university funding / how do your universities work

[grue]

yes ben all of that and also a balance must be struck somehow because the university is run by people and their job needs to run smoothly too. it's unfair to ask a professor to grade a thousand people regardless of the effort or commitment they are putting in. the quality of life and work on the university staff needs to be respected aswell. if someone is just grinding there without any sign of effort or improvement for like ten years on the same class there must be a point where the professor is allowed to end that.

this is touching on the evaluation - graduation process specifically, of course. a whole different issue is whether attendance should be closed off. some classes dont allow people who arent enrolled to attend, i think that is silly insofar as there is room for someone to sit. also college libraries and published papers should be available for public consult. that's all great because it probably won't be a brutal increase in work for everyone else - and if it was, if you opened the doors for people to educate themselves on their free time, and they came in crowds, wouldn't that be great? I think it would be beautiful

but courses themselves, though, those take a lot of work to set up and run smoothly, so there has to be a balance between the student's individual needs and the scientific/pedagogic demands of the course. imo

[Ben]

and ben i guess you could say its "harder" to have a career in engineering but it isnt really an easy/hard dichotomy that only applies to arts and stem. certain stem fields are WAY harder than others. is it the same level of difficulty to do astrophysics than it is to do like... computer science? throw them into a differential equations class and let me know.

i meant, sustaining yourself (having a career, a job, whatever) on engineering skills you learned yourself at home is much harder than doing so with art. if you put your materials science self-education against someone with a degree, i dont think you will 1) be as qualified 2) be chosen for the job over them. maybe there are exceptions but...

with art, its totally different. there are plenty of filmmakers that do great, beautiful work without having been to film school. or artists that just work, and learn, practically rather than in school. the divide is not so clear. you might be correct that this difference exists within STEM as well (in that computer science might be easier to learn on your own and be competent at than astrophysics yes) but theyre both very hard in comparison to the arts. there is a spectrum of difficulty and the separation between STEM and the arts in this case is very, very wide. not a dichotomy, but far enough apart that they can be treated differently

[fat lesbian]

grue do you think with more immediately accessible education we would have the same amount of professors? id have to assume some of those people would get doctorates and become professors themselves, so it wouldnt really be like "if we have 30 students and one professor now we'd have 100 students and one professor then"

but like yea academic libraries n shit should be publicly accessible n its a disgusting travesty that they arent

[fat lesbian]

and ben i guess you could say its "harder" to have a career in engineering but it isnt really an easy/hard dichotomy that only applies to arts and stem. certain stem fields are WAY harder than others. is it the same level of difficulty to do astrophysics than it is to do like... computer science? throw them into a differential equations class and let me know.

i meant, sustaining yourself (having a career, a job, whatever) on engineering skills you learned yourself at home is much harder than doing so with art. if you put your materials science self-education against someone with a degree, i dont think you will 1) be as qualified 2) be chosen for the job over them. maybe there are exceptions but...

with art, its totally different. there are plenty of filmmakers that do great, beautiful work without having been to film school. or artists that just work, and learn, practically rather than in school. the divide is not so clear. you might be correct that this difference exists within STEM as well (in that computer science might be easier to learn on your own and be competent at than astrophysics yes) but theyre both very hard in comparison to the arts. there is a spectrum of difficulty and the separation between STEM and the arts in this case is very, very wide. not a dichotomy, but far enough apart that they can be treated differently

i mean like... i guess on like the basis of sustaining a career. but on an individual level i can do calculus a hell of a lot better than i can draw a dog

maybe there should just be different funding programs in place for arts n shit like that then with different requirements? idk. i just don't think its fair to completely devalue and refuse to fund art studies when culture is a massively important thing that influences everything, including science and how ppl interact w it. of course u can make great pieces of art without going to art school. but like. i think its pretty universally accepted that it helps lol n on a grand scheme it would be sooooo cheap to send everyone to school. especially somewhere like america. universities r always gonna have donors n just cut like .02% of the militarys budget n there u go lol one less b-2 and now everyone can go to college

[grue]

ideally we would have much more, the advantage of university is that being a professor isn't really A Job, right? most of them are researchers that also teach or they are professionals on a specific field that take a few hours of their time to teach at university. the greatest thing about higher education reform is that all the groundwork for it to be an awesome thing is already laid out, all we need is the political will and a little time to make adjustments

Edit: also let me chip in on that arts vs stem debate

the greatest difference and why STEM is "harder" is how reliant it is on testing and peer review. STEM fields belong necessariily in college because you need the crowd of people ensuring the validity, objectivity and unbiasness that it needs to stay strong.

the world of arts is much freer on that regard and can be explored thorugh different venues, though to work in arts in academia you normally have to be a master on a certain artistic skill set + that shit is pretty much philosophy and philosophy is crazy

[fat lesbian]

lol i could talk all day about how science and medicine especially are never unbiased or objective and incredibly based on culture but that's another conversation for another time
i lied here's a really good example of it taking place in psychiatric settings and how medicine and science which are supposed to be objective are heavily influenced by the cultures they're in which affects what's "objective" and what's "factual"

http://mobile.nytimes.com/2010/01/10/mag...che-t.html

i guess not super relevant to the conversation about academia or whatever but still worth reading