbabwe.
The point of democracy, like it or not, is that if government is to be just, it should not be imposed. That means it is necessarily not elitist or detached as academia tries to be (I have spoken of elite mediocrities before) or is (I have just argued the detachment).
With profs in some ideal of knowing more and students being good if they at least shut up and listen, the univ is itself sliced into an unequal mix. The students that are well-treated by profs tend to be those that do what they are told and agree with what they are told.
So I thinkmany go through the motions and get their degreees, remember getting laid in the dorms and puking on Univ Drive, then move on and do something that they are paid for by someone that knows what they actually do.
Profs instead, stay in Harvard Sq, bang grad students (if someone recently got caught banging an undergrad) and drink with like-minded do-nothings.
I don't pretend that the taxpayer has any use for my theorems.
I think this is a pretty short sighted view. There are countless examples of purely theoretical work that eventually found practical applications (asymptotic expansions were eventually used in waveform tomography, which itself has applications in exploration of fossil fuels for instance).
Your theorems are beautiful baby.
The asymptotic expansions were done a hundred years ago before the NSF was handing out money for mathematicians to fly around like Bill Gates.
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