20 July 2008
second corrective
From Roger:
'Britain's higher ed institutions have a much different history than America's - and even now, American higher education is a triumph of America's secret social democracy. Since WWII, the state has poured money into higher education, partly through the huge military industrial complex, to reap a number of benefits - one of which, of course, is to absorb unemployed youth, always one of the big drivers behind education. Big colleges and a huge jail system both address that problem. As James Galbraith points out in the Predatory State (which I'm reviewing, so I can handily quote it), higher education in the U.S. consumes 2.75 percent of the GDP, which is about a percentage over the European norm. European nations, including the U.K., scandalously underresource higher education. It is a bit inexplicable to me - huge increases in h.e. would take care of millions of unemployed youths, who would be unemployed still, but we can pretend they aren't and they get to have more fun, too. If you want to create a docile generation of consumers, and who doesn't, build more universities.
In the golden sixties and seventies, when the U.S. made a big effort to develop the kind of horrifying weapons and all the paraphernalia of warmongering at any price, money flowed like wine into the universities. There's a reason that the first encounter with LSD by most of the 'counter-culture' leaders - Keasy, Ginsburg, Robert Stone, Leary, etc., etc. - came under the aegis of one government grant or another - it was a very tiny tiny part of the money that went into every part of the academic system, from the humanities to psychology. The humanities was important in the cold war. You might not see why at first, but ... well, take something like anthropological field work among the Yanomami. That wouldn't seem of military importance, but when Napoleon Changnon first went there in the early sixties, he went there on a grant to collect blood. Why? Because the people in the AEC were getting a little freaked out by one of the results of testing nuclear weapons - everywhere they tested in the world, people had way elevated levels of an iodine isotope in their blood. The U.S. and Russia had accidentally performed the greatest experiment in history, since never before had there been a distribution of a radioactive isotope throughout the human race, once which nobody had before. Is that cool or what? A new chemical in the human system, with unknown potential effects. It was a big oopsy moment when this sunk in, and - contrary to myth - some people in the U.S. government were a little concerned that they may have given the world's population something that would make them chronically ill or even kill them. Call them softies, but that's the kind of responsible people they were. So that was why this young prof just off his PH.D dissertation was in the jungle of Venezuela, taking blood samples. Oh, and they turned out to have the isotope in their blood too. But you'd never know that from Changnon's writings, because he took advantage of the grant for his own purposes. All the academics did.'
'Britain's higher ed institutions have a much different history than America's - and even now, American higher education is a triumph of America's secret social democracy. Since WWII, the state has poured money into higher education, partly through the huge military industrial complex, to reap a number of benefits - one of which, of course, is to absorb unemployed youth, always one of the big drivers behind education. Big colleges and a huge jail system both address that problem. As James Galbraith points out in the Predatory State (which I'm reviewing, so I can handily quote it), higher education in the U.S. consumes 2.75 percent of the GDP, which is about a percentage over the European norm. European nations, including the U.K., scandalously underresource higher education. It is a bit inexplicable to me - huge increases in h.e. would take care of millions of unemployed youths, who would be unemployed still, but we can pretend they aren't and they get to have more fun, too. If you want to create a docile generation of consumers, and who doesn't, build more universities.
In the golden sixties and seventies, when the U.S. made a big effort to develop the kind of horrifying weapons and all the paraphernalia of warmongering at any price, money flowed like wine into the universities. There's a reason that the first encounter with LSD by most of the 'counter-culture' leaders - Keasy, Ginsburg, Robert Stone, Leary, etc., etc. - came under the aegis of one government grant or another - it was a very tiny tiny part of the money that went into every part of the academic system, from the humanities to psychology. The humanities was important in the cold war. You might not see why at first, but ... well, take something like anthropological field work among the Yanomami. That wouldn't seem of military importance, but when Napoleon Changnon first went there in the early sixties, he went there on a grant to collect blood. Why? Because the people in the AEC were getting a little freaked out by one of the results of testing nuclear weapons - everywhere they tested in the world, people had way elevated levels of an iodine isotope in their blood. The U.S. and Russia had accidentally performed the greatest experiment in history, since never before had there been a distribution of a radioactive isotope throughout the human race, once which nobody had before. Is that cool or what? A new chemical in the human system, with unknown potential effects. It was a big oopsy moment when this sunk in, and - contrary to myth - some people in the U.S. government were a little concerned that they may have given the world's population something that would make them chronically ill or even kill them. Call them softies, but that's the kind of responsible people they were. So that was why this young prof just off his PH.D dissertation was in the jungle of Venezuela, taking blood samples. Oh, and they turned out to have the isotope in their blood too. But you'd never know that from Changnon's writings, because he took advantage of the grant for his own purposes. All the academics did.'
