LifeItself

In Part I and Part II of this series, I told you how desperately public universities play the U.S. News & World Report rankings game. Public academia appears to be unable to grasp the fact that school rankings are an elaborate scam set up to boost private schools and provide them with steady income and prestige.  This obsession with rankings also plays to the recurrent thinking in the U.S. that unless you are rich or an already highly-educated, ready-to-use immigrant like me, you are not worthy of a decent life and it is your own fault.  Yeah, shame on you, why aren't you rich or well-educated? In Part I and Part II, I also suggested that in undergraduate education public universities would never win or place high in the current rankings scam.  Simply put, the rankings carrot is dangled from much too high for the public universities to bite, no matter how hard they try to jump. Since I spent 18 years as a faculty of the University of California at Berkeley, a...

I presume that you already know what engineering and science education should morph into in the near future. After all, the distinguished professors of management and psychology are telling you how research should be divorced from teaching and how good teachers and good researchers should be put into two different academic drawers.  Today, the consensus is to split teaching from research in all disciplines of public academia, thus lowering cost and increasing efficiency.  I find this consensus to be misinformed and potentially harmful to many of the students who will not go to Harvard or Yale to replenish the ranks of our oh-so-smart and so-thoughtful elites. A complete divorce of research and teaching, vigorously pushed by non-scientists (psychologists, economists, political scientists, business majors, and the like), is akin to a religious belief in absolute right and wrong that simply do not obtain in science.  Dr. Isaak Asimov commented on this belief, which is...

Here are two other questions related to the title: What unique benefits are given to students at all levels - from freshmen to PhD candidates - by a good engineer and scientist, who also happens to be a decent teacher?  How are these benefits different from those delivered by a credentialed, but scientifically incompetent teacher? We keep on hearing the loud and stubborn voices that call for a strict separation of teaching from engineering practice and research. I think that these voices are tragically mistaken. By the way, when I say "tragically," I am thinking of Euripides , Aeschylus , Sophocles , and Shakespeare. In a good Greek tragedy the audience knows the inevitable fatal outcome, but the protagonists don't. For 22 years, I have been a teacher at two top public universities in the U.S.: UC Berkeley and UT Austin. Over time, I have taught some pretty large classes, so my statistical sample is sufficiently broad to justify the statements I shall make next. ...

On May 14, 2011, Professors Richard Arum and Josipa Roksa published an unsettling Op-Ed piece in the New York Times, entitled " Your So-Called Education ."  In it they show that roughly 1/2 of all undergraduates learns little or nothing in college, regardless of tuition costs. Never mind, much of the tuition goes to nicer dorms, bigger gyms and other amenities, while education is left behind . Apparently, education is not on top of priorities of the young undergraduate "customers" and their overly protective parents. I presume that the authors refer mostly to the non-science and non-engineering students, because no engineering student would ever survive learning for just 11-13 hours per week.  This is why practicing engineers make only o ne-half of one percent of the population in the U.S.  It gets really lonely out there when we talk about rigors of engineering education, while other people stare at us in silence, their eyes saying: " You guys think too muc...

Yesterday I was in Dallas.  I participated in a panel discussion: "What Cost Gas Drilling?" at the 48th Annual Conference of the Society of American Business Editors and Writers (SABEW) that took place in the beautiful Collins Executive Center at SMU. The participants of my panel included Mr. Calvin Tillman, the Mayor of Dish, Texas; David Pool, Senior VP and General Counsel of Range Resources; Elizabeth Souder, a Staff Writer for the Dallas Morning News; and Andrea Gabor, a Professor of Business Journalism at the Baruch College - the panel leader. Mr Tillman's deep anguish and fear for his children made the largest impression on me.  Mr. Tillman was demonized by the industry sources as an unreasonable person, who made crazy demands on the well-meaning companies producing natural gas in his community.  Mr. Tillman says that he is quitting the mayor's job, and is moving away from Dish to protect his children from what he fears are real health threats. It was real...

Here is a nice followup to my January 6, 2011, post on patents as a measure of U.S. productivity and creativity.  Now Big Pharma is getting ready to throw their towel into the ring and call it quits of sorts.  It seems to me that they were pursuing a wrong paradigm in their research and their colossal blunder was called by the unforgiving Mother Nature.  The mistake they seem to have made is a simplistic belief that one or few unique genes are responsible for each major illness.  Identify the genes and, voila, appropriate therapy presents itself.  Well, hundreds of billions of dollars later, they seem to have discovered that gene expression is context-dependent, and the environmental influences (epigenetics) are stronger than genetics.  This may be the best example of a seriously misguided huge research effort that essentially broke a whole industry.  So now federal government is stepping in with another corporate bailout plan, this time an $1 billion...